Innovation and Disruption, What’s Holding You Back?

On March 7, 2010, In Biz, By Tac Anderson

I have stated before that, while I don’t know the guy and have never met him, Marc Andreessen is probably the entrepreneur of my generation that I most admire.

Today I came across a post on TechCrunch where Marc is quoted as saying that Old Media needs to burn the boats. I love this type of bold strategies. When Cortes came to Mexico he burnt the boats so they had no choice but to conquer, Marc says media companies need to do the same thing. The post is short and well worth your read but here’s my favorite quotes.

We got to talking about how media companies are handling the digital disruption of the Internet when he brought up the Cortes analogy. “You gotta burn the boats,” he told me, “you gotta commit.” His point is that if traditional media companies don’t burn their own boats, somebody else will.

Everyone knows this true (even if they don’t admit it). At some point physical media will be too cost prohibitive to create at the mass market level. Print will be the new vinyl.

Andreessen asked me if TechCrunch is working on an iPad app or planning on putting up a paywall. I gave him a blank stare. He laughed and noted that none of the newer Web publications (he’s an investor in the Business Insider) are either. “”All the new companies are not spending a nanosecond on the iPad or thinking of ways to charge for content. The older companies, that is all they are thinking about.”

And finally the part that will end any business discussion with any old media CEO:

Print newspapers and magazines will never get there, he argues, until they burn the boats and shut down their print operations. Yes, there are still a lot of people and money in those boats—billions of dollars in revenue in some cases. “At risk is 80% of revenues and headcount,” Andreessen acknowledges, “but shift happens.” You’d have to be crazy to burn the boats. Crazy like Cortes.

Radical strategies like this either get you excited or terrify you (or both).  Could you imagine the NYT or WSJ stopping all print publications and going digital only? Wow, that would be amazing. Lay off everyone connected to print and forge ahead. It won’t happen for years, maybe decades. Maybe they’ll always keep some niche print production, but eventually most printed papers will go away.

But it’s easy for us to criticize the media for not being willing to let go, but what about your business?  Every business has boats they’re holding on to. And it’s usually the part of their business that’s stopping them from being truly innovative. That’s the part of the business the startups love to attack.

In my world, agencies continue to submit to hourly billing even though it’s a pain, unproductive and not conducive to providing the best work. Marketers refuse to give up on the CPM advertising metric (cost per thousand rate advertisers charge). It’s broken and doesn’t prove any type of business ROI. These are two boats I would volunteer to ignite myself.

What are your business boats? What would be the hardest thing to give up?

Photo credit via very little dave

Popularity: 3% [?]

Tagged with: • • • •
 
Comments Comments
Leave A Response

Will Technology Drastically Change the Agency Business Model?

On February 19, 2010, In Biz, By Tac Anderson

Adam Singer has a post about the challenges in building a consultancy/agency in the digital world. I shared this post on Twitter and instantly had replies from Marc Meyer and Jason Moriber. Marc couldn’t agree more and Jason totally disagrees. I don’t know exactly why Marc and Jason feel that way, maybe they’ll share their comments here, but I love it when a topic sparks polarizing responses.

I’ve been an individual consultant. I’ve helped grow a 4 person agency startup into a 12 person million dollar agency over 2 years and an acquisition of a web dev shop. (I then left 6 months later before it all imploded.) I’m now at a 800+ person global agency that’s growing like crazy. Technology scales, people don’t scale. You have to grow and develop talent. The only other option is to acquire talent and I’ve already talked about the challenges of social media talent acquisition.

When I was on my own I did a lot of consulting. Consulting pays the bills but the only way to grow is to hire people. People are expensive. As an EIR at Highway 12 Ventures I saw a lot of people that wanted to build agencies or service firms of some sort. Here’s your free tip for the day, if you’re trying to build an agency that is technology enabled don’t bother talking to a VC, an Angel investor maybe but not a VC. If you’re a technology company that also offers consulting that’s something different. That’s why Mark Hurd spent so much money for HP to buy EDS.

I personally think all agencies will become a hybrid of consulting and technology. This still isn’t scale, it’s just market demand. Publishing, measurement and workflow tools technologies are just a few areas agencies are developing. Many agencies are partnering with technology providers, we’ve seen a lot of that over the last year and we’ll see a lot more.

In addition to partnerships some agencies <ahem> are quickly developing internal technical capabilities to create their own technology solutions. This is also going to increase significantly.

The work agencies are doing has been changing drastically but I also think the agency business model is going to drastically change.

What about you? What additional changes is technology bringing to the agency model?

Will Technology Drastically Change the Agency Business Model?

image via [auro]

Popularity: 6% [?]

Tagged with: • •
 
Comments Comments
Leave A Response

Why Business is Broken

On October 26, 2009, In The Book, By Tac Anderson
Mechanical desktop typewriters, such as this U...
Image via Wikipedia

I believe companies need a complete overhaul from the inside out. From business models to internal and external communications practices. Why?

Our processes, organizational structures, communications practices, systems for measuring ROI internally and externally and the vast majority of our business models were created in an age of triplicate carbon copy paper, typewriters and inner-office memo’s.

The Business World and all that it entails was created in a time that is irrelevant to most of today’s work force. The few people for whom it may posses some level of relevance are mostly retired or planning to be as soon as their 401K’s bounce back enough.

This doesn’t just apply to the News and Music industries, it applies to every type of business.

I’m not advocating for a total rebuild. There are a lot of good practices that are tried and true for any environment. But if you’re not reevaluating everything right now you will be shortly.

Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Popularity: 1% [?]

Tagged with: • • •
 
Comments Comments
Leave A Response

A Glimpse into the Future of Social Media, Journalism and Advertising

On October 1, 2009, In New, By Tac Anderson
Playing with the TypeDrawing app.
Image by Tac Anderson via Flickr

What will the future of social media look like? You just need to look around because “The future is already here – it is just unevenly distributed.”

In rapid order I came across three articles that help paint that picture (all emphasis are mine):

Marc Meyer rightfully points out:

So I ask you, what is next? Social Media as you know it right now, will not be recognizable in the next 3-5 years. Think long term.

Chas Edwards discusses the success of Digg ads and hints at the future of advertising filtered by (and I’ll throw in co-created with) their customers:

Digg Ads: It’s Just the Beginning

As marketers perfect their skills as web publishers and invest more aggressively in content creation content about their products and services, as well as general content that might be useful to their customers it creates an opportunity for better advertising experiences: ads we don’t feel the need to block, skip or ignore. Digg Ads, we hope, will give those marketers a real-world proving groun” a place to measure their success in making content that’s relevant to their customers.

Now combine that with the LA Times story about how Google Wave (and many of the technologies coming out that are similar) could transform reporting:

Collaborative reporting: You may notice that double bylines aren’t very common. That’s because trying to co-author a news story stinks.

The process usually [...] result in a mess of incompatible and unrelated research that gets either thrown out or somewhat-awkwardly wiggled in.

We’re not going to e-mail our co-writers with every new lead and minute detail we dig up. But if we’re sharing a virtual notebook, we can scan through …

… or search the newest findings as they’re logged, make comments and highlight our favorite bits.

Then, when it comes time to write, we can rearrange and discuss the story’s flow in the same software. Thanks to the openness of Wave, collaborative pieces between bloggers could become more common.

To be fair collaborative, real-time or (what Shel Israel calls) Braided Journalism, has already been happening but it’s primitive compared to what is to come.

  • Imagine for a minute that this blogger collaboration doesn’t have to be limited to bloggers or journalist writing for the same publication.
  • Imagine that the story was reported on in real time in the public as it evolved.
  • Imagine if the readers were invited to participate it the reporting.
  • And finally imagine that marketers were invited into the journalism process and their contribution was judged for the value it added not the value of the ad buy.

What do you see now? I see a new business model for journalism. I see relevant advertising. I see a world in 3-5 years where journalism and advertising are better than anything we’ve ever had before.

As I think about this new model I think of the idiocy behind pay walls and intrusive advertising and for the first time in a long time I’m optimistic for the future of both advertising and journalism.

Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Popularity: 1% [?]

Tagged with: • • • •
 
Comments Comments
Leave A Response

What will Twitter do with $100 Million? [Acquisitions]

On September 25, 2009, In Biz, By Tac Anderson
Money
Image by TW Collins via Flickr

While there are some great debates over Twitter’s newest round of funding the bigger question is what is such a small business (29 employees) going to do with all that money?

I’ve said it over and over again. They will buy their business model. I believe that Twitter is building out a core functionality that will enable a whole ecosystem of products and services. Within a few years people will be using services and not even realize they are being enabled by Twitter.

They’ll build some features and tools (the easy ones). They’ll start making the kind of partnerships that Facebook is making in selling data to other companies. But I think they are going to start getting serious about acquiring companies.

I’m hoping they make some really creative ones like Adobe did when it bought Omniture. You know like buy Iceland or something.

Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Popularity: 1% [?]

Tagged with: • •
 
Comments Comments
Leave A Response

Write Great Content. Fragment. Distribute Everywhere.

On September 3, 2009, In Comm, By Tac Anderson
Fragmented Content

Fragmented Content

Dave Patton and I have been talking about creating content and then “fragmenting” and re-purposing it. This would allow for the whole story to be found but plan for and receive all the benefits of fragmenting and distributing your content. Write a feature length journalistic story, turn that into a blog post into a tweet, etc.

It dawned on me this morning that HBR has been doing this well for a while. Ironically, I came to the realization while reading the 7 page article on Death by Information Overload. Not having the time right now to read the whole thing, I was debating printing it out or saving it to Evernote when I spotted the “In Brief” version of the story. This is the 5 sentence version of that that same article.  Then they fragment it more and send it out in 140 characters or less on the @HarvardBiz Twitter account.

  • A) I think this is the way all companies should be telling their story. Create one highly leveragable piece of content and then fragment that a million different ways.
  • B) Seems like this business model makes a lot more sense for newspapers than just building a Great Wall of Content. Give away the “In Brief” piece and sell the complete story for those that want that. You get all the traffic (which you can sell ads against) and charge for the full story.

Is anyone else doing this? HBR just gives away both but that’s only one small piece of their overall content business.

BTW, where’s the HBR study of HBR? I’d pay for that.

Photo Credit: Tac Anderson

Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Popularity: 1% [?]

Tagged with: • • • • •
 
Comments Comments
Leave A Response

My Big 3 Social Puzzles

On July 18, 2009, In New, By Tac Anderson

These are the things I spend most of my days thinking about lately. I think they’re going to be the 3 big drivers of change in business and society over the next 5-10 years.

- Citizen and Corporate Journalism.
I don’t think current news corporations can fill the need society and companies need. I think they need to fill that gap themselves.

- What is Social CRM and what should it do?
I really don’t think that juxtaposing a Twitter feed next to CRM data makes a Social CRM.

- DRM, Creative Commons and Open Source.
This weeks Amazon fiasco highlights the problems I have with DRM. I find the business models of all three of these and the problems they create endlessly interesting.

What about you, what are your big 3?

Sent from my Windows mobile phone.

Posted via email from /tacanderson

Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Popularity: 1% [?]

Tagged with: • • •
 
Comments Comments
Leave A Response

In Defense of Journalism

On June 18, 2009, In Comm, By Tac Anderson
Quoted in Buffalo News about the local citizen...
Image by inju via Flickr

I can come off pretty rough on journalism on this blog. That’s not my intent. I am *very* critical and skeptical of news corporations and the media companies that own them. And the people I hold fully at fault is the top tier management of these companies. I think they’ve been complacent and short sighted which has lead to one of the most important professions in our country to be nearly crippled.

Yes, I do think Journalism is one of the most important functions in our free society. But journalists are stuck in a restrictive business model while being forced to work with little to no resources and little hope for anything resembling a future.

I personally think that in the short term we all have to take on a small piece of the mantle of journalism. PR people need to think less like project managers and more like reporters. Bloggers need to assume a little more responsibility for what we write and all of us consumers of media need to be more watchful and skeptical looking for inaccuracies and false truths. We also need to be sure that the information we share via links is correct.

Eventually I believe the market will do it’s job and an even better model for journalism will develop but for now I think we all need to help deliver on the promise of citizen journalism

Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Popularity: 1% [?]

Tagged with: • • • • • •
 
Comments Comments
Leave A Response

Are there no new business models?

On June 15, 2009, In Biz, By Tac Anderson

So if you haven’t heard Chris Anderson revealed the business model of the future of the Web. (via TechCrunch)

“Everything that becomes digital will become free. There will be a free version, either you will be competing with free or giving it away for free and selling something else. If it is not zero today, it will be zero tomorrow.”

  1. The best model is a mix of free and paid
  2. You can’t charge for an exclusive that will be repeated elsewhere,
  3. Don’t charge for the most popular content on your site,
  4. Content behind a pay wall should appeal to niches, the narrower the niche the better

Um, yep that’s the one we kind of expected. In fact publishers have been using this model since before the Internet. I guess for some people this might still be a shift from driving mass eyeballs. I first thought the pure play ad model went out with the DotCom bust but then it was revived in the Web 2.0 hey day. Maybe it’ will finally die now.

It does make me wonder if there are any new business models out there. I guess everything is just a variation of what’s already come before it. How disappointing. I guess the real innovation comes from how you implement these models.

Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Popularity: 1% [?]

Tagged with: • • •
 
Comments Comments
Leave A Response

How Murdoch’s Plan for Paid Content Could Work

On May 11, 2009, In Comm, By Tac Anderson
Modified version of http://en.wikipedia.org/wi...
Image via Wikipedia

How Murdoch’s Plan for Paid Content Could Work

A lot is being said about Rupert Murdoch’s plan to charge for all Newscorp Web content. Every blogger I’ve read have said that Rupert’s a delusional old media dinosaur (or some variation thereof) and that his plan is doomed.

Personally I think he’s probably a pretty smart guy. The rationale behind this change is that The Wall Street Journal has seen a large increase in subscriptions.

How could Rupert’s plan work: If the content is good enough then I believe that people will pay.

I don’t believe that this new model will support the current media infrastructure. There’s just too much overhead. If Rupert is not willing to innovate the business model of his companies, then he will have to innovate the operating model of his companies.

While I do think this could work for news site like The Wall Street Journal I think that it will work for very few sites. The content has to be better that anything you could get anywhere else.

As a side note I also believe that the future of media lies in privately held companies. I don’t think journalism can give the returns the market demands. Now I said journalism, not  content/media companies.

Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Popularity: 1% [?]

Tagged with: • • • • • • •
 
Comments Comments
Leave A Response
« Previous Entries
Go To Top »

Bad Behavior has blocked 4514 access attempts in the last 7 days.