by Hylton Jolliffe
May 11, 2009 at 10:37 am · Filed under
Clayton Christenson, Webinars
A reminder that we will be hosting another discussion in the FASTforward Insight Series – Innovating through the Storm: Insights on the Disruption in the Media Industry – this Thursday, May 14, from 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM EDT.
Expect a real treat for this conversation between Vivian Schiller, the newish president and CEO of NPR and Scott Anthony, the president of Innosight and the author of the forthcoming book “The Silver Lining: An Innovation Playbook for Uncertain Times” from Harvard Business Press. Moderated by Renee Hopkins Callahan, the editor of Strategy & Innovation, the hour-long webinar will explore the many challenges media companies are facing and how they’re navigating through truly disruptive times.
We’re lucky to have two people so qualified to speak to the issues at hand – Vivian was previously the SVP and general manager of NYTimes.com, and Scott spearheaded the “Newspaper Next” project with the American Press Institute, is a colleague of Clayten Christensen, the renowned innovation thinker and specialist, and is president of the innovation strategy firm Christensen founded.
Find out more and register today.
Also, if you’re interested in downloading “The Great Disruption” a free chapter of Scott’s book, due out in a few weeks, register here.
by Bill Ives
May 5, 2009 at 9:35 am · Filed under
FASTforward'09
Here is an interesting post from Andre Yee at eBizQ, Is Twitter’s Growth Sustainable? He raises four issues: attrition, demographics, user experience and usage patterns, and monetization. I think that each of these are real concerns. However, I think the key in number three: user experience and usage patterns. If they get this right the others will take care of themselves.
Andre points out that “Facebook, MySpace and other social networks have a richer user experience beyond broadcasting. This means additional usage patterns and these translate to greater user affinity and stickiness.” The simplicity of Twitter is a large part of its power. However, I think there needs to be more for sustainability. One part is the actual interface itself, as TweetDeck has proven.
Another part is the ability to use Twitter as a personal knowledge management system. I do this with my blog so I naturally started doing this with Twitter. I tweet or retweet links to things I want to go back to. Since it is Twitter, a social tool, I am also sharing them but in many cases that is secondary. Twitter does the social part fairly well. But the archive part is very primitive. It reminds me of del.icio.us. Once I got a few hundred links it became clumsy and I stopped using it.
Do you use Twitter for personal knowledge management? How do you think it can improve in this area? Are their third party apps that help here?
by Bill Ives
May 1, 2009 at 7:45 am · Filed under
FASTforward'09
Nora Ganim Barnes and Eric Mattson recently released a study on the Fortune 500 and Blogging. The study found that eighty-one (16%) of the 2008 Fortune 500 have a public-facing corporate blog. What is more interesting is that the higher you are in the standings, the more likely you are to have a blog. The study reported that of the top 100 Fortune 500 companies, 38% (31 companies) have a corporate blog. Those listed 101-200, 25% (20 companies) have a corporate blog. The top 200 companies account for 63% of the Fortune 500 corporate blogs. In contrast, the bottom 200 (those listed 301-500) account for 26% of the Fortune 500 corporate blogs.
They are open to interactions as over 90% of the Fortune 500 blogs take comments, have RSS feeds and take subscriptions. The study says that, “these blogs are kept current with frequent posts on a range of topics. It appears that those companies that have made the decision to blog have utilized the tool well. There is frequent posting, on-going discussion and the ability to follow the conversation easily through RSS or subscriptions.” In addition, 23 (28%) linked to a corporate Twitter account.
However, the Fortune 500 lags behind other sectors as the 57% of charities, 41% of higher education institutions, and 39% of the smaller Inc. 500 have institutional blogs. But many seem to be trying. I would like to see a comparison on revenue and profits with blogging. Not that you can claim a cause and effect but you can see if the most successful companies are ones that also have the vision to operate blog.
