Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Re-Socializing the web
Leave a CommentOver the past number years we have seen an increase in the use and creation of Social Media Tools that allow us to communicate over the web.
As with everything else, the Marketing and PR teams grab hold of these concepts and tries to participate with the view to generating revenue via sales, affiliations, sponsorships etc.
Craig Hepburn wrote in his predictions for 2009 that social ranking,de-friending and filtering will become more important and I think he is right. The problem many of us have with all this communication is that a lot of it is marketing and sales. Now this also can be broken down into two main areas products/services and Self PR.
Self PR is starting to gain traction in the on-line world like never before, there are so many ways in which to publicise yourself and now it has never been as easy due to companies allowing employees to socialize with the communities. These employees may become figure heads or well known in the specific areas and this may lead to job offers as more and more recruitment is being done via social media tools.
This has a few implications that you need to be aware of and will indeed lead to some disruption.
So why am I talking about this?
Well I think that we are coming to a point that the social web is getting less and less social and more about “Look what I have done” rather than engaging. There is a great blog post about Social Media experts being the cancer of twitter which I find both amusing and pretty much true in many ways, http://www.fanboy.com/2009/01/social-media-experts-rant.html
I do find it very difficult to even justify this becuase I am a) writing this (self PR) and b) plan and create social media campaigns.
So the question is…
How do we re-socialize the web to make it easier to communicate without being sold anything or do we leave it as it is because we are all happy with the way things are?
Or are we addicted???
Print 2.0
Coming from a background in online B2B publishing dealing with the migration from print to online and the slight decline in magazine subscriptions I find it quite interesting that the print industry is also moving forward which is something that I thought was many years away until e-book readers became more like paper itself in the mainstream, e ink e ink has this technology.
Now whilst this technology is being improved, we have something new on the scene, A company called On Demand Book LLC created the Espresso Book Machine (ESB).
The ESB is essentially a printer that can print any book it has in its library in minutes.
On Demand Books (ODB) replaces the inefficient and centralised supply chain for the distribution of books, with a radically decentralised direct to consumer retail model in which content is fully distributed electronically at point of sale and converted into a paperback book.
It was voted best invention in 2007 by Time Magazine
Jason Epstein has written an excellent post on An Autopsy of the Book Business where he is quoted as saying:
“The only way to save the book industry is to get rid of all the books.”
So what does all this mean for us?
Well, I like reading, but do not always have the time or patience to visit a book shop or wait for an online delivery (I live in Dubai so shipping takes a while and you generally need a few hours to get into a mall and shop), so it would be great to be able to just stop off at a Book Machine and be able to print what I want, when I want quickly.
From a business perspective, this could easily allow magazine publishers as well as book publishers to offer their consumers the option to access the via a new medium which could lead to an increase in sales and therefore could also increase advertising revenue.
What are your thoughts?
