tom willerer . com

knowing what to ignore

Knowing what to ignore is and will become one of the most important skills for people to be effective, efficient, and creative in business and in life.

And, I would guess that this key skill is one that most of us (myself included) are terrible at.  We pay attention to things that should be ignored and ignore things that need our attention.  This only gets more difficult as our involvement in social media (and media more generally) increases.

I have no “solutions”, except trial and error and awareness or what neuroscientists refer to as Metacognition (term introduced to me by Jonah Lehrer).

Anyway, we’re in a world where the mainstream social networks want any and all people to boost user numbers for the big selloff and are not concerned with the quality of experience.

— Part of Trent Reznor’s rant on Social Media and why he’s “signing off”.  I agree.

If there is any error in iTunes’ ways, it is their initial belief that people will want to own movies the same way they want to own music,” said Russ Crupnick, NPD analyst. “It might have been successful on the TV side. But with movies, it’s turning out to be much more of a rental.

— videobusiness.com

Blogging Evolution

It all started with

• Normal Blogs containing paragraphs, pictures and videos.

Then

• Micro-blogs containing shorter paragraphs, but still pictures and videos.
• Micro-blogs containing 140 characters, with links to pictures and videos.

What’s Next?

• Outsourced blogging where we have someone blog for us because we’re too busy.

I have come to call this approach to discovering the emerging markets for disruptive technologies agnostic marketing, by which I mean marketing under an explicit assumption that no one - not us, not our customer - can know whether, how or in what quantities a disruptive product can or will be used before they have experience using it. Some managers, faced with such uncertainty, prefer to wait until others have defined the market. Given the powerful first-mover advantages at stake, however, managers confronting disruptive technologies need to get out of their laboratories and focus groups and discretely create knowledge about new customers and new applications through discovery-driven expeditions into the marketplace.

— Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma, p.182

…it is precisely when emerging markets are small - when they are least attractive to large companies in search of big chunks of new revenue - that entry into them is so critical.

— The Innovator’s Dilemma

Startups don’t seem to spread so well, partly because they’re more a social than a technical phenomenon, and partly because they’re not tied to geography.

— paul graham

The half-life of a microblog, it turns out, is even briefer than the half-life of a blog.

— Rough Type

This is one of the innovator’s dilemmas: Blindly following the maxim that good managers should keep close to their customers can sometimes be a fatal mistake.

— The Innovator’s Dilemma.  I just got this book in the mail and began reading it last night.  I’ll post interesting snippets and thoughts from the book as I progress.

people don’t necessarily want to solve puzzles on their own. They often enjoy attacking them in online collaborative groups that include dozens, sometimes millions, of fans. These groups are collectively far smarter than their individual members, and regular puzzles don’t stand a chance against that many brains.

— wired.com

How We Got Here and How We Get Out of Here →

Great analysis by Kenneth Lerer of the print journalism industry.  Many of the examples and bits of advice apply more broadly than to only print journalism, and I’ve pulled a few of my favorite bits below:

While he didn’t mean this as a compliment, his comment did underscore a too-often ignored truth about Internet news, one that has been proven many times since. Web reporting is not a sideshow to print journalism. It breaks and creates — important news.

Part of the problem was that these assumptions were embedded into huge corporate structures that weren’t built for sharp turns. Years of media consolidation created a handful of conglomerates that now control enormous swaths of the media market. Some, like Disney, G.E., Viacom and Time Warner have bought up all types of media, from magazines and TV to movies and books. Newspaper companies followed the lead and expanded as well. News Corp., Hearst, and the New York Times Company now own over two hundred newspapers between them. This vertical integration left them with far less competition, so they were able to grow without innovation. But they also lost perspective. They doubled down on a business plan that seemed to work short term, and then stifled creativity by barricading themselves in a corporate echo chamber. So they kept expanding their control in the analogue world, even while the digital world was on the rise.

Clayton Christensen calls this The Innovator’s Dilemma. The problem, as he describes it, is that the best companies in any industry will eventually lose market dominance by doing everything that a good business should do. (By the way, if I were in charge of Columbia University I would make this required reading for every incoming student) Good businesses listen to their customers, they give them what they want, and because of this they ultimately fail.

So it’s not that newspapers didn’t notice the Internet. And it’s not that they didn’t hold to their original business model because they were stupid, or lazy, or because they had some sort of pathological aversion to technology. Newspapers are in trouble now because, ironically, they were very well run — for the world that was, not for the world that was coming to be.

If I owned a newspaper, I would move to a robust hybrid model very quickly. I would aggressively build out my online business and I would start planning my future without the printing press. By responding to consumer demands for greater engagement, I would take advantage of the changes the Internet has brought. I would open the door to citizen journalism and to small, local investigative units like the ones that we are seeing in many cities. I don’t mean to suggest that citizen reporters can replace the great work of journalists like Dexter Filkins or David Barstow, of the Times. But if newspapers pursue these new ways of newsgathering, it will help build their online community and that will, in turn, attract more users and that will make for a better business model.

It’s time the industry got comfortable with the idea that media today is a networked/ecosystem. It’s all about originating, aggregating, curating, linking, and spurring conversations. Why? Because users want it this way. For today’s newspapers to compete, they will have to offer their readers more chances to engage and discuss, to react and interact.

The vibe of Twitter seems to have changed: a surprising number of people now seem to tweet about how much they want to be free from encumbrances like Twitter.

— 

NYT.com

My opinion is that for the next 5 or so years we will continue to focus on acquiring more and more people as “connections” on facebook, twitter, myspace, etc. Then we will realize that we don’t care about 90% of the people to whom we are connected, which will cause us to pare down our lists to very close family and friends.

1. The best presentation is no presentation at all. If you can get by with a memo, send a memo. I can read it faster than you can present it and we’ll both enjoy it more.
2. The second best presentation is one on one. No slides, no microphone. You look me in the eye and change my mind.
3. Third best? Live and fully interactive.
4. Powerpoint or Keynote, but with no bullets, just emotional pictures and stories.
5. And last best… well, if you really think you can change my mind by using tons of bullets and a droning presentation, I’m skeptical.

— Seth’s Blog