From oct 2010 my educational posts are published only on Pip

28 nov. 2011

Cowards stay behind when the future is created

Recruiting, promoting, dismissing by safety.... or cowardice. It's not a new order but it's a model that might not work very well in times of change. Media companies act in an era where we have absolutely no idea of where we are going, what we should or should not do. Everyone have versions of the future, but it seems as safety is most often prioritized to innovation and disruptive actions. This is highly frustrating for those who are a step ahead. Normally that is the early adopters, but now it seems as those ahead are the big crowd. The mobile, social mass is ready for the future while the traditional media businesses stand still wondering where the money is and choose to do if not nothing, but very little.

But there is obviously money to catch - in Facebook integrations, in applications and in the new mobile reality. For those who understand it.

Leaders keep surrounding themselves by dweebs - nice people with long history in the business (print, games, broadcast). The dweebs will never take or make a conflict but will not eather push to reach progression. They will not challenge teams or strategies and new, to begin with unexpected contenders, have free space to make fast moves and conquer the constantly contracting global market. Contracting in the aspect that there are no distanses anymore and expanding as you are always able and thereby should or must aim for the population of the entire Internet. This means that small unexpected parts all of a sudden become huge and powerfull.

This chicken leader is missing out on the most imporant of the web - the end mobile social user. These bewildered media companies protect their beloved content desperately. They know their traditional users by heart - those who watch, or play or read - but they don't know the new style user. Spotify and king.com presented a first version of their products already 6 years ago, in a time when the social graph and Facebook not yet had any proven value. Fall 2009 american visit metrics dropped in many communitys. The Lehmann-Brother fall the econimists claimed. We will recover. But it wasn't logical. Online gaming and entertainment is a growing industry in economically restrained times. User surveys insinuated in the same time that Facebook grew and that it gained timespent and visits from others. The american figures kept falling followed by more parts of the online world to the favor of Facebook. It's all very easy. People with time to spend spend it on Facebook. It's where they are and you should really want to be where your customers are.

Spotify and king.com amongst others dared to rethink, add, change their great working core products. They integrated with Facebook less than a year ago and are today on the top lists of reach, timespent and stickyness. They got the future and have passed everyone who doesn't believe in it. All those who believe that they are doing mobile first just by making their content accessable in the phone, or they who think that mobile is and should be a parallell feature to the content, not integrated with it.

The traditional content has worked fine so far and the customers doesn't ask for anything else. But things doesn't have to be broken to need a change. It is time to let go of safety... or cowardice, and let people who know the mobile online end user be disruptive.