Tag: influence

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Weekly Wrap 141: Taiga and the travels, to Queensland!

Modern economics explained: click to embiggenThe week of Monday 11 to Sunday 17 February 2013 was a strange one, beginning in Wentworth Falls and ending in Queensland, with a brief sojourn in Parramatta.

It was in Parramatta that I met my new friend (pictured), whose name is Taiga. If you follow me on Twitter or Instagram you’ll have seen a lot of him over the weekend. You’ll see more today and tomorrow, I’m sure.

Articles

Podcasts

None. But wait, I told you! Be patient!

Media Appearances

None.

Corporate Largesse

The Week Ahead

Kickstart Forum on Monday and Tuesday, returning to Sydney on Tuesday night. On Wednesday VMWare is launching the new end-user computing platform in Sydney at Altitude Restaurant in The Rocks. I haven’t locked in my plans beyond that. Please place your bids.

[Photo: Modern economics explained, being a photograph of Taiga looking eastwards from the Parkroyal Parramatta.]

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Doing the business on Stilgherrian’s journalism

As 2012 draws to a close, it’s become clear to me that many aspects of my life should be reassessed for next year. One of the more important is my work — that is, what I do for who, how often and for how much.

Last night I made a couple of pictures to help me understand the issues I’ll need to think about. This first one shows the relative importance of each masthead, at least in revenue terms, based on the gross income they generated in 2012. I’m surprised.

Stilgherrian's income from journalism in 2012 by masthead: see story for the numbers

I knew ZDNet was my biggest earner. What I didn’t realise was that my written stories for them, either ad hoc commissions or as conference coverage, when combined with the weekly Patch Monday podcast, represent roughly five times the revenue of the second-place holder, CSO Online.

Continue reading “Doing the business on Stilgherrian’s journalism”

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Weekly Wrap 78: Screw Klout, give me the food!

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets. I’m feeling lazy this weekend, after a fairly intense and sleep-lacking time, so I’ll post this early.

Podcasts

Articles

Not a lot in the written-words department this week, but I’m very, very happy with the one piece I did write.

  • Influence without Klout, Technology Spectator, 28 November 2011. All this “social influence measurement” stuff is bullshit as far as I can see, and this article explains why.

Media Appearances

  • On Tuesday I spoke with ABC Gold Coast about exploding iPhones and some information security tips for the holidays. Alas, I didn’t record it.
  • On Wednesday I spoke with ABC 105.7 Darwin about the Downfall parody internet meme and the like. There isn’t a recording of this one either.
  • On Thursday I was on the ZDNet Live panel discussion Bringing the Cloud Down to Earth.

Corporate Largesse

The Christmas party season has started. Expect this section to expand considerably over the next few weeks.

  • On Wednesday, the guys from Bleeply bought me a cider, and I didn’t have time to return the favour.
  • On Thursday afternoon, the Internet Industry Association hosted a two-hour cruise on Sydney Harbour with food and drink, sponsored by Enex TestLab.
  • On Thursday night, CBS Interactive held their Christmas Party with food and lots of drink. But does that count? I do work for ZDNet Australia, and that’s a CBS masthead.
  • On Friday, Watterson Public Relations held their Christmas Lunch at the South Steyne Floating Restaurant, Darling Harbour.

Elsewhere

Most of my day-to-day observations are on my high-volume Twitter stream, and random photos and other observations turn up on my Posterous stream. The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.

[Photo: Horizon Apartments, Darlinghurst, photographed from Kings Cross. I quite like this building, designed by Harry Seidler. Many disagree.]

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“Influence is the future of media”, eh?

The Influence Landscape: click for a more details

This year, the Future of Media Summit has been replaced by the Future of Influence Summit. It’s next Tuesday 1 September, Sydney time. I’ll be going, and I can offer you a discount.

Summit-master Ross Dawson has changed the name because he reckons that influence is the future of media.

Ross writes:

We have already begun to discover this through the now-dominant concept of “social media”. In the Future of Media Strategic Framework that was launched for our Future of Media Summit 2006 we described the (symbiotic) relationship between Mainstream Media and Social Media.

Social media is all about human relationships, about how we shape our view of the world based on our peer communication. The extraordinary breadth of information and opinion that we are exposed to today, combined with the ability to converse, means our own opinions are often driven more by peers than traditional sources.

In fact this shift to the social means that media is becoming far more about peer influence than information and reporting.

This year companies globally will spend US$450 billion on advertising. The composition of advertising spend has changed dramatically over the last decade. That pace of change will rapidly accelerate in coming years. Total marketing spend is hardly set to reduce in an increasingly crowded marketplace, but it will be allocated to those activities that truly make a difference. Influence — based on conversations and aggregated opinion — will be at the centre of how companies seek to drive sales and customer engagement.

Today, people find content such as movies, music, news, books and so on primarily through aggregated channels. Instead of buying the New York Times and reading it cover to cover, people are pointed to the most relevant articles in the New York Times and elsewhere, based on what people find interesting. It is hardly new that people buy music or books because of recommendations — but now adding to their friends’ opinions and magazine reviews are a universe of influencers who provide guidance on what to buy. Influence is driving the world of content and publishing as never before, and this is just the beginning.

Last year’s Future of Media Summit was full of old media journalists and managers in denial.

It triggered my controversial essay Note to “old media” journalists: adapt, or stfu! (parts of which were even translated into French in Le Monde), a wonderful response from the MEAA’s Jonathan Este, and furthers writing from me including the essays “Trouble at t’paper” and Sunday Thoughts about Journalism.

A year later, a lot has changed — although my liveblog from Media 09 still reads as pessimistic. I’ll be interested to see what emerges, and to prepare myself I’ll be reading more of Ross’ blog over the next couple of days. Expect further posts.

Meanwhile if you want to register for the Future of Influence Summit, you’ll get 20% 25% off if you use the discount code TIESTIL.