A great post by Robert Scoble: My message in a bottle to Bill Gates. Can you imagine executives in 99% of companies going public in this way? The world is changing.
And as Scoble says
Humans want to create things. We want to send them to our friends and family. We want to be famous to 15 people. We want to share our lives with our video camcorders and our digital cameras. Get into Flickr for instance. Ask yourself, why is Sharepoint taking off? (Tim O’Reilly told us that book sales of Sharepoint are growing faster than almost any other product). It’s the urge to create content. To tell our coworkers our ideas. To tell Bill Gates how to run his company! Isn’t this all wild?
Meanwhile, my mate Alan Moore (no relation) blogs an FT article looking at the fragmentation of mainstream media. Now there’s podcasting, so just about anyone with talent can have their own radio show.
(The one I listen to fairly often is Adam Curry‘s Daily Source Code. His latest – From the A8 – was broadcast from the wheel of his Audi on the way home from Schipol. Amazing quality and this guy was born to do this. Juggling SatNav, incoming traffic reports, various bits of recording gear (I guess), and still finding time to chat to a listener waving an IPod from an adjoining car and plan a stop to pick up something that’s legal in Holland but maybe not elsewhere. What’s more, he has really intelligent things to say while doing all this. The next one is gonna come from his private helicopter as he flies himself somewhere. Whoa!)
With this level of access to media, brands will have to be managed (if that’s the right word) in a very different way. Looking at some of the brilliant bits of propaganda created by Joe Citizen in the US elections, the ability to create impact is no longer the monopoly of network news, nor of ad agencies. If folks are being liberated to do their own creative, they’re going to want to be part of creating the brands they like, they’re not gonna settle for watching Saatchi’s latest mini-epic.
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