Back in 1980, Michael Porter (most famous of creating Porter’s Five Forces) published the study Competitive-Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors. It was more or less the beginning of what you today would call Competitive Intelligence - the action of defining, gathering, analyzing, and distributing intelligence about products, customers, competitors and any aspect of the environment needed to support executives and managers in making strategic decisions for an organization.
Personally I think that time has come for change. Organisation and brands today tend to believe managers are supposed to create business development departments that make sure the company stays ahead of competition. I don’t agree. In the complex world we live in it’s time to make each and every employee a part of that competitive intelligence process. In other words it’s up to you. You are the ones that can make it happen.
A constant flow of information.
The world is becoming smaller and smaller. The Internet has erased borders and will sooner or later erase even language barriers. As a result your company isn’t fighting the local competitor around the corner [click to continue…]
psst. You haven't missed the new app for kids aged 1-9 years old? It's created by my other company JAJDO. Check it out in the App store
Some of you might have followed my blog since way back while others followed me only a couple of days. So I decided it was time to dig into Google Analytics and gather my top 100 blog posts, based on traffic, (I have written 596 to this date) between the years 2005 and 2011 for you to read.
I did actually start my first blog back in 2002 but quickly stopped blogging. It was more of an installation experiment. Then in 2005 I slowly started posting again. Up until now I’ve had over a half a million pageviews and 367374 unique visitors dropping in.
Oh, by the way. If there’s anything you like – please Tweet it or put it on your FB page. It would make me happy.
Students over at the Berghs School of Communication asked for some advice on research about social networking behaviours in Europe.
As I gathered my links and sources from my Delicious account I ran into this wonderful presentation below by Tom Smith from Trendstream. The presentation was given by Tom to the IAB Europe Social Media Research Showcase, sharing insights from Wave 1 of the Global Web Index. It’s well composed and extremely valuable if you’re into branding, communication, advertising, business development and social media. So I thought I should share it with you too!
Tom lists three big trends that will impact your brand in 2010 based on Social Media involvement across Europe.
The passive impact of social media is bigger than the active one
We increasingly consume content and information based on the consumer network
Digital networks are much now bigger than our face to face ones
So there you go. Nothing to blame on now. Just get going!
I’ve always wanted to write a book. This is NOT it!
So far this year my blog have had more than 115 000 unique visitors and just over 240 000 visits. I’ve written more than 500 blog posts covering everything from design, gadgets, trends, technology, advertising, innovations, personal things, branding and more.
About 28% of the visitors during this last year have ended up reading a post that was tagged with branding. That’s probably not a coincidence since besides trends and creativity I’d say branding is the subject that is the most dearest to me.
When I’ve been looking deeper down into the stats I’ve seen that many of you visitors haven’t really explored my blog beyond the posts on the first page or the actual post you came to read. This is why I thought it made sense to gather them all like this – ‘Top 10 Blog Posts on Future Branding and Communication From Ronnestam.com’- My first book.
A Book, MashUp, PDF or Whatever You Wanna Call It By Johan Ronnestam
Even though this isn’t actually what I would call a book it’s been the perfect opportunity for me to experiment with the production process of a book. I’ve put a big block in my calendar covering January, February and March and if everything goes right I will present my ‘real’book sometime in April or May next year. It will be a book on how to integrate future communication with product and service development. One things for sure – I’m doing it on my own. But for now you have to do with this first book, mashup, pdf or whatever you wanna call it.
4 Ways to get your hands on Top 10 Blog Posts on Future Branding and Communication From Ronnestam.com With Love
1. Buy a signed copy of the printed book – 39€ including shipping world wide.
I’ve printed 150 books in Denmark at Norhaven. Out of those 150 I’m giving 50 signed copies away to the first 50 Twitter retweets of this post (if you live outside Sweden you have to pay for the shipping). If you wanna get your hand on one of the other 100 signed ones you either hope to get one at one of my speaking occasions during 2010 or you contact me to buy one for €39 including shipping costs.
2. Download the PDF for free (pay by linking or tweeting this blog post)
Who said Google Wave couldn’t be made to good use. Hmm…I sort of did at this networking meeting the other day when we talked about the biggest fails of 2009. At least we haven’t seen that many good cases yet but of course they will follow.
Whirled Interactive (same guys who gave us Pulp Wave) use Google Wave as a tool for visualization and it’s is hilarious. This beats PowerPoint any day! Of course I’m not saying this is how you should use it but these guys sure sum up 2009 in the proper manor – use the ONE to that was supposed to do it all and turn it into a presentation video of what really did go down.
The Institute for the Future in Palo Alto decided to give a go at the future. How? A game of course. Superstruct is the world’s first massive multiplayer forecasting game. The game, launched in october 2008, was constructed and launched by Jane McGonigal.
By playing the game, people help The Institute for Future chronicle the world of 2019 – and imagine how the human kind might solve the problems we’ll all face together. It’s obviously needed as the horizon for survival in the game right now is 2042 according to this special report.
Jane is a pretty cool chick and an expert on applying game design and game theory to real work and real business. Among other credits MIT Technology Review named her one of the top 35 innovators changing the world through technology, for her role in pioneering the field of alternate reality gaming.
Think about it! What good could a gaming scenario do for the future of your business? Maybe that’s where you should put your money?
If you think this post is a little bit over the nerd hurdle, then at least have a look at the wonderful visualization of this future world made by Density Design. Creative Director Donato Ricci, Concept developer Gaia Scagnetti, Visualizer Mario Porpora, Artist Michele Graffieti and Designer Luca Masud set out to solve the complex task of bringing the 2019 vision created in the game to life. Their result can be downloaded from Flickr. And it’s uploaded in a great quality, so any company with an office space big enough should get it and redecorate their walls asap.
ps. One last tip on how to keep up with the future. The Institute for the Future runs a pretty nice blog on the subject.
Last week I got hold of this presentation held by Mary Meeker, Managing Director Morgan Stanley at the Web 2.0 Summit San Francisco. It’s one of the more important time stamps I’ve seen the last couple of years. This one was created two days before Apple reported on their second quarter – beating the rest of the competitors with a 28 % better revenue.
It’s clear things are moving faster than ever. According to this presentation iPhone and iTouch is the “Fastest Hardware Usage Growth in History” (slide 38)
On slide 2 Mary outline important Internet trends. Ouf ot eight bullets three leave me (and they should leave you too) with somewhat of a nervous laughter.
1. Mobile usage is and will be bigger than most think.
3. Next generation platforms (social networking + mobile) driving unprecendeted change in communications and commerce
8. Mobile-related share shifts will create / destroy material shareholder wealth.
Conclusion: If you’re working at Nokia, SonyEricsson or another big as dinosaur – you’ve better start doing something creative to get away from that Meteor! MS Economy Internet Trends 102009 FINAL
ATweet from Gary Hayes caught my eye this morning. I followed a link and found this wonderful social media counter. Gary has built and coded this app based on data collected from a range of social media sites.
Sit tight and watch the thing start counting. After a couple of seconds you’ll grasp the power of social media. But also note the stats that tells you how many SMS’s that has been sent globally. People pay for that stuff!!!
And now to a very sensitive issue – monitoring. As some of you know my profession is leading brands into the future of communication. One of the more important parts of this is teaching them how to keep track of their own brands in the jungle of conversation. What are people saying about my brand, [...]
Today Google launched their latest resource called the Google Internet Stats. It contains industry facts and insights from across five different areas – Macro Economic Trends, Technology, Consumer Trends, Media Consumption and Media Landscape. This is a great resource for us who are trying to make people understand what the future is all about. I [...]
The other day Hans Kullin, writer of the excellent blog MediaCulpa, published BlogSweden 4 – his fourth annual blog survey. According to the survey the typical Swedish blogger is a 16 to 20 year old female who reads about 6-10 blogs daily. Not me in other words. Enjoy!
The 1st of November 2007 I was invited as one of the speakers at Daytona Sessions Vol 1.. Martin and Rasmus, the founders of Daytona wanted me to speak about digital communication in 2012. Said and done – I pinpointed 8 things that would happen and change digital communication in 2012. My predictions and status [...]
This blog is written by Johan Ronnestam. He's widely regarded as one of Sweden’s leading speakers and authorities in the field of modern creative and conceptual thinking and skill of innovating brands and their communication. In 2010 the readers of Microsoft Indikat named Johan Swedens most influential authority within digital communication
