Interview with Gerd Leonhard, Media Futurist

Timon Singh

CXO EU talks to Gerd Leonhard, one of the leading Media Futurists in the world, about cloud computing, the growth of social media and the future for businesses online.

A expert on the Future of Media, Content, Technology, Business, Marketing, Advertising and Communications, Leonhard is considered a leading expert and influencer.

His keynotes are renowned for a hard-hitting and provocative yet inspiring and motivational style; with over 300 engagements in 28 countries during the past 6 years Gerd’s clients include Nokia, Google, Sony/BMG, ITV, the BBC, Orange, Deutsche Telekom, DDB, NSN and many others. Gerd is a fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts (London), and resides in Basel, Switzerland.

“Journalism has always been about filtering but now it's even more obvious.”
-Gerd Leonhard

CXO: These days, lots of companies are getting on board the "social media technology bandwagon" and we're finding that lots of B2B companies are using it for the first time, whereas some B2Cs havelong embraced it. Why do you find that some companies have taken so long to embrace social media technology?

Well, that's the problem, I mean I think the whole word, "social media", is a bit of a misnomer because really what it means is that now companies have to start to actually engaging with their customers, whether it's businesses or consumers. That means they have to have interactions and have conversations rather than having monologues or sending out emails so they actually have to get involved and engage in the conversation, so it's a whole different paradigm.

In the past, it was a very centralized way of marketing and that's been replaced by more of a dialogue. It's more of a two-way communication and that's really what Facebook and Twitter and blogs and such are all about. It's about having the conversation and out of the conversation comes to selling or the transaction.

It's really not that much different except that it's what I call it "from broadcast to the networked". You have, the old, sort of broadcasting mode of sending out stuff - and that's still there and that's gonna continue but it's no longer the only way to do this. So this is why some companies are having real trouble with the networking or with the sort of networked approach because they don't have a network. They just broadcast.

Their whole style of communications is based on a one-way system. they send stuff to the clients and that's that, it's sort of like "take it or leave it". There's no real conversation, especially B2B.

Many companies don't have a mechanism of talking. So this is one of the biggest shifts and this is why social media is sort of the wrong term. I call it more like "social business", rather than a sort of a provider centric approach where everything starts with you and the customer can take it or leave it. Now it's a two-way thing.

CXO: In terms of social business, there's been a big shift in terms of content online. Yahoo! just recently announced that in terms of content, it's going to be 'crowd source' in terms of content on the internet. On the other hand, many publications, such as Murdoch's news corp services like The Wall Street Journal, are going to go much more subscription-based. Where do you see the future of online content going?

Well, it's clearly not either/or. It's not like professional content is going be replaced by user made content, it's just that there's so many more users. So what they're creating is like a huge amount of data and what is called meta-content and that's content around content.

So they're rating and forwarding and linking and creating the click trails, and in a way that becomes content itself.

For example, remixes or comments or buzz and those kind of things, they become their own kind of content because there's literally two billion users now. This kind of content is going to really overwhelm the other content in terms of volume, but I think in the end they both go together very well if you know how to integrate them.

So if you're looking at The New York Times or Guardian, they have found ways to actually have both. You have the professional writers, the people who are making comments and the uploads from the users like CNN.

So if you're a big media company, you have to find a way to involve the user but at the same time the professional content is crucial because of the duration, as people have less time. The biggest drawback in the user made content is that there's so much of it and they're such a 'noise' it takes forever to find the good stuff.

So that's where the media companies come in. They can take their own content, they can take the user made content, and they can filter it. Journalism has always been about filtering but now it's even more obvious.

Journalists are not going to just write their own stuff, they're also going to go and say, "Well, what about using other people's raw posts and feeds and all these kind of things?" It has always been like this, expect that users were unable to post as much as they can now, thanks to mobile devices and mobile internet.

Everybody can be a journalist and shoot a picture that becomes relevant, so basically the quality of the journalist is not to outdo the mass of the users but to be much more focused and more knowledgeable and quicker.

There's no real conflict between the two except that the user made stuff is so noisy that it may drown out the more accomplished stuff. But ultimately, they go together. And the most successful newspaper companies or other media companies like television, they will find ways to combine the two.

CXO: Real-time technology's really taken overm with Twitter being used more and more readily as a new source. Do you see that is something increasing more and more? Are companies are going to focus more on the real-time aspects?

Absolutely, but of course in the end there's no way that you can have real-time newsfeeds with a centralized company like CNN or Fox, because you can't have a journalist every point of the way.

There just aren't enough journalists or camera people around to do the job, so you need the consumer. You need the user to chime in because there's billions of them and in terms of feasibility, it's just not feasible to create a news network that is omnipresent. You need the user because they are everywhere to feed you headlines or photos or even videos.

So real-time is obviously crucial and that's sort of the difference between search and social media. Search gives you the most popular links in total, so if you were searching for the best sushi in London, you may find stuff from a year ago because it had the most links.

But do you really care? I mean, in the end, you care about the best stuff yesterday because it's guaranteed to still be good, so that's where social search comes in and you can already see some traffic on CNN or ESPN. The amount of traffic that they're getting from social networks, like Twitter and Facebook and others is already 10 to 1 from the search.

CXO: And Facebook is becoming used more and more as a search engine...

Yeah, but that's clearly the value of that. You don't search have to on the internet at large, you simply search within your social network, your friends or your family and then you search only what happened yesterday or today. Google is going to have to integrate that widely and, of course, well..

CXO: Speaking of Google in terms of consumption, Google TV has just essentially failed. Do you think Google are trying to get more into the whole social media aspect or do you think that Facebook is going to eclipse them? Or are they simply too established for that to happen?

Well there's room for several players. This is like FedEx and DHL - there's enough business for everyone, but I think Google will buy Twitter for that reason sooner or later, no matter what the price is. Google has already integrated social search into their own search, and you can search for images within your friends already.

Cearly the idea of searching just anyone's link to find the most popular content... that's kind of outdated, now. So for marketing purposes, for example, the whole idea is basically searching for within a crowd that you know because they're prequalified.

The same goes for news. If you're looking for news about technology, maybe your top 200 Twitter friends are the best source to search first. And that's clearly gonna be a trend across the board.

CXO: Speaking of new trends that might get picked up, augmented reality is getting used more and more by smart phone developers. Do you think businesses are going to be quick to jump on board with that technology in terms of attracting business or do you reckon it'll be a slow process such as utilizing "social business"?

Well I think augmented reality still has a long ways to go in terms of the user picking up on it. I mean this is 'geek-material' right now because the problem is that for it to work really well, you need huge amounts of data to make it meaningful.

So for many users it's sort of nice to have, but it's cool for the geeks. It will be a while before people pick up on this kind of technology. I think more than the basic form, there would, for example, be what Google is doing with AroundMe.

When you're searching, you can click the button and see what is around you, so it can show you right there and you can see the patchwork of Flickr photos and those kind of things. So in its basic form, I think it will take off fairly quickly but in the whole, full-fledged 3D kind of environment, it will be some time.

The data isn't there. the data allocation simply isn't there. It's also not really adding that much value, I don't think, right now. I think it could but it will probably be at least a year or two.

CXO: In terms of businesses and communications, there seems to be a big push for businesses to switch to cloud networks rather than simply relying on site storage units. That seems to be the way most businesses are going. Again, why do you think many businesses are slow to get on board with the cloud networks? Is it just fear of new technology or shifting information online, security wise?

I think all businesses are scared about being dependent on others. This is the reason why people have their own networks, their own service, their own everything, because they don't want to depend on anybody else for critical missions. I think that is ending, because clearly the costs of having your own stuff duplicated a number of times is just too expensive.

So you will see businesses basically say, "You know if we can move to Amazon's cloud and it will cost one-tenth of the total, you know, that's what we're going to do" and clearly that's a trend.

I mean, the fear of being dependent on others just won't cut it anymore because the advances are so big. I mean, there's already like over 1,000 businesses that are dependent on Twitter. So if the Twitter API dies, then they're dead, right?

I think businesses are seeing that the benefit of having the cloud service business with maybe a backup, a local backup, is a good combination. But it's really fear of depending on others, you know, that's a typical sort of Internet 1.0 kind of problem.

CXO EU: How about from a security point of view, in terms of having all of your information online? Identity theft, corporate fraud and general hacking is a big concern for many.

People always say that. I think that the individually connected, centralized systems that banks and insurance companies used to have in the past, they were much more prone to attacks than the networked systems because you had to have a team of 100 people to address the issues.

I think they have other issues like what if one of those key people is corrupt or something, ythen all of the companies in the system are at risk. So this is what banks are worried about, but in the end a network system is more secure because you can specialize on the applications to make it secure, much more so than an individual network.

It's like the idea of the open source software. You could have 500 programmers working on fixing the code, which is much quicker than two.

So I think they're not rational arguments. I think they're more like arguments that come from a couple of years ago when there was nothing to be done about that. Now it's becoming clear that these problems can be solved.

CXO: As a leading media futurist, where would you say over the next few years business technology is going to go?

I think clearly anybody that empowers their customers, whether it's consumers or other businesses, more will win. People are starting to expect stuff like being able to look up things online, browse a catalog, look at 3D objects, watch a video of the executives, all these kind of things.

Anybody who empowers the users and clients will win because the clients will get hooked on doing it there. You see that everywhere - airlines, insurances, banks.

The other thing that we're going to see, and already are seeing, is creating networks of the users. So basically, building a platform for all the users to meet each other. You can see already in Google forums and in the Apple forums, people solving technical problems together, so you don't need centralized customer service.

The other big thing is the mobilization of everything, especially business-to-business, on a mobile level. Also, the importing of social netwroks into a corporate system. It could be a huge asset.

Gerd Leonhard is ‘one of the leading Media Futurists in the world'. He is widely known for his books ‘The Future of Music', ‘Music2.0' and ‘The End of Control'.

Gerd work focuses on the Future of Media, Content, Technology, Business, Marketing, Advertising and Communications, and he is considered a leading expert and influencer. His keynotes are renowned for a hard-hitting and provocative yet inspiring and motivational style; with over 300 engagements in 28 countries during the past 6 years Gerd's clients include Nokia, Google, Sony/BMG, ITV, the BBC, Orange, Deutsche Telekom, DDB, NSN and many others. Gerd is a fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts (London), and resides in Basel, Switzerland.

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