 I don't want to ask a question. Who has a mobile phone? A stupid question, right? Do you know how risky it is to have a mobile phone? I'm not joking, right? You lose this phone, you're in deep trouble. Credit card information, email, location information, free phone calls, whatever, right? If you ever lost a phone, you know exactly what I'm talking about, right? Why did we use something that's so risky? I mean, your wife could look at this and look at the SMS messages from other people, right? Very risky. Many examples like this, right? Why did we use this? Because it's empowerment, right? What we can do with this device beats all our concerns about risk. There's a reason. And we try to control it, of course, by making sure the phone doesn't get lost, right? So one of the key points I'm trying to make right from the beginning is that we have this cartoon here, right? There's this guy sitting around and saying, you know, we've considered every potential risk except the risk of avoiding the risk, right? So we do have to ask a question, you know. If we're looking at social media, what's called social media, that's actually not really a good word. I'll get into that later, right? We can't have the cake and eat it, right? I mean, this is a very American expression. But clearly, you know, if we're looking in this direction, you know, I work as a futurist, and this is really my job. There's a saying in China that says, if you want to know the future, ask your children. That's my job. So I'm quite lucky that way. And we do this for many clients. We try to help them to sort of understand where things are going. Is this working? OK. So that they actually figure out what the future is. Basically, what we're seeing today is that we're living in a networked society, right? And we may not like this fact very much because in a networked society, it's a network, right? It's not a broadcaster. It's not Disney, Universal Music, and Ron Madoff, you know. It's a society of people watching each other and learning from each other. The MIT in Boston published years ago already the entire courseware of their offerings. Now just three months ago, you can get all of their speeches, presentations, and all the slideshows from the teachers online as well. You can study at MIT for free online. This is really what a network education looks like. And basically, we're living now in a society where we're all interconnected. I mean, if you're looking at the most successful businesses in the last 10 years, they're all businesses that operate like this, right? eBay, Skype, Amazon, Twitter, and so on and so on. I mean, look at the rocket valuation of Google. What do they actually own? They have a network. They use data. They don't own anything, really, except for the source code. They don't have a warehouse. They have servers, yes. But I mean, in a networked society, the world looks like this. Not like Facebook, but it looks like interconnected people working together. And this is now happening with companies. And I can tell you with many of my clients, which there are many different kinds of clients, it puts the fear of God into them. Because in this kind of world, all of a sudden, the hierarchy gets flatter. I work with Telcom Indonesia. They have, I think, 80,000 employees. You're in a meeting. People sitting together talking about new products. You wouldn't know who the CEO is. They already live in this sort of flat hierarchy. They're already living in this kind of system. So this is happening to us now. And basically, in this society, it's all about here and now and flat hierarchies. So there's a great saying by Bruno Latour. It says, change the instruments. And you will also change the entire social theory that goes with them. As Marshall McLuhan, the famous futurist and media expert says in 1971, we're moving to a global village. And the global village is not a place of peace, harmony, and quiet. Then you can't have a global village. If you want peace, harmony, and quiet, you can go somewhere where there's no village, just by yourself. So basically, if we're looking at this, we have to say, OK, what's happening now is that our entire social theory of how we work together is changing. And this includes, of course, remote working, which is not secure. Working from far away, telepresence, and so on and so on. Because now, we've become what's called people of the screen. Kevin Kelly is using this term, who is the co-founder of Wired. I mean, if you go to some place like London or Hong Kong or whatever, you see when you take a taxi, the taxi driver has six screens in the front. His Facebook thing, his car navigation, his mobile device, they're hanging all over the screens everywhere. You're taking a taxi to the DVD player in the back. So now, our kids are growing up using screens. They're no longer people of the book, which is sad. I write books. Love them to take my books. And I have a library. But basically, people are becoming people of the screen now. And of course, the mobile device that we have are becoming cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. We will have 10 euro iPads for 10 euros in the very near future. Solar Fed as well. And we have some really unimportant people. Also, digital immigrants are catching up very quickly as well. That's people like us saying, well, the iPad is cool. I can actually use it. I mean, it works. So this is a really big trend. But the next digital natives, they look like this. This is a video of a kid with an iPad, a toddler. And she can figure out very quickly what's happening with the iPad, zooming and doing. I mean, try it with your kids if you want. Rune the lives forever. But basically, you get used to this. Now, see what happens if another kid who's used to the iPad does not have the iPad. It looks like this. She's trying to zoom the page in a magazine. Now, this is what happens with companies who are not in this turf. They will not even look at you in the future. If you're not part of this social connection, if you're not having conversation, they will not even zoom you. Because it doesn't work. You're broken, essentially. I mean, look at airlines. Swiss Air after, I don't know, 200 years. They finally got their Facebook and Twitter channel. And I'm a Swiss Air fan, of course. I fly all the time. Great to see that they have finally made the move to actually communicate with people. But they will not participate if you can't be zoomed. I mean, it's basically that simple. IBM Research Lab has said, now we have Watson, which is the IBM machine that beats people in chess playing, and a few other minor things. They say, we have Watson in our pocket. It's so true. I mean, if you remember what's happening, basically, as Ray Kurzweil has pointed out, a kid in Africa now has more information with a smartphone, has more information than the president of the US 15 years ago. And two years from now, that same kid is going to have more information than the CIA database. Well, they published part of it, too. So I mean, it's mind-boggling what's happening here. And we want to control these people. I mean, this is obviously not going to happen. We have to engage them. That's our chance. There is no control factor. I mean, if you have looked at what's happening to the music business, for 12 years, they've tried to control what we do with the music. Result being 74% revenue decline in 10 years. Because people said, oh, you know what, I can just go to YouTube. And now we have Spotify and those kind of places where people are getting back into this. But basically, we're living in a time of disruption. And this is powered by social, by mobile, and by what's called cloud computing. All our music, our media, our health records, our money, our education is moving into the cloud. Because this is very interesting for lots of companies who run the clouds, like Cisco and Amazon and so on. But imagine the security issues here. Obviously, this is all remotely hosted and done. So basically, there's a new study just came out from the economist, a sponsor by Rykel, which is kind of strange, but they sponsored it. So it talks about the disruptions that are happening. And if you're not aware of this, you should download the study. I think it's free, actually. They're talking about cheap smartphones, business-oriented social networks. It's point number two. Third point, data mining, cloud computing, immersive holographics, augmented reality, all stuff that we somewhat know about. But the second point is business-oriented social network. Key point here, third assumption, also from them, holds that increasingly immersive video-based communication, social media, and other tools will all become far more pervasive in business. So we can say, you know, this is kind of strange. We don't really know what to do about this. But can we do anything in terms of not being part of it? That would be exactly like the record industry saying, we don't want to be part of the internet. We stay with the CDs. It's not going to work. So a tough challenge, right, for big companies, because the internet is like a speed wagon, we're like a turtle. So that's something to think about there. But basically, there's two important things. Okay, back to the RISC thing, right? And back to the ROI, right? I mean, if I got a euro or a Swiss franc better, right? Better currency, huh? If I got that, every time somebody says, you know what, what about making a plan and getting money back from this, right? I'm like, well, you know, that's not really how it works here, like, because there's two toxic assumptions, you know, two poisons. One is avoiding risk is safe, which that itself, of course, is strange. And two, ROI means everything. Of course, that's what we've learned clearly. I mean, this is textbook stuff, right? But it still isn't true, but I'll explain why, right? It's toxic for that reason. Back to music, right? You see the decline here, right? Control obsession can sink the ship, right? Of course, a reverse can also sink the ship, right? Not having control, right? So I'm not arguing for it either way. Just as an example. So I think social media risks are not like petting a shark, right? I mean, this would obviously be stupid to do this, right? It's actually a live shot, not media. It's complicated, right? These are lots of issues about social media, what happens there and how we think about this and kind of stuff, but the risks of not engaging, right? You know what this is? The BP disaster, right? The day after this, somebody puts up a Twitter website, BP Global PR, right? Well, guess what? It wasn't BP, right? And within days, they had, I don't know, 187,000 followers and constantly bashing BP until somebody turned them off, right? And it took a long time, right? This did a lot of damage to BP because I did not respond that didn't communicate, that didn't actually interact with the problem, right? Dell computers has 27 people Twittering about problems with Dell, with Dell machines, right? All out in the open. Everybody can complain and get an answer on Dell computers. So the question is really, will you engage or will you be engaged, right? That is the only question, right? You can participate or you are participated. You can't just say, I'm not gonna participate, right? There's no such thing, right? Because again, we have the power here in our mobile devices. So social media, very important, is not a better mouse trap, a cheap way of marketing. In any case, social media doesn't really exist, right? It's more like a social operating system. It's larger than just media, right? It's not a better mouse trap. And for that very reason, it has nothing to do with advertising. In legal ways, of course, that's easy to call it advertising, right? But social media really is content, right? What you do there is you create content. You blog, you give comments, you do ratings, you communicate with your clients, with your customers, right? You are becoming content. In fact, every brand is a publisher. So because of this, we're living in a network society challenge, right? This is a challenge all the way down to the personal, the things that you identify with. I mean, look at the differences, right? This is a chart here I got from Merchant, right? Very interesting stuff, where she talks about the social era business models, right? They're about curators, peer communities, crowdfunding, all the stuff that's legally a nightmare, right? I mean, clearly crowdfunding, I mean, think about that idea of a company going out and saying, you know, what we have research is to research a cancer medication, but we would like you 100,000 doctors outside to contribute to the research, right? Through an open, like, inocentive or so, right? Think about the ownership of this medication then, right? Who owns that? Yet every single Fortune 100 company has crowdsourcing initiatives, right? BMW, Audi, crowdsourcing stuff from the outside to find out what electronics should look like in the car. Who owns those ideas, right? Does it matter? It does matter, but how? If you apply the risk factor, you would just say no to each one of those. Not as simple as that, right? I mean, why risk something? So then we're living in a world that I call this a tyranny of transparency. I mean, WikiLeaks being the extreme example of this and I wouldn't advocate for that. I mean, something should be secret, of course. Don't really know what, but it's a good principle, right? Here, we have a security camera filming the FedEx guy who's delivering a computer monitor. It just happened last week. And the guy just throws it in the garden, right? After this was put up on YouTube, within 13 hours, over 8 million views, right? FedEx stopped the client, a whole bunch of people fired, big thing, right? Everything is transparent today, right? We're talking about this earlier. I mean, the bottom line is if you're whitewashing, if you're lying, if you're not saying something that actually, it's gonna come out, right? And believe me, every company would prefer a few things not to come out because they're just not part of what you publish, right? But now it's like, it's very hard to keep that in sight, right? If you make a mistake, you have to apply it. I mean, in politics, here's another scene that you may have seen. Occupy Wall Street in Sacramento or Davis, California where a policeman like in church dishes out a dose of pepper spray, right, on live television, right? I mean, basically pepper spray is people in front of the running YouTube camera, right? I mean, this is changing our entire dynamics of what people are doing, right? I mean, companies, politicians, you know, and so on, right? So quite scary. In Japan, when you go on the date, in many clubs, you can scan the face of the woman or the guy that you're meeting and it will pull up the social media information superimposed over the image on the cell phone, right? It's called augmented reality. It's quite real in Japan, right? So I can talk to you and then I see on your profile that you have a dog and I don't like dogs so I'm moving on, you know? And that happens there, right? This cartoon sort of shows, you know, basically what happens there, right? But I have to warn you about this, of course, you know, openness and transparency is not a black or white issue. You can be open, you can be transparent, you don't have to be completely transparent like naked, right? I mean, you have to find a compromise and I call this open AMAP, open as much as possible, I think would be a good strategy. And then, of course, you know, we have to decide who we are. I mean, this is a difficult question on Facebook, right? Because we were a private there once but now basically we're completely public on Facebook. And that's basically what it is, we're public, right? I call this publicity. It's taken from Jeff Jarvis's book. We're going from privacy to publicity and that's basically what we're seeing here. So we have, you know, big data accidents and we'll probably have them in the future, right? We have to deal with this new power and responsibility. If I'm blogging about my boss, if I had a boss, you know, I'm a boss, I can do blog whatever I want, right? And I'm saying, okay, this guy is a jerk and I don't like him and so on. Clearly, I'm not aware of my power or responsibility, right? This is a new power. So we have to learn this. They're going to have to be laws and regulations eventually to deal with all that stuff. But regardless, you know, we're entering what a friend of mine, Rohit Bogawa, who's writing a book about this call, he calls us Lyconomics. Lyconomics basically meaning you don't do business with people, companies, politicians, anyone that you don't somewhat like, not in the sense of Facebook-like, right? I mean, this has always been true, of course, right? We buy from people that we like, right? But now it's extreme. This is why companies are paying people to like them on Facebook, right? You can click the Facebook button on Delta Airlines, they're going to give you a 50% off on the next ticket that you can buy on Facebook, right? Gap Jeans, if you're in New York in the store, you check in with Facebook that you're there, you can get a Jeans for free, not all the time, but just by checking in and being their friend, right? I mean, think about the value of that, right? So Lyconomics, soon somebody likes you or you don't have a business, and that goes business to business or business to consumer, right? Because LinkedIn, you guys are on LinkedIn, right? What do you do before a meeting with somebody? You check them out on LinkedIn. If they're not on LinkedIn or Zing, then you're saying, oh, there's something strange, this person can't be found, he's not anywhere, you must be Richard Branson, right? Or, you know, Mick Jagger or something, but even they are on LinkedIn, right? So, and Obama as well, right? So the global currency is made, not made of paper, it's made of relationships. And because of that, social media is a big part of furthering that relationship, right? Between companies and between people. And when you have a relationship, you don't sit down for dinner and you tell your kids, you know what, tonight we're only going to talk about Siberia, right? That's the only topic that's allowed, right? That would not be considered social, right? So we can't do the same when we have discussions with our business partners, we can't say, you know, the only thing you're allowed to talk about is XYZ. So, I'm sure you're aware of this, but you know, data transfers and data volumes are exploding, all the stuff that people put up, right? I mean, basically bandwidth goes up, network access, storage costs, I mean, the trend is clear, in five years, everything, all the time, everywhere, right? Very scary actually, for a lot of reasons. But that's where we're going. So the question is, what do we do with this? And basically, you know, we have to say, we're entering the era of big data. That's actually a term now. Big data, meaning lots of data about all of us everywhere. And that means, one of my favorite terms, it's not from me, unfortunately, I don't even know who came up with this, but data is the new oil. Every data you can collect about your team members, your customers, your business partners, right? Collect and analyze becomes worth a lot of money because you can use that to change things. So why do we get all the Google stuff for free? Gmail, docs, operating system, Google has 150 products that we're getting for free that used to cost money because Google reads our email, right? And we're giving them data in return, we're paying with data, right? So this is a very big change that we're seeing here. I was alluding to this earlier, right? All brands, including banks, insurance companies, financial institutions are becoming publishers. I mean, they make videos, they record podcasts, they have blogs, right? What is that? That's called a publisher, right? And you can't exempt yourself from that because basically it leaves only very few people standing. The few people who are islands, like Apple, right? Apple as an island doesn't really communicate very much, right? That we have somewhat accepted that they do this. All right, so Credit Suisse is doing this, right? And they have a video channel. And of course, we have all variations, you know, Zurich Financial is all linked in, doing a group and then there's Twitter and so on and so on. So that leads me to an important point, what's called earned media. You may have heard the word before, you earn media when you publish something and people like it and they share it, you get a buzz and people look at you things that that's called earned media. And you earn it because you don't pay for it, right? So what happens with earned media is that you have a lot more reach but you have vertical control. Now we could say, you know what? We don't really like that. We'd rather pay, you know, that's here and own the media and have a little bit less reach, right? But you know what? That's not gonna be an option, right? Not a good option because in a very short time earned media has become up to 50 or 60% of how people market stuff in a digital network because it's based on opinions and ratings. So we have to accept somewhat the loss of control and we can discuss it on the panel. I'm gonna wrap up very soon. So with this kind of reality where people can wink and smile and comment and rate whatever you're doing, that includes B2B transaction, right? I mean, really if I wanted my clients there, the procurement people are looking at this right now and saying, oh, you know, if we buy a million leaders of palm oil, people are gonna look where we buy it from. Because there's a direct economic relationship but all of a sudden it's a larger story. So my final advice for you would be to employ what I call the open AMAP, the open as much as possible strategy. There is no recipe for this, right? But let's not believe we can be participating in a conversation and also control it, right? I mean, that is the cake in eating it, right? So there's a risk involved. We have to calculate it. We have to be careful, but that is clearly part of it. So I want to thank you for your attention and you can download all my books for free on the internet if you want and follow my tweets. Thanks very much.