OPEN

I’m quite excited about someone else’s New Year resolution. John Hagel says he’s going to be blogging more this year.

Most interesting to me is that he specifically wants to explore advertising:

Without developing the detail right now, let me suggest that traditional models of advertising where vendors pay for messages to be delivered to prospective customers will be challenged longer-term by various forms of collaboration marketing and advisory services where customers pay trusted advisors to recommend relevant products and services….

Unfortunately, this short-term advertising revenue growth has had a narcotic effect and made a lot of online businesses lazy. Longer-term, I anticipate that most businesses online will have to make money the old fashioned way – by offering products, services and experiences so valuable that people will actually pay money for them. Those who begin to develop this discipline today will profit in the long-term.

I’m looking forward to seeing this elaborated on – I suspect it may run as a nice counterpoint to Chris Anderson‘s development of his ideas around the economics of “free” (building up through the year to the publication in 2009 of Free, his next book after his seminal work The Long Tail).

: : Thanks to my colleague Jim Byford the writing of John Hagel had a big influence on my thinking in 2007 (and will continue to do so this year). His collaboration with John Seely Brown on The Only Sustainable Edge brought the concepts FAST strategy and process networks into my working life and has changed and refined the way I think about many things, from running an innovation based business to how marketing programmes need to be developed in a world of networks.

Like all the best business books, it articulates ideas and instincts that were half formed in my mind and gave a common language, a reference point for discussions about radical approaches to business and marketing challenges.