Is the title of an upcoming book by Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers about the shift from hyper to ‘collaborative’ consumption – so the rise of everything from freecycle to car sharing clubs like Streetcar, to bike rental and sharing schemes (the latest of which was launched in London).

This  accompanying promotional video (via SoundLounge) explains more:

Collaborative Consumption Groundswell Video from rachel botsman on Vimeo.

Some stats from the video:

• The estimated worth of the car sharing market by 2015 US$12.5 billion
• ‘Freecyle’ is now the third most searched environmental term after global warming and recycling but ahead of ‘earth’
• Over 9.1 million items are gifted every year through freecycle, piling them in a rubbish / garbage truck would result in them reaching 7x the height of Mt Everest
• Local farmers’ markets in the US?  In 1994 there were 1755, in 2009 there were 5274 meaning there are now 1000 more farmers’ markets than Walmart in the States
• Peer to peer lending is predicted to reach $5.8 billion by the end of 2010 = 10% of the US personal loan market
• Couch surfing (where you go on holiday but stay on someone’s couch) gets an average of 40 million online page views a day

It’s a simple truth that the vast majority of blog posts such as this one draw on existing news stories and then build on them in some fashion.    Hence the statistic from the Pew Research Center that 95% of stories with ‘new information’ originate from the traditional media, particularly newspapers.

Conducted in the Baltimore Maryland area, researchers found that 83% of stories were ‘repetitive’, with the other 17% that were new coming almost exclusively from what’s termed traditional media.   General interest newspapers were responsible for 48% of ‘new news’, specialist titles generated 13%, TV in the Baltimore area was responsible for 28% of new content, while new media only generated 4%.

It’s a fair point: Our society depends on organisations who have the resources and professionalism to delve into and uncover the stories we all need to know about.   Very few people who work in the digital media space would argue otherwise.   Instead in response to this research I’d say:

For non professional and online media outlets to break almost 1 in 20 news stories is quite high.   And there have been some major ones – for example, here and here

Even if social media doesn’t break news, it does have a role in moving it along and magnifying it considerably.   For example, look at what happened to Eurostar (the train service between London and Paris / Brussels) before Christmas

No one realistically thinks social media will ever replace traditional news gathering outlets, whether they publish in print or online.   But it is a game changer, and the organisations themselves seem to think so as evidenced by Sky News installing Tweetdeck across journalists’ computers.

Social engineering doomed to fail?
One thing that I do question is social engineering to ‘make’ people read newspapers.   True, giving 18 year olds free (print) subscriptions has had some impact in France, but I wonder how successful these sorts of schemes will be long-term.

Paid Content has an article about the (opposition) Labour culture spokesperson in Scotland, Pauline McNeill advocating a similar scheme North of the border.

The article also includes some stats about the mountain Scottish newspapers face, with ‘The Scotsman’, the paper that holds itself up as Scotland’s national quality paper, seeing a circulation drop from 75,402 to a pretty shocking 46,300 since 2002, and The Daily Record (the main tabloid), dropping from 626,646 to 323,01 in the same period.

Image – Swanksalot

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• Newspapers and Traditional Media Still Produce Most News (marketingpilgrim.com)

I rarely put posts up where I talk about myself, but this will be the exception.

That’s because from today I’ve got a new job.  The former digital division of Cow has been hived off into a separate agency, Rabbit, which I now head.

So, nine years after being one of the team that started Cow, I’m back in start-up mode!

Cow (where we remain part of the group) has done some incredible things, going from a £10,000 loan in 2001 to agency of the year in 2008, while remaining completely independent.   That’s thanks to the amazing group of people working there.

The awesome Louise Doherty has come over from Cow Digital to help me make Rabbit happen and we’re drawing on five more Cows in Cape Town and London – really we can be as big as clients need us to be.  But, if with Rabbit we achieve just a fraction of the success that Cow has had, I’ll be happy!

Why a separate agency rather than a division?   Three reasons really, two commercial and one personal.

I know there’s been chatter that this year could see the end of division between digital and traditional agencies, but from experience, we’ve lost out on business due to some brands still preferring to give online business to someone they saw as a specialist.

Having said that, we have backgrounds in traditional comms and marketing and don’t believe in working in silos.   Whatever we develop will be designed to have traditional media legs as well as online ones.   In fact, ideally we want to become the lead creative agency in campaigns.

Then there are certain advantages in being able to build up our own client base.   Some clients we’ll of course share with Cow.   Others will be our own.

And from a personal point of view? I just fancied trying this all over again and concentrating on something that’s become a specialism of mine.

We like carrots, not sticks

Finally why Rabbit:

Because of the Cow link we wanted to choose an animal, but we took one that was as likely to be undomesticated as live on a farm.   Then there are the obvious Internet connotations with ‘rabbit, rabbit’ and ‘breed like.’

Want to find out more? Check us out online, follow us on Twitter, or send us a mail – hello at therabbitagency.com….and, oh,  did I mention exactly how excited we are about all this?!

Image – Svadilfari

Bob Knorpp of the Beancast (which I’m on tonight) alerted me to this statement by Yates Buckley of Unit 9, made to coincide with last week’s Creativity and Technology event at London’s Saatchi Gallery:

“If you are a creative and don’t know about technology you’ll be out of a job soon.”

It’s a statement that I imagine touched a lot of raw nerves as it zeroes in on the debate raging in agencies today.  In fact, I’d point to another quote made by Guardian columnist Roy Greenslade the other month that nicely encapsulates it.   Greenslade talked about the fundamental divide between those who think the digital media revolution is transformative, or whether it’s tactical.

Substitute the word marketing in place of journalism here:

The split (in the pro and anti camps) is both philosophical and practical.

“There are those (with whom I agree) who believe that the digital media revolution is in the process of transforming journalism and those (such as Murdoch and most traditional newspaper publishers) who believe the net is merely another platform rather than an instrument of transformation.”

It’s a complex argument, but the truth as always surely lies somewhere in between.

I tell the 20-something execs at Cow that the skills set they’ll need in ten years time is different to the skills set they have now (and we have a responsibility to help them get there).   That’s due to consumers, and so agencies, straddling the old and new media divide, meaning that you still need to know about the old way of doing things while also embracing the new.

Beth Harte in fact expresses it perfectly in her post ‘PR 2.0 will double your workload‘.

Perhaps the voice of sanity in all this comes from Iain Tait of Poke, an agency that’s squarely at the forefront of digital marketing.   Iain talks about the dangers of getting carried away with technology for the sake of it:

“Now that we’ve been invited to the party and have money, influence and power, I worry we are like a bunch of kids with the keys to the sweetshop.   Do we need all that?  People like things that are free and simple – money likes stuff that is slick.   Building big things is fun and impresses people, but it has no value.”

Image – Sammy0716