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In the latest Interview from Denise Shrivelle, she profiles Nick Holmes a Court, CEO of Buzznumbers and serial online entrepreneur.
When I first read Nick’s profile – I resisted the urge to yell out loud – ‘YES WE CAN’ – I felt so pumped about our industry and what is ahead of us both professionally and as consumers. Nick’s excellent insights and views overall highlight to me what an exciting industry we are in and the rapid change we continue to see. He does compare our time to the industrial revolution and I think he is right. So, next time you are having a bad day at work, the internet gods are not smiling down on you or your client and/or boss are behaving as they do (we all have days like this) – read Nick’s profile again – you are definitely exactly where you should be. YES WE CAN!
Name: Nick Holmes à Court
Works: Buzznumbers
Job Title: CEO
1. How, where and when did the digital industry find you?
I was involved in online communities and early web development in the mid 90’s as a self taught Internet programmer. I moved to San Francisco in the height of the dot com boom to get involved with start-ups and Internet technology companies. My initial passion and interest was around the transformative impacts of the Internet on media and business process, as well as having a deep interest around consumer and Internet usage for my own personal enjoyment. Ultimately, digital for me came out of a personal Internet passion.
2. What is your current role and what do you actually do?
I am currently the CEO at Buzznumbers. We are a Social Media Intelligence company, buzzwords asides, basically we help companies track, measure and report online conversations
My role has been to drive strategy and vision for both the product and the business to grow the market and commercialise a product that capitalises on the opportunity of the shifting media scape.
On a day-to-day basis, I am involved in corporate development, product development as well as sales and marketing. It’s an interesting cross section of focus and I’m privileged to be able to be involved in all the different aspects of the company.
3. If you could have any job, what would it be (can be in and/or outside the industry)?
My current job! I work on what I love and get to interact with people much smarter than myself on a daily basis.
4. Take a punt on the ‘next big thing’ in digital?
It’s a cliché to punt and predict on the significant decline of all existing media and marketing industries that aren’t digital, but I believe that to be true. We’re seeing this now in journalism with newspapers struggling to support their business model, we’re seeing the decline of the music industry as online distribution routes for information have cannibalised and crippled their existing business models
In terms of a punt moving forward, I think that any industry that can go digital will go digital and any incumbent from that traditional industry will ultimately have their business model completely cannibalized by the shift to a significantly more efficient model in the digital industry. This is great for start-ups, not so good for big old companies.
5. Where do you see the digital industry in the next 5 years? (any forecasts and challenges)
The digital industry is not a fad or a new product, as many media companies believe, it is a fundamental transformative shift in the way organizations collaborate and communicate.
In my opinion – traditional hierarchical models of all aspects of society, commercial, government and citizen organisation are going to have to change. I believe this is a paradigm shift much bigger than the industrial revolution. We are now seeing the mass adoption of these technologies. We are seeing the value of bottom up peer production – Wikipedia replacing Encyclopaedia Britannica, blogs challenging traditional journalism etc.
I think over the next 5 years we are going to set in concrete the understanding that bottom up peer production is a more accurate, more efficient and lower cost way to do things than top down organization. We know that online social channels enable people to collaborate around topics faster than they have ever been able to in the past. Twitter shows us this about news, Wikipedia shows this about knowledge, and Youtube shows this about media creation and sharing.
Industries who aren’t actively prepared to change are going to be hurt. This creates wonderful personal and commercial opportunities for people and companies who have lower overheads and less infrastructure to change the way organizations and people behave and collaborate.
It’s an exciting time to be in. The digital industry is not just an add on, it’s becoming a core component of everything we do in marketing, media and all aspects of corporate organisation and collaboration. Digital provides a better way of doing things at a lower overhead and better outcomes in a more measurable way.
6. How do you see other media evolving in the next 5 years?
Traditional top down creation processes are going to be overridden by bottom up peer production and social collaboration around everything. Given that advertising came out of the 1920’s to the 1950’s, we are now seeing a generation of people who are “advertising hardened” and I think advertising is going to have to change. Less and less companies are going to want to purchase traditional media.
Shouting at your customer till they buy your product is no longer a valid marketing model for reaching the advertising hardened digital native consumer, we encourage our customers to find a more interesting way of participating in a conversation with their customers.
I do think PR industries will adapt fairly rapidly because they have always been skilled in understanding how to create messages that people are interested in reading and sharing. TV is clearly a declining medium, as Clay Shirky put “ Any screen that ships without a mouse, ships broken”, as far as kids are concerned. If there is no interactivity, it’s boring.
No longer can companies afford to ignore what is happening to try to protect the bottom line in the short term, because ultimately and fairly quickly they will be made irrelevant.
7. Where do you see the digital industry going in the next 12 months? (particularly in light of the evolving financial situation)
Non-measurable media and advertising spends will be weakened and replaced by more effective, measurable strategies, which the digital industry in completely aligned with. Digital will stand out in the marketing space as a double or triple digit growth.
I think traditional advertising agencies who are just adding digital to their offering as an add on component will struggle to succeed against core digital strategies. Clients know digital better than their agencies often enough.
8. Did you ever have a big digital idea you wish you pursued (or someone else’s idea you wish was yours)?
Yes, I built a start up in 2002 where RSS was just emerging, which had a feature-set equivalent to Feedburner, which was later acquired by Google for $100m. It taught me a hell of a lot about the technology adoption lifecycle and understanding how transformative technologies emerge way before the transformation that their impact has.
9. Where do you get your industry information from?
Blogs, Forums, Email newsletters and Twitter.
10. What industry groups or networks are you a part of?
Silicon Beach and STUB communities I also sometimes attend Open Coffee and AVCAL.
Know anyone you would like to see profiled – or have any other comments? Please email me at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
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