How to become a genius:
“You must clarify your goals, gain knowledge through spaced repetition, preserve health, work steadily, minimize stress, refuse interruption, and never resist sleep when tired.
We continually get asked by our corporate clients: why do people participate in social activity online? What drives them? In Groundswell we tried to collect as many reasons as we could, to reflect the diversity that drives all this participation. In this post I’ll list as many as I can. But this is just a start — participation is as varied as the people who participate. * Keeping up friendships. Facebook is about connecting with people you know, to find out what’s going on with them. * Making new friends. We’ve all heard stories of people hooking up on social networks. According to Forrester’s consumer surveys, one in five online singles has viewed or participated in online dating in the past year. * Succumbing to social pressure from existing friends. People in the groundswell want their friends there, too. Your friends, your daughter, or your golf buddies are emailing you right now, asking you to join them. * Paying it forward. Having seen that a site is useful, you may be moved to contribute. * The altruistic impulse. This is Flickr cofounder Caterina Fake’s “culture of generosity.” It’s what made Wikipedia possible. People just want to help. * The prurient impulse. People are sexy, entertaining, and stupid. All that is on display in an endless parade of exhibitionism. * The creative impulse. If you’re a photographer, a writer, or a videographer, the Web is the perfect place to show your work. * The validation impulse. People who post information on Yahoo! Answers, for example, would like to be seen as knowledgeable experts. * The affinity impulse. If your bowling league, your PTA, or your fellow Red Sox fans have connected online, you can join and connect with people who share your interests. Respect this diversity. Keep it in mind as you set up your social applications. Assuming everyone wants the same thing as you do — or as each other — is a big mistake.
As McKelvey and Andriani point out, companies like Google and Microsoft have achieved enormous concentration of economic value creation that defies the averages of the Gaussian world. These extreme events have an interesting property – they emerge first in the “fat tail”, on the edge of conventional business activity, driven by a different view of business opportunity, and then gather momentum until they eventually break into the head of the distribution and change the game for everyone else. The challenge for business managers is to sort out the signal from the noise in the fat tail and spot early on the emergent extreme events that could reshape the business landscape. The Gaussian focus on averages obscures these events, treating them as meaningless “outliers” until it is too late.
Conference Talk on Business Model Design and Innovation
So current free offerings are more a quantitative than a qualitative shift. I see limits to the trend, though, that Anderson does not discuss. He argues that the costs of providing free information are decreasing, but the true costs of information have never been in the production and distribution of media. They lie in the human intelligence required to produce the information in the first place. Therefore, it’s important to look at his sources of funding.
Gavin Potter says, “The 20th century was about sorting out supply, the 21st is going to be about sorting out demand.” Think about that one for a second. Not about maximizing demand, but about sorting it out. When your messages reach the right people at the right time in the right way, magic happens. It’s not about forcing or pushing or attacking or targeting or closing. This is a huge step forward in how you can think about your customers and how they act.
This month’s issue of Wired magazine features a cover story on the topic by editor-in-chief Chris Anderson. The article is a preview of his forthcoming book, called (you guessed it) Free. However in this post we look at two issues that make this new economic model rather worrisome: monopolistic markets and complex transactions.
Email is 49% of Impressions. Portals and Search Engines is 10% by contrast. This is some free data from Nielsen-Netratings. click on Top Site Genres.
