Trust has greatest value where choice is highest and price sensitivity lowest

Trust - the output of the 10 Principles of Open Business - is essential for success in today's open economy.
But we should note that its value varies across market segments. Trust will attract the right staff, keep the organisation honest and true to its beliefs and inspire people to perform at their best. But its impact on consumer action varies depending on choice/ease of switching and price sensitivity.
This may explain why even when we lose trust in something we don't always stop using it.
The graph included here illustrates my plotting of some market segments and institutions which shows us which should put the greatest efforts into building trust for the purpose of impacting consumer behaviour.

Where it's very difficult to switch (ie your daily commute by train) trust has some value but building it won't encourage more commuters to use a rail company. They just may feel a little better about the next price hike, a little safer while on board.
While there is no option when it comes to your police service you could argue there is little requirement to build trust to change user behaviour (though trusting the service does of course encourage people to be more open with it, even if we can't go and share our intel with an alternative organisation).
The key area for trust as an investment in behavioural change seems to be where both the cost of both switching and the price sensitivity is low (the top right quadrant).
Here we find the banks, the media, transport. Most retail vendors would fall here. Topically - politically parties appear a standout. Trust should be everything to them.
My positioning of supermarkets on this grid may explain why - despite the repeated crises of trust in our supermarket giants (even Open Business advocates Tesco) - there hasn't been a mass exodus of customers. Tesco's market share is down less than 2% year on year according to Kantar (Oct 2014). But that's based on spend, not numbers of customers. Customers are less likely to have left Tesco for Aldi or Lidl over issues of trust than they are over issues of price. They have added an Aldi run to their routine Tesco buys, not abandoned it completely.
These positions aren't fixed. IF through Open Business or other investment in building trust (and blockchain is being advocated as one such tool by The 10 Principles Co-author Jamie Burke) organisations can make trust a competitive advantage they can become more resistant to start-ups and new-comers who do not have a trust bank already established.

Disaggregated Government, here we come

I saw Alex Butler speak yesterday; the Director of Transformational Strategy at the UK Government's Cabinet Office (cool title, btw)

She's facing an uphill battle - as anyone who is attempting to tackle the silo'd mentality of any organisation will attest. Her gig is to try to put the 'citizen' (read consumer for the rest of us) first - not the producers of the information (familiar difficulties in media, too).

Her problem is that each Government department wants to dissemminate its 'information' from its centre, out to the edge that is the citizenry. The result is something like (and it appears very hard to audit) 1500 government web sites.

And famously you may need to contact something like 40 government offices if you suffer a sudden bereavement. Not really putting the citizen first.

So the Directgov.co.uk site is an attempt to address this.

Alex says she understands the need for two-way flows of conversation, says government is learning from the success of e-petitions (that people actually want to take part in the legislative process) and is even considering the thorny issue of letting go of control - by offering government stuff as widgets and sources for mash-ups. Alex referred to NetMums (not a government site), revealing an understanding that local mums know best about services locally. Edge is best.

And at the end of this process you might conclude there will be no need for directgov.co.uk.
For example, if you want to go abroad; sure you need to know about passports and visas and whether or not your dog can come with you etc etc etc - all those government agency things... but you also need to know where you can book flights, hotels, car hire etc.

That government information is best deployed where it is of most use - eg when we're going through the 'consumer journey' of booking our travel.

So allowing government 'information' to be set free to be re-used by other relevant widgets/sites will mean the distribution is no longer controlled by the centre. And in citing NetMums Alex seems to understand that even the control of content is not always best performed from the centre.

Heartening. Makes me wonder what changes will be wrought to the machinery of government as a result. Disaggregated government here we come.

Reason report on MIT's Futures of Entertainment conference

Alan Moore on Communities Dominate Brands draws our attention to this post.
It's by Jesse Walker at Reason magazine. Read the whole thing here.

Here's some of my personal highlights, Alan selects others at CDB here.
And there are a few of my own conclusions at the end. Feel free to add your own as posts.

INTERNAL COMMUNICATION!
Last summer, as the explosive popularity of YouTube became obvious to the older media companies, the marketing department at the Cartoon Network decided to use the site to promote its shows. So it posted some video clips there, hoping the promos would get forwarded in emails, linked on blogs and MySpace pages, and otherwise spread through the Internet, strengthening the channel's fan base and drawing in new viewers.
Happily, people noticed the videos. Unhappily, some of the people who noticed the videos worked for the Cartoon Network's legal department, who mistook their colleagues' new marketing tactic for an unauthorized appropriation of the firm's intellectual property. They promptly sent cease-and-desist letters demanding that the clips come down...

PUT THE CONSUMER FIRST - AND MEAN IT!
...a business meeting she and some colleagues once had with Apple... the TV people were caught up in pleasing all their stakeholders, while the Mac man was concerned solely with improving the consumer's experience. It's a pretty good snapshot of the difference between a company that sells eyeballs to advertisers and a company that sells tools to the audience....

NEVER MIND THE QUALITY, FEEL THE COMMUNITY
The second panel... was devoted to content generated by the audience itself. The speakers included Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr; Rob Tercek of the (M)FORMA Group, which produces mobile entertainment; Kevin Barrett of BioWare, which makes computer-based role-playing games; and Ji Lee, who started sticking empty speech balloons on ads around New York City, waiting to see what people would write inside them and photographing the results... They all build structures where users can roam, interact, and create and share their own content.

Fake suggested that there is a "general exhaustion with mass consumer culture," and that less passive forms of entertainment are arguably the natural state of affairs. It wasn't long ago, historically speaking, that quilting bees and front-parlor music occupied the space now filled by movies and television.

Tercek argued that economic logic favors user-generated content.

And Barrett noted that, while only a minority of the grassroots creations... might be "good" by mainstream standards... that doesn't matter from the ordinary consumer's point of view. What's important is that it fills a need for the people who make it, not that anyone outside their immediate circle find it engaging...

FOLLOW YOUR USERS
You can't predict the way those people will use those tools. Flickr began as a feature in a long-dead online game, a way players could drag and drop photos into instant messages. The programmers soon added the ability to post those pictures on webpages, and that was the side of their service that succeeded.

Wise companies -- put another way, companies that survive in the marketplace -- understand that it's better to foster and follow such serendipitous developments than to try to force your users to conform to your original vision.


BUILD YOUR OWN SECONDLIFE
Ron Meiners of multiverse.net described his company's plan to build a platform that will let other people build yet more worlds on a license-free basis, from enormous World of Warcraft-style games to amateur, user-generated realms, each with their own aims and mores.


Of all of the above, the most telling for me is the notion that the natural human state is to join in - to interact, to be part of the entertainment rather than to sit back and stare at a screen: hence the success of social-networked sites, of blogging, of computer games... etc etc etc

It's why engagement marketing beats interruptive marketing, why UGC is essential, why micro mass media beats mass media, why broadcast is failing and self-cast is growing.

Even when we thought we were a mass media, passive-entertainment addicted society, the clues were still there: It's why people always liked Letters pages in magazines and newspapers, why phone-ins have always been at the heart of talk radio and why gossip happens.

Hollywood and TV have masked some human truths. The tools of the internet have done nothing more than reveal the huge commercial potential in understanding them.

Skills for a 'participatory culture' world

Henry Jenkins has written a paper for the MacArthur Foundation which is all about what he calls: "participatory culture" and what this means for 'media literacy'.

He and colleagues have also identified core cultural competencies and social skills they believe the kids of today have got to pick up if they want to participate fully.

They also argue that many are acquiring these skills informally from the way they use digital media.

It might be useful to think of these alongside your own digital publishing plans. Does what you are offering allow participation on these levels:

Play – the capacity to experiment with your surroundings as a form of problem-solving

Performance – the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery

Simulation – the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real world processes

Appropriation – the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content

Multitasking – the ability to scan one's environment and shift focus as needed to salient details.

Distributed Cognition – the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities

Collective Intelligence – the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal

Judgement – the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources

Transmedia Navigation – the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities

Networking – the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information

Negotiation – the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms.

Read more HERE (start with the post by Alan Moore and move on to Jenkins own blog.

Current trends in consumer behaviour

Nokia will publish a white paper at the end of this year on where it sees gaming in 2010.

You can read a preview HERE on Communities Dominate Brands

It's extrapolated from recognition of what is currently going on in gaming and social networking. But I think the insight is worth bearing in mind in any digital publishing plan.

Here's some of what the paper has to say:

"Three interesting aspects about current consumer behavior are:
1) leaving traces,
2) media acrobatics’ multi-tasking culture and
3) pleasure orientation.

"It is increasingly relevant to leave your own mark (tags, comments, modifications, patches (for a really graphic example, see plazes.com...fasterfuture) to the networked media communities and interlinking with mobile with online communities.

"Multitasking refers to a way of using several channels, devices and services simultaneously to link with other products and related themes.

"Media acrobatics refers to the fast reception ability of new technologies, devices and services, as well as an open-minded experimentation mentality and misuse (also known as " creative hackerism").

"As a general effect of these, one can say that media use is in transition points. The change affects mobile games and the expansion and creation of new active consumer groups."

Perhaps the most all-encompassing learning being made from the success of social interaction via digital devices is that the human is a "we species", one which is naturally (ie built to be) social.

That should be at the heart of all new developments.

You'll find more on this from Alan Moore an CDB.