Here's a really simple way of thinking about the value of involving your 'customers' as partners right from the off - in an Open Business relationship: The music you buy.
The music you choose indicates the music you would have created yourself if you had the skill/time/access.
It isn't the music you would have created for yourself. It is an approximation. Just as the products and services you buy aren't those you would have created for yourself. They are an approximation.
As a 'customer' to get closer to the product you would have created yourself requires you to invest some of your skill/time/input into the the process.
As an organisation your role is to create the platform to enable your customers to invest.
I am continually amazed by the number of people who still seem to think 'social media' is all about content and the distribution of messaging.
Their end game is to persuade you, via the gift of influence, to do stuff. This is the exact same model as old school PR and Advertising: Pay us money, we'll persuade folk to do what you want them to do.
Social Media is not a 'do to' medium. It is a 'do with' medium.
Yet few in the persuasion camp will even open the door to allowing their campaign of doing to to be done with the people for whom it is intended. The lip service to peer to peer participation usually paid is simply to use you and I as a channel to distribute.
This is to treat the peer to peer networked environment as if it were simply another broadcast medium - which is to misunderstand the difference between a network of nodes and a centre-out broadcast mechanic.
The web creates greatest value when it is understood as the best available way for groups (communities of purpose) to self form. Our sharing of messages, perhaps better understood as our expression of metadata, is our way of reaching out to connect with other people who want to solve the same problems we do, right now.
Bringing together people who care about the same things, self forming into groups, is how the energy to make change is generated.
Bring together people who really care about something and they will help you improve it, making it a better fit for themselves. They'll help you make products and services which work better for them, because they matter to them. They'll do with... you.
It's social, its participatory, it's niche, and it's where the purpose of messages (metadata) is to connect us rather than to persuade us.
1% of people create content, 9% edit or modify that content, and 90% view the content without contributing.
I suspect its assumptions are used to calculate all kinds of 'propensity of your market to join in social media estimate'. I'd hazard a guess Forrester applies it to this, for example (corrections welcome). (Image courtesy Chris Devers.)
Let me say I don't think this is a rule about willingness to participate - it is one about ability to participate.
And that is a critical, critical difference.
It means (and assumes) for example that everyone wants to participate and that it is the lowering of barriers to participation that will surface this.
The barriers could be cultural, technical, linguistic, financial, logistic
Whatever the case, don't kid yourselves participation is for a small elite. It's for whoever you are prepared to help overcome the barriers the rest of us face. It is up to you to lower those barriers.
Afterall, it's a rare human being who doesn't want to join in a conversation that matters to them. You just have to find ways to help them join in.
I've been thinking about the issues of access a lot recently - mostly prompted by my work as a Trustee at CitizensOnline.org (which I, of course, recommend to you :-). (I should make clear before I go on, the following are my views - not necessarily those of Citizens Online.)
For a start 2mb isn't very much these days. If it was a real (rather than 'as advertised') 2mb that would be a start. My 8mb home connection rarely actually delivers half its claim. (thanks BT).
But that is very much only half of the story. (image courtesy)
Speed of access to the internet is not the same as speed at which something can be broadcast at you via broadband.
Speed of access is - just like all the best things about the internet - about a two-way flow.
The internet is created by us, with us. You are a participant and contributor to it. To access it is therefore to have an equal ability to contribute to it as it is to draw down from it: So 2mb download and upload speed, please.
But the story of access is about more even than this. It is one thing to have connection to the pipe - and a nice fat two-way one at that - it is quite another to get your share of the value.
It's a little like Victorian Government sending a free set of encylopaedias to every home, only to discover only the rich kids benefit - because they know how to read.
It's time to think about the equivalent of teaching people how to read and write. on the web - making their ability to participate and share a core foundation of how the UK as a whole benefits from the digital revolution.
Let me give you a real and personal example. If the very nice people at the Government decide in their wisdom to provide free wifi in the road my dear old mum lives in it she'll get precisely zero value from it. Zip, nada, until such time as someone either gives her an interface to access participatory sites with such ease it's like popping the kettle on. Or until such time as someone invests the time and trouble to show through demonstration the value she could join in.
Access to the value creating power of the network is little to do with access to a particular terminal at a particular speed.
How many people got real value from the early internet; from the dial-up modem internet; from the not-always-available internet - from the bloody-hard-to-use internet? Lots.
Those pioneers didn't need 2mb downloads to join in the value.
We wouldn't have today's internet if they had. They found value inspite of the limitations.
And they told their friends. Their friends joined in and made it bigger and better.
Their friends got value, told their friends etc etc ad infinitum.
Helping others discover the value available through the tools on offer is the crucial and critical thing here.
It's the part the Government should be focusing on with its reports and big ideas.
But it's also the part ALL of us can commit to doing something about.
Sure, you can lobby your MP to put pressure on for the Government to spend more cash on ever fatter pipes.
Or you can just coach one more person in the value you get from being online.
The more of us who make it to the edges - the less those in the centre have control over the big decisions anyway...
2009 is the year the realisation dawns that social media is already bigger than all other media put together, because more people spend more time participating in it than is spent consuming any and all other kinds.
I mean that the stats which, for the past and present, are already staggering, will start to reflect the truth that many of our daily lives bear witness to - less TV, less print, less broadcast; more social media, more networks more of our time. More of ourselves, personally invested.
It is the year when even those sat plumb in the centre will be unable to deny that our mass migration to and participation in social media is much more than simply where and how we are entertained and informed.
It is how we come together around things we care about. And in doing so, we create change. We can create everything we care about.
It is the year that many will realise that our increasingly ubiquitous use of social media is not a fad, trend or bubble - it is a new reality and the key to unlocking a new era in cooperation, a new world of collaboration. (image courtesy)
For those with their eyes open wide enough, 2009 will reveal that we are only at the start of the great disruption of the Internet.
2009 will be a great year for those who ditch the idea of the web as a distribution channel and instead embrace the web as a place where communities of purpose come together to collaborate.
The more we engage with social media the more we understand this and the deep reaching disintermediation that follows from this as sure as night follows day.
It will be a year in which those wedded to broadcast will have their notions of reality challenged at every turn.
I saw James Gardner, head of innovation at Lloyds TSB (the UK bank, of which I am a customer), write that:
"social media is a channel optimised for the insignificant." (context here)
I think that rather neatly sums up how and where the misunderstanding is occuring.
This is not a channel for use. This is a web of many-to-many flows for participation.
It is optimised for everyone to share with anyone they care to, any and everything that matters to them right now.
Significance, whether you describe the nodes or the content, is relative - no longer to be judged from the centre. The value is between the people doing the sharing.
Those stuck in the centre must prepare for the new reality. And you, my friends, must help them.
The rate of change is so rapid it's difficult for one person to keep up to speed. Let's pool our thoughts, share our reactions and, who knows, even reach some shared conclusions worth arriving at?
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