The wisest people in history have been saying the same thing over and over again, yet we fail to listen and act: People are an asset, People are the greatest asset.

So Then, Watch your assets

Meanwhile, our “risk based” capital structure accounts only for the observed randomness of individual human nature rather than trying to securitize the potentially infinite wisdom of crowds.  This is a problem, this is our very serious problem.

Everyone is Committed to The Public Domain

Anyone familiar with The Ingenesist Project knows that we commit a new class of business methods to the public domain for other people to use for building the next economic paradigm. For example, The Value Game developed by ourselves, is being used by at least 3 new start-ups as the value creation mechanism of their business plan.  We likewise consult to social entrepreneurs across the World to help them build a new form of capital structure where knowledge assets are the basis of fungible social currency.

Zertify.com

Zertify.com is a business plan that will convert social currency to financial currency and make money for you, dear reader. Zertify.com can employ well over 40,000 people directly (and tens of millions indirectly) in the US alone within months, not years. Zertify.com is a knowledge inventory system that accounts for knowledge assets as they reside in a community – not necessarily as they reside sequestered within a corporation.

Zertify business plan

Here is a downloadable PDF of Zertify.com Sample Business Method. The word “Zertify” comes from the combination of the words “Certify” and the statistical Z-test.  These two things correspond to “Social Vetting” and “Predictive Modeling Capability” – these are the two ESSENTIAL elements for the capitalization and securitization of any asset.  Of course, I have made certain assumptions regarding taxonomies and proficiency criteria – my intention is simply to re-deploy existing market infrastructure as best as possible in this Example.  But go ahead, change it, modify it, understand it, build it, and let us help. Become a billionaire – see if we care.

Why?  because we do care.

In case you were wondering who all those wise people are, flip through this presentation (great to see Tara Hunt among such luminaries !!)

The Great Promise

View more presentations from Oscar Berg.

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I have been approached by many brilliant social entrepreneurs in recent weeks.  They each have several things in common. Each has an incredibly creative idea and a strong passion linked to a deep seated observation that social currency has value.  As nebulous as that may sound, it is very real, specific, and clear in the minds of those who I’ll call, The New Entrepreneur.

Nothing Economic can happen until two or more people get together to build something.  Likewise, when two or more people get together to build something, economic things happen. The objective of this post is to demonstrate the 3 underlying actions of a new class of business plans that will become dominant in the next economic paradigm.

Our recipe is simple:

Step one: convert financial currency into social currency

Step two: Create value denominated in social currency

Step three: Convert new social currency back into financial currency – if needed

This simple recipe forms the basis of the business plans for several start-ups including Social Flights and The Social Value Network as well as numerous other projects that we consult to in the US, Greece, Brazil, Australia, China, and Mexico.

So here is how it works

The Old Business Model:  Suppose you buy a truck and you use it to haul stuff for your own personal and business interests. After 5 years, you can sell the truck for about 1/2 what you paid for it.

The New Business Model: Suppose that you buy a truck to hauls stuff for your own personal or business interests.  Suppose that you also let The Boy Scout troop leader borrow it to pick up christmas trees for sale.  Suppose you let the Kiwanis use it to pick up supplies for their annual salmon bake.  Suppose you let the YWCA haul donated furniture to their satellite facility.  Suppose you help your neighbor use it for a home improvement project.  After 5 years, you sell the truck for about 1/2 of what you paid for it.

The difference is that now your community is engaged with your personal interests.  You have converted financial capital into social capital and created new value denominated in social currency.  One notable example includes Neighborgoods, but there will undoubtedly be thousands of variations of this leveraging every conceivable physical asset.

Now, how do you transform this back social capital into financial capital?   Well, that’s what the emerging science of Social Capitalism is all about.  Social Profit is like a fungible option with a face value.  If structured correctly, an option can have a face value equal to the difference between discount and full price. That face value can be traded like money.  When you are engaged in a community, people know who you are, they trust you and they share with you.  People are trading options – the right without the obligation to exercise a financial position in the future.

Options have real value as an asset if you have them or as a liability if you don’t

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The Branded Debit card has long been a staple of the vanity financial services industry.  Having your favorite football team, alma mater, or non-profit proudly displayed upon your purchasing prowess is a clever offshoot of those printed checks of days gone by.  Now, in the age of social media, YOU are the brand. Your product is your information and the information that passes through your social graph.

Self-branding

The most valuable asset is not who you’ve known in the past – many of those relationships are played out.  Rather, it is whom you will know in the future.   Your future connections are where all new innovation will be valued – all the decisions that are yet to be made and all the intentions yet to be acted upon. The only metric that can accurately predict this is your knowledge inventory; what you know, what you are talented in, and what you enjoy doing.  You are the future maker.

Next generation debit card

The next generation of debit cards will allow anyone to deposit value in your account, but only you will be able to take it off your account. So, instead of giving away your knowledge inventory to Facebook where marketers can scrape it for free, you can associate your most valuable asset to an electronic account number and treat it like a currency.  There are very strong laws in place regarding usage and re-usage of financial information.

Hello, my name is 5412 7512 3456 7890

If anyone wants to see what’s behind this number, they need to give you something – they need to play The Value Game.  The more valuable your knowledge inventory is to a vendor, the more they will pay to access it.  Now here is the twist:

Leveraging Knowledge Assets

Suppose you are a famous person, your brand may serve as an knowledge inventory of your followers. Fans who associate themselves with your brand can receive vendor coupons that you negotiate for them.  If you like Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, you can negotiate with the ice cream maker to place a 1.00 coupon on the cards of your 1M followers.  You have the power to leverage your social currency into financial currency for your followers who then transform it into more social currency for you soon you’ll have 2M followers. You can promote matching funds for your charity, treat your fans to a free beer on their birthday, or double their frequent flyer miles for flying to your concert, etc.

Suppose that you are not very famous

A mechanical engineer who publishes a paper on a better way to install solar panels may speak at a conference.  Their brand consists of a highly specialized group of people who will each likely talk to many people about solar energy application within the next year.   It is worthwhile for a group of vendors to pay down your airfare and apply discounts to your audience and youtube video.  This set of incentives will reward professionals for producing new knowledge which benefits a broader community.

Everyone is famous to everyone else

If given the right incentives and generalized across a community, people will venture into their community to build social currency.  Visionary social enterprise will help them to do it.  Those who stick to the old ad model of “scam and spam” will be systematically played out of the Value Game.

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The fastest way to unleash the extraordinary value that is contained in communities of experienced, talented, and motivated people is to provide a substrate for them to trade their knowledge assets among each other.  When people get together around a purpose, they build things that create incredible social value. The Social Value Platform provides an electronic accounting system for social value.  In The Social Value Game, vendors deposit inventory into a strategic community of people and the community creates social value.  This new social value is then converted into monetary revenue in the next economic paradigm called Social Capitalism.

Introducing The Social Value Network:

The social value network is a debit card platform that allows for the trade of social currencies.  Using The Value Game method created by The Ingenesist Project, vendors can place socially valuable inventory into a social game.  The social entrepreneurs leverage that inventory to organize communities to build something together.  Other vendors will insert complementary inventory to drive social value in these increasingly organized communities.  These organized communities take on characteristics of “a virtual corporation” as both consumers and producers of goods and services.

Social Capitalism

The best reason for developing an alternate economy in social currency is to bypass the inefficiency of the monetary system at least temporarily so that true value and true wealth can be created.  Once true value is created, converting it back to a financial currency would be relatively simple.

Social Currencies

Social currencies account for your productivity in a community, not your productivity in a corporation.  Every time a gatekeeper extracts a fee from you, they expend your social value.  Taxes, user fees, ATM fees, convenience fees, commissions, subscriptions to automated services, all destroy social value irrevocably.  Every time someone asks you to fill in a web form, type out a captcha, walk through a full body scanner, or opt out of a privacy invasive application, they are spending your social value and stealing your information, period.  Hackers attack PayPal not you, yet ultimately you are responsible and subsidize their inefficiency with your own.

The Holy Grail of Marketing

Advertisers and vendors have long sought the holy grail of advertising – the ability to speak directly to the community of people who want their product.  Good vendors want to segment themselves from the bad vendors instead of engage in damaging price wars.  Customers want great service and a strong knowledge base of other people who use those products. Countless businesses want to support community activities with additional products or services.

Your Social Enterprise

Social Currencies are a frictionless way to conduct transactions, defeat spammers, hackers, info miners, while also building community doing the things that you love. Your information is valuable and you should have the right to give it away freely, trade it, or even sell it to whomever you choose.  Do you have an impressive social, creative, or professional set of knowledge assets but are bored to tears by employers who don’t care what you are passionate about?    Or, maybe you have just been laid off and over 40.  Have you ever wanted your own business?  Many people may be better off trading social currencies instead of chasing the greenback.

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Living to work, or working to live?

Everyone knows what money is supposed to be – it is supposed to be a representation of human productivity, otherwise nobody would “work” for it, right?

It is also fairly obvious that money is not the only thing that represents human productivity. People work for family, community, reputation, love, recreation, art, music, etc.   These values are denominated in social currencies.

Working for Social Currency

Market Capitalism has deftly turned social currencies into consumption verticals.  People consume recreation products, family products, community products, reputation products, etc. The irony is that people are  foregoing all those things to drive off to work in order to earn the money so that they can buy back their family, recreation, and community. People are “working” for social currencies denominated in dollars.  The Mantra of Madison Avenue is to “Steal the thing that people love about themselves and sell it back for the price of the product”

Influence Peddling

Well known internet celebrities are getting sponsorships from some well known corporations – but not all.  The reason is clear – these people have the ability to influence the opinions and interactions of their community.  However, if the sponsor has a terrible product, that same influence can turn against the brand and the influencer in an amplified manner.  It is clearly in the brand’s best interest to match the product with the message of the influencer and vice versa.

Everyone is an influencer within their own knowledge inventory

A mechanical engineer can influence the professional community of engineers.  A math teacher can influence students.  A police officer can influence citizens.  A patriarch can influence an extended family. A big brother can influence a little sister.  Taken together and segmented across a hugely diverse knowledge inventory of human civilization, everyone is an influencer of everyone else.

Printing Social Currency

So instead of going to work to to earn money, people could just as easily go into their community to earn influence.  Brands can sponsor people based on their knowledge inventory to use, share, organize, and improve communities and products.   The most successful product will be those that help people to improve their communities. As such, brands and products will likewise benefit from stronger and unified communities.  Products that weaken, marginalize, oppress, or isolate people from their communities will fail.

The Invisible Hands of Social Capitalism

Nothing economic can happen until people get together to build something.  Strong linked communities will get together to build “economic” things. What they choose to build will become the value generation mechanisms of the future economy that will transform social value back into financial value.  Like Adam Smith’s invisible hand of Market Capitalism, the Invisible Hands of Social Capitalism will reward people for organizing themselves to make what they enjoy most and are naturally talented in producing.  We’ll call them “Recorporations“.

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Illustration from Wired (reversed) - Aegir Hallmundur; Benjamin Franklin: Corbis

Debit Cards and Credit cards routinely handle conversions from Dollars to Pesos to Euros and Yen.  The calculation is simple because there are known conversion rates between them.  In Fact, the credit card or debit card is buying the other currency much in the same way that they buy the pair of Levies, IPad, or bag of Tulip Bulbs being purchased.

Trading coupons for coupons

In other words, a debit card or credit card should also be able to use IPads, Levies, or Tulip Bulbs to buy money.  Of course, they would not use an actual IPad any more than a bank uses an actual Dollar – they trade a 100% coupon of a dollar for a 100% coupon of an IPad.  By adjusting the exchange rate between IPads and Dollars,  a 50% coupon for an IPad equals 300 Dollars and it is easy to see we are in very familiar Groupon territory.

The Dollar as a black market Currency

The debit card (or any form of mobile payment system) can, in fact, be used to trade what in earlier technological eras would be called a Black Market currency.  For example, After the Mexican currency crash of 1994-1995, I personally witnessed people empty WalMart to the bare shelves literally overnight, only to find those items circulating as currency the next day – in exchange for Dollars; the black market currency of the less developed World.

Drive the economy in reverse in order to drive the economy forward

With a high velocity and frictionless payment processing system, the economy should be able to operate in “reverse” just as easily – if not better than – it operates in so-called “forward”.  Here is why:

Suppose that Big Box retailer issues a coupon for 50% off all of it’s products for one Christmas Season because they want to beat out every merchant in the country.  The contingency coupon gets applied to all the credit/debit cards of all people that have ever shopped at the Big Box.  Since the local merchants are driven to failure and they’ll need to liquidate anyway, their response is to also honor the Big Box coupons.  This will initiate a spiral and all retailers will begin to accept each other’s coupons.  Soon, the brands such as Nike, Coca-cola, and Canon will be pulled into honoring retailer discounts.   The “coupon” will become the currency instead of the dollars.  The exchange rate between products will be determined by local arbitrage.

Lose the friction, improve efficiency

First, it would become very difficult to tax these transactions.  It would also be very difficult to inflate or deflate a dollar currency against these transactions. Arbitrage opportunities will be based on the true social value of a product in a community.  The dollar denominated conversion factor will become increasingly arbitrary.  The the new currency will be a social currency because people will now favor whatever products have the highest Social Value in their community relative to the knowledge assets of the community.  Advertising friction will disappear.  Assume Market Friction was 50%…..what changes?

In the end game, social priorities will drive Wall Street priorities

Social Currency is real currency.  The technology exists today to make it a frictionless exchange.  The economy may actually run better in so-called “reverse”.  The only thing missing is a True Value Social Game

References:

Sepp Hasslberger The Future of Money

The March issue of Wired Magazine carries an article titled: The Future of Money: It’s Flexible, Frictionless and (Almost) Free.,

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Went to see The Social Network last night, and thought it was terrific. Even though most of the scenes set at Harvard and Silicon Valley were shot elsewhere, the versimilitude was high. And,while it was strange to see the recent past treated as history, the story actually works, and carries truth, even if it doesn’t ring true for the living subjects of the story. (I’ve haven’t met any of the movie’s characters, but I thought Justin Timberlake’s portrayal of the Sean Parker character was drawn straight from Jason Calacanis.)

One way for executives to shake up their strategic thinking is to start with the radical question of how a mutation could destroy the boundaries of their industries. In my mind, that danger increases under the following circumstances:

1. The products or services you offer are affordable to few but desired by many.
2. Trust between you and your customer has fractured. The average person’s trust in business has been in steep decline for the past 30 years, and the distance between what today’s businesses can deliver and what individuals want is only growing. This problem makes all consumer-facing industries—especially financial services, health care, insurance, autos, airlines, utilities, media, education, and pharmaceuticals—particularly vulnerable.
3. Your business model is concentrated, with a high level of fixed costs, a large percentage of which could be distributed, delegated to collaborators, or shifted to the virtual world. Here, too, most existing industries are deeply vulnerable.
4. Your organizational structures, systems, and activities can be replaced by flexible, responsive, low-cost networks. A neighborhood watch, citizen journalists, online peer support, and peer-to-peer reviews and information sharing are all examples.
5. There are hidden assets, outside institutional boundaries, that are underutilized but could replace your fixed costs, add capacity, or add new capabilities.
6. You don’t have all the tangible or intangible assets required to meet your customers’ needs.
7. Your end users have needs and desires that you haven’t imagined and have no way to learn about. Unless you make a strategic commitment to explore I-space, you’ll learn about this vulnerability only when your end users migrate elsewhere. This has already been the experience of executives in industries such as recorded music, newspapers, broadcast news, and travel.

To help with keeping up with the fast moving pace of Social Business, we’ve created a useful new model aimed at helping you stay up-to-date with the major moving parts of Social Business today. We define Social Business here as the distinct process of applying social media to meet business objectives.

First published on The Blog Herald.

Are you doing all that you can to enhance the productivity of your knowledge workers? It’s a simple question, but one that few senior executives can answer.

Their confusion isn’t for lack of trying. Organizations around the world struggle to crack the code for improving the effectiveness of managers, salespeople, scientists, and others whose jobs consist primarily of interactions—with other employees, customers, and suppliers—and complex decision making based on knowledge and judgment.¹ The stakes are high: raising the productivity of these workers, who constitute a large and growing share of the workforce in developed economies, represents a major opportunity for companies, as well as for countries with low birthrates that hope to maintain GDP growth.

Nonetheless, many executives have a hazy understanding of what it takes to bolster productivity for knowledge workers. This lack of clarity is partly because knowledge work involves more diverse and amorphous tasks than do production or clerical positions, where the relatively clear-cut, predictable activities make jobs easier to automate or streamline. Likewise, performance metrics are hard to come by in knowledge work, making it challenging to manage improvement efforts (which often lack a clear owner in the first place). Against this backdrop, it’s perhaps unsurprising that many companies settle for scattershot investments in training and IT systems.

Since knowledge workers spend half their time on interactions, our research and experience suggest that companies should first explore the productivity barriers that impede these interactions. Armed with a better understanding of the constraints, senior executives can get more bang for their buck by identifying targeted productivity-improvement efforts to increase both the efficiency and effectiveness of the interactions between workers.

 

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	About the research This article summarizes the results of a research project under way since 2006. In the first phase, more than 200 knowledge workers at four organizations—the research institute Battelle, Educational Testing Service (ETS), Novartis, and the US Defense Intelligence Agency—kept daily logs of their knowledge interactions (more than 3,000 in total). Subsequently, we conducted field research and interviews with about 35 people at the original four companies plus three new ones: Ecopetrol, NASA, and Petrobras. For more on the first phase of research, see Al Jacobson and Laurence Prusak, “The cost of knowledge,” Harvard Business Review, November 2006.

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Among companies we’ve surveyed (see sidebar, “About the research”), fully half of all interactions are constrained by one of five barriers: physical, technical, social or cultural, contextual, and temporal. While individual companies will encounter some obstacles more than others, our experience suggests that the approaches to overcoming them are widely applicable.

I don’t know how you feel but I certainly feel like everything I read about Social Media is the same old thing just a rehash of something else I read before. There doesn’t seem to be anything really new. Sure Facebook changes its platform every Tuesday but I mean something more like groundbreaking ideas using social. Maybe that’s because we are entering a stage where we are all including social in everything we do. It’s no longer a social science experiment by a bunch of early adopters – it’s just part of our everyday approach!

Also I am not seeing anyone really “killing it” with or in social media (sans Mark Zuckerberg of course). There seems to be tons of Social Media consultants and Directors of Social Media but will that party last? (see my post on Fire your Director of Social Media).

Furthermore everyone seems to have a book out on Social Media – heck I have 3 books on social media (2 out there and 1 on the way!) It’s amazing to see so much written on this topic which leads me to believe the party is over.

So where do we go from here?

I guess we head back to the core of what we do as B2B Marketers and take these lessons learned in Social Media back with us and see if we can innovate. I once heard that innovation happens when people get bored with a technology – perhaps we are at that point now in social.

Paul sounds a lot like a 2.0 Hippie :)

“Big companies are like communist countries – we all know how well communist countries worked. At some point they fell apart, not because the leaders were dumb, but because nobody would tell the leaders at the top, who had to make decisions, what decisions to make.”

Jeff Severts, EVP, Best Buy

A large bank asked me if B@B companies are really using social media. Go figure :)

But, some still buck this trend, said Ebenezer Heng, a spokesperson for social media marketing agency, Kumeiti.

He told ZDNet Asia that it is a "fallacy" when businesses choose to ignore social media totally to avoid problems and challenges that may arise from adopting such platforms, such as security and negative branding.

Noting the growing influence of social networks, Heng said: "Consumers always talk about their experiences with businesses they patronize. Everyone is a publisher in the social media world, from blogs to forums. Content now drives awareness, not advertising."

To best tap the power of social media platforms, he said business should adopt "the right mindset and technique", and not simply the medium itself. "Social media means allowing the company to become human, to react to its consumers, to reach out, ask them [questions] and then actually listen to the answers," he added.

Carlyn Law, consultant and director of PR agency Sixth Sense Communications, said businesses should not blindly use "a blanket strategy" but look instead at carving out a mix of online tools and content that suits their concepts and brand values.

As GetIT Comms' Nair described: "It's about being social. So get your feet wet and start interacting."

You have to change your beliefs before you can change your mind :)

Yes, another acronym to share - VRM - Vendor Relationship Management. This one captures the value of the efficiencies of the Internet... making relationships easier. Particularly with the companies that you want.

VRM combines a customer-centered philosophy about industry guidelines and the technology platforms for making interactions more efficient and effective. Our clients have asked us to assess the "best practices" being developed from this initiative.


Last week Doc Searls led the CRM = VRM 2010 conference at the Berkman Center at Harvard. Here are notes from the event by Trust Fabric.

The same principle applies to the websites that are distinctive because their authors combine content and packaging into a beautiful product that others aspire to recreate. Mega-sites like Facebook, Yahoo!, CNN, and many others designed to keep you moving through content like merchandise racks in a department store will never define the web, because they don’t push it forward. They have the biggest, brightest signs, but can’t match the experience and quality of sites that are the product of craftsmanship and dedication.

Talk about asymmetry. You are no longer just a client to a server. You are a target with crosshairs on your wallet.

Trying to make advertising more helpful is a good thing. Within a trusted relationship, it can be a better thing. The problem with all this tracking is that it does not involve trusted relationships. Advertisers and site owners may assume or infer some degree of conscious assent by users. But, as the Journal series makes clear, most of us have no idea how much unwelcome tracking is really going on. (Hell, they didn’t know until they started digging.)

So let’s say we can construct trusted relationships with sellers. By we I mean you and me, as individuals. How about if we have our own terms of engagement with sellers—ones that express our intentions, and not just theirs? What might we say? How about,

• You will put nothing on my computer or browser other than what we need for our  relationship.
• Any data you collect in the course of our relationship can be shared with me.
• You can combine my data with other data and share it outside our relatinship, provided it is not PII (Personally Identifiable Information).
• If we cease our relationship, you can keep my data but not associate any PII with that data.
• You will also not follow my behavior or accumulate data about me for the purposes of promotion or advertising unless I opt into that. Nor will your affiliates or partners.

I’m not a lawyer, and I’m not saying any of the points above are either legal or in legal language. But they are the kinds of things we might like to say within a relationship that is symmetrical in nature yet includes the kind of asymmetry-by-choice that Joe talks about: the kind based on real trust and real agreement and not just passive assent.