- Posts tagged Social Influence
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The Invisible Hand of Social Capitalism to define the future of Money
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“.
Doc Searls Weblog · The Business Movie
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.)
Creating value in the age of distributed capitalism - McKinsey Quarterly
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:
- The products or services you offer are affordable to few but desired by many.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- There are hidden assets, outside institutional boundaries, that are underutilized but could replace your fixed costs, add capacity, or add new capabilities.
- You don’t have all the tangible or intangible assets required to meet your customers’ needs.
- 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.
State of The Blogosphere — Infographiclabs
First published on The Blog Herald.
Boosting the productivity of knowledge workers - McKinsey Quarterly -
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.
Toggle Sidebar 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.
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.
Social Media – is it really mainstream in B2B Marketing? | Buzz Marketing for Technology
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 :)
Best Buy Prediction Market Videos
“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
Think of the possibilities! Tapping into the wisdom of the crowd is the new way of predicting future outcomes.
Mindset change critical to ensure social success -
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 :)
