A couple of years ago in the course of some consulting work I developed a framework of what motivates people to participate in networks of all kinds. This includes and goes beyond the Facebooks and MySpaces of today, to community-based and values-based initiatives. These motivations need to be understood by organizations wanting to implement open innovation by drawing on external resources, environmental and social change groups, politicians and any initiative that involves drawing in broad participation from outside organizational boundaries.
The nine motivations are:
* Financial. Immediate or future financial rewards
* Contribution. Feeling of contributing to something socially worthwhile.
* Outcome. Benefiting by using or applying the outcomes created by the network.
* Learning. Learning from leading thinkers or peers or through the participation itself.
* Community. Feeling of belonging to and participating in a group with shared values or interests.
* Reputation. Enhanced reputation and esteem from others.
* Coolness. Being involved in interesting, exciting, and novel domains with broad appeal.
* Fun. Enjoying play, exploration, and social interaction.
* Fairness. Feeling there is equitable share of rewards (this is in fact most often a demotivator, if people believe that reward sharing in the network is inequitable).
When planning any network-based initiative, it’s valuable to consider each of these motivations, which ones will be the most important in driving participation, and how you can support these. It’s also a useful exercise to examine existing projects that are similar to yours. This allows you to see both how well other projects are addressing the relevant motivators, and how you can differentiate your initiative by calling on other motivations, or being more effective at providing these.
All business is media: Institutional media usage surges
By Ross DawsonThere is much excitement at the release of private equity firm’s Veronis Suhler Stevenson’s new measures and prognostications on the media landscape, with most commentators focusing on their prediction that Internet advertising revenues will exceed those for any other media form by 2011.
The single thing I find the most interesting in the report is the different paces of growth across different media users. “Consumer” usage of media is actually DOWN 0.5%, driven by shifting from long-format media such as TV to short-format media such as online news and video. In contrast, “Institutional” usage of media (comprising business, education and government) is UP 6.9%, outpacing the increases for “marketing” and “advertising”.
I have long said that we are moving to a world in which ALL BUSINESS IS MEDIA, and that is supported by these trends. Almost all of what businesses do today is gather, process and disseminate information or knowledge-based products, making what they do essentially a media business. This is reflected by a massive 7.4% difference in the growth trend in consumer versus institutional use of media.
The second key aspect to pick out of the report is the 6.8% total growth in spending in media over the last year. While global GDP growth for 2007 is forecast to be 4.9%, suggesting just a 2% outpacing of the rest of the economy, this masks the fact that media is heavily overrrepresented in the US, which accounts for 42% of media globally, where the GDP growth is expected to be just 3.3%. In other words, a very rough view suggests that media will double it’s share of the global economy in around 25 years or less. This just happens to be the figure I’ve been quoting for some time, so we seem to continue to be on trend for this.
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Is the trend to openness accelerating? Social networks as an inflection point
By Ross DawsonThe openness in social networks debate continues to flourish. Some of the more interesting and prominent commentary in the last couple of days, since my post on Openness, network effects, and competition in social networks, are:
Scott Gilbertson (in Wired): Slap in the Facebook – It’s Time for Social Networks to Open Up. Scott takes the pulpit, and calls on the web programming community to develop a framework based on open standards, and offering tips on how to create your own profile using open tools.
Dan Farber: Facebook, social capitalists and open networks. Dan thinks that revolution isn’t yet ripe, as users are still content to play within walled gardens.
Anshu Sharma: Identity crisis in the land of social networks and platforms. Anshu draws the distinction between the Internet as the platform and the application as the platform, suggesting that if Google, for example, were to offer an entirely open social networking platform, this would dominate.
Marc Canter. The Chess game of social networking. Marc has been at the heart of open thinking on social networks for at least 6 years (we had a good conversation on this in 2002) – he reflects on where this has come from, data sharing today, and suggests that this is about creating a playing space rather than winners or losers.
Pete Cashmore. Mashable supports the Open Friends Format (OFF?). Pete supports the move to open standards for social networks.
Dare Obansanjo. Some thoughts on open social networks. Dare provides distinctions for four different kinds of openness in social networks.
In my 2002 book Living Networks I wrote:
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The future of video search
By Ross DawsonOne of the transformative technologies over the next 5-10 years will be improved video search. With video becoming the majority of digital content on the web, the ability to find what is relevant and useful is a vital task. Imagine being able to find, in a world dominated by video content (accelerated by eventually most mobile phones including video capabilities), the video segments most relevant to what you. In an interview on Beet.TV, Google’s Gabriel Stricker talks about Google’s ambition to search all video on the web, including the content on YouTube and the dozens of other video hosting sites. As he mentions, only a tiny fraction of existing video is on the web, so part of the task is helping video to migrate or be accessible on the web. On one level, this is about making it easier and more compelling for video creators – professional and amateur – to post their content on the web. Another innovation that will advance this is when all video cameras and video processing software come with one-step functionality to get content on the web.
One thing that Gabriel didn’t mention in the interview was the mechanisms that Google intends to use for video search. At the moment most video search uses only the title, any tags given by the author or others, and potentially words used in links to the video. To be truly useful, video search needs to index both the words and images in the video in a meaningful way. The first phase of this is now possible, with fairly good voice recognition technologies allowing traditional text search capabilities to be overlaid on the video search. Examples include Blinkx and Nexidia, which allow video search using its voice recognition and text indexing capabilities. One of the applications is to have contextual ads next to the video changing depending on what people are speaking about as the video proceeds. However the next phase, of recognizing and indexing the images in video, is largely beyond current technologies. Image recognition of even simply objects has proven to be one of the most difficult tasks in artificial intelligence. Massively greater computing power than we currently have available, along with far better evolutionary algorithms, will be necessary to be able to reasonably accurately identify what is relevant in video content.
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The 9 motivations to participate in networks
By Ross DawsonA couple of years ago in the course of some consulting work I developed a framework of what motivates people to participate in networks of all kinds. This includes and goes beyond the Facebooks and MySpaces of today, to community-based and values-based initiatives. These motivations need to be understood by organizations wanting to implement open innovation by drawing on external resources, environmental and social change groups, politicians and any initiative that involves drawing in broad participation from outside organizational boundaries.
The nine motivations are:
* Financial. Immediate or future financial rewards
* Contribution. Feeling of contributing to something socially worthwhile.
* Outcome. Benefiting by using or applying the outcomes created by the network.
* Learning. Learning from leading thinkers or peers or through the participation itself.
* Community. Feeling of belonging to and participating in a group with shared values or interests.
* Reputation. Enhanced reputation and esteem from others.
* Coolness. Being involved in interesting, exciting, and novel domains with broad appeal.
* Fun. Enjoying play, exploration, and social interaction.
* Fairness. Feeling there is equitable share of rewards (this is in fact most often a demotivator, if people believe that reward sharing in the network is inequitable).
When planning any network-based initiative, it’s valuable to consider each of these motivations, which ones will be the most important in driving participation, and how you can support these. It’s also a useful exercise to examine existing projects that are similar to yours. This allows you to see both how well other projects are addressing the relevant motivators, and how you can differentiate your initiative by calling on other motivations, or being more effective at providing these.
Openness, network effects, and competition in social networks
By Ross DawsonThe social networking space has opened out significantly today, with two significant announcements changing the state of play and introducing a new level of competition. From the very beginning of the social networking space, with the launch of sixdegrees.com in 2000 (which gave up the ghost in January 2002), the fundamental underlying issue was whether social networks would be entirely exclusive and competitive, or whether they would in some way integrate to create a global social networking space. Today’s news suggests that finally, after many years of highly competitive play, there is the potential for more open social networking systems.
The first key news is Plaxo’s release of a new social network Pulse, due out on Monday (Robert Scoble has provided pre-release news, apparently leaked at the end of a long party). Almost everyone has been subjected to emails from Plaxo over the last few years asking them to confirm their contact details. From the birth of Plaxo, it was clear their ultimate business model was going to be something quite different, building on the extraordinary database of members and contact information they were acquiring. With the recent surge in popularity in Facebook – which means that now a far broader segment of the population is familiar with social networks – Plaxo has decided the time is right to make their move.
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Review of Future of Media Summit from Public Relations Institute of Australia
By Ross DawsonI just found this detailed review of the Future of Media Summit 2007 written live by Sue Kirkland Smith, Lloyd Grosse and Sarah Creelman of Public Relations Institute of Australia.
It contains a detailed review of every panel session, and concludes by saying:
It’s well worth reading the entire post – there are many great insights and nuggets from the Summit there.
SAP Thought Leadership: Service Delivery Innovation – Creating Client Value and Enhancing Profitability
By Ross DawsonSAP has just released a Though Leadership White Paper on Service Delivery Innovation, which I wrote with Matthew Horenkamp of SAP America. Service Delivery Innovation is an absolutely critical issue for professional firms. Firms’ ability to do this well will undoubtedly be a major factor in determining the winners and losers over the next decade. See the paper for more detail…
SAP White Paper: Service Delivery Innovation
Click here to download the complete Thought Leadership White Paper on Service Delivery Innovation. Executive Summary and Table of Contents below.
Executive Summary
A variety of forces shape the professional services industry – from fierce competition and globalization to the modularization of business processes and technology. Clients want professional services firms to deliver cost-effective services in smaller, fixed-price contracts, but at the same time want to retain highly seasoned professionals equipped to address their most challenging industry-specific process needs.
To succeed in this environment, professional services firms must continually improve their service delivery methods to increase client value and profitability and lower costs. This involves implementing more efficient resourcing and partnering processes, creatively packaging services, and cocreating value with clients. However, for any of these endeavors to work, a firm must have a foundation that supports global processes and workflows that enhance client and supplier collaboration. For the firms that succeed, the rewards are great. They can differentiate themselves in a crowded marketplace, lock in loyal clients, use internal and external resources more profitably, and improve time to market.
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Keynote speech: Success in the global economy: The future of business in the age of networks
By Ross DawsonI am doing a speech at the American Club in Sydney on Success in the global economy: The future of business in the age of networks this coming 12 September. Details below – click through to get the invitation and registration details. I’ll provide some of the content on this blog around the time of the speech. Hope to see you there!
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Knowledge management shifts to new ways of thinking
By Ross DawsonThe most recent issue of Image & Data Manager magazine has an article titled Knowledge management gets a social life, drawing extensively on an interview with me. Sections of the article that quote me as below:
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Global comparisons: Why bandwidth drives Internet participation
By Ross DawsonOne of most interesting snippets in the Future of Media Report 2007 was a chart showing the relationship between bandwidth speed and time spent online across a number of countries, in the second diagram below. The data supporting these charts was provided by Future of Media Summit Research Partner Nielsen//NetRatings, which was able to provide original and valuable insights by drawing on its global coverage.
(Click on the images for full details in the Future of Media Report 2007)
As the first chart shows, the proportion of people with access to so-called “broadband” (in this case meaning anything other than dial-up) is consistently high across nations. However the speed of Internet access varies substantially, by a factor of almost five across the countries covered. The second chart shows an unambiguous correlation between bandwidth and time spent online, underlining the debate in Australia and other countries about the impact of low bandwidth Internet access. Demonstrably, low bandwidth Internet means people use it less, and for a narrower range of applications (there is specific data on that).
My comments in the recent Sydney Morning Herald article on why blogging is so behind in Australia have attracted significant attention. In particular, a number of people (e.g. Gavin Heaton, Mark Aufflick, Meg Tsiamis) have questioned my assertion that low bandwidth impacts blogging activity, given that blogging is a low bandwidth activity – it is after all mainly text. The reality is that people if something is easier to do, they spend more time doing it, explore further, try different things, get engaged more, and are far more likely to actively participate. If you’re a keen blogger, it makes no difference. If you are someone who may be interested in blogging, but because spending time online is not a great experience you don’t discover the power and potential of participating yourself, you’re less likely to do so. The evidence in the data above is there for anyone who doubts what appears entirely obvious to me.
Of course bandwidth is far from the only issue at stake here. I’ve written before about the challenges of building a distinct English-language blogging community that doesn’t get absorbed into the global blogosphere. Meg adds further thoughts on what’s happening and how to build a national blogging community. I do believe that as a society, some introspection is required as to why we aren’t engaging as well as we could with the transformative potential of a connected world. This is a fundamentally important issue.