Research
In my role as Executive Editor at nGenera Insight, I get to work with many experts focused on how the Web 2.0 and collaborative business models are changing the way businesses operate. You can get a flavor of a lot of the stuff that we do on Wikinomics blog. I also do a lot of my own research – here’s a brief overview of some of the topics I’ve covered recently.
Spot.Us & The New York Times: is crowd sourcing noblesse oblige sustainable? Amidst all the challenges facing the news industry, some held out hope that a noblesse oblige—a new generation of rich families that views running a newspaper as a civic responsibility—might emerge to save the traditional model. This is unlikely. While the old noblesse oblige may have sacrificed some profits in the pursuit of other objectives, they did so while operating in an environment of 20% profit margins, not permanent losses.
But there are many civic-minded people that don’t have deep pockets. Start-up Spot.Us is attempting to tap into this community to commission reports on important topics. The organization doesn’t intend to operate on the fringe, and the New York Times has already picked up one of their pieces. This partnership points towards a radically new business model for the media incumbent—one where some of the content delivered to customers is not only sourced from freelancers and prosumers, but also selected and (at least partially) funded by a sub-set of those same customers. Admittedly, there are challenges to scaling this model—but most are unique to the perilous position the newspaper industry is in. Leaders in other industries can draw many lessons from these ongoing developments.
The Hipstery: Creating – and leveraging – Johari Blind Spots. In Pervasive Personal Identity: From Digital Footprints to Digital DNA and the Rich Digital Self, Nick Vitalari, Nauman Haque and Ian Da Silva used the Johari Window to illustrate how the dynamics between the digital and real self are continually evolving. Right now we are in the profile era, where the most dramatic change is the increase in the relative size of the “blind spot” – things that are not known to us, but are known to others. The Hipstery is a retailing start-up attempting to create such a blind spot, and turn it into a profitable business opportunity. This flash report explains their innovative approach – “surprising” customers with t-shirts selected specifically for them based on responses to a set of questions – through the lens of the Johari Window. It also draws lessons from the evolution of online dating and job search sites, and highlights key questions companies should consider in relation to emergent blind spot opportunities.
The six phases of Twitter’s evolution. While Twitter has become one of the hottest social media properties on the Web, perception and use of the platform have remained in constant flux. This evolutionary pattern can be divided into six distinct phases. It starts with the “idle chatter” that spurred the Twitter’s original growth (and annoyed many), and ends —for now—with the opportunities and challenges that emerge as Twitter innovates in search of a sustainable business model. It is critical to remember that each new phase supplements—not replaces—its precursors. Organizations need to design their strategies to account for the fact different people use the platform in very different ways.
SeatGeek: using data to empower customers and alter industry dynamics. The secondary ticket market has become a huge business – but one that lacks transparency and is rife with inefficiencies. This is often to the benefit of a few powerful, and generally disliked, intermediaries. SeatGeek is a start-up attempting to empower end customers – those that actually attend the events – by feeding them information on whether ticket prices are expected to go up or down. It does so by gathering information from hundreds of different secondary market sites, and applying a proprietary algorithm to analyze each unique event. The company asserts that it is directionally correct 80% of the time—which if true should lead to a more efficient market that better serves customers.
The most pressing question is whether the company’s business model—which attempts to serve both brokers and customers simultaneously—can actually work. An important consideration for SeatGeek is whether a prediction market or sentiment analysis could improve their forecasting abilities. The longer-term issue for the industry is whether a new data-driven platform could emerge to connect the original seller to the end buyer more efficiently – at the expense of established intermediaries. Implications of the SeatGeek case apply to enterprises considering collaborative-competitive platforms in B2B2C situations.
@WholeFoods: Exploring a portfolio approach to Twitter. @WholeFoods is the most popular consumer brand account on Twitter with close to 1.5 million followers. But the company’s Twitter presence goes far beyond that – including hundreds of store and region-specific accounts, experts on wine and cheese, and a self-organized group of Northern California moms that work for the company. This case study analyzes Whole Foods’ Twitter account portfolio through the lens of nGenera Insight’s Twitter Brand Engagement matrix.
The Prosumer Strategy Guide. The term prosumer refers to a consumer who actively engages in the innovation around, and the promotion of, the products and services they consume (producer + consumer = prosumer). Different prosumer strategies are best understood in the context of a 2 x 2 matrix. On the Y-axis is type of prosumer contribution – ideation vs. creation. On the X-axis is platform control – company vs. community. For each quadrant, different approaches (supported by company examples) are explained in order to illustrate the many options companies have for engaging prosumers. No matter which approach you take, the key is to ask not what you can do for your customer, but what your customers can do far each other!
Case Studies in Brand Engagement on Twitter: Brands vs. Personalities, Conversations vs. Broadcasts. This is a topic I’ve been talking about a lot on this blog recently – exploring how different companies are using Twitter for marketing and customer engagement. At the center of the research is a 2 x 2 matrix I developed – Brands vs. Personalities on one axis, and Conversations vs. Broadcasts on the other. It’s a very useful lens for analyzing not only how different companies are engaging on Twitter, but how multiple accounts from individual companies are working together in an integrated fashion.
A “foolish” platform for investment advice. While continuing to bill themselves as the “world’s premiere multimedia financial education company”, over the last few years Motley Fool has subtly changed its focus from “(aiming) to educate, enrich and amuse individual investors” to “dedicated to building the world’s greatest investment community.” At the heart of this strategy is Motley Fool Caps, a platform which brings together the ideas of thousands of investors around the world. This is a leading example of what we call a collaborative service platform, where the company has effectively engaged a prosumer community to enhance – not replace – their traditional newsletter-driven value proposition.
Starbucks: Guiding a Prosumer Marketing Transformation. This paper dug into the process behind how the “If you vote, Starbucks buys you a coffee” campaign during the Obama election. It’s an integrated social media story, from how the idea was sourced from BillMac through their MyStarbucksIdea site, through the IdeasInAction blog, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc. Very powerful example of how to put together an integrated, compelling, and cost-effective web 2.0 enabled marketing campaign.
Prosumers & YouTube: How Important is Broadcasting Yourself? YouTube’s tag line is “broadcast yourself”, and that’s what many people think make it compelling – a whole bunch of prosumers generating content that they share with each other in the ultimate example of how the “long tail” works. This quantitative analysis revealed something different – YouTube’s viewership patterns reveal a definitive “blockbuster” distribution model, and it is content from traditional media outlets, and a select few prosumers, that dominate. Many implications from this for people looking at YouTube as a marketing channel now and in the future – including that the model might look a lot more like “traditional” TV then people think.
The Ecosystem Challenge: A Framework for Maximizing Customer Experiences. This paper proposed a framework for enabling an experience-on-demand platform for companies looking to operate from a social graph perspective. Key points of differentiation include identifying when you are looking to converse with ecosystem partners vs. truly engage with them; whether the conversation happens inside (invite input) or outside (seek input) traditional corporate boundaries; whether the engagement model is focused on finding uniquely qualified minds or tapping into the wisdom of crowds; and underlying analytic and agile business capabilities required.
