Socialwares

We live in a world where a wealth of high-quality amateur content is being produced and developed right alongside the industrial model. There is a shift in the traditional power structure whereby anyone with access to the Internet and an affinity for technology can produce and distribute a product or service that directly competes with you and your business. On-demand printing sites such as CafePress and Spreadshirt allow users to upload designs and open their own T-shirt and accessory stores completely free of cost. As Gibson noted, the audience is no longer content to stay in the role of receiver—today's audiences want, and in more and more cases expect, to directly contribute and participate.

Excerpt from: Juliette Powell

It was the height of the dot-com bubble, and everybody was getting in on the game. So when a couple of college dropouts with no formal Business training got together in 2000 with $500 each and decided to start a t-shirt shop on the web, nobody paid much attention. Not at first, anyway.

Jeffrey Kalmikoff and Jake Nickell got the idea for their online store from a T-shirt design contest that Jake entered and won through an online design and development community they were both part of at the time. The idea of that contest stuck, and they decided to use the same principle to build their own ongoing, community-based T-shirt design contest. Nobody expected that these two college dropouts would go on to become the multimillionaire creators of a new standard of peer production on the Internet.

"In a nutshell, our business is based upon the idea of 'customer cocreation' or 'user innovation' or 'crowdsourcing' or whatever the next buzzword for it is," muses Jeffrey Kalmikoff, cofounder and chief creative officer of online retailer Threadless. After expanding at a rate of 3 to 4 times a year and becoming one of the most popular shirt-makers on the Web, Threadless now pulls in an annual revenue of about $30 million with a profit margin clocking in at an impressive 30 percent.

As illustrated in Figure 9.1, the Threadless Crowdsourcing process goes like this. Seasoned designers and novices alike submit more than 1,000 new T-shirt designs a week to the Threadless Web site. Users then have a seven-day window in which they vote on and rate the submissions. The company finally chooses designs from the top-scoring submissions to be printed in limited quantities of 1,500. Invariably, every single design sells out.

IN THE NEW AND EVOLVING ONLINE WORLD, THE GREATEST MOMENTUM GOES NOT TO THE CANDIDATE WITH THE MOST DETAILED PLAN FOR CONQUERING THE WEB BUT TO THE CANDIDATE WHO SURRENDERS HIS (HER) IMAGE TO THE CLICKING MASSES, THE SAME WAY A ROCK GUITARIST MIGHT FALL BACKWARD OFF THE STAGE INTO THE HANDS OF AN ADORING CROWD.

—MATT BAI, (NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE, DECEMBER 9, 2007, "THE WEB USERS CAMPAIGN.")

Whether you personally implement a social networking strategy or hire someone to empower your community through social networking initiatives, you'll increase your company's internal and external ROI and get the jump on your competition. Social tools extend basic social skills and enable proactive businesspeople to build communities that better connect employees and customers among themselves and with one other. By putting yourself and your company at the center of your immediate universe, you give yourself access to newer and better information and facilitate better and more effective communication between you and everybody around you. In so doing, the legacy thinking taught in business schools is squared with new ideas and new measures of success. By building social, cultural, and financial capital through the amplification of your microcelebrity brand and through successful use of feedback loops, you might even be able to take it one step further. Consider the ultimate opportunity made possible through social networking for business: Take the lead, set the corporate standard for success, and reinvent legacy thinking for your industry.

Social networking offers you the opportunity to become an expert in your field and lets people near and far know about you and what you do. It makes your connections more visible and more readily available, and can increase your reach and create brand awareness. Does that mean that the more you affect culture, the more you attract financial capital? The answer is yes... to a certain extent. However, just as you can't directly correlate the number of people who will buy your product to the amount of money you spend on marketing and branding it offline, you can't directly correlate sales to your online presence. Whatever your strategy, always keep one rule in mind: Success begins with adding value to your community.
With social networking strategies, just as with general Internet and online strategies before them, it's not as much a slot machine as it is a game of chess. Making a single move probably won't make a fortune pour right into your lap. Ultimately though, planning your moves carefully and being able to think a few moves ahead will pay off in a way that is far greater, far more meaningful, and most importantly, far more lasting than any one-time fluke could ever be. A slot machine is all about luck; a chess game is all about making the best use of strategy given the available possibilities and opportunities. Now it's up to you to get out there and make your first move.

...May the best players win.

Excerpt from: Juliette Powell

When you look at the history of business, art, and science, the people who are changing the cultural, business, and scientific landscape are all connected to each other. In any era, the great artists and the brilliant scientist all knew each other. They go together and inspired each other and collaborated together. Social network make those relationships transparent and provide tools to help you connect and stay connected.

Excerpt from: Juliette Powell