Clay Shirky and Steven Brill were discussing the above question on Mckinsey. Please have a read.
I think both Clay and Steven have made excellent points and I do think there is a fine line as to when a user would or wouldn’t pay. In simple economics, when there is a demand, there is a supply. I feel that online content will be the same too. Let me give some examples 1) Movies, 2) Books, 3) News / magazines. I will describe when consumers would pay for content and when they wouldn’t. I believe these are popular content types that are used by the average internet user.
1) Movies. Would you pay of it online?
Yes and no. Its becoming slightly harder to download from illegal sources. Even though its still rampant, laws are been erected to protect media companies. Its only fair that way, they make good movies, someone pays for it. Some people are also watching these shows being streamed online in places like Hulu. Since there are quite a few channels for free movies, why would anyone buy? I would for sure.
Movies from other sources are not fully trust-worthy, troublesome to get and potentially of a lower quality. With a media device like Apple TV, you rock up at home after work, really tired and feel like a movie and a beer. Switch on the TV, select the movie you want to watch and buy it. At the same time, whip up a simple dinner and movie is ready to be watched. There is a demand here – a demand for the latest blockbuster which is easily accessed, high quality movies with no security risks and almost real time. I would pay in this instance.
2) Books
eBooks is pretty much a double edge sword. eBooks allows publishers to reach consumers faster and environmentally friendly. As compared to paper books, ebooks are cheaper as well. However, that allows consumers to start trading it online and uploading it to random sites. Opps, that’s a problem – free books online. However, if ebooks publishers could restrict ebooks from being shared, they could create a demand. As far as I heard, ebooks takes a long time to get “shared” online and the demand for such books online could potentially be slightly lower and since we could assume that people who buys books are slightly more educated, there is an ethical commitment to pay for it. Moreover ebook readers are still not extremely common and downloading an ebook would mean users would have to have their laptop (not everyone has one) to read their book in bed before bedtime. All these reasons could contribute to the reason why book publisher’s revenues are not as affected as media companies.
3) News / magazines
News and magazines are an interesting one. If it is straight up world news on the latest bombing or political news, I won’t pay for it. There are way too many sources to get it free. However, certain news, especially financial news and business commentary, could potentially be worth alot because of the structure and data. These information is not freely available or requires time to consolidate and for busy people in the world they could be willing to pay to reduce some redundant work load. In my opinion, people will be willing to pay for quality data and information at top tier news sites. This could potentially be a problem for regional publishing houses with a small circulation. Their revenue stream will be deeply affected.
In many magazines that are still surviving, what could be done to provide a demand is to aggregate information for readers. Let’s take the popular female magazine – Cosmopolitan (or Cosmo in short) as an example. Alot of the gossip news published on Cosmo can be found online and readers could get it free. However, what Cosmo does is rather interesting, they have articles about fashion, love, cooking, leisure, gadgets and a whole heap of other content. They aggregate content for their target readers which then allows their readers to benefit from a one-stop shop for all their feminine informational needs. Would their target audience pay for it? Well, my female friends do.
Conclusion
I guess in any case, there must be a scare resource/content for people to pay for content. Companies must create a specific demand and meet specific requirements that will convince users fork out and part with their money in exchange for the content and/or services. Content by itself is freely available and I agree with Clay but we can always bundle content up with some value added features and sell it at a premium.
There is a really interesting post on cnet and Informaiton Is Beautiful on the usage trends of the gender split in some of the most popular social networking sites.
I can see some kinds of trends here. According to the stats provided above, it seems like women prefer social networking sites whereas men prefer information driven sites like Digg and De.li.cious. I am not extremely surprised by the stats provided and was just wondering based on these stats, more research could be conducted to understand how gender differences could impact the usage of an Enterprise 2.0 platform. Does that mean that men will be more active in an information driven internal Enterprise 2.0 platform? Does that also mean that social networking within an organisation could potentially not be very successful if its a male dominated workplace?
More research needs to be conducted to find out more regarding usage patterns, types of activities, cultural differences and geographical differences to uncover more underlying information.
Aardvark is a fantastic system. I have been a user since its early days and I guess I have been helping people around the world almost on a daily basis. Aardvark is a system that allows users to ask questions on their favourite instant messenger and it discovers the perfect person to help with any question.
However, a question is not always answerable just by writing a line in an instant messenger. For example, “Should I accept a job offer in a large bank in NYC?” or “how can I increase the performance of my sharepoint server?” Some might argue that these are badly framed questions and others would argue that these are harder questions to answer as compared to “are all apples red?” Whichever the case, there are some pretty tough questions in the world that requires contextual and environmental information in order to be answered.
At the moment, just from my personal experience, aardvark is extremely powerful to answer simple questions and mid level questions. However, the more advance questions doesn’t seem to be answered as efficiently. It could be because there are lesser experts in the area or users could not be bothered to go back and forth to clarify, analyse and answer a complex question or the user could just be busy at that point of time.
I think what Aardvark could benefit from advance questions is to build up a paid service where difficult questions could be answered by paying and users with experience in that area has a greater incentive to answer the question. By matching the “buyer” and “seller”, both parties benefits and aardvark could take a cut of the price and make some money.
This is the largest flash mob in a single city. 21,000 people coming together dancing in sync – unpaid, connected via twitter, facebook and all the cool technologies. They came together, learn the dance steps and performed!
From Wikipedia: A flash mob is a large group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual action for a brief time, then quickly disperse. The term flash mob is generally applied only to gatherings organized via telecommunications, social media, or viral emails.
This is an example of the power of crowds. There is no financial or economic model that can explain this phenomena – just like Wikipedia. Watch it and feel it.
We have heard of various resistance stories when it comes to Enterprise 2.0 / collaboration initiatives. There are also many blog posts regarding this topic. Today, I would like to approach this topic from an academic perspective.
There are three key reasons why people resist changes in technology.
1) Internal factors to the person or group – where it targets reactions like “People resist all change; People with analytic cognitive styles accept systems; while intuitive thinkers resist them”
2) Application or technical factors – if its a crappy system, people will resist it.
3) Interaction factors – where the new application or system would change the balance of power in organisations and people who are threaten by it would resist it.
In the Enterprise 2.0 world, I believe that all three factors can cause resistance but I feel that the third factor is probably the most problematic factor. How can we go about managing this?
The whole idea of Government 2.0 is changing the way government works. Traditionally, the government is the master of the country. They could say and do alot of stuff that can affect the economy and society in general. Good governments make life better and bad ones just create a whole lot of rubbish. However, the concept of Government 2.0 passes some of these powers back to people and allow citizens to speak and do more.
In Australia, we have the Gov2.0 taskforce and the government is looking at ways on how they can get people to contribute and collaborate more. Obama is one of the famous advocates of Gov 2.0, the Americans are a fair way ahead of other countries on this with many initiatives in this space. Other countries like Denmark, UK and Singapore have started some initiatives in this space as well.
First and foremost Government 2.0 is defined by Wikipedia as:
Government 2.0 is neologism for attempts to apply the social networking and integration advantages of Web 2.0 to the practice of government. Government 2.0 is an attempt to provide more effective processes for government service delivery to individuals and businesses.
I would say there are three key components to Gov2.0, 1) social media, 2) collaboration and 3) innovation. These three components are similar to that of Web 2.0.
Social media in Governments
This is a strong area in which governments can easily do. Look at how Obama connected with his voters during his presidential campaign. He has effectively use social media to create and mobilise his army of voters to donate and create awarness for his campaign. Governments can also use social media during disasters, examples of this are Australian CFA’s use of Twitter and facebook the deadly Victorian bushfires early this year. The ideas in this space are endless. Governments could use the army of connected individuals via their computers and mobile phones to provide information, help each other and aggregate information.
Collaboration
Collaboration in Governments is still relatively new. There are some reasons behind this. Political information is generally quite sensitive and secretive so collaboration in any form would generally be more in-house as compared to public collaboration. However, this is not stopping interested individuals from joining publicly created groups to discuss about political issues and in some cases, people within the government agencies have joined in the conversation to listen and discuss what these folks have to say. One of this example is the Gov2.0 Google groups.
I can see this space growing as the government is making decisions on behalf of their citizens who voted for them. In some way or another they need to listen to them and what they say. This could make the decision making process easier or harder but for sure it would be a more informed decision. Could we even have citizens voting on every single bill, law and jury that takes place in the country? Maybe, I do see some problems with that though. We could have the government having the final veto in all matters and controls the relationships with other countries and the agency that has the top talents and analysts to help citizens make the right and informed decision. (Having said all these, I am taking the assumption that government and their staff for virtuous and honest).
Innovation
Innovation is a way in which government can engage with experts in various fields. Tapping into the larger network of experts in or outside of the country allows a greater flow of idea contribution and hopefully these ideas is worth it thus providing a better solution. I really do not see much activity in this space so far. However, I do believe as points 1 and 2 evolve, Innovation in government will evolve as well.
Government 2.0 will change the way people work. Doing this well can help retain top talents in the country, improved satisfaction ratings, improve the economy and a better society in general. Government 2.0 is not without its challenges and we have to study and work through each of them.
I always knew that Jivesoftware was good. I’ve implemented it (v2.5) and used it before and love it. However, whenever someone asks me why I like it so much, all I could say was “Its so easy and it makes sense”. I have decided to jump into Jive Social Business Software and have a deep understanding why I love it and reviewed Jive Social Business Software extensively.
First of all, I must say I look at Jive from an Enterprise perspective and what I would want if I ran a company.
1) Spaces are fantastic
2) Permissions on Spaces is even better
3) Permissions on individual documents within a space – Wow!
4) Leader in Forrester Wave: Community Platform 2009, Gartner Magic Quadrant, 2008
5) Excellent plugin and API interface
6) Strong community reporting tool
7) Has a document publishing approval process
8 ) User fully customisable front page, excellent widgets (you can create your own widget too – good for the geeks)
9) Excellent notification via customisable RSS, emails and “watching a page/tag” functionality
10) History of where you have been
11) Interesting functionalities on documents like (“more like this page” and “More by Sean” )
12) Video and interactive communication capability
13) Simple project management (I would probably wish that this functionality was stronger so that I could save on buying MS project if possible)
I personally feel that Jive is like facebook and anything else is like MySpace? Or should I say Jive is like a MAC and the rest are like PCs? You get what I mean. You just get it.
I spoke to an Asian friend recently regarding social networking in the Asian region and I am pretty surprised that places like China where internet is being censored and freedom of speech is unheard of, there are approximately 220 million just on the QQ’snetwork. These statistics are for early 2008. TechCruch also reported that there were 376 million QQ users as of April 2009 and just over a year it grew about 70%.
In Korea, with a population of approximately 47 million people, Cyworld, a Korean based social networking site has 22million registered users. This is quite a shocking number of people. In Japan, its a similar case too.
Even though the penetration rates are not as high as Western countries, the dynamics of using social networking in each culture and sub groups can be quite different. For example, mobile phone usage is much higher in Asian countries like Japan, Korea and Singapore and I suspect that there will be more users that would be accessing social networking sites via their mobiles. This changes the way people use such tools for communication. Also in these countries, wireless broadband speeds (3G or free wifi in most parts of the city) are extremely high and streaming videos into mobile devices is a common thing.
I am sure we can learn alot from these countries just by understanding the infrastructure differences, cultural differences and tools differences.
I have been researching the benefits of Enterprise 2.0 for a while now and there are not alot of statistics out there to show the benefits organisations are achieving. This could be due to a whole myriad of reasons –
1) No two Enterprise 2.0 implementation is the same
2) Enterprise 2.0 is still quite new
3) Lack of understanding of Enterprise 2.0
4) Lack of companies implementing Enterprise 2.0
Having said this, alot of the success stories so far are case studies and not mentioning any names, I must say some of these “success stories” are really not that successful. Its been over hyped.
So which companies have really made Enterprise 2.0 successful and managed to gain competitive advantage, cost savings, innovation and so? There are not many strong Enterprise 2.0 case studies (like P&G’s Connect and Develop and Lego) that really delivered value to the bottom line.
So does Enterprise 2.0 deliver value? I truly believe so. I have experienced the benefits of it before. If this is the case, how can we measure it? I feel that a framework of understanding the benefits of Enterprise 2.0 must be created. Its not as simple as just connecting people together or just posting videos online and sharing it or collaboration with others. It has to be looked at from a holistic angle. This is my study and this is what I hope to achieve.
Dean from Infovark wrote a very real and truthful story about “the empty wiki problem“. I can really related to everything he said. In a nut shell, Dean discussed a failed Wiki implementation and how to defeat the “empty wiki problem” –
“either decrease the individual effort needed to maintain the system, increase the value that each user gets from the system, or — ideally — do both things at the same time.”
Interesting enough, I had a chat with another Enterprise 2.0 enthusiast last night and he had a similar problem as well. This is my personal point of view on how one can increase adoption of Enterprise 2.0 should work.
1) Quick wins – solve immediate problems or pain points users are experiencing. Make them happy by making their life easier straight away.
2) Integrate the Wiki (or Enterprise 2.0 platform) into the current business processes and reduce any kinds of redundant work. Remember, if it means more work, it means it won’t work. Sharing and knowledge management will always take back seat when it comes to mission critical priorities.
3) Unless its three times better, its not better. I use this simple rule of thumb from a change management article I read previously. Also three times better should be measured according to what the user’s definition of “better” not the skewed understanding of anyone else.
4) Long term strategic benefits – the CEO, CFO, CIO needs to know Enterprise 2.0 will deliver value to their bottom line. May it be tangible or intangible, value should be somewhat measurable and there are abstract ways to do that. Remember, we are in business not in a playground. Anything that doesn’t directly or indirectly make more money or save some money will be canned and make sure stakeholders can see and understand that clearly.
G'day, Sean here. I am a senior consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers and also a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne and my proposed thesis title is "Implementation of Enterprise 2.0 and its Value in Organizations"
This blog is dedicated to topics surrounding Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Collaboration, and IT strategies for organizations with the aim of increasing efficiency, increasing profits and reducing costs. Hope you enjoy this blog.
Disclaimer: The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent my employer's and/or University of Melbourne's positions, strategies or opinions. I have not been compensated in any way for the content.
Be the First to Comment 
