As part of our new strategy and market positioning I have been doing a lot of reading, assessing and investigating around communities, but not the facebook and like (what I call generalist and horizontal communities) but more focused and vertical ones
I found David Silver book, even being by now 18 months old and full of interesting notes and insights. In fact I did recommend to the team that I will be worth it to spend a couple of days on the book
Here are some of my notes and extracts from the book:
- "I predict the formation and sustained growth of 10,000 online communities, each with 1,000,000 more paying customers and another 90,000 smaller communities
- "Each of us will belong to 12 and 24 online and/or mobile communities by 2010 (I do think David is too optimistic here and his prediction will be achieved by 2011 or 2012)"
- "The wealth that communiteers will create in the period 2007 to 2010 will approach 1 trillion $
- Mobbing describes massive number of people joining an online or mobile club
- "...liquidity and mobbing will be central to the success of any community
- The get go rules for users to think about paying to be a member of a community: Reciprocity, Consistency, Social validation, liking, authority, scarcity
- Mobile member (thus mobile communities) wants to be found and members usually meet, take that into consideration.......in fact in mobile communities where one of the goals is to meet people physically, there will be fewer defectors
- Learn the value of silence....Communiteering is for quiet entrepreneurs ("Do not talk about your community to the media until you hit 20 million revenues or 1 mio members")
- Unexpected rewards are absolutely key to creating successfully sustainable online communities
- Developing private e-wallets do create great opportunities for development within communities (dedicated or no-dedicated). People is more relaxed when using a private-branded currency
- A community will always do better than an expert when in comes to a search
- Make friend before you make funds
- There is a huge opportunity to become a market research type firm to measure the effectiveness of product placement on social media sites
- Always remember the prisoner's dilemma single property that distinguishes the high-scoring entries and this is the property of being nice, which is never being the first to defect. On top of that ad the factor of clarity
-Today the largest communities on the Web and on mobile phones, as measured by numbers of active daily participants are games
- Mobbed Formula ("Little Richard's Law) or M or the rate at which a new community will be mobbed = P x C x N, where P is the number of people, with instantaneous communication capability (C) times the amount of negative publicity (N) churned by people or corporations afraid of you
- Sources of revenues for communities: Tip Jar, Kudos, Reputation Management fee, Syndication fee, Affinity Credit Card, DRM or rights management, Users group (or membership fee), revenue sharing, strategic alliances, facilities management (or building communities for corporations), wireless carriers revenues (sharing messaging and wireless traffic revenues)
- There a number of means by which old corporations can launch new products using the mechanism of online and mobile communities....... do not push the corporations, brand have often loyal fans big corporations don't
Some companies I did research based on the book comments mixi (Japan), BuddyPing (NinetyTen), Dodgeball, Optit.com, Loopt.com
From BuddyPing "...a combination of BuddyPing and services in the social media arena along side mobile search and sport related sites will ultimately be the most visited mobile internet sites and the services who can drive heavy traffic for mobile surfing"
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