Browsing Tag

community

Human Intervention: markets in the making

So I spent some time understanding a little more the impact of social media over the holidays, basically in response to the online norm piece and a comment on art from gapingvoid guy, [tag]Hugh MacLeod[/tag].   People who interact online can impact online markets and untimately offline concerns as well.  O’Reilly had a [tag]Bill Janeway[/tag], from [tag]investment banking[/tag] firm [tag]Warburg Pincus[/tag], quote on the [tag]Money:Tech[/tag] conference which is fairly relevant in context of human interaction’s impact on financial activity:

The timeliness of this Conference is NOT only because “web 2.0” technologies and business models have reached critical mass in the financial markets. It is also because, as driven by the web more generally, the frontier between human and machine-decision making has become radically problematic. First, quantitative approaches in trading, pricing, valuation, asset definition vastly expanded the domain for machine decision-making. But then the humans struck back, by refusing to act like the mindless molecules that the models driving machine decision-making required. The self-reflective, behavioral attributes of human market participants is now driving back that frontier, requiring innovations in every aspect of financial market processes, beginning with techniques of risk measurement and risk management. When price is an inverse function of [tag]liquidity[/tag] and liquidity is an inverse function of price certainty, the recursive loop can only be broken by human intervention and action

Wow – what a mouthful and insightful – people impact markets. The significant investment in optimized algorythm based business models online may have a challenger – human interaction as it relates to online advertising.

Changed search models, content availability and pervasive shared content may ultimately make Feedburner’s (Google) adverpublishing platform which best serves as a sliver markets to a high value market channel at some point in the future?   While not necessarily the mainstream population, active online human decision makers continue to collectively impact markets, one might say communities.   Facebook, Twitter or others represent segments of market influencers and makers. Most [tag]Facebook valuation[/tag] discussions all essentially acknowledge a significant market segmentation asset.

Communities as Market Makers

The current underpinnings of the global social media infrastructure (Xobni, [tag]Utterz[/tag], Twitter, [tag]Plaxo[/tag] [tag]LinkedIn[/tag], [tag]Flickr[/tag], [tag]Flock[/tag]…) are establishing market definitions, definitions of buyer classes in their highly attributed/user extended data model.   So that begets the question as to how does a collective commonality define a market? Are there bookmark markets? Blog markets? “Group” Markets?

It’s reasonable to infer this is in fact the case. Sites/Platforms such a Digg,  writing cabals creating content and individuals bring together friends and randoms around a common set of attributes which should they sustain overtime may in fact create micro-markets. Not a believer?  Go to Gizmodo – That IS a Gizmodo market.

Sure advertising is inherently audience biased and to that end the delivery vehicle has just changed, but can the vehicles actually begin to deliver value add services – access to branded public information, focusedcontent and web service community tools across an interoperable network.  Imagine it – share attributes (friends, content, services…) could be managed through a unified market based UI – the Facebook user who likes cooking, the Truemors reader who looks up his 401k balance on the truemors interface – there are all kinds of abstract concepts and extensions. Once the social media markets mature from their currently narrowly banded spiky reality, these may be the only advertising markets – community focused views of online commerce, communication and service consumption.

So now on to the the abstract thought to end the article.  Does an individual define the market or an individual’s relationships?  If it’s the latter, Facebook may be under valued and the usability race has begun!

January 5, 2008 by
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So what’s the social networking “bench”?

So I’m back to that Bob book again – I’m another 15 pages in or so. I’ve got a 2 yr old, 2 dogs and a newborn – so not a lot reading time at home. I was able to bring the books bench metaphor into play, mainly due to a post on how to be a [tag]digg[/tag] power user. After reading the post and seeing the number of diggs, 1224, I got to a wonderin. What is genuine in this whole social media thing and how do you filter through the content and self-promotion. So I thought about the Bob book. I actually started thinking about this post a couple of weeks ago when I read [tag]John Scalzi[/tag]’s post on How to Annoy and Irritate People in the Name of Blogging.

The book uses the bench outside of the [tag]Royal bank[/tag] in this small [tag]Ontario community[/tag] as essentially a ranking system of where you are in the scale of things in the community. Being on the bench represents making it essentially. The concept of qualifying for the bench is being legendary and legendary is not so much a legend, more like do you have a Don Quixote thing going on. A passion, some stories and some friends who respect your passion and stories.

So I went to thinking about – what is the online bench? Where is it that the cool people hang and do so out of earning the spot. I quickly realized I don’t know where that is, so I started thinking about personal or social network benches. I also realized the inclusive nature of social networking and social media almost makes it impossible for a bench to exist, but I’m an optimist – so I keep thinking about it.

So is it google hits in a query? Pageviews? People following you on [tag]Twitter[/tag]? [tag]LinkedIn[/tag] connections? [tag]Feedburner[/tag] readers? Gosh I hope it’s not feedburner readers, because my 23 readers are probably not that interesting. These seem like benchmarks, more so than benches, so I would offer that it’s none of the above. Why?

Let’s use 21st citizen as a use case. 21st century citizen on Twitter who is following me and now out of courtesy, for now, I’m following him. I did go to his blog – nice ads! Everywhere! It’s the low bar of “click and add” which makes it difficult to justify the stuff of legends. This creates just a real noisy twitter environment, so here are 21C’s metrics:

• Following 7,568
• Followers 6,666

I have a sum total of 16 people I’m following and just can’t keep up, some folks just have too much time or people posting on their behalf. My checking on twitter 3-4 times a day is becoming like that first IM sign on after vacation. You sign on Sunday night and get the deluge of all those offline messages, which are no longer important. So what do you do with 7569 people worth of tweets?!?! I’ll acknowledge that it is possible that 7569 is the stuff of legends and could qualify for the bench. Just need to figure out where the bench is.

There are similar “friend flewsies” on nearly every network I’m on – so if links, views and metrics don’t do it, what does? I think it’s the transition to the real world. Who calls you and who do you call? I had originally thought email might be the winner, but I audited my outlook address book and I have numerous people I have never talked to, but sent email and many people who are contacts, not friends. So your phone address book seems as close as possible from a metric driven bench.

So maybe I’m doing this this whole social media thing wrong. Maybe I should just link, add, nudge and poke as many people as possible or whatever a given network kitsch action is. Nah, just doesn’t feel right. I’ll just continue to attempt to post fairly meaningful stuff, not so meaningful, things of interest and just see what happens.

Then again, maybe the real benchmark is the number of Viagra emails I get, if that’s the case I think I win and have found the internet bench and earned my right to sit outside the internet Royal – guess I have to sign up for [tag]second life[/tag] and create a bench.

November 10, 2007 by
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