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A world where everybody is doing business with everybody else appears to be quite viable, if not always hugely inspired.
— Derrick de Kerckhove, The Skin of Culture
In the middle of the first year of the new millenium, the fact that more traditional businesses are making big online plays is a huge media story. Why? Because the business press seems to think it’s time for a fight – a battle between ‘bricks-and-mortar’ businesses and ‘pure-play’ dot coms. Will Sears beat Amazon? Which ecommerce site is laying staff members off today? Will ‘meatspace’ (the physical world) win? Or will the cybernauts from beyond the planet-of-the-bits be victorious? The continuing saga of old economy vs. new economy is looking more and more like a soap opera.
Pretty silly stuff. The real solution has nothing to do with either/or logic. ‘Winning’ means understanding how collectivity works and applying its principles to what you do.
Many people looking for new business ideas are realizing that commonspace doesn’t have to betheir business for it to fuel their business. They may be ravers making clothes and accessories to sell to others they know from the online party world. They may be filmmakers building excitement about their new independent film using online word-of-mouth. Or they may just be people running small businesses who see opportunity for their own growth in collective spaces like eBay. As in the open source model, companies don’t need to make their money directly from commonspace. The contributions they make to the collective are an adjunct to what makes the money and pays the bills (or vice versa).
The real action is in the sidelines, where commonspace is just a part of an existing business or an offline business idea. There’s no question that there are a lot of pure-play commonspace ideas that will make money and provide us with nifty new toys. But in the end, the market for new kinds of information, ideas and community is limited. After all, how many Bloggers and eGroups can one person use? In the meantime, we still need and want all those staid old-economy goods: food, clothing, shelter, and a decent bottle of wine. Smart businesses will take advantage of the connection between the real-world economy and commonspace to bring those goods to us. It’s a win-win situation: the consumers gets the goods they want more conveniently; the merchants gain an efficient new channel for orders, and everyone gets to feel like they’re on the vanguard of some wild new technological era… even if they’re just ordering more toothpaste.
Feed the Conversation
Companies must ask themselves where their corporate cultures end. If their cultures end before the community begins, they will have no market.
Cluetrain Theses 36 & 37
Before you do any thing else, connect your customers
- To talk about your products and services
- To enable them both to learn and to teach
- To create new synergies and new kinds of opportunities
Connect them, and then join the conversation. Spaces for