As the Web evolves beyond 2.0, thank to open source participative software, people are finding each other online around shared interests, and although these thousands of active communities are not tangible, they are real, this is a not virtual phenomenon as many assume. Geography is been redefined and becoming totally irrelevant as a Brazilian organic grower starts sharing real time information and content in an extremely efficient knowledge created partnership with a New Zealand farmer who shares his same passion. This goes further than getting information from Wikipedia, it is no longer about downloading content, people are grouping in specialty communities revolutionizing decision making processes in a way it never seen before. Consumption, production and communication patterns are changing as people, influenced by others they trust online, share news, information create a collective intelligence and constructive partnerships. Since this is a web occurrence, most people are not aware of the enormous activity that is taking place online, since in our “real” world everything flows as usual, but we are about to get our heads up when Technorati will soon announce 100 million registered bloggers and MySace 200 million users online. Since the demographics are so overwhelmingly young and the Millennials are not in power positions, we are not experiencing yet any real transformation in behavioral patterns nor corporate changes. But these adolescents, that are now partying online, will soon be making corporate, political, and consumer decisions in the real world. They are accustomed to watch little television, and since they access the news online they seldom read newspapers. They do not respond to traditional marketing campaigns or advertisers. They respond to each other. Their trendsetters are their peers on MySpace, people who they trust. Opposed to us, the boomers, they are not to be influenced by mass media, they decide for themselves. They are accustomed to the constant exchange of ideas online; therefore corporate communications will have to change dramatically in order to dialogue with, and between, these new stakeholders. As these increasing online communities seem to build themselves around common interests and goals, companies that want to develop relationships, will have to open up and integrate management, employee and customer blogs into a common blogosphere where product, corporate responsibility and customer information will be shared in Wiki like platforms. Stakeholder’s active participation will probably outgrow customer reviews, and powerful new models of production and consumption will be created based on a new integration of community collaboration and self-organization.
Due to deep changes in technology triggered by open source software and new collaborative media we a defining what some already call the Web 3.0. As Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams define it in their recently published Wikinomics: “ This new participation has reached a tipping point where new forms of mass collaboration are changing how goods and serviced are invented, produced, marketed and distributed on a global basis. This change presents far-reaching opportunities for every company and every person that gets connected.” "MySpace, YouTube, Linux and Wikipedia – today’s exemplars of mass collaboration- are just beginning..." In their book they go on to describe seven unique forms of peer production that are making the economy more dynamic and productive, and we will discuss more about this in future posts. But what they affirm in the quoted test is true it is just the beginning of an incredible revolution in of mass collaboration. My-Wi-Li-You is my aphorism to describe these four revolutionary first entrants to the Wikinomics era, the Fords, the Bells, Sears and Procter’s of this century. Following with the WE Media Miami conclusions, a new question arises: when the audience, this new participative individual take the overall control of the web and the true Web is born, the Web 3.0, a Web that requires identity, true collaboration and commitment, will “Mywiliyou” survive???.
Jason Pontin, editor in chief and publisher of the MIT's Technology Review, is skeptical about YouTube, “it has not become a journalistic media” He affirms that Splashcast, recently reviewed, is the “coolest” concept, and will probably challenge YouTube/Google to adapt the concept of user-generated video. He also states that Blinkxs will revolutionize search video content. Searching text is easy since you can identify words, but searching for video content has been impossible to now. “Blinkx lets you find what you want in video”.
MySpace will evolve with adolescence usage, and as their participants grow up in social media and the Millennials get their fist job, or go to college, MySpace grow out of puberty and probably a new and different MySpace more aligned to the new times will grab the youngsters attention. It is difficult to keep leadership when the audience has the control, as we have seen with MTV, which is paying the consequence of entering adulthood.
Broadcasting and telecommunication managers initially envisioned Internet as another distribution conduit to channel more content and advertising to the rapidly growing PC user market. It was aimed at the broadest possible audiences, those anonymous masses they already reached through their TV, Cable and Radio frequencies. As such, Internet was initially thought as a download content distribution media and the same agencies that created advertising campaigns for corporations, cloned the simple and successful billboards into Web banners, convinced that the same business model would work. It didn’t, as the Internet Ecommerce evolved to a Web 2.0 Me media, advertisers discovered that the same communication formula wasn’t working. The audience was different, it was not passive individual, but an active participant who actually expected companies to stop “selling” and start dialoging, who wanted companies to speak a common language, that of the participatory media. People were searching for relevant contents to be informed, to learn, but also wanted to construct a personal history, and participate. They were “uploading” and sharing personal information. And as the Millennials appeared, a new standpoint appeared regarding Web identities: the posted pictures, comments, preferences, recommendations and ranks. They tagged and linked and voted. And as the chat evolved to MSN and blogs, identities became relevant and as important as the participation itself.
Credit card numbers together with Ebay reputation and Amazon preferences evolved to information of who we are as people, our interests, in music, books, and media. Our passions, secrets and habits are increasingly shared with our MySpace friends, our new community. We entered a new era, that of We Media, an era of radical change for media companies and marketers. As Chris Anderson states in his recently published book the Long tail & Long Tail Blog: “Faith in advertising and the institutions that pay for it is waning, while faith in individuals is on the rise. Peers trust peers. Top-down messaging is losing traction, while bottom-up buzz is gaining power. A Company’s brand is no longer what the company says it is, but what Google says it is.”
Peer Word of Mouth is more important in the decision making process that a product advertising campaigns, as Zara the Spanish apparel company confirmed in a recent study: peer recommendations, accounted for 39% of the purchasing decision of their customers while conventional advertising only impacted in a 27%.
As Anderson points out, "remarkable democratizing forces are remarkably un-democratizing industries".
Although it seems impossible to Oldmedians, and most of them are skeptical or deny it, think of this: Millennials, this new user-generating content self publish generation, is just flowing out of high school and they are not accustomed to reading printed newspapers in order to access the news. Most Oldmedians say "but.... you need to hold something in your hands to read it", listen up, if this is true, for those that have this habit, of holding something in their hands, known as “the hold & Fold” factor, EInc, out of MIT will be launching a revolutionary slim sheet that beams custom made information from the internet. Sony’s reader, although not as flexible, will also be in the market this year.
But......Don’t underestimate the Oldmedians, Big media will catch up pretty fast, Oldmedians are listening. The We Media convention was outbalanced by these “media elites”, networking, listening and learning. Newspaper editors worldwide are learning from the blogosphere, and although it seams that blogs are to drive the mayor media, this will probably won't be so......
Has BlackBerry decided to associate its new campaign to the sustainable development “green” movement that Wall Mart and GE embraced last year? We will probably see more of these ads where BlackBerry speaks through committed environmentally friendly leaders.
"I'm passionate about sustainable environment. Our premium homecare products are bringing green to mainstream. In the last three years, the company experienced 3,400% growth, kicking off a tidal wave of demands on my time. I never stop moving. Firing up a laptop isn’t going to happen. Blackberry gives me fingertip access to what I need. And I guess most importantly, it helps me manage my own sanity." Says Adam Lowry co-founder of Method products Inc.
Today I received these books from Amazon, I had unfortunately misplaced, or lent, both an Inconvenient truth and McLuhan's understanding media.
The world is full of inconvenient truths, our problem is that we are either afraid to listen, or unable to see them.
Denial is probably our most effective countermeasure. We are afraid to see, to understand. We probably don’t fear the truths themselves, but dread their follow-up consequences: commitment or action. We despise their combination: commitment to action.
“The medium is the massage,” wrote Marshall McLuhan.
"Societies have always been shaped more by the nature by which men communicate than by the content of communication.... It is impossible to understand social and cultural changes without knowledge of the workings of media."
This was right forty years ago, and still is, but did McLuhan envision Web 3.0?
Was McLuhan referring to old media concept?: That of one transmitter, powerful and influential, and one audience, millions of passive individuals receiving the same message.
Did he envision Internet? and its flip-flop, from an initial extension of the old media formula, devised as an edit-publish concept that brought connectivity to millions of ‘eyeballs”, to an out of control and mutating phenomena of publish, and then edit, RSS of sprouting participating communities online.
"Understanding is 50% of the road to the solution" afirmsBill Drayton the creator of Ashoka.
This is just the beginning. Power is no longer where it used to be.
Wal-Mart, the greatest supermarket chain in the world, announced its commitment to the environment. Muhammad Yunus, the economist who created the first bank for the poor, received the Nobel Peace Prize. The giant Google acquired YouTube, a website whose only assets are millions of homemade videos uploaded by users.
These and other events that took place towards the end of 2006 are signs of three powerful forces that are changing the world: sustainable human development, the revolution of the social sector, and the boom of the participatory media.
Sustainable human development is a group of concepts and practices that allow us to consider what kind of world we shall bequeath to our children and the children of our children. It represents a profound change vis-à-vis the industrial model that was established in the Western world in the eighteenth century. This current implies a different look on our planet, companies and governments, and our way of producing, consuming, and living.
What is most striking about the times we live in is the sensation that the future is already here. In the last days of 2006, economist Thomas L. Friedman wrote: “We reached a tipping point this year — where living, acting, designing, investing and manufacturing green came to be understood by a critical mass of citizens, entrepreneurs and officials as the most patriotic, capitalistic, geopolitical, healthy and competitive thing they could do…”
The recent world release of the movie An Inconvenient Truth, starring Al Gore, established the problem of global warming once and for all as a current reality, no longer the paranoia of a few scientists and activists. In California, the State has sued six big automobile manufacturers for their liability with regard to global warming. Wal-Mart has announced its commitment to sustainability and, in so doing, has become the world’s greatest organic cotton buyer. It has started a plan aimed at having several of its suppliers sell it products manufactured through sustainable practices, in a term of three years. In consequence, some 40,000 companies are adapting their manufacturing methods to satisfy this giant that has resolved to change the habits of the more than a hundred million clients it welcomes every week.
Everything indicates that the “tipping point” (a term coined by Malcom Gladwell to define the moment when something unique and unusual becomes normal) is very near.
For more than 20 years, another powerful force has grown at a rate between two and three times higher than that of the private area’s economy. It is the global associative revolution: the rise of millions of organized citizens who are working to find answers for mankind’s most urgent problems.
The Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Muhammad Yunus is powerful proof that mankind is accepting social change ideas which –just like microcredit- have little to do with the traditional concept of charity and philanthropy. Through his Grameen Bank, founded in Bangladesh in 1976, Yunus demonstrated that offering trust and responsibility to loan recipients is an efficient way of solving the problem of poverty and of building peace from a community’s foundations. Thanks to this financial system, among many other positive consequences, eight million Bangladeshi people earning less than a dollar a day obtained access to cell phones, which allowed them to be better communicated from their rural villages and to improve their employment possibilities.
Yunus is no longer alone. According to Johns Hopkins University, the total contribution of Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) makes them the seventh largest economy on the planet. They are true armies of people connected between themselves, whose aims are to protect the environment, to fight poverty, to defend human rights, and democracy.
Google’s acquisition of YouTube made headlines worldwide. This union marked the peak of a third phenomenon with the power to accelerate the process of the other two currents: the rise of the participatory media, which for the first time in history allow common citizens to be heard in the world stage. The tool is the Web 2.0. The platform is the Internet.
Time magazine has just chosen as “person of the year” the Web user, the one who, through his or her participation in blogs and sites such as YouTube, MySpace and Flickr, is generating unprecedented economic, social and political changes. In this new model, a Shanghai corporate secretary’s blog can have the same relevance as an Oxford professor’s. The decision as to what is worth one’s while is in the hands of the people.
Internet natives, teenagers between the ages of 12 and 18, participate in social networks such as MySpace and Fotolog, very popular in Argentina; Orkut, with a big following in Brazil; and Facebook, the favorite of American university students. Meanwhile, citizens of all ages are making their own news through blogs or sites such as Crónicas Móviles (“Mobile Chronicles”), where anyone can upload videos filmed with cell phones, showing –for instance- what is going on in the city: from Daniel Barenboim’s concert to the Gay Pride parade.
The advertising industry is already reacting to this change. Companies such as Unilever (Dove), Chevrolet, and Converse have understood the phenomenon: the massive audience that passively received “buy” messages is on its way to extinction. In the year 2006, Dove Canada –through Ogilvy Toronto agency- launched on the web a video entitled “Evolution”, which shows all the steps cosmetics advertisers follow in order to transform an ordinary girl into an artificial beauty for an ad. It is estimated that over three million people saw this campaign of viral marketing through the brand’s official site or social sites such as YouTube and Daily Motion.
But, besides revolutionizing advertising, journalism, and communications in general, Internet users are transforming the concept of citizenship. Chilean students –a mass of half a million youths united through the Web- have used social networks, chatting and SMS to empty all the schools in their country in their demand for a reform of the education system. They put into practice the phenomenon some call “glocalization”, that is, the Web’s aptitude to widen the social worlds of people who are physically far apart (global level) while also connecting them more deeply with the place they live in (local level).
Notwithstanding this, users’ interests are not circumscribed to the public sphere — they are also looking closely at corporate practices. There are a number of consumers who look for corporate information online, conversing among themselves about the products they consume and the history behind them, and reading corporate blogs. In 2005, a blog informed that motorcycle padlocks manufactured by Kryptonite, a leader company in the market, could be pried open with a pen. A few days later, a user uploaded a video to show that the padlocks were really “made of butter”. The company ignored these comments. Days later, the news appeared in The New York Times and an estimated five million people learned about the incident. Kryptonite had to announce that it would change all of its padlocks, at a cost of ten million dollars.
According to a recent Ipsos research, presented in Madrid in November 2006, 39 million Europeans have refused to buy a product after reading a negative opinion in a blog. What will happen with the civil society’s power of action after it has massively adopted these new communication tools? What will the corporations that don’t progressively adopt sustainable practices do to stop the wave of citizens-turned-activists, informed through the new media?
The tools are out there, within everyone’s reach. 25% of Internet users participate in online communities. Solutions for the future lie in the weaving of virtual networks, united by values such as social inclusion, responsible citizenship, and sustainable human development. The world is moving in that direction faster than we can perceive. The change is here and people are talking about it — online, of course.
You are not alone, there is a community "out there" of participative individuals, I call them "Wikiduals" always online, willing to help.
Tap The Hivemind: "Throw everything you've got online, and invite the world to look at it. They'll have more and better ideas that you could have on your own, more and better information than you could gather on your own, wiser and sager perspective than you could gather in 1,000 years of living -- and they'll share it with you. You'll blow past the secret-keepers as if you were driving a car that exists in a world with different and superior physics. Like we said, information used to be rare ... but now it's so ridiculously plentiful that you will never make sense of it on your own. You need help, and you need to help others." via collision detection for upcoming Wired feature: "Radical Transparency"
Social entrepreneurs are essentially individuals who have decided to face by themselves the answers to problems afflicting their communities, and to do so by applying the same vision and determination for achieving goals that characterize businessmen and –women.
Bill Drayton has accurately defined those people as “persons possessed by an idea, who, by means of unquenchable determination and revolutionary ideas, are solving problems around the globe.” Like himself. Like Rodrigo Baggio, Iqbal Quadir and Fabián Ferraro, who transformed football into a tool for the social inclusion of kids from low-income neighborhoods.
Bill Drayton: “The most radical change”
“How do you intend to put your initiative into effect? How will you manage to make others join you? How will you do it?” How, how and how. The kind of question theorists hate, but which obsesses Bill Drayton and all entrepreneurs of his kind.
Drayton, an American, studied in Harvard, Oxford and Yale and was a member of President Carter’s administration in the EPA. Almost thirty years ago, influenced by Gandhi, the American civil rights movements, and his own travels in India, Indonesia, and Venezuela, he reached the firm conclusion that everywhere in the planet there were people who thought that their ideas could improve the world significantly. It was the passion and enthusiasm expressed by those people that persuaded Drayton that every one of them was a social entrepreneur, a catalyst for large-scale social transformations. And this is what he had in mind when in 1980 he revolutionized philanthropy by eliminating the words “non-profit” and “donations” from its vocabulary and creating Ashoka, the organization of which he is both president and CEO.
During its twenty-five years’ existence, Ashoka has supported 1,700 people in 62 countries – people Drayton defines as social entrepreneurs, using the latter word to signify their ambitious, competitive characters, which one would rather expect to find in the business world than in this area.
“Magical opportunities are out there for everyone willing to face the challenge and go for a social solution,” he affirms, adding that “if we allow people the deep satisfaction of being able to contribute, of feeling they are total citizens, they will love it, because it’s contagious. We are nearing that end: if we multiply the number of change-makers from 1% to 20% in the next fifteen years, that will be the most radical change ever witnessed since the agricultural revolution.”
Rodrigo Baggio: Everything started with a dream
A dream in which slum kids transformed their reality by means of informatics. The year 1993 was drawing to a close and the dreamer was Rodrigo Baggio, at the time an employee of IBM and bound to be featured a couple of years later on the cover of Time magazine as one of 50 youths likely to change the world in the Third Millennium.
Baggio created the Committee for the Democratization of Informatics (CDI), an entity that currently has branches in 10 countries and has already introduced more than 500,000 youths to the use of new technologies.
“How can we use information technology as a means for transforming our society into a more just, equitable, and free one?” he asked himself at the beginning. In 1994 he started the first computer-donation campaign Latin America had ever seen. “We received the computers from companies and delivered them to low-income neighborhoods in Rio de Janeiro. But then I started thinking about a model school of informatics and civil education.”
What Rodrigo immediately realized was that, in order to make a real change, he needed to replicate the school he had created in one Rio de Janeiro neighborhood in the hundreds of other slums or low-income areas of the region. Aware that he clearly couldn’t do it on his own, he decided to work jointly with the communities, creating a simple franchising system that could be autonomously developed in different parts of Brazil. It was then that he made the fundamental decision of trusting this project in the poorest areas of his country and gave local leaders the responsibility of making the schools work.
“We believe that through our schools we help young people help themselves,” Baggio says.
Meet Rodrigo Baggio
Iqbal Quadir: “Connectivity is productivity”
Thus the motto of this entrepreneur who grew up in the rural areas of Bangladesh. A motto that in 1997 led him to seek answers for the telecommunications problem of his country, where one had to wait over ten years to have a phone installed, and that at a cost of USD 450, one of the highest in the world.
Combining state-of-the-art digital wireless technology and the Grameen Bank’s experience in granting micro-loans, Quadir created Grameen Phone and launched the Village Phone program. His aim: to increase the non-urban, low-income population’s access to communications, by means of the introduction of mobile phone terminals managed by rural operators, preferably women.
Community telephones have been installed in 40,000 villages since the program’s inception, which means that 50 million peasants are connected.
Telephones are used, among other purposes, to exchange information about health issues and product prices. “Not only is the program socially beneficial, it is profitable as well. It has also represented a significant increase in the Bangladeshi communities’ economic activities, promoted commercial exchange, and created new sources of income,” Quadir explains, adding that “the economic impact is also relevant with regard to the person managing the telephone service: rural operators are usually women who, thanks to their jobs, can be the source of about 25% of their homes’ income.”
Fabián Ferraro: “The wonderful thing is to see the changes”
“… and see how kids start changing their personal appearance, their way of acting, their vocabulary – how they respect each other, want to improve their lives and start having hopes. It is with these kids that we have to work, because it’s them who are going to make the changes,” says Fabián Ferraro, who lives in Chaco Chico, a densely populated neighborhood in the Buenos Aires suburbia where many of the 6,500 residents are unemployed. Like many Argentinean young men, Fabián had played football since he was a kid, and soon after started playing it professionally. It was around this time that he began working with street kids. And then, convinced that football could be a powerful tool for social change, he decided to quit professional playing and create the Asociación Civil Defensores del Chaco (“Chaco Defenders”) club.
Says Fabián, “in 1996 we formed a team and started working with fourteen youths. As the club started growing, we began teaching the older ones how to train the younger.” Like Rodrigo Baggio, Ferraro had also grasped that giving responsibility-involving tasks to young people who grew up marginalized and undervalued by their environment could have a real impact on their personal development.
The organization Fabián leads uses street football as a method for social inclusion, violence prevention and informal education for youths in “risk situations”. For some 1,500 children and teenagers, its offices have become a space for having non-competitive fun, for teamwork and collective construction.
Meet Fabian Ferraro
In the words of its founder: “Defensores is no longer a dumping ground. These sports fields and this club that we built jointly with lots of entrepreneurs are a school without walls. This is a space for education, where human values are intensely transmitted.”
Ideas in action
The sheer variety and quantity of social organizations formed by these and other entrepreneurs is glaring evidence of how far these people are from traditional relief organizations focusing on charity: they have new, distinct work methodologies, new concepts – they develop a management style in accordance with their aims and their members are people with very different qualifications and profiles. They are joined by a central idea: that solidarity is not enunciated but practiced; that one must not give away the fish, but teach how to cast the nets; that the common good is everyone’s good and we have to act now.
