Nothing Economic can happen until people get together and build something, period.

Social Network services are not that.  Social media gives people the impression that they are getting stuff done – but they are not.  Nothing economic is happening on Linkedin or Facebook or Twitter.  Rather, the impact of these services is derived only from what people accomplish in reality.

Yet so many social media services sell advertising.  The objective of an advertising site is to keep you in your seat where you can view more advertising.  The objective of advertising as an industry is to influence you to do something other than what you already want to do.   Each of these things impacts people’s activities, and therefore, much of the crap that people share on social network services.

Race to the bottom

This self–depreciating cycle does not actually create very much nor does it arrive at anywhere interesting or important.  The content that keep people coming back to Social Networks is produced by a relatively few number of entertainers – people who separate themselves from consumption of the medium and instead produce content for consumption by the medium – instead of “For” the medium.  Again, the objective is to keep people in their seats watching more advertising.

Did I mention that nothing economic can happen until people get together and build something?

We are in the middle of creating a different type of social network in Social Flights.  We are billing it as “The Social Network where people actually do stuff” because the objective is to get people out into their community looking for other people who can help them build something.  We’re still experimenting so please be patient if it still seems a little clunky.

The Last Mile of Social Media

The idea is to form travel communities in relatively small geographical areas and enable them to share an airplane to anywhere where there is another travel community.  We call the The Last Mile of Social Media – empowering neighborhoods not Hollywoods.

There is no advertising on social flights; however, local vendors are encouraged to place discount coupons in direct response to a community travel objective.  There is no airline schedule because the objective is for people to share an asset – the airplane. This means that the passengers tell the plane where to fly and when, not the airline.

In the end, Social Flights rewards people, venders, and aircraft operators for interacting with their communities in real life and real time – instead of their computer screens in virtual time.  Now, the social network, laptop, or mobile device becomes a real productivity tool.

Back to economics:

Most logical people will ask “where do I get the money to travel to new places with new people?  The answer is simple: “That is precisely why you need to travel to new places to meet new people”

Nothing economic can happen until people get together and build something, for real.

Money Matchmaker

The function of a Bank is to match most worthy money surplus with most worthy money deficit. In the old days, the banker was the person to know if you wanted to be successful in town because they did the matching. But with the emergence of the credit score, the “banker” became digitized.  The spread of the credit score is responsible for great wealth creation because many more entrepreneurs could borrow money in the present to increasing human productivity in the future.

The Credit Score

The credit score is statistical in nature; it isolates about 30 or so indicators of your financial activity and puts them on a bell curve. These include how much debt you have, how much your assets are worth, your income, etc. These ratings are run through the FICO Equation and out pops your credit score. Anyone can predict the likelihood that you may default on your financial obligation.

All of the data that feed FICO are collected from public records, your employer, and the people who you borrow money from because these same organizations have a vested interest in a system of correct credit scores.

We are competing with ourselves

It is interesting that people do not compete directly with each other for our credit score because it is not a ranking system, it is a “normal distribution”. However, with no credit, people are invisible and the system shuts them out. With bad credit, the system also shuts them out. People are also willing to give up some freedom and privacy, but they accept these terms because the credit score provides tremendous leverage to finance a business, automobile, or a home.

The Knowledge Matchmaker

The Value Game specifically transforms financial currency into social currencies where value increases by human interactions in communities. Then, the social currency is transformed back into a financial currency or stored in a yet to be determined social currency. The efficiency of the Social Value Creation Process can be vastly improved with a Social Credit Score.  The objective, like the financial credit score, would be to match most worthy knowledge surplus to most worthy knowledge deficit.

The Social Credit Score

There are two forces that need to be combined to produce a credit score; the reporting of social activity and the independent variables that constitute social activity. We already see some elements where search engines report your social activity and we have seen a few unsuccessful attempts to use Twitter as a proxy for social productivity. Neither are functional but the nascent social credit score system will eventually improve.  But why wait if we already know what needs to be done?

Something else needs to happen

Not unlike the FICO score, the Social Credit Score is a knowledge inventory for social, creative, and intellectual assets that a community of people collectively hold. The format of the knowledge inventory must be assembled to a bell curve.

Next, a new type of search engine must be developed that can process the knowledge inventory and statistically match most worthy surplus of knowledge asset with most worthy deficit of knowledge asset given a set of business objectives. Then and only then can holistic transactions take place which can redefine human economics in social currencies, i.e., where knowledge really is an asset.

Our culture organizes itself around winners and losers. Corporations reflect this competitive nature to the core of their Capitalist doctrine. Sports analogies abound across the enterprise straight through to the HR department always on the lookout for the most amount of superstar for the least amount of money.

Social media has every industry trying to understand the concept of community.  Nature and our environment continues to demonstrate to humanity that there is far more cooperation going on than competition. There is tragedy looming at both ends of our political spectrum and some people are realizing that we are all in this together.

Twitter shows us that everyone is an expert at something and nobody is an expert at everything.  Corporations must understand that someone not performing adequately cannot be treated as flotsam subject to jettison at the next layoff or outsourcing opportunity.  They soon see that their customers disappear as well – because they are the same.  Communities, people, social networks, and their integrated knowledge assets are the mis-allocated asset being squandered by losing management teams, not land, labor or capital.

Like most valuable assets, there is a perfectly legitimate market for everyone in a community – nobody need be excluded, marginalized or laid off. Social Media is turning the tables on the hierarchy.  Old winners who don’t play by the new rules quickly become the new losers. Maybe we ought to run our economy like a community instead of losing so badly at trying to decimate our competition; each other.

The term “Vetting” comes from the sport of horse racing where the animal is “vetted” by a veterinarian to determine if the animal is in suitable condition to race.  Today, there are many vetting mechanisms acting in society and communities.  Think of it as the referee that keeps the game fair.  This is important because if the game is not fair, people will stop playing.

Where the vetting mechanism fails, the system fails. This has happened in countless instances from the current financial crisis to nearly every product, market, environmental calamity, or political failure in recorded history – the referees who were supposed to keep their eye on the ball, did not. Likewise, where a vetting mechanism is effective, the system is efficient.

Today, we find severe problems in finance and government and people are investing their knowledge assets in social media as the place to “store and exchange” their present and future productivity – instead of deploying money or debt. As such, social vetting is taking many different forms to validate, qualify, and quantify knowledge assets in communities.

While the progression may not be noticeable, there will be a tipping point where the medium has built enough trust that it can support a currency. This new currency needs to be only a little bit more “trustworthy” than the currency it will replace. This is the point where knowledge becomes tangible.

I don’t often run a full repost from other people on this blog, but this post by Seth Godin was just too rich to leave alone.

I have been posting a lot lately on the irony of social media devolving to spammers spamming spammers, especially the recent Twitter plan to charge advertisers for jumping to the front of the line by exploiting data provided voluntarily by the users (Twitter Me Elmo).

All of this tells us that Social Media is up against the ropes on the monetization plan. As a result it is starting to consume itself. This may be the first indication that the Dollar is NOT the currency of trade in the social media space, it’s a yet unnamed Social Currency. This definitely tells us that something new must happen soon.

Of course, The Ingenesist Project specifies an alternate financial system that can accommodate a social currency, but the lure of the almighty dollar remains strong enough to blind the choir itself and out-pitch the humble whisper new economic paradigm evangelists.

Anyway, here is Seth’s post in it’s entirety. Buy his books and read his blog, get his feed for daily email enlightenment. Seth, I apologize in advance for posting without your explicit permission…etc…just trying to “keep the convo rolling….”

*****

Cannibalism and spam

By Seth Godin:

So, these two cannibals are eating a clown, and one says to the other, “does this taste funny to you?”

We don’t often have conversations about cannibalism. We don’t trade recipes or talk about health issues. That’s because it’s off the table, not permitted, inconceivable.

Marketers should feel the same way about spamming people. Spamming them by email, by text or yes, by calling their cell phones with a robot, repeatedly, just because it’s cheap and because they can.

If anyone should know better, it’s the Word of Mouth Marketing Association. And yet, not only did they spam thousands of people by phone, they want us to “keep the convo rolling”. And when I spoke to their Executive Director, she had a hard time understanding that what they were doing was spam.

Spam is unanticipated, impersonal, irrelevant junk I don’t want to get. Not only that, it costs them less to send it than it takes me to figure out what it is and deal with it. That doesn’t scale. In fact, it destroys the medium.

Why would anyone join, pay their dues, go to their meetings or want to engage with an organization that’s willing to cross a line like this? Even once? (and then brag about it!) Maybe I’m getting cranky, but the relentless march of marketers into our lives is really getting to me.

In case you missed the first part of our show, the future of marketing is based on permission. It’s based on sending messages to people who want to get them, who choose to get them, who would miss you if you didn’t send them. It’s not easy and it’s not cheap to earn permission, but so what? This is my attention, not yours, and if you want to use it for a while, please earn the privilege.

PS If I ran Twitter, I’d build my new ad service about a socially acceptable way for corporate users to build large lists of followers, people who would give permission to get news and discounts and insights from advertisers. Twitter knows who likes what and they have permission from users to be a bridge between the user and those that might want to talk to them. That’s a powerful place to be.

Using cheap technology to spam people is not.

Dorothy the goldfish is imagining Elmo reading his Twitter stream… and what would it say? Who would he follow? And who would follow Elmo?

Elmo; “Computer, who’s following me on Twitter? Starbucks, Microsoft, and WalMart? Hey wait, Twitter is selling advertising. What’s up with that? Let’s ask Mr. Noodle.”

Mr. Noodle (in mime) “Everyone is promoting something on Twitter otherwise nobody would use it.”

Murray Monster: “Hey, I thought that Twitter was supposed to give everyone an even playing field. Otherwise, nobody would go to school to learn how to actually produce anything. Ovejita!!!

Ovejita (translated from Spanish): “Yeah, everyone spends time and energy building social capital in their community. Now Twitter lets rich guys can come along and just buy access. Why then should the rest of us work so hard?”

Big Bird: “Sponsored Tweets allow Brands to buy a seat at the head of the line. What about my Tweets? Does this build or diminish my social equity?”

Grouch: “Yeah, isn’t that great, Twitter is built on social currency. Now you don’t have to produce social capital, you can just buy in. Watch the social currency devalue!!”

Count Von Count; “ah ah ah, I can count the people leaving Twitter, ah, ah, ah… 50, 40, 30, 20 million,… ah ah ah”

Abby Cadabby; “I’m comfortable with who I am in a pink dress and can just cast a barrage of nasty Tweet spells on those unfair Tweeters”.

Baby Bear: “The only ones who really benefit are National and International Brands – what do they care about what happens here on Sesame Street, let alone in the forest where grandpa bear still lives?”

Grouch: “Quit complaining, the big Twitter moments will be revolutions, airplane crashes, assassinations, natural disasters, celebrity indiscretions, political extremisms, etc. I know that only the most respectable Grouchy brands will jump into any trash can that’s burning with eyeballs….can you say Voyeur?”

Burt and Ernie: “Who said Voyeur?”

Gordon the Shopkeeper: “Then there is the subject of conflict of interest. Can a brand dispel, displace, or disproportion negative Tweets by purchasing out the social media space? Will Mr. Hooper’s store have to buy tweets just to be stay in business?”

Elmo: “Thanks guys. If Twitter makes a little bit of money and goes public, they will eventually want to make more money and more money and more money until people are fighting over the next Christmas Toy Craze. Will this invite a competitor, a disruptive technology, or speculators? Let’s ask a Baby.”

Baby: [confused look]

Elmo: “Thanks baby, What does the future hold? Even Elmo has to worry about profit margins on character marketing. It’s only a matter of time before I will Tweet and my tweets will be followed – but the question becomes; by whom?”

Today we see Social Media duplicating many of the functions of earlier society by storing community wisdom, applying social vetting, and deploying social currencies.

It takes a Community

Here is an article is about a a person who learned through social media profiling that her fiance was active in hobbies that conflicted with her moral constitution – before the wedding instead of after.  In the old days, the community would also profile each individual based on the social record of their behavior.

Social Capitalism

Here is a video article that discusses how social media is  duplicating many functions of the corporation outside the construct of the corporation. Factors of production increasingly enter the org chart as a social media application.  We now question whether the corporation itself is the sole vehicle of wealth creation.

Social Currency

We see social media duplicating many of the functions of the financial system where currency, credit scores, banks, land, labor, and capital are being replaced by social currency, social vetting, social capital, creative capital, and social entrepreneurs.

Macro vs. Micro

We see divisions of scale from the long-winded one-sided content of the static web presence to the micro blogging applications that more closely resemble a conversation.  Time factors are accelerated to the point where real-time is not fast enough.

Local vs. Global

We see an emerging segmentation between Local Social and Global Social. At first global leverage was the awarded the small entrepreneur with something to offer to the world.  Now ‘Local Social’ enjoys substantial leverage over global corporations by reorganizing the way people prioritize and experience each other and their community.

Everyone is a node

Taking an analogy from the physics of electricity, the term “potential” means the difference in energy between two nodes.  The greater the difference, the bigger the spark and the greater the impact.   The local energy at each node influences the direction and size of sparks between nodes.  As people accumulate ‘Social Current’, their position relative to those around them changes. Likewise, their potential also changes relative to the ‘Social Current’ of others. Everyone has some potential relative to every other node.

Integration has arrived

Much like the knowledge economy integrated, but did not replace, the agrarian economy, Social Media will not replace the corporation, the financial system, dissertation, conversations, localization or globalization.  Rather, everyone becomes a corporation, everyone prints their own social currency, everyone publishes their intentions, everyone has local and global leverage.  That’s what Integration is all about.

A ‘culture of one’ is moot.

It is not surprising then that our culture itself is now being defined in terms of social media with effective aggregation of  social norms, storage of social wisdom, and medium of exchange for community ideals.  The true test of “culture status” is when engagement is no longer an optional.  Without engagement, there is no culture.

The Next Economic Paradigm is arriving and the first entries include Foursquare.  Few people understand the significance of this new class of social media applications. Foursquare contains many (but not yet all) of the components of the Innovation Economy that we have been discussing for several years at Ingenesist.com, Conversationalcurreny.com, and Relationship-economy.com.

Here is what Foursquare does have:

Geolocation: Sure, social media has been great sport for chatting with your buddies across the world, but nothing really happens until the rubber meets the road.  people need to be in the same location in order to “build something” together.  We call this The Last Mile of Social Media

Mayor of Popcorn: As silly as this may sound, badging it is a highly sophisticated feature that we have called the “knowledge Inventory“.  In order to build anything, there must be an inventory of parts. “Knowledge” is not the exception as the crude and archaic resume system would have people believe.

Knowledge is an asset and it will perform as an asset if it is characterized in the form of a quantity and a quality.  ”Mayor of Popcorn”, believe it or not, is in the correct form.

Vetting Mechanism: Vendors are an equal part of the social network and will soon provide their coupons, specials, and other economic incentives on Foursquare because advertising any other way is dead meat.  Vendors will live in a system that is in their best interest to practice high integrity rather than low integrity while favoring mom and pop operations that live in the community.  We call this “Social Vetting” as it lives beyond law and government – let the market be the judge.

Here is what they do not have (yet): Currency

The attraction of foursquare is the promise of fun and fancy crowd play.  The incentive is to be seen as connected, mobile, and plugged-in.  As such, people will be implicitly attracted to you like bees to a flower. In actuality, this game takes Social Media right to the edge of becoming a new financial system that can compete with, and challenge, the almighty dollar. No kidding.

Remember that currency is a social agreement.  History shows that people will trade seashells, tulip bulbs, paper notes, and little copper disks as a device to store and exchange value. All value is expressed in terms of human incentives of some kind.  Well here we have it.  Now let the entrepreneurs play.

That is a huge, huge, huge matter.

The dollar represents productivity….well, so does Foursquare.  What will entrepreneurs do in this environment?  How will entrepreneurs organize communities around “things-o-do” – or even – “things-that-must-be done”?

Here is the hint.  The idea that innovation is the exclusive domain of corporations, academia, or government is now as obsolete as Twitter.  Innovation is now related to knowledge as knowledge is related to information.  Anything that increases the rate of change of knowledge in a community can now be defined as innovation in Foursquare.

Debt and innovation represent the exact same thing.

Innovation is a promise of future productivity. Debt is also a promise of future productivity.   It is only a matter of time that all of the activity in this new generation of social media applications will resolve to, and aggregate around, a new form of currency that will compete with the dollar itself.  Mark these words.

Where the vetting mechanism fails, the system fails. This has happened in countless instances from the current financial crisis to nearly every product, market, environmental calamity, or political failure in recorded history – the referees who were supposed to keep their eye on the ball, did not. Likewise, where a vetting mechanism is effective, the system is efficient.

EBay does little more than defend the vetting mechanism (feedback system) and entrepreneurs do the rest. The credit score allows companies and people to capitalize and securitize assets. The US legal system keeps the game of commerce as fair as practical. Police officers and school boards keep our society safe and smart. We often overlook the importance of vetting in our communities.

Today, we find severe problems in finance and government and people are investing their knowledge assets in social media as the place to “store and exchange” their present and future productivity – instead of debt. As such, social vetting is taking many different forms to validate, qualify, and quantify those assets.

While the progression may not be noticeable, there will be a tipping point where the medium has built enough trust that it can support a currency. This new currency needs to be only a little bit more “trustworthy” than the currency it will replace. This is the point where knowledge becomes tangible.

Sure Bro…Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin are great for broadcasting across the Ocean, but how good are they for meeting your neighbors? As wonderful as all this global chatter appears, nothing tangible happens until the rubber meets the road.

Don’t Worry, Be Neighborly…

The following video describes how the components of the next economic paradigm must act locally, but share globally. For anyone wondering what to do next or where the great opportunities are, think about building out the Last mile of Social Media.

Many Social Media Gurus are espousing a new culture that their clients should forget about blogging (adding meaningful content) in favor of the ubiquitous widespread “updates”.

Using automated apps, you no longer need to waste time creating content that teaches or expresses, you can populate across social media space carefully wedged in between someone else’s creative content. I find this appalling.

The new marketing mantras go something like these:

• “Go where your customers congregate”.
• “Gain their trust by sharing your stuff”
• “Soon, you can start to influence their behavior”
• “Once hooked, they will do your deed for freeeee!!”

This is starting to sound more like the neighborhood drug dealer than any sustainable economic paradigm.

Slavery on Steroids

Slavery is a term characterized in part by the coercion of another person to perform or act without compensation. The effects of slavery are not only physical, but mental as well.  The effects of oppression manifest themselves in addictive behaviors.

Social acceptance is an extremely powerful psychotic that can be cleverly turned against any person. The techniques of social media are getting increasingly sophisticated in hijacking and consuming the social capital of others.

Green Marketing

It does not take long to see that the marketing professions are defining the social media space regardless of what anyone says about user-generated content.  The danger is that social media will become just as unsustainable as the economy that it replaces.  People will soon lose the ability to produce the currency that the media demands to support itself.

Ban advertising

t would be high temple sacrilege for any social media monetization strategist to suggest that advertising of any kind must be banned.  Well, not exactly, but the objective of advertising can be redefined if there were a means to do so.

The only sustainable monetization strategy (of which there are terribly few current examples) are the deployment of social media applications that empower people to discover their own individual talents, to pursue what they are naturally best at and enjoy doing most – while also eliminating the clutter and irrelevant messages that distracts them from their personal life goals.

This means that brands should communicate more and not less.  They should identify, educate, and promote the talents and abilities of a million customers instead of 1 superstar athlete or celebrity.

The proverbial sports analogy:

Advertisers should sit in the bleachers and cheer on their favorite customer, but they should not be in the game, blowing the whistle, or running the scoreboard.  Let them pay admission, see my logo, and buy my overpriced beer.  Let them sell to each other on their own dime – but under no circumstances should they be allowed on the field, in the schools, or in the home without explicit and expressed permission of the customer.

Given the events of the last several weeks, it’s time to for the aviation industry to get serious with Social Media.   This article demonstrates how an alternate currency can be used to severely reduce or eliminate terrorist risk in commercial aviation.  Think I’m kidding, read on.

Obviously an airline will not let you board an airplane if you don’t have the financial currency sufficient to buy ticket.  Why should an airline let you board an airplane if you do not have social currency sufficient to fulfill your social obligations while in the air?

People with extreme social currency deficiencies are routinely stripped of their rights by a jury of peers and isolated from society for a period of time (where they would not board an airplane anyway).  While there are many systems in place to manage the various degrees of social currency deficiency, none appear to be able to identify a terrorist without also violating the rights of non-terrorists.

Human Writes

However, many people are willing to share information about themselves to associates with whom an economic benefit is shared or exchanged.  This happens a billion times per week on Linkedin, Facebook, and Twitter – why not among fellow passengers?  After all everyone is already connected by 6 degrees.

What would a terrorist’s Facebook profile say about them?  Do they have a lot of referrals on linkedin?  Do they post great work on Flikr? Is their community orchestra featured on My Space? Are their posts popular on twitter?

Should a social currency credit score become imperative to social transactions as the financial credit score is for financial transactions?

Banks and Insurance companies already rely on a highly invasive “Credit Score” to establish financial risk profile as a means of protecting their selves and their other clients. Why wouldn’t an airline use a social credit score to establish a social risk profile as a means of protecting their selves and the lives of their other clients?

Ruse and lose

Sure, the bad guys can adapt to social media as they have adapted to all other measures.  The problem is that the greater the size and scope of their social media ruse, the more difficult it is to maintain the ruse.  A threshold score could be set to nearly eliminate this possibility.  Those folks can then simply opt into the full body scan.

The Paradigm Shift

As the saying goes, the attacker needs to be successful only once, while the defender needs to be successful every time.   The concept of a Social media credit score flips this paradigm on it’s head. The attacker’s social credit score needs to be successful every time.  The defender needs to be successful only once.

USocial is now going after YouTube. These clever guy and gals have figured out a way to bypass the democracy of social media to bring is a new form of merchant class capitalism…SUPER SPAM.  For a small fee, you can get your message to the head of the line – in effect pushing the rest backwards.  Presumably for a bigger fee, you can get ahead of those who paid a smaller fee, and so forth.

Once the bastion of lobbyists and special interest groups, anyone with a few bucks can now pull themselves up the ladder by pushing other people down the ladder.  Once the domain of high powered PR firms and Marketing agents; just a few dollars cast among the USocial Gods delivers those long elusive eyeballs of the old radio/TV marketing paradigm.

Watch this one carefully kids.  Social Media has long proven uncontainable.  Saying that you can beat  social media at its own game is like saying you can repair a credit score.  Like a credit score, you can do more damage than good trying to steal what does not belong to you in an effort to boost your income.

Those eyeballs, those followers, and those “friends” do not belong to USocial and are therefore not theirs to sell.    They belong to you and I and we control them – or we don’t play.  If USocial keeps their client list secret, this would be the capital offense in social media space.

For every new spamming technology, there is a new friction introduced to the Internet market.  Captcha’s and Askimet are a necessary barrier to unfettered abuse by the lesser “USocials” who seek to game the system.  A new friction will be introduced to push back against the tide of USocial and their inevitable copycats.

Unfortunately, every new friction to a market introduces inefficiency to the market.  If the Market becomes too inefficient, a new market will form.  This is how social media arose, and this is how the successor to over-spammed applications will arise.

So bring it on USocial – Kill Facebook, Twitter, Youtube.  Squander the trust, value, and full disclosure that each and everyone of brings to the table of social media and it’s emerging “Productivity market”.  Go ahead and push yourself in front of the people who I help to get ahead and who help me to get ahead.  Send more Press Releases telling everyone how cool you think you are by pissing on the parade.  Go make a lot of money from advertisers so we can all move along to the next  economic paradigm.  If you were smart, you would be moving on with us before you even get started.

Most bloggers invite you to share their content far and wide on any one of many aggregation sites.  But some people get really upset if you post that article on your own aggregation blog (even with full credit and back links).

I am always amazed when I get that proverbial chest thumping quasi-barrister “cease and desist” letter, followed by remedial citation of copyright law, and always ending with some pathetic accusation of irreparable damages and criminal violation.   They get upset if you change the content and they get upset if you don’t.  The worst is when it comes from a self-proclaimed social media guru who touts all ‘dat social media Kool Aid in their consultancy propaganda.

Reality Check:

1.    Ummm…nobody is an island in SM, you get ideas from someone else too.
2.    If you are pissed off – this means that you have nothing else to offer.
3.    Social media is a conversation – you have no claim to my response.
4.    So you think you are better than Wikipedia?
5.    Maybe your content is not so great – just convenient.
6.    Your feed is public, your content is public.
7.    If you’re not giving it away – lock it up.
8.    Implied Copyright?  Go ahead, sue someone.

Regarding ‘my own’ content, If I feel that I earned the right to request that my reader spend their valuable time to promote my stuff across their hard earned social networks on TWT, MS, FB, LI, then they also have the right to share whatever, wherever, and however they want (with full credit and back links, of course).

To those who participate with others in this great journey – we will bend over backwards to help you along in any way we can now or any time in the future.  Give us a call next time you’re in Seattle.  Need a contact of LI? A referral?, Book review? PR shout out? let us help out! Thank you.

David Meerman Scott provides qualified research that demonstrates how authors that offer free downloads of their whitepapers and books (with the minimum of barriers), enjoy readership success increases several orders of magnitude over restricted content.  If you love it, set it free.

The moral of this story is give, give, give, and the magic of social media will return your royalties- otherwise, thanks for the C&D letter – now I can delete you from my blog, social network, and corporate referral list – with full credit and back links, of course.

By the way, our research would cost millions to reproduce – all of it is committed to the public domain through Creative Commons.  Go ahead, take it – it’s yours (apply full credit and back links, of course).

Picture credit
]]> http://www.ingenesist.com/general-info/intellectual-property-in-bloggerville.html/feed 0 http://www.ingenesist.com/general-info/can-twitter-fuel-a-run-on-the-banks.html http://www.ingenesist.com/general-info/can-twitter-fuel-a-run-on-the-banks.html#comments Mon, 16 Nov 2009 13:00:41 +0000 Dan Robles http://www.ingenesist.com/?p=2177

The Ingenesist Project is often hired by corporate clients because we look at the world through a different set of filters. We are looking for possible disruptions on the horizon as far in advance as possible so that our clients can be aware of potential perils and modify their business plans accordingly.

One of our signature assertions is that Money is merely a social agreement – not a federal mandate of a democratic government. People will trade whatever currency they agree to trade. Increasingly, people, empowered by social media can impact the financial system as much the Quants peddling CDOs.

People simply do not know how powerful they are.

Suppose someone puts together a Twitter campaign for everyone the withdraw their money from a single financial institution who just handed out big bonuses? At best, those bonuses will have to be recalled to keep the doors open. At worst, people will find an alternate currency to store the “value” that is destroyed by a bank run. Would they form a Virtual Currency? Admittedly, it’s far-out, but we need to keep our eyes on these trends because once started, they move very very fast. That’s why they call it a “Run”

Is this scenario really possible? Read on…..

Organized mass customer withdrawls force Dutch bank DSB into bankruptcy

The Ingenesist Project is often hired by corporate clients because we look at the world through a different set of filters. We are looking for possible disruptions on the horizon as far in advance as possible so that our clients can be aware of potential perils and modify their business plans accordingly.

One of our signature assertions is that Money is merely a social agreement – not a federal mandate of a democratic government. People will trade whatever currency they agree to trade. Increasingly, people, empowered by social media can impact the financial system far more that a bunch of Quants peddling CDOs.

People simply do not know how powerful they are.

Suppose someone puts together a Twitter/Facebook campaign for everyone the withdraw their money from a single financial institution who just handed out big bonuses? At best, those bonuses will have to be recalled to keep the doors open. At worst, people will find an alternate currency to store the “value” that is destroyed by a bank run. Virtual Currency? Admittedly, it’s far-out, but we need to keep our eyes on these trends because once started, they move very very fast. That’s why they call it a “Run”

Is this scenario really possible? Read on…..

Organized mass customer withdrawls force Dutch bank DSB into bankruptcy

I have been hearing a great deal about an inevitable collapse of the dollar.  Not today or tomorrow, but more likely over the course of the next 10 years.  The failure will probably not be a stupendous crash since politicians would avoid this as a means of self-preservation.  Rather, it would simply be a slow and grinding inability to “afford” many important things using cash.  Note that this has little or nothing to do with your human ability to produce important things.

Few people disagree that a 50 Trillion dollar debt obligation cannot be paid back without at least 50 Trillion dollars in increased human productivity.  Traditional productivity usually means taking stuff out of the ground, air, ocean, or the forest and making things that eventually wind up back in the ground, air, ocean, or the forest. Today, we are encountering constraints on the planet’s resources.  Something has got to give.

The ONLY technological change that is happening at anywhere near the rate that can conceivably deliver a substantial amount of “increased productivity” is Social Media. But how do we turn it into dollars?  Maybe we shouldn’t.

Here is the problem; the trends for monetizing social media actually slow it down.  People use social media only because of the prospect for increasing their long term productivity as relationships prosper. Entrepreneurs trying to get paid for their innovations invariably need to introduce “friction” by attempting to convert “short term” user productivity into cash.  There is no business case on short term productivity making their innovation nonviable.  Therefore, the monetization problem introduces a threshold over which most great innovations simply cannot reach.

The purpose of this article is not to instill fear or label myself as a “death panelist” – the objective is to simply to consider what people will use for trade if the currency becomes ineffective AND their productivity does not.   If the dollar does fail, people will attempt to meet their daily needs until a financial system is corrected.  Many countries that have experienced currency problems and the most common result are the emergence of a black market where Levi’s, Cigarettes, or other commodities serve as a de facto tax-free currency.

While on-line gaming industry is pioneering virtual tax-free currencies with extraordinary results, back in reality, people will begin trading services.  Plumbers will find dentists, farmers will find laborers, and teachers will find landscapers.  Matchmaking will become a financial instrument. People will use Facebook and Twitter, Linkedin and many others in new ways in order to keep the game in play.

In fact, perhaps they already are.

Several articles have come out refuting the death of MySpace as researchers try to make sense of the continued persistence of what many people consider last-year’s news. Here is an interesting article by Misiek Piskorski from Harvard Business Review answering the question “Where are all those My Space Users”?

“Both traditional and social media have declared MySpace dead. Even a brief scan of articles reveals that media mavens “don’t know anybody who uses MySpace anymore,” which reportedly is not a huge loss as the site “is ridden by spammers” and “its atrocious HTML, bLiNgY graphics, and horrific backgrounds” are offensive. Many of you reading this post probably do not know anyone who uses the site either.

Yet MySpace is the 11th most visited site in the world, with unique 60 to 70 million U.S. visitors every month. Even though the site is not growing, it is a far cry from “dead” if you ask me.”

But wait!

Notice how the “Media Centers” Los Angeles, Chicago, New York are in Facebook territory.  Also note how the technology power centers; Silicon Valley, Seattle, and Boston are also in the Facebook territory.  Academics from Harvard, Yale, Stanford are taken by surprise in Facebookville.  The great financial centers; Wall Street, LA, SF and Chicago are all Facebook.  Maybe the prognosis for the future of social media is skewed by the proximity to major media, academic, and financial centers. Centralized power is the antithesis of social media, Right?

Looking for Disassociation.

Here at The Ingenesist Project we have long been looking for a disassociation between main stream media and social media.  MySpace may be the social experiment that indicates a deeper and most promising trend.  Is it a requirement that a social media analyst be located in Silicon Valley? Do celebrity endorsements really mean anything tangible?  Does editorialized news always provide what people need?

MySpace Demographics:

The resulting sample is representative of the MySpace population. 53% of users identify themselves as women. Of all users below the age of 50, half are 21 years old or younger, and 30% are between the ages of 22 and 30.  Everyone knows that Kids don’t Tweet and late adopters to Social Media are also later-in-lifers.   The population of the world is finite, so when will Facebook level off as Twitter has?

Looking for reversal:

Next, we are looking for a reversal where Social Media drives s0-called traditional media – not the other way around. Can a blogger in Arizona drive the great branding strategies of the future?  Can a Webinar from Montana introduce the next age of enlightenment?  Can Nashville become the next great Venture Capital hub? Can a community of children in Florida band together to sustain the next great social movement.  Will democracy, voting, and public opinion be driven by youth culture? Will corporate innovation respond to social priorities rather than Wall Street Priorities?

Ideas whose times are coming:

There are many examples of the above miracles of social media, however, a disassociation and reversal with traditional media will be an event of flip-floponomics of great significance – a watershed moment in the history of the next economic paradigm.  Traditional media, understandably, may inadvertently be assigning a premature death to many great ideas yet to come.

Flip-floponomics is a term that I just coined with this post which means:

1.    A traditional business method flipped on it’s back to reveal a new business method
2.    A mirror image of a previously accepted economic paradigm
3.    sing. n; flip-floponom; A phenomenon of flip-floponomics.

Let’s demonstrate how this works.

Flip-floponom A:

Twitter has announced that they will mine user generated data and process it into business intelligence which they will sell to corporations for a whole lot of money.  As such, corporations who were unable to figure out how to charge people a whole lot of money money to “watch” social media can now be charged a whole lot of money to “watch” social media

Flip-floponom B:

YouTube can’t make money on ads because viewers don’t care.  But with user generated content such as Jill and Kevin’s wedding (with 12 million views), Chris Brown landed a land slide of sales for the song “Forever”.  The audience is now the Brands positioning themselves to be “user-generated”.

The Mother of all Flip-flopona:

Before flip-floponomics: entrepreneurs assumed that they had the knowledge to execute a business plan and they went to the bank to borrow money.

After Flip-floponomics: entrepreneurs assumed they had the money to execute a business plan and they go to social media to borrow the knowledge.

Next economic paradigm:

With the continuing integration of social media, every single business transaction has the potential to be re-invented in the mirror image if itself using the principles of flip-floponomics.  The opportunities for future entrepreneurs who figure out this class of business activity can be described as nothing short of astonishing.

The bottom line:

Conversational currency is a mirror image of the dollar.

Image Credit Picasso

The Convergence of Knowledge

The Ingenesist Project and related blogs such as Relationship Economy and now Conversational Currency have long predicted that the resolution of social media space will vastly increase from  “Monet” to “Blue Ray”.  The segmentation and convergence of social media space will happen on two fronts: Knowledge Inventory and Proximity.

From Strategis:

“As Facebook balloons to over 250 million users, many voice their appreciation for Facebook’s small social network feel.  Unlike its so-last-year counterpart, MySpace, Facebook has successfully maintained a very personal feel, finding hundreds of ways to link the most relevant people, in the most relevant ways.

Even so, because Facebook has so many interesting people, useful content, and relevant apps available, many users would appreciate a broader search option that would enable the to quickly search ALL of Facebook’s content. Thus, Face says: “your wish is my command”. And so it is. Facebook has now announced that it will soon make the change allowing users to search the entire site, not to mention, do new things like share status updates with everyone, rather than just confirmed friends. Expect to see these changes in full effect some time within the next two months”

What’s in store for the next 2 years?

While the coolness of Social Media is still riffing through society as the late adopters drive huge growth, nothing “economical” happens until people actually get together and build something.  In order to build anything, there must be an inventory of parts.  All these parts need to be in physical or virtual proximity to each other. A financial system must support the initiatives of the entrepreneurs in any market.

The United States of Mind

We’re about 3% into this new paradigm today.  At 20% the corporate structure will become increasingly mushy as many corporate functions are now handled in Social media space. At 30%, cooperation will “compete” with competition as a business model.  At 40% a new currency emerges to hedge debt backed dollar with productivity backed “conversational currency”.  At 50% people convert general dollar backed holdings to ‘conversational currency’ holdings.  At 60% social priorities dominate corporate priorities. At 70% the Innovation Bond dominates financial markets. At 80% international borders become fuzzy as knowledge flows as easily as, say, avocados and T-shirts do today.  At 90% global currency backed by productivity, dollar, Euro, Yen all expire.  At 100%, the president is elected to a “State of mind”.

Hold on, not so fast….

OK, so that’s the problem with predictions, it’s hard to survive with one’s credibility intact.  Kudos to Strategis for showing us the future!!

If you’re a Flash game developer, you are concerned with how you can make a living from your creative and intellectual services. Fortunately there is a payment system so workable, that it may actually work.   Game developers can charge money both for their games, and for things within their games.

Here’s how it works:

1.    Player pays real money to buy fake money within the game.
2.    Player spends fake money on virtual stuff.
3.    Virtual stuff increases the value of the game.

The game developer can technically charge for whatever they like: level packs, hats, extended versions/director’s cuts, etc, etc. The sky’s the limit.

These types of transactions have been very popular in places like Korea for a long time, and it was amusing to see the initial resistance and resentment in North America to the idea. Meanwhile, North American Pioneers of such systems are drowning in money.

The Right [virtual] Stuff:

Now, suppose that Social Media could be modeled after a huge game where people act based on a set of incentives like, say, connecting with friends, accumulating followers for their blog, finding proverbial “gold rings” like employment opportunities, business opportunity, spiritual growth, professional advice, cheap airfare, fun things to do, product reviews, or political activism…just to name a few.

Suppose that in order to get from one level of the game to the next, they need to engage in conversation with another player.  Anyone who has been on Linkedin, Twitter, or Facebook long enough knows that the “right virtual stuff” is sometimes hard to acquire.  Twitter finally broke the mold with applications that now “sell” followers (I wonder if there were any Flash Developers behind this innovation).

A Mutually Inclusive Game:

Now, suppose the game was mutual such that some players need you a little bit more than you need them and they are willing to invest in your connection.  Similarly, suppose you need some players a little more than they need you and you too are willing to invest for their connection.  Finally, all players know that a mutual link between two appropriate players substantially increases the value of both players relative to the game.

It Takes Currency to Make Currency.

Immediately the engine of entrepreneurialism will ignite as people figure out new ways to play the game.  With a trillion dollar advertising industry, a trillion dollar Professional Placement industry, and a trillion dollar recreation/leisure/entertainment/family industry on the ropes, you can guarantee that innovation will be absolutely intense.  Welcome to the Innovation Economy.

(Editor’s note: This article was inspired by a piece authored by Ryan and can be found here)

The search engine wars continue as both Google and Bing develop more exotic ways of arriving at the wrong answer.  Both commit the same error as all declining industries in social media space; assuming that they can predict what people want without engaging them in a conversation.

The first development is the predictive search notably pioneered by Amazon.com for predicting future purchases based on past purchases.  While predictive search is an improvement, the next step is the “vicarious” search, that is, when the search engine sees the world through your eyes – or someone Else’s – for your benefit.

The Web is Flat

The Ingenesist Project specifies a standard knowledge inventory that may be represented as a packet of code.  If someone wanted to see the web through the eyes of another person, they could buy a packet of their knowledge inventory.  Likewise, a web article would be tagged with the representative knowledge inventory code of the author.  Each comment or re post to a blog article would contain the knowledge inventory of its aggregated vetters.

The search can be done in reverse as well.  If I find an idea on the web and want to know who can execute it locally, I can simulate the knowledge inventory in one or more local people.  This is not trivial.  It literally allows an entrepreneur to manage knowledge assets that they did not know exists and predict content that does not yet exist.

Been there, done that?

Obviously there are privacy, security, and ethics issues related to others seeing the world through your eyes.  But what if every American was told 20 years ago that their identifier number for an insolvent social security program would be attached to their personal, medical, financial, and civil records then spun through Wall Street algorithms, sold worldwide to advertisers, politicians, banks, insurance companies, demographers, and ultimately hacked?  The cities would have burned.

So why can’t social mediators monetize?

The difference today is that if packaged correctly, we can own and control our knowledge inventory.  We can allow or decline access and we can revoke access – it happens all day long on Face Book, Linkedin, Twitter, and My Space.   On-line communities represent collections of knowledge assets.  The 400 Billion dollar per year advertising budget is on the table – up for grabs.  The 100 Billion dollar “head hunting” budget is up for grabs. The multi-billion dollar election budgets are all up for grabs. What are we thinking?

The likelihood of Innovation

The innovation economy will depend on business intelligence related to society’s knowledge inventory to match most worthy knowledge surplus to the most worthy knowledge deficit.   Entrepreneurs must know supply and demand for knowledge assets as well as where to find them at what cost.  Entrepreneurs need to predict competition, disruption, risks, and volatility in knowledge assets.  They need to conduct scenario tests before expending money.  They need to predict the likelihood of innovation and all of the options that they have in the future related to those innovations.

The Securitization of Knowledge Assets

Entrepreneurs need to securitize knowledge assets in order to finance innovation on the scale that will be required to offset our massive debt. This is how the innovation economy must play out.  We cannot depend on corporations or governments to do this for us.  People must control, regulate, anonymize, and manage  their own knowledge inventory.   If only they could see their world through the entrepreneur’s eyes – perhaps they need a vicarious search engine more than anyone.

“Hey, I know a guy who owes me a favor …”

It is only a matter of time until professional contacts will be for sale.  The problem is that the ROI (return on investment model) is such a poor valuation tool for social media. Another valuation tool used in finance is called Real Options.  An option is the right, without the obligation, to act on an opportunity at some time in the future.  Social Networks, friends, family, and professional contacts behave much more along these lines.

Five Easy Pieces:

While the calculation for the value of an option is complex, the things we need to plug in are fairly simple in the context of social media:

1.    There must be an inventory of the assets
2.    The future date when the asset can be acquired must be known
3.    The cost of acquiring the asset must be known
4.    The value effects on the enterprise must be estimated
5.    The uncertainty related to the asset must be estimated

The term “asset” in social media space may include: Knowledge, skill, an undertaking of a new project, or the generation of a new idea, etc.

The Social Networking Manifesto:

The objective of the building a social network is to know where the knowledge assets are, how much they can help you, how much they cost to exercise, and the certainty that they will be applicable, available and useful when you need them.   Conversely, the best way to increase the value of a social network is to be visible to others, tell people what you can do for them, tell people what you need from them, and establish a reputation for reliability.

Most importantly, everyone must have the right, without the obligation, to accept or decline the opportunity.  This is what jump starts ‘supply and demand’ and makes a market a market

Let’s consider all options:

To estimate the value of an option to call on anyone in your network use a financial option calculator tool on the web and plugged in social media numbers.  Let’s use Linkedin as the knowledge inventory; 40 million knowledge assets also hold options with their contacts. Say that the expiration date is 1 year (for tax reasons).  Assume the market value of their skill is 100 dollars and that at some point in the next year, the value of their skill relative to yourself becomes 200 dollars. The right to buy the asset at the earlier price is worth a premium.  Suppose that the volatility of the asset is 50% and the interest rate is 7%.

The value of the “call” is worth about $3.47 dollars.  The Call is an option contract that gives the holder the right to buy a certain quantity of an underlying security from the writer of the option, at a specified price up to the specified expiration date.

The value of options in a network:

For the above scenario assuming all assets are equal in price of 100 dollars; if someone has 10,000 1st and 2nd level contacts on Linkedin, the value of their implied call option is about 34,700 dollars.  If Linkedin were a stock market, the value of the social contracts that people have with each other is 34K x 40M = 1.3 Trillion Dollars market value for the contracts that people hold and trade.

This is not even the value of the transaction – only the right to have a transaction. The value of the social contract is in the conversations that they hold.  Contracts are a financial instrument that can be traded, combined, diversified, and aggregated for real money.  It’s only a matter of time.

The Ingenesist Project specifies the structure of an innovation economy where a knowledge inventory, a percentile search engine, and an innovation bank will facilitate and aggregate the 5 components of Option Valuation.  Social media applications form the operating system for the market in options.

Money represents human productivity.

Recent headlines declare that 78 billion dollars worth of fuel and productivity are wasted each year by congestion on highways. 1.2 Trillion dollars per year in productivity is lost due to past failures in education. The US spends 7% more of our GDP on health care than the average of other developed nations leaving nearly 1 trillion dollars of unknown ‘productivity value’ in vapor per year. 200 Billion dollars per year is spent on war, whether necessary or not, that has not increased American productivity in an economic sense.

2.5 Trillion Units of Human Productivity

Without even trying hard, 2.5 Trillion Dollars per year in stuff not produced is wasted on activity that does not increase human productivity (stuff produced). Obviously debt is a promise to produce stuff in the future. But we’re wasting stuff now? At some point the logic falls apart but no matter how you look at it, money represents productivity and the only way out of this mess is to innovate at an astonishing rate.

Conversational Capital

In an earlier article, we conjured up a rough tabulation of productivity gains due to social media:

One billion messages are sent on Facebook every day. Suppose that each Facebook conversation has a net value of $1.00 per person. That comes out to 730 Billion dollars per year of human productivity saved.

Twitter is worth a cool 100 Million tweets per day. Let’s assign a net productivity gain of $1.00 per tweet delivered. That is $36 Billion per year in increased human productivity.

Suppose each blog article published increases human productivity by $0.50 each. With over 100M blogs, that is 10 billion dollars per day – or1.8 trillion dollars per year.

The grand total is 2.5 Trillion Dollars worth of conversational currency.

In Search of Waste Economics:

Now, return to the waste side of the balance sheet let’s reflect on the areas of impact that social media has on: transportation, energy, education, health care, and world Peace:

Social media reviews automobile quality and drives social priorities toward green industry. Social media allows people to find work close to home, social media vets energy systems such as wind, solar, nuclear. Social media is driving journalism to value added roles and away from corporate collusion. Social media provides richer and more current content than textbooks. Social media is driving social priorities over Wall Street priorities in health care, energy, politics, industry, and science. You Tube is seeing a 1700% increase in downloads as people set up video cameras all over the world searching and reporting injustice.  Little Brother is watching.

Social media strikes back

In order to predict where social media will strike next all we need to do is look for the waste economy; areas where world governments, institutions, and corporations are inefficient, wasteful, co opted, or corrupt.