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Individualization= Collaboration

As we were saying, people are now well-versed in living the individualized life. But in terms of what is happening online, the interesting part is how we go about individualization these days. It seems that while individualization - as a way of life- has matured, it has done so almost to the point of transforming itself as a concept. Today, ironically, it seems the most efficient way of making sure one’s individual needs are met is to collaborate with others!

Building online communities to meet individual needs

We wanted to know more about the reasoning behind why people contribute online and maintain online communities. Some interesting comments have been made on the blog about people contributing online purely to boost their personal ego and seek online fame. While it did emerge from our ethnography sessions that a sense of personal gratification was gained from sharing one’s personal information and opinion, the motivation seemed to go much further than a simple case of ego-boost.

In a world where we are so accustomed to being bombarded by information and manipulated by spin doctors, the uploaders are seeking to inform themselves and others in order to reduce the risk of bad decision-making that might negatively impact on their lives. The best way of ensuring you are one step ahead of the rest is to have the maximum and widest range of knowledge possible at your fingertips so that you can learn from other people’s mistakes and in turn improve the existing data for future reference. This is why uploaders consult more sources of information on average. In short, knowledge collaboration in communities optimizes efficiency; it is best survival practice and is of equal benefit to the individual and the community.

But while it is true that for a community to remain on top of things all members need to feed in, some people seem to be feeding more than others. When profiling uploaders and their motivations, we found that uploaders hold a special social function. They are undoubtedly social leaders and were proven to possess more opinion leadership on average, but they were also strikingly community-minded as they are members of more online AND offline communities, and are more driven by personal values.

We might conclude that while uploaders evidently do what they do out of personal interest, in this day and age personal and community interest seem to be fused. In this sense, today’s context means that the more community-minded a social leader is, the more effective they will be.

The Net Generation of Uploaders

Don Tapscott (author of Wikinomics and Growing Up Digital) has spent millions of pounds studying the Net Generation, digital natives under the age of 25, and as Don observes: “they’re different”.  They are less motivated by money and more motivated by interest and having fun. They are very prosocial and social media is second nature to them.

The incidence levels of Uploaders for this demographic was very high which indicates that in the not too distance future, the amount of Uploaders will be dramatically higher than 8%. If Uploaders are relying more and more on information from other people and the ‘wisdom of crowds’ to inform their decisions about brands, products and services, then we could be seeing a fundamental change in consumption habits within years.

The rise of the Net Generation means that understanding how to talk with Uploaders maybe interesting today, but essential for tomorrow.

Who's informing who? Let's have a conversation...

Back in '99, The Cluetrain Manifesto said that markets were nothing more than conversations and message-based marketing was the ''Anti-conversation". In light of this it insisted that companies should converse directly with 'we'- the people, if they wanted to communicate.

Since then the popularity of social media and networking sites like MySpace and Facebook has indeed mushroomed exponentially. Rapidly, we are seeing these media overshadow the 'old' media, as consumers turn to each other for the content-creation and conversation that these applications allow. In fact, this year saw the first ever user-generated marketing awards!

So what does this mean for us?

It used to be our job to inform people about new brands, products and services, but now people are increasingly turning to user-generated content and reviews to inform their purchasing decisions and opinions. Interestingly though, our research showed that it is only 8% of the UK online population that are uploading the content that the others consume, exchange and talk about.

We agree with the precept that markets are conversations, but what are people basing their conversations on? We decided to dig a little deeper and find out more about these informers of the people... what drives them to do what they do and what potential influence do they have both online and offline?

We have summarised an initial interpretation of our findings (see pdf) and are keen to kick off a conversation around these ideas...