The Mandate of Kevin
December 12 2008 / by Alvis Brigis
Category: Social Media Year: General Rating: 9 Hot
The quick rise of the prosumer is exerting great force on the social networks and platforms that depend on these users. As prosumers are empowered and generate more value their options broaden, allowing them to control more of their web and market environment through their participation.
The output power of individuals is increasing rapidly largely due to evolving web, information and other technologies. At the same time it's getting much easier to capture and generate digital content that can then return value through the web.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg observes that of late people are sharing roughly 2x more digital data about themselves every year. With better, cheaper video, audio, graphics, machinima, and search capabilities arriving regularly, this new content is steadily growing richer.
As the web market evolves, more value is returned to users through better ad pairing/serving, payment through links, personally relevant structure (i.e. social networks) and access to other data. Ultimately, prosumers (consumers that create content) gravitate toward services that give them the most and best rewards for their time and attention spent.
For example, some people contribute content to Facebook because they receive in turn access to the content generated by their web of friends. Others, especially artists and musicians, choose MySpace because it is easier to monetize their creative output there. And of course there are also those who have enough time to frequent both.
As these networks, and others including the likes of Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Wikipedia, etc, compete for user-share they are forced to offer increasingly more value to their constituent prosumers. Just as Google gained large market share for its Gmail product by offering significantly more free storage than competitors Yahoo, Hotmail and AOL, new and established companies alike must constantly better their offerings and decrease the costs of use if they are to retain or capture participants.
This is a dynamic and useful forecasting trend that I like to call The Mandate of Kevin.
Like its namesake, the Chinese Mandate of Heaven, a philosophy that permitted revolt by citizens in the event of obviously unfair rule, the Mandate of Kevin is the right-to-exist extended to the proprietors of a given social media platform by its users. The fundamental difference is that nowadays all our Kevins can choose to secede from prosumer networks with their feet (which, incidentally, can also result in a change of leadership at the impacted corporation).
With the digital online environment becoming more fluid, web prosumer networks are forced to better their value:cost offerings or pay the price. For instance, MySpace lost many users to Facebook due to design. Microsoft failed to grab millions of online word processing users by failing to create web versions of its Office platform before Google could make a huge dent through its Docs offering (which adds significant value to the Gmail experience). Twitter opened the door to competitors like Yammer by failing to add features for groups in a timely manner.
It's interesting to note how quickly these battles are being fought. The aforementioned all took place over the past few years. In most cases, the losing companies did not even realize they were vulnerable to attack until it was already too late.
Now, as it gets easier to launch serious web applications, especially niche services and apps built atop free or low-cost software, user-based businesses must get even more nimble if they are to stay ahead the value development curve. Sure, the massive established networks have the benefit of existing network effects and adopter momentum, but they too are vulnerable to the growing mass of efficient new prosumer federations, each of which can capture large amounts of attention from small groups of people.
In response, these larger networks are working around the clock to reach out to these new structures by building access bridges that deliver added value and users in exchange for a % of user hits. Right now, Google and Facebook are battling hard to keep their users happy by allowing them to login to third party sites and services via their competing Friend Connect and Connect products. Thus, they are adding value to their respective prosumer experiences by growing out the network and diluting some of their sovereignty.
Considering the strong near-term growth expected in domains like connectivity, semantic search, data portability, encryption, computing, interface, video broadcasting, video editing and virtual worlds (just to name a few), we should expect the power to continue shifting over to the Kevins who can increasingly output more/better directly or indirectly monetizable content. This means that more players, including bottom-up small-fries, can compete in the space, which serves to accelerate the pace of innovation.
On the flip side of the coin, new innovations and business structures also permit the Kevins of the world to more effectively participate in multiple prosumer networks through merged or mashed experiences, automatic content dispersal and third-party assistance. (Hence the race to create the ultimate social network hub, which everyone wants to dominate.)
In summary, the likely near-term possibilities for prosumer networks include:
- Steady increase in value offered to prosumers ($, traffic, reputation, association networks, access to data)
- Ongoing growth of niche prosumer networks (i.e. Future Blogger)
- Ongoing growth of total # of prosumers
- Increasing compatibility of prosumer networks, new variations of prosumer structures
- Even faster application development for prosumer platforms
- More strategic cooperation among compatible prosumer platforms
- Increasing prosumer compatibility for old media platforms (digital friendliness)
- Increasing quantification of individual and group behavior through analysis of prosumer data trails
- More accurate models of information diffusion and innovation
- The beginnings of bottom-up wealth redistribution?
As the supporting infrastructure evolves and the prosumer monetizes more personally generated content we can expect more power to flow to the Kevins. Fortunately for all existing network proprietors this also results in a bigger pie and smarter web/information market. Fundamentally, this empowerment of the prosumer also influences the efficiency of the broader market. As everyone becomes their own broadcast media station the world also gets smarter.
Duncan Riley was right. We are going to hear the term "prosumer" far more frequently.
Comment Thread (1 Response)
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Please Alvis, tell me that near-term possibility #10 is only an example of “deadline fever”; you’re not really trying to intimate that some Kennedy* must fall in order to free up the capital to permit yet another Kevin, are you? Wouldn’t a more accurate wording be: “The beginnings of yet-another bottom-up wealth creation event?”
You’ve obviously done considerable research into this effect; an examination of the relationship between the rate of technology development (the whole Singularity/Moore’s Law thing) and the growth of wealth opportunity from it’s general adoption (if so, how; if not, why not) would make an interesting follow-up, I suggest. How capable are unenhanced humans of taking advantage of such opportunities, and for how much longer? How might the existence of such opportunities impact the enhancement/technology development process as well as the debate regarding the desirability of its continuation?
Nice one.
*My intent was to suggest the individual nature inherent to the “finite pie” school of economic delusion; feel free to substitute Schwarzenegger or some other wealthy person if the provided example offends your sensibilities.
Posted by: Will December 12, 2008
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