Social Media Trends
Porous Boundaries and Leverage
Adrian Scott, Ph.D.
www.adrianscott.com
Founder/CEO, Ryze

Personal Background
 Founding investor, Napster (peer-to-peer)
 Pioneered Social Networking in 2001 –
Ryze
Major Influence on Friendster
Precursor to Myspace, Facebook
 Currently: New Social Media Project

3 Important Words
 Systems
 Leverage
 Scalability

Social Media
 Anything that can have a spam problem
(Clay Shirky)

Business Implications &
Opportunities
 Porous Boundaries
 Leverage Greater Resources

Traditional Strategy Model
 Porter's Five Forces
Supplier
Customer
Substitutes
Competitors
Barrier to Entry

Missing Force
 Complementors

Each business interaction as an
API
 Application Programming Interface
 Customers, Suppliers, Complementors, …
 “Employees” / Workers

Leveraging Resources
 Facebook API
 OpenSocial API
 Twitter API
 Leveraging existing 'social networks'

Crowdsourcing
 Competitions
 Talent 'auditions' / recruitment
 Amazon mechanical turk, mturk.com
 On-demand labor, unbundling the labor
contract, increasing freedom
 Labor process as part of the service /
experience

Cloud Computing
 Leverage for accelerated development
 Google App Engine
 Amazon Web Services

Social Media
 Social Consequences of Actions

Power-Law Distribution
 The misleading average
 Median is below the mean
 Deployment of resources

Business requirements evolve
 Sociological & psychological capabilities

Metrics & Data analysis
 Analytics
 A/B Testing
 Personalization
 Investment Decisions
 Iteration (Learning) Capability

Double-Exponential Tech
 Double-Accelerating Exponential
Development of Technology

For Additional Exploration
 Raymond Kurzweil
 Clayton Christensen
 Made to Stick
 Four Steps to the Epiphany
 Power-law distributions (Scale-free)
 My contact info: www.adrianscott.com
 Ryze: www.ryze.com