Employing Your Customers for Fun and Profit

Who am I? http://twitter.com/karllong http://experiencecurve.com http://tcritic.com Social Media/Web Strategist Product Manager at Nokia MBA in Design Management

Employing your customers for fun and profit

Modern Business Is A Young Discipline

1900’s 1930’s $ 1940’s 1950’s 2000’s 100,000+ products in one store Mass Market Really Takes off Here

Companies Are Still Packaging and Delivering Products

How Companies Think About Consumers

Consumer Theory: A gullet whose only purpose in life is to gulp products and crap cash Proudly stolen from the Cluetrain Manifesto

Consumer Theory: Homo Economicus Proudly stolen from Adaptive Path: Subject To Change

Task Oriented, Productive, Efficient Proudly stolen from Adaptive Path: Subject To Change

Consumer Theory: Sheep Proudly stolen from Adaptive Path: Subject To Change

Companies tend to focus on one motivation, to purchase

What looked homogeneous at a distance is group of unique individuals

Creative

Empowered

Connected

Unique

Who is the new consumer? Via. Trendwatching.com

Be very quiet, I’m hunting consumers

We’ll make it viral Add some web 2.0

Isn’t this just an internet thing?

Changing the role of consumers and changing business models: IKEA

Employing your customers

Companies as network of value creating activities “ What is Strategy” (Porter, 1996), Harvard Business Review

Hidden Value X 2.3 Million Subscribers = 345 Million Movie Ratings June 2005, when Walmart gave up

Beyond Reviews, Examples of Real Co-Creation

Threadless $6.5 Million by ‘06 11 Employees 2000 for $500 Figures courtesy of Business Week

Customers do: Research Product Development Design Portolio Management Market Sizing Merchandising Marketing Advertising Threadless does: Prints T-Shirts Business Development/Partnerships Runs ecommerce infrastructure Runs community infrastructure

Thx http://uservoice.com

How do you employ your customers?

30 Open Positions Per Year 36,000 Resumes From podcast interview with of John Winsor

Hierarchy of Customer Interaction

Culture: “The Way We Do Things”

http://www.pennyarcademerch.com/pat070381.html

Make it easy to join in and easy to get better

Reward the right behaviors

Recognize top performers

Allow exchanges (social interactions)

Provide rich feedback

Making it happen

Make it easy to join in

Reward the right behaviors

Recognize top performers

Enable structured interactions “exchanges”

Provide rich feedback

Experiment Fail Learn

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPAO-lZ4_hU

Co-opting Customer Competence by C.K. Prahalad and Venkatram Ramaswamy 2000 The Future of Competition: Co-Creating Unique Value With Customers By C. K. Prahalad, Venkat Ramaswamy 2004 The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End Of Business As Usual by Levine, Locke, Searls & Weinberger 1999 Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations By Clay Shirky 2008 http://experiencecurve.com - Social Media & Marketing Strategy http://tcritic.com - The Daily T-Shirt Blog You can find me here: http://twitter.com/karllong [email_address] Essays on Culture and Lolcats http://www.dashes.com/anil/2007/04/cats-can-has-gr.html - I can haz grammer by Anil Dash http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/idblog/2008/03/12/would-it-be-so-bad-if-we-created-our-own-culture/ SPARK: Be More Innovative Through Co-Creation By John Winsor 2005