1. MEASURING OCE
Unique visitors;
Page views;
Session time;
Click-throughs;
... measure the
Registered members;
community’s
Frequency of postings;
health but say
Read-to-post ratio;
little about the
community’s
value

2. 3
ROI: Community members are worth
more
• Assisted buy
– Forrester: 30% of cummunity members are there to
seek help in buying
• Self-selection of advertising targets
– Forrester People are 27 times more likely to respond
to email they volunteered to receive
• Repeat visits
– Bain: Value of purchases by repeat visits is 57%
higher than that of first visits
4

3. Customers online,
really
Varieties of online customer practice
6

4. Two types of innovations
An innovation is a
USER innovation
An innovation is a
when the developer
MANUFACTURER
expects to benefit by
innovation when the
USING it
developer expects to
benefit by SELLING it.
7
Two types of innovations
Users:
Functionally novel
Manufactures: innovations
Improvements
First nutrition bar
Better tasting
nutrition bar
8

5. First device used in field built by:
Innovations
% User User Mfg.
Affecting
Gas 83% 10 2
Chromatography
Nuclear Magnetic
Resonance 80% 12 3
Spectrometry
Ultraviolet 100% 6 0
Spectrophotometry
Transmission
Electron 72% 44 17
Microscopy
Total 77% 72 22
9

6. IM is a User Innovation
• 1987 MIT Lab for Computer Science
had1000s of workstations and
difficulties diffusing system admin info
rapidly. Developed “Zephyr” instant
message system.
• MIT students begin to use for general
instant messaging.
• Other universities adopted Zephyr-like
programs
First Commercial Product 9 years later
• 1996 Israeli firm Mirabilis put out
comml product ICQ
• 1998 Mirabilis acquired by AOL
Not all users
are created Have needs that
equally foreshadow general
demand in the
marketplace
Expect to obtain high
benefit from a solution
to their needs. (Such
users are more likely to
innovate – “Necessity is
Lead
the mother of
invention!”) users

7. 13
Exercise
New fashion trends start on the street and
the high school playground

9. Exercise
New fashion trends start on the street and
the high school playground
Imagine you are the CEO of Christian
Dior, how would you use online
communities to capture user innovations
in fashion?

10. Varieties of online customer practice
19
Network armies...
…are products of the Internet Age, united not
by geography but by common cause and
technology that lets them communicate
freely and instantly. There's no leader, no
command and control structure, just a
potent ability to mobilize. (...)
Information systems 20 Joao Vieira da Cunha

11. Network army defined
• Affiliation based on ideology, not geography
• Public communications
• Communities and individuals with disparate
agendas, aligning on a common purpose
• “Influencers” vs. formal “leadership” or
organizational infrastructure
• Examples: anti-globalization coalition; terrorist
networks; bloggers
Information systems 21 Joao Vieira da Cunha
“The marching avatars are digital simulacra of
today's exploited masses of neoliberalism:
précaires, precari@s, precari, cognitarie,
contingent knowledge and service workers.
We are a mixed bunch, a heterogeneous multitude
of precarious jobs and lives. Yet we have not spawn
out of fordist assembly chains, but out of dystopian
retail chains and office spaces. “
Information systems 22 Joao Vieira da Cunha

12. Information systems 23 Joao Vieira da Cunha
Varieties of online customer practice
24

13. 25
F/OSS

14. What is Free/OS software?
Free to copy
Free to make derivative works
Royalty-free!
Free to redistribute
Usable by anybody for anything
Viral licensing
Broad rights

15. Information systems 29 Joao Vieira da Cunha
The numbers
SourceForge
The largest home for open Source
Projects
.8 Million Users / 75 Thousand Projects
1 Million Emails a day
Market Cap? Redhat $3 Billion, Yahoo
$40B
UK municipalities are increasingly on
OpenOffice

16. The server market
31
The potential of OpenSource
• No Scarcity of Talent
– The entire planet
• No Scarcity of Ideas
– Ideas aren’t scarce
– What’s scarce is people in the right
context
• No Scarcity of Effort
– to debug, polish, document.
Information systems 32 Joao Vieira da Cunha