sharing

Every week we bring you the FreshMinds Friday picks – ideas to help you understand the impact of digital technologies on consumers, brands and markets. This week we look at five statistics that show the real potential of the Collaborative Economy and the impact that it can have on many existing brands and markets.

The great promise of the Internet has always been the ability to create truly "frictionless" markets, where buyers and sellers, producers and consumers, are able to do business directly with one another. Fifteen years after Bill Gates first coined the term friction-free capitalism, a new generation of Internet companies are innovating to find ways of reducing friction within the Internet economy.

Not long ago, I found myself talking with several clients about a trend I felt would truly impact their business. Social Sharing. There's no brilliance to identifying this as a meaningful trend, we see social sharing everywhere. In the real world and most recently on networks as people not only share what they are doing, but what they are reading, listening to, and even purchasing.

One of the beauties of David Gauntlett's Making is Connecting is the way it develops a fundamentally simple idea with successive layers of richness and power. The cover captures the kernel of the book: the core thesis that making (with hands and brain, resourcefully) is connecting (in terms of relationships, meaning, learning); the context that extends from scissors and thread to YouTube; and the ethos of the personal, handmade artefact captured in the stylish smudge that subverts the sleek sans-serif typeface.

As much as the car chieftains of Detroit try to fight it, America is slowly but surely turning away from the concept of car ownership. Instead, hundreds of thousands of Americans are choosing to share their cars by the hour and by the day - especially in densely-packed urban areas, where the total cost of car ownership is incredibly high.

Fascinating study here from Yahoo Labs that analysed 'Like' counts for 45 of the world's most popular news sites over the period of three months. It's worth taking a look at the site, but the findings showed just how well The New York Times is performing in terms of social engagement with no less than 2.3 million Likes per month (which, if you take the average Facebook friend count to be 130, gives an impressive incremental potential reach). Good to see The Guardian also performing well.

I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore. If you are a regular dim bulber, you know what I'm going to say. My apologies, in advance, but this content thing has gotten waaaaaay out of hand. I don't blame the proponents of social theory. They're good salespeople, and they seem to believe what they're pitching; the fact that they're completely clueless isn't my beef. I say shame on marketers for being so gullible and lost for believing the BS.

I'm late to the party on Quora (hey, it's not when you use it but how well you use it). I'll do some more in-depth analysis later, but after a few days of active use I see tons of potential. Here's why:

I came across a recent article “Making Social Business Strategy Work” posted on AMA and I forgot who wrote it because I didn’t want to know. The title is bad enough but it managed to attract me to spend three minutes reading the article. The article was written by a ‘consultant’ obviously and advocates that formulating a sound social business strategy requires understanding the key factors driving current market opportunity which includes the following:

Here's my talk from the Jay Chait Award Ceremony. Enjoy.