Micro Persuasion

An Experiment in Lifesourcing

What if you could tap into your social net (or even strangers) and ditch time intensive information tasks that you have to do in favor of the higher value stuff that you're best at? After an experiment in "lifesourcing" some work to India, I believe such a scenario might become common in the business world or even more widely - one day. Here's my story and where I think this could lead.

I first heard about lifesourcing - e.g. personal outsourcing - last summer when I read Tim Ferriss' runaway bestseller, The Four Hour Workweek. His mantra is to free yourself up to do the stuff you and only you are best at. Seth Godin covers a similar theme in The Dip.

Though it's very early, my gut says that it's conceivable that as people cope with the Attention Crash, they will zero in on their core competencies and seek to offload the rest in order to become more productive and remain competitive in the workplace. There are several forces at work here: the massive and independent-thinking Gen Y workforce, big time disruptions in IT, the growing ubiquity of social networking and peer-to-peer platforms and the rise of a giant talent pool in Chindia.

Back when I read Tim's book, I didn't see an immediate fit for lifesourcing in my day-to-day as an executive at Edelman. In fact, given that so much of what I deal with is confidential client information, it's darn near impossible.

Still, I remained extremely intrigued to run a pilot. It seems to bridge to a growing "digital nomadism" movement. For more, check out what my former colleague Mike Elgan and folks like Lea Woodward and Skellie are writing about.

My blog seemed like a natural place to dabble in lifesourcing since since pretty much everything I do here eventually enters the public domain. So, on Tim's recommendation, I posted a job on Elance. I searched for someone who could take my raw reader survey data and convert it into percentages and nice charts. This was a rather trivial assignment. However, for an Excel-challenged dude like me it was a major timesaver.

Even though the job was small, I was stunned when dozens of bids flowed in within the first few hours. The bidders seemed extremely aggressive and hungry for the job. After 24 hours of fervent bidding, I selected Sri from India based on his feedback rating, correspondence, experience and price. I also selected him because I was eager test a project with someone based in India.

After some back and forth and a bit of clarification in what I was looking for, Sri got to work. The amazing thing is that almost all of his emails came during my workday, not his. Sri turned around the job quickly and professionally and it cost me all of $50 - the Elance minimum. (I will share the charts in a subsequent post.)

Granted, this was a very simple assignment that probably anyone (but me) can do in an hour or two. Still, I was impressed. And it gets me thinking about where this might go when you combine lifesourcing and social networking - especially if the costs come down.

Social networking and online real-time communication/collaboration tools are a way of life for many Gen Yers. They already use these systems to get stuff done both inside and outside the enterprise.

Over the next five years I believe that lifesourcing will become a core part of every social network, be it b2b or b2c. Like IM or corporate blogging, social lifesourcing will start as a bottom-up movement as workers tap into the Net to get work done in the most efficient way possible, no matter where these resources may be. A groundswell may build as word spreads and workers try hard to compete with those who are farming out work elsewhere.

Still, there are big pitfalls. It's a guarantee that companies will try to put the kibosh on such activities as their information seeps beyond their virtual walls. This is already happening on social networks. Many employees have water cooler groups on Facebook. Others are dabbling in using LinkedIn to get questions answered.

It's conceivable that these interactions will migrate from simple collaboration to peer-to-peer transactions over the next few years. The implications here - if this happens en masse - are huge. People will focus on their core competencies. This in theory will make everyone more productive and prosperous. However, it remains to be seen if this will become a mass trend given all the inherent risk.

Web 2.0's Impact: The Tourism Industry

Over the next several weeks I am going to start posting about the global medium to long-term impact Web 2.0 will have on different industry sectors. First up: travel and tourism.

According to the the Travel Industry Association, tourism generates $1.3 trillion in economic activity. And that's just in the US, folks. They say if one dollar bill equaled a second of time, then $1.3 trillion would equal over 41,000 years. That's a lot of iron. Get ready to get your share.

Before we were all connected to the broadband Internet, it was hard to get good information about a particular destination. In 1980 when I was 10 years old my parents took my brother and I on a six week trip to all the National Parks. I wrote the AAA and National Park Service by mail and waited for them anxiously to send us all the brochures and maps. Then I studied them until I knew everything about places like Bryce Canyon, Arches National Park, Crazy Horse and Mesa Verde. Until very recently most of us turned to travel agents, the Sunday newspaper and travel mags to guide us. They were our sherpas.

Flash forward to today. Beginning in the early to mid 1990s it became very easy to research destinations. Hop on to Expedia, Yahoo Travel or Travelocity and there's gobs of information to help you compare prices and make an informed decision. That's how most of us still go about planning for a trip today. Our habits are locked...or are they.

In the Web 2.0 era, the power is shifting. The authority figure is no longer the travel agent or even the media. It's us. We're empowered with technology and we're using it to catalog every place on earth using video, photos and text. We are telling it like it is and sharing it globally. Consider the following examples.

• Wikimapia: Hey, what's a wiki doing in my Google map? That's the big idea behind this killer site. They layer a Wikipedia-like service on top of a Google Map allowing everyone to label every single place on earth. In just a few months, there have been more than two million places annotated, including some places in those national parks I adore. You can even view these annotations as a layer in Google Earth.

• Flickr: One of the most popular photo sharing sites is making it easy for us to annotate every place on Earth with photos. They allow people to geotag (definition) their photos so they can show us where the shot was taken. Soon digital cameras equipped with GPS and wireless technology will do the work for us.
• Yahoo Trip Planner: Who needs a travel agent when there's 43,000 people eager to help us. That's how many full itineraries have been created on the popular site. Simply plug in a destination and there's someone who has likely created a Triptik of their vacation, which you can easily then replicate using Yahoo's tools.

Right now, while all of this information is invaluable for travelers, it's basically fun and games. I started this post talking about money and I plan to finish it that way. While Web 2.0 is wonderful for transparency and knowledge sharing, when it comes to the impact on the tourism the final chapter has not yet been written. It's all about the Benjamins.

In the very near future these hubs will enable people to monetize their wonderful contributions to our collective knowledge about destinations, hotels, flights and more. Pennies to a site like Yahoo Travel is dollars to the individual who is the highest ranked authority on the Yahoo Trip Planner site or Yahoo Answers. This sort of revenue sharing will turn everyone into a real travel agent.

Here's a future scenario...

Maryclaire730 has put together a terrific itinerary on the Yahoo Trip Planner of my home town, New York City. She highlights a three-day junket that covers the basics like the Waldorf Astoria hotel, a Broadway show as well as places off the beaten path, like Dylan's Candy Bar, which is deep in the bowels of Bloomingdales. (Who knew?) The trip plan has been rated positively by Yahoo users and there are lots of rich photos to boot. However, maryclaire730 hasn't made a dime on this.

Now imagine that Yahoo linked you back to their main travel site. If you wanted to, you could copy maryclare730's entire trip. You can book the same flights, stay in the same hotel for the same number of days, reserve the same restaurants and even get a coupon for Dylan's Candy Bar. The revenue is shared between Yahoo, the specific attractions/airlines/hotels and, yes, maryclare730. She gets a few bucks every time you link over and book all or part of her itinerary.

That is what Web 2.0 will do for travel and tourism.

Edgeio Used to Steal Content and Spam

Looks like some nefarious dudes or dudettes are using the edgeio classified ad sites to steal content and then trackback spam. So far two of my posts have been lifted and turned into classified listings. In each case a trackback was sent to the original post. It's unclear if this is widespread or just an isolated incident.

TechCrunch impresario Michael Arrington is an Edgeio co-founder and I am sure he will get to the bottom of this. Still, it shows that the spammers are getting more aggressive and are branching out beyond setting up spam blogs. Comment spam has been showing up lately in my Flickr account as well.

Tags: Edgeio, Flickr, Spam

Key Second Life Statistics

BusinessWeek's Inside Innovation quarterly has a good package on Corporate America entering Second Life virtual world: main story, tips for companies,  branded metaverse destinations, developers other virtual worlds worth exploring. The most important part, however, are these statistics - some of which come directly from Linden Labs. What's notable?

• Second Life citizenship grew 995% just this year.
• Commerce, a more important statistic, rose to $9M, up 287% this year
• The male/female split is close to even -57 to 43%
• Finally, more than 55% of citizens hail from outside the US.

The Future of the Newspaper is as a 2.0 Platform

Michael Kinsley, writing in Time magazine, asks the big (and loaded) question: "Do Newspapers Have a Future?" Kinsley notes that newspapers have embraced blogging as one solution, but overall his column raises more questions than it even attempts to answer.

Blogging has been wonderful for newspapers. It unshackles reporters from just delivering facts. They can now show who they are as people through the expression of opinions. However, blogging is the first in a series of dominoes that have to fall for the newspaper to thrive in a world where the reader rules - and tells everyone so.

For newspapers to survive, they need to turn themselves into an online and offline platform for local readers. I don't mean a platform for contributing to the reporting process. They're doing that already (and nicely). What I am saying is that local newspapers need to use their brands and their big web sites to help local readers profit emotionally and monetarily by: selling goods peer-to-peer, expressing themselves, developing new kinds of technologies, connecting through online and offline local social networking and more. Think Google or Yahoo, not USA Today.

In short, they need to become destinations where almost all value is created by the "readers," not by the publisher or journalists. This means tearing pages right out of the Wikipedia/Second Life playbook. In both of these communities, the greatest value is created by the crowd, not the online destination itself. The community is merely the operating system that enables value creation. Newspapers need to do the same - both online and off.

Will that happen? Time will tell. But early signs are here today. The Washington Post Blogroll program is in that spirit. Now we need to see more of it - and fast.

'MySpace Effect' Hits eBay Sellers' Bottom Line

Auctionbytes has the first in a two-part report that a group of enterprising eBay sellers have created MySpace pages for their auction businesses. They're seeing results in increased traffic, search optimization and sales. (MySpace is an Edelman client.)

Tags: myspace, ebay

The 2006 Halftime Report

With half of 2006 behind us and think week well underway, I thought this would be a good time to check in on each of the trends I wrote about last year and to assign each a progress report.

Trend I: Comment Search (Grade: B-)
In December I complained that every single blog search engine is missing out on the next great opportunity - comment search. The three big existing blog search contenders - Blogpulse, T'Rati and Google - and newcomers like Sphere and Ask continue to pile on the features for searching blogs, but still lack any capability to mine blog comments.

The one bright spot is coComment, which launched in February. Although it requires work on the commenter's part to enroll, I like coComment. They have been innovating since their launch with multi-language capabilities, social networking features and more. Plus, they know comment search is their ball to grab. I would bet on coComment to add search to at least all of the comments it is aggregating by year's end.

Trend II: Social Commerce (Grade: A-)
Social commerce is basically utilizing the power of many to help us find and buy products and services. It involves the creation of new collaboration technologies that shrink the research and purchasing cycle.

Since the beginning of the year we have seen lots of activity in this category. For example, there's Edgeio, which organizes listings published on RSS enabled websites like blogs and makes them searchable. BloggerKit helps bloggers insert contextually relevant products from Amazon. While, Pepperjam can be used to find, buy and blog about products and services. Of course, let's not forget Shopwiki, Google Base + Google Checkout and eBay's blogs. Later this year I would expect Yahoo to answer by embedding commerce inside Yahoo Answers.

Trend III: RSS Inside (Grade: F)
Here I predicted that this year feed reading would become even easier than it is now, because RSS will be bolted inside all kinds of connected devices and that all kinds of new information will find its way into feeds, not just news and blogs. I also hoped that RSS - as a popular term - would actually begin to fade.

We're basically nowhere here. Yes, there are lots of new uses for RSS. However, getting started with feeds is still just as hard today as it was at year-end 2005.

Trend IV: The Talent Crunch (Grade: A)
Back in December I wrote: "In 2006 blogs will play a bigger role in how companies find and retain key talent. Smaller companies that might normally have a tough time positioning themselves as cutting edge places to work will use transparency to compete for top talent. At the same time, large company bloggers who establish a foothold as subject matter experts will find themselves increasingly wooed. Finally, a small group of companies will turn their talent loose in the blogopshere to keep them motivated and engaged... and visible."

Well, Scoble went to Podtech, I went to Edelman, and Om was set free. Case closed.

Trend V: Crash 2.0 (Grade: C+)
According to JupiterResearch, online display and search advertising spending will grow at an average annual rate of 10% between 2005 and 2010. Also, there is a huge disconnect between the money outlaid for online advertising and time spent online. This, I wrote last year, spells trouble for startups hoping to capitalize on online advertising. There won't be enough to go around.

If you measure this prediction by the number of startups that have shut down this year, I have been wrong. There have been only two notable failures: Fold and PubSub. However, I still contend that there is far more ad inventory on Web 2.00 sites than there are advertisers willing to buy it up. Michael Arrington and I disagreed on this at Gnomedex.

Trend VI: Features Creep (Grade: C+)
Last year I expressed concern that the breakout Web 2.0 companies of 2005 will slow down in innovating ever so slightly as they make sure they have the infrastructure in place to grow. So far, I think this was mostly wrong. While Bloglines is virtually the same app it was a year ago, there's still a lot of innovation to go round.

Trend VII: The Empire Strikes Back (Grade A-)
Finally, I wrote that big corporations will strike back in a big way in an effort to make sure they don't lose the online game to the small fries. I definitely think this is happening. Look at the new Netscape.com or NBC and YouTube tying up. The big companies know that they need to partner with startups or ape some of their best practices if they want to compete.

Technorati Tags: 2006 Trends

Search, Buy Then Blog

Pepperjam.com is a new comparative shopping site with a twist. You can use it to search for products and compare prices across 2400 different sites, but then they give you the option to blog about your purchase. This is a good start, but I would like to see it go further in embracing social commerce. For example, a comparative shopping site should have links to blogs that are already talking about the products you're searching for.

BloggerKit Advances Social Commerce

BloggerKit is a new free service that bloggers can use to insert contextually relevant products from Amazon by adding special tags to their posts. Once you insert the code into your blog, you add some tags at the end and BloggerKit will pull up relevant results from Amazon.com's catalogue. If you're a member of the e-commerce site's affiliate program you earn a return when readers buy products. Very clever idea and simple too.