In my first blog, I talked about some differences between traditional social interactions and the new-age social networking. I identified three key areas that are affected by this change:
● Non-verbal communications (difference due to the less face-to-face time).
● Number of active interactions (multiple active conversations at a point of time and in larger volumes).
● Establishing a connection with another person (increased numbers and shortened initial introduction time).
The second blog was about different phases of collaborative engagement. I proposed five of them:
● Invitation - to a new opportunity or our interest in it.
● Hesitant Engagement - in which we are a little bit interested, but would like to know more.
● Enthusiastic Engagement - in which we are fully engaged in a collaborative effort.
● Disengagement – which comes after realizing the benefits or lack of confidence in the outcome.
● Closure - which marks an end to our involvement.
Now, let’s look at the types of collaboration and how they are changing with time. In this blog, I will cover the simplest form of human collaboration - buying and selling of goods.
Starting from the mid 90’s, the buying and selling of goods has seen exponential growth. Now, nearly everything is sold over the Internet. There has been a volumetric increase in the number of opportunities that we can get engaged in – all highly visible opportunities. Amazon, Ebay and Alibaba are some good examples of this trend.
Almost every e-commerce and business opportunity site relies on volume to compete with the physical world establishments. This is, of course, unless they are an extension of the physical world establishments. Furthermore, their offers are getting smarter and more targeted. Google and Facebook advertisements are targeted towards our interests and will get even better over time because they will continue improving their tools.
With more choices, our needs are more closely met, but high volume means that we must learn to quickly assess the suitability of a product and quickly make our decision about buying/selling it. This gave birth to our first ‘crowdsourcing’ venture in which many of us participated without even knowing the word ‘crowdsourcing’. Ebay Seller and Buyer ratings or Amazon product ratings and reviews are actually crowd-sourced decision making tools that we use regularly.
I think socially we are becoming more accustomed to the higher volumes, but people from Generation X or earlier complain about the over-marketing and excessive choices available on the Internet as compared to the good ol’ pre-Internet days.
So, how have our collaboration efforts changed over time?
● It is easy and more convenient to find interesting things and it is easier for interesting things to find us.
● We have more choices when we want to buy something and there is more reach to buyers.
● We collectively learn about the products and product teams can learn more about consumer behaviour.
● We can simultaneously engage with multiple sellers and sellers can group buyers through sites such as groupon.com.
● Reviews from fellow buyers/sellers help us make selections and shape our decisions.
I have used examples from a consumer perspective but similar ideas apply to Business-to-Business or B2B dealings.
Just on a side note, I was thinking how much time are we saving by shopping online? J.P Morgan is projecting $963B in online shopping for 2013. If I took $1,000 as an average spent per shopping trip, the world will be saving 963 million trips to shopping malls in 2013. Assuming a 10 mile one-way trip for shopping and an average gas consumption of 30MPG, the world will save 642 million gallons in gas consumption, $2.5B in gas cost and save 5,707,380 metric tons in carbon emissions. This is very interesting - if we also add driving time to this mix, with the assumption of 15 minutes each way, 481 million hours will be saved in one year.
Future possibilities
New Social Media Marketing would allow closer collaboration between the product designers, developers and consumers. We are seeing some of the early attempts like ‘Citroen’ doing the design of their car on Facebook. Quirky.com is another example of crowdsourcing product design ideas.
Social beliefs would play a larger role in product selection with potential new breeds of tools, allowing buyers to consider the production/selling company’s ethics/practices/history in their purchasing decision.
Thinking beyond ten years, 3D printers may end up printing personalized products at our home. Today I saw on Engadget, a chocolate printer or someone even trying to print the whole house!
Can you think of more possibilities in which people will buy or sell in the future?
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