Community rules all

December 8th, 2005

Caught this piece in the Guardian Technology section today.

With the public in charge, reality rules

and its all about gaming and communities.

Aleks Krotoski writes:

A few months ago, I was dumbstruck when a deity in the UK games business suggested that the future of computer gaming was community, not content.
The static content that arrives in a packaged game is becoming pass?. Instead, community and community-created content are the keys to courting and keeping players, as games technology becomes a testbed for self-expression.
Community is an essential aspect in the race for the throne for the next generation of home consoles. The Xbox 360 is leagues ahead, and not just because it launched first; it has incorporated community into its hardware.

Ebay, SMS, instant messaging and Skype in telecoms, music file sharing, Wikipedia and OhMyNews (the Korean newspaper produced by 26,000 citizen reporters), online role playing games, RSS feeds, myspace.com are all examples of how enabling or capturing peer-to-peer information flows can transform business models.

And this is only the tip of the iceberg. As Kevin Kelly argued in Wired Magazine , Peer-to-peer flows of information and communications, unleash involvement and interactivity at levels once thought unfashionable or impossible. It transforms reading into navigating and enlarges small actions into powerful forces. We have gone from spectator art to full blown participatory democracy.

Jeff Jarvis argues why has Rupert Murdoch bought myspace.com – Because it is about relationships, not about content and not about controlled distribution

And Hubert Burda the CEO of a German Media conglomerate says

We now concentrate on using social software to build closer relations with the communities of readers around our magazines. News has now become a commodity, thanks to the Internet, so we must differentiate ourselves in other ways. Content alone can no longer win. You must build and interact with audiences.

We have said it in our book, we have said it on the blog. But here goes again

Everything you thought you knew about business, marketing and communications you can forget. What we are witnessing is nothing short of the beginnings a cultural revolution that within 10 years will have replaced the fixed orthodoxies of government, business and marketing forever.

Communities will have become the primary medium by which government, businesses and their brands will successfully engage with their customers/stakeholders/voters.

And, that those organisations that ignore the newly empowered and connected customer/voter/stakeholder will simply struggle to survive.

This is the unsung, un-remarked media revolution. That the great explosion is in peer-to-peer flows of communication – something many organisations up until now has overlooked.

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