The Ingenesist Project

The Next Economic Paradigm

Tag: social priorities

The True Value Calculation

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On September 1, 2010

In General Information

In case anyone is wondering if Social media can drive Social Priorities  against Wall Street Priorities, they need not look any further than the cover of the New York Times. Here is a story from the August 31st edition about banks that step away from no-brainer money making business venture because of the social risks to their reputations and therefore, their bottom line.

It is obvious that new sources of energy will be hugely lucrative in the future – except when blowing up pristine Appalachian mountain tops or releasing vast CO2 emissions cracking oil from Canadian sands – both perfectly legal enterprises.

In the past, the struggle between those in favor and those opposed to, say, a coal extraction project played out largely in private and was heavily biased toward those with the deepest pockets. In the past, the developers had an advantage of vast money reserves to wage legal battles, political wrangling, and public relations campaigns against the lowly community action members. Now, this fountain of money may dry up in the future if banks step away, politicians become wary, and the public becomes increasingly informed of the true value of all alternatives.

“We’re taking a much closer look at a much broader variety of issues, not all of which are captured under state and local laws,” said Stephanie Rico, a spokeswoman for the environmental affairs group at Wells Fargo.

These dynamics are converging on something called a “True Value” Calculation. The True Value Calculation is the expanded ROI of a business venture which includes the positive and negative impacts on a much wider body of stakeholders in the sum total of viability. In the very near future, we may find that the True Value Calculation will become the rational basis of our democracy as social media aspires to the role of social vetting mechanism and politicians become increasingly irrelevant to anyone but each other.

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Fallout: FTC and Blogger Payola

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On December 11, 2009

In General Information

 

The FTC recently issued guidelines for payola to bloggers.  The impact and opinions are now emerging over what this means for social media. As with any game played on a new field, rules need to apply.  The questions emerge regarding who the rules hurt, who they help, and how the game will develop in the future due to those rules.

Straight from the horse’s mouth:

The revised Guides also add new examples to illustrate the long standing principle that “material connections” (sometimes payments or free products) between advertisers and endorsers – connections that consumers would not expect – must be disclosed. These examples address what constitutes an endorsement when the message is conveyed by bloggers or other “word-of-mouth” marketers.

Extrapolate into the future:

Read More

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Social Isolation Funnel

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On November 13, 2009

In General Information

You don’t stand a chance.

Social Influence Marketing (SIM) is becoming more sophisticated at finding you in your social space than you are in avoiding Social Influence Marketing (Advertising).   A new set of theories and systems have been deployed on how to engage you in conversation, grab your response data, funnel you into the pitch, induce credit card labor, and draw out your social broadcast.  Guess what, your social media sites are helping them….

Flirting with the enemy

The greatest problem that social media created for advertisers was to disperse the crowd from the once treasured “captive audience” of the radio/TV days to millions of individual affinity outlets.  Blasting the message home is no longer a function of Ad spend.    However, marketers are smart and social media sites are corporations too – now these forces are converging with unimaginable voracity.

They have you figured out.

In a quest for monetization, popular sites now provide “data services” to the brands. Such data empowers, once again, the advertiser over the viewer.  Why not provide “data service” to the users about what the brands pay for and what information they are mining about users?  If Brands are not comfortable with disclosing such information – should we be comfortable about teaching our “human nature” to them?

As social sites increasingly develop stickiness applications to retain the audience, new innovations are directed to that old business TV/Radio model rather than reinforcing the reason why social media emerged in the first place.    At some point, it becomes the best interest of the social site to meet the Wall Street expectation of “tangible output” over the user expectation of increased productivity. In other words, keep people glued to the LCD and don’t empower them to enter their communities to innovate social change.

Once users lose the ability to reject a brand message, we’re all right back where we started from.

People need to meet each other in real life to do real things. The best way to retain the original power of social media is to disperse once again.  Micro-social networks reflecting communities of interest need to form in proximity to each member.  Each community of interest must combine with other highly local social networks to share ideas, create local innovation, and enforce social priorities.

Hide your data in your own data:

Each time a different affinity group meets with another affinity group, the demographic data changes – it becomes renewed, refreshed and remains in the possession of the community.  This is where the value is, people can own it of they knew it’s theirs – and Brands can access far more value by supporting communities rather than by isolating communities.

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1,000,000 More Become Invisible, Powerless, and Marginalized

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On October 8, 2009

In General Information

The September Job Numbers are out and the trends are disturbing.  Millions upon millions of Americans are now wondering how they are going to safeguard the health and welfare of their families and property.  As these people lose their “money” they become increasingly invisible, powerless, and marginalized – except for one single, solitary, beacon of earthly influence.  Social Media.

Now, more than ever, we need to implement an alternate economy with an alternate currency.  I am not pitching some “anti-dollar-therefore-anti-American” platform, I am talking about what the hell will millions of unemployed people and their families do if they don’t have a functional currency they can trade for basic needs and services.

These same people have tons of practical experience, diverse knowledge, and worthy intellect – but no money?  It makes absolutely no sense that “productivity” should become so divorced from the value of a solitary currency.

We must come to the immediate conclusion that social media can be a fabric that binds the American economy.  If done correctly, Social Media can become the basis of an economy that rewards social priorities over Wall Street Priorities.  But ONLY if done correctly.

While the institutions around us falter, social media will increasingly duplicate – for all practical purposes – the functions of these institutions in our society.  As this transition takes place, we must lead social media in specific and intentional directions.  This cannot be a “traditional” market driven process – the market is what we’re trying to correct.  This cannot be a random process or else it will become reactionary and feed on itself.  Instead, Social Media needs to be organized in a manner that allows information, knowledge, and innovation – the basis of human productivity – to trade like a financial instrument.

What if I told you that it would be a lot easier than it sounds?  What if I told you that almost all of the components needed to build this new economy already existed in the social media landscape?  What if  I told you that Government, Corporations, and Wall Street will not do this for us.  What if I told you that the risk from not doing anything far outweighs the risk of trying to develop and implement an economy built on a social media platform.

Everyone must have a productive role in the next economic paradigm – employed, unemployed, communities, traditional media, even existing corporations and their advertising departments.  All of the existing infrastructure is in place – it only needs to be rearranged a little bit.  That is what The Ingenesist Project hopes to initiate.  We may not be 100% correct and the process that actually arises may be substantially different, but we need to start somewhere.

Meanwhile, here are the Jobs stats for September;

Headlines: 263,000 “jobs lost” and unemployment rate up to 9.8%.

That’s not good – there goes the “second derivative” argument. Weekly earnings are also down by $1.54, which is bad news too. But the Household Data is VASTLY worse than reported. Here are the month-over-month changes, and they’re in the realm of frightening.

Civilian Labor Force: 154,879,000 to 153,617,000 this month.

Employed: 140,074,000 down to 139,079,000 this month.

That’s a loss of 995,000 jobs, not 263,000, and the labor force contracted by 1,262,000 people!

THE INVISIBLE PEOPLE: The people “not in the labor force” rose by a staggering 1,516,000 in the last month (”unemployed” who have given up and exited the labor force).

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Gnomedex 9.0 Seattle

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On September 16, 2009

In General Information

I attended the Gnomedex 9.0 Social Media Conference in Seattle.  While it was wonderfully informative and every single person that I met was engaged, interesting, and accomplished in some productive way related to social media, I was left with some troubling observations as well as some very inspiring moments.

Observation:

1. Trillions upon trillions of dollars are being transferred to Social Media with the persistent extinction of old media dinosaurs – does anyone care?

2. Advertising concerns, print media, corporate HR, were strikingly absent from the corporate vendors on site and in among the sponsors – they should have been hovering over in helicopters.

3. There were ONLY a few hundred people in attendance – there should have been a few hundred thousand (6619 Tweets sent).

4. This event should have been gold plated – it was not, which leads me to some of the inspiring moments.

Inspiring Moments:

1. Many of the presentations reflected social priorities like the environment, using social media to empower yourself and the people around you,  and empowering less developed nations.

2. Relative absence of commercialization

3. Gnomedex 9.0, means that 9 have occurred and this is what it has “evolved to”.  As a worthy social experiment in itself, this shows us what social media WILL evolve to

4. Building trust was a predominant theme

Read Between the lines:

Social media reflects social priorities, not Wall Street Priorities – in fact, the table has turned.  For example: Twitter will be charging Corporations to view social media – after corporations failed to get people to pay them to view social media.

Every single business transaction is subject to a similar “reversal” relative to social media space.  The World has no idea what’s coming down the tracks.

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A Few Predictions for the Innovation Economy

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On September 18, 2008

In General Information

Here are a A Few Predictions for the Innovation Economy

Social Network will become the corporate structure of the future. They will spit out start-ups at an astonishing rate.

The “resume system” will be banished forever possibly earning the title of the cruelest human invention since the lobotomy.

The University System will be challenged – the relevance of the college degree will be questioned in an economy that favors unique combination of knowledge assets rather than everyone having the same “degree”.

Everyone will have visibility of supply and demand for knowledge assets meaning that employers and employees will have equal information about cost, availability, and demand.

Creative knowledge workers will earn micro-royalties for their participation in thousands of brainstorming sessions and product development discussions. Earnings will be shared openly and the percentile Search Engine.

The new Patent will be the “Secret Sauces” – the algorithm that entrepreneurs will develop to select their knowledge assets when producing specific innovation.

Teachers will forego salary in favor of an equity position in their students. The best teachers will make the most money. Universities will forego tuition in favor of an equity position in students; the best students attract the best mentors and universities. Apprenticeship will become commonplace.

The knowledge inventory and Percentile Search Engine system rewards people for doing what they are most passionate about. The dominant strategy for all players in an Innovation Economy (that which produces the most revenue) is for participants to pursue what they are naturally good at and passionate for – as long as there is a market for it.

Innovation bonds will return 80% interest or more with near-zero risk. Institutional investors, insurance reserves, and foreign investors will flood the market with venture capital.

Knowledge workers will outsource management.

The Fed will peg the dollar to productivity, not gold or silver – interest on deposits will track productivity increases due to innovation.

Social priorities will impact what gets invented or what stays on the shelf; Global Warming, Alternative Energy, Sustainable environments will have net positive business cases.

The flaw in market economics will be reversed. Technological change will precede economic growth eliminating the economics of debt (ref video). The financial system will be restored to a sustainable condition.

We know that innovation is the engine of all wealth creation and it will live in an integrated system. Knowledge will be reformatted to emulate a financial instrument.

A good article from business week

A great Blog: Jay Deragon and the relationship economy

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The Capitalization of Knowledge – Innovation Bonds

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On September 18, 2008

In General Information

With a computer readable knowledge inventory, local communities of practice, a percentile search engine algorithm, and the virtuous circle of finance, then future innovation cash flows can be predicted much more accurately and with far lower risk than with, say, the venture capitalists acting alone.

Were risk is predictable, cash flows are predictable and the portfolio of innovations can be diversified so if one business fails there is an equal chance that another will succeed and the risks cancel each other out. The cash flow of all the innovation enterprises can be combined into a single large steady cash flow. Just like companies do to raise money for expansion, the innovation bank can issue innovation bonds on the open market. The revenue from selling Innovation Bonds can return to the community to finance innovation and fund wealth creation at very low interest rates compared with venture capital today.

With a lower cost of venture capital and a system that supports open source innovation an astonishing amount of innovation will be unleashed in society.

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