April 2008 Archives

This is one of the best uses of the native feature set in a social media application I've seen from a campaign yet. John McCain is leveraging the questions feature in LinkedIn to invite participation, ostensibly from an "expert" set of individuals. Given the LinkedIn usage stats, his campaign is onto something. I'm curious to see if they incorporate the comments here into the McCain platform or campaing planning.

I also wonder if either of the Democrat candidates will reach out in the same way, or if the demographics of LinkedIn seem too upper income business user for them to spend their money that way... which would be their loss I think.

The Q/A Page: http://tinyurl.com/5hvb6q

McCain's Profile: http://tinyurl.com/5ny3p7

UPDATE: John McCain does also accept LinkedIn connections (at least when politely worded) and wisely keeps his connections private.

UPDATE 2: HIllary Clinton is also on LinkedIn: http://tinyurl.com/4pfr7z

An interesting new side to the the Prosumer trend is the development of professional services that allow individuals to design and purchase and/or sell physical goods via the web. In other words, take physical outsourcing and make it available at the individual consumer level. It's pretty straightforward, you design something, put digital working drawings into their templates, upload to the site, they laser cut everything according to your lists and ship you the goods. You can refine and tweak (obviously the more rounds you do of this, the more you pay in cutting and materials) and then keep for yourself or place into their marketplace.

The short view of this is the initial reaction I had "hmmm, maybe I'll finally make that table I sketched out" (although not the one w/ steel legs, since they don't yet work in metals.) Then, after thinking for a minute I started thinking about: what if IKEA or Target contracted with these folks or someone like them? Upload a few templates from their designers, allow users to customize, and make selected custom designs available on their website. If something you customized sold, you'd get either some more store credit or perhaps even some cash. Maybe there's a sales level below which you get credit, above which you become a "registered" designer and can start collecting checks.

What's the risk to them? I don't see much of one except perhaps "taste pollution/dillution" due to poor or "off brand" designs. They can always refuse to "publish" designs that don't meet their standards -- while still allowing the creator to purchase said designs for themselves. Additionally, by giving their consumers the ability to become involved in the production & design process, thereby becoming prosumers, they are allowing for brand engagement and growth. It seems a bit like a win/win to me. I get to not only make my own table, but if it's cool enough, I'll make some cash and be able to tell people that I have a product at IKEA/Target/whereever.

Are there downsides I'm missing?