A user's activities in a Web 2.0 website has to be able to turn into assets.
[+] Desire of the humankind to establish relations
A Web 2.0 website, whatever type it may be, is founded on the basis of communities, or small societies. For communities to develop, operators must pay attention to improving and regulating interpersonal interaction, so that the chain of relations among users can be formed. Otherwise, users won't stay for long.
Take social networking services: the offering of Blog and relevant services cover only the first two layers of the psychologist Maslow's "Hierarchy of Needs," referring to people's basic needs to exist.
Everyone in the society has different needs. Some are happy as long as their basic needs are satisfied without caring too much for developing complex relations with others. Social networking service providers can meet the needs of these people by offering basic tools and functions and large storage space.
Yet people, after all, have the need to associate with others, and service operators have to be able to guide users to do so. Otherwise, users will leave even if they have to desert the places they have created because they can find no one to share.
This is a major difference between Web 2.0 and 1.0, yet people rarely notice it. While Web 1.0 addresses the instrumental needs people may have, Web 2.0 focuses on the psychological needs which are invisible yet no less real.
[+] More attention to everyone
People choose to keep their diaries online while they can do it with their PCs; people would rather store bookmarks online than offline in their browsers. Let's face it - people like to be known, and such urge is overwhelming and has been clearly observed during the past few years.
Bloggers will lose their impetus to continue writing if no one cares. Enthusiastic responses will encourage Bloggers to keep on writing. If you are a Blog service provider, it is very critical that you know the driving force behind the scene.
Some Blog service providers would feature certain Bloggers by means of "editor's picks" or the like, yet such method can only help about 5% of Bloggers. Therefore we've seen self-help services such as MyBlogLog emerge to allow Blogs to forge links with each other so as to increase their exposure.
It is the responsibility of the service providers to raise the chances for Bloggers to visit each other. Quite a few Blog service providers have introduced the feature like "add this person to my favorites," so that users will be notified of any updates in the Blogs they subscribed, which significantly increases the visits to users' Blogs.
Here we have to admire the vision of operators of 51.com and Mixi in Japan and the like. They've started doing so since two years ago and have succeeded in letting users feel that "they are not alone." It is the sense of belonging they've fostered among users that leads these websites to success.
[+] Virtual assets as a criterion for self-assessment
Yet getting attention is only the first step. People in any society would have the desire to climb up the social ladder and seek self-realization, the highest layer in Maslow's "Hierarchy of Needs." Despite that only 5% of the people will succeed, yet everyone wants to be among the 5%.
How do you know if you are successful? This is another important point in Web 2.0: you need to accumulate results of your efforts to reach success. Such results have to be quantified and displayed to make known. This is parallel to the concept of "private property," which can be divided into visible and invisible assets.
The Blogs you write and pictures your uploaded are visible assets and invisible assets are something like "credit," or the degree of recognition by the society. For example, the ranking system employed by community websites for years can be seen as a kind of credit rating system accepted by community members.
Activities of a user in a Web 2.0 website need to be turned into assets to be accumulated with time so that s/he will be tied up by these virtual assets, in addition to the chain of relations developed here. In other words, moving away becomes not so easy.
Yet very often the ranking system is not being executed properly, and scores or rankings become irrelevant. Operators somehow fail to notice that the existence of "the poor guy" and "class inequality" is a key to stimulate the progress of community websites. This is also true in our real society.
[+] Class inequality drives the society to move forward
The ranking system has created the distinction between "the rich" and "the poor." The point is to make sure that these two groups of people appear in the same place so that the difference in their strength is clearly shown and perceived by each other.
"The poor" can thus be mustered to work harder as long as they would not have the feeling that "it's impossible to become one of the rich." Many more affluent people engage in charities because they see there are so many poor people in the world. The contrast between the rich and the poor is what prompts the behaviors mentioned above.
Why not aim to create an equal society? We should know that the idea of "equality" means more of "less variation", instead of "no difference," in wealth." While a huge gap between different groups may discourage "the poor" to strive for improvement, moderate degree of difference can stimulate the development of Web 2.0 websites.
In other words, if "the poor" see only the people as poor as they are, they would not feel inferior and hence no achievement motives. But if they can see "the rich" everywhere, they would feel being marginalized.
The management of such contrast is an art. If you are good at it, you can make good money just like some community service operators. The Avatar service, which has proved a huge success in Korea and China but suffered a setback in Taiwan, is a good example that shows how it works.
[+] The key is also "class inequality"
As is commonly known, the Avatar service enables users to decide how her/his virtual image should look like - the head shape, hair style, eyes, nose and costume and even including pets. These objects are for sale. Those who don't want to spend money would have a "fig leaf," a default setting by the system.
For Avatar service to succeed, the operator needs to give users the stage to show off. They spend on their Avatars, and they want to display the results. There would not be many people spending money on this service. When most users are wearing a fig leaf only, no one would feel embarrassing and have any desire to buy an Avatar clothes.
The critical success factor of Avatar services is the ability to properly expose the difference between the rich (who buy the virtual items) and the poor (who don't buy). The disparity between the two groups should be vivid enough so as to make the poor feel stimulated to buy one, but not to the extent that the poor would instead be discouraged because the gap between the two groups is too wide to cross.
The above explains why QQ Show (qq.com) running by Tencent in China makes good money, while the Avatar service introduced by Yahoo! Taiwan from Korea would end up closing down. The key to success is to present class inequality between "the poor" and "the rich" in an community in front of users with an appropriate way.
[+] Human nature prevails in the real society as well as in virtual communities.
In fact, we have seen similar practices in the case of online games, which are miniature virtual communities. In the beginning, users would need to purchase credits or pay monthly fee to play games; gradually, the rule has become that all players (the poor) can play for free, but if they (the rich) want to equip themselves with virtual items, they need to pay. The logic of the former is equal footing, and the latter is those who are able and willing to pay for virtual items can enjoy a higher status.
Paradoxically, class inequality does not drive users away - the number of concurrent online users of free games has been reaching new heights - and the money online game operators have made from virtual items is more than the monthly subscriptions they have let go. How well operators can manipulate class inequality between the poor and the rich determines how successful they can become.
Generally, for entertainment communities like online games or Avatars, paying users are about 5% and the rest are non-paying ones. Yet can we drive these 95% of users away?
Remember, the 5% users spend money are paying to consume the 95% non-paying users; the existence of the latter is necessary for revealing the affluence and status of the former in the virtual society! This is all about human nature.
You may think online games and Web 2.0 are two separate things, yet my experience is that: human nature prevails in the real society as well as in virtual communities. You may deplore the dark side of human nature, or you may wonder how human nature prompts the society to move forward.
[+] Web 2.0 is a business driven by human nature
The last one important point about virtual property is that it has to be consumable. There is no way that credits can get increased and rankings enhanced endlessly. The fortune you have can only be real to you when you have to make great efforts to accumulate it or when you can feel the excitement to throw away a big chunk of it. It is this sense of reality that makes users stick to your communities.
What operators should do is to define the virtual fortune, both tangible and intangible, your users can have in your communities. Should it be based on how active you are, how many chains of relations you're involved or how many references you get? How credits should be accumulated and rankings promoted?
Moreover, how credits and rankings should be presented or consumed so that users can feel the value of credits and rankings created in the process and the reality of class inequality? How to present this inequality appropriately so that it can turn into a driving force to prompt the communities to move upward and enter into a virtuous circle?
If Web 2.0 businesses are to make money, the key is to realize the working of human nature. It is absolutely helpful to have close observation of our society in the real life and human nature. The Web 2.0 business is driven by human nature.
2007/06/10 - By Digitalwall.com - Way to
China Internet/Telecom )
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- Today in History
Web 2.0 Think Again (4) "Private Property" and "Class Inequality" - 2007/06/10
Ultimate Mobile Device (1) Age of Hybrid Handset - 2005/06/19
Pricing is a Handful for Internet Business - 2005/06/11
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