The Next Step for Web 2.0 (1) The Dawn of Emotion Economics

The Internet in the future will become a place for group therapy.

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[+] Emotional products in the physical world

There are many ways to sell "happiness." One is to write a book on "happiness" (hedonics), turn it into some kind of study and sell it in bookstores. Or, you can package it in a mineral water advertisement and represent the bottle of water as an indispensable thing when families and friends get together happily.

In a fiercely competitive car market, a car dealer seeks to boost sales by presenting its car as "the only car that equipped happiness." In a trendy sitcom, the leading actor would win the heart of thousands of female audience by calling," I swear I'll bring you happiness."

This is the power of "emotional products," Marketing experts in the traditional business world have long noticed that the key to a consumer's purchasing decision, sometimes, is not the function or price of the product, but something that can trigger certain memory or emotion deep inside the mind of a consumer.

For those who buy the book/mineral water/car/trendy sitcom DVD, do they then live happily ever after? No. More precisely, their feeling of happiness reaches completion right at the moment of consumption. Emotional products that cannot achieve such effect would definitely fail.

Certainly you can say that emotions are added value to the above mentioned products; they are not the products themselves. Yet after ten years of development of the Internet, we begin to see that "emotion" per se can become a product and has the potential to change the look of the business world.

Yes, the dawn of emotion economics is upon us. In the past, "It" is the added value of some products; now "It" will become a product and will revel "Its" value through the form of Web 2.0. Strong emotions will become a kind of belief, so the reference for emotion economics will be religion.

[+] Internet from physical to spiritual

I sort out the characteristics of traditional Internet, Web 2.0, and Web 2.0 Next in the following chart. Simply put, the mission of the Internet will evolve from "carrying information" to "carrying emotion."

From eCommerce to emotion-centric websites, ordered from left to right of the chart above, we can see that during these 10 years, the Internet has evolved from more physical to more virtual and from material to spiritual.

Though eCommerce is an important business of the Internet, 70% of the operation, such as warehousing, logistics and payment processing, is done in the offline world in a way similar to that of mail order or brick-and-mortar retail stores.

Information processing is a critical issue in Web 1.0. The lessening of the problem of product information asymmetry has led to the emergence of eCommerce. Users can compare prices online with just a click, and they can easily find product information or even other people's experience of the product before making purchasing decisions.

Web 1.0 media have moved a lot of content online and even produce their own in order to reduce the cost of acquiring information. Too much information however creates the problem of overload. Then there is the search engine that provides precision to help filter undesired information.

In this phase, the trait of the Internet as a "tool" is very obvious. People use the Internet to make their life more convenient, with a focus on how to "improve efficiency." As a result, many traditional business models are gradually replaced by the Internet for better efficiency.

[+] Web 2.0 Next: the emergence of "emotion centric websites"

Blog ushers in the era of Web 2.0, empowered people to publish their own work - the so-called "individual publishing" - for the first time. There is no problem for us to download information anymore; now it's time for us to upload and express our voice.

Such characteristic then starts to push Blog to the way of Social Networking. People of similar interests and tastes are gathered and get to know each other through well-designed guidance. Content on Blogs only provide an excuse for people to start a talk.

Well, the kind of blogs mentioned above are only those that are focused on content sharing. The number of bloggers is increasing, and it is impossible that every one of them is good at writing or photography. As a result, a lot of bloggers are just letting off their feelings of these days. Normally there are only a few words on the Blogs.

Yes it's about emotions. So what to do next is to lead the people who have similar or opposite emotions to get gather and allow their emotions to vent and thus reach completion through some kinds of rituals or activities.

Just like the one who buys "the only car that equipped happiness" - his desire for a happy family reaches completion at the moment when he pays for it. It is easier for us on the Internet than in the physical world.

What kinds of (good and bad) emotions and desires do people have? They may include:

- Hope. (It's said that among all living beings, only humans will have hopes.)

- Happiness. (Longing and expectation for happiness that one lacks or desires.)

- Hatred. (To smooth it away through some kind of ritual.)

- To be loved, cared and blessed (and thus gain strength).

- To know if there are other people in the world who have similar weird thoughts or particular experience or so on.

- To enjoy solitude (while keep in touch with the world!)

- To fulfill the desire and enjoy the excitement to peep and to be peeped.

- To satisfy the sense of vanity or accomplishment (or to find motivation to catch up) through comparing with others.

- To do good and help others (everyone wants to do a little good as long as s/he has a chance.)

- A secret whim to "kuso" or to do non-sense reckless doings (and enjoy the pleasant sensation to break the rules and customs of the society).

- Greed (and jealousy and desire to monopolize that comes along.)

- Innocence and the desire to be like a kid. (This is why Little Prince is so popular.)

- The hobby to collect things (We are all more or less obsessed with collecting some things.) and fetishism.

- Hesitation when faced with choices and desire to pry into the future. (This is why fortune telling is so popular.)

- ...

The more subtleness of human nature you observe, the more you can grasp the essence and spirit of emotion economics. What will people get gather for, and what kind of emotion will they pay for its completion? Through creative packaging, the items listed above can be developed into interesting and colorful "emotion centric websites."

Simply put, the Internet in the future will become a place for group therapy. (
2007/08/26 - By Digitalwall.com - Way to
China Internet/Telecom )

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Prev : The Spirit of Web 2.0 New Media Lies in "Inter-personal Communication"


Next : The Next Step for Web 2.0 (2) The Fourth Flow: Emotion Flow

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- Today in History

The Next Step for Web 2.0 (1) The Dawn of Emotion Economics - 2007/08/26

The Web 2.0 Revolution (2) the Emergence of New Media - 2006/08/27

The Web 2.0 Revolution (1) the Root Cause is Cost - 2006/08/20

Envisioning China's 3G Market (1) 3G Will Not Increase ARPU - 2005/08/28

PDA in Siege (2) Bottlenecks of the Smart Phone - 2004/08/22

The Spirit of Web 2.0 New Media Lies in "Inter-personal Communication"

The meaning of "new media" is about giving up traditional broadcasting media and enabling interactive, inter-personal communication in a world that is turning into an intimate global village.

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[+] Social networks become a new channel for branding

In the earlier stage of online advertising, website operators would ask advertisers to pay for 1.3 million exposures. Soon the CPC (cost per click) model became popular, and website operators started to tell advertisers to pay for 1.3 million clicks.

In the case of traditional advertising, it is aimed to produce an impression of the brand on you by repetitive exposures, so that you'll remember to buy this product when you do shopping in a store. In the earlier stage of the Internet, online advertising followed this thinking, and advertisers were told that the branding effect existed even if users did not click on the advertisements. Although it does not sound very persuasive, it still sells to big brand advertisers having huge budgets.

In spite of the growing popularity of CPC model, which has taken a good share of the market of medium and small advertisers, advertisements sold on the basis of exposures still can pull the money out of big advertisers' pockets.

Now we are entering the era of Web 2.0, yet major brand advertisers and website operators still stick to the old-fashioned concepts and 1.0 mindset. In fact, online marketing has entered the era of "pay for 1.3 million users' in-depth participation."

The point here is "inter-personal communication," which is exactly the strength and spirit of Web 2.0. Simply put, traditional advertising is about "I play and you watch," while Web 2.0 advertising is about "I tell you, you tell her/him, and the brand quickly spreads in the social networks."

[+] The Pepsi case

Here I'm going to share with you a recent case, which is classic in Web 2.0 marketing. The event in this case lasted for one month, attracting 1.3 million users to register, 120 million votes in total, and 6.8 bulletin board messages posted by users.

This event was the annual online event of Pepsi, which was called "Your Picture Appear on a Can." That is, contestants submitted their pictures and got selected by consumer votes. Those who garnered the highest votes can put their pictures on the Pepsi can.

The competition was divided into two stages. At the first stage, Pepsi together with five participating websites held tryouts respectively. One participating website, 51.com, attracted as many as 1.3 million users, which was more than twice as many as the total of the other four websites, to join the competition.

Such contrast was largely because that 51.com is completely a Web 2.0 website, which is characterized by real-time interaction. Therefore we need to look at the difference between this particular website and other traditional blogs websites.

First of all, 51.com is a kind of Social Networking Service, including blogs, photo albums and online communities. Users write their online diaries while reading others', and they can set up their own "friend list."

[+] How brands spread in a Web 2.0 website?

Not like traditional blog websites, 51.com does not emphasize on content. For many blog websites, the first page after logging in is the user's own article, but for 51.com, the first page tells you who have visited, who on your friend's list are online or have posted a new article.

This increases user interaction on 51.com. The system will inform you about who visits your article shortly. If you link to a visitor's blog and leave a comment, the system will inform that visitor about your visit, which may trigger another visit to your blog. This is how spontaneous personal interaction begins.

Because of such real-time interactivity strengthened by immediate system alerts about your friends' activities, users of 51.com almost get hooked on the website. This makes 51.com a robust platform for "inter-personal communication." An online campaign can spread very quickly on this platform.

In this Pepsi campaign, 51.com first pushed the news of this campaign through various channels to draw people in. For everyone signed up for the competition, there would be an article with a big picture "Vote Me for Pepsi Star" automatically produced by the system on the front page of the contestant's blog.

The posting of this new blog article would trigger a notification to those on the blogger's friends list. When these people came to visit, they would learn about Pepsi's new event. Some of them might become contestants and thus set off another round of notification....

[+] Interaction and alliances among social networks amplify the effects of communication

As such, the spread of inter-personal communication takes place in 51.com with a terrifying speed. Here we see the manifestation of "Six Degree of Separation," which is a popular theory normally associated to social networking, particularly for a business purpose.

At the first stage of the Pepsi star competition, there were also other participating blog service providers. Yet they did not take the advantage of real-time interaction; instead, they relied on the traditional method of one-way broadcasting, which is much less effective in spreading the message and drawing in more users.

Most interestingly, there were quite a few voluntary activities going on among the user communities of 51.com, which was beyond expectation. Here are some examples:

1) Those who did not join the competition tried to canvass for their friends who were contestants on their blogs. This helped increase exposure of the event.

2) Users of 51.com can start their own groups. Some group owners can be very powerful, as the size of these groups can reach some tens of thousands under good management. Group owners could ask members to vote and canvass for them.

3) Groups can form alliances. For example, First Alliance of 51.com has as many as 2 million members. Each group within the alliance could select its own candidate to compete for representing the entire alliance, with the support of its 2 million members, to compete in the Pepsi contest.

[+] Web 2.0 marketing is about inter-personal communication

Many people argued that such competition was nothing more than beauty contest. However, to everybody's surprise, the winner of 51.com tryout was a monk nicknamed "silly hermit." In fact, his picture has been on the Pepsi can before you read this article.

Yet it is not that surprising. Firstly, 51.com with 80 million registered users of various kinds is a small society of itself. Moreover, users' voluntary concerted action as shown in the above-mentioned example can be applied in many aspects.

For those participated in this event through joining the competition or voting or canvassing for contestants, together their friends within six degrees of separation, the brand of Pepsi will remain imprinted in their mind for a long time. What Pepsi got in this campaign was 1.3 million heavily engaged users, which had much greater effect than 1.3 million banner clicks.

Did you notice that the model of Web 2.0 marketing is basic inter-personal communication! Inter-personal communication works very slowly in the real world, so we need mass media such as television to do mass communication.

Yet, because of the birth of Web 2.0, the cost for inter-personal communication has dropped substantially and the efficiency has increased. Therefore we see a very paradoxical thing that marketing communication will go back to the basic model of inter-personal communication from traditional "broadcasting" media of mass communication.

These days we hear a lot of "new media" things from the media and people in the industries. What this term really means is about giving up traditional broadcasting media and enabling interactive, inter-personal communication in a world that is turning into an intimate global village. (
2007/08/05 - By Digitalwall.com - Way to
China Internet/Telecom )

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- Read More

Prev : From Idea to Business (2) How to Estimate Your Income and Cost?


Next : The Next Step for Web 2.0 (1) The Dawn of Emotion Economics

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- Today in History

The Spirit of Web 2.0 New Media Lies in "Inter-personal Communication" - 2007/08/05

The Good Old Days of ECommerce - 2005/08/08