Denis Hancock
Denis Hancock has been living the Net Gen life, having been hired to work on Don Tapscott led research and consulting teams at least five different times over the last decade. During this same time frame he has also studied transition and development economics in Amsterdam, spent a year wandering through Australia and New Zealand (among other travels), developed new customer segmentation and brand portfolio assessment models for a large food industry player, freelanced here and there, and most recently completed an MA in Economics at the University of Toronto. His current work is focused on creating amazing customer experiences in the age of wikinomics, and engaging and assessing Net Gen talent. He is also managing the development of the wikinomics blog, where he is currently fixated on becoming a Dilbert mash up artist (now at mydilbertmashups.blogspot.com). There is a 98.2% chance Scott Adams is not concerned.
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October 10th, 2008, 10:26am
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As TechCrunch reported on Wednesday, an interesting new company has moved into beta launch mode - Poptent, a “crowdsourcing platform” for the creation of advertisements. Why I put crowdsourcing in quotes is that they are not targeting a totally open platform where anyone can participate (think: YouTube), but rather a community of “small put professional teams capable of producing TV quality ads.” In the words of Poptent (you can check our a video about them here):
Poptent is a vibrant community of filmmakers (and actors, comedians, grips, animators and more!) who are connecting to each other and to companies that want to pay them for their talents. Through our passions for advertising and commercials, we are exploring a new way of creating branded messages for the Internet age.
Poptent members can show off their work, build a portfolio, collaborate with other creators, leverage our deep set of features, and best of all make money doing what they love.
Poptent brands are seeking new ways to reach their consumers and create new audiences. They are finding exciting possibilities that save them both money and time while staying just ahead of the curve of competition. They are, in a word, trendsetters.
What I particularly like about this “modified crowdsourcing” model is that it deals with some of the inequities inherent in more traditional platforms - too much power being given to the buyers, at the expense of the sellers. In such models, companies post a request to a community (for little or no upfront cost) where pretty much anyone can work it, and then if they deem any of the projects worthy they can opt to pay for them. Among other problems, there’s a scale issue here - as more and more people join, you are less and less likely (as a creator) to be successful, and in turn one might expect the best creators to start shying away.
Read More »
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October 8th, 2008, 08:37am
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If you click on the “contact us” link on the side of this page, it sends an email directly to me. I’ve been amazed at how many great stories and contacts I’ve received through this link, but occasionally I’ve been overwhelmed by them - and thus unable to respond to everyone, let alone share all of the messages with wikinomics readers. This has been particularly true over the last couple of months, due to various other work commitments and a couple of excellent vacations thrown in the middle. But I apologize to those who wrote that I have not yet responded to (I will try to address this shortly), and want more importantly I want to start sharing a lot more.
In turn, I’m going to start with what I consider to be the most interesting messages I receive - information about new start-ups that appear to be being built on wikinomics principles (all titles will involve the words Wikinomics in Action Start-Up). What’s slowed us down in the past is we try to investigate them all fairly thoroughly, which can take a lot of time. Instead, I’m going to throw up here the link, a summary of any extra information an individual may have sent us, and a couple more tidbits from the site, and then ask the community for feedback on it. What I’d really love to see is our readers collectively helping out some new start-ups (constructive criticism, new ideas, etc)… so I implore you to get involved.
For no other reason than that I got the message this morning while I was thinking about this, today I’m going to start with Laboratory Films. The new entity describes itself as a network based filmmaking enterprise, and is honest in saying they are not the first in the category. How they are seeking to differentiate themselves is:
- being profit oriented.
- requiring no financial backing from investors and no financial participation from its peers.
- running on a simple, global, public system.
Read More »
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October 6th, 2008, 09:00am
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The HP Social Computing Lab has taken an interesting look at the dynamics of crowdsourcing in relation to content consumption. Noting that we are in the midst of an inversion from the traditional model where relatively few people produce content and the majority simply consume it, the authors seek to explore an apparent paradox - why growth in content provision continues to persist, given that the structure of crowdsourcing would predict a tragedy of the commons situation. More simply, given that we can all just sit back and free ride off of what everyone else is doing, why aren’t we all sitting back and taking the free ride?
In order to explore the problem, the authors look at a dataset of almost 10 million videos on YouTube, submitted by 579,471 people, as of April 30 2008. The key finding is that while one might look at a “digital commons” as a traditional public good, the individuals contributing to the digital commons may perceive their activity as a private good. In this mindset, they’re not necessarily getting money, but rather attention, which can essentially be looked at as a “currency” they are collecting. I would personally call this benefit reputation, as I believe it is the ability to build one’s reputation that is driving the majority of crowdsourcing activity, but it’s essentially the same point. Read More »
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October 3rd, 2008, 09:15am
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The makers of NBA 2K9 have come up with a very, very cool way to promote the game, and get users engaged in an ongoing way. It’s called The Other Season, a unique combination of video games, fantasy sports, and celebrity endorsement. Eight NBA superstars (real ones like Kevin Garnett and Steve Nash) own “franchises” within the game, which are competing with each other over the season. How they are competing is by selecting a team of gamers to join their respective squads. In other words, I, Denis Hancock, could be drafted by Steve Nash to play for his team, the Nash Potatoes- an MVP staple that always delivers.
Read More »
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October 2nd, 2008, 03:57pm
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Andrew Cherwenka posted an interesting article last night called Antisocial Web Marketing: Why McCain is Losing. While I’m personally not willing to jump to the conclusion that what’s happening on the web is the main reason he appears to be losing, the comparison between how the two leaders (& parties) are represented is startling. One would have thought that after all the stories about how Obama’s online presence was key to his triumph in the Democratic primaries would have led McCain’s team to focus on this… but apparently not.
Side note: for previous coverage of the role of wikinomics in this race, see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Most interesting stat in the story? The top-20 user uploaded YouTube results for McCain are negative, and the top-20 for Obama are positive. Read More »
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September 29th, 2008, 09:45am
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Eric Picard, the director of advertising strategy and emerging media planning at Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions, authors one of the most interesting blogs in relation to the future of advertising. Unfortunately a lot of people miss it because he posts basically once a month, which isn’t exactly conducive to getting found on the search engines or staying top-of-mind. When he does post, however, it’s almost always worth the read.
His most recent post is titled Appearing Soon in an ad near you. The core argument is that people haven’t considered the ramifications of Moore’s Law on real-time image processing. While a lot of people have (or are) focusing on the impact it might have on things like targeting and analytics, the intersection with computer graphics is quite interesting - a future where ads directed at you could easily feature you and prominent members of your social network, both past and current.
A hypothetical example he gives about an ad featuring a man’s wife and three kids is interesting - but the example featuring a person that is the composite of the three people you dated in college really gets to how powerful (and scary) it could be. The question in the long-term may not be so much the ability to make these ads, but whether people will accept them - but history indicates the Net Generation in particular will likely glance over the privacy concerns.
Other recent, interesting posts: Why search doesn’t really matter, Counting the streams in the new media age, & Is an Impression an Commodity?. On a side note, they might make you think that a few more people in the new/social media space should consider getting away from the “post whatever I’m thinking every few hours” mindset…
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September 26th, 2008, 11:06am
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You must check out this very cool advertisement for Wario Land: Shake It! - a new game from Nintendo Wii. It only takes 45 seconds, and you really have to watch the whole thing to get the full effect. It’s probably the best example of creatively leveraging YouTube in a way the truly connects to the brand message that I’ve seen in a long time. Anyone seen any other great ads recently that they’d like to share?
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September 16th, 2008, 07:53am
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I think one of the most remarkable things about the web over the last 5 years or so has been Google’s continued dominance of the search space… and how such a dominant company has emerged from a patented algortihm system called PageRank. What makes it so remarkable for me is this nibbling feeling is that Google search isn’t really that good. That’s not to say there are other search engines out there that are far superior, but rather that I just feel there should be far better search capabilities available to us by now.
To give an example of what I’m talking about, I’m a pretty big basketball fan. I also know a lot of other pretty big basketball fans. Over the years I think I’ve probably been to every basketball related news site that exists, and I have a pretty good idea of which ones seem the best, and a lot of other people seem to have similar ideas. If I was to give a short list off the top of my head, InsideHoops, HoopsHype, and RealGM are among the better daily news aggregation sites, sites like ESPN and Yahoo! remain quite strong, some blogs like True Hoop on ESPN are particularly good as well, and of course NBA.com is the primary site for the world’s dominant league. I could go into far greater detail, but you get the idea. At minimum, I think I can tell a good and popular news site from a bad one.
In turn, if I type the term “basketball news” into the Google search engine, I expect to be directed towards these type of sites in one order or another. Instead, here is what I get on the first page: Read More »
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September 11th, 2008, 08:18am
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While a combination of my job and a bit of intellectual curiosity leads me to devour a lot of content on the web, there is precisely one publication that I pay to have delivered to my house each week - The Economist. It’s always a special treat when one of their articles focuses on one of our regular research areas, which is just what happened last week with Following the Crowd. While much of the article covers some of the “unusual quarters” where crowdsourcing is popping up, the final few paragraphs focus on the perceived limitations and/or challenges.
I want to particularly focus on the last one, which is in relation to Cambrian House (CH). Following a brief discussion about why crowdsourcing and commerce “make uneasy bedfellows”, the article leads into the CH story with “And even those companies that do try to share the proceeds from commercial crowdsourcing are not safe.” Noting that the CH model of encouraging people to send in ideas for new software products, have the community evaluate them, and fund the winners sounded like a good idea, the article then mentions that the chief executive acknowledged that the business model failed.
Read More »
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September 5th, 2008, 12:45pm
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Note from Denis: this blog post ended up being a lot longer than I expected. The first seven paragraphs focus more on the “challenges” these sites are facing, but I encourage readers to check out the bottom 3 or 4 about what Marketocracy has been up to this year- they could be hitting a very interesting tipping point in their model, in a good way.
In February of 2007 I wrote a post entitled The Perils and Promise of Marketocracy, a company that was taking a very wikinomics-type approach to finding the “best investors in the world by tracking, analyzing and evaluating their performance in managing virtual portfolios on the site.” While I was, and continue to be, quite intrigued by the possibilities of their model, the bulk of the post was fairly critical. The reason for this was a clear disconnect between the performance of the virtual m100 index, which was based on the stock picks of the best investors in the Marketocracy community, and the Marketocracy Masters 100, which was the real mutual fund supposedly based on the m100.
The main problem I had is pretty easy to demonstrate For example, if you looked at the performance of the virtual fund (as posted on the site), it seemed to perform remarkably well from (for example) January ‘03 to January ‘05- a net gain in the 70 % range. If you looked at the performance of the real fund over the same time period, it went from $9.93 on January 3rd 2003 to $10.86 on January 7th 2005. Suffice to say, that’s a lot less than 70%- which doesn’t make a lot of sense if one is based on the other. You can read the post for more details, which was an update on the original post (after I interviewed the CEO).
What inspired me to revisit the company was a TechCrunch story about Cakedex. Read More »
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August 29th, 2008, 12:21pm
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For those of you that might not be up-to-date on your Miocene knowledge, Aquitanian is the first age of the Miocene Epoch, which dates back something like 23 million years ago. If you think I wouldn’t have known that without wikipedia, you would be correct.
As always, you can compare this to the original at www.dilbert.com… and see the rest of my Dilbert Mashups here. They’re positively Messinian!
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August 28th, 2008, 09:18am
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An interesting little report came out of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research recently - a “statistically significant, longitudinal (study) on the usage of social media in corporations.” However, it wasn’t just any corporations - the study focused on the Inc. 500, which is comprised of the 500 fastest growing private companies in the U.S. One particularly interesting headline result - 39% of the Inc. 500 is blogging, which is a 20% increase over the previous year. In contrast, other research indicates only 11.6% of the Fortune 500 currently has “active public blogs by company employees about the company and/or its products“, a bump of 3.6% over the same time period. As the following chart shows, the Inc. 500 is also showing rapid growth in the adoption of social networking, online video, wikis, and podcasting:
It will be intriguing to see if the leadership of the private companies over public continues to persist, and/or whether the Inc. 500 adoption is a leading indicator of what the public companies are going to do. Wikinomics readers might also be interested in following the “In contrast” link above, which is a wiki page that was created by Chris Anderson and Ross Mayfield to enable a cooperative, volunteer effort to review the blogging activity of Fortune 500 companies. My favorite link here is the “spectrum of corporate social media“, which hopes to flush out a taxonomy of ways to engage in social media (with specific examples). I think it still has a long way to go, but here’s how it currently stands: Read More »
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August 27th, 2008, 01:51pm
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The combination of Ning and WidgetLaboratory (WL) was a story that had wikinomics written all over it. The former is a platform that enables anyone to create their own social networks focused on anything they want, and they actively encouraged individuals and companies to innovate on top of the platform and make it even better. WL did just that, and in a big way - they sold a number of widgets (for around $30 / month) tied to the Ning platform, supporting somewhere in the range of 2,000 networks and 1,000,000 individuals. WL was the most popular widget creator on the platform.
If I was writing this post a week ago, it probably would have been a feel good story about wikinomics, but the wheels have recently fallen off the proverbial bus. This is a development equally worthy of exploring in relation to the challenges that come with embracing wikinomics principles - and particularly those that emerge when you only embrace a few of them. Of greatest interest to me - if more stories keep popping up like this, it could be a dramatic blow to more open, collaborative innovation processes. That would be a shame.
TechCrunch picked up the story on August 22nd, when Ning suddenly removed all of the WL widgets, without warning to anyone, from their network. This decision which clearly angered the company, as well as the thousands of customers who had spent time and money with WL in order to optimize their offerings. Based on the emails that WL has published on the web, this is the gist of Ning’s complaint:
Over the past few months, WidgetLaboratory’s applications have caused multiple and significant technical degradations to the Ning Platform. In point of fact, your code has broken numerous times and has negatively affected a large number of Networks in addition to the Ning Platform.
Read More »
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August 21st, 2008, 11:49am
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It seems that hardly a day passes without a journalist trashing the blogosphere - and for some reason it tends to happen most often when someone is writing about sports. Christie Blatchford is among the most recent - see “I’m not blogging this, mark my words” on the Globe and Mail website. While I’ve written about this topic fairly extensively before (see here, here, and here in particular), a few of her points - all centered around the negative effect blogs are having on journalism - made me want to dig into the subject a little more. Notably:
And journalism wasn’t meant to be a conversation, anyway. It was maybe a monologue, at its most democratic a carefully constructed dialogue. If readers didn’t like or agree with the monologues in paper A, they bought paper B. What was most important about their opinions was that they thought enough to spend the coin.
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August 15th, 2008, 10:14am
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Rasmussen Reports just released some interesting results from a recent telephone survey in the United States. Nearly half of Americans “believe the government should require all radio and television stations to offer equal amounts of conservative and liberal political commentary, but they draw the line at imposing that same requirement on the Internet.” By “drawing the line”, they mean that 57% do not believe the government should force balance of commentary on individual Internet sites - but 31% still do. That’s still uncomfortably high for me.
You need to be a premium member to get access to the demographic cross-tabs, but I would assume that age is the primary dividing line here: I can’t imagine too many Net Geners who grew up “bathed in bits” would support the balance initiative, but I could just as easily understand how people who don’t use the Internet (or don’t use it too often), which is a much older demographic, could be drawn into supporting it.
Such people would come from a broadcast media mindset, where certain individuals could consolidate control of dominant media assets, and thus control the political messaging that the vast majority of people are exposed to (think: the one newspaper town). Read More »
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August 14th, 2008, 10:03am
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To understand the wikinomics connection here, you may have to read what wikipedia has to say about termites. Notably:
The termites are a group of social insects usually classified at the taxonomic rank of order Isoptera (but see also taxonomy below). As truly social animals, they are termed eusocial along with the ants and some bees and wasps which are all placed in the separate order Hymenoptera. Termites mostly feed on dead plant material, generally in the form of wood, leaf litter, soil, or animal dung…
As eusocial insects, termites live in colonies that, at maturity, number from several hundred to several million individuals. They are a prime example of decentralised, self-organised systems using swarm intelligence and use this cooperation to exploit food sources and environments that could not be available to any single insect acting alone.
As always, you can check out the original at www.dilbert.com, and see all my other mashups here.
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August 11th, 2008, 07:46am
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Very observant readers may note that this post has some striking similarities to what I wrote about three months ago - the collaborative experience economy. What I tried to do then was connect the “four forms of theater” idea from Pine & Gilmore’s “The Experience Economy” with the principles of wikinomics - hence the name of the post. For whatever reason I didn’t get a lot of traction with it, but I’m still intrigued by the underlying ideas, so I wanted to re-frame the idea directly in relation to social media. More to the point, I’d like to hear from wikinomics readers as to whether it’s a useful framework for thinking about the use of social media in relation to creating experiences both for and with customers.
Read More »
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August 4th, 2008, 03:42pm
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I’ve been trying to immerse myself in the world of social media over the last few months, and it has been quite an eye-opening experience. As I’ve navigated this remarkably inter-connected little world I’ve probably read several thousand blog posts on the topic, and most of these – predictably – seem to focus on the people Malcolm Gladwell would call the “mavens” and “connectors”.
For the six of you that may not have read his book, “mavens” are the intense gatherers of information and impressions that are most likely to pick up on new trends, and “connectors” are people with a broad network of acquaintances that trust their opinion. Whether the actual term used is “trend setter”, “nfluencer”, “bzzagent”, or any of the many of the others you are likely to come across in the social media blogosphere, the focus seems to primarily be on how these two types of people are using new social media tools.
Seeing this led me to ponder a simple question – what about everyone else? What about that staggeringly large group of people that are neither mavens nor connectors (and particularly those one might call anti–social) - are their social media appetites distinctly different, and if so what are the implications for companies pursuing a social media strategy? More pointedly, will this great mass of people slowly get in line with the adoption curve that mavens and connectors are setting in social media, or might they do something totally different – something that would put some of the prevailing theories regarding cohort behavior into question? To begin looking into this issue, I wanted to start with a particular application where I sense line is being drawn in the sand – Twitter.
Read More »
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July 31st, 2008, 11:00am
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As I noted a little while back, the majority of my Dilbert mash ups are now being posted on a different site - you can check them all out here. However, if there’s a direct application to the principles of wikinomics they’ll be posted here, and there’s something about jury duty that speaks to either the wisdom or madness of crowds (depending on your perspective), so this seems to fit quite well with the ‘mass collaboration’ theme. It’s also interesting to note that we recently found out that the Dilbert mash ups are one of the prime conduits to the wikinomics blog for our Google reader subscribers - hopefully this will continue, and those that don’t like them can just look past them!
As always, you can check out the original at www.dilbert.com.
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July 28th, 2008, 09:50am
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There is a great debate raging all over the blogosphere, and more traditional media for that matter, in regards to the effect the Internet is having on the “wiring” of our brains, and more specifically our collective reading skills. We’ve recently written about it here, here, here, and here, Nicholas Carr had a great piece published in the Atlantic Monthly called “Is Google Making us Stupid“, Clay Shirky has an excellent response on the Britannica Blog entitled “Why Abundance is Good: A Reply to Nick Carr“, and a variety of other well thought out replies to Carr’s article can be found here.
Personally, I find that the quality of the debate itself runs somewhat counter to the thesis that Google, Digg, blogs, and other social media tools are making us stupider (or stoopider, if you prefer) - it’s pretty hard to read everything that I’ve linked to above and not come out feeling a little smarter for the time invested. However, such articles are by no means representative of what most people typically spend time reading online, so I certainly see value in the debate continuing to evolve - which is where this recent NY TImes piece comes in.
Here’s a selection of my favorite quotes (and I really like the first couple as thought starters in terms of how brains are being wired differently, in a way that could be construed as both good and bad): Read More »
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