@T: ALWAYS THE TWAIN

In the same week that the media moguls are gathered in Sun Valley to attend boutique investment bank, Allen + Co’s, pow-pow over how to monetize social networks, get consumers to pay for content and make their investors happy, the political leaders are in Italy discussing the global economic crisis and climate change.

The two events may seem discrete and unconnected, but actually they can be “twained”. Here goes……..

Yesterday news reports said that G8 leaders had hailed a “historic” agreement on climate change policies to try and set new temperature and CO2 emission targets for 2050 (lowering by 2 degrees Celsius and halving, respectively). This follows on from 1990 agreements to cut CO2 emissions by 20 percent by 2020. Here’s the website of the July 2009 G8 summit being held in L’Aquila, Italy and hosted by the Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi:

News coverage on the G8 is available here:

* http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/g8/

Below are some useful links on what the UN Environment Program, Oxfam, BBC forum bloggers, Open Democracy, World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the All Africa network believes needs to be covered by the climate change agenda at the G8 summit:

· http://www.unep.org/Documents.Multilingual/Default.asp?DocumentID=593&ArticleID=6242&l=en

· http://www.oxfam.org/en/campaigns/g8-2009

· http://newsforums.bbc.co.uk/nol/thread.jspa?forumID=6705&edition=1&ttl=20090709111737

· http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/the-g8-and-climate-change-towards-copenhagen

· http://www.panda.org.za/?section=News_AboutUs&id=191

· http://allafrica.com/stories/200907070060.html

CLIMATE CHANGE: TWAINING SOCIAL NETWORKS TECHNOLOGY WITH PRODUCTION STREAMS AND CUTTING CO2 EMISSIONS

Several years ago, I posted a broad overview of my business case for “Web 3.0: socially-voiced co-creation” onto slideshare — an excellent site run by an excellent management team, btw. In its time it was ranked #1 if you searched for “Web 3.0”.

Now, I’m not going to be one of those people who allows the “Why should emerging economies agree to cuts when it’s the developed economies who’ve been responsible for polluting the world ever since the Industrial Revolution for the last two centuries?” argument distract me from what is a CLEAR CHALLENGE AND SOLUTION we all need to find. Nor am I going to argue, “Well, emerging economies like India and China are actually churning out more CO2 because their factories are manufacturing goods to fulfill the consumption demands of developed economies. It’s actually them that’s causing us to pollute in the first place. Factories built because developed country economies wanted to take advantage of the cheaper labor and wage costs abroad, etc. etc. etc.”

There are countless objections all sides can put forward to why developed and emerging economies shouldn’t do something about climate change but all of these objections are, frankly, fatuous and don’t move human progress forward (and I like moving human progress forward, :*)).

What also needs to be recognized is that what all governments have yet to do is to make COMPELLING BUSINESS ARGUMENTS for companies and consumers to tackle climate change. Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth documentary remains a philosophical call to our conscience rather than a pragmatic program towards change in action — not simply attitude — of consumer behavior.

What we need is the model I propose in ‘Web 3.0: socially-voiced co-creation’.

At the moment, social networks seem to be little more than online meeting points where consumer herds are channeled into topic pens for marketers to push more information at them and increase their consumption habits. They then buy more goods (often not what they genuinely need but for momentary consumer satiation or fad reasons), cause factories to churn out more CO2 and other noxious chemicals to pollute the environment and then waste electricity on the gadgets and goods they’ve bought but don’t really need. Disposal of these over-produced gadgets with their harmful substances (e.g., mercury in monitors, aluminum smelting, etc.) further causes complications to the ozone layer which still need to be researched and mitigated against. Admittedly, there are political lobby groups set up on the social networks — including climate change activists — but still this is not the optimal harnessing of consumer intelligence, influence or active collaboration on a wider and more effective scale than some educated niche activists providing information and awareness rather than instigating actions which affect bottom line results.

In short, the non-virtuous cycle of climate concerns goes around: we’re marketed into wanting, we buy to satisfy this want and then we worry about what kind of Earth our children and their children will inherit (deforestation, ocean pollution, out of control weather, airborne chemicals which damage their lungs, etc.).

Now let’s turn the social network model on its head and think about a monetization model at the same time.

Imagine if, instead of registered users being pushed marketing at or lobbied, they were engaged in the production process. Imagine if they were harnessed as a gigantic market research pool to ask them:

· what products they’d like to buy

· what price point they’d be prepared to pay for that item

· when they plan to complete purchase (within 1 week, 1 month, 1 quarter, half a year, end of year)

· which distribution outlet they’re more likely to buy it from (online, boutique, super-store)

· who else they would recommend the product to

instead of the current market research methods which try to extrapolate purchase intent from demographic information gathered (e.g., if you live in a household where income is US$100K and you are a white, male professional who reads the New Yorker, you’re likely to buy the Apple iPhone).

Then imagine if they were enabled with tools to collaborate in the design of products, with a percentage share in the net profits of any sold for a defined period of time. Next, imagine that this market research and product collaboration feeds directly into a sophisticated inventory system so that the company produces a level of goods which more accurately reflects and meets consumer demands — rather than the current way this works which is whereby companies have to make projections 3 to 5 CAGR years in advance, based on consumption behavior gathered in reports from the likes of Datamonitor etc. which are only comparatively small sample populations with all their inherent skews, extrapolation inaccuracies and time lags rather than social network sampling which is instantaneous, targeted and more representative of sizeable populations. The way it currently works also means that there is a lot of wastage in materials used to market to consumers (e.g., flyers, billboards, paper cut-outs at consumer electronic shows).

Finally, consider how this change in engaging the consumer further upstream in the production process will change CO2 emissions and move the climate change issue towards a positive solution.

Companies will actually gain insights into what consumers REALLY need and want. They can better manage their inventories to produce at levels needed rather than over-stock. In this way, factories won’t be over-producing and churning out excessive chemicals to further damage the environment. Plus companies will increase their communication effectiveness and production efficiencies, and reduce the wastage and costs incurred in over-stocking of materials, labor, electricity etc. needed to produce goods to meet consumer demands.

Governments can support companies which foster this form of positive consumer influence by giving them tax breaks, emission offsets and assistance with factories abroad where the goods will be manufactured.

Moreover, the consumer can be incentivized and will be rewarded for their participation in product design process. They will also end up getting products they want: what, when, where and how they want it.

Now, THAT is the COMPELLING BUSINESS ARGUMENT governments, companies and policy-makers need to explore and implement.

These “2 degrees Celsius and halving CO2 emissions here and there, developed versus emerging economies claims to be allowed to build factories and use electricity” etc. are too ephemeral and theoretical to companies and to consumers.

What we need to do is transform the awareness of climate change into ACTION at the bottom line level. We need to engage consumers further upstream in the production process and not simply downstream where they’re pushed more marketing to increase unnecessary consumption (and, inadvertently, CO2 emissions).

There, that’s my “twaining” of the paradigms between technology, business models and government policy on climate change.

Now we just need Google to choose my GREENSPOT proposal (an Android / mobile devices application to develop a global social network for green consumers) in their 2008/9 Project 10 to 100th competition so that we can realize this vision of companies and consumers contributing positive action where climate change, changing consumption behavior and better production levels is concerned!

* http://www.project10tothe100.com/

Yes, we do need the commitment of tech giants like Google to do it — purely because they have the global resources to reach out towards corporate and consumer audiences and encourage them to convert to new consumption and production frameworks.

Yes and the ‘Web 3.0: socially-voiced co-creation” model is consistent with the Global Brain and Web 3.0 (the Semantic Web) constructs. The objective of any Global Brain is for us to collectively collaborate to solve the world’s major challenges which includes climate change. The usefulness of a Semantic Web would be for machines to be able to understand us and each other when, for example, there’s an inventory order out of Paris and we can work out that means from the capital of France instead of the Hilton celebrity.

Tesla is right: think through before we do. At some point, the theories and the practices will twain — LOL.