InsightaaS: Regular readers of Across the Net will recognize that this section is dedicated to highlighting important IT-related posts in the blogosphere — connecting our readers with the thoughts and thinkers who we believe are important to staying current with the rapidly-changing technology universe.
On several occasions, Across the Net has featured posts by Jeremiah Owyang, the pioneering social media analyst who started at Forrester and worked with Charlene Li at Altimeter Group. Jeremiah continues to expand the leading edges of social-related thought, with analysis of social media (featured in this Across the Net post) and the maker movement (featured in this one).
Jeremiah is now found and Chief Catalyst at Crowd Companies, which describes itself as a “brand council for the collaborative economy.” In that role, he has partnered with Vision Critical to publish a report via SlideShare called Sharing is the New Buying: how to win in the collaborative economy. Based on more than 90,000 surveys across the US, Canada and the UK, it provides insight into non-sharers, “re-sharers” (users of eBay, craigslist, etc.) and “neo-sharers” — people who are already using sharing services for a wide range of services, including business and personal services (such as oDesk and Angie’s List), transportation (Lyft, Car2Go), office or personal space (ShareDesk, Airbnb), and/or money lending/crowdfunding (LendingClub, Indiegogo). The report finds that 23% of people in the US and UK and 25% of those in Canada are neo-sharers, already using of one or more of these services; nearly half of this group is 18-34 years of age, more than 90% would recommend the last service they used, and 73% use social networking sites, meaning that their satisfaction is amplified through their preferred communications media. The potential for growth within this group is immense: the report notes that while use of any one service category is still below 10% of the total population, “neo-sharing could double in the next 12 months,” spurred primarily by current new-sharers expanding their participation into other categories.
Although we don’t usually comment on SlideShare posts, we thought we’d bring you a link to this one. As a report, it is both richer and more challenging a read than most pieces linked here — but those who click all the way through will get great insight into why, as the report concludes, “sharing online is mainstream, growing, practical and satisfying, and has become a competitive threat to large corporations.”
Two newlyweds spend their honeymoon in a rented loft instead of a chain hotel. A first-time mom rents a stranger’s truck in her neighborhood to pick up a baby crib. An entrepreneur taps the crowd to fund a new product on Kickstarter rather than seek traditional investors.
These transactions are part of a much larger transformation: the birth of the collaborative economy. The collaborative economy isn’t simply a new way of buying or selling: it’s a powerful movement in which people are getting goods and services from each other (what people call the ‘sharing economy’), or even making them outright (also known as the ‘maker movement’). Just as social media enabled peer-to-peer sharing of content, the technologies of the collaborative economy now enable peer-to-peer sharing of goods, services, transportation, space and money at a speed and scale that were unimaginable a decade ago.
In this world, the people formerly called ‘consumers’ are also funders, producers, sellers and distributors…
Read the report: http://www.slideshare.net/jeremiah_owyang/sharingnewbuying
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