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Can you sell social software to the organizations it replaces?
Can you sell social software to the organizations it replaces? My cut is to build your social software business to avoid this question and all of its implications. Business models that do this are low-priced and built on volume.
Sections: Business Emerging Practice
In Social Software: Stuff that gets you laid... Clay Shirky reiterates JWZ's suggestion:
If you want to do something that’s going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy.
The theme of the piece really is that social software by its very nature upends many traditional top-down organizational forms. Ed Vielmetti and I have been having a discussion around a similar theme in the comments section of a post I made a couple of days ago, and Scott Moore and I have had similar interaction regarding a large, institution-based social/educational software attempt. To me, the more provocative question is: “Can you sell social software to the organization it replaces?”
My own personal answer is that it is best to build your social software business model to avoid the question. A business model that seems to have a chance is to price your software (or web service) so that social entrepreneurs can purchase it without recourse to corporate purse strings. Then, of course, you have to make your money on volume. Two companies that are actually doing this are The Port, just outside of Atlanta (disclaimer: they have approached me for an evaluation of their product as they ready it for market), and 21Publish. Both companies offer the infrastructure to create blogging communities.
An interesting feature of The Port is that they are actively trying to find ways to integrate folksonomy into their offering. In their case, gatekeepers can promote other people's tags to be used in the central tag library. Personally, as I mentioned a couple of days ago, I would like to see a bit more sophisticated of an approach to using the folksonomy data, but The Port's method provides a start.
Bud posted this on February 17, 2005
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