Book Review: Citizen Marketers by Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba - Page 2

Citizen Marketers includes dozens of other stories about the positive, negative, and sometimes confused reactions of the companies that are targeted by the “1 Percenters” (as the book refers to citizen marketers, who make up such a small percentage of the whole). It’s clear that not every company “gets it” — perhaps they’re the ones who need this book the most.

As the founder of Bessed, a search site that encourages user participation, I was particularly interested in how McConnell and Huba see the “democratization” of the market playing out in terms of new business models. While it’s interesting to see a single person make enough noise to get noticed by Coca-Cola, that’s an example of new means of citizen participation affecting old ways of doing business. But are there companies being built specifically around this “democratization”, and, to quote the often-asked question of the Internet’s early years, how do you make money from it?

Active Internet users can quickly point to sites such as Digg and YouTube as examples of participatory models. But, other than the fact that YouTube’s founders got rich by selling out to Google and Digg’s founders may have a similar exit strategy, these types of sites have been more about building a user base than about turning a profit.

So I was particularly interested in McConnell and Huba’s focus on Threadless. On the surface it’s simply a site that sells T-shirts. But look under the hood and you see that Threadless has made democracy the core of its business. Members of the Threadless community create T-shirt designs, which are then voted on by other community members, with the winning designs printed and sold by the company. The community has already told Threadless what they want to buy, so there’s never a clunker in the bunch. It’s on-demand production of sure winners. Threadless pays the designers a nominal amount (as well as some free T-shirts) for designs it already can bank on. Now that’s a business model!

That said, Citizen Marketers has as much to teach entrepreneurs as it has to teach lumbering corporations. When people are the message, treat them as such, and everybody wins.

Article Author: Adam Jusko

Adam Jusko is founder and CEO of Bessed, a Web site promising "search without spam", thanks to human-edited search results and ongoing visitor feedback. Do a search, offer your comments, submit your site--help create the "bessed" search site in the world. …

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