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Having all these technologies has really changed the way in which people think about commerce,
communication and communities. At one point, commerce was essentially based on a seller
trying to find the right buyer on a one-on-one basis and making the best deal possible.
But today a lot of what has happened is that commerce has now been transformed from a diatic
relationship between a buyer and the seller to being a scenario where what you are dealing
with is a community of potential buyers.
And the goal of commerce today is to make a website as a host of activities so that
people come to the website not just to buy a product but to meet like minded people,
to be able to share with them ideas about these products, to be able to have suggestions
on how to make products better as well as to learn from one another about what happens
in the future of that product.
So a perfect example of this a company called CISCO that makes a lot of networking devices.
And what they found was that in their case they had several people like system administrators
and network administrators who were using CISCO routers in their various offices. Rather
than having to buy or sell products directly to individuals, they created a website where
all of these network administrators would form a community where they would trade ideas
with one another, and help one another trouble shooting problems with network routers that
CISCO was selling. CISCO then focussed on the fact that they had free access to a large
number of loyal customers who would give them ideas on what should be the next generation
products, what were the specific features that these products would have. And it all
happened because what they focused was not selling specific products to specific buyer
but instead creating a sticky website to serve as host for a community that therefore by
communicating with one another would increase the level of commerce that they would engage
in.