Opinion Leadership

Malcolm Gladwell devotes a whole section to "Opinion Leaders." See The Tipping Point, New York: Little Brown and Company, 2002)pp. 30-81.

Wikipedia defines "opinion leadership" as:

A concept that arose out of the theory of two-step flow of communication propounded by Paul Lazarsfeld and Elihu Katz. This theory is one of several models that try to explain the diffusion of innovations, ideas, or commercial products. The opinion leader is the agent who is an active media user and who interprets the meaning of media messages or content for lower-end media users. Typically the opinion leader is held in high esteem by those that accept his or her opinions. Opinion leadership tends to be subject specific, that is, a person that is an opinion leader in one field may be a follower in another field. An example of an opinion leader in the field of computer technology, might be a neighborhood computer service technician. The technician has access to far more information on this topic than the average consumer and has the requisite background to understand the information.

With the rise of Web 2.0 I'm not sure this two-stage communication model works as well as it did in the past. It seems that our disintermediated society is avoiding traditiional opinion leaders and going to reputation management systems. Still, opinion leaders are an important source of spreading the word about an entrepreneur's vision or venture and I would not ignore them.

Everything for me is an entrepreneurial activity. For my thoughts on entrepreneurial real estate, go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog; and for writing and publishing to to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blotspot.com

Tragedy of the Anticommons

You remember from a previous post (July 27, 2008), a commons is a shared resource that can be ruined if a member of a society over-uses it. This is kind of the flip side of that is the anti-commons where there are so many private property restrictions that the resource dries up from lack of use.

Wikipedia describes it this way:

The tragedy of the anticommons is a hypothetical situation where rational individuals (acting separately) collectively waste a given resource by under-utilizing it. According to proponents of the theory, this would happen when so many individuals have rights of exclusion (such as property rights) of a resource that the transaction costs of coordinating those rights overwhelm any previously existing benefit. This situation (the "anticommons") is contrasted with a commons, where many individuals have privileges of use (or the right not to be excluded) in a certain resource. The tragedy of the commons is that rational individuals, acting separately, may collectively over-utilize a scarce resource.

The term "tragedy of the anticommons" was originally coined in a 1998 Harvard Law Review article by Michael Heller, a professor at Columbia Law School. In a 1998 article in Science, Heller, along with Rebecca Eisenberg, claimed that biomedical research was one of several key areas where competing patent rights could actually prevent useful and affordable products from reaching the marketplace. Proponents of the theory claimed that too many property rights could lead to less innovation. The purported counter effect of the tragedy of the anticommons, the increased usefulness of a resource as the result of many individuals using it, has been dubbed the "comedy of the commons" by Carol M. Rose in a 1987 article that appeared in the University of Chicago Law Review. It is related to the concepts of network effects and non-rivalrous goods.

Those interested in this terrific subject should consult the Wikipedia article and follow the references given there.

Everything I do is entrepreneurial. For writing and publishing, go to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com; for real estate, to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog.

Tragedy of the Anti-Commons

If you remember from a previous blog entry

Statistical Sampling

Wikipedia says:

Sampling is that part of statistical practice concerned with the selection of individual observations intended to yield some knowledge about a population of concern, especially for the purposes of statistical inference. Each observation measures one or more properties (weight, location, etc.) of an observable entity enumerated to distinguish objects or individuals. Survey weights often need to be applied to the data to adjust for the sample design. Results from probability theory and statistical theory are employed to guide practice.

There's more to read in their entry.

I don't encourage entrepreneurs to go out and do surveys. They should, unless there's a compelling reason not to, rely on available research. Surveys, even if done yourself, cost money, resources better spent on other tasks. After all, what you want to do is create a baseline--what a market is like without you in it. That way you can measure your progress. That can best be done by extrapolation from existing literature. But if they do want to do some kind of survey, they should go to an expert rather than trying to figure it out on their own. They have plenty of other things to figure out on their own. Believe me, that used to be my business.

For Real Estate 2.0 see, www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog and for Writing and Pubulishing, 2.0, see www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com

Consumption Chain

Rapid change spells opportunity for the entrepreneur, if the entrepreneur has the passion and openness to see it.

McGrath and MacMillan have a handy flow chart of a consumption chain. This is a layout of all the steps a customer goes through in buying a product. Basically, these steps are: (1) awareness of need; 2) search; (3) selection; (4) order and purchase; (5) delivery; (6) payment; (7) financing; (8) receipt; (9) installation and assembly; (10) storage and transport; (11) use; (12) service; (13) repairs and returns; and (14) final disposal. (Rita McGrath and Ian MacMillan, The Entrepreneurial Mindset. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2000, p. 57.)

These will vary by industry. For example, buying a refrigerator is different from buying real estate. But in step, there is embedded a great opportunity waiting to be exploited. What's been happening is that traditional busines models have been "blown to bits" and whole industries created from each step in the consumption chain.

All my activities are entrepreneurial. For my thoughts on writing and publishing, go to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com; for real estate 2.0, click on www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog.

A Commons

A "commons" is a held "in common", meaning that no one can be prevented from using. Howard Reingold, quoting Mark A. Smith in his book Smart Mobs, tells us, "'The word commons originally denoted pastureland treated as a common resource, where individual herders were free to graze their sheep or cattle.' The problem arises when someone starts using threatening the viability of the resource by using more than his or her fair share. Reingold goes on: "'The land can support a limited n umber of grazing animals. The temptation to graze more than one'd fair share is a rational strategy for an individual herder. But if everyone succumbs to the same temptation, the grass eases go trow, the value of the whole pasture disappears.'" (Basic Books, 2002), p. 34.

A need entrepreneurial trick these days is to take something traditionally thought of as proprietary, like an encyclopedia, open it up for all to work together to create, then take part of it and monetize it, not by fencing part of if off and prevent others from using it, but by making an application and getting paid for making that application of the commons available in a way no one else has thought of yet.

All my activities are entrepreneurial. For my views on entrepreneurial real estate, go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog. For writing and publishing, www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com.

Customer Retention

Take this quiz:

what's the most important thing for entrepreneurial success?
[1] Money.
[2] A good idea.
[3] A charismatic leader.
[4] Customers.

Give up? Answer's #4

If you don't have customers, you don't have a business. And if customers keep leaving you for competitors, you have a problem. First it costs a bundle to replace a customer. There's a way to calculate the cost, but believe me it's a bundle. Second, it shows that you've got some work to do. Your product is not competitive; your business has a poor reputation; you're alienating people; or any one of a hundred other things.

But don't just believe me. Read Wikipedia:

Customer Rretention is the activity that the selling organization undertakes to reduce customer account defections. The success of this activity is when the customer account places an additional order before a 12-month period has expired. Note that ideally these orders will need to contribute similar financial amounts to the previous 12 months. It can also be described as a series of actions that the selling organization undertakes to reduce defections. This is the selling organization's perspective of what they have to implement after the agreement in principle stage of the buying cycle. The success of the customer retention process is measured when the customer places an additional order before a 12-month period has expired. Retention Rate is the percentage of the total number of customers who have repeatedly placed an order (or made a transaction) during a twelve month period measured over a number of years, compared to the total number of customers in the same period.

If you have a comment about this, let me know.

All my activities are entrepreneurial. For entrepreneurial real estate, go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog; for writing and publishing, go to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com.

Narrative Drive and the Entrepreneur

Over on www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com, I commented on narrative drive. Narrative drive in a novel is what keeps the reader reading. Narrative drive for an an entrepreneur means the customer keeps on coming. So, narrative drive has to be present for the entreprenur as well. The entrepreneur's life story has to be interesting, coherant, and presented in such a story that every thread of it contributes to the story of the entrepreneur and his or her business. Much like a good novel, the structure of the entrepreneur's story has be be sound with every sentence leading the reader (read customer) onward to find out how it comes out. Entrepreneurs who don't know what I mean have some work to do.

For my thoughts on writing and publishing, go to the blog given above. For my thoughts on entrepreneurial real estate, go to ww.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog

10 Ways to get the most our of social networking sites

Dustin Wax (dwax.org) gives ten suggestions for getting the most out of social networking sites. I don't agree with two of them, so I'll passon theother eight:
1. Have a clear purpose. Know what you're using it for.
2. Complete your profile. Think what you want people to know about you and why they should care.
3. Don't follow the leader. Take the initiative and add people. Don't wait for them to come to you.
4. Pick one or two networks and work them. Focus all your energies on creating useful and meaningful connections there.
5. Send messages. Find reasons to connect with people in your network.
6. Have something to say. Give people a reason to pay attention to you.
7. Avoid Clutter. Limit what you put on your profile.
8. Firewall your personal with busiess lives. If you are using the site for business, don't put personal stuff on there.

The two suggestions I don't agree with are: "Accept everyone" and "Add everyone you know, no matter how little. I don't agree with the frist one. I think you should actually now the person. The second one, I agree with for Facebook but not for Linked In.

Everything I do is entrepreneurial. For entrepreneurial real estate, go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog. For writing and publishing, go to www.kearneymusicschool.blogspot.com.

Free Revealing

Eric A. Von Hippel and George Von Krogh have isolated a new trend. They call it "free revealing" and abstract the argument of their paper this way:

Central tenant of open innovation is free revealing of the detailed workings of novel products and services, so that others may use them, learn from them, and perhaps improve them as well. We explain that innovators frequently do freely reveal proprietary information and knowledge regarding both information-based products and physical products they have developed. We explain why free revealing can make good economic sense for innovators and for society as well. The article develops the case for free revealing in terms of a private collective model of innovation incentives. [See von Hippel, Eric A. and von Krogh, Georg, "Free Revealing and the Private-Collective Model for Innovation Incentives" . R&D Management, Vol. 36, No. 3, pp. 295-306, June 2006 Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=904435 or DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9310.2006.00435.x.]

To read more about it, you can go to von Hippel's worthwhile book, Democratizing Innovation (London: MIT Press, 2006), pp. 77-91. By traditional standards, it appears mystifying that someone would tell you everything about what they're doing, but this is more and more what's happening. More and more, patent-protection is becoming both less relevant and more anti-innovation. von Hippel explains why.

All my activities are entrepreneurial. For entrepreneurial real estate, go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog. For entrepreneurial writing and publishing, go to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com.

The Rise of "Freeconomics"

Chris Anderson describes freeconomics this way in his article "The Rise of 'Freeconomics.' (www.typepad.com/t/trackback/156819/6942457):

Today we have an unprecedented number of resources that are closing in on free when measured in units that were once meaningful to regular folks. Through the 1950s and 1960s Mead watched transistors drop from $100 each to $10, then $1, then $0.10, then a penny. Then, in the 1970s as transistors were integrated into semiconductor chips, they fell to a millicent and then a microcent. They're now nearly down to a nanocent--virtually free. Hard drives now go for about 30 cents per gigabyte, or .03 cents per megabyte (I remember my first 10-megabyte drive, which cost me a few weeks salary at the time). Bandwidth now costs less than ten cents per gigabyte at retail, and it wouldn't surprise me to hear that it's fallen below the penny-per-gigabyte level for big commercial outfits. How long would it have taken you to download a gigabyte of data in the old dial-up days, if you could even keep a connection open that long? With apologies to Levitt and Dubner, I'll cheekily call the emerging realization that abundance is driving our world "freeconomics". Understanding when to shift out of scarcity mode and start giving away what you once held dear is a core competency for our age. Heck, there might even be a book in it! My friend Michael Schrage had a good column in the FT that talks more about the power of free, and the policy quandaries it creates. I'll finish by quoting him:'Never in history has so much innovation been offered to so many for so little. The world’s most exciting businesses – technology, transport, media, medicine and finance – are increasingly defined by the word “free”. Whereas WalMart, the world’s largest retailer, promises “everyday low prices”, entrepreneurs and ultra-competitive incumbents develop business models predicated on providing more for free. It is a difficult proposition to beat.' Indeed.

For my thoughts on entrepreneurial real estate, go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog; for writing and publishing, to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.com.

Wilson's Six Simple Principles of Viral Marketing

According to Dr. Ralph F. Wilson,

Viral marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message's exposure and influence. Like viruses, such strategies take advantage of rapid multiplication to explode the message to thousands, to millions.

Wilson goes on. To paraphrase, an effective viral marketing strategy (1) "Gives away products or services"; (2) "Provides for effortless transfer to others"; (3) "Scales easily from small to very large"; (4) "Exploits common motivations and behaviors"; (5) Utilizes existing communication networks"; and (6) "Takes advantage of others' resources." To read more about it, go to www.wilsonweb.com/wmt5/viral-principles.htm. He elaborates using Hotmail as an example.

Everything I do is entrepreneurial. To see my thoughts on Real Estate 2.0, go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog. For entrepreneurial writing and publishing, go to www.thekearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com

Prosumer

Wikipedia defines "prosumer" this way:

Prosumer is a portmanteau formed by contracting either the word professional or producer with the word consumer. The term has taken on multiple conflicting meanings: the business sector sees the prosumer (professional–consumer) as a market segment, whereas economists see the prosumer (producer–consumer) as having greater independence from the mainstream economy

Commentators have used the combined word to reflect the co-creation that is going on in the market today where those who consume, or use, a product innovate and produce new, marketable products, thereby becoming prosumers. Those interested in reading more about the concept should consult the Wikipedia article.

All of my activities are entrepreneurial. For my thoughts on entrepreneurial real estate, go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog. For writing and publishing, www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com.

Product Adoption Process

Entrepreneurs have to think about producing somthing, whether a service or product. Customers go through a process before they buy something. BusinessDictionary.com defines the product adoption process this way.

Five-stage mental process all prospective customers go through from learning of a new product to becoming loyal customers or rejecting it. These stages are (1) Awareness: prospects come to know about a product but lack sufficient information about it; (2) Interest: they try to get more information; (3) Evaluation: they consider whether the product is beneficial; (4) Trial: they make the first purchase to determine its worth or usefulness; (5) Adoption/Rejection: they decide to adopt it, or look for something else. Another explanation is that the customer moves from a cognitive state (being aware and informed) to the emotional state (liking and preference) and finally to the behavioral or conative state (deciding and purchasing). Also called adoption process. See also adopter categories.

To me this is a little static and rational, but I think it gets the point. Today there is more emphasis on producers and consumers co-creating products, but in general, this definition is useful as at least a starting point.

Everything I do is entrepreneurial. For my views on entrepreneurial real estate, go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog. For writing and publishing, www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com.

C

Coase's Law

Wikipedia has quite a long description of the work of Coase's work on the theory of the firm, too long to quote here. If you're interested, you should go to Wikipedia and read that entry.

Tapscott and Williams, in their book, Wikinomics; How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (London: Portfolio, 2006), explain this law in the context of modern life:

A firm will tend to expand until the costs of organizing a extra transaction within the firm become equal to the costs of carrying ut the same transaction on the open market. As long as it is cheaper to perform a transaction inside your firm, keep it there. But if it is cheaper to go to the market place do not try to do it internally....the Internet has caused transaction costs to plunge so steeply that it has become much moreuseful to read Coase's law, in effect, backward: Nowadays firms should shrink unti the cost of performing a transaction internally no longer exceeds the cost of performing it externally. Transaction costs stil exist, but now they're more often more onerous in corporations than in the market place. (p. 56)

Everything I do is entreprenurial. For my thoughts on Publishing and writing, go to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com. For entreprenurial real estate, go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog

Adoption of Innovations

Students of innovation and the impact of it, have talked about five categories of readiness to adopt an innovation: In Answers.com, the following quote:

Classification of consumers according to their readiness to purchase a product. There are five adopter categories: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. The innovators are the first users of a product, representing 2.5% of the target market. Innovators are considered to be venturesome people willing to take risks. Early adopters, who enjoy leadership, prestige, and who tend to be opinion leaders, represent 13.5% of the target market. The first part of the mass market to purchase is the early majority. Although rarely leaders, these consumers usually adopt new ideas before the average person and they represent 34% of the target market. The late majority also represents 34% of the target market. This group of people is usually skeptical of change and will adopt an innovation only after a majority has tried it. The laggards represent 16% of the target market and are the last to purchase. They are usually price conscious, suspicious of change, tradition bound, and conservative by nature. See also diffusion of innovation.

Writing and publishing and real estate are to me entrepreneurial activities. For a window into writing and publishing, go to www.kearneymusicschoolmurdes.blogspot.com. To read my thoughts on entrepreurial real estate, go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog.

Ron Burt's Central Argument on Structural Holes

Ron Burt writes: "Much of competitive behavior and its results can be understood in terms of player access to 'holes' in the social structure of the competitive arena. Players are onnected with certain others, trusting of certain others, obligated to support certain other, dependent on exchange with certain others. Push here and someone over there moves. By dint of who is connected to whom, holes exist in the social structure of the competitve arena. The holes in social structure, or, more simply, structural holes, are disconnections or nonequivalencies between players in the arena. Structural holes are entrepreneurial opportunities for information access, timing, referrals, and control." See The Social Structure of Competition (Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 1-2.

All my activities are entrepreneurial. If you want to read my thoughts on entrepreneurial real estate, go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog. For the notes on my mystery, click on www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com.

The Stages of Change Model

Entrepreneurs need to know about the stages of change model. Here's a description that seems pretty comprehensive, from Mark F. Kern, "The Stages of Change Model was originally developed in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s by James Prochaska and Carlo DiClemente at the University of Rhode Island when they were studying how smokers were able to give up their habits or addiction. The SCM model has been applied to a broad range of behaviors including weight loss, injury prevention, overcoming alcohol, and drug problems among others. The idea behind the SCM is that behavior change does not happen in one step. Rather, people tend to progress through different stages on their way to successful change. Also, each of us progresses through the stages at our own rate."(www.addictioninfo.org/articles/11/1/Stages-of-Change-Model/Page 1..html)

The model specifies 5 changes: pre-contemplation, contemplation, preparation/determination, action/will power, maintenance, and relapse.

It has provoked a huge literature, and a lot of academics don't like it for varying reasons. It seems serviceable enough, though, if you don't take it too far. Check that website for more on it.

All of my activites are entrepreneurial. For my thoughts on entrepreneurial real estate, see www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog. To read my thoughts on writing and publishing, go to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com.

Employee Retention and Entrepreneurship

Hiring and keeping good employees is among the most important thing you can do as a business owner. According to the Rainmaker Group, at www.therainmakergroupinc.com, the cost of employee turnover can range from 1/2 to 4 times an employee's annual wages and benefits; 80% of turnover stems from mistakes during the hiring process; employee retention has as much to do with whom you hire as what you do after he or she is hired; and traditional methods provides only a 14% likelihood of a successful job hire. Rainmaker goes on to say, "an ineffective employee retention strategy can drive any manager crazy. The crippling effects employee turnover costs can have on your organizations efforts to consistently turn a profit only adds to the stress you are already under as a leader in your organization." (5/4/2008)

Everything I do is entrepreneurial. For my thoughts on entrepreneurial real estate, go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog. For my notes and comments on publishing and writing fiction, go to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com

Complex Adaptive Systems

It seems to me that to understand our world, the model of complex adaptive systems is most appropriate. Peter Fryer describes complexity theory this way: For years scientists saw the universe as a linear place, where simple rules of cause and effect apply. The universe was a big machine. If they took it apart and understood the parts, they could understand the whole. Despite their efforts, the universe remained unpredictable. Complex systems didn't behave as expected. It was in quantum physics where the strangest discoveries were it was apparent that the very smallest sub nuclear particles were behaving according to a very different set of rules than cause and effect. "Gradually as scientists of all disciplines explored these phenomena a new theory emerged - complexity theory, A theory based on relationships, emergence, patterns and iterations. A theory that maintains that the universe is full of systems, weather systems, immune systems, social systems etc and that these systems are complex and constantly adapting to their environment. Hence complex adaptive systems." Fryer describes complex adaptive systems as having the following properties: emergence, co-evolution, Sub-optimal, requisite variety, connectivity, simple rules, iteration, self-organizing, edge of chaos, and nested systems. Go to (www.trojanmice.com/articles/complexadaptivesystems.htm)

Read other of my posts if you wish to gain a window on entrepreneurial thinking. I also regard writing and publishing as entrepreneurial activities. If you want to read about them, go to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com. For entrepreneurial real estate, go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog.

The Long Tail

Wikipedia defines the "The Long Tail" thusly: "The phrase The Long Tail (as a proper noun with capitalized letters) was first coined by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 Wired magazine article to describe the niche strategy of businesses, such as Amazon.com or Netflix, that sell a large number of unique items in relatively small quantities. However, the concept of a frequency distribution with a long tail — the concept at the root of Anderson's coinage — has been studied by statisticians since at least 1946. The distribution and inventory costs of these businesses allow them to realize significant profit out of selling small volumes of hard-to-find items to many customers, instead of only selling large volumes of a reduced number of popular items. The group of persons that buy the hard-to-find or "non-hit" items is the customer demographic called the Long Tail. Given a large enough availability of choice, a large population of customers, and negligible stocking and distribution costs, the selection and buying pattern of the population results in a power law distribution curve, or Pareto distribution, instead of the expected normal distribution curve. This suggests that a market with a high freedom of choice will create a certain degree of inequality by favoring the upper 20% of the items ('hits' or 'head') against the other 80% ('non-hits' or 'long tail')."

This describes the way I'm approaching my publishing. It's why niche markets can thrive in today's economy where they had trouble before.

Writing for me is an entrepreneurial activity. If you want to see my thoughts on writing and publishing, go to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com. If you want to read my thoughts on entrepreneurial real estate, go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog.

The Creative Economy

I just came across the term "Creative Economy". From Wikipedia: "A set of interlocking industry sectors...that focus on creating and exploiting intellectual property products such as Music, books, film, and games, or providing business-to-business creative services such as Advertising, Public Relations and Direct Marketing. Aesthetic live performance experiences are also generally included, contributing to an overlap with definitions of Art and Culture, and sometimes extending to include aspects of Tourism and Sport. Economic activities focussed on designing, making and selling objects or works of art such as jewellery, haute couture, books of poetry or other creative writing, or fine art also often feature in definitions of the sector because the value of such objects derives from a high degree of aesthetic originality."

For more go to Wikipedia under "Creative Economy and Google it too. There's moreout there. These are exactly the businesses that are subject to long tail economics.

I am decidely entrepreneural. If you want to read my thoughts on entrepreneurial writing, go to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.com. For my thoughts on real estate, click on www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog.

Strategic Thinking 2.0

Li and Bernoff, in their dynamite book, Groundswell; Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies, (Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008)pp. 67-68, describe a new stregic planning process, shortened to the acronym POST (People, Objectives, Strategy, Technology) People: "What are your customers ready for?" Objectives: "What are your goals?" Strategy: "How do you want relationships with your customers to change?" Technology: "What applications should you build?" This is a whole new slant on things. I heartily recommend this book. They list a blog: groundswell.forrester.com.

Everything I do is entrepreneurial. If you'd like a window into entrepreneurial real estate, go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog. For a look at my thoughts on fiction writing and the business of fiction publishing, go to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.com

Why the Virtual Marketplace Matters

Richard Goossens, in E-preneur From Wall street to Wiki; Succeeding as a Crowdpreneur in the new Virtual Marketplace(2008), says it all:

Many established businesspeople believe they have already integrated the Internet into their businesses. To them, the Internet is a portal for long lists of impersonal e-mails, or an information highway complete with Web pages that look like desktop billboards. It is a more convenient tool for doing things they have always done.

But these businesspeople may not fully realize that the internet is changing, and that its new developments have a huge impact on every business. With its continually evolving technology, the Internet has the potential to further transform businesses through an interactive model that promotes entrepreneurial activity and transforms relationships with customers. The new virtual marketplace provides an international group of people willing to collaborate, offer loyalty, engage in dialogue, envision possibilities, and co-create with companies. It is the most dynamic and widespread community this world has ever seen. And that is why the new virtual marketplace matters.(p. 10)

If you want to read my thoughts on Real Estate 2.0, go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog. If you want to read my thoughts on writing fiction, go to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com

E-preneur

Richard Goossens, in his new book, E-preneur from Wall Street to Wiki; Succeeding as a Crowdpreneur in the new Virtual Marketplace (Franklin Lakes, NJ; The Career Press, 2008), describes an e-preneur this way: "E-preneurs apply the realities of Web 2.0 and crowd power to their business models, using these emerging opportunities to redefine the way their companies operate." (p. 27) This is the way money will be made as we go forward.

If you want to view my thoughts on real estate, go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog. For my writing blog: www.kearneymusicschoolmruders.blogspot.com