Firstly, what a find. A fantastic TED Talk by Rachel Botsman! Even though the sun was out in Sydney as I watched this talk in my lunchtime yesterday, I was transfixed, engaged and unfazed by the lure of the nice weather outside. Sign of a great talk.
Rachel Botsman discusses collaborative consumption, something which to be honest I don't really know much about. Or put another way, something I thought I knew a little about but now realise there is much more to learn and appreciate on this topic. This talk really made me think outside of my personal management of online reputation and made me think of the evolution in business transactions.
Rachels TED Talk very eloquently puts across the huge role that reputation has, especially for the many growing new businesses that are operating on a trust basis. It's actually quite astonishing at how many businesses / jobs are now being created within the 'Collaborative Consumption' vertical (or should I say horizontal), and as Rachel creativity puts it - Business examples based upon Collaborative Consumption are like "Lemonade stands on steroids".
Influence (think Klout) is an important metric, but real reputation is contextual and is a true weighting that as Rachel argues will become more and more important for business of the future. (It's already happening now).
This really is such an interesting topic, would love to hear other peoples comments on the subject.
Rachel Botsman:
Full Bio
Yeah, I agree. This was an eye-opening video. I particularly found interesting the concept around virtual trust, reputation capital and the thought about "access is better than ownership". As revolutionary as the movement might seem to be, I think there will be a lag in adoption by people of our generation and older. The general public are still getting accustomed to the process of purchasing things online, so perhaps we're a year or two away of people becoming savvy with trading goods based on trust. The media for one isn't doing any favors to make the fear of trust go away. On the other hand, Reputation will undoubtedly become more engrained in our every day lives. As soon as the likes of LinkedIn catch-on or Google standardises or incentivises its users to gain reputation to rank higher, then it will become the "in thing". It is already starting to happen with things like Klout and "social presence" ideas.
ReplyDeleteMy favourite line from the talk is:
"A good reputation can be used to buy cooperation from others, even people we have never met".
Cheers for the comments Greg and agree with your comments. Pretty exciting times and I guess we all need to be conscious of our online reputation! Like the quote you mention above ;)
DeleteAs people wise up to the financial system we are currently working under and it's many flaws this has some potential to step up and actually offer a legitimate solution to some of the problems, not just identify more problems. Good ol TED.
ReplyDelete^ Definitely agree. Real credibility not smoke and mirrors like some (cough banks) work under.
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