soziale netzwerke haben eine eigendynamik entwickelt, die kaum jemand voraus gesehen hat. Wie begründen sie diesen erfolg?
Social Media bildet im Grunde nur digital ab, was Menschen schon immer getan haben: sich austauschen, befreunden und mitteilen. Sie erleichtern die Suche nach Gleichgesinnten, ehemaligen Kontakten und Beziehungen. Wenn man so will ist ein Soziales Netzwerk eine Art Suchmaschine für menschliche Beziehungen. Dabei steht allerdings das „in Kontakt bleiben“ im Vordergrund.
Was kann ein soziales netzwerk leisten, was macht es aus?
Zum Reiz sozialer Medien gehört, dass diese für jeden Einzelnen etwas anderes sein können: Freunde halten, die engsten Liebsten über das eigene Leben unterrichten, Interessen bekunden, sich inhaltlich austauschen, Ereignisse nachklingen lassen, die eigene Karriere fördern. Soziale Medien macht auch die Einfachheit aus – die am simpelsten zu bedienenden Plattformen sind auch die Erfolgreichsten.
Wer nutzt es und welcher Mehrwert steht im focus?
Die meisten sozialen Netzwerke haben einen soziodemographischen Fokus, wie ursprünglich schuelerVZ oder MySpace. Einige Plattformen umspannen sehr unterschiedliche Zielgruppen, wie Facebook, wer-kennt-wen.de oder meinVZ. Mit inhaltlich orientierten Diensten wie youtube und sevenload steht zunehmend auch die situationsbedingte Interaktion im Vordergrund: heute Verbotene Liebe mit einer Interessentengruppe diskutieren, morgen Star Trek.
das thema datensicherheit ist im Zusammenhang mit sozialen netzwerken sehr wichtig. Worauf sollten nutzer achten?
Wie im realen Leben muss jeder Nutzer darauf achten, wem er was über sich selbst preisgibt. Was einmal im Netz ist, ist dort für immer. Jeder muss sich bewusst machen, dass das posten in Sozialen Netzwerken eine Veröffentlichung ist, die auch viel über den Nutzer preisgeben kann. Das macht den Reiz,bei unvorsichtigem Handeln aber auch ein we- nig die Gefahr aus. Letztere lässt sich durch besonnenes Handeln vermeiden.
Was haben die user zu erwarten, wie werden sich die sozialen netzwerke weiterentwickeln?
Soziale Interaktion wird immer mehr zu einer normalen Dimension eines jeden Angebots in den digitalen Netzen. Die Verbreitung des “Like”-Buttons von Facebook ist ein erster Schritt in diese Richtung. Auch Inhalte wie sozial verknüpfte Fotos und Videos werden sich zunehmend in verschiedenen Diensten und Portalen ausbreiten.Die Website,wie wir sie heute kennen – quasi als „digitale Zeitung”, die durch Klicks geblättert wird – wird es bald nicht mehr geben.
In addition to my keynote, I was interviewed by the host of the channel. What exactly are the Web 3.0 changes that lead to a “webciety”? Big questions, small answers: I tried to pinpoint how individuals get a chance to monetize their expertise or at least make it available to a larger crowd/audience.
Videoportal for conferences a successful product!
After a number of trial runs and the establishment of a channel for ETRE, we were very happy to get DLD 09 conference as a high profile client for our conference application. We feel it was a great success, and are looking forward to a number of new event partners.
The application lets you relive the conference, jump from session to session and speaker to speaker, all in HD quality and with, of course, all the player functionality of ffw and rew, embed, fullscreen etc..!
This will be an interesting application for companies and media as well.
Labor Costs and Service Prices in the US economy: hidden flexibility?
Travelling through the US once again and hearing comments about the recession every day, I was struck by the elasticity of US business once again. As much as the business climate is intoxicating to the point of being hectic in boom times, as seen in 1999/2000 and once again in 2007, in bear times everything gets very gloomy.
I was riding in a cab in Las Vegas headed to CES and for once in the habit of European cab fares I forgot to tip the cab driver. He commented “You Europeans never tip, do you?”. After paying the due tip, I reflected on how dependent employees in all services industries were on tips for their regular income. I also noticed that tipping behavior on the part of Americans differed strongly from what I had experienced just 6 months ago on my last extended trip to California. People now, out of need or out of fashion, were downright stingy. Given that such large portions of the US economy are service based, I could not help but wonder how that had the same effect as a wage cut in many of these industries. At the very least, it shows that employers, who deflect part of the necessity of paying market wages to the culture of tipping and its encouragement in the policies of their businesses, thereby have an instrument to reduce and flexibilize their labor cost. In boom times employees earn more from tips and in bust times they earn less without the employer having to enforce wage cuts. This benefits the employer because he remains at his (low) wage cost basis, keeps his prices stable and lets the customer reduce tips if he feels he needs to. Since tips are part of the price structure of using a service, this means that lower tipping amounts to a deflation of service prices from the point of the customer. Thus, in a way, the business owner is leaving part of the pricing to the customer who can deflate the price he pays at will if his pockets are tied – as is the case in a recession.
Now while this, from a European perspective, could be perceived as an unfair advantage the business owner has in his relation to employees and customers, it could also be described as an “entrepreneurial risk” of the employee. Employees that commit particularly well to the service they are a part of and endear themselves to customers will invariably in good or bad times reap better tips from the customers. An employee who does well will probably convince a business owner to give him the responsibilities (assigned tables, assigned services) that will have the highest likelihood of earning him tips. One can already observe that some businesses compete on a labor market by installing policies that encourage tips.
A hamburger chain called Fat Burger places a small tip box next to a big tip box at the cash register and each time a larger tip is paid into the so called “fat tip box” the cashier yells out “FAT TIP!” and all other employees chime in yelling “FAT TIP!” as well.
As ludicrous as a discussion of the macroeconomic effect of tipping might seem at first glance, the impact on the US economy must be sizable. Considering the service industry is a 10s of billions of dollars segment of the economy and that average tipping is between 10 and 20 % of a purchase, tipping could well amount to several billion dollars in the economy. Adding or subtracting billions of dollars of volume to the price structure of the service industry could in turn have stronger than imagined effects on inflation and deflation, as well as on purchasing power in low income segments of the population.
As I am not an economist, I will leave the discussion at that, but I sure would find it interesting to know if this has ever been explored academically.