After stuffing yourself with too much Thanksgiving dinner and the tryptothan kicks in, there’s some time when all conversations seem to work like this one from Martin Wilson.

Peter Caputa dropped a comment on Jeff Nolan’s post about Zvents. The discussion was about how online event/calendar aggregators did business in a world where everything is rather thinly distributed. Part of the problem is answering how do you get people to contribute content — post their events — to a site that has little traffic, and how do you build traffic without content? The suggestion is that you have editorial staff scouring for content to build the database until reader contributions can catch up, and that’s where Peter comes in, suggesting that content and traffic aren’t where the value and excitement are:

At the end of the day, though, we need to bring the people that plan events together with the people that attend them, so that the planning happens together. Pulling massive amounts of data together and getting eyeballs doesn’t help event planners. What event planners need are tools that help them engage the attendees in the decision making process, promotion process and the documentation process of events. That’s what we aim to do.

We’ve been talking about social calendaring, but Peter’s comments obviously address a much larger concept, one that suggests the web really is turning things upside down. Now we’ve heard it from a dot-commer. We’ve heard it from the Pew Internet Project study on teens. And we’ve heard it from Jenny Levine when she talks about the “4Cs” of “conversation, community, commons, and collaboration.”

collaboration, commons, community, conversation, decision making, documentation, inclusion, involvement, jeff nolan, pete caputa, promotion, social calendaring, social software

Drawing from John Blyberg’s ILS Customer’s Bill of Rights and
The Social Customer Manifesto, Jenny Levine offers this Online Library User Manifesto:

• I want to have a say, so you need to provide mechanisms for this to happen online.
   
• I want to know when something is wrong, and what you’re going to do to fix it.
   
• I want to help shape services that I’ll find useful.
   
• I want to connect with others that share my interests.
   
• I want to use your services on my schedule, not yours. I don’t care if it’s noon, midnight, Sunday, or Christmas Eve.
   
• I want to know how your library works.
   
• I want to tell you when you’re screwing up. Conversely, I’m happy to tell you the things you are doing well.
   
• I want to interact with institutions that act in a transparent and ethical manner.
   
• I want to know what’s next. We’re in partnership…where should we go?
   

The basis of this, is of course the critical mass of users who are making online services a part their everyday lives. And it’s not just the millennial generation, as it turns out that it’s the 35 to 44-year olds who are most likely to buy movie tickets online, just as one example. But a recent Pew Internet Project study on millennials does reveal an interesting trend, one that the above manifesto seeks to address:

These teens would say that the companies that want to provide them entertainment and knowledge should think of their relationship with teens as one where they are in a conversational partnership, rather than in a strict producer-consumer, arms-length relationship.

And if that isn’t clear enough, take a look at the message in the marketing world.

collaboration, commons, community, conversation, interactivity, millennials, manifesto, jenny levine, social software, online library user manifesto, library, libraries, future library, future of libraries

Jenny Levine alerted me to the Pew Internet & American Life Project report on teens as both content creators and consumers.

It turns out that teens, and teen girls especially, are highly active online IMing, sharing photos, blogging, reading and commenting on other’s blogs, and gaming. An especially strong trend in this group is the use of web technologies for collaboration. Interactivity, increasingly, is being defined by the teen’s ability to ask questions, comment, or contribute. Take a look at this quote, (found via this BBC report):

These teens would say that the companies that want to provide them entertainment and knowledge should think of their relationship with teens as one where they are in a conversational partnership, rather than in a strict producer-consumer, arms-length relationship.

Jenny calls this the “4Cs,” for conversation, community, commons, and collaboration. Clearly, services that allow those 4Cs are preferred over those that don’t. Competitively, where do you stand? How well have you embraced the 4Cs in your online services.

tags: 4cs, collaboration, commons, community, conversation, interactivity, internet, jenny levine, pew internet, pew internet & american life project, pew internet project, social internet, social software, social web, teenagers, teens, youth