Platform thinking: 4 ways to make the Internet available to your company (transferred)

Under the existing commercial background, the network has become more and more important. Consumers are no longer just a mere recipient of services and products, and are beginning to participate more in value creation. Online platforms that allow external actors to collaborate to create value are rewriting competition rules. The iphone has broken the operator's business model, and has shown that companies are either accepting this platform model or being exposed to the risk of being subverted by new players.

In order to make better use of the strong competitive advantage provided by the Internet, the leaders and managers should rethink their business models and adjust their operation methods appropriately.

Rethinking the business model of the Internet era

The industrial age has made us accustomed to linear thinking patterns. Companies engaged in manufacturing through the procurement and processing of raw materials, and finally put the molded products into the sales channels to make money. The service industry guarantees supply by hiring more people. The traditional model is to solve the user's needs by creating new inventory in the industry.

The internet has made it possible for us to create online platforms that allow businesses to create new resources from outside. In the traditional industrial way, while tightening supply and commercial operation, the platform approach is gradually becoming an ecosystem with external cooperative suppliers.

Traditionally, we have solved people's travel problems by producing and selling more vehicles, or by organizing teams. The platform-based solution, like Lyft, is to establish a direct link between consumers and those who want to earn some extra money. In this way, a new resource supply system was created, and it was the fact that the platform-based solution was becoming more and more important, and Avis acquired Zipcar.

The hotel solves the problem of tourist accommodation by deploying new stores around the world. Airbnb has also solved the problem by turning individuals with empty beds or vacant rooms into BNB owners without any intra-industry investment, and for the benefit of travelers around the world.

Platform mode is difficult to carry out smoothly, because these platform-based enterprises do not have direct control of the source. Even if they may have a large investment in technology, they will eventually fail because of a lack of stable supply. However, as long as the platform can be developed to a certain scale, they will often subvert the traditional enterprise and create a new consumer market.

Rethinking the "work" of the internet era

In the traditional sense, "work" contains the meaning of creating value activities within the system. This perception of "work" is based on the fact that the cost of communicating and collaborating on these workflows is much lower when everyone is working within the same individual system. However, with the rise of internet and cloud technology, the cost of acquiring value from outside the system is lower than in the system.

There are two ways to rethink "work" for your business reference:

leveraging third-party platforms : Elance/odesk, and recently, Gigwalk, the rise of such platforms in the service market has further accelerated the growth of the free-employment economy. Adobe's recent acquisition of Behance also once again demonstrates the importance of a freelance economic platform. The pattern of bringing in the workforce through "the cloud" is gaining more and more attention, and the core and supportive functions of any industry are likely to be affected. With this decentralized workforce, the company can do its job without increasing internal friction.

building a producer's ecosystem : a disruptive way of using the Internet (albeit difficult) is to re-organize your business into a platform that connects producers and consumers directly. The mobile app industry is reorganizing around this new standard. Traditional application developers used to work for companies like Nokia. The rise of the iphone and Android App Store and the decline of Nokia have also reshaped the concept of "work" in this area. The internal developers who used to develop applications for Noika are now in the arms of the iphone and Android.

Enterprises that use this strategy should reward the outside producers with due diligence. Apple's iphone App Store, for example, has been successful because it offers a better revenue-sharing model than its operators. Threadless and YouTube have redefined the role of suppliers and the way they do work in an industry that has been subverted.

The form of the platform allows enterprises to use external talent to create products, compared to the system can be created in terms of products, more rich and diverse. As shown in the example above through the mobile app industry, the advantage of using an external producer ecosystem is that internal personnel cannot replicate.

This platform model, which is probably also applicable to other industries, is used by them as a blueprint for subversion of tradition. With the rise of 3D printing, even industries that are closely linked to manufacturing are likely to be subverted by various platforms. Through the platform, you can buy designs online, then print them at home, which will reshape the way the company designs and products are shipped

Rethinking marketing in the internet era

A product needs to be advertised, and advertising has always played the most important role. However, advertising is not a sustainable and expandable growth strategy. Deploying advertising requires additional input, and in fact, it will in some way lead to a reduction in the amount of revenue.

Advertising works with traditional media because the ads themselves are well-suited to channels such as television, advertising, and printed matter. The internet, especially social media, often moves advertising past channels to the web to create new opportunities and develop long-term and expansionary growth strategies. The rise of viral marketing has made consumers the center of your growth strategy, and every consumer has become a potential communication partner. Viral marketing provides a model for organic growth that can be scaled up to a large extent.

However, in the use of new media, must not be careless. Some misuse/misuse of viral marketing companies have tasted the bitter fruit, damaging the user's viscosity.

Viral marketing can bring a very high return on investment, which is well known. But at the executive level, viral marketing has often been mistakenly simplified to just add the share button on the page. Companies that have managed to grow through viral marketing have at least taken advantage of one or both of the following strategies.

create content that can be shared with third-party platforms : Businesses are widely disseminated through the use of contests, offers, and other content that can be shared. The media itself is also growing by creating shareable content. All of BuzzFeed's operations are built around the creation of optimized, shareable content. All of BuzzFeed's business revolves around creating content that has been optimized for sharing. BuzzFeed's editors, on sites such as Reddit, have been re-packaged after discovering content that already has viral transmission characteristics-drawing on their past research and practical experience to create content that can be transmitted in a viral style.

provide a platform for users to create shareable content : Whenever there is a widely disseminated video or project on YouTube or Kickstarter, the platform hosting them is also gaining exposure in the process of spreading, and attracting more users to come in. Social e-commerce companies use similar strategies to let users create wishlist or collect content and share it with their friends.

Rethinking Human resource management in the Internet era

In the knowledge economy, how to manage the talents within the company has become one of the more and more important issues. However, in an era when users start creating value on online platforms and "work" is being redefined, the concept of human resources management needs to be further expanded, and the framework for thinking is beyond the company.

The way enterprises focus on user management needs to be aligned with the way employees are managed. After becoming a community manager, the enterprise also began to apply the relevant principles of HR to the users.

Incentives: Employees in the company need incentives, and, similarly, content makers outside the company need to be motivated to participate in the process.

Tools: Like internal employees, content makers outside the company also need the tools and infrastructure needed to act.

Fairness: Like employees within the company, external content-producing people also need a fair working environment. Therefore, in the treatment of user contributed content, the platform in the treatment of all users to create value, there should also be a democratic equivalent model.

Compared to the traditional garment production line, by the company's internal designers to provide design, threadless is through the external designers to design new T-shirt styles and patterns, these designers of works, not only because of the company's internal recognition, and get the corresponding remuneration, at the same time, Once their design is finally adopted, the designer can also get T-shirt's sales commission. The designer's work rating system must be fair. Threadless provides external designers with the same incentives, tools, and fairness as any traditional apparel company can offer to internal designers.

The criteria for judging a company's competitive advantage are also changing. The traditional industry regards the size of the company as an important indicator of size, and the new standard of scale is to look at the size of the ecosystem based on the company's creation platform. YouTube is smaller than traditional media company entities, and Airbnb doesn't have a large entity for holiday hotels, but it can serve more visitors from around the world every day. In this era of Internet, a company's competitiveness will depend on, you can very successful use of the above factors, and to create a user to create a value for the ecosystem.

Via TNW

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Platform thinking: 4 ways to make the Internet available to your company (transferred)