Curation Revolution

Every one of these 3 crowdfunding whitepapers is worth a read. As I state on our #startup http://www.crowdfunde.com crowdfunding will become a new and important marketing "channel" for all NOT JUST equity crowdfunders. 

P&G might crowdfund new R&D, Amazon might crowdfund a new book or movie. Every marketer is now also a publisher, TV producer and movie creator. Forming the capital for all the cool marketing we need is fraught with DANGER. 

Crowdfunding provides a way to "test before you test", to see if you can scale an idea before you invest in hard goods or more content and information. Crowdfunding is going to change...everything.

Reading these 3 white papers helps understand why. I promise to write something on Crowdfunding: The New Marketing Channel soon too.  

Great Post But Upside Down
This is a great post by Primal's founder Peter Sweeney, but it is upside down for what I want to accomplish today. Sitting there thinking I wish the bottom were the top I realized I have the tools to make that happen (lol).

Crowdfunding feels like a "next big thing" with tentacles in everything from banking to ecommerce so it passes the very good Next Big Thing Test Peter's post creates:

"How to Recognize The Next Big Thing?

If the history of The Next Big Thing teaches us anything, it’s that new media invariably dominates old media; regardless of how hard the incumbents try to keep new media down.

Equally clear, the essence of The Next Big thing won’t be technological. Cloud, data, augmented, geo, semantic, mobile, distributed, implicit, programmable networks are statements of technological enablers, not human experiences."

Ideas Peter sees as Next Big Thing:

* Interest networks (niched & more personal social media).
* Computational Services.

* Automated Assistants.

Ideas I see as next Big Thing:

* Crowdfunding.
* Distributed Ecommerce.
* Curating Conversations.

Crowdfunding
Crowdfunding is so much MORE than seed equity funding. Having managed a multi-million dollar ecommerce website and remembering putting my job on the line every Christmas means finding ways to "test before we test" and generate tribal formation every website needs these days favors a crowdfunding revolution that only has a little to do with seed funding via equity crowdfunding.

The trend is already manifesting. Dell creates a new "venture fund", P&G outsources 50% of their R&D and Kickstarter is slouching toward their $1 BILLLION in funding party. Soon we will "crowdfund" everything.

Ecommerce
After Google's algorithm changes storming the castle of scaled websites to achieve top search rankings is all but impossible. This begs the question WHY is commerce something we must got to a website to complete. In a SOCIAL and MOBILE time why can't we THINK, "I want that," and have it flying in on one of those Amazon drones?

Why is our eCommerce imagination so BORING? Whit is it so proprietary? Why do we make online customers COME TO US? One of the things we proved with CureCancerStarter.org, our crowdfunding cancer research platform on Authorize.net, is once you've created the commercial "token" it can go anywhere. SO why isn't it?

The most disruptive thing any affiliate marketer does is ship traffic across the bridge to their partner. More than half the traffic drops off. Why not CONVERT ANYWHERE?

Conversations
The conversation is rapidly becoming the new medium and currency thanks to the SOCIAL, MOBILE and VIDEO tsunamis. We can consult experts on anything. Our marketing is "inbound" so own the conversation to own the traffic.

"Owning the conversation,” means curating in a Radian6 ORM (Online Reputation) way. Our marketing must curate conversations in near real-time no matter where they happen.