The competition for an audience to gain attention has been immense and this has given rise to the free economy, an expectation that much of the information and tools on the internet should be supplied for free. This expectation affects you too – the free economy is everywhere. The gain for you is that you don’t have to pay for many of the tools; the downside is that this means you have to filter out a lot of noise.

Another consideration is the way in which sites have decided to focus their attention, either on the tools, which I call utilities, or on the people, which I call community. In this chapter I will provide you with some examples of sites that I like and use and that I know are the market leaders in most cases. However, there are several hundred sites out there. Your job is to decide which sites you intuitively like and where you will find people you are happy to be associated with.

Free Economy

Throughout this book I have talked about contribution, intention and helping others. There is more to it than just being kind. It is said that ‘there is no such thing as a free lunch’. It is also said that ‘no kind gesture is a selfless one’. I will explain how this applies to the free economy.

One of the toughest aspects of building Ecademy privately has been accepting that more than 95 per cent of our users do not want to pay for the access to people and knowledge we provide. I guess if we had taken investment from venture capitalists this would be less painful. For us, we have needed to very clearly understand the reasons why people won’t pay and we have also had to learn to value every member, whether they pay or not. I talked about this in terms of contribution currency earlier.

Everyone has something to contribute to a community and a business, some in terms of finance, others with their advocacy and their content. Interestingly for us, the members that don’t pay us a penny invite more members into Ecademy than those that do. They not only contribute with their thoughts and knowledge by adding content, they also help us with our marketing.

In 2004, Chris Anderson wrote an article in Wired magazine where he talked about the ‘long tail’. He described a strategy for businesses that distributed their goods at high volume to a large number of people but at a low price (or free) in order to gain a great deal more at the ‘end of the tail’. This phrase and concept has become commonplace in the social media industry. It helps many understand how to achieve sales from a smaller group of people from providing free or low-cost value at the beginning of the journey, which involves a large group.

Now termed the ‘freemium’ business model, this is the concept of combining free products or services with premium ones. The freemium business model was first articulated by venture capitalist Fred Wilson in March 2006. It is worth noting that Chris Anderson is an economist and editor of Wired,42 and so is embedded in the new media world and is an advocator of the ‘free economy’. On 26 February 2009, he announced he would be running a free summit. The marketing material on this summit stated that ‘we are looking for individuals or organizations interested in presenting case studies on how they’ve used “free” as a part of their business model’.

This theory is becoming mainstream and has been the pillar of the social media and social networking sites. It is now becoming an important message to individuals who want to build their brand and business.

• Extract 1:  A Changing World - The Individual Capitalist

• Extract 2:  Contribution Currency

• Extract 3:  Building Attraction and Being a Magnet

• Extract 4:  Leveraging Social Networks For Your Business

• Extract 5:  Know Me, Like Me, Follow Me

• Extract 6:  Know Me: Creating Your Social Media Footprint

• Extract 7:  Like Me: Creating Your Social Networking Footprint

• Extract 8:  Follow Me: Creating Social Transactions