The Goldsboro News-Argus (Wayne County, NC) has a familiar plea for people to offer their time and effort to a wide variety of community volunteer opportunities. It’s the type of article that reminds us, especially around the holidays, why each of our respective communities are special places to live.
I’ve devoted my time to any number of local volunteer
efforts over the years. My interest in this particular piece however (similar
to a post I ran a couple months ago) is in both how civic organizations can use wiki
technology to further their missions AND how ISPs can facilitate that. Obviously, any group has the ability (and
many do so already) to set up a private group wiki and engage their members
very productively. This, however, is about an opportunity to leverage critical
mass:
- Every community in America has civic organizations like this along with the solicitations for participation.
- Every civic organization has a purpose, members, and myriad activities.
- And most organizations are enabled by people who are members of multiple civic groups.
There is typically
a local ISP that services the residents of most local or regional communities. Most people who are
involved with these civic efforts have email accounts with that ISP and most of
the target market of potential volunteers AND the intended recipients have
email accounts with the ISP as well.
If YOU are an ISP, do you get the sense of synergy in all of this? Here are a couple implications for an ISP to consider:
- Non-ISP account members can be allowed to join these groups thus increasing the pool of candidates for ISP subscription (and their fees):
- You can attract a critical mass of participation that will get the attention of local marketers (and their advertising fees):
- As participation grows beyond the local geography through viral growth, national marketers take notice, and
- If you are an ISP that is bundled with other telecom services, you are attracting an audience that can be direct marketed for those additional bundled services.
This is a revenue model based on 4 distinct levels. Anybody interested?
Take it a step further - collaborative tools like wikis are being
adopted by large enterprises, but how does a small enterprise do this? The same
people who participate in local civic organizations also work in local
companies that are looking for cost effective communication tools.
Does there appear to be an element of leverage in all this?
Note to ISPs - wake up. You are snoozing and soon to be
losing. As I posted a few days ago, you are experiencing churn, you are cutting costs to the point of being
mere ‘lights out’ operations, your margins are still eroding, and none of you
appears to have anything differentiating to attract new subscriptions.
The first couple ISPs to latch on to this model will put the rest of them out of business.
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