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Business Causes, Social Causes: The Power of Participation
On July 2, 2005, Sun, together with organizers of the Live 8 concert series in Philadelphia, powered a text messaging campaign and provided Web infrastructure support that contributed to mobilizing 26.4 million people globally to pledge their support for ending extreme poverty in Africa.
The Live 8 Web site, powered by Sun, received 300 million hits on the day of the concert. Imagine how numbers like this could affect your bottom line. Whether or not this is a cause that concerns you personally, the numbers and potential alone are staggering. All over the world, people are embracing the power of participation with devices as simple as cell phones.
Ready or not, the Participation Age is here. Your readiness to embrace the technologies that allow for large-scale participation will be a key factor in how quickly your business grows in the coming years.
"Participation is not just about writing a blog or sending your code into the network," says Sun President and COO Jonathan Schwartz. "Participation is about driving economic opportunity. It's about wealth creation. It's about economic progress as much as it is social progress, and they've become intertwined as a result of technology."
From Participation to Profit
What does this mean for executives who have a business to run? More people participating means more business. More customers drive greater economies of scale, which leads to lower transaction costs and thus lower price points. Remember when there was a bank fee for paying your bills online? It's free now because of the minuscule cost per user given the vast amount of people doing it.
Participation networks also drive your business forward because your customers are more involved. Active customers give real-time feedback that enables you to improve your products and services while simultaneously increasing loyalty. In the case of online bill paying, customers who have taken the time to enter all their data into your system are less likely to change banks because they're invested with you. This reduces your churn, which increases your average revenue per user (ARPU). Executives have an obligation to shareholders to involve people more if it reduces churn and drives higher ARPU.
Similar examples can be seen in the stock trading industry, where the Internet has driven more people to participate, thus lowering the cost of transactions and increasing the addressable market. In the government arena, the ability to put forms online and reduce the staff needed in local offices reduces costs for everyone and leads to a more educated and enfranchised populace. For governments in developing countries, digital infrastructures are actually cheaper to set up than physical infrastructures, so the technologies lead not only to a more informed voting public, but also to a reduction in the digital divide between developed and developing countries.
Rockin' the World
Which brings us to one of the reasons that Sun teamed with the Live 8 concert organizers. By leveraging Sun's core competency in technologies that fuel the Participation Age, Live 8 organizers were able to leverage the network to fuel a social movement. The concerts were held in July in six cities around the world with top performers including Coldplay, Elton John, U2, and many others, who donated their talents to the effort. More than one million people were in attendance and two billion viewers participated via TV worldwide.
Sun's solution involved a text messaging infrastructure that allowed people to join the cause by sending their name via text message to UNITE (84683). The momentum of the movement was captured visually via a data stream fed by Sun's system to the concert's 5x50-foot Jumbotron that was part of the Live 8 Philadelphia visual display systems.
The service-oriented architecture (SOA) solution scaled rapidly to support tens of thousands of text messages. The solution was architected, built, tested, and deployed in six weeks, demonstrating the efficiency and flexibility of Sun technology and services. Fans who participated in the campaign received a reply text message back from Sun thanking them for their support and directing them to the Live 8 Web site to join the march to make poverty history.
 "Combining millions of voices from around the world in support of Africa epitomizes the power of sharing," said John Gage, chief researcher at Sun Microsystems. "This is a time like no other, and we're thrilled to help build this global community." The concerts were a prelude to the G8 Summit in Edinburgh, Scotland, which had at the top of its agenda African poverty, debt relief, and famine. The text campaign Sun delivered to Live 8 organizers leveraged the work Sun did for U2 lead singer Bono in support of the ONE campaign.
The Bottom Line
We're now living in an age that enables more democratized participation than has ever been possible before. In the Industrial Age, railroad technology allowed for the movement of people and resources, thereby shrinking the world. In the Participation Age, with blogs, Wikis, eBay storefronts, instant messaging, and e-mail, the game has changed again by expanding the individual, who can now sit in one place and be everywhere at the same time. Embracing the power and participation of the user will be a key trend to growing and maintaining your business.
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