digital sharecropping
Digital Sharecropping!! Have you heard about it? It can be a very important term considering that most of the B2B marketers today are online based. The term was coined by Nicholas Carr to describe a peculiar phenomenon on Web 2.0, “One of the fundamental economic characteristics of Web 2.0 is the distribution of production into the hands of the many and the concentration of the economic rewards into the hands of the few.”
In simple terms, anyone can create content in Facebook that content effectively belongs to Facebook. So you may be the original writer but the site you published it would be eligible to reap all the benefits.
So, is digital sharecropping scary?
The owner sets the rule:
More and more businesses are moving towards Facebook, Linkedin and other social media websites to build their company profile. It’s free, local and gives the sense of doing something cutting-edge.
But think..
What if one fine morning you wake up and find that Facebook has decided to make brand pages a paid-service, which is not a distant dream considering that the company went public now. Think about all the contacts you made, content created and traffic built would all just go in vain.
Owners, may not last forever!!
Sharecroppers may have put in millions of hours in creating accounts on multiple websites like Digg or MySpace and they no longer bring the same traffic that they used to bring. May be the case may not be the same with Facebook and Google, but the point here is choice, with one wrong decision you can land up in square one.
Make the most of it, till time rests:
When you are socially on its best to build up your assets and focus on the long term of your business:
- A worthy website with your own hosting account.
- Opt in mail list with high quality autoresponder.
- A reputation of valued website.
Last but not the least, think twice before renting your website to third –party source and make the right decisions for your business.
