Panellists at the Business 4Site conference earlier in June discussed what motivates users to stay active in their online networks.
According to eWeek, Jas Dhillon, president and CEO of ZeroDegrees Inc. considers the most important motivator to be the 'favour economy' - the mutually beneficial nature of online business relationships. However, Antony Brydon, co-founder and CEO of Visible Path Corp. considers cold, hard cash to be the best incentive.
He [Brydon] dismissed the notion that goodwill alone will motivate people to join and become engaged in social networking.
"No way," Brydon said. "The favor economy is where we started, and we quickly moved to the barter economy and then the economy economy. It's an ideological point that will become a real issue for what to do to move things along faster [in this industry]."
1. I don't think there's a one size fits all model. It depends on the context. For a sales person that relies heavily on commissions , monetary would definately be the motivation to build up his./her referral base. For career networking, a person would rely on the "favor" aspect of business networking. I believe context is key to discovering the true motivation of business networkers.
Posted at 8:15PM on Dec 18th 2005 by Jeff