New (old) digital model: burning down the house

This last week Prosperity Research achieved its final milestone of creating a purely distributed business model. We brought down our website, www.SO-U.TV. Yes I know it sounds so archaic to talk about websites when social networks, mobile computing and Twitter are all the rage. However, it has taken four years to get out reluctant clients to live with out its reassuring presence. When Prosperity Research was established we came up with the simple idea; it is easier and cheaper to go to your consumers than to get them to come to you. At least this is true in the digital world. We saw social media coming and bet right.

Think of a website as a home, one that you can never leave. This is a romantic thought, but imagine the constant maintenance, lifetime mortgage, and since you can not leave you must spend huge amounts of time and money to attract and entertain your guests. Also, if the house needs remodelling or repair the cost can be excruciating.

Reference:Adam Broitman sez 4 reasons web sites are becoming irrelevant

Now imagine if you could live anywhere you wanted rent free. If you tire of someplace you can quickly move to another more attractive and spacious one. You can live in as many places as you like and spend as much or as little time as you like. You always have lots of friends around and someone else always pays the tab at the end of the party. Too good to be true? Not really.


It is called distributed marketing and whereas we started down this path more than 4 years ago it is just now starting to come into its own. Social media marketing is a similar concept and better understood. So putting it in the context of social media marketing, it is simply using "free to post" or consumer generated content areas of sites such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and more to host your content and conduct your business.

To prove the coming of age of distributed marketing and increasing acceptance of social media, David Ketchum of Upstream Asia was featured in an article recently discussing the huge discrepancy between how business uses the Internet and how consumers use it. Consumers have quickly adapted to distributed marketing and are head over heels in love with social media. So why isn't business? He states that business needs to start fishing where the fish are. Three years ago we coined the phrase "put yourself in the path of your consumer". Not quite as folksy sounding but the same concept.

BTW, www. SO-U.TV is not completely gone. You can find us on 100's of sites and if you feel nostalgic for an old fashioned website, we kept a bit of our past on Ning.com. Come join us!

Much success,

Doug