Friend and smart man Ed Mitchell has just blogged about this year’s e-Consultancy and cScape Customer Engagement Survey.

He pulls out the following:

“… 70% consider building a sense of community around their brand essential or important, but…
… only 20% plan to engage with target customers in social networking sites that they do not own…”

Which puts the thinking around how to approach the three types of community (centralised, de-centralised, and distributed) into an interesting organisational context. And ‘Ownership’. And ‘Control’.

Which makes me think about what Eric Schmidt said in The Economist yearbook for 2007:

“… The past few years have taught us that business models based on controlling consumers or content don’t work. Betting against the net is foolish because you’re betting against human ingenuity and creativity…

The direction is clear…

Simplicity is triumphing over complexity.
Accessibility is beating exclusivity.
Power is increasingly in the hands of the user…”

As one of our recent postcards puts it: ‘the internet is already e-democratising you’.  The statistics and the arguments just keep stacking up…