Everything can be shared

An early blog post by Francesca Pick — October 10, 2012.

Last week was worldwide Social Media Week. From Berlin to London, Barcelona, São Paulo, Shanghai to Vancouver and many more cities, this global conference was filled with a week of interesting events surrounding social media and its influence on society, culture, politics and business. Luckily, I was able to personally attend the event in Berlin and hear about many interesting new startups first hand.

Even though the conference was dedicated to social media, there was also a panel about collaborative consumption. Moderated by Benjamin Tinq, co-founder of OuiShare, a magazine and community network for the collaborative economy, representatives from various German sharing-economy businesses spoke about the common issues they face.

The panel was made up of:

• Joel Dullroy, founder of Deskwanted, a platform that helps you locate co-working spaces all over the world
• Michael Riegel, co-founder of the peer-to-peer vacation rental platform Wimdu
• Katie Needs, community manager at Gidsy, a marketplace for activities
• Michael Fischer, PR spokesperson of DriveNow, a carsharing service by BMW (which had also just launched in San Francisco)

These are some of the questions they discussed: What motivates users to share? Are the reasons mostly financial, or are people seeking to create human connections? As one could expect, users’ motivations seemed to vary by the type of platform being used. While Michael from DriveNow claimed that the company’s users solely sign up for their service as a cheaper and more convenient alternative to owning a car, Katie had the opposite to say about Gidsy. According to her, “for people organizing activities on Gidsy, making money isn’t the most important part. They also want to meet new people, and share their skills and passions with others.”

A further common challenge that was discussed was learning how to inform people about your service. Since the collaborative consumption space is so new, many people are not familiar with business models based on the concept of access over ownership. Therefore a large effort must go into educating users on what the sharing economy is and providing tools to help them be able to trust strangers on the Web.

As Joel from Deskwanted put it, if this succeeds, “soon we will be sharing everything.” I surely hope so!