Marketing in the Participation Age: A Guide to Motivating People to Join, Share, Take Part, Connect, and Engage

Chapter 5

Participation Way for the Participation Age

There were a number of examples cited earlier regarding how the elements of competence, autonomy, and relatedness are relevant in today’s Participation Age. Obviously, although these examples illustrated individual ingredients, all the ingredients are connected. They are not independently discrete. This is important, because a number of marketers still wonder whether it’s sufficient to incorporate just one or two elements. We know now that this is not possible. Each principle is both individual in what it represents and highly connected with the others. Furthermore, today’s connected world weaves these relationships together even more closely. As mentioned in the previous chapter, Facebook is a great example of an environment that embraces and uses all three principles very effectively.

For example, we know that mobile devices enable participants to find new information and become more competent. In addition, there are more than 250 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices. As cited in the previous chapter, Facebook participants who use mobile devices are two times more active than users who access the site via other means. We live in a connected world that, each year, sends more than 11 trillion e-mails and more than 6 trillion text messages, posts tens of billions of tweets and Facebook status updates, “checks in,” and more.

Tim O’Reilly’s concept of Web 2.0 was first promoted at a 2004 ...