You can create powerful social change simply by sharing your opinion online. But you’ve got to know how to share.
#feeling grateful
Sometimes you simply feel like you discovered the best pizza place in the city, or that your new running coach has really transformed your life or that you’ve been blessed with a mechanic with amazing attention to detail.
You’re probably unaware of it, but at these moments, you hold in your hands a powerful asset for dramatically uplifting our society, our economy and our lives. That asset is reliable information.
Reliable consumer information about products, services, content and events is one of the most important pillars for a healthy and productive market economy. Consumers need this knowledge to help them make informed decisions that drive the economy forward. But for this information to be of any service, you have to share it with those who have interest in it.
Traditionally, people simply shared such information with whoever was around through word-of-mouth. With the development of the internet and social media, however, we were suddenly able to share information more easily and efficiently with more people than ever before. This seemed to open the door for amazing new possibilities.
But then, something went terribly wrong.
To understand the problem, let’s get back to the basics of online sharing. The first thing to understand is that when we share information online, we’re actually generating potential economic value. Why? Because when we spread information about products, services, content and events that we like, we’re actually contributing in our own way to advertising them and giving them exposure.
More importantly, we tend to share this information with people whom we believe may be interested, since otherwise we may face the social consequence of becoming a nuisance to our friends and ending up in their spam box.
For example, if I have information about a great yoga class, I’ll most likely share it with someone who’s interested in yoga, for example, a friend who was just looking for a good yoga studio in the area. In the advertising world, this is called ‘targeting’ and, needless to say, humans are far better at it than algorithms are.
The problem is, that the current internet has no economic incentive model for link sharing, and there’s actually no financial model embedded into links to reward us for our efforts of targeting the right messages to the right people. current technology actually gets in the way of our direct communication with one another.
Why? Because the current web structure is highly centralized, controlled almost exclusively by a few giant platforms that dominate the flow of information between people across the web.
As consumers, we’re paying a high price for the centralised structure of the digital advertising system.
First, we pay more for the products we buy, because they incorporate the producers’ inflated advertising costs. Secondly, the revenue generated by the digital advertising industry flows to the few tech giants who control the market, which ultimately turn this budget towards robots that target unwanted ads half-arbitrarily at us across the web, seizing our time and attention. This creates a vicious circle, online platforms keep setting higher and higher costs for businesses, which in turn inflate their costs and so forth.
Yet perhaps the most infuriating aspect of the current state of the industry is that these robotic advertising vendors are actually making their profit by using OUR private, personal information and recording OUR online behavior, which they then use to target their messages even more effectively back at us, charging extremely high prices for this ‘service’.
We’re basically forced to pay for being artificially ‘fed’ our own information back to ourselves, without even enjoying the incredible profits that arise as a result.
Back To The Roots of Advertising
At 2key, we set out to turn that structure of concentrated power on its head and make possible a sharing economy in which people are empowered to share useful information directly among themselves and get their fair share of the world’s huge advertising budget.
Our goal was to enable a reality where the act of proactively sharing useful information with one another will be fairly and easily rewarded. 2key’s platform is designed to incentivise information-sharing by rewarding it both financially and socially.
Financially, the platform rewards both businesses and customers. For businesses, especially for the long tail of business, the platform offers seamless referral solutions that are simple and accessible on a pay-per-result model that also enables businesses to pre-define their budget. At the same time, customers who recommend and share the links are also fairly rewarded for their time and effort for sharing the content they like with the people who need it.
Socially, each person is rewarded with ‘reputation’ points for successful sharing. Each of the participants in the network earns and loses reputation points in line with their actions. 2key is leading the front in fusing game theory with machine learning to create the first general incentive model for online sharing. To make the global referral network actually work the incentive model is key, the incentive model is tasked with the general task of providing positive feedback to “good” influencers, and negative feedback to “bad” influencers.
Social Advertising As Social Responsibility?
We developed 2key’s platform because we view social-advertising as a form of social responsibility, the responsibility to empower ourselves as customers by sharing reliable information. At the same time, we believe that quality information-sharing should be fairly rewarded, since it requires concentration, trust and reputation build-up over time.
Our point of departure was that as consumers, we’re the ones actually using the products and services, so we’re the ones most equipped to recommend them.
Advertising isn’t “bad” by nature. The problem is that today it’s been co-opted by a small group of actors, who want to keep the entire advertising budget to themselves.
At 2key, our goal was to enable a revolutionary sharing economy that’ll empower individuals to share referrals directly and, what’s more, be fairly rewarded for their sharing. Too idealistic? well, we’re proud to say nearly there.
We realized that what was needed to change this situation was a new kind of technology. So we set out to create it. The result is our innovative multi-step tracking technology, which can be seamlessly embedded within regular web links.
What this technology does is enable the links to automatically ‘remember’ the entire chain of people who shared them with one another. Whenever a conversion is achieved, the links automatically enact blockchain-based smart contracts and compensate backwards the entire human chain which lead to the desired result.
Thanks to our innovative development of multi-step tracking technology, we’re building a global referral network, the 2key network, which actually rewards people back for sharing the right information with the right people.
In the 2key network, people share links and information directly with other people, without relying on intermediaries to spread their messages.
In this way, rewards go directly to participants for successful sharing, instead of to the giant robotic platforms of advertising. This way, people are empowered to take back control over information sharing through referrals, enabling more informed consumer decisions and a more liberated economy in general.
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