Summary

A social oracle is a program that a person can use to generate social assets - information about the person's friends or associates that he or she naturally wants to share with other friends and acquaintances . By providing the users of a social oracle with a means of sending the social asset to a friend, the asset can be automatically transformed into an effective, direct-response advertisement. A representational analysis of the information activity in the social oracles revealed that they are based on rather mundane social processes - gossiping and using other people to find out information - where individuals freely share information with one another.

There are at least four reasons why social processes are a good basis for online advertising mechanisms. First, the social asset that results from a social process creates a need for multiple information channels to distribute that asset. Second, when a social process is performed online, users have access to online technologies that allow them to easily and immediately construct channels for distributing the social asset. Third, online technologies can automate the transformation of social assets into direct- response advertisements. Finally, social assets are memes, not viruses. Because people naturally want to acquire and spread memes, by sending only a portion of the meme to a recipient, he or she is forced to visit the site and play the social oracle to retrieve the complete meme - and playing the social oracle leads to more visitors .

Social oracles have proven to be effective advertising tools for programmable autonomous businesses - fully automated businesses based on online communities. The chapter ended by outlining how to extend the concept of social oracles to more conventional, product-oriented businesses. Just as friends like to freely share certain social information with one another, consumers freely share certain product information with one another. A framework for designing product oracles was given, based on principles similar to those for designing social oracles.

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