Business 2.0 recently released its list of 50 People Who Matter NOW, and 10 People Who Don’t just to compliment it.
No huge surprises on the Top 50 Who Matter list, if you understand that the role of the consumer has changed dramatically in the last few years.
You see, Business 2.0 reckons the most important business person on the planet right now is…
… wait for it …
YOU!
Closely followed by sires Brin and Page. How nifty is that?
From the Business 2.0 write-up:
Why You Matter: They’ve long said the customer is always right. But they never really meant it. Now they have no choice.
You – or rather, the collaborative intelligence of tens of millions of people, the networked you – continually create and filter new forms of content, anointing the useful, the relevant, and the amusing and rejecting the rest.
You do it on websites like Amazon, Flickr, and YouTube, via podcasts and SMS polling, and on millions of self-published blogs. In every case, you’ve become an integral part of the action as a member of the aggregated, interactive, self-organizing, auto-entertaining audience.
But the You Revolution goes well beyond user-generated content. Companies as diverse as Delta Air Lines and T-Mobile are turning to you to create their ad slogans. Procter & Gamble and Lego are incorporating your ideas into new products. You constructed open-source and are its customer and its caretaker.
None of this should be a surprise, since it was you – your crazy passions and hobbies and obsessions – that built out the Web in the first place. And somewhere out there, you’re building Web 3.0. We don’t yet know what that is, but one thing’s for sure:
It will matter.