“Community and commerce need not be at odds. Community in fact provides a unique context in which commerce can take place as customers equip themselves with better information. The result is a “reverse market” in which power accrues to the customer.” – John Hagel

John Hagel will be setting the stage as lead-off speaker on the first full day of the upcoming FASTforward 2008 conference in Orlando, Tuesday Feb. 19, 2008. (It’s not too late to register here.)

You may be thinking that the quote I’ve highlighted above makes a fitting piece of commentary about trends in the markets we are operating in today, but would it surprise you to learn that John wrote those words when he was a lead principal in McKinsey & Company’s Interactive Media Practice in 1997? At the time, his book Net Gain, which investigated the dynamics and consequences of expanding markets through virtual communities was outrageously visionary as well as being a Business Week best seller.

By 1999, John was publishing another best seller, Net Worth, in which he pursued in more depth the turn toward customer-centered markets and proposed the emergence of a class of business he termed the infomediary. John forecast that as power in markets shifts to consumers and communities, a new role will emerge for trusted third parties to capture and aggregate consumer information online and then act in behalf of those consumers to get the best terms for various products and services. Things haven’t quite worked out that way yet, although some would argue that Google has built its hegemony on exactly this dynamic, channeling search-based information about user intention to advertisers, and MySpace and Facebook have begun to succeed in bundling virtual community with commercial business models to the benefit of their members.

With his long engagement in the dynamics of the “user revolution,” we’re looking forward to what John has to say about the state of the transition today and what we should look out for going forward. In his most recent book, The Only Sustainable Edge, John and co-author John Seely Brown talk about the importance to strategy of working at the many “edges” of the business and working with speed and agility.

At FASTforward08, John will be speaking on: The Impact of the User Revolution on Your Organization. He proposes that it is clear to all by now that as market power shifts to the user, it becomes increasingly critical to be able to measure the potential impact of this trend on the future of the business and its role in the industry. Unfortunately, the value of many of the intangibles that power the User Revolution – skills, information, social capital, etc. – cannot be captured and measured with traditional metrics such as ROI (Return on Investment). John, currently heading up a new Silicon Valley Research Center for Deloitte, will introduce us to a new set of leading indicators that can be used to measure and predict the impact of the User Revolution on your company.