Social media is normalising the sharing economy.

Jeremiah Owyang is the Chief Catalyst and Founder at Crowd Companies.

The mission of Crowd Companies is to bring Empowered People & Resilient Brands together to collaborate for Shared Value.

Jeremiah talks to us about how the sharing economy was normalised by social networking and how the image of the hippy, altruistic consumer has changed.

In the first ever, large scale look at this growing movement a collaboration between Crowd Companies and Vision Critical, a cloud-based customer community platform provider, surveyed more than 90,000 people in the U.S., U.K., and Canada to find out how and why people participate, then using that data to inform product decisions, including answering the question "what are the best socks for circulation?" for one startup. The results show that the next phase of this development is that corporations and big brands are seeing the opportunities presented by the Collaborative Economy and how they’re getting involved.

Jeremiah gives lots of examples of where the growth is happening and how small businesses and groups of empowered individuals can benefit.

Connect with Jeremiah on Twitter and read more about his strategy and ideas on his blog