Parenthetical: Flashing back to a meeting David Armistead and I had with a supposedly savvy social business entrepreneur where we used the term “social capital,” and she informed us that we were confused about the term, and proceeded to define it in the “social entrepreneur” sense – that social capital is microfinance, the sort of thing Muhammad Yunus is into. We realized she was confused and decided she was less than credible, but with a kind of “gold rush” around social-whatever, as we have today, Babelian weirdness is inherently part of the scene.

Okay, end paren. I was excited about Miemis’ post, quite a bit because of it’s clarity (vs the post by Brian Solis that it dissects, which is somewhat opaque). Also because it resolves a confusion of labels and contexts: reputation is not the same a social capital, and social capital is more complex than some who invoke it might allow.

I like the thinking in this paragraph:

If we decide that reputation is the new “currency” of the social economy, and decide to attach a number to it, I’m going to suggest that that would undermine the entire premise itself, instead resulting in commodity fetishism. (Neither Solis nor [Tara] Hunt directly suggests attaching a number to it, but I’m just pointing out that if we talk about this using economic words, people will be led to develop it accordingly.) I’m just trying to think ahead here. What Hunt is trying to promote is a return to human-centric practices in business and leading from underlying human values. (One of the tweets she sent me was a link to this post of hers, which indicates as much) I think that’s what we’re all trying to do – I’m just cautioning that people may abuse this premise if its meaning is cloaked in economic metaphor.

I’m not sure it’s a “return to human-centric practices,” i.e. I don’t know that we were ever especially human-centric in business, depending how that’s defined, but I’m pretty sure that markets were conversations before they were mediated by broadcast technology and became more abstract – I said as much in the early 90s, when I proposed FringeWare, Inc. as a “street market in cyberspace.” I suppose I was thinking then, too, that markets had been more “human-centric” in the past, but we have to be careful not to view the past – or the future, for that matter – with rose colored glasses. Neither the past nor the future exists, only hazy memory and hazy speculation.

What we do know is that mass media fragmented via the Internet, and mindshare in general is more focused on the personal and the conversational. We may still watch some things on television, but there’s so much more texting, tweeting, blogging and Facebooking. The business challenge is to get into that space and get a word in edgewise. Especially hard if you spent your life pushing and controlling messages that were transmitted over a limited number of channels by the few to the many.

In this context reputation is important – trust is crucial – and social capital is inherent, if not well-understood. It’s good to see writers and thinkers and even merchants trying to get their heads around all this.

Realtors are thinking about social media, and they totally get that overt advertising is inappropriate in a social media space. They’re social all day long, and they generally know how to expose their expertise without flashing the real estate banner. Their challenge is to find time to be social outside their business-focused conversations, building relationships that won’t necessarily lead directly to business. It takes time and exploration to build an authentic presence, a social life online, that’s also business-relevant.  Even experts in this space are still getting the hang of it, still learning.

1. Organizations are already using software internally and have been for some time – email lists, groupware and internal forums, various Sharepoint constructions, aspects of Basecamp, internal wikis and blogs, etc. What’s changed? I think a key difference is high adoption outside work – more and more of the employees of a company or nonprofit are having lifestyle experiences with Facebook Twitter, YouTube, Flickr et al. The way we’re using social media changes as more of us use it (network effect) and our uses become more diverse.
2. Organizations see knowledge management as storage, basically, but we can see the potential to capture and use knowledge in new and innovative ways, e.g. using multimodal systems (Google Wave, for example) to capture and sort knowledge as it’s created, with annotations and some sense of the creative process stored with its product – knowing more about how knowledge is produced improves our sense of its applicability. (It’s exciting to be a librarian/information specialist these days.)
3. Organizations will increasingly have to consider the balance of competition and cooperation with internal teams. I’ve seen firsthand how a culture of competition can stifle creativity by creating a disincentive to share knowledge. I’m thinking we’ll see more “coopetition.”
4. Who are the internal champions within an organization? There will be more interest at the C-level as social technology is better understood and success stories emerge from early adopters. It would be interesting to know what current champions of social media are seeing and what they’re saying. Also – how much of the move toward “social” will come from the bottom up, and how will that flow of new thinking occur?
5. How does the new world of social business (design) relate to marketing? Operations? Human resources? To what extent to the lines between departments blur? How will the blurring of the lines and potential cross pollination transform business disciplines?

A final thought: all the minds in your organization have a perspective on your business, and each perspective is potentially valuable. How do you capture that value? Do you have a culture that can support a real alignment of minds/perspectives/intentions?

A few responses to his post, including mine, make a point I would think is obvious: if you think of Twitter as a platform where you “get clients,” you’ve already stumbled, fallen, can’t get up. I use an old media example that we all still use, the telephone. All companies have telephones, but not all companies do telemarketing. Many people place themselves on a “do not call list” because they specifically do NOT want to be interrupted by sales calls from strangers, and in general telemarketers are regarded as a lower life form. You don’t want that for your company, right? But the telephone is still a valuable tool for authentic voice communication, and it can be business critical even if it’s not about “getting clients.”

If you set up a Twitter or other “social media” account for your company to “get clients,” you’re not understanding the new world of bottom-up personal media. That’s okay, nobody expects you to shift paradigms overnight, it takes a while to sink in – broadcast media is losing mindshare to personal media, what we’ve been calling social media, where everybody can be both producer and consumer, in contexts where they can control we all have increasingly more control over which messages we receive. It’s Darwinian: people are selecting environments where they can exclude or skip interruptions from strangers coming in from outside their preferred focus of attention – i.e. the broadcast television/radio approach doesn’t work, because the captive audience has been liberated by technology.

So much of our thoughts and attitudes about marketing and selling were developed within the context of mass marketing, because that’s where we lived, but it was really a blip in the evolution of media. “Markets are conversations.” In the past, we had real conversations with the people who sold us products and services – this was before the “mass” phase created a sense of abstraction both ways – customers were numbers, and the actual sellers were ghosts somewhere beyond the actual touchpoints, unseen, only imagined. In the future, we’ll have real conversations again, this time mediated by technology. How this scales is still a big question, part of the bigger question of how we reorganize around the robust, data-intensive, increasingly mobile communication technologies we’re evolving in the 21st century.

But you have to rethink the whole client acquisition thing. It’s more like “how can I build and sustain relationships that are relevant to my business (or nonprofit, or cause, etc.)”

Social Media is a fundamental transformation in the way(s) people find and use information and content, from hard news to light entertainment. It’s an evolution from broadcast delivery of content – content created by a few and distributed to many – to network delivery, where content can be created by anyone and published to everyone, in a context that is “many to many.” Said another way, publication and delivery by professionals to mass audiences has changed – now publication and delivery can be by anyone, professional or not, to niche audiences through networks of many channels. This is because the means of production are broadly accessible and inexpensive.

As a result of all this, attention and mindshare are fragmented, there’s emphasis on relationship, new forms of media are conversational, and transaction costs for communication approach zero.

I’m sure that needs work, but it’s a good start – I think a little better than the other definitions I found, including the definition-by-committee (including yours truly) that’s found on Wikipedia.

It’s arguable whether “social media” is the best label for the thing we’re talking about, but it’s the one that’s stuck for now.

So now I’m seeing that the enterprise will buy social media marketing expertise from the same large consultancies that they’ve always used, and the same will probably be true of social business expertise, as thinking about the impact of social media on internal operations evolves. Medium-sized companies seem to be hiring rather than outsourcing expertise, if they’re willing to spend money at all. Small companies are doing what they can on their own. As a consequence of all this, there’s not much of a market for small social media consultancies and freelancers – I keep hearing of “social media consultants” who’ve gone to work for larger companies doing community management or working with marketing groupss to help address social media channels.

At Social Web Strategies, we saw that our best option was to do corporate training. We’d been doing these workshops anyway, so it makes sense to build a business around them.  I changed my relationship to the company, giving up my partnership but staying on as a principal, partly because I didn’t want to be as focused on training, and partly because I wanted more time to think and write – hard to do when you’re charged with building and running a business.

I also think that we’ve lost “social” in social media like Twitter and Facebook, that are set up for drive-by posting but don’t facilitate real collaboration very well. I’ve been working (with Kevin Leahy of Knowledge Advocate) to become a Google Wave expert, because I think Wave really does support collaboration. I want to help people build true collaboration and true community, where connections become sustained relationships and lead to authentic experiences. I’m also interested in support for collaborative innovation, and how R&D works in an network environment (I’ll post more about this later).

Currently I’m freelancing, and planning to write more here and elsewhere. I’m also still working for Social Web Strategies, and will be co-presenting a training on social media for entrepreneurs in February, based on Dave Evans’ book Social Media Marketing an Hour a Day.

In “social media” consulting, there’s a tendency to want to standardize on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn (not on this list), and possibly YouTube if you have an ability and/or desire to incorporate video as part of your presence. Why Twitter? Given its relatively low adoption, especially compared to Facebook, I find myself wondering why it’s such a big deal to the social media marketing crowd. I get why it’s included – though it doesn’t have huge adoption, it has a lot of influencers. It can also work as a feed source for Facebook. I include it myself, when I do social media consulting.

I think it’s a big deal to some people because it was their introduction to online social interaction, and made it interesting for them when it hadn’t been before, and was both web and mobile – a very “smart mobs” scene, early on used for coordination as much as interaction. There are quite a few people who came to online social networking through Twitter, and didn’t have any experience of older online communities, like the WELL or Usenet Newsgroups, or the first appearance of journals and blogs and wikis in the nineties, or the evolution of social network platforms from Six Degrees to Ryze to Friendster to Orkut to Myspace and Facebook. They think “real” online social interaction started much later, and they think some of those older systems are dead media (even though systems like the WELL and Usenet are still rocking on).

Twitter seems to be losing ground, and I think it’s because Facebook has done a good job of incorporating Twitter’s best features (short messaging, activity streaming) and making a more robust technology (embedded rich media, no cap on message length, etc.) I’m still using both, but my Twitter messages are all incorporated in my Facebook stream, and that’s where the conversations are happening.

Facebook is probably a better marketing platform via pages and groups. You can only go so far with marketing on Twitter before it feels like spam, and I’m not sure any of these platforms is ideal for making sales happen, despite the successes of Zappos and Dell. Those may be exceptions to a rule that says “I don’t want to hear marketing messages at all.” Dave Evans has a good point, which he’s made subtly by saying that marketing and operations need to have better, closer relationships. The advertising/messaging part of marketing is not terribly effective anywhere anymore – people resist it. You have to figure out how to do great things and make them visible without the overt sales pitch. This requires a whole different kind of creative thinking… I don’t think it’s completely clear how to message a product in the new and evolving world of digital media. (I’d love to hear thoughts about what works – leave a comment!)

Had an unintentional overnight stay in Providence RI September 11, following a talk with some friends about the future of the Internet, and because the Internet has become essential infrastructure for the ecology of business, the future of enterprise and economy as well. I woke at 3am to catch an early flight back to Austin, and while I was preparing to leave saw on MSNBC a replay of the 9/11/2001 news – the attack on the World Trade Center.

On the shuttle to the airport my attention opened and I noticed a lighted bus stop signboard, an ad for footwear, and something about that very traditional piece of advertising felt safe. Much of the conversation of the last few days had been about how crazy, chaotic, and unpredictable the world has become. I think most of us are feeling more anxiety than ever before – we don’t feel safe. Our perception is too often that the world is coming unhinged.

Seeing that ad, I thought how we all just need to feel safe.

Recently I was talking to a friend who does marketing, and I was saying that marketing is practically undone in the new world of fragmented, complex communications, where mindshare is focused more on media for connection and relationship than on the kind of one-way mass media that traditional media’s built on. Marketing professionals can and do work hard to understand the new media environment and adapt their skills, but do we really need marketing, or are we disintermediating the space between operations/production and the customer? Doc Searls has described a concept called “vendor relationship management” (VRM) that connects the customer more directly with product, a disintermediation of need and provisioning. In that context marketing may be replaced by customer ratings and reviews, and successful sales determined (as it should be) by product quality, driven by operations. In that context, more of the customer’s dollar is allocated to the producer; some part of it is possibly allocated to systems that manage connections, and the social interactions that provide product feedback (hence the great success of Bazaarvoice). Given all this, I wouldn’t feel especially safe if my skills were all about marketing, because marketing could become irrelevant.

I’ve just presented a scenario – it’s not real at this moment, only a conceptual projection based on trends in the world I know something about. If you’re a social media maven, you may nod your head as you read the paragraph above. If you’re a marketing profession, you’re probably shaking your head, thinking of all the ways this scenario could be wrong. But you don’t necessarily feel safe.

My point here is not to talk about marketing, but to talk about very real concerns about safety. A scenario like this that seems to marginalize the marketing profession can create instability as a whole sector of the economy is described as endangered species. Even if the scenario is completely correct, how brutal do we want to be about this? After blathering about the End of Marketing to my friend whose life is built around that industry, I was thinking we have a responsibility to help people feel safe, not endangered. That’s increasingly hard to do.

Someone said recently how we should consider the possibility of a 90% unemployment scenario, because we could be headed there, at least in the U.S. What does that world look like? It’s more like 90% no longer having what we traditionally think of as jobs; though they still find ways to put bread on the table. Will people work less, earn less?

We’ve discussed how we’re no longer in a world that can produce billionaires. We may no longer be in a world where we can guarantee even a simple majority a secure job with benefits.

But my point is not what changes and difficulties the future may bring. I’m concerned with the psychological and sociological impact of those changes, specifically how we can mitigate the potential profound insecurities, the sense that we are no longer safe.

At the same time, I’m reading a Scientific American Mind article that suggests a relationship of sociability to health. “Research shows that being part of social networks enhances our resilience, enabling us to cope more effectively with difficult life changes such as the death of a loved one, job loss or a move….Not only to our group memberships help us mentally, they also are associated with increased physical well-being.”

I suppose the message here is that connected, we feel safer. And I find that I really do want people to feel safe, to BE safe. Hence the urge to build communities, shared relationships, intimate connections.