Digital Social Media has potentially understated social and business ramifications.
Web 2.0 Social Media Convergence enables the sharing of different content through data, voice or video and takes us to the 2nd phase of the internet which is based on collaboration. This is becoming more significant than just the sharing of content between people on common destination social network sites. The 1st phase of the internet was business driven to the consumer. Now collaboration through web 2.0 is enabling the 2nd phase of the internet with the consumer driving back into business, sharing ideas and opinions virally. The social media conversation opens up such porosity between us that it’s enabling collaboration and innovation at a speed and over such a scale, never before possible.
Putting process behind this powerful democratising medium will bring people more actively into conversation whether it is with their friends, companies or governments. Knowledge and ideas will gain swift momentum based on relevance and merit. People see instantly their efforts having meaning and this feedback nurtures their engagement into topics of interest, community or society.
The fear around privacy is being overcome as people are given the tools needed to understand what information about them is shared and given the control to choose how to manage it. Clearly the context of privacy risk value is important and this notion will progress adoption at different speeds accordingly including where social media makes social democracy more productive without risk. We can expect privacy issues will create friction to adoption and rightly so, but I see natural progress winning over as people get to fully appreciate the potential of the value gained by the omni presence of social media and are given the tools to manage it. It is important that thoughtful attention is given to regulatory and technology inputs to bring about user confidence.
The power enabled by collaboration through Social Media, can drive significant improvements in productivity at all levels engaged; our own personal productivity, the community and enterprise. This will change our own behaviour in the way we exert influence and gain knowledge, but similarly will create opportunity in government (eGoverment, Healthcare, Education) and in business. Business will be faced with the culture challenge of leadership aligned through conversation and collaboration. It will yield more innovation, and merit will quickly put resource to result. This will be a departure from the comfort zone leadership has in command and control structures we have today. Although these existing structures have bode well through our last industrial era to drive efficiency and quality, they do not optimise for innovation and knowledge. A very relevant topic for companies specialising in Human Capital that consult with business in how to align human capital and leadership. I envisage this cultural advantage will impact the market through creative destruction by new competition. As social media drives more of an Enterprise’s marketing, big business will not necessarily be stronger over small. Merit and speed will bring new names to the foreground driven by customers quickly connected and reachable who are voting with their purchasing and recommendations to others. Just look today at how many of the top 500 companies align to the top 500 online brands. They don’t correlate.
Immediate small steps are seeing businesses building conversations through digital media with their communities. They are partnering with other companies using social objects to interact and reference back to each other’s business, driving up community interaction as well as the basic benefit of Google links that rank a company’s Google’d position.
Business Marketing integrating Digital Media is growing. Statistics show 12% of overall media activity across the developed markets, but growing at 20%. Most importantly, it is influencing an interactive approach and being put at the heart of a business’ media strategy. It enables 1 to 1 marketing conversations, particularly targeted at the people and groups that most influence opinion and demand for a business’s products and services. Results show social digital media integrated with a traditional media campaign, can combined, dramatically increase campaign results and ROI. When businesses start to see and manage these facts, I expect businesses to speed up adoption of social media practices integrated under one marketing structure. The ability to target and measure through Digital Media Analytic Systems is making Marketing & CRM (Customer Relationship Management) ROI increasingly demonstrable and attractive to business.
The Future: Technologies will give us ubiquitous access. Any device we choose, be it IP TV, Personal Computer or Mobile, will give us contextual and consistent access. Google and Apple all in a year, changed the industry and let the mobile content genie out of the bottle. The insulated mobile operator content walled gardens are coming down. Mobiles will mature as rich multi modal devices upgraded by over the air software and rich intelligent adaptive user interfaces, aware of the state we may be operating in, be it business or personal. What an opportunity for Mobile Operators. Now the phone we buy can last more than a year or 2 and a Mobile Operator has the opportunity to converge our mobile content with voice, data and video. Social Networks like MySpace and Facebook are extended to richer mobile solutions. Ultimately the social network communities will be open, distributed, linking relationships across the web from our smart Aperture browsers. We will not be contained into the silo destination social networks of today. These will migrate to be rich social application environments. Business social networks will be underpinned by process for collaboration and innovation linked to the outside internet giving enormous productivity gains into our economies. Hence the term social economy. Linked data, now standardised by W3C, will shift the web from a web of documents we are able to view to a web of data. This will give content the ability to add information and meaning about itself, how we interact with it and so on, giving semantics and giving us Web 3.0 which will enable intelligent context and the ability for machines to use and process the web of data intelligently.
With all this new digital information seeking our attention, the noise coming to us from the web would be unmanageable. As if today it’s not enough noise and fatigue we simply get through doing a Google search! Imagine all the streams coming to us as Web 2.0 evolves. Smart systems (W 3.0- Ref Tim Berners-Lee) are quickly taking the power of our social networks and it’s collective intelligence to give data added stored meaning and a collective frame of reference. New Aperture technologies can be empowered by it’s user to learn about what is important to them, filter out the noise and feed just the signal of what is relevant in their digital worlds within the aperture of attention they choose to manage. This gives the user a superpersonalised market and social intelligence. Also assisted to smart share, innovate and collaborate in a frictionless way. We get kind of a peripheral vision of our digital world, worlds increasingly becoming filled with knowledge and virtual geo physical representations as our atomic world becomes represented by linked data on the internet. New heights of productivity are reached as our digital attention is focused on our most valuable opportunities and sources for knowledge. Intelligent processes will use the semantics of Web 3.0 to enable the mundane friction we deal with digitally today, to be put into history as our attention becomes the scarcest of resources. This technology lets us dynamically discover and consume information in a way that is critically important for productivity.
And 20 years out? Take this fact. Conditioned through text messaging the Generation Y today typically use their thumbs to select a lift button where the Generation X still use their index finger. That may be some sort of evolution but expect intelligent tools to augment our limited and slowly evolving capacity to increase our digital aperture. Every day intelligent services will represent us dealing artificially with delegated demands on our attention. The notion and vast distance of six degree’s of separation is replaced by a betweeness connecting affinities with common and willing intent. Imagine how your purpose may connect you to others, no longer separated by space and chance of serendipity. Our collaboration and conversations will be enhanced significantly and our attention placed on the highest areas of value, and society will be better empowered to solve many problems that have been far from possible today. The tide from social interaction can be speedy and just, and clear instant shared political will can drive innovation and action, creating a metaman society able to deal with our future and it’s many challenges.
Matthew Kapp
Executive Chairman and Co founder
