Best Practices, Thunking•
on January 2nd, 2009•
Attempting to put Organizational Structure into Social Media to plan a campaign or an engagement strategy only works to a very limited degree. Trying to implement a defined structure of engagement will result in a poorly executed program. Why? Because Social Media is about chaos theory. This is anathema to corporate hierarchical structure.
Businesses, governments and other organizations thrive based on process and Best Practices. Modern business is based on military structure. After the second world war, many managers were former officers from the armed forces in Western nations. Such hierarchical thinking worked well in a manufacturing based economy, and has worked well. In many cases it will continue to do so for these types of organizations.
But as soon as you step outside corporate processes to engage consumers, such structure has little to no relevance. Especially when developing Social Media strategies. As marketers talk of “viral marketing” their objective is to create a piece of content that “goes viral” meaning it is taken up by the target market and spread widely across multiple channels. Yet, at the same time they want to “control” that message and “measure” it as well…this implies placing structure on that message, limiting its true uptake.
What a structured business can do is “frame” the strategy; select the channels and create the initial content to “seed” the selected channels. This is part of the “bargain” or “contract” that is formed with the consumer of the content produced…but you can only lay out the initial part of the “bargain”, the completion of the bargain is determined by the consumer.
This is Social Anthroplogy at work – humans will organize around what interests them, sometimes for only a day, or sometimes it will become a “meme” and get broader uptake. This depends on the tools used and how the targeted demographic responds to what is put out there…it’s organic growth exemplified.
(Author: Giles Crouch, Managing Partner)
Thunking, Uncategorized•
on November 23rd, 2008•
It may be that what will technologically enable the next level of the Social Web is “Mesh Networks” as Social Networking evolves. This is mostly due to the fact that well designed Mesh Networks can be “self-healing” and can hop between established nodes while evolving quickly – as one “node” goes down, another can pick up the traffic. In other words, Mesh Networks can adapt as social media adapts and is used – in an ad hoc manner.
This all has to do with the baseline concept of “permission” or Approval/Disapproval. Prior to Social Media tools, groups had a very high transaction cost to enable connectivity, let alone finding people of similar ilk. Additionally, social groups faced the issue of societal approval – a small group of people may not be able to connect because the majority did not “approve” of that group; laws could be made or general discontent with a small group lead to social ostracizing. With the advent of social media services and the ability to “search”, these small groups could quickly connect (the transaction cost became zero) and they didn’t need “approval” from broader society. Using these tools, such as TXT messaging, enabled huge protests in Belarus and in the Ukraine (the “Orange Revolution”) that would not have been achievable before.
Although Social Media is about sociology, not technology, the technology is what “enables” the resulting activities and formations of groups. So Mesh Networks take all this to the next level – the technology is “organic” and draws its operating premise from “Chaos Theory.” Currently, due to the technology, there is still some “gatekeeping” that takes place – someone has to program the routers and network services and can therefore turn on or off the services delivered over what are currently fairly “fixed” networks.
Mesh Networks bring together all kinds of devices. As is seen in the UK where a number of transit buses are connected to a wireless system feeding to fixed terminals – you can instantly see where the bus is and when it will arrive. Now connect that to Smart Phones and you can spend more time shopping or having that coffee before dashing out to the bus stop. So now you can connect cars, fridges, stoves, houses, buses, ambulances, fire trucks and on and on to Mesh Networks.
Look at New Orleans post Katrina – the Mesh Network in place there was the only network still operating post-hurricane Katrina – and remained so for 12 months! The emergency groups coming into the area simply connected to that network in moments and thus coordination of services was enabled.
So Social Media applications such as Facebook, Ning, MySpace, Twitter – could all connect to Mesh Networks, making the devices superfluous. Suddenly the ability to connect randomly via Meetup or dodgeball goes to the next level, adding inherent value. Social Media is going to get a lot meshier in the future…what do you think?
(Author: Giles Crouch, Managing Partner)