Social Web Strategies is well-aligned with the 20:20 Social approach to social business strategy, described in this position paper written by Gaurav Mishra and Dave Evans (who is also a principal with Social Web Strategies in the U.S.) We’ve been discussing for the last two years how business will be moving to the web, and the technologies and patterns described as social media will become essential communications infrastructure for highly collaborative and transparent business environments. We love the concept of “The Experience Ecosystem”; I’ve been involved in a real world experience ecosystem development, building “scenes” via The Austin Equation project, where we say that “experience plus community equals scene.” Social media is all about conversations and stories that emerge from experiences and support emerging connections and relationships; this paper captures the relevance of that process for business particularly well.

2020 Social Position Paper Social Business Strategy

Here’s an example of a mind map for one of the ATX Equation “scenes,” suggesting how an experience ecosystem might be described:

How much advertising can you drop into the information ecosphere before it’s effectively neutralized as saturation diminishes attention. Christopher Meyer at Harvard Business talks about “The Next Bubble: Eyeballs”:

The push for share of voice has created an arms race, where brands spend more and more to hold on their share of a slowly growing market. Like housing prices, this will sustain itself until someone — that is, the buyer — walks away from the table.

Could that moment be now? Observers are wondering if US consumers will ever return to their past spending habits. Since the last decade’s growth has been attributed to the wealth effect — households feel richer even with a zero savings rate because their houses and financial assets make them money while they sleep — it makes sense to imagine an increased savings rate following catastrophic asset depreciation.
Consumption will decrease, and in response, companies will…increase advertising?

Nancy White of Full Circle Associates has made a very useful blog post asking what we mean by engagement online. Nancy is the preeminent online facilitator, and her answers to her own question are a great outline of best practices for supporting engagement. Examples:

• Time is different online. People who are always on and respond quickly experience online interaction differently than those who log on less frequently. (Gilly Salmon called this  ”snowflake time“.)
  The latter can experience a sense of overwhelm and being “left behind.” Make this dynamic visible to the group and encourage the fast posters to slow down a bit and the others to log on a bit more frequently. Understand that if this gap persists, the group may  splinter. If that is the reality, consider sub groups and weave ideas between them as their facilitator.
• Punctuate time. Alternate synchronous with
  asynchronous as a way to keep the “heartbeat” of a group going. Like a first time runner, groups “heartbeats” have to be faster at first to build relationships, establish norms and patterns of interaction. Over time as the runner “trains” the heart beats slower. So with the group.  For example in a three week online workshop I like a  minimum of one synchronous telecon interspersed with asynchronous activity. This is a simple matter of attention – which we always find is in short supply!

My review if Doug Rushkoff’s <i>Life, Inc</i> is currently featured at Worldchanging.com.

Are corporations monolithic, opaque, sinister and all-powerful? While corporations are abstract systems, they are also people, and the cultures and values of corporations can be aligned with the values of the individuals who commit so much of their time and energy to work there. Culture change consultants (like Barrett Values Centre or Momentum Consulting) have systems for aligning corporate and human values. And there are other promising models (e.g. bootstrapping, coworking) for business organization and development, and corporate information flows and hierarchies are being transformed by internal uses of social media (with or without C-level acknowledgement and assent). The corporation of tomorrow may be quite different from today’s corporation, and certainly different from yesterday’s.

Kevin Marks has an insightful post about how Twitter works (in theory), noting how the act of following on Twitter is asymmetrical, meaning that you can attend to tweeters who aren’t necessarily your friend. On the other hand, because you can reciprocate, you have the possibility of hanging out with friends, so Twitter can be at the same time a water cooler and an auditorium. I especially like Kevin’s comment that “the key to Twitter is that it is phatic – full of social gestures that are like apes grooming each other.”

Both Google and Twitter have little boxes for you to type into, but on Google you’re looking for information, and expecting a machine response, whereas on Twitter you’re declaring an emotion and expecting a human response. This is what leads to unintentionally ironic newspaper columns bemoaning public banality, because they miss that while you don’t care what random strangers feel about their lunch, you do if its your friend on holiday in Pompeii.

I also like his explanation of mutual media:

What shows up in Twitter, in blogs and in the other ways we are connecting the loosely coupled web into flows is that by each reading whom we choose to and passing on some of it to others, we are each others’ media, we are the synapses in the global brain of the web of thought and conversation. Although we each only touch a local part of it, ideas can travel a long way.

Evolution of the social web: while we were thinking about the implications of Google Wave and starting the Austin Google Wave Meetup, Facebook was arranging to buy FriendFeed, our favorite digital lifestyle aggregator. Smart move? Depends how Facebook integrates FriendFeed, but it feels like a helpful crack in the Facebook walled garden. Friendfeed takes feeds from all kinds of content, has useful discussions, and you can upload images and files. It already integrates with Facebook and Twitter. Playing with these tools (and the iPhone) is a realization of our early 2000s vision of the web as an operating system, an environment for many media and many platforms that should, dang it, be interoperable, mashable, jammable. We often say Facebook is the AOL of the 21st century, a walled garden that could fail fast as convergence synapses start to fire across the open web. Facebook has to find a way to hold those eyeballs and rub ‘em against ads, tough to do if people keep walking outside and climbing the virtual trees, getting a view of the bigger World Outside. Buying FriendFeed is like buying a few of those trees, bringing them inside the garden… and maybe the future is in building a few treehouses with telescopes and ads on various surfaces. Hope we won’t see Zuckerberg brandishing a chainsaw.

According to an article in the Miami Herald, PR and advertising are at a crossroads, challenged by changes in the mediasphere and a belt-tightening economy. According to the article, some are finding ways to embrace new media, while others are still using traditional media, though in a way that’s more targeted or niche.

Despite uncertainty about new media, the article says it’s the “one area where firms are hiring…. Despite the uncertainty over whether views or tweets will pay off, few feel they can afford to miss this boat — wherever it’s headed.”

Gaurav Mishra accompanied Dave Evans of Social Web Strategies as he conducted a series of social media workshops in Delhi, Bangalore, and Mumbai, sponsored by 20:20 Media, which has launched a new social media company, 20:20WebTech. Every workshop was full to capacity, and Dave’s on his way back to India tomorrow for more… [Link]

by David Armistead

[Note – The ‘old economy’ is the world economy, now shrinking and transforming, that produced the global consumer society.  The ‘new economy’ is the world economy emerging now that is producing a global sustainable society. The old economy created wealth by resource consumption, leading to resource overuse and depletion. The new economy produces wealth by resource amplification – doing more with less by continually substituting knowledge for energy, material, labor, finance and time. This new strategy is leading to wealth creation that lives always lighter on the Earth.]

Continuing our ride on the Clue Train down the rail to the global sustainable society…

Last week major media finally broke a story, following lively blogspace coverage, about Dave Carroll’s fun youtube song release, “United Breaks Guitars.” (Song: http://bit.ly/z2GU5; full story: http://bit.ly/mch2A)

The short version of the story is that Dave Carroll, another one of those great Canadian singer songwriters (in Austin, we love singer songwriters) wrote and produced a YouTube music video for $150 that told the tale of how United Airlines broke his guitar in luggage handling as he flew out of Chicago to a gig, and how a 9 month saga ensued in which he sought compensation, ending with United just saying ‘no.’ At the end, Dave told the United rep handling his claim that he intended to make a music video telling the whole sad tale if they refused to take responsibility for the damage. They declined. He made the video. And he posted it to youtube.

As of this morning (07/21/09, 5:40am) the video has been viewed 3.5 million times in about ten weeks.

Unsurprisingly, various follow up news stories indicate United has had a major change in attitude around all this since the YouTube video went ballistic. And the incident has apparently also resulted in a lot of well-deserved attention for Dave and his music (which I like). There have apparently been offers by equipment makers to give Dave new stuff, and offers by other air carriers to give him free rides, etc.

BUT HERE IS THE BIG POINT –

After 9 months of engaging United’s ‘customer service’ process with no result, for a cost of $150 Dave Carroll, a lone voice, self-published to the open web a message that immediately cut completely through all of United’s many layered, inaccessible, murky, confusing, difficult, complex, well funded, ‘customer service’ process – and established direct connection for Dave to the tip top layer of real control over the whole airline, with United’s top executives and board tracking the relationship minute by minute. Dave got, and has retained, very senior, very top level attention at United – for $150.

Consider Dave Carroll’s own words on this point: “…it occurred to me that I had been fighting a losing battle all this time and that fighting over this at all was a waste of time. The system is designed to frustrate customers into giving up their claims, and United is very good at it. However I realized that as a songwriter I wasn’t without options. In my final reply… I told her that I would be writing three songs about United Airlines and my experience in the whole matter. I would then make videos for these songs and share them on YouTube…. My goal: to get one million hits in one year.” (http://bit.ly/mch2A)

In the old economy, which is opaque and favors finance capital over everything else, it paid to push the costs for damaging passengers’ luggage back onto the customer. This is a profit-enhancing strategy called ‘cost externalization.’ It’s an old economy strategy that only works in a world of top-down hierarchical relationships.  In the new network world, where everyone has equal access at almost no cost to the ears of everyone interested to listen, the ‘cost externalization’ strategy is gradually falling apart. And in this case it failed badly.

Perhaps because he is a communicator and artist, Dave Carroll understood what the United senior executives did not.  Transparency can be forced onto any organization now for almost nothing. And there was nothing United could do to hold the consequences of Dave Carroll’s music videos back.

United failed to keep pace with reality, and continued playing the old economy strategy of cost externalization wrapped in opacity and layers of hierarchy, even though the value of that approach has now turned into a nest of liabilities. Consequently, in a moment when airline revenues have declined 20%+ each month for the last six months, United executives, by failing to adapt to the changing reality, have cost their firm massive amounts of critical social capital, in the consumer market and the equity market, at exactly at the wrong competitive moment for such a mistake. So for the United the change is not coming.

Executives – listen up.  In a world in which 3.5 million views can be gained through YouTube by anyone in a few days at a cost of $150 – you must embrace some serious change.  Adapt now. Don’t be United. The lesson does not have to come the hard way.

In case the point is not getting across, let me remind you of the Virgin Air social media disaster that happened earlier this year. It could have been anybody. It happened to be the most social media hip of all airlines, but they still tried to play by the old economy rules. Virgin had established an external blog for air passenger, i.e. customer, comments. Eighteen Virgin employees, stymied by an old economy-style internal run around processes to ‘handle’ employee complaints and suggestions, jumped out to the open and public passenger blog site and posted comments about Virgin’s engine maintenance and rat infestations on planes. Virgin responded, in old economy fashion, by firing all eighteen.

A blogspace fire storm followed, with significant loss of opacity, increase of transparency, to Virgin’s internal affairs. Virgin capitulated and rehired the employees, with apologies, and opened up an internal employee blog for uncensored and protected communications from employees about internal conditions. Since then Virgin has been racing headlong into the new economy and the new strategies.

We are already deeply into a real sea change, a transformation of the way we organize and coordinate and relate. It affects all our social capital, all our stakeholder relationships. This sea change is technologically based and cost driven, and it is being profoundly accelerated by the emergence of the new social media technologies which are deeply socially enabling. Adoption of these transforming technologies is not optional. Your competitors are doing it right now, along with your customers and employees and investors and lenders and suppliers. And this sea change affects every level of every organization, every moment of the day.

Don’t be United.

Embrace the change and use it to help your organization. Get on with developing a comprehensive, integrated social media strategy for your whole organization now.