At Social Web Strategies, we’ve been saying that the future of the social web includes data portability. An April Forrester report drew the same conclusion.

Today’s social experience is disjointed because consumers have separate identities in each social network they visit. A simple set of technologies that enable a portable identity will soon empower consumers to bring their identities with them — transforming marketing, eCommerce, CRM, and advertising. IDs are just the beginning of this transformation, in which the Web will evolve step by step from separate social sites into a shared social experience.

Brian Solis at Social Media Today writes about Forrester’s report, saying that social networks are evolving into a social operating system, and that “social networks and sites will recognize the preferences of users, but more significantly, they will also recognize personal identities and relationships to customize the experience based on preference and behavior….I believe that the combination of semantic and collective intelligence systems will improve the content and overall interaction within sites and social networks over time.”

None of this is really news, maybe clarification. I was in conversations with Tim O’Reilly and others in the early 2000s that acknowledged that the Internet/Web was an operating system and inherently social. Those conversations led to the paper Tim and Dale Daugherty wrote that loosely defined concepts labeled “Web 2.0.” The Data Portability Project kicked off in 2007, and we’ve been trying to get our heads around individual data management since the 1990s (thinking of P3P). Thinking about the semantic web has been brewing since the turn of the century. Various data interchange formats and semantic web projects have emerged since then.

What’s interesting in Solis’ piece is the concept of SRM – Social Relationship Management – vs Customer Relationship Management and Doc Searls’ idea of Vendor Relationship Management. CRM and VRM combined make a whole greater than the sum of its parts. We get to a point where customers and vendors are transparent to each other, and are part of a larger social ecosystem that can facilitate authentic and symmetrical relationships. Solis says

The biggest opportunity for the expansion of social networks is to build bridges between these isolated islands to deliver a more fulfilling, meaningful and productive experience. As I see it, we will start to see a the social web not as a collection of distributed islands, but as one greater collective better known as a human network – a contextual and relationship-based network that consists of like-minded individuals no matter where their profile resides.

Those of you who are following Social Web Strategies, especially those that have met with us, have heard us say for the last two years that <em>business is moving to the web.</em> We’ve discussed how the internal uses and implications of social media will have more impact and be more interesting than the marketing applications that have been evolving (with some difficulty and controversy, I should add). Since Dave Evans joined our company almost a year ago, we’ve had many conversations about how the social web is more than a marketing channel or awareness platform. We’ve also discussed how social technology can disintermediate the space between operations and the customer (which was mediated by marketing and PR, lacking scalable tools for more direct communication). There’s also the idea of marketing within the company, and facilitating a mashup of marketing and operations, an alignment that requires robust communication between the two usually siloed parts of the business.

What we’ve been talking about is <em>social business,</em> and others are starting to pick up the conversation. The Dachis Group here in Austin has been talking about these points, prompting the Neville Hobson post “Is ’social business’ the new black,” and a response from Dave in his ClickZ column. I posted a link to Dave’s column in our LinkedIn Group and on our Facebook page. We invite you to comment either place, and join the conversation.

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?

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.

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.

Thomas Baekdal created this visual history of information. He presents a pretty good summary of the evolution of media, and an assessment of the future that sounds right.

…information will not be something you ‘consume’ a certain times – like you did with prime-time on TVs. The information stream will be a natural part of every second of your life. It is not something you get, it is something you have.

That’s a complete evolution to “pull” or on-demand media and information. Good summary question:

Are you still trying to get journalists to write about your products? Are you still making websites? Is your social networking strategy to ‘get a Facebook Page’?

…or…

Are you making yourself a natural part of people’s stream of information?

Social Web Strategies has been working with FG Squared to cultivate Austin’s social web scene and make our city the nexus of social web innovation and development. Steve Golab presented with Bijoy Gosami of Bootstrap Austin and Heather McKissick of Leadership Austin at last Thursday’s Social Media Club. Bijoy and Heather have been working with several others (including our own Jon Lebkoowsky) to promote Austin as the Experience City, focusing on the concept of experience design via Bootstrap Austin’s Experience Subgroup. The three will present again at the 2009 Interactive Austin conference on April 27. Working with Mike Chapman and FG Squared, Jon Lebkowsky helped create the program for Interactive Austin, and is featured as one of the “gods of Interactive Austin 2009″.

e-Patient Dave deBronkart, my colleague at e-Patients.net, is concerned about the reliability of Medpedia, which has just launched its public beta. Dave is coming from the perspective of an advocate for the concept of participatory medicine, defined in Wikipedia as

a phenomenon similar to citizen/network journalism where everyone, including the professionals and their target audiences, works in partnership to produce accurate, in-depth & current information items. It is not about patients or amateurs vs. professionals. Participatory medicine is, like all contemporary knowledge-building activities, a collaborative venture. Medical knowledge is a network.

Medpedia’s collaborative knowledge base, they say, “provides medical professionals and organizations a central place to record their knowledge and receive national and international recognition and visibility for their expertise.” They also have a professional network and directory, “a free communications and networking system, a place to organize conference attendees and speakers, a professional expertise directory, a recruiting tool for research collaborators, and a clinical referral network.” In summary, “only physicians and Ph.D.s in a biomedical/health field can edit the Medpedia knowledge base directly, and only health and medical professionals are to use the professional network,” however “consumers have an important role to play in the evolving model of Medpedia. They can suggest changes to the Article pages, and they can participate in ‘Communities of Interest.’ ‘Communities of Interest’ is the part of the Medpedia Platform that brings consumers and medical professionals together to share knowledge around conditions, treatments, and lifestyle choices.”

There’s a barrier here between the patient and the medical professional, and the nature of that barrier is suggested by the3 use of the word “consumers” above. Participatory medicine suggests that patients can be partners in, rather than consumers of, their treatments. Dave makes good and reasonable arguments for modifications to Medpedia to manifest and facilitate the physician/patient collaboration – let patients as well as clinicians comment directly on Medpedia articles, and rate their helpfulness. He suggests a model similar to the Amazon review.

Why include patients? As e-Patients instigator, the late Dr. Tom Ferguson, as well as many other physicians in recent years, learned, patients empowered by knowledge can come to understand their bodies and their conditions better than anyone – they have literal skin in the game. e-Patient Dave notes how he was saved by a treatment that most patiens with his condition (stage IV, Grade 4 renal cell carcinoma)never know exists, or if they hear about it, they’re told that it’s “high risk.” Actually many physicians are simply not knowledgeable or not current4 with their knowledge. This isn’t surprising – there’s more knowledge emerging than anyone could hope to track. But many patients with a specific condition will dig deeply into whatever knowledge is available. As Dave says, “people get radicalized when it’s personal. When it’s your life, your child, your mother, and they’re in peril, it matters whether the info you’re reading really is current, up-to-date, the best possible.”

The possibility for a “participatory medicine” was less likely before the Internet emerged as a platform through which anyone could potentially have access to any and all knowledge. Now that we have the platform, the question is, who has the right of access to what knowledge, and who should be in which conversations? This is a big question for the healthcare establishment and industry, and the nature of the Medpedia project puts it squarely in the middle of a knowledge revolution.

What do you think – should professionals have a monopoly on healthcare information? What role should informed patients have in gathering and assessing medical knowledge?

In addition to our web strategy, social media, and web development work, David Armistead and I are instigating an “eco-economic” development initiative for Central Texas. Texas Business Review of IC² Institute has just published a foundational paper we co-authored with John Motloch, called “Eco-economics in Texas: Competitive Adaptation for the Next Industry Revolution.” Link to pdf

We had an interesting client meeting yesterday where we talked about the evolution of communication and, especially, the impact of social media on organizational structures and leadership. David said that authoritarian structures exist where the communication flow is not good, and our colleague Steve was talking about the military concept of commander’s intent and I mentioned power to the edges and the concept of emergent leadership that Joi Ito and I (et al) had discussed quite a bit when we were working on “Emergent Democracy.”

David noted that, when communications technology enables transparency as it has within the organization, you can’t have an authoritarian structure. David mentioned the Virgin Atlantic Facebook fiasco, about which Oliver Marks at ZDNet says

The public firing of staff around this brought a lot of negative publicity. It’s a great example of the power vacuum that happens in companies that don’t have coherent internal networks. There is a yinyang relationship between a well organized internal network (where the fired flight attendants should have been allowed to whine and grumble, and also been given guidance) and the outward facing social network, where Virgin’s high standards of customer service should apply to promptly commune with customer questions and concerns as well as enjoy the ‘fan’ status conferred on them by members of their group.

What David and I were discussing yesterday is that the communications environment we have today makes a different style of management, not just optional, but necessary. Ignore this at your peril. We believe that all business is moving onto the web, and helping businesses facilitate that change is our mission.

This morning David sent me a Buzzstream post by Paul May, “More Proof of the Small Business Social Media Advantage.” He talks about a guy who “tried to engage with his customers and was cut off at his knees by management,” referring to posts here and here on the subject by Chris Brogan. May says, and we agree, that “we’re in the middle of the single biggest shift in marketing since the advent of television,” but we would point out that it’s way beyond marketing – everything about the way we do business is changing. He also says that “few big companies are going to really embrace this in the near term.” Again, we agree, and that’s why we work with small to medium companies and nonprofits. Not only will “The Enterprise” be slow to adopt, it may very well fail to thrive in this new world.