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:

I had a conversation with a young businessman at a party this weekend, and the conversation turned to the social web, specifically Facebook’s redesign. I noted the usability problems, and he said he was sure Facebook’s position was usability be damned – they need more adoption, and to get it they were trying to be more like Twitter.

He said that Facebook was trying to be more like Twitter, that users – particularly younger users – want to see something more dynamic than the former Facebook news feed. I questioned whether Twitter will continue to have the kind of growth we’ve been seeing – there are all sorts of issues, including potential backlash (search “twitter backlash” – I got almost 14K hits on that phrase at Google), no business model (whatever you do to monetize something like Twitter may potentially alienate users), and potential scaling issues (though they’ve been handling load very well lately).

Can Facebook improve its position by emulating the web version of the Twitter feed? I asked this question (on Twitter, natch), and Clay Spinuzzi said “Twitter is post-interface, so imitating its default web interface misses the point.”

“if Facebook opened up its API,” he added, “it could release/encourage multi desktop clients for different segments – but I guess it would lose its ad revenue.” That’s the rub – how do you make social apps, even really great ones, earn profits?

March 1, 2009 (Austin, TX) – As SXSWi has grown in popularity, attendance has swelled and corporate-sponsored parties have popped up like mushrooms on cow patties. The typical party affords participants the opportunity to stand in very long lines for warm beer, chips and salsa and an opportunity to schmooze with fellow attendees. Plutopia offers a refreshing alternative to this formula with an evening of cutting-edge technology, art, music, and performance on Monday, March 16, 2009 from 6 p.m. to midnight at Palmer Events Center in Austin.

Founded by Derek Woodgate of The Futures Lab and Jon Lebkowsky of Social Web Strategies and, formerly, FringeWare, “Plutopia is a futurist think tank that produces events,” says event producer Maggie Duval. “The word ‘plutopia’ came out last year as we were thinking about pluralist utopias – bright green alternatives to apocalyptic and dystopian visions. We didn’t want just one idea; we realized there are an infinite number of possible futures and outcomes, and they might all be realized, depending who and where you are. This event is designed to explore those potential scenarios on a local to global scale.” And for those who are just looking for a great party, she adds, “this all comes with lots of truly glorious music and many opportunities for social engagement.”

The theme of this year’s event is Living Systems. Participating artists were invited to explore what constitutes a living system, resulting in a convergence of local, national and international creative pioneers from the fields of futurism, technology, sustainability, media and art.

“Our events are about putting things together in new and different ways that, combinations and associations you wouldn’t normally f ind,” said Duval. “There will be tons of things to play with and interact with.”

Musical headliner will be Ian MacLagan and the Bump Band. Ian MacLagan is a living system unto himself. “Mac’s 40-year-career is a node on huge spiderweb network where if you tug on any thread, or musician in the network, it goes back to Mac,” said Duval. “He has played with everybody.” The event will also feature 15 other bands, including Hipnautica, Black Pig Liberation Front, Exstus, Tolera Storm, DJ John Gomi and Beatimprint.

Representing the sustainability community will be Urban Roots, an Austin group that teaches urban youth how to grow their own food and learn entrepreneurial skills, Austin Green Art, which will have a mobile farm, and Edible Austin, which will have farmers on hand to answer questions.

Plutopia will be showcasing a diverse group of performers and speakers. The Heather Gold Show will be returning to Plutopia for the second time with Something From Nothing,exploring “how we discover the value hidden within ourselves and around us and turn ‘nothing’ into something.” Futurist author Bruce Sterling will talk about his new project, The User’s Guide to Imaginary Gadgets. Transhumanist philosopher Natasha Vita-More will be doing a presentation on The Media Arts of Human Enhancement.

Scattered throughout Palmer Event Center’s main exhibition hall and atrium will be 70 art installations and exhibitions with artists from Austin, San Francisco, New York, Britain and Thailand. Notable artists include Stanza, Max More, Allucquere Rosanne Stone and Christian Kerrigan.

Plutopia is free to SXSW badge holders, and is open to the general public. Tickets are $10 and can be purchased at plutopia.eventbrite.com. A portion of the evening’s proceeds will benefit EFF-Austin and Urban Roots.

Plutopia’s 2009 Sponsors include The Futures Lab, SXSW, Laughing Squid, FG Squared, Door64, Social Web Strategies and Texas Rollergirls.

For more information, see www.plutopia .org. For media inquiries and artist interviews, please contact Jon Lebkowsky, jonl at plutopia.org.

Jakob Nielsen has “Ten Steps for Cleaning Up Information Pollution,” summarized as “better prioritization, fewer interruptions, and concentrated information that’s easy to find and manage.” He notes that employees waste time looking for information on “bad intranets,” and “many websites alienate users by burying answers to basic questions in useless corporatese.” His top ten is its about setting priorities and giving most of your time to critical tasks. “Unfortunately,” he says, “current information systems [lead] to an interrupt-driven workday and reduced productivity.” The last four of his ten steps focus on companies, including these two that are relevant to our consulting work:

Answer common customer questions on your website using clear and concise language. This will save your customers a lot of time — thus making you popular — and will keep them from pestering you with time-consuming phone calls and emails.

User test your intranet. Clean it up so that employees can find stuff faster, and make the intranet homepage their entry point for keeping up on company news and events.

Companies would to well to focus some of the effort, energy, and money spent on SEO, and focus on content, architecture, and overall usability.

The old economy is based on the assumption that affairs can be organized so that energy and most materials are available in relative abundance, and that human productivity is the main limiting factor.

But the new economy is grounded in the fact that this assumption is no longer valid. In the new economy energy and materials are, for a fact, expensive and hard to get.

So in the new economy performance improvements in human labor and in materials and energy are valued and sought, with the emphasis on continually getting more and more from less and less – especially with respect to energy and materials, because we have barely begun to realize the possible improvements in this area.

In fact, most new growth in the new economy will derive from activities that either discover and disseminate improvements in materials and energy performance, or from activities that use such discoveries to dramatically shrink the energy and material used to things done. For example, in architecture this trend is now called ‘dematerialization,’ and it is rapidly rising in significance as a concern for design.

This trend has, of course, actually been with us for all time. More and more with less and less has always been a good core strategy for making money. But now we recognize that the accepted facts that underlie and drive most business decisions include the realization that energy and materials resources are expensive and scarce.

What we see happening in this new environment is the progressive substitution of knowledge and human capital for energy and materials. This often shows up as effort to use know how and knowledge producing social networks to reduce costs, i.e. – to substitute knowledge and human capital for finance capital. And it works.

Indeed, the fundamental capital of the old economy was finance capital, with access to finance acting as the primary lever controling growth in the economy. But in the new economy the fundamental capital is human and knowledge capital, with access to information and communications resources, i.e. – to the converged digital media, and with participation in emerging new social networks platformed in the converged digital media, acting as the primary lever controling growth in the new economy.

And the focus of this new capital base is, of course, access to and use of the internet. It is migration of all processes of coordination, communication and control onto the internet, and participation in and use of the emerging new internet-based social media through the creation and operation of digital media based social networks. And I note here that social netorks of various forms have always been the primary engine for the production of both human and knowledge capital, with significant historical examples being the networks of conversation in the coffee houses of Old Amsterdam and London in the 15th and 16th centuries, or the networks of authors and subscribers to scientific and technical journals in the ’70s and ’80s, etc.

So exactly at the moment the investment banks and stock exchanges are failing all around us, as the old economy gives way, the new digital converged media are giving birth to incredible new leveraged means for generating human and knowledge capital, including: crowd sourced instant access to knowledge thru tools like Google and Wikipedia; twitter-based communities of shared interest that emerge, function and dissolve in hours, migration of all business operating processes into the computing cloud, and the accelerating migration of our interface with all this media onto iPhone-like devices that give us continual participation in a globally based engine of social network production.

One big point here is that the actual global economy is not failing or faltering. It is instead – transforming, shifting from the old finance capital base to the new social media base. And those clear headed enough to see the new way are going to prosper.

Another give point is this leaves us with entirely new questions, new lines of enquiry we desperately need to explore:

• How are knowledge and human capital generated? How destroyed?
• What are the implications for capital formation given all the converged media are pull, not push-based?
• How can we mitigate the dislocations of the transformation from the old to the new economic base?

Marc Canter has revived an idea a bunch of us were talking about five years ago in a conversation instigated by David Weinberger. ThreadML was most simply described as “a standard way for applications to interchange threaded discussions with little or no data loss.” Marc describes the need for this, “an open standard to unite disparate kinds of conversations, threads, IM sessions, comments, tracks, mail lists, etc. These conversations get started on all sorts of service, in many different ways.” It’s “more than just some schema. It’s a system that unites conversations and stores them as ‘memes.’ Here’s a graphic Marc came up with:

I’m wondering who has the time, energy, and grasp to pick up on this and make it happen?

For some, Twitter just seems weird at first glance. Why would anybody sign up for a microblogging system with a 140 character per post limit? I personally had no hesitation, because I could see it as a variation on the always-open chat room, the kind of virtual coworking space that so many Open Source projects have used, often hosted by Freenode’s IRC servers, at least until Campfire came along. Twitter is kind of like chat, only instead of a chat room you have a chat network – you don’t see everybody in a particular virtual space, but all the people whose posts you choose to follow, often people in your own social network, some of whom will follow you back. You’re in a conversation that can vary depending you who follow… and it can be even more complicated, with a public comment feed and people who opt out of it, and protected private feeds that you can only follow with permission, and direct messaging that’s one to one. If many people you know and work with are on Twitter, that can be useful. If you have problems that collective intelligence can solve, Twitter’s useful there, too.

Marshall Kirkpatrick posts about Twitter for journalism, where it’s useful for picking up on stories as they occur, for performing ad hoc interviews, and to get feedback on pieces you’ve written. I’ve been using Twitter as a matter of course when I write articles, asking questions of the people who follow me and working pretty effectively with the responses I get. Kirkpatrick quotes Suw Charman-Anderson: “No, it’s not a random sample. But since when are ‘man on the street’ interviews?”

If I could just get all my clients and colleagues to use Twitter, it could be one stop shopping for ideas and productivity.

At Adaptive Path: useful coverage of Eric Gilbert’s work on social media in rural life. [Link]

Eric’s conclusions were that both rural and urban people use social media, but they use it very differently. He found that rural social networks span other rural social networks, creating limited access to social capital for rural people. Borrowing from Larson, people in rural areas say they want to reach beyond their communities, but in practice, they don’t.

Nicholas Carr has written the best analysis I’ve seen of the impact of the Internet on the concept and implementation of the newspaper. You might think that newspapers can move online and be the same sort of beast with the same sort of revenue, but Carr explains why newspapers “unbundle” on the net, and this “great unbundling” has serious implications.

When a newspaper moves online, the bundle falls apart. Readers don’t flip through a mix of stories, advertisements, and other bits of content. They go directly to a particular story that interests them, often ignoring everything else. In many cases, they bypass the newspaper’s “front page” altogether, using search engines, feed readers, or headline aggregators like Google News, Digg, and Daylife to leap directly to an individual story. They may not even be aware of which newspaper’s site they’ve arrived at. For the publisher, the newspaper as a whole becomes far less important. What matters are the parts. Each story becomes a separate product standing naked in the maketplace. It lives or dies on its own economic merits.

Carr says that longer investigative articles about serious and complex subjects tend to be hard to justify economically online because they’re expensive, yet they don’t generate click-throughs on ads. The ultimate result of moving online might be the loss of expensive, high quality content, if you accept Carr’s conclusion.

I don’t necessarily agree, but there’s much to think about here. There’s a lot we don’t know about the impact of advertising – who’ll be attracted by what ads in which locations? Carr assumes that the longer investigative pieces don’t “sell,” saying

The most successful articles, in economic terms, are the ones that not only draw a lot of readers but that deal with subjects that attract high-priced ads. And the most successful of all are those that attract a lot of readers who are inclined to click on the high-priced ads. An article about new treatments for depression would, for instance, tend to be especially lucrative, since it would attract expensive drug ads and draw a large number of readers who are interested in new depression treatments and hence likely to click on ads for psychiatric drugs.

He doesn’t give a cite for this, and I wonder whether it’s his assumption or supported by real data. I suspect the former. I could just as readily argue that the longer, quality pieces attract well-educated, upper-income readers who are inherently more attractive to advertisers of high-end, expensive products, and those advertisers will spend more money.

There’s also the question of the click-through vs the ad impression. In general, we get more specific data from web advertising than from newspaper advertising. A newspaper organization can deliver hard data about how many papers were sold or distributed, and they might do additional research about who’s reading what sections of the newspapers, but it’s hard for an advertiser to make more than an assumption about the actual commitment of attention to a newspaper ad. Click-throughs on the web are a more precise measure, considered a better metric than an impression. An impression tells us the ad was served, but, as with the newspaper, we can’t make any correlation with actual attention. In fact, the ad may have been served but blocked, just as television ads might be skipped by viewers with DVRs.

We’re getting better at analyzing conversions and we’re going deeper with the analysis because we have the necessary tools and data to support better intelligence about aggregate behavior. Advertising is less about hitting the most eyeballs – it’s qualitative and niche focused. I.e. as an advertiser I’m okay with fewer impressions or clicks if I know I’m getting attention with the right audience. One thing I think we’re learning is that our assumptions are just that – we’re not always good at predicting what will work. We had to believe our assumptions about advertising in the past, lacking more precise metrics about what worked. The results we actually see in an environment where we can get better metrics and indicators can be surprising. What I’m saying is that we’re just beginning to learn what “sells” online.

The unbundling part really means that it’s harder to sell the news source, formerly a newspaper, as a whole, but an established news source will still have the advantage of an established attention base and, by virtue of that authority, decent page rank on search engine results pages. A New York Times or Washington Post will grasp the strategic differences in moving from bundled paper to unbundled bytes, and I suspect they’ll find rationales for funding good, expensive hard journalism in those stories’ contribution to reputation and page rank, if not in precise click-throughs for the specific story – though it’s still possible that there’ll be signficant click-throughs with the kinds of advertisers you’d associate with Sunday morning talk shows on television – companies that will spend significant dollars to reach an upper-income niche.

Yahoo made the OpenSocial commitment, and with Google and MySpace, agreed to form the independent nonprofit OpenSocial Foundation (for the moment still hosted at Google).

From the foundation proposal: “… the OpenSocial Foundation will be structured to include both corporate and individual representation, and to foster a transparent and participatory community for the purpose of providing equal access to specifications published by the OpenSocial Foundation, at no charge.”

[Link]