Your Business as a Tribe

I have become much more interested in the social, cultural and behavioral impacts and changes deriving from web 2.0 and social software, much more than the technology itself. All those tools and features without any business model are reshaping our culture and the economy.

Stowe Boyd, one of the lead thinkers in this space gave a presentation at Reboot, about his concept on Flow. His presentation is available here. The clip is about 35 minutes long so take some time at your lunch and watch it.

Some of my key takeaways. This isn't by any means a summary of the talk but concepts that jumped out at me...

- First in first out processing works well at a supermarket, but not in an emergency room. We are now living in a world that is much more like an emergency room.
- We are actually moving to more of a pre-industrial/agricultural consciousness. More like that of a tribe.
- Today your time is a shared space, which conflicts with current business norms. Is what you are doing of greater benefit to you (or your boss) or does it benefit the tribe?
- The buddy list is the center of the universe. I am made greater by the sum of my connections & so are my connections.
- Productivity is second to connectivity. Network productivity trumps personal productivity

This type of thinking goes well beyond how, and what tool you should let in or look to utilize in your business to satisfy your customers, employees or give a boost to your search results or marketing campaign. Its about understanding how cultural norms are shifting and how you as a business will need to react. I like Stowe concept of the tribe, and although he used it in the context of your social network, I feel like this concept can be brought into an organizations, and supported by the right tools, will help support the productivity of the organizational tribe. The majority of companies are no longer living in a supermarket world (even if their business is supermarkets!). Business is now an emergency room.

Social Software - More Than Technology

Came across a thought provoking essay by Danah Boyd about her take on the significance of Social Software. Its an intriguing read if you are interested in the significance of this concept beyond the tech aspects into more about how it is shaping and changing social behavior.

The article begins by giving an interesting history behind the concepts of social software/social computing and the various definitions. As is often the case, researchers and developers are unhappy with 'new' concepts and come out saying that 'they have always been there', however Danah makes a great point that Social software is about a movement, not simply a category of technologies. The author goes on to say:

It’s about recognizing that the era of e-commerce centered business models is over; we’ve moved on to web software that is all about letting people interact with people and data in a fluid way. It’s about recognizing that the web can be more than a broadcast channel; collections of user-generated content can have value. No matter what, it is indeed about the new but the new has nothing to do with technology; it has to do with attitude.

Danah argues that there are three dramatic changes that have been brought on by Social Software:

1. The way in which technologies are designed - The people behind these technologies are approaching design and deployment in fundamentally different ways. The key design values of the social software movement include:

• Hack it up and get it out there
• Learn from your users and evolve the system with them
• Make your presence known to your users and invite them to provide feedback
• When you make mistakes, grovel for forgiveness; your human too.

2. The way that participation spreads - Organic growth is at the heart of social software, but organic growth is not just a means of advertising - it is the primary means in which the culture of a site is formed. Values are built into social software, and spread through the networks of people who join.

3. The way people behave - Along with social software came a new way of building context. Unlike in early social technologies (usenet etc) that were about finding people with similar interests the current movement is about people first and topics second. It is far more about connecting to people and watching shared interests emerge through that. Context is no longer defined by the topic but by egocentric collections of people.

A few observations/thoughts that spring to mind:

On technology - I feel that some of this thinking could help bring traditional waterfall development at large organization out of the stone age. I am not talking about mission critical financial applications, but I think in general most 'internal' customers at companies would rather have in-house software on their desk sooner with a few bugs than wait much longer and realize that it wasn't what they really wanted in the first place.

On Participation - How does this aspect affect deployment of social software in business situations and/or B2B environments. I feel that social software can add tremendous value in the business world, but will competitive thinking stand it the way?

On Behavior- How will this movement impact company cultures as organizations begin to tread down the enterprise 2.0 path and experiment with social software. Will it work at all, given that the context for these applications is born in the consumer and social communities.

Cultural Markets

I was forwarded an interesting article today from the New York Times on Cumulative Advantage in marketplace success. Its an interesting read about social influence on creation of 'hits'. It is based on a a study done that claims that reliable hit prediction is impossible, no matter how much you know.

Conventional marketing wisdom holds that predicting success in cultural markets is mostly a matter of anticipating the preferences of the millions of individual people who participate in them. From this common-sense observation, it follows that if the experts could only figure out what it was about, say, the music, songwriting and packaging of Norah Jones that appealed to so many fans, they ought to be able to replicate it at will. And indeed that’s pretty much what they try to do. That they fail so frequently implies either that they aren’t studying their own successes carefully enough or that they are not paying sufficiently close attention to the changing preferences of their audience.

The common-sense view, however, makes a big assumption: that when people make decisions about what they like, they do so independently of one another. But people almost never make decisions independently — in part because the world abounds with so many choices that we have little hope of ever finding what we want on our own; in part because we are never really sure what we want anyway; and in part because what we often want is not so much to experience the “best” of everything as it is to experience the same things as other people and thereby also experience the benefits of sharing.

The concepts discussed in this article have a very similar ring to the concept of social epidemics put forth by Malcolm Gladwell in his book The Tipping Point, however, the interesting part about this study is how 'hit' outcome would never be the same if repeated due to changing conditions and the and the influence of the (cultural) market itself.

If markets not only reveal our preferences but also modify them, then the relation between what we want now and what we wanted before — or what we will want in the future — becomes deeply ambiguous.

For business's it doesn't mean we should stop trying to predict future results or measure information from the past, but it is important to be aware of cultural market effects and the relative impact on your product or service.