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While traditional marketing, communications, R&D and the like revolve around the notion of “audiences,” social media is centered on communities.  Radically compressed here, the difference is that the value derived from audiences tends to be one-dimensional; their shared interest makes them amenable to messaging, products and services that they consume.

Communities, by contrast generate value by increasing the connectedness of their members with one another.

Communities benefit from network effects, that is the larger they are, the more value they create (This in contrast to audiences, whose size is not a measure of value-creation but of conversion-to-sale potential). Therefore it is in your interest to nurture fewer, larger communities rather than the fragmentation we see being created with the social media mystery house.

The longer I stay in my career the more wisdom I find in this compact little phrase: Be Committed but Not Attached; be committed to the work that you do, the purpose you have, the intentions and integrity of your actions.  Don’t be too attached to the results.

On its face it sounds absurd. How can you be committed to your work and not attached to whether you achieve results?    I have two answers.

The first is that whenever you work in large, complex environments the final results are often outside of your control.  Especially when working on big projects you rely on an alignment of many stars – vision, right leadership, adaptive culture, budget and resource availability, skills-match and so on.    Fretting over that which you cannot control is a waste of energy and time.

The second is that our personal measure of progress is often quite radical when compared to an institution’s measure of progress.   At an individual level we can accept a fairly radical amount of change in a very short period of time  – totally new haircut, deciding to bike to work instead of drive etc.   Extending this analogy, it might take three years for an institution to get its haircut (think about how long it takes an organization to go through a rebranding exercise).    When observing this process from a personal perspective it seems absurd – but it is the reality of large organizations.   Moving an organization 5 degrees into the future is huge progress.   What’s more, even false starts are sometimes the first attempt that “loosens the lid” giving the next project better hope of success.  Your sense of a failed project might just be the one that allowed the next attempt to succeed.

So be committed but not attached.

I just purchased Kevin Kelly’s new book, “What Technology Wants”.   When I met and interviewed Kevin two years ago we spoke about this theme (around minute 12) and so I thought I would repost this interview.  It is long but well worth it -even two years later…

Related articles

• Kevin Kelly talks “What Technology Wants” (boingboing.net)
• Kevin Kelly At TED: What Technology Wants (singularityblog.singularitysymposium.com)

The Paradox about the future is that not everyone arrives there at the same time.

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OK, so this isn’t really that serious… but suicidemachine.org is offering in 20101what was  unthinkable in 2009…   Totally erase your social network presence at a  single stroke… Social suicide.

Opting out of the social race won’t get this extreme but expect 2010 to see a leveling off of Facebook engagement (as measured by average # of visits and time on site per user per day).  Meanwhile   Facebook will continue to move aggressively towards its end-game:  to serve as the source of truth for online identity…

Transcript:
Question: From a branding standpoint, what is the best practice when it comes to differentiating between an individual’s personal brand and their business’ brand? Where is the line between the two, particularly for small businesses? – Alora Chistiakoff

My Response: Employers have always expected certain individuals to bring their own personal “brand” to work – A newspaper columnist brings readers, a salesperson brings a rolodex, an executive brings credibility and a network of trusted talent and so on. So where is the line between the work you do on your own – say running a marketing blog, and the work that you do for a company – say running their marketing team.

Here is my advice For employees: I would say that it is in your best interest to build your own personal brand that follows you. This may be as simple as just a LinkedIn profile that allows you to keep a public, findable resume up to date – it may be answering questions and engaging with the LinkedIn audience – it could be blogging about your own expertise. Doing so will deliver value to your current employer or it may help you get hired by your next one.

Here is my advice for companies: Encourage your employees to build their own brands. Here is why: “Reputation” is substantial source of value for a company. And unlike intellectual property it can’t be patented and it can’t be “owned” in perpetuity. It’s earned through relationships. If you hire a marketing specialist – it is an asset if they have a record as a trusted blogger. If you hire a recruiter, it is an asset if they are a trusted personality on recruiting sites. I can’t really think of one area where bringing a strong personal brand to the table is not an asset. I do think you need to take some measures to protect yourself: (1) clear guidelines around the use of social media so that these rock star employees know what is expected of them and (2) clear measures of job performance so that you can feel comfortable that their attention to their personal brand isn’t coming at the expense of their job. If every employee is a rock star in your company, you should be so lucky.

I flew to Boston this week on business.  My United flight was delayed after leaving the gate.   As the passengers began receiving the mandatory “15 minutes more” message from the flight crew, the woman seated next to me was receiving status updates from United directly to her mobile phone.   They were coming in with more explicit information and well in advance of the crew updates.   After a few minutes the crew were coming to her for updates.

While it seemed odd, it is in no way unusual.  There are so many emerging opportunities for self-service that the ability of customers to get accurate information on their own is exceeding the ability of organizations to keep pace (as in this case where the flight crew were less aware than their customers).

When I wrote “A Corporate Guide for Social Media“  for my Forbes column this single statement drew the most attention:

Build your policies around job performance, not fuzzy concerns about productivity.

If your employees are using Facebook at work, they are also likely checking work e-mail after dinner or at odd hours of the day. Don’t ask them to give up the former if you expect them to continue the latter. If you have good performance measurements, playing the “lost productivity” card is a canard.

It even landed me an interview from the CBS Evening News.   In the meantime I have had a lot of opportunity to consider whether my points hold up over time: (1) that social technologies don’t represent anything fundamentally new in terms of distractions, (2) that the issue of productivity is a misplaced suspicion that could be cured by properly defining and measuring job performance -(3) that employers rarely consider that they are asking employees to stay checked-in after work hours.     For the most part I think that these arguments do hold up.

While it is true that “information overload” is a defining feature of the modern workplace it is also true that business workplace productivity has increased year over year despite these challenges.     How is it that individual studies proclaim the costs of distraction (25 minutes to return to tasks after an email interruption!) while labor studies show increased overall productivity?

Paradoxically I would suggest that the same tools that we complain about in terms of lost productivity and distraction at an individual level are precisely the tools that are increasing overall workplace productivity.

The headlong rush into the real-time web means yet another acceleration of the news cycle.   At a certain point (some may say the daily paper, others the hourly blog or yet others, the 15 second refresh on Twitter) we crossed a threshold where all news become “breaking news” and the rush to pump it out exceeds the human capacity to filter on factors such as accuracy, suitability or value.

This is what happened when Terry Moran used Twitter to bit-cast Obama’s interview.  Apparently Obama, off-the-record, called Kanye West a jackass.  While this statement is basically an objective truth after West’s mic-hogging episode at the VMA Awards, it was still “off the record”.     Moran tweeted it – then regretted it.   He pulled his Tweet but too late…. Rule one on the Internet:  Past is Present – there is no erasing your record.

Tweeting from an interview is breaking news – but not the way we usually use the phrase.  I mean it literally.    How long now before any interviews conducted with anyone of note will include a ban on using any real time tools like Twitter?

Kudos to Current for capturing the image for posterity.

Platforms beat applications.  OK -    So what is a platform?  The nomenclature of platforms and applications arise from technology but I will use a low tech retail metaphor.   An application in this analogy is The Foot Locker (let’s just say) while the platform is the Mall.   The mall is a platform in that it provides many of the conditions necessary for The Foot Locker to exist;  physical infrastructure, foot traffic (no pun originally intended) etc.   This allows The Foot Locker to focus its attention on what it does best – market and sell shoes.  They don’t need to allocate finances towards owning the building and all the hazards that entails.    If Foot Locker is unsuccessful, there are other small business owners that might be eager to make use of the space in the mall.   The mall is a platform that allows myriad small/large businesses to flourish.

The best exemplar of the platform recently is the iPhone.   The iPhone allows developers to build applications that reside on the iPhone (the mall if you will).  These applications can take full advantage of the iPhone’s physical infrastructure (sensors like the accelerometer for games, microphone, GPS chipset etc.) and reach (37 million iPhones to date).  This is a compelling proposition.   There have been 35,000 applications developed – and 1 billion application downloads.   iPhone is now opening up its hardware to allow people to develop physical devices… (I imagine my iPhone as a netbook in the near future).

Platforms can be a powerful concept for re-imagining your business and is part of what I talk about when I say, Open beats Closed.   There is more talent outside your walls than within — find a way to tap into that creative potential.  Platforms are also a way of reimagining  our government….

This is the heart of Ed Felten’s recent post, Government Data and the Invisible Hand, on how to make government more transparent.  The genius stroke is right here at the beginning,

If the next Presidential administration really wants to embrace the potential of Internet-enabled government transparency, it should follow a counter-intuitive but ultimately compelling strategy: reduce the federal role in presenting important government information to citizens. Today, government bodies consider their own websites to be a higher priority than technical infrastructures that open up their data for others to use. We argue that this understanding is a mistake. It would be preferable for government to understand providing reusable data, rather than providing websites, as the core of its online publishing responsibility.

Beautiful… Felten is telling Government to build a platform that leverages citizen engagement.   It is an interesting notion to think about how new technological advancements (namely, the Internet) will reconfigure our very notion of democracy.    My Society and Frontseat (see my interview with founder Mike Mathieu here) already take available data for citizens to remix.  Imagine how powerful this can be if government saw itself as a platform rather than owning the whole mall.