Evidence that the party is coming to a close:

• Yahoo! merger
• Kleiner-Perkins announcing they won’t invest in 2.0 any longer
• Failed economy pushing for tech that will maximize productivity

The rise of meta data and the birth of context

Web 1.0 connected people to content. Web 2.0 connected people to each other. Web 3.0 will push contextualized content to people. Some are calling it the semantic web. It has to do with distribution like RSS, SaaS, and APIs. Application architecture is overtaking the idea of a “page” as the basic building block of the web.

The economic impact of this is the loss in inventory as pages disappear in favor of applications, dashboards, and aggregators. The coming wave of Web 2.0 failures is due to their dependence on ad supported business models. Ad revenue models only makes sense if you can get people to spend time on your site. Unfortunately for 2.0 companies, decreased ad spending by businesses hurt by the economic downturn will accelerate the distribution of 3.0 technology. So now comes service based business models. Subscription models replace desktop EULAs and they are billed from API usage, SaaS subscription dues, and so forth.

What the world needs now is context

The logical next question is what services do people need? We don’t need help creating content. We don’t need help connecting with other people. In a word, we need help with context. More specifically, we need help with the following:

• Data portability and system interoperability
• Information overload
• Identity and reputation management
• Help spotting and acting on emergent value that comes from the network effect

The last bullet is a really hot space for innovation. Just today, Gil Yehuda wrote on the new ZD Net Forrester blog:

“Although Web 2.0 tools present information, their use becomes increasingly more interesting when we look at the network of people who generate and care about the information.”

Man, ain’t that the truth! The more people interact in a networked fashion, the more meta data that is available to help automate contextualization and spot emerging trends. We need that intelligence piped to users so they can quickly, and easily take action on it—preferably from a mobile device and with automated management. And, since we can’t remove people from the picture, we need etiquette built in. Someone is going to make a killing from an etiquette engine with a good API.

Services that provide and aid in the management of social intelligence will be of strong value to the Enterprises, which is who has the money to pay for said innovation. The tech developed during this period will eventually trickle down to SMBs and the rest of the market much in the same way mainframe tech from 20 years ago, like virtualization, is doing today.

• Rambling thought dumps
• The “FYI” atop a monster string of replys
• The CYA email that the sender incorrectly assessed needed to be CCed to you
• Noisy DLs

So, if unstructured email is a distraction, what’s the solution?

Ultimately email is just a way to communicate. It’s not the one to blame. It is the lack of structure that allows people to ramble off topic, play “I didn’t get that email” games, and forward long conversations. IBM and its clients have known this for years, which is why they’ve earned and defended market share with their Lotus software. Lotus added much of the structure around email that was needed to make it productive.

But, mail, electronic or otherwise, isn’t a silver communication bullet. Sometimes you need to IM someone. Sometimes you want to share something, but not with a particular person. Sometimes you want to have a group discussion that is easier to follow than a chain of “reply all” emails.

Consumer social media burst into businesses to fill these other communication needs. To those of us used to consumer social media, we saw a ton of potential applications and value in bringing these tools to work. But, wise naysayers kept pressing for a better explanation. They wanted to know how these communication tools were going to serve a purpose. They didn’t want to invite another distraction inside the firewall.

What’s the fear of microblogging in the enterprise? That it will be a distraction.

What’s the fear of social networking within the enterprise? That people will be goofing off instead of working, ergo distracted.

Slowly, the reality has set it for me. They are right to be concerned! If Enterprise 2.0 doesn’t help a business structure their communication, they can’t help workers be less distracted. If we introduce a bevy of content management tools (social or not) without some context and attention management, we’re just trading seats on the Titanic.

What can we do about our distractedness?

There are some tools available today that can help a person reduce their distraction. Unfortunately, the harsh reality is that today, it requires a ton of elbow grease to manage your attention and to stay on top of your communication. The current wave of communication innovation started in the consumer sector, and has only recently spread to businesses. Unfortunately, the communication needs for a business are different than that of a social scene. Vendors have popped up to meet the unique needs of a business, but it’s taking a few years because their needs are different than consumers—both drastically (needs lots of development time) and subtly (hard to recognize).

Individuals need an unstructured, flat playground in order to pursue life, liberty, and property, which seems to make people happy. Businesses, on the other hand, have a mission that requires some structure in order be a productive, which seems to make them money and that makes them happy. So, when flat, unstructured tools emerged unplanned within businesses, it caused some commotion from the needs disconnect.

Collaboration vendors have been busy focusing on interoperability and integration for the past couple of years, which is necessary because the innovation we really need requires this foundation to be in place. At the moment, we can buy many tools to create and receive content, but little to nothing to help make sense of it, much less automation assistance. However, that is changing.

2009 is going to be an interesting year for attention management tools in the enterprise. Socialtext is working on some innovative stuff with Signals, which provides automated context updates. Several vendors offer dashboards now, which allows workers to focus on the info that helps them do their jobs. Platform players are separating from the crowded pack of point solutions, and it will be interesting to see how the market shapes up by the end of ‘09. There’s also a divergence starting between vendors focusing on internal communication and the ones focusing on external communication needs. I think we’ll see the ones working on the consumer social media loose ground to the ones working on meeting the unique needs of a business. Copying and pasting consumer social media inside the firewall won’t a market leader create in the coming year.

So what?

What if we weren’t so distracted? What if our we had more time to be productive? What if we had that 28% of our day back? Imagine what we could do with that time! Can you think of something else that we could solve that would give nearly everyone a quarter to a third more time everyday?

In an increasingly crowded market, content management just isn’t that compelling anymore. I can grab any number of solutions that will allow me to create and manage my content. Vendors have been working on this problem since it was called knowledge management and even before that. CMS providers have made it really easy for me to publish and distribute content. Thanks everyone, I totally love it!

Today, I need help making sense of all of the content being created. I, like many others, am drowning in an ocean of content! What I need is less content and more context. If you know me, you know that I drank Marshall’s RSS kool-aid a while back and have been happily leveraging the tech to manage my own context and attention (he just shared some more of his magic at WordCamp too). Tools like Yahoo! Pipes, AideRSS, Netvibes, and more save my ass daily. But managing crazy RSS plumbing is getting to be a lot of work. I seriously need context automation.

Context automation from Mad Libs

Signals has me all excited because it helps me with context in a really innovative way. It has what they’re calling a MadLibs engine that sends automated updates in micro message format. Steve Gillmor describes it well:

This implicit stream of data can be augmented via the REST API and the ATOM Publishing Protocol to create new update types in the form of a “MadLib” syntax: [Bob] [edited] this [page] in this [workspace] or [Jane] [closed] this [Salesforce lead] successfully, and so on. Gadgets can be dragged and dropped onto the Dashboard to let users pay attention across multiple workspaces, enterprise systems, and Web services.

Pretty cool to not have to remember to send updates, huh? Nice to know you don’t need to rely on your teammates to remember to notify you, huh? Well, that’s just the beginning.

Micro Message Rules

With structured micro messaging comes rules that can automatically process updates. Socialtext hasn’t said they would develop this functionality, but since they have an API, someone could!

Maybe you don’t care about every time someone edits a document in your department, but you care a ton about a specific document. You could set rules to turn off notices on document editing, but keep notices from a specific document. If people were manually updating that info, there would be no way to filter the data without natural language processing tools that don’t yet exist.

Maybe you need to talk to someone, but they’re at lunch. You could create a rule to ping you when their status changes to available. Since it’s not manual like IM, the user doesn’t have to remember to update it.

Now, think about rule sets! A job description could have a corresponding rule set helps the person stay focused on the updates that help them do their job

Ethan Bauley got myself and a few others to think about it again about a month ago. I just posted the summary of what turned into a month-long, email conversation about What is Social Media?, which I posted on the Voce Nation blog. In a follow up post called The biggest irony on the Internet, Ethan shared some economic perspective from Yochai Benkler, which has convinced me to stop using the phrase “traditional media”:

At the core, my contention is that if we’re going to call some media “social”, there has to be some apropos name for “non-social” media. A lot of people go on and on about “traditional” or “broadcast” or “mass” media but that’s more wishy-washiness as far as I’m concerned. I’m looking for something much more clinical.

I always look to a higher power when parsing issues like this, and so I’ll cut myself off and pass the torch to a genius work from someone who figured this all out years ago: the introduction of Yochai Benkler’s seminal book on network-based communications technologies, The Wealth of Networks.

As far as I’m concerned, Benkler defined social media in that book, except he speaks in terms of “the network information economy” and “the industrial information economy”.

In the network information economy, it’s cheap to communicate; ownership of the tools to communicate are broadly distributed in the population at large. The vast majority of the population has the capacity to communicate to large audiences (e.g. they own a computer connected to the Net and can make a blog on Wordpress, which has the capacity to be read by billions of people).

Social media = “network information economy”

In the industrial information economy, communication is expensive; ownership of the tools is concentrated among a few commercial entities that can put the capital together necessary to purchase printing presses, television cameras, FCC-licensed spectrum, etc.

Both of these economies can co-exist at the same time. But their economics are very different, and that calls for different business designs for the firms that play in them.

Ladies and gents, I give you: “social media” vs. “industrial media”.

Boomers and Xers can now step out of Gen Y’s shadow

When asked what I do for a living, it was the Boomers and Xers that I ended up in an accidental argument with the most. By contrasting social media with “traditional media”, I was essentially saying that “traditional media” was no longer relevant, which made them feel like I was saying they were no longer relevant. They correctly and intuitively knew that wasn’t true. And so did I! Neither of us were capable of having an intelligent discussion about it, because *I* had incorrectly framed the discussion from the beginning by using the term “traditional media”. They knew that the art of relationship building, quality writing, networking, etc. hadn’t changed. Really, the only thing that has changed is the distribution model. Media has moved from creation by the few to creation by the many. That didn’t change journalistic ethics. It didn’t change how to write a good story. It didn’t wipe out networking or media social skills. It *did* change access to the business and the types of models that were profitable. It was an economic shift, which is why it makes sense to me to describe the differences between social media and it’s counterpart in economic terms.

Kara Swisher is someone I see quipping about the differences between journalists and bloggers from time to time. While snarky at times, I think she’s right to point to differentiators like journalistic integrity (something bloggers are starting to embrace), grammar skills (some bloggers like Zeldman are using old-school style guides), and networking skills (I’m talking in-person friends, not Facebook buddies) to mention a few. I think using the term industrial media allows her and her many colleagues to regain their foothold as top media professionals. The shift in the distribution model has made media participation more accessible, which has many implications on the business model. However, it hasn’t changed the rest of the skills required to be a top media pro.

What do you think about the usage of traditional media vs. industrial media?

Obviously I’m excited. Part of my excitement is because I’m doing a presentation there. Wordpress has grown from a tool that I used to manage my own blog, to one of the most significant engines powering the blogosphere. My job requires that I help multiple clients with many bloggers each, which is a lot of touch points and variables when dealing with individual installations. My presentation will discuss benefits, strategies, and tactics for weaving together a large number of Wordpress blogs to create an efficient, interoperable communication ecosystem.

The benefits portion will talk about the business value one gains for operating inside an ecosystem. The strategies that I focus on will be about leveraging an ecosystem to coordinate bloggers. Tactically, I’ll be sharing the following:

• A Wordpress MU system with BuddyPress plugins installed to function as a private social network. I’ll share what I had to do to get it into what I considered a working state.
• A Wordpress MU system that functions as a backchannel for working with clients on the content of their blogs.
• An exploration of additional ecosystem functionality and the pitfalls for enterprise application.

This presentation is a big deal to me. Social networks like MySpace and Facebook long ago proved a new level of value emerges when you string together blogs and other social tools. Companies like Ning and others have made it easy to deploy your own social network, but they host and manage it. I’ve been excited about the potential of turning Wordpress into a decentralized social network since I did an Ignite talk requesting a decentralized social network. My hope is that this presentation will provide some of the specific information people need to create social networks that was lacking in my call to action a year ago.

I hope to see you there!

Image source. Get your scene T-shirts here.

It’s interesting watching the various people in my life react when I talk about different web services. Some of the more controversial services I talk about are Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook. I get reactions like, “Eww, you’re on Twitter??” and “Facebook just isn’t what it used to be.”

Some people LOVE Twitter. It’s like crack. Some people loathe Twitter. They don’t want to be associated with the crack heads. For Gen Yers, MySpace and Facebook represent the difference between high school and college.

But, I don’t really think about myself as being on Twitter. Twitter is just a service that I use. It’s part of a mix of services that I integrate to stay connected with my friends. I send and receive messages from every service through a single interface. So, I’m thinking who cares which source the message comes from? Who cares which service my friends receive them on?

If I think about it honestly, the tools I use to integrate these services are not widely understood or easily accessible. So, we’re in this temporary moment in time where some users don’t care about the underlying service that carries their messages and some users do. This moment gives time to reflect about why people care so passionately one way or another about the service they use.

IMHO, people are passionately loyal to particular web services because each one supports a specific scene. Musicians. Artists. Burners. Gay. Latino. Geeks. Anime. Your company. Etc.

This isn’t breaking news really. danah boyd was comparing tag clouds between social networks in 2005. Comscore reports about the worldwide distribution of service usage yearly.

Cool, young designer kids would rather be on something like Vimeo than Twitter. SecondLifers prefer to hang out on Plurk. Burners like to congregate on Tribe.

What’s the point here?

It has a lot of implications for markets. Markets are formed around communities. Communities form around people. Often times communities are formed around a small number of very specific people.

That means if you’re building a service, you’ll want your strategy to be tailored for the scene whose party your going to host. Think about their needs in terms of functionality. Think about who the cool kids are amongst that crowd and who will invite everyone to the party. And, then think about how to be a good host.

If you’re trying to hang out with a particular crowd, ask around about where they’re hanging out. See what kind of interactions they’re into. Pay attention to times when it looks like the party is moving and be a joiner.

It’s also interesting to speculate about how scenes will be formed in the future when integration services kill the need for service monogamy. Jason Calacanis recently stated that he is retiring from blogging. His states that he wants to build a deeper relationship with fewer people. He wants to get back to his roots. He wants to find his scene again. Jason turned to email for that solution, which I think is silly. Self assembled networks do feel like the right move, though. Much of the functionality that we needed social networks for is now readily available as part services like Utterz and iPhone apps. I’m excited to see where self-assembled MMS groups will go.

When you’re out there on the Intarwebs, don’t forget about the fact that the online world has scenes just like the offline world. They should be regarded here as they are there.

This comic was adapted from xkcd. Check out Sam’s sweet round up of historical naysaying around tools we now take for granted like internet access and email.

Since the first person tapped social media for commercial gain, there have been daily bus loads of fresh faces to call bullshit. Media calls it hype. Senior managers demand ROI case studies. Clients want endless examples to substantiate why they should listen to you.

Well, I am sick of it.

Sure it is reasonable for people new to social media to want answers to the questions we seasoned folks have long forgotten we asked. Newbies want to know how much time will it take, how does it work, can you *really* make money, who are the leaders, etc. I work with a number of social media participants and they all have similar lessons they have to learn as they grow into an independent contributor, which validates the need for answers during one’s development phase. All perfectly understandable parts of a learning curve.

What isn’t reasonable is a shitty, doubting-Thomas attitude about it. The reality is that blogs are more than a decade old. Web 2.0 has been rocking since the turn of the millennium. Success stories are more plentiful than celebrity gossip blogs. So, by now if you don’t know the value of social media, you are behind!

We’re no longer in the period of time where questioning the value of social media makes one look savvy. You should know that now when you write your article casting doubt on the value of social media, you look out of the loop. I’m telling you this because you might get fooled into thinking that you just burst the social media bubble. But, you didn’t. Your article may have had a bunch of page views, but your audience is the other people who are also out of the loop that are ignorantly hoping what you said was true. They are scrambling to remain relevant during this changing of the guard and will flock to anything that says they don’t need to evolve. Congregating together in ignorance doesn’t invalidate social media, it just makes you easier to spot as part of the old-school.

If you’re new to social media, make no mistake that you have some catching up to do. My advice is that you do so gracefully. Those of us enjoying success in social media don’t need to help you. We certainly don’t want to prove to anyone that social media is valuable. Why? Because we don’t need you to believe in social media in order to get value out of it. I even get a competitive advantage from knowing more than you. It benefits me that you’re hating on social media. And, I happen to know the only people that don’t believe in social media are those that either 1) Don’t participate or 2) Have poor social skills. Consider this post your notice that all of the answers you seek are available from the people you’re calling into question. You will get your answers from participating with them, not from standing on the sidelines and heckling them.

The silver lining here is that we’re a friendly bunch. You can easily befriend someone that is doing well with social media to get some pointers. I know I like helping people that are excited about starting a blog or signing up for Twitter. However, if you come tearing onto the scene acting like we’re all a bunch of liars or naïve hippies, you probably won’t get much help. If you come into our discussions looking for help by saying “prove it” or “I think it’s all a bunch of hype”, you will alienate people. I know senior managers and my Dad think that doubting pessimism is a great way to elicit answers, but it’s anti-social in its approach and will get you nowhere. Instead, you’ll find yourself in the company of other clueless Luddites because your approach offended and drove off the people who could have helped you.

1. Skills
2. Focus
3. Enlightenment

The purpose of this post is to provide some reference for people going through this learning curve and to offer a resource to those who coach people through it.

1. Social media skills

During the skill development stage, participants are figuring out the terminology, tools, and etiquette associated with social media. It’s mostly a technical skill development time where one learns how to do such activities as login to a CMS, embed a link, or how to leave a trackback. With regular interaction, most people make it through this stage in a month or so.

2. Focusing on the social web

Once a person learns how to consume and generate content socially online, they run into the next challenge: information overload. Everyone goes through a period where they can’t stay on top of the incoming communications, talk too much, and struggle to find meaning in all of the tracking stats. This can take anywhere from a month to a couple of months, depending on the participants aptitude and commitment.

3. Social media enlightenment

After a person becomes proficient and efficient in their social media engagement, they begin to see the world in a different light. I won’t go into too much detail here because of two reasons 1) If you’re not at this stage, anything I say will sound like far-fetched-hippy-crystal-woo-woo gibberish, and 2) If you are at this stage, you already know and can find more valuable interaction with my posts

Social media participant learning curve mind map

I put together the mind map below as a resource for people that are either going through this learning curve or are looking to help someone else going through it. If you would like to help build this out, please let me know in the comments and I can add you as a contributor. If you have something to say about it or have a question, please leave me a comment below.

I’ll post more detail about each of these stages and the points that go along with them.

We are nearing the end of the time when technology was a gate keeper. You no longer need to be a developer to create a web page. You don’t even need one to start using a powerful content management system. You don’t even have to pay for it! As social web tech continues to commodify, your social media technology knowledge will shift from a resume builder to a unspoken requirement, much the way typing is expected today. One could argue that with the arrival of Gen Y into the workforce, that day is upon us.

What is social intelligence?

From Wikipedia:

Social intelligence according to the original definition of Edward Thorndike, is “the ability to understand and manage men and women, boys and girls, to act wisely in human relations”.

Daniel Goleman authored the book Social Intelligence, which incorporates a large, but palatable dose of Social Neuroscience to demonstrate how our brains are wired to connect. Here’s a brief clip of Goleman giving a high-level explanation of his book:

Recently, Jenny Andrews did a talk on The Evolution of Our Social Brains that referenced primate research (not the torture kind) that suggests our highest level of evolution to date is our social intelligence, with empathy at the peak. Here’s her 5 minute talk from Ignite Portland:

What does it have to do with the social web?

EVERYTHING! While it is important to know how to create links, embed media, and leave trackbacks; most of your success is determined by what you use those skills to accomplish. Blogs, wikis, forums, Twitter, social networks, and the like are all made up of people. And, you mostly interact with them in front of everyone else. That means that your social skills become acutely more important as you socialize on the world stage—especially as you move from an anonymous lurker to a high profile blogger. The A-Listers of today’s social web are the ones that have had an intuitive fluency with socializing, but as the rest of the world comes online intuition may not be enough. And, whether or not you plan to are a contender for the top, most of us will have to do some work if we want to remain relevant in tomorrow’s social workforce.

How do I get started?

Ok, all of this theory is great, but how does one take this info and start to apply it? Don’t worry, ol’ Justin isn’t going to leave you high and dry. I’ve pulled together a few resources that should jumpstart your exploration:

• Social Intelligence - If you only follow up with one of these resources, make it this book by Daniel Goleman.
• Radical Transparency - This is a concept that has already infiltrated the tech bubble, which makes it easy to relate to.
• Fernando Flores - Get to know this early thinker and his work Ontological Design. Fast Company did a story on him in 1998 that is still a pretty good introduction to Fernando.Landmark Education offers a programmatic distillation of his work.
• Non-violent communication - Marshall B. Rosenberg, Ph.D., developed this methodical means of interpersonal communication from decades of mediation going back to the Civil Rights movement. This is great knowledge for dealing with competitive business people.

I should probably end this post by saying that I am by no means an expert on any of this. I’m in the beginning stages of my development in this area and will be sharing my experiences through out the course of this blog. I hope to connect with others that are ready to push into this next frontier of the social web to see where this leg of the journey leads.

I have recently joined the board of directors for Legion of Tech, the folks behind the Ignite Portland series, and I have to say that it has been a pleasure working with this group. They are a passionate bunch with integrity supported by good networks of friends.

The Ignite Series is totally blowing up and I for one and stoked about it. It’s really nice to have an event you can go to that isn’t a concert or a bar. Presentations cover a variety of topics, but all of them are intellectually engaging, and some are touching. I’m looking forward to this February 5th this next set of topics!

Congratulations, LoTers! You have given Portland something wonderful.