Right now I am reading Jeffrey Sachs - Commonwealth. Economics for a crowded planet

Fascinating - and sitting at the kitchen table tonight I reflected on a quote by Jared Diamond in Collapse

Human societies and smaller groups may make disastrous decisions for a whole sequence of reasons: failure to anticipate a problem, failure to perceive it once it has arisen, failure to attempt to solve it after it has been perceive, and failure to succeed in attempts to solve it.

 This quote is mentioned in Commonwealth - and I thought I would use it in the context of what is challenging so many businesses today.

So much has happened in the last 3 years- you can't fart without the word social network or social media coming out. Or dare I say engagement. Though the trouble is when reflecting on Jared's quote is the quality of the response. Just look at the banking crisis a systemic failure.

So in terms of marketing and business, if we can accept that we now live in a "pull economy" - a world of all information tagged and described in a miscellaneous soup of the long tail, a world of widgets and networked distribution, why are we still trying to shoehorn to the old way of doing, making and selling stuff in the old way.

But as Diamond wrote…

failure to anticipate a problem, failure to perceive it once it has
arisen, failure to attempt to solve it after it has been perceive, and
failure to succeed in attempts to solve it.

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Not just in the so called virtual world - but also in the real world. Kenya and the recent elections held there proving to be an interesting case history. And here

So you might be interested in the book Crowdsourcing. How the power of the crowd is driving the future of business by Jeff Howe

He starts with the story of two young guys that started a business called Threadless. Something that I have talked about in my keynotes for a while now and we posted about them recently

Jeff Howe has some principals

These are…

[1] Pick the right model

Collective intelligence vs crowd wisdom

Crowd creation

Crowd voting

Crowdfunding

[2] Pick the right crowd

[3] Offer the right incentives

[4] Keep the pink slips in the drawer

[5] The dumbness of crowds, or the benevolent dictator principal

A light hand on the tiller is always required

[6] Keep it simple and break it down

[7] Remember Sturgeon's Law

90% of anything is crap. Be prepared

[8] But remember the 10% antidote to Sturgeon's Law

[9] The community is always right

[10] Ask not what the crowd can do for you but what you can do for the crowd

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Dave mentions Reed's Law - the law of group forming networks. Another thought that has crossed my mind is that there is a great deal of discussion around self-serving advertising engines, again this is the start of how the role of commercial messaging will evolve in this social interactive media ecology. In my view open api's and widgets, being used within the context of Reeds Law - defines a new paradigm of marketing, communication and commerce.

For example David asks

Who gets to create content?
Any and everyone
Who gets to distribute content?
Any and everyone
Who controls the user experience?
The user is the destination now, they control their ownA-to-anywhere journey

And, in (social) networks the broadcast message doesn’t arrive because are already looking at, and pointing to and, talking to each other.

Different model see to a captive audience - They aren’t your groups, they are theirs. They aren’t your messages, they are theirs. Marketing is not done to them, it is done by them.

And yet we are still trying to stuff the same old furniture of advertising into a completely different model of communication.

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and 12 Seconds

There are some that decry the web as a place that kills culture. I just can't figure out what they mean.

and a good example of that is Wordia - so Word Up Culture Vultures.

And remember - people embrace what they create

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The guts of Euan's post is here, 

We were each asked to bring to the event 5 things which we felt had
meaning for us or said something about us. After an initial welcome
presentation we were asked to sit in groups of around six people, to
tell the story of the things that we had brought, and say why we had
brought them. As a result we found out about each other through stories
and metaphors rather than through our job titles or names. We also
shared a vulnerability as the things that we had brought had deep
personal meaning for us. We were each worried that the other people in
the group would laugh at us or not like the things we had brought -
they might even drop them. This was a very levelling activity which
brought the groups very quickly to a high degree of understanding and
trust.

Next the combined group (about 30 of us) were asked to lay all of
our things out on the floor at one end of the hall, then step back and
stand at the other end. The image of all of those people's personal
things laid out on that church hall floor in north London has stayed
with me ever since - it so reminded me of photographs of the personal
belongings left behind by people killed in the holocaust - poignantly
tatty looking but full of meaning.

We were then instructed to step forward one by one and move an artefact next to something else we felt it was associated with.

One by one, almost reverentially given the fact that we were
touching and moving other people's very personal belongings, we began
to move things next to things we felt they were associated with.
Patterns began to form and reform (we were allowed to move things more
than once) as we silently stepped forward one after the other. Around
20 minutes passed until it became clear that we were telling four
predominant stories with our patterns, one around families, one around
work, one around entertainment and the last around nature.

What was fascinating was that although we didn't articulate why we
were moving things at any time, nor were we instructed in any way other
than our original simple instructions, yet we were able to carry out a
complex process in a very short space of time with no fuss at all.

Euan's lessons from this experience is

We can tolerate a lot of apparent messiness and our ability and desire to make patterns allows us to get real value from it.

Dave Snowden was right when he said if you have a complex environment you need to have simple rules. Complex rules just result in a mess.

One mans rubbish is another man's gold dust.

This reminds me of the work we did with TV2 in Finland, where SMLXL was tasked to relaunch the station as a brand and through all its on air communications and marketing. I observed that we could do this job but, it was the people in the station that were the key to success.

My question was - would they embrace with the same passion that we went to work on this project when we left? I am no change management expert - but Euan's story resonates with me because we treated people with respect, we listened and we just got stuff done by recognising that people wanted to be involved - so we invited them in – it enabled them to feel respected within the group, people were motivated and cognitive, it became a shared experience which then became a powerful bonding agent. It was a true project of collaboration and co-creation. And we engaged in the organisation from top to bottom, we ate with them and spent far less time with the management. I would have a sneaky conversation with Päivi the channel head - but that was it.

I still feel immensely proud of that project.

We can work together on complex activities with minimal directions.

Writes Euan, and I concur with that from my own shared experience. At the heart of all this talk about mass-collaboration, or co-creation, is the fact that we are happier when we act together in collective action. This so much of what and who we are.

We cannot deny the rise of the individual, but neither can we deny that collective action is so much a part of what defines us as a race. Euan's story is also interesting, as when people do collaborate together - it makes them on the one hand initially feel exposed - and finally euphoric as the shared experience of bonding brings a greater sense of belonging, and togetherness.

Barbara Ehrenreich writes

The capacity for collective joy is encoded into us as deeply as the capacity for erotic love of one human for another. We can live without it, as most of us do, but only at the risk of succumbing to the solitary nightmare of depression.Yet there appears to be no constituency today for collective joy itself. In fact the very term Collective Joy is largely unfamiliar and exotic.

Ehrenreich points us towards the Berlin Love Parade or the Burning Man Festival - as events generated and created by shared experience.

Extrapolating Euan's story further as we push towards deeper theories and ideas around collaboration and society - Ehrenreich writes

In fact the very notion of the "collective," of the common good, has been eroded by the self-serving agendas of the powerful–their greed and hunger for still more power. Throughout the world (capitalist and postcommunist), decades of conservative social policy have undermined any sense of mutual responsibility and placed the burden of risk squarely on the individual or the family.

I have argued that in fact the splitting of communities and the rise of the family unit becomes a wonderful piece of social engineering. But perhaps that should be the grist of a another post. 

However, lastly I make the observation that we are a "We" species and we have an innate need to connect, communicate and collaborate socially. The evolution of a "We Media" - for a "We species" (Social Media) is in fact no surprise to me at all - we have collectively directed technology towardsthat specific goal.

We as human beings know how to get stuff done - its just that there is a great deal that gets in the way of getting stuff done in the post modern age.

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 It is often said that that what works in one country, does not work in another. Especially when it comes to mobile - an argument I wholeheartedly refute.The reason being that human beings as a race, are in fact more alike than we care to admit. We share the same gene pool for a start. This is important when we understand that we are programmed to be a "we species" - a social and networking species - with an innate need to connect and communicate.

And that is why we inevitabley move towards the Mobile Society, where our mobile devices become the remote control for life. Any piece of technology that allows us to better connect, communicate, share knowledge and information, get stuff done - will be adopted.I often muse on the reasons why sms is so universally adopted as a communication tool. It's because we as a species do in fact communicate via short messages - constantly. A behaviour that we learnt millennia ago.

The mobile society - is completely different to the industrial society, it requires a new logic and a new way of thinking of how to create business, civil governance, health care and education.

The Mobile Society already exists, dotted across the 4 corners of the globe - yet it does not exist in any one country. This is because we are in transition from one type of economy to another, the collapse of the banking system recently perhaps a painful symbol of that transition.

But also the reason why it is not universally adopted is because there are vested interests that do not want the mobile society to flourish - as it signifies [1] a re-ordering of business models, [2] flows of communication [3]  the appearance of new gate keepers in the information distribution wars. This is a natural pattern when society changes structurally.

So the way forward is to truly understand how the Mobile Society can benefit us all - business being but only one piece of this jigsaw. In my recent work I have come to the conclusion that we have separated commerce from community, we have lost sight that in fact the society of consumers is in fact us - people, who need more than shopping to give them richer lives. Again, the epic and sudden collapse of the banking system demonstrates how removed commerce has become from community and that ultimately leads to hubris - and ultimate demise. Curiously its the taxpayer that has been asked to foot the bill.

The Mobile Society can promise I think a richer life as in the same way that Gutenberg's 42 Line Bible released information from the church and brought us the Reformation, the Mobile Society will bring flows of communication unprecedented - and it is these very flows of information and communication that are the engines of innovation and commerce.

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We've stipulated already that display advertising as a marketing tool - inefficient and universally resented as it is - is headed toward
near obsolescence. The key words in that sentence are "headed" and
"near."

Writes Bob Garfield in Your data with destiny And of course I could not agree more. I have been posting abut how data will transform marketing for a while now. for example in When Petrabytes seem like kilobytes - what comes next?

Tacoda believe they can automate the serendipity of helping brands and people find each other, when they need each other the most. And Microsoft R&D in Cambridge is working hard on how refined data will transform marketing and advertising. Garfield uses Netflix as a company that has built its entire success out of data analytics.

Brands in today's world need to be three things. They need to be… [1]. Life enabling [2]. Life simplifying [3]. Navigational. (Help me navigate my life better) This also means putting the customer experience at the very heart of what you do. Advertising therefore must change too - into valuable services, experiences and interactions.

Netflix, which built a substantial business by delivering movie DVDs
overnight for a flat fee and built a gargantuan business by
recommending to customers — via the miracle of collaborative-filtering
software — movies they'd like to see. Be not misled by the stucco and
ugly, teal industrial carpeting. This is a technology company to its
core. 

Consider this, harnessing and understanding the increasing flows of social interactions, is the missing link between the migration of our old media and business world to the new one. The story of social networks and Alpha Users. So consider this… Alphas have 8 times higher influence on churn, or recent findings: 65…70% of purchase decisions are primarily based on recommendations by a peer group. If I were Facebook, Myspace, Microsoft, a broadcaster, a bank, a insurer, a mobile company anyone in fact that is facing up to the significant challenges of the changing worlds of media and commerce in our digital age, I think I would be wanting to understand what Social Marketing Intelligence could do for me.

and another point is that data as a raw material is expected to grow to 988 billion Gb's by 2010from its 2006 position of 161 billion Gb's

Have a gander at Peggy Ann Salz's blog to get your head around how data is changing the face of marketing and communications. Even the Economist has wriiten exstensively on algorithm's and business And of course then the question is who counts the audience and what are the metrics in this instance?

It transforms metrics from CPM's to Cost Per Relevant Audience . Take BMW for example, and a story Tomi Ahonen has recently posted

German winters require snow tyres. So if you bought a car in the summer months, summer tyres would be on the car, and would need replacing with winter tyres. BMW had the necessary information about their recent customers; what car model, what wheel types, and could therefore figure out which winter tyre model would fit the car of any given customer. And BMW, possessed their customer mobile phone numbers. Obviously BMW focused only on those cars that were sold that year between spring and autumn, because if the owner had owned the BMW for more than a year, the owner would have bought winter tyres last year, for last winter.

So BMW designed an MMS campaign, wher they customized the picture of the car to be the model of the car that the customer had, and the
colour of the car, with the wheel rims that the customer had bought. BMW virtually fitted the suggested winter tyre for that car and wheel. Then this image was to sent to the relevant customer.

So when do you buy winter tyres. Not when its the summer. But when winter begins. Because this was mobile, BMW had prepared the campaign, and waited for the perfect moment. That moment was the day the first snow started to fall in Germany, that was when the MMS messages went out.

The MMS message included a link to come to BMW's mobile website, to select alternate tyres (and wheel rims) to upload to the tyre simulator, so that the customer could experiment with other variations and see their prices and compare.

The results? A conversion rate from messages sent, to actual tyre purchases made at registered BMW dealers, of 30%

And this is not unusual - ask yourself do you want 6 feet of junk mail or a 29% response rate?

 Garfield highlights the ABC's of data analytics these are

ABCs
That's Reed Hastings, founder and CEO of Netflix, who is describing not
only his company's methods but also the essence of collaborative
filtering, which is one of the "ABCs of predictive marketing." B is
behavioral: tracking your path online. C is contextual: paying
attention to keywords, and A is associative: divining your tastes and
interests based on patterns established by people like you. 

However, Bobby, you are missing one vital ingredient and that is peoples roles in social networks, combined with your ABC's. So its ABCR's in fact. R=role in social network.

This vital missing component brings a degree of accuracy that is simply unprecedented. Its described as 3D - profiling. Clay Shirky quoted in Bobs piece says, people do not suffer from information overload but filtering failure. The minute people
are exposed to reality, they freak out. What collaborative filtering does is replace categorizations with preference.

Right and then you need self learning systems, dynamic data analytics, and predictive analytics. Now Garfield gets into 5th gear as he addresses a pet theme of mine, called the furniture of advertising

That brings us, finally, back to the 24-year-old wunderkind Mark
Zuckerberg. Dude, blessed as you are with the megaphenomenon called
Facebook, why are you just another popular utility in search of a
business model? Could it be that you're fixated on the notion that your
revenue must come from typical advertising? Haven't we agreed that
advertising is problematic, because users are suspicious of it, resent
it and employ every means to avoid it? Yes, we have. Yet the same
people 1) love goods and services; 2) crave information; and 3) are so
fabulously self-involved that they display every last detail about
themselves, their tastes, their preferences, their favorites, their
hobbies, their embarrassing drunken photos, their damn near everything right on your site.

So why in the world do you not have a big honking box on the bottom of
every Facebook page titled "What You'll Like" or "YouStuff" or "The
Mirror" with a category-by-category selection of books, music, films,
videos, news articles, websites, tennis gear, shoes, power tools,
specialty foods, flea and tick protection, you name it? 

Right on - what is advertising in the 21st Century? We seek knowledge and information that is relevant to us as we go in pursuit of that knowledge and equally on a journey of discovery. If your commercial messaging is not seen as timely, relevant and contextual, forget it - you are irrelevant. How close to 0 do you need to get to discover that click throughs don't work. Heed the lesson of BMW, or indeed Blyk

and that's the painful bit for how advertising is still currently bought and sold.

and of course the next bit is developing a Ui that is so intuitive and so simple in its ability to examine and manipulate massive data flows to make more informed decisions on marketing activity.

The other elementary part is that refined data analytics can enable a company to defend cashflow and revenues and also grow and acquire new revenues and customers.

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I have no doubts that its social repercussions will take decades to be fully understood, but it has already done much to benefit the world. It has provided access to information on a scale never before imaginable, lowered the barriers to creative expression, challenged old business models and enabled new ones. It has succeeded because we designed it to be both flexible and open. These features have allowed it to accommodate innovation without massive changes to its infrastructure.

 Cerf goes onto to write

There are more than three billion mobiles in use today and more than 80 per cent of the world's population live within range of a network. In areas where wireline or WiFi access barely exists, many new users will first experience the internet through a mobile phone. In developing economies, people are already finding innovative ways to use mobile technology. Grameen's micro-finance and village phone programmes in Bangladesh and elsewhere are known and respected around the world, but there are many less famous examples. During the Kenyan elections, Mobile Planet provided its subscribers with up-to-the-minute results by text message. As the cost of mobile technologies fall, the opportunities for such innovation will continue to grow.

We're nearing the tipping point for mobile computing to deliver timely, geographically and socially relevant information. Researchers in Japan recently proposed using data from vehicles' windscreen wipers and embedded GPS receivers to track the movement of weather systems through towns and cities with a precision never before possible. It may seem academic, but understanding the way severe weather, such as a typhoon, moves through a city could save lives. Further exploration can shed light on demographic, intellectual and epidemiological phenomena, to name just a few areas.

This is the networked society. "A medium of communication is not merely a passive conduit for the transmission of information but rather an active force in creating new social patterns and new perceptual realities" writes Robert Logan in The Alphabet Effect. In the film the web is Us/ing Us. Robert Wesch Professor of Social Anthropology at Kansas University argues that, text is linear when written on paper. In digital it is different. Digital is more flexible. Digital text is moveable, and above all digital text can Link. The alphabet has been described as masculine whereas, the network society – is female. 

And new technologies do not come out of nowhere.  As both William Powers, and Carlota Perez argue. They are indeed human creations in the first place and they succeed, or not, to the extent that they meet human needs. In other words, as much as communications media influence the way people of a particular time and place live, the reverse is also true: People have tremendous influence over how technologies evolve.

So if we looked at the needs of the humans prior to the invention of the wheel, or Gutenberg arriving with the printing press, which led to the reformation, technology was directed towards very pressing human needs. Industrialisation emancipated us from nature’s very hegemony over us and so we now look to social networks and social media to do something else - for us – because the needs of humans cannot be accommodated only within the context of an industrialized – consumer oriented world. The old model was – we make – you buy. You purchase to passively; read, watch and consume. When you pause to think about it what we are experiencing right now, fundamentally challenges that logic – social media, and theories about engagement marketing are defined by; collaboration, listening, participation and co-creation.

Perez points out that at a certain point in a technology life cycle, we the people take that technology and direct it towards very specific goals and purposes, like the tools of web 2.0 and its moniker social media. Marshall McLuhan argues in the Gutenberg Galaxy that technologies are not simply inventions which people employ but are the means by which people are re-invented. The invention of movable type was the decisive moment in the process of re-invention from feudal man to reformation man.

we're at the cusp of a truly global internet that will bring people closer together and democratise access to information. We are all free to innovate on the net every day and we should look forward to more people around the world enjoying that freedom.

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 In the The Customer is the Company  an in-depth look at the company Threadless - one can see the 4C's principals - [1] Commerce [2] Culture [3] Community [4] Connectivity is full play

the lesson

of Threadless is more basic. Its success demonstrates what happens when you allow your company to become what your customers want it to be, when you make something as basic and quaint as "trust" a core competency. Threadless succeeds by asking more than any modern retail company has ever asked of its customers — to design the products, to serve as the sales force, to become the employees. Nickell has pioneered a new kind of innovation. It doesn't require huge research budgets or creative brilliance — just a willingness to keep looking outward.

And one of the principals that I work to is <strong>Trust</strong>

Trustworthiness is especially important at Threadless because the company's most important asset — its vast online community — is managed collectively. Threadless employs no moderators, and no single person or group is charged with keeping the community happy. Nor, technologically speaking, is the social network itself especially advanced. It lacks many of the features found on MySpace or Facebook. There are no virtual friends, no messaging features, and no status messages. Users' profiles are made up of their blog postings and their submissions.

And dedication to authenticity

But what Threadless lacks in flashy features, it makes up for in steadfast dedication to staying close to its customers. Both Nickell and Kalmikoff spend much of their time cruising Threadless.com — posting comments on blogs, inspecting designs, and tweaking the website. They publish their instant-message addresses and regularly query the public about changes to design or contest policies. "If someone changes something on Facebook, there's no expectation that some random 14-year-old from the middle of Idaho is going to be able to get in touch with Mark Zuckerberg," Kalmikoff says. "On Threadless, if people see something they don't like and want to talk to Jake, they get Jake."

And what does ENGAGEMENT give you?

This rabid engagement propelled the company through four years of phenomenal growth, beginning around 2004. The user base grew tenfold, from 70,000 members at the end of 2004 to more than 700,000 today. Sales in 2006 hit $18 million — with profits of roughly $6 million. In 2007, growth continued at more than 200 percent, with similar margins.

'Nuff said, 'cept I love it.

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The concept of Web 2.0 is a dynamic, user-driven mesh of technologies

Absolutely, and Carlota Perez in her book Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital states that when separate technologies become interlocking they have a profound impact on the direction of economics, culture and wider society.

So the question was well - what comes next? Ubiquitous social computing and digital footprints means that we get a huge spike in data and so we become completely data-driven. The web (the 6th Mass Media) converges and becomes one with mobile (the 7th Mass Media )

Data will be the key . There will be independence from platforms, devices and the internet. Users might be able to collaboratively design websites and applications. The barriers between applications will begin to break down as portability between applications increases.

But it is more than just data - its what one does with that data, how one processes it - how one refines it and then deploys that intelligence. - This is called Social Marketing Intelligence.

In 6 feet of junk mail or a 29% response rate? Blyk shows the way We demonstrated the potential of refined data

Average response rate 29%

Average SMS response rate 41%

Average MMS response rate 22%

Really engaging communications consistently receive responses over 50%

So - firstly we see a disproportionate success rate when campaigns are Engaging but also an incredible mean average of 29%. Nick Fuller, Chair, DMA Mobile - 2nd November 2007 declared that

Response rates for cold [Mobile] campaigns are in the 3- 6% range while campaigns using client’s own customer data fare much better with response rates ranging between 1.3% and 20%

Recently we have seen churn rates at a large Telecommunications company reduced by 20% by using Social Links a subset and the DNA of Social Marketing Intelligence - Now that's a big number. Further with unique intelligence I think one can transform communications - Any communications - so that it becomes:

1). Timely

2). Relevant

3). Contextual 

Also, what many do not understand is that data when coupled to social networks analytics becomes transformational in what is communicated to whom and when - yes there are many data analytics companies out there, yet few I think have the ability to capture data that comes from many multiple sources, including the richest raw material of all - mobile data - and at volumes which make petrabytes look like kilobytes. Also however, data flows are dynamic like tidal waters - ebbing and flowing. Dynamic social data processing enables organisations to be responsive, fleet of foot. Traditional Media cannot deliver a captive audience anymore - so what can? And what type of audience is one delivering. I have argued we will move froma world of CPM's - Cost per Thousands to CPRA - Cost per Relevant Audience

In the advertising world, multiple shifts are piling on top of each other and it is often hard to keep track of them, much less understand their implications. says John Hagel Let’s look at just some that are re-shaping the advertising world:

1). Shifts from advertising placed in digital content to ads placed in social networks and applications
2). Shifts from digital advertisements delivered through conventional PC’s to a growing array of mobile devices, with an increasing ability to target messages based on the physical location of the person
3). Shifts in the behavior of digital users in their responsiveness to advertisements online
4). Shifts in the way that companies connect with and build relationships with stakeholders (e.g., blurring boundaries between customers, partners and suppliers)
5). Shifts in the revenue models for businesses, as online businesses in particular become more and more dependent on advertising as a key revenue source (e.g., is there any Web 2.0 start-up that doesn’t blithely answer "advertising" when asked about their revenue model?).

 Hagel goes onto say

The basic paradox of the Internet can be framed very simply: The very platform that makes advertising both more relevant and more measurable is the same platform that longer-term will challenge and ultimately undermine the basic role of advertising in communicating with customer. Exactamondo though he doesn't mention mobile - which is a bit of an oversight.  

This a map of a hierarchical social network. A beautiful image in its own right, yet it has something far more valuable to offer - Insight into how that network operates and how individuals inter-relate with each other. Understanding the social and communication dynamics of such networks will transform marketing/advertising and any other form of communications one cares to think of. And indeed what we find is that social data intelligence can become self-learning and predictive.

Social Intelligence is how we will Mind the gap as the circumnavigate the world from Analogue to Digital

Forrester in their report the Connected Agency believe that data will play an increasingly important role in marketing and branding and will in fact shape those organisations in the future.

Offer access and intelligence to brands and media                                                                                                                                                                                                  An agency will know which brands and content can enter and access community data. The agency will facilitate the interaction with the brand, and consumers will welcome agency involvement as the key to their independence. Brands like The Body Shop and Toyota will want to connect — and pay — for community entry, much as they would pay for media today. Similarly, agencies will broker content-sharing deals with media firms like Viacom to add targeted entertainment and information.  

And

Planning, strategy, and research become continuous                                                                                                                                                                                              Insights and consumer intelligence will constantly ?ow from the community — as from a 24×7 focus group. Agency sta? will be hungry for real-time results to see how a conversation is spreading and to drive future decisions. So agencies like OgilvyOne will adopt sophisticated enterprise marketing platforms (EMPs) and sta? up with data analysts to manage this knowledge and sell it at a premium to advertisers. 

They go onto say that these organisations will become community focused - communities are formed around meaningful social connections. Manuel Castells says that we must emphasise the role of technology in the process of human transformation, particularly when considering the central technology of our time, communication technology, which relates to the heart of the specificity of the human species: conscious, meaningful communication. Clay Shirky's book Here Comes Everybody and the wealth of other research and book titles are all affirmations of Communities Dominate Brands published in 2005.

Price Waterhouse Coopers in How Consumer Conversation Transform Business outline the following points again affirmation from our previous research

The speed and scale of consumer conversations can redirect entire markets

1). Monologue is a thing of the past

2). Conversation is the new source of consumer intelligence

3). We have to know how to analyse consumer conversation

4). The Market is ready (companies in all industries are actively seeking new tools and capabilities)

5). We need to develop the art of translating conversation into action

6). The new currency in advertising is the voice of the consumer

7). Companies can use consumer conversation to innovate

Indeed and as Labour MP Tom Watson wrote

The 19th century co-operative movements had their roots in people pooling resources to make, buy or distribute physical goods. Modern online communities are the new co-operatives.

Its a far cry from the straight lines of our industrial era and this is the result The world of set piece competition is over. In a hyper competitive landscape where reach is no longer defined by time or geography and as our economic and political landscape also evolves - companies will be required to ensure that they are prepared for the landscape that confronts them. Data and the ability to refine that data into unique intelligence will become a central component in competing for the future.

 A map of set piece competition

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