This document discusses the current state of social business communication and possibilities for the future. It breaks down social media into social networks, paid social media, earned social media, and social media engagement. Organizing an effective social media program requires significant upfront investment in areas like client education, response monitoring, and new roles. Looking ahead, the growth of technology could lead to a "singularity" where machines exceed human intelligence, or "emergence" where organization arises without clear leadership through principles of decentralized control.

1. organized chaos:
current state of social business communication

2. what's inside:
•Social in the context of org communication.
•The state of social today.
•What might come next?

3. there is a gap...
between what the industry perceives can/should be done
with “social media”
and what people actually do as social human beings.
The term “social media” is misleading. rather than
provide a single definition, let’s breakdown the concept
by discipline:
•Social Networks
•Paid Social Media
•Earned Social Media
•Social Media Engagement

4. Social Networks
online services like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Zoosk
Paid Social Media
ad units that incorporate social context
Earned Social Media
additional impact from shares, mentions, or referrals
Social Media Engagement
responding to, and interacting with people outside of the
organization

5. how we got here:
“Social”
Face-to-Face Mass Media
Media (WOM Media .?.
(WOM) (WOM
undervalued)
overvalued)

6. What has been proven has just scratched the
surface of how context can improve online
advertising performance...
Understand the Value of a Social Media Impression, Nielsen BrandLift: 2010.

7. organization around social communication:
The truth is that activating a social program requires a significant investment
upfront (efficiencies are gained over time). It’s difficult to adequately fund
projects where the entire scope isn't identified in the beginning. We can plan to
occur costs according to three buckets:
Soft costs:
Client education
Hard costs:
Response (need for monitoring)
New roles (ex: community manager)
Future costs:
When existing social technologies are leveraged, we assume risk given that
development is done indirectly with a third-party platform(s). When that
platform evolves, and it will, it could directly impact (or break) the build.
On-going attention from a continuity perspective is required given social
channels are “always on”. The industry must realize that society doesn't evolve
around our campaign timeframe.

8. what might come next?
How can we predict what to invest in?
Here are two (extreme) theories to consider:
•Singularity
•Emergence

9. singularity.
This theory is based on on Moore's Law which was
identified by Gordon Moore in 1965 (co-founder of
Intel).
Here we observe that the exponential growth of
computing power (smaller, cheaper, and faster) will
bring radical, irreversible change.
The singularity is a point in time when our
technological creations could exceed the computing
power of human brains...

10. Image Source: http://educationalbits.blogspot.com/2011/02/text-to-world-to-text-to-text.html

11. singularity.
If this accelerating rate of technological
advancement holds true, the landscape will change
significantly.
What might this mean for the future of marketing?
Implications suggest to avoid allocating significant
budgets on identifying "best practices", or cracking
the code of "Facebook marketing".

12. emergence.
Organization can form even when there is no clear leader.
Although individual entities appear autonomous, the
group as a collective unit functions in a structured way.
Colonies of ants illustrate this concept in nature. There
doesn’t appear to be a “queen ant”.
Cyclical trends in fashion is an example in society.
"Conway's Game of Life" illustrates the concept of
emergence when we add technology as a programatic
layer...

13. emergence.
The “Game of Life” is designed around the following
rules, regardless of the initial state:
•Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbors dies, as
if caused by underpopulation
•Any live cell with more than three live neighbors dies, as
if by overcrowding
•Any live cell with two or three live neighbors lives on to
the next generation
•Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbors becomes
a live cell
Scientific American 223 (October 1970): 120-123.

14. Source: http://www.bignell.demon.co.uk/life.htm

15. emergence.
What this may mean for marketing and creative professionals is
that there is no "silver bullet" to discover among the piles of
available online behavioral data.
Looking at the typical patterns of “Conway's Game of Life” we
observe that regardless of the interim condition, the outcome is
one of three states...
•Complete disappearance, because the cells were too sparse and
all of them died.
•A stable configuration in which the living cells can not die, but
can not spawn new cells either.
•Ripples causing a series of "blinking" cells that live and die in the
same pattern again and again.

16. ***