The Problem of Enterprise Document Integration

A typical large-scale Intranet is a cheerful mess of Websites running on different platforms, often from entirely different generations and technology paradigms. Within Xerox for instance, we have an ancient 1.0 level default Intranet (sorry any Xerox IT guys reading this, but you know it is true!), several repositories running on our homegrown Docushare CMS, some Sharepoint installs, and of course, a whole bunch of special-purpose local workgroup sites running on systems ranging from Confluence to Mediawiki. This is as it should be — a few slowly-evolving sensible enterprise defaults, complemented by some faster-moving local solutions for local problems. Besides this general content management infrastructure, like every large corporation, we naturally have all those specialized platforms for functions like elearning and HR.

This information environment though, doesn’t lend itself to easy organization and re-organization around changing and often transitory purposes. How, for example, would you pull together all the online resources needed to help employees from a newly acquired company orient themselves? Or give your employees an easy way to explore all the information related to a particular market?

The traditional 1.0 answer (which we know does not work) is “portal.” Portals are simply too hard to set up, too slow to adapt, and too centralized (I often rant about “Portalitis” — multiple silos each wanting to centralize information around themselves, leading to a proliferation of portals with a lot of redundancies). In reality, valuable information exists all over in a distributed way, and is constantly shifting.  Most of us are reduced to emailing bunches of cut-and-paste links and attachments to each other for every situation.

This is the problem of enterprise document integration, EDI: The problem of rapidly assembling and sharing an organized set of online resources to suit a given situation.

I don’t claim to have the complete, definitive answer, but I do think the idea of a “trail” is one potential solution. So here’s my quick soapbox pitch, before I get back to discussing the broader EDI problem. Keep in mind that what I am describing below is the simpler consumer version that we already have out there. The stuff isn’t yet ready to take on full-fledged EDI.

What is Xerox Trails?

Trails allow you to collect, organize and present (in short, “blaze”) collections of Web content using the user experience metaphor of a “trail” (as in hiking). You navigate a trail using a “Trail Map” view and a “Following” view. Show is easier than tell, so here is an example trail I created on our destination site, trailmeme.com, about the “Social Media vs. Knowledge Management” debate I triggered a year and a half ago, organizing the original article and some of the most interesting responses. Here is a screenshot of the “Trail Map” view of the trail (Click here to go to the live, clickable map: you’ll need to have Flash enabled in your browser).

And here is the “Following” view (think of it as a “ground-level/street-level” view). The idea is to support navigation with the sorts of signs you might see on a highway or a hiking trail at the ground level, by framing the original source with a useful navigation overlay. Click here to start “following” the trail.

This is the basic user experience. We also have a plugin that implements this experience on WordPress blogs (our project blog has this enabled), and we have a similar plugin for MediaWiki in the works. These allow you to create the “trails” user experience on your own site. Both are open source (GPL) and if you are interested in supporting trails on other platforms, talk to me.

And of course, since we are Xerox, there is a print and publishing angle to all of this. Trails (when appropriate) can be sequenced and converted to instant PDFs with one click (currently only supported on the WordPress and MediaWiki plugin version).

So that’s the technology itself.  Now let’s get back to the EDI question.

The Varieties of EDI Problems

Here is a quick half-dozen variants of the EDI problem that occur to me, that frequently appear in the enterprise. One of the big things I am interested in hearing from you guys is: are these the right EDI use cases? Are there better/more important ones?

1. A bid team for a major and complex enterprise sale collaborating to rapidly assemble existing resources into a raw material package to support the proposal writing
2. An HR/eLearning department creating an ad-hoc, just-in-time “course pack” out of stuff already scattered across the intranet, to support a course on the eLearning system
3. A workgroup involved in competitive analysis gradually putting together a “market view” picture by putting together internal material, analyst reports, press releases, competitor news and so forth, into a sort of constantly evolving online intelligence dossier
4. Creating an ad-hoc org chart out of wherever people choose to post their Intranet (or even public) profiles (even for companies that have a single social network/expert locator system, the ordinary model of organizing with tags and a couple of matrix dimensions reflecting the static organizational structure, rarely reflects the real org chart of ad-hoc teams, workgroups, dotted-line reporting and so forth)
5. Creating a weekly or monthly newsletter out of press coverage of your company
6. Creating a collection of information for a new “community of practice” type group, without creating yet another silo with redundant copies of information

Some of these problems, of course, can be solved with other technologies, including internal social bookmarking or collections of RSS feeds in a truly SOA-enabled Intranet. Where trails add value is where there is a need to add some meaningful sequencing (”read this before that”), so that the collection becomes a guided narrative of sorts. Some questions that my research team and I are interested in include:

1. What are the most critical EDI problems and pain points?
2. When the existing solutions to these problems work poorly, how do they fail?
3. Lost opportunities: what problems are being finessed or not faced at all, due to the difficulty of the problem?
4. How transient are information organization needs? How much organization lasts for days, versus months, versus quarters, versus years?
5. How dynamic are information collections, how often do they change during active and quiescent phases of the respective workflows?
6. What sort of security and permissions architecture constraints impact EDI?
7. What regulatory and “need to know” constraints impact EDI?

Invite Code and an Invitation to Dream

One of the smart things Xerox does is organize “dreaming sessions” between researchers and customers (who otherwise rarely meet).  That’s kinda what I am hoping to create here, virtually. If there is enough interest and I am able to scrounge together a budget, we might even do a face-to-face dreaming session at some point.

So here you go, here is how you can experiment with the technology in its current consumer incarnation:

• Go to the login/registration page of trailmeme
• Request an invitation to register with the coupon code: e2blog

You should see the invitation in your email in 10-15 minutes. If you don’t, check your spam folder. Once you register, you can create your own trails. The code will work for the first 100 users who sign up. We’ll release more batches of invites soon.

Keep in mind that this is NOT a commercially launched Xerox product. It is a labs project that is in research beta, so yes, some things (okay, several things) are kinda klutzy at the moment. But I hope you will be won over by the sheer coolness of it all.

There is a FAQ, and quick-and-dirty screencasts to help you follow/blaze trails. You can keep up with our updates  on the project blog at blog.trailmeme.com

So play around, create some trails, and feel free to post any comments/feature suggestions/high-level conceptual thoughts on EDI, anything you like. You can also email me directly at venkatesh.rao@xerox.com if you want to share private comments or just want to connect and talk about this.

If you are itching to use this inside the firewall, and you happen to run WordPress inside your org, you can of course try the plugin right away.

And I’d appreciate any reblogs. Feel free to share the code too.

Venkatesh Rao is a researcher in the Xerox Innovation Group. His personal blog is at ribbonfarm.com. While his posts on this blog usually come with the disclaimer that the opinions are not that of his employer, in this case, that is obviously not true.

McAfee and the Left Brain

McAfee’s book is dry, to the point and somewhat formulaic, but it gets the job done. That job is to serve as ammunition for E 2.0 evangelists, change agents and executive sponsors everywhere.  The book is a well-balanced mix of anecdotes and concepts, with a couple of new acronyms thrown in (ESSP: emergent social software platform). Astutely, McAfee starts with a personal story that gently encourages skeptics to identify with his own trajectory. He recounts how he was personally skeptical of the claims of the Web 2.0 movement until he decided to look up “Skinhead” on Wikipedia (the idea being that as a contentious flame-bait topic, it would stress Wikipedia’s claims of being able to produce level-headed articles on contentious subjects). Wikipedia passed the test, won over McAfee, and presumably, at this point, the book will sort of draw the skeptical reader into adopting a more open mindset.

From there, the book proceeds systematically to a chapter-length answer to the basic “what problems does this solve?” question asked by passive aggressive blockers and nay-sayers every evangelist must face, titled “vexations and missed opportunities in group work.”

We then get a brief history (too brief, as we’ll see) and a treatment of how E 2.0 does what earlier generations of Enterprise groupware and Knowledge Management (KM) failed to do (yay! for my early KM vs. SM thesis). The usual laundry list of design principle differences are trotted out, starting with the basic distinction between folksonomies versus top-down imposed taxonomies.

After what are essentially “neutralize the nay-sayers” ammunition chapters, we get a more positively-framed chapter listing the benefits. That concludes Part I. If you are using this as your tactical evangelism manual, by this time you should have convinced your quarry of the basic value proposition, and have him or her prepped for the deployment discussion.

Part II proceeds with a higher-level neutralization task: the roadblocks to deployment and operationalization. A particularly valuable section is “red herrings” — the huge list of idiotic objections that slow adoption (arising rarely from genuine ignorance, and usually from basic risk aversion, inertia, posturing by self-styled “critics” of flavors of the month, and intentional passive aggression). This bit should help newbie evangelists avoid particularly vicious and tortuous bunny trails and arguments that go nowhere, with people who don’t intend on moving, and who don’t need to be moved. Then we get a sketch of the the legitimate concerns, and a wise caution to prepare for the long haul. I was pleased to see a strong bit of advice to avoid the ROI question and focus on “are we moving?” as the core operational strategy question (the book does not address business model strategy at any length).

The book concludes with two chapters titled “Going Mainstream” and “Looking Ahead” which are roadmap fodder for the unfortunate middle managers everywhere tasked with creating those powerpoint slides for senior exec briefings. “Looking Ahead” has one nice bit about a “Model 1″ (goal-directed/waterfall) vs. “Model 2″ (open-ended/agile) approaches, and should help evangelists set the right expectations.

Overall, the book is a workman-like tactical manual aimed at driving change. That does make it somewhat tedious and boring to those of us who’ve already been down this road and learned the lessons the hard way, but it is critical to understand that this sort of book is essential for the army of second-generation evangelists out there (think Marines vs. Army), to make sure they are solving the right problems, and solving them right. A big part of this is knowing which battles to pick, and knowing who must be persuaded and who needs to be sidestepped.

If I have one criticism, it is that the book is almost too cynically level-headed and focused on being the ammunition needed by the frontline warriors. Even frontline folks have souls and need some inspiration and a sense of wonder at what we still don’t understand, to keep them going.  Rather than focusing on converting the resistance through sparking genuine “Aha!” moments, the book focuses on helping believers win, outmaneuver the resistance, and push through their agenda. Winning hearts, minds and souls isn’t something the book will help with.

The  book will also not help those who already have frontline experience in their search for a broader philosophical synthesis and intellectual stimulation. That book is the Fraser/Dutta one.

Fraser/Dutta and the Right Brain

Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom is a very different book. It eschews all talk of mundane practical issues except where such talk helps to make broader social-psychological or historical points. The book also does not suffer fools gladly, and is written at a high, nearly academic level. I suspect (and I am being pessimistic here) that the book will simply be beyond the comprehension of the majority of bright-eyed and clueless evangelists who just want to whine about (ugh) “culture change.” While their efforts may be propped up and rendered safe in the short term by good practical manuals like McAfee’s, to operate at higher levels of sophistication, understanding at this level is needed. Most will not achieve it. They will be doomed to energetic and misguided evangelism that will do more harm than good.

With that caveat, a look at the book. I have less to say here since it is a dense, closely-argued book that is anything but formulaic.

The overall narrative attempts to make a single broad point: Enterprise 2.0 tools up-end power structures in radical ways, and the higher-level social psychology questions that matter are all about the various tensions that play out in individual power struggles and authority battles.

To this end, the book situates the E 2.0 debate in a much broader context, drawing its inspiration from the power struggles between the “hierarchical” monarchies and “horizontal” Knights Templar in medieval European Christendom. There is a nuanced discussion of power, status, authority (ascriptive as well as real), and how these evolve when there is a struggle between hierarchical and network modes of organization. There are deep discussions of social identity, privacy, loyalty and friendship. Where McAfee and others take ideas like ratings at face value, Fraser and Dutta dive deep into the motivations driving rating behavior.

The book is very loosely structured at an overt level, but is very tight at the sentence level. There are three parts titled Identity, Status and Power, each with 5 chapters. There are no crutches for those with weak stomachs. No anecdote boxes, no graphs, no bullet lists of key concepts and talking points. Instead, each chapter is a single densely argued essay that dives into a few tricky themes. The only concession to “popular” accessibility is a single well-chosen cartoon at the start of each part. Don’t expect to easily translate this book to Powerpoint.

It is a keep-up-or-shut-up book that takes no prisoners. While not scholarly in the strict sense, there are plenty of references to the sort of original literature that most readers would never think of reading. Probably the best thing about the book is that it pointedly avoids annoying Kumbaya talk about how social software is all about world peace and Burning Man sensibilities. It is not, it is about the same old ornery self-interested, calculating individualists that power is always about. Again, I feel vindicated (see The Unsociable, Radically Individualist Soul of Social Media)

The overall effect of the book is that it delivers a brilliant and much-needed boost to the level of the discourse. This is the level at which we should be talking at today. This is the level at which fresh insights are still available. This is the level at which the conversation needs to operate if what McAfee calls the “long haul” challenge is to be met. Unfortunately, I think maybe 10% of the people who need to be talking at this level will actually be able to do so. I don’t mean to be elitist here. This has simply been my personal experience. Enthusiasm for a cause, and competence in supporting it are not the same thing.

Which Should You Read?

Ideally, you should read both. Use McAfee’s book to help you fight your battles. Even if you already know all that stuff and have gone beyond, the book is the ammunition you need. Put a little bit of your own soul into the battle though.

The Fraser/Dutta material is far more dangerous and subversive. If you really get what is being talked about, you should be cautious in selecting who you discuss the ideas with. The ideas openly frame the conflicts the right way, and only those who have been won over heart and soul will be prepared to engage you at this level.

If you can read and follow McAfee, but find that Fraser/Dutta leaves you confused and fumbling, you might want to gently step back from what you are doing before you do too much damage.

Venkatesh G. Rao writes a blog on business, innovation, and other stuff at www.ribbonfarm.com, and is a Web technology researcher at Xerox. The views expressed in this post are his personal ones and do not represent the views of his employer.

The New Adoption Threshold

My actions (which I suspect were pretty common for yesterday) show that the biggest barriers to adoption these days arise from two questions we ask:

a) Whether the marginal value of a service is greater than the startup-costs of registering and integrating it into your routine and…

b) Whether you think the thing will survive long enough to be worth learning.

Keep in mind that for a), supporting open registration models (OpenID, Facebook, Google, Twitter) is not enough: the startup costs of using a service go beyond merely creating and remembering new login info. You must additionally do something nobody can automate for you: integrate the new beast into your routine.

The Friendfeed acquisition and my response to it suggests that a lot of people will react like me: only believing in a site’s survivability (even if it is VERY good), if it integrates into a larger, more stable ecosystem. In a similar piece of news yesterday, the URL shortener tr.im announced that it was going out of business. Twitter, which accounts for most shortened URL use, picked bit.ly as their official shortener a while back, and after that it was only a matter of time before the mass extinction event began. Another victim of the era of standardization.

What both these incidents show is that “social networking in the wild” (SNITW) is finally starting to take off. You could interpret it equally as “domestication of the Web 2.0 wilderness.”

Acronym of the Day: SNITW

What is SNITW? It means your identity following you around wherever you go, as opposed to just inside a silo site like Facebook. Think of it as single-logon on steroids, and spanning your entire life as opposed to just your work life.

For example, if you go to popular techie blog ReadWriteWeb and try to post a comment, you will see options to post via Twitter and Facebook, 2 of the bigger “in the wild” identity suppliers. Your in-the-wild activity can also feed right back into your in-the-sandbox activity via services like Friendfeed which pick up and re-domesticate all your wild wanderings.

Other contenders: your Google ID (which is part of Google’s open social model), Gravatar by Automattic (the folks behind WordPress.com), OpenID (a distributed model where you can be your own identity provider, centralizing your life around your blog for instance) and Disqus (which centralizes your commenting life). It’s been a long journey. Remember Microsoft Passport?

So here’s what your social-virtual life will look like in the coming years:

• Source: You will establish 2-3 “base camp” identities via services like Facebook and Google (on average, we consumers are not very trusting, and the B2B world naturally resists monopolists, so it isn’t going to be just one)
• Process: Using these 2-3 base-camp identities, you will use services all over the Web (mostly social, non-financial). Many sites will support all major base-camp identity suppliers, but a few will have gaps, which is a technical reason you’ll need more than one base-camp. Sort of like those places that don’t accept American Express, so you will always need a Visa.
• Sink: Using re-integration services like FriendFeed, you will put your Humpty-Dumpty life together again. If you want to. If the source base-camps represent the “theory” of your life, the sink systems represent the logs of experimental data.

In this scheme, services which do NOT offer open registration models will need 2x-3x the value add to reach same penetration levels.

The interesting thing here is data-sharing. Apparently a random new service xyz.com will lose their most valuable resource: customer data. Not quite. The major base-camp identity providers will need to meet their own set of customer expectations (both business and 3rd party provider), namely involving open API access. Apple is learning this the hard way right now. So the balance of power among providers is shifting quite a bit, but not as radically as it might appear. Advertisers still need the high eyeball-surface-area provided by a large number of services, which gives these services enough collective bargaining power to rein in excess by the base-camp or sink providers.

Closing the Loop

Another interesting point is this: the Facebook acquisition signals a “close the loop” event, since a major “source” base-camp now owns a major “sink” re-integration service. But in general, I don’t think the 2 will converge neatly. Both consumers and 3rd party services will hesitate about putting all their eggs in one basket, and one of the most powerful ways to resist data monopolization is to keep source and sink ecosystems somewhat separate. Kinda like after Enron the SEC created mechanisms to ensure corporations, banks and auditors weren’t all in bed together. Another reason is technical: some kinds of stuff just don’t feed back nicely into the structure of something like Facebook. The last reason is social-psychological. Facebook is my “social resume” and LinkedIn is my “work resume.” There is no particularly good reason either should be the home of my “comment posting” persona.

So the re-integration ecosystem will organize itself around patterns of social activity, where the source base-camp providers will specialize in terms of social identity.

The New Order

What are the pluses/minuses of this?

• Pluses: life gets simpler for you and me, worst-case security thresholds start rising as the base-camp identity providers start imposing minimum security standards, anonymity starts to fade somewhat (if you’ve seen these SNITW sites, you’ll see things like people’s real names and pictures showing up automatically).
• Minuses: The whole system has far fewer points of failure. Successful security breaches can cause much more damage as a result, and will be harder to contain. Like the electric grid, the co-dependencies between major services can cause cascading failures (we saw a preview of that with the Facebook 2nd order consequences of the Twitter denial of service attack), anonymity starts to fade somewhat.

Some consequences that aren’t pluses or minuses for you and me directly, but still interesting. With all the focus on real-time search challenging Google, we seem to forget that the identity wars are creating an even bigger blindspot for Google than real-time: Facebook for instance, cannot be indexed well by Google (by design). So search is an example of an infrastructure service that might get balkanized as the source/sink identity providers leverage their capabilities into search. Tellingly, Facebook just revealed a big search play today, and Friendfeed is also known for having a great search component.

What about Financial Identity?

The big thing that’s missing in this picture is integration between unified social identities and unified financial identities. On the latter front, services like PayPal and Google Checkout and Amazon Payments are slowly creating a parallel payments ecosystem. The cutting edge is services like Mint.com which attempt to do to your financial life what Friendfeed does to your social life.

But these 2 universes don’t talk to each other. And perhaps they shouldn’t.

And Enterprise/Work Identity?

This is where there may be unpleasant news in store for Enterprise 2.0 vendors. As job-hopping and free-agent lifestyle trends increase, individuals will be increasingly reluctant to maintain a whole separate inside-the-firewall identity. I (and I imagine you) would rather fill out a special “private/corporate” section of my LinkedIn profile, were I to join a new company, than go sign-up for and populate a whole new internal system. In fact, the ability to centralize my work life around me, rather than my employer, could well become a major factor in decisions made by prospective employees between competing job offers.

The math is unforgiving. If a new employee expects to stay in a job for only 2 years, and the company, in the worst case, has a god-awful paper forms/triplicate signoff based system to get yourself into major databases for various purposes, and you estimate it might take 3 months of annoying paperwork at the beginning and end, that’s 6 months, or 25% of your work-time, spent with annoying bureaucratic process headaches bogging you down. I might choose a job with maybe a 20% pay cut rather than accept that I’ll spend that much time in hell.

The Holy Grail: Healthcare Identity

You may have noticed, but we’ve worked our way down the Maslow pyramid.  Google Health is the thin end of the wedge. If the current attempt at healthcare reform actually creates portable health insurance, the trifecta will be complete.

Once you’ve got all 3 into one broader architecture that is individual-centric, great powers and terrors could be unleashed. By controlling finely-graduated access to my 3-ring identity circus (outermost: social, second: financial, innermost: health), I could potentially eliminate 90% of the huge burden of paperwork “living” today entails. I expect that translates to about 15-20% in core, intrinsic productivity gains (not “economic” productivity as in GDP divided by population).

The flip side: I am my own single point of failure.

And no, let’s stop here. No global physical+digital passports and Facebook-managed systems of visas for international travel. That I think is not going to happen within our lifetimes. The irresistable force that is Web 2.0 will finally meet its immovable object when it runs up against national borders and the biggest “old” organization of all: the international system of nation-states.

Social Cash?

A friend made a point once in a conversation about the nature of money: the anonymous paper-currency economy, besides being a favorite of mobsters, serves as a check and balance against the tyranny of any information-based governance system. The more a tax regime is viewed as unfair, the more money moves out of the trackable economy and into the cash economy. Mess with money supply through over-free printing of money or lowering of interest rates below inflation, and wealth migrates further from cash to gold.

With all this identity unification fun, a similar check and balance is needed. We need social cash. True, anonymous, paper-currency-like cash. Cory Doctorow’s Whuffie will not do, since it is personally identifiable. There is a real need for somebody to invent a system whereby I can take some of my online social capital (earned through my blog’s rankings for instance) and converting it into an anonymous trust currency. Imagine being able to post a one word comment, “bullshit” as an anonymous comment on a blog and actually be listened to. Today such a comment would be ignored as noise (since it has neither the credibility of known identity, nor the credibility of intrinsic content). But if I could associate with such a comment 1 million reputation dollars say, that I’ve earned elsewhere, the comment would get taken seriously, the way anonymous donors to foundations are taken seriously.

Isolation, Interdependence, or Unification?

When you consider other major technologies that have gone through a Wild-West youth, followed by an era of standardization and integration (such as railroads, container shipping, credit cards, ACH-driven banking), you realize that there are two major tradeoffs that drive the dynamics. The first is the consumer’s trade-off between making life more simple and trusting any one infrastructure system too much. The second is the exact same dynamic at the B2B level. In various historical cases, we’ve seen outcomes ranging from pretty much complete unification (such as railroad gauges) to oligopolies (the top 2-3 credit card companies, metric and FPS systems) to continued anarchy (English isn’t going to be the universal language/human-brain-OS anytime soon).

For Web identities, I think the future is going to be “interdependence.” A small set of interlocked and co-dependent identity services, which are coupled enough to function well together (and take each other down in crises, but able to recover individually).

(p.s. I’ve had to withdraw from being a regular contributor here, thanks to relentlessly increasing demands at work, but a “Hi there!” to everybody I’ve had the pleasure to get to know through this site).

Venkatesh G. Rao writes a blog on business and innovation at www.ribbonfarm.com, and is a Web technology researcher at Xerox. The views expressed in this blog are his personal ones and do not represent the views of his employer.

Business at its Best and Boringest

Think of the most exciting parts of business. The charged atmosphere of a sales office “bullpen” in the morning, as salespeople make their morning calls before hitting the road. The boiler room excitement of a trading room. The bated-breath 3-2-1-ignition! pressure of a product launch. The blow-by-blow of a complex battle to steal a major customer from a competitor. Compared to how gut-real business can get at its best, the atmosphere of the virtual communities inhabiting Enterprise 2.0 infrastructure can feel pretty anemic (with the exception of IM and email, which I don’t count as “social media” anyway). From what I’ve heard from friends, this seems to be broadly true across all but the most aggressive and young small companies.

I am thinking here primarily of broad, enterprise-wide elements like a popular intranet blog or wiki, or an intra-company laconi.ca or yammer microblog. But even workgroup-level stuff, though closer to “mission critical,” rarely rises to the level of “exciting.” Staff organizations seem to do more with social media than line organizations. Innocuous fun stuff and watercooler banter goes ‘2.0′ pretty quickly. Caucus groups post their event roundups.  Extra-curricular groups jump in to share picnic or softball game pictures. Armchair strategists, safely distant from the real strategy tables, post interesting news articles and uncontroversial comments about industry trends.

Official but low-impact/mostly harmless committees love the 2.0 medium too. You know what I mean: the ones chartered to do various non-critical-path things like “look into” a new long-term trend, champion green practices, organize a seminar series, or whatever.  The medium is a natural home for their activities. Don’t pretend you haven’t seen something like this:

“We are starting this blog to share thoughts and findings from our committee on blah blah blah, and provide a forum where community members can have their voices heard, share their thoughts and provide feedback. Readers can find a collection of resources at this repository. Let the fun begin!”

The signs are unmistakable: a slightly self-important, editorial “committee” voice, and a hopelessly retarded attempt to humanize and be “engaging.” Quite often, there are overtones of social justice, empowerment and other such themes.  Cheap shots aside, I’ve run or participated in a couple of such committee efforts myself. While they have their place and value, they are not where the action is. The evidence is pretty compelling: the part of the enterprise that is going “2.0″ fastest is the periphery, the part that views itself as disenfranchised, not the center. For every 2 blogs or wiki entries that display a wicked sense of humor or dare to raise truly consequential issues, there are 8 mostly-harmless dullsville pieces.

You could argue that this behavior is justified risk aversion. People don’t want to go on the record saying potentially unsafe, job-threatening stuff, or stuff that could be read as criticizing peers. People certainly don’t want to widely distribute sensitive or need-to-know information. Unfortunately that explanation doesn’t hold water. There is typically plenty of room between the reasonable boundary and the boundary at which people actually seem to stop. You don’t have to put together the communication around a million-dollar deal in a blog-fishbowl to make things interesting.

Why the Excitement is Missing

Here’s why I believe the exciting stuff is missing. The exciting people, by and large, are missing. One part of the reason is hard to fix. The exciting people — say the guy leading the consequential re-org, or managing the “bet the company” product launch, is probably far busier than everybody else. But I suspect there is another reason: to put it in terms of an American high school analogy, it is the same reason the “cool kids” avoid the “loser kids.”  Enterprise 2.0 is mostly populated by the equivalent of band geeks. The equivalent of football players and cheerleaders are possibly avoiding it. Just possibly, they might be thinking “nobody who is anybody goes there; nothing that matters happens there.” And it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Enterprise 2.0 stuff  fails to deliver value, despite popularity and heavy activity, because the valuable stuff isn’t happening on it to begin with.

The world of business inherits its exciting elements from the market economy, the only truly Darwinian ecosystem (modulo bailouts) that modern information workers participate in. Those who participate in the risks, participate in the excitement. Those who want safety and security do their best to stay out of the line of fire.

It is critically important that Enterprise 2.0 tools get adopted by the risk takers and in-the-line-of-fire people actually driving the business. If we speculate that 20% of the employees are responsible for 80% of the results, we need that proportion reflected in online activity. The people who don’t pull their punches. The ones who dare to call a spade a spade. The ones who know how to tell the truth without unnecessary collateral damage. Without them, the revolution that Enterprise 2.0 thinking is capable of triggering will not happen.

Venkatesh G. Rao writes a blog on business and innovation at www.ribbonfarm.com, and is a Web technology researcher at Xerox. The views expressed in this blog are his personal ones and do not represent the views of his employer.

The Overview

Here’s the list of 14, with a self-rating of the level of provocation in each piece:

1. Breaking the Second Moore’s Law: Clouds and the Two Enterprise Cultures (Apr 10, 2009, 0 comments, provocation: low)
2. There is No Such Thing as Culture Change (Apr 1, 2009, 28 comments, provocation, high)
3. Diffusecasting: The New Model for Mass Influence (Mar 24, 2009, 5 comments, provocation: medium):
4. The Unsociable, Radically-Individualist Soul of Social Media (Feb 26, 2009, 13 comments, provocation: high):
5. Grown Up Digital, by Don Tapscott (Feb 6, 2009, 4 comments, provocation: low):
6. A Social Media Capability Maturity Model: Part II (Jan 28, 2009, 1 comment, provocation: very low)
7. A Social Media Capability Maturity Model: Part I (Jan 27, 2009, 0 comments, provocation: very low)
8. The Future According to Microsoft (Jan 21, 2009, 1 comment, provocation: very low)
9. The Last Page of Web 2.0 (Jan 14, 2009, 9 comments, provocation: low)
10. Will Your Enterprise 2.0 even make sense in 2009? (Dec 15, 2008, 3 comments, provocation: medium)
11. The ‘Hit by a Bus’ Social Media ROI Method (Dec 9, 2009, 9 comments, provocation: medium)
12. Has Seth Godin Peaked? (Nov 20, 2008, 7 comments, provocation: high)
13. Social Media vs. Knowledge Management: The Reactions (Oct 16, 7 comments, provocation: medium)
14. Social Media vs. Knowledge Management: A Generational War (Sept 28, 46 comments, provocation: very high)

You don’t need me to plot the correlation between level of provocation and level of reaction (comments, as well as what I haven’t computed: blog responses and tweets). If you provoke intelligently and skillfully, this pattern will emerge. And contrary to what you might think you may or may not always want a high-intensity response.

Manufacturing Dissent

When I first began writing online, back in 1999 (I wrote furiously for a couple of years, took a 5-year break, and returned to the online scene around 2006), I had pretty decent raw ability to create reactions, but very little control over the process. Back then, I was very active on Sulekha.com, both as a columnist (this was before the word ‘blog’ gained traction) and on the bulletin boards. My posts routinely provoked big reactions, and I gained some notoriety and even a couple of dedicated stalkers who liked to react pretty poisonously to anything I said. I knew that half of what I said would create debate and dissent. The problem was, I couldn’t predict which half.  I also couldn’t predict or control the quality of the debate.

Now, 10 years later, I have fairly good control over the rhetoric of online conversations (and much less interest in creating reactions for the sake of reactions). I can modulate my writing to achieve a desired quality/quantity of responses (within limits set by how well known I am, of course), with fairly high probability. On my own blog, ribbonfarm.com, where I try to post very enduring content on fundamental themes, I aim for low provocation. I don’t have the time to manage a very active discussion scene there. My intent there is to provide my audience food for thought; stuff they really have to think about. Here, I like to stir the pot and challenge the biggest pathology in the world of work: groupthink and assumed consenus. A pathology that leads to the formation and perpetuation of mutual-admiration cliques that do not talk to each other, thereby silencing public discourse around the most important divides. I think this is particularly useful for the Enterprise 2.0 space, which has the potential to change the entire philosophy of organizational management, not just its IT infrastructure. So what have I learned about manufacturing dissent?

1. Calibrate your range: depending on your fame, there is a baseline level of reaction you will get on social media no matter what you say or how stupid it is. Oprah will get 100x more retweets for her most inane thoughts than I will for my most useful tweet. That is your lower limit. Your upper limit depends on your skill, but will be limited at some point by your reach.
2. Separate your mood from your rhetorical intent (but not all the way): 10 years ago, the reason I couldn’t control the level of provocativeness in my writing or the probable intensity of the reaction was that I hadn’t yet developed the maturity to separate rhetorical intent from my own feelings.  It is one thing to spout vituperative nonsense because you are mad about something, and quite another to (for example) dramatically posit a “War” between social media and knowledge management because you think that will start an interesting debate. On the other hand, you can get too detached from the content of what you are saying, and get addicted to the sociopathic delights of baiting and button-pushing. Don’t. Stay detached enough to control, close enough to care.
3. Really understand your rhetorical intent: Self-awareness is key. Don’t delude yourself that you are trying to foster useful dialog when all you are doing is creating linkbait to drive up your page rank, or rationalizing a desire to vent or spew venom about someone/something. The absolute best intention behind provocation is personal learning. If you are the kind who is into provocation as part of an SEO (search-engine optimization) strategy, smart people will soon tune you out, and you will find yourself surrounded by idiots and other SEOers.
4. Dichotomize, dichotimize, dichotomize: Your two favorite colors should be black and white, and in any given provocation post, you should talk about both and pick one. Don’t insult your audience’s intelligence by offering philosophy 101 lessons on the futility and falsehood of all dichotomies. Not any dichotomy will do: picking the right dichotomy to poke at is like finding a social earthquake fault-line. The latent energy has to be out there, not in your head. Usually in the form of two non-talking cliques that are silently wooing fence-sitters on some issue. A newbie mistake is to assume that any old silly post with a title like “X vs. Y” or “A or B?” will work.
5. Be careful about adopting polarization as a goal: Dichotomies are necessary to create fertile framings for public discourses. But if your goal is to create a deeper chasm between two sides (polarization) and more cohesion on both sides, you are basically preparing for escalated conflict. There are some who believe this is never a legitimate goal for a public discourse, but I tend to be somewhat agnostic. I am willing to believe that there are sometimes irreconcilable positions, and that you have to help move the public discourse towards a winner-take-all conflict.
6. Qualifications are your cadmium rods: A friend of mine has a great rule of thumb for crisp writing: round off to the nearest simple assertion. The more you qualify bald statements, the more you will dampen the response. That’s not a bad thing. That’s how you exercise calibrated control, like the cadmium rods that prevent nuclear reactors from turning into nuclear bombs. Baseline high-clarity assertions, where 10 words articulate 80 % of your nuanced “internal truth” position, should be your starting point. Every additional 10 words worth of qualification will get you 80% of what remains. So 10 words will create a perception that is 80% true to what you believe, 20 words will get you to 96%, and so forth. You need to put in a minimal amount of qualification based on your estimation of the sophistication of your audience, and then add more to the extent that you want to dampen debate.
7. Target a level of provocation that matches your own level of uncertainty: Here is a paradoxical rule: the less sure you are of your position, the more provocative you should be. If you are unsure what you believe, a highly-qualified 96% true-to-you articulation will result in a turgid, gray, useless article that merely expresses your own confusions. An 80% true-to-you articulation will create room for others to challenge and support you. But here’s where newbie agent provocateurs make a mistake. If your level of confidence in your own position falls below a certain threshold (that you need to intuitively judge), you basically don’t know enough to play the catalytic agent provocateur role at all, and you should shut up. Pick topics where you have more to offer than the average listener, but aren’t 100% certain of your position either.
8. Decide what you want out of the conversation: It goes without saying that despite your best efforts at managing the ensuing conversations in your own comments sections, others’ blogs, and places like twitter, the overall public conversation may not reach closure at all, may converge to multiple different conclusions in different places (or even the same place), or solidly converge to a “you are WRONG!” outcome that you still disagree with. You need to be very very modest in setting your own goals. My goal is rarely persuasion, polarization, conversion or bringing a choir closer to me. My goal is nearly always to draw my own private conclusions from the conversation, move to a more refined position myself, and bank the learning credits. Only rarely do I share my revised position in a follow-up post because that rarely serves any purpose (though I usually publicly thank/acknowledge those I learned from). The public conversation you have caused will likely have too much momentum and locked-in equilibrium positions for you to strongly influence further in the same medium. Further influence will need a higher impact medium. To the extent that I have a public-spirited goal for others, I hope others take away some private learning like I do.

These are just the most important “advanced” principles. But a comment on the 101 stuff is in order. There are many basics that I haven’t talked about, like ignoring the jerks and knee-jerks, selectively engaging only those with the sophistication to understand that your stance is rhetorical rather than absolute, knowing when someone is on the other side of an unbridgeable divide and so forth. If you are still at that level of the game, you have only two choices. You could just give up on the challenge of developing your dissent skills and decide to become a purely harmony-driven blogger (and accepting a much lower ceiling in your ability to create reactions), OR you could fumble around and learn like I did. Hopefully it will take you less time than it did me.

Venkatesh G. Rao writes a blog on business and innovation at www.ribbonfarm.com, and is a Web technology researcher at Xerox. The views expressed in this blog are his personal ones and do not represent the views of his employer.

There are two basic business model architectures, complex systems and volume operations, and the two cannot and should not mix, or share best practices. Businesses with one architecture should not covet the benefits of the other.

The distinction is a nuanced one, but has almost biblical clarity (Moore actually uses the word “covet”). Think “high touch mega-deal business” vs. “mass production of widgets” for starters.  Like every good dogma, it catalyzes a lot of creative thought when you attempt to think of ways to break it. My question to the Enterprise 2.0 crowd is this: does cloud technology provide a way to break the Second Moore Law? I think it does, but it will take some extraordinary business creativity to do so.

The Two Enterprise Cultures

The Second Moore’s Law gets at a far more fundamental distinction in business than small/large or closed-and-hierarchical/open-and-flat. It gets at the very definition of a business, the purpose of which, if you recall your Papa Drucker, is “to create and keep a customer.”  Complex systems customers, like buyers of enterprise healthcare plans, or individuals buying homes, require a high-touch, high-customization approach. Volume operations customers, like individuals buying coffee, require a low-touch, a few-sizes-fit-all approach, where customization, if available at all, is in DIY form. Here are two pictures illustrating the difference, taken from Moore’s book website.

The complex systems model involves selling a solution which involves an integration platform over legacy infrastructure, followed by a technology architecture layer, a mix of your modules and third-party modules, a “solution architecture” that maps the bottom of the cake to the customer’s needs, and topped by an icing of consulting and integration services. You may instantly think “IBM” for the whole thing, and “Dell” or “Microsoft” for the modules, but think broadly, beyond IT, to businesses like Boeing aircraft, space launch services, or commercial real-estate construction.

The volume operations model on the other hand, involves starting with a base technology that spawns a portfolio of offerings which spread out through a ring of channel operations to a huge base of consumers, who generate cashflow as a river of small-ticket transactions. This is most familiar in retail, but be careful not to conflate volume/complex with consumer/enterprise or small/large (I’ll leave you to work out the nuances).

The book has a rich discussion of the two, but I’ll highlight just a few elements. Let’s return to Drucker for guidance in how to interpret the assertion that complex systems and volume operations business architectures do not mix. Two of Drucker’s ideas are pertinent. First, that there are only two really essential functions in business, marketing and innovation. That’s what you need to create and keep a customer. Second, maximizing profitability is not the goal of business (that, as we said, is to “create and keep a customer”). Profitability is a constraint. You have to make a profit primarily to manage risk and uncertainty in order to ensure survivability and meet the “keep customer” part of the definition of a business, which you cannot do if you aren’t around. So based on Drucker’s guidelines, here are the parts of the Second Moore’s law that are worth pointing out:

1. Marketing: The marketing function (which in the broad sense encompasses everything from positioning and competitive strategy to market research, not just selling) could not be more different. The high-touch/low-touch distinction is an obvious one, as is the difference in the length of the sales cycle and the revenue balance between initial buy and post-sale. But there are more subtle ones. Complex systems architecture companies must orchestrate a large coalition of companies to deliver a solution, so reputation and collective positioning matter more. Volume operations work primarily by pull rather than push, so branding and stand-alone segment positioning is key (rather than coalition positioning). Marketers who are good at one are rarely good at the other.
2. Innovation: Moore’s book is based on the technology adoption lifecycle and the category maturity cycle. He has a thorough discussion of 15 different types of innovation, from initial disruption to end-of-life innovations and harvesting. The big point, which he elaborates painstakingly, is that all  types play out very differently under the two architectures. For example, in the first kind, disruptive innovation, which comes at the birth of a category, complex businesses disrupt via technlogy innovations (example, Oracle in abstracting databases from mainframes), while volume businesses typically disrupt through business model innotavtions (for example, Kindle and free Wi-Fi downloads).
3. Profitability Constraint: Each business architecture also has a very different gross margin model (set by Wall Street expectations for that architecture). Roughly, “messy cost structure, large margins, low velocity” versus “lean cost structure, tight margins, high velocity.”

These three “business basics” distinctions provide powerful reasons why the two don’t mix. It goes right down to the personalities and strengths in your talent base. To make it explicit, Moore offers a “worked” example with a simple 7-stage linear value chain (the “skeleton” of a business), involving [Market] Research, Design, Sourcing, Making, Marketing, Selling and Servicing. Each value chain element, he shows, ends up getting structured differently. For example, the first step in the value chain, market research is primarily driven by qualitative scenarios in the complex systems architecture, because the customer base is small and diverse (example the airlines Boeing sells to), with no useful statistical structure as a “market.” Metaphors and story telling guide market research.  In volume operations by contrast, quantitative market research and analytics dominat (Netflix is the classic here).

So there you have it, that’s the two cultures for you. And Moore is pretty much resolute in his recommendation: the two cannot mix. The meet in the marketplace, and play a countercyclical dance, as complex offerings get increasingly tightly integrated, modularized and commoditized, thus moving from “complex” to “volume” regimes (example: mainframes to PCs), leaving the complex systems incumbent to look for new value at the next layer of the offering. But despite this partnership and meeting, they cannot play each other’s games.

Or maybe they can. Can the cloud break this law?

Clouds and the Two Cultures

Though Moore’s book has a brief discussion of Salesforce.com, and has an obscure discussion of how products can become platforms, it doesn’t really get to the idea of the cloud comprehensively (the book was published in 2005).

So is the idea of the cloud (whether it is Amazon bare-metal, Google’s App Engine level, or Microsoft Azure) a game changer at the level of business models? Certainly not in the general sense. Building Boeing jetliners will never be the same game as building Hyundai cars (automobiles are the most complex of the volume operations businesses, according to Moore) or Bics. I am an aerospace engineer, and I am pretty sure there is no currently feasible way to offer air-travel platforms that scale by the seat. You’d need something like a highly aerodynamic and fuel-efficient formation-flying set of auto-piloted 1-person aircraft to get to the aerospace equivalent of Amazon EC2. Since I studied formation flight in grad school, I am fairly sure that isn’t going to happen in the next 100 years.

But within the narrower world of IT systems, where the laws of physics are less constraining, can it happen, at least upon maturity in a few years, if not today?

I believe it can, and it can happen through the complex model becoming mostly unnecessary, and the bulk of revenue moving into the volume model. The complexity doesn’t go away, it just gets absorbed into market-based on-demand coordination models that are owned by nobody, not even the “integration” vendor, who can then become the “platform” vendor.

1. The Free-Premium Stack: Every module vendor  has grand visions of a stack where a free (possibly open source supported) base props up an SMB volume operations “premium” version, and a “super-premium” one for large enterprises. Unlike the integration challenges of 1.0 technology (like setting up special customizations to copies of Windows sold to a Fortune 100 company), there is a secret hope at work that SaaS, WebTops and XML-based SOA integration standards like RSS, integrating into a complex system will require no extra customer-specific work. Even if you are selling a 10,000 seat license. Holy grail, yes, but conceivable in a way perpetual motion machines are not.
2. The “Open Platform”: If module vendors are dreaming low-touch integration dreams, the platform vendors have similar hopes. With the evolution of open APIs and SOA as legitimate technology strategies, there is the hope that integration work will not be demanding on the platform end either. Perhaps it can be as simple as the CIO’s staff checking off a bunch of boxes for supported modules, and IT ecosystems simply culling out module species that don’t talk the main integration languages.
3. The “Sip” Sales Cycle vs. the Mega-Deal: Another big reason to believe the Second Moore Law can be broken is that it is now possible to engineer sales models where even very complex offerings can be sold with an entry-purchase in the volume regimes. Cloud-metered by-the-sip sales in fact. Dell sells to large enterprises by the truck-load. Amazon EC2 can sell by the box-hour. The goal is still millions of dollars from a single customer, but you don’t get that with a starter sale of hundreds of thousands. You can get started with one unit. Stowe Boyd just pointed out a great Niall Kennedy piece on the power of flexible pricing, and the implications for business model architectures are seriously significant. Google actually charges by the type of database access command.
4. Open Source as an Integration-Operations Game Changer: Moore has a quick treatment of open source, but I believe he fails to realize its true significance, which is this: much of the operational complexity of complex systems business architecture comes about because it is attacked top-down within a single umbrella sale or engagement. When your offerings are based on open source, much of this complexity is simply shunted out to the open marketplace, where it is solved by market/crowdsourced mechanisms rather than complex operations. If you think about it, the idea that complex systems integrations offer Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees within the SLA (Service Level Agreement) is a specious one. Well-organized open source communities beat formal QoS and SLA models hollow on specific fronts like bug fixing, security threat resolution and so forth. Slowly, open-source coordination models are taking on more and more of the integration challenges through their market-like models, and winning.
5. The Moving Target Effect: The customer isn’t standing still in all this. If “bazaar” models are taking over the open economy of free agents via open source, the insides of companies are also going from cathedral to bazaar architectures. This makes the complex-systems architecture slightly less necessary. Thomas Malone’s “Future of Work” (2004) chronicles many of these internal changes, and things are evolving so quickly, his book is is already outdated.
6. The Invisible Hand and the Single Wringable Neck: Perhaps the biggest reason complex systems architectures have been required in the past is that CEOs of Fortune 100 companies have demanded a “single wringable neck.” IT systems are now so large and complex, and so critical to operations, that if something bad happens on a large scale, the CEO needs to be able to call up a single powerful VP level account manager (or even the vendor CEO) and yell. What happens when there is no single wringable neck? Everybody expecting the mix of automated plumbing systems and market mechanisms inside and outside the firewall to resolve everything? This is perhaps the biggest unknown. In a sense, the single wringable neck is replaced by the invisible hand. As with Obama and the financial crisis, there are people to blame, but no single person who can be called and yelled at to get things fixed when a complex system breaks. My opinion is simple: it is evolution. We are now at a point of complexity in IT systems, where limiting things to levels where “single wringable necks” can exist is to limit business itself. Individual large businesses must be willing to operate as mini-economies rather than controlled systems.  You get the threat of meltdowns and messy recoveries, but you also get the promise of a brave new age of next-generation business model species. The dinosaurs are dying. The mammals are coming.

Venkatesh G. Rao writes a blog on business and innovation at www.ribbonfarm.com, and is a Web technology researcher at Xerox. The views expressed in this blog are his personal ones and do not represent the views of his employer.

Here’s the short version: there is no such thing as culture change. The only process that can actually occur is Darwinian natural selection and displacement of a central culture by a marginal one within industry sectors and inside individual companies. The odds against this happening are astronomically high if a business is healthy (why mess with something that isn’t broken?). The odds improve slightly if the business is in some sort of strategic trouble and requires a new business model to survive. They only improve slightly because the case that needs to be made is a two part one. If the company is mulling shifting focus from manufacturing declining margins product X to manufacturing newbie product Y, you first have to argue that Y demands a different culture. Then you have to argue that social media catalyzes the right culture to be a manufacturer of Y.  The only dead-certain way to clinch both arguments at once is to point to some upstart little disruptor in your industry that is growing rapidly and taking away marketshare, is selling Y and has a social media DNA.

I can’t tell you how to solve that complicated problem, since it is about industry specifics, competitive strategy and business model architecture. But it does help to stop the unproductive “culture change” train of thought in its tracks.

Five Ways to Get Out of the “Culture Change” Mindset

1. The Churn Argument: There is an idea in Kuhn’s theory of paradigm shifts in science that says radical new ideas (like relativity) don’t get adopted because people are won over. They get adopted because the nay-sayers retire or die out and get replaced by others. Resistance ceases because the resisters leave, and because the adopters are younger and are clearly producing more value using their ideas. Kodak CEO Antonio Perez is credited with a refinement of the idea: that any change or adoption will face a population with 3 segments: the people who buy in immediately, the people on the fence who can be convinced, and the people on the other side who will need to be waited out.
2. Don’t Blame Culture for User Experience Issues: Enthusiasts of some social-media triggered idea (like “don’t email attachments, put them in the repository and send a link”) often blame lazy, resistant cultures when what is actually wrong is that the new user experience simply isn’t engineered well enough to use. Emailed attachments are a good example. Email is a such a frequent daily task that every little extra step is a burden. Emailing attachments around is easy and convenient in most cases, and the version control mess is easier to deal with than repository discipline. This is a case where the technology had better meet the productivity expectations of the users. If you can’t make sending links simpler than attachments, don’t blame the end user. The user is expecting something along the lines of the “Attach” button getting replaced with a “CloudStore-And-LinkAttach” button that works with the same or fewer number of steps.
3. Don’t Blame Culture for Your Misunderstanding of Incentives: Librarians and change-management/workforce aging people from HR would love to see Boomer knowledge documented before they retire. That’s because their jobs would become easier. The people who actually have the knowledge to be captured may or may not have posterity/archival instincts. If you can’t figure out who is reaping benefits and who is paying the costs, and align incentives appropriately, you are a bad economist. Don’t blame culture.
4. Stop a Moment to Ponder the Darn Word!: Cultures and subcultures aren’t technology-use behaviors. Some technology-use behaviors have cultural components, but culture is a broader construct. And the biggest thing about it is people self-select into cultures containing people they want to be socially connected with. To the extent that social media are friendlier to certain cultures (just as wine bars and beer pubs will attract certain cultures), the best you can do is create highly visible self-selection mechanisms, compete in hiring to bring in more people of that sort, and in promotions to put more such people in mission-critical roles.  There is a limit to how much this helps, because many factors create a huge incumbency effect. These include: the  maturity of the company, the nature of the few people who are stewards of key money-making processes, as well as the inherited organizational culture descended from the founders. Sheer numbers will not win this game (in fact you will not succeed in building numbers). If social media truly are critical to survival in the new industry environment and you aren’t winning the displacement battle, the ship is going to go down. You are better off finding a start-up ship that is sailing off with the right culture.
5. Retooling Running Operations Costs Money: All sorts of gatekeeper organizations exist in enterprises that can seem like they are there purely to thwart you. Petty bureaucrats out to shut down things they don’t understand. What you don’t understand if you ever entertain this thought, is this: they are there to protect rivers of money, not systems or processes. That workflow you want to wiki-ize, that monstrosity written in Cobol that requires an expensive end-of-life support operation, is not just sitting there like a rusting hulk. It is working furiously to generate cash flow. Shutting down to retool is not smart.  What you want to do is spin up the momentum of an ancillary effort that adds value to the management of this death process. For instance, legacy applications are always crashing or creating other sorts of trouble. Documentation is out of date and the support team is under-resourced (possibly outsourced) and demotivated by having to play funeral director. Rather than rip-out-and-replace, get your social media solution to start by playing band-aid and helping with the extra exception-handling being caused by the brittle end-of-life alternative. Then when the thing is ready to die, your effort has a chance to step in. Things that are robust and live applications that are problematic but not end-of-life (email is a prime example) aren’t good starter targets. Which is why email is going to be the last bastion holding out against 2.0ization.
6. Recognize the “Culture Change”-”Victim Mentality” Connection: You may not realize this, but most smart and productive people see the phrase “culture change” as a clear sign of somebody with a hand-wringing victim mentality. 90% of the time, they are correct. If you are in the other 10%, do you really want to be perceived this way? If you are in the other 90%, chances are you will not admit it. So I wash my hands off you.

Have fun being Darwinian!

Venkatesh G. Rao writes a blog on business and innovation at www.ribbonfarm.com, and is a Web technology researcher at Xerox. The views expressed in this blog are his personal ones and do not represent the views of his employer.

As I write, a Presidential news conference is going on, a broadcast event that I, like many of you, would have treated as ‘unmissable’ 10 years ago. Yet, today, I am happy to keep twhirl in my peripheral vision, trusting that if anything truly important is said, tweets or emails will come my way.  I have let a vast, trusted crowdsourced filter descend over my eyes. My changed behavior is just one symptom of the waning of broadcasting and the waxing of diffusecasting (I hereby claim credit for the term) as the central process in mass communications. Virality and word-of-mouth are just surface characteristics. Here is a deeper X-Ray view. Mass persuaders, read this if you value your future in your profession.

Broadcasting vs. Diffusecasting in History

Let’s get one thing out of the way: word-of-mouth, viral memes and  1:1 influence are not unique to our age. Neither is it merely a matter of increased speed and degree. By way of proof, consider two pieces of evidence.

Exhibit A: Viral diffusion is not new. Innovations, historically, have mostly spread by diffusion rather than by broadcast. There are hundreds of examples of innovations diffusing through an economy as fast as communication allowed. Students of innovation will be familiar with the Plank road, a flawed innovation that spread like wildfire in the 1840s. Back then, communication was expensive enough that only high-value news could go viral (like the idea of the Plank road, or news of gold in California), but the dynamics were the same.

Exhibit B: Word-of-mouth is also not new. Consider this excerpt from William Whyte’s Organization Man (fast becoming my management bible, easily displacing Drucker’s writings), about how the close-knit suburban word-of-mouth networks were eroding marketers’ influence:

In this process, merchanidsers have been comparatively passive. In the check I made of air-conditioner ownership in Philadelphia, I found only two cases where the original suggestion to buy had been made by a salesman; in almost all cases the initiative in the purchase had been taken by the consumer himself. To a surprising degree, retailers — and most manufacturers, for that matter — fail to appreciate the power of these word-of-mouth networks. Few tend to use “outside” salesmen to speed up the process, and those who do tend to have the salesmen scatter their calls over a wide area rather than work on natural neighborhood groupings… [a footnote continues] Many manufacturers talk about the cut-price problem as if it were due largely to the machinations of discount houses…What has been happening is that the consumer has been taking over part of the selling burden historically alloted to the retailer…The real selling job, in short, is done before the customer comes into the store. Guided by the group, the customer already has determined almost everything about the purchase — including the fact that he will make it– except the price and a few minor options; he is earning the price cut, and whether manufacturers like it or not, he is going to get it.

This surprisingly modern analysis, which could apply to IKEA, remember, was written in the 195os, when TV was in its infancy. Howard Armstrong, the iconoclastic inventor of FM radio, had just committed suicide (1954) after losing his legal battles with RCA. Brownie Wise was just inventing the Tupperware party. Whyte describes how the minority of smart WOM marketers operated back then:

With mingled admiration and horror, I heard a door-to-door selling expert explain how a smart merchandiser could exploit the group contagion. First, he said, he’d make a special effort, even if it involved a slight loss, to place air conditioners in the key homes in the neighborhood. Then, after the rest had succummed, he’d leave them alone for a while. Just about the time they would be feeling guilty that there wasn’t a conditioner in the childern’s room, he would return to trigger the next round of purchases. “All you do now,” he said, “is pull the trap. Here’s the way I would do it. I’d go in to ‘check’ the first conditioner, and while I was about it I’d mention to the couple that my wife and I had just bought a second conditioner for the little ones. I’d pause and let that hang in the air for a while. Then, very quitely, I’d say, ‘You know, Mr. and Mrs. Jones, now my wife and I really sleep nights.’”

So much for Malcolm Gladwell and his apparently new theory of the tipping point. Whyte was chronicling the same phenomena 50 years ago, as canny salesmen figured out how to leverage WOM and predictable groupthink to drive adoption with domino models and surgically precise nudges.

So what stopped the movement in its tracks? Why did WOM and virality need rediscovery in the 2000s? What happened was the few-decades long age of broadcast, a form of cheap mass influence that could be used with so little marketing creativity that it derived its name from the inefficient model of pre-Industrial age agriculture. To “broadcast” is to sow seeds by randomly scattering them in a field. Jethro Tull (1674-1741) perfected the seed-drill, a far more efficient way of sowing seeds (tellingly, at the time, it aroused fears of job losses among farm workers). Mass influencers were not unaware of this waste. John Wannamaker famously noted, well before the Golden Age of broadcast, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

The reason they could be this wasteful of that most precious commodity, human attention, is a brittle construct nearing the end of its design life, known as the ‘market segment.’ Broadcasting relied, for its effectiveness, not just on the technologies of delivery, but on the social structure that allowed the ‘market segment’ to exist as a meaningful idea.

The Rise and Fall of the Segment, and the Legibility of Markets

What happened in the Golden Age of broadcast between the 60s and the 90s (a term I’ll loosely use to include mass circulation print, not just TV and Radio), was that three social forces temporarily domesticated WOM and viral dynamics, and conspired to make marketing easier than it naturally is. The Tupperware party, the ancestor of modern 2.0 marketing, was reduced to a marketing curiosity, meant for a fringe type of product, by the Super Bowl commercial.

• The first force was what I call the direct-line-of-sight. Broadcast allowed mass persuaders to directly get a message to pretty much everyone in the middle class American (and to a lesser extent, global) population. This was because people reliably tuned in to only a few channels that served all attention. Exactly what I am not doing right now for Obama’s press conference. Nobody was solely at the mercy of his neighbor’s second-hand opinion about anything. Society was all surface area, zero volume.
• The second force was what I call the homogeneity effect. When Whyte observed suburbia, socio-geographic mobility was just beginning to take off. It was just strong enough that people could move into neighborhoods of superficially similar social class and cultural inclinations, and succumb to the homogenizing Organization Man forces. But it was not enough to create today’s culture of global digital nomadism and neo-urbanism (I know nobody in my apartment building; most of my social network is probably an average distance of 1500 miles from me). This meant that highly cohesive, easily visible, and geographically localized groups were forming. Differences were being smothered by the norms of inconpicuous consumption (what Whyte calls “keeping down with the Joneses”). The intricate societies of the teeming pre-suburbia cities were sorting themselves out through sprawl.
• The third force was local, subsuming peer-influence. Word-of-mouth effects were largely contained within the geographically localized and relatively homogeneous flocks, and peer influence only came from one subsuming peer group that entirely enveloped the individual.

These forces fed on each other. For example TV and Hollywood creating one-size-fits-all grand narratives that further homogeneized communities, making them even more susceptible to broadcast. This virtuous cycle created the stable echo chamber known as the market segment. The idea of an identifiable, localizable, homogeneous group of consumers, who enforced and policed the homogeneity so strongly that WOM/viral effects became predictable and contained. Not only did everybody see the same commercial on TV, but they talked about it within a predictable group of people like themselves and created en bloc responses. The result was that the only possible effects were wholsesale amplification through echoes, followed by adoption, or wholesale rejection. 1 or 0. An entire complex culture of buying reduced to a geographic map that could be broken down into segments marked 1 or 0. For a few precious decades, the fog of human complexity lifted, and human buying behaviors organized themselves in ways that were, in the words of James Scott (Seeing Like a State) “legible” to the coarse eye of the large organization. The market became legible as a very coarsely pixellated black-and-white geographic map. Something even the primitive visual apparatus of the organizational brain could parse.

Think about it. This actually makes no sense at an absolute level. What exactly is a market segment independent of the product that induces a segmentation? Why should constructs like “suburban Midwestern white female” mean anything in relation to a car model?

Demographic and socio-psychographic profiling have been serendipitously effective tools for several decades. Tools that have enabled marketers and other persuaders to not think about the problem of mass persuasion in all its richness. This effectiveness has been a function of these 3 factors, all of which are in full-reversal today. The direct line of sight is vanishing; society is trading surface area for volume. The largest mass audience is much smaller than it used to be, which means messages that do get through to everybody do so indirectly, soaking in from the listening ’surface’. Second, socio-geographic mobility has accelerated to the point that the  homogeneous echo chambers are gone. You cannot predict individual reactions to messages by locating the individual on a map and in a neighborhood. Making the map more fine-grained isn’t going to help. Worse, it isn’t just that these homogeneous “neighborhoods” have gone virtual. They just don’t exist, period. This is because each of us now belongs to dozens of overlapping virtual networks rather than one all-subsuming geographic or virtual community. The fact that I share a specific group context with somebody on Facebook, prima facie, tells you precisely nothing about how I will react to a message, because that affiliation accounts for just 1% of my identity, not 100%. Further analysis may yield some intelligence, but you can’t hope to just use that data bit in simple ways.

Goodbye Segment, Hello Inkblot

Taken to its logical extreme, the logic of  ’segmentation’ gets us to the somewhat ridiculous idea of mass personalization/customization, the idea that the market can be profiled, sliced, diced all the way down to market segments of size 1. The idea of mass personalization is actually applicable only to a small group of power users of a small group of products and services. The vast majority of economic activity will remain aggregated in larger chunks. The problem isn’t that the chunks of the market are getting tinier. It is that they are becoming less visible and are bleeding into each other.

Think about it. Is everything you own customized? How about 90%? 10%? Yup, that’s right. Very little is actually customized. I buy commodity rice and ball-point pens, branded, but mass-produced cameras and cellphones, and so forth. What has changed is that it has become very very hard to predict what total basket of goods and services any of us will consume. In terms of total buying profile, we have all become very unique.

Some marketers are getting the idea. The authors of “Trading Up” get that it isn’t about mass customization/personalization everywhere. It is about selecting where to go personal/customized. Our ‘trade-up’ choices, instead of bonding us to a single cultish group, pull us centrifugally towards many, and our loyalty to each is very limited and contextual.

So what replaces the idea of the relatively product-independent market segment? It is the highly product-dependent Inkblot. Conceptually, this is the social grouping created by just letting WOM operate naturally and watch where your product or service actually goes, and to what use it is actually put.

Practically, however, you cannot operate this way.  You cannot find your product/service inkblot by a priori analysis or by the risky strategy of letting your product/service “find its market” after launch (witness the Segway).  But you do have to discover and size your market before investing too much in developing it. This then, is the real reason viral, social media marketing is valuable. They are not tools of cheaper-than-Superbowl-ad promotion and persuasion. They are tools of Inkblot discovery, like radioactive tracers. Which brings me to diffusecasting, the process of discovering and mass-influencing illegible, foggy markets that cannot be found on a map (geographic or virtual), predicted through psychographic profiles or inferred reliably from the intent of product/service design. At least, not for much longer.

The Seven Laws of Diffusecasting

A lot of this section are my analyses of empirical observations conveyed to me by Jeremy Epstein. I am totally an armchair guy myself. So a major hat-tip due to to @jer979

1. Virality is neither a cause nor an effect, it is a market-tracer: For a year now, I have been listening to superior-sounding 2.0 marketers preaching that virality is not a cause, but an effect. True and false. True, it is not strictly a cause (duh!). You cannot make a ‘viral video.’ But you can follow some design principles and create something with a high probability of going viral. Infectiousness can be engineered with predictable probability, but contagion for the sake of contagion is pointless.  Only college kids with too much time on their hands can afford to waste it making random things go viral (not very hard, not very useful).  Virality is only useful if subsequent analysis shows that the virality correlates to interest in an attribute of the product or service riding the virus. The reason people don’t get this is that they confuse diffusecasting virality with broadcasting memorability. In broadcast, recall was enough for influence (since all you needed was to get suburban housewives talking over coffee). But a YouTube video about burgers that goes viral because it shows Paris Hilton in a swimsuit washing a car tells you very little about the market for the burger, and a whole lot you already knew about the market for Paris Hilton videos. Yes, the by-now well understood attributes of virality (a good introduction is in Made to Stick) are necessary, but they are not sufficient. The only way to truly leverage viral marketing models is to make a large and diverse set of messages go viral, and hope that post-hoc analysis of at least one of them will reveal the contours of the hidden market you are trying to size, access and sell to. Once you’ve had that one ‘useful’ viral, you go in, do the detective work around the path of that tracer, and define your market. Which means by the way, that you have to instrument your viral experiments to death, and get all the analytics you can. Otherwise you are just playing.
2. Drip Irrigation, not Waterfall: Release early and often ain’t just for open source. Thanks to Jeremy Epstein, I found the right agricultural metaphor for social media: drip irrigation. Why do you want to have an extended series of small messages going out rather than one big one? Same reason you want agile programming and public betas for product development, instead of waterfall (curious that the same ‘waterfall’ metaphor works for the antithesis of 2.0 in both programming and marketing). You want to maximize the number of diffusion experiments and learn from feedback to refine future diffusion experiments to reveal structure even more. You do not want to merely maximize impressions. Having the most popular Paris Hilton video on your marketing resume is not much good if you were trying to sell industrial cement mixers or get McCain elected.
3. Be the fuel, not the fire: Again thanks to Jeremy Epstein, who got it from I-don’t-know-who. While release-early-and-often plays to the role of virality as primarily a tracer, it is still pretty darn expensive. You have to be creative and create a diverse set of viral experiments and hope that one of them finds your market (aside: too many viral marketers just look for the first hit, and then use a ’sequels’ strategy. Dumb unless your first viral hit is also the right viral hit.) What better way to do that than to crowdsource your tracer experiments? Scan for proto-viral messages that might have the same tracer effects that you want, and just pour fuel on them. Find your Jared. You need to build an early warning system of course. Joe the Plumber isn’t as easy to find as Michael Jordan.
4. If you can’t find the echo chamber, create one: This I believe is Jeremy’s own strategy, inspired by Seth Godin. For Dan Pink’s book, which he was marketing (The Adventures of Johnny Bunko), Jeremy had the insight that they needed to get readers of the book talking to each other rather than to Dan. So he came up with the idea of catalyzing “Bunko Breakfasts.” I have no idea how successful that was, but this is the right direction of thinking. If you can’t see your market, and seeing isn’t much use anyway because of the non-subsumption effect, why not just provide the constructs that help structure it? 60s and 70s markters found readymade communities in the suburbs, you just need to create the crucibles of peer-reinforcement yourself. And no, this does NOT mean creating a community around your product or service. It means creating a community around whatever set of values might serve as glue (as discovered in viral tracer experiments) for people who like your products. As P&G (I think) discovered by accident, the community glue for young girls who might buy tampons isn’t “tampon,” it is “girl talk.” Again, what came readymade in the Organization Man suburbs  needs to be discovered and foregrounded to form communities that serve your messaging needs. And remember, you are dealing with individualists here, not tribes, so your glue will be temporary and for a limited context. Which brings me to…
5. Say it with me once more, NO TRIBES: I am now getting truly tired of the ‘raving fans’ and ‘tribe’ metaphors. Besides Kevin Kelly and Seth Godin, we now have Tribal Leadership by Dave Logan. There’s some good thinking in all this writing, and empirically valid principles, but I strongly believe the analysis in terms of the construct of ‘tribe’ is wrong. Not only is the implied collectivist culture being displaced by individualist ones, but the “many overlapping communities and no 100% subsumption”  principle makes ‘tribe’ the wrong idea. The defensible definition of tribe is “[closed and all subsuming] community where everybody knows each other,” roughly what the primate ethologist Desmond Morris used as his definition in The Naked Ape and The Human Zoo. Primate ethology also gives us the limits of ‘tribal’ organization in the idea of the Dunbar Number and the Monkeysphere. ‘Tribe’ is an extraordinarily misleading term. What look like tribal dynamics are situational, temporary, ‘aspect’ dynamics. The Organization Man suburb is the tribe.  The groups we are seeing today are more like the temporary communities of airport waiting areas. Your job is to create the equivalent of flight delays: a reason for people to start talking. Hopefully about you. Even the God of Media, Marshall McLuhan, fell victim to the ‘tribe’ idea when he talked about ‘retribalization’ (again, good ideas, wrong metaphor).
6. The Long Tail is more important than you think, but not for the reason you think: Most discussions of Chris Anderson’s “Long Tail” concepts have focused on the aggregate volumes of many small niches. But remember, the very idea of segment (of which ‘niche’ is a variety) is suspect now. Framed this way, the “Long Tail” seems important only for the mass-personalized/customized part of the market. WRONG! It is vastly more important than Anderson says, because the Long Tail actually is the market research arm of every product and service, mass-customized/personalized or not. Here is why: we’ve talked about various degrees of laziness in finding your once-easily-legible markets. Viral methods put tracers through it. Drip irrigation spreads your risks and increases the probability of discovering your market boundaries. Fuel-not-fire helps you crowdsource the creativity required for diverse drip irrigation. Why not outsource the whole darn thing? With so many little, temporary, non-subsuming cults forming around all sorts of things, and forming natural boundaries through customization choices, maybe one of them is the one for you? Maybe everybody who voted Jericho back is the market for a new Sci-fi book? Maybe everyone who buys non-white iPod headphones is your customer (’design conscious, but under-the-radar’). I’d pay as much for a service that tracks a select group of long-tail product launches as I would for a good segmentation database.
7. Down with ‘Authenticity’, Up with ‘Ironic Authenticity’: Coming in a close second to ‘tribe’ in terms of ‘concepts that make me want to hurl’ is ‘authenticity.’ The idea of genuine, high-trust, no-mind-games discourse as the norm, and an age of ‘genuine’ conversation as mass persuasion is downright silly. I mean, ask yourself, do you really want your soap sales pitch to reach the same level of rawness you had when you bared your soul, after Drink #6, to your college buddy (which you were so embarrassed about after, you never spoke to him again?). When it comes to marketing, we want, not ‘authenticity’ but a return to open, fish-market style joint-narrative-construction bargaining. There, we merely have to go from the bad acting of broadcasting to the method acting of diffusecasting. Authenticity does have a role, with the adjective “ironic,” in a truly solid notion of that overused idea, the personal brand. But that’s a subject for another polemic, another day.

As always, I am just trying to stir the pot here to invite debate. This isn’t a complete or rigorous analysis by any means. Heck, I am not even a marketer. But this is just the beginning. A great deal more needs to discovered about diffusecasting. I am personally fascinated by the idea of a ‘diffusion editorial’ — the discourse that emerges around a single viral probe into a market. I might blog about that sometime.

Venkatesh G. Rao writes a blog on business and innovation at www.ribbonfarm.com, and is a Web technology researcher at Xerox. The views expressed in this blog are his personal ones and do not represent the views of his employer.

We had a great conversation, where we figured out world hunger and other such small issues, inspired by some great coffee from the Blue Bottle Cafe in the SoMA part of downtown.

And we touched upon a few Enterprise 2.0 related questions that even our combined brilliance couldn’t seriously illuminate. Care to weigh in? Here they are:

Question 1: What will Social Media do to TV?

Print publishing, we know, is being hammered, but TV is a far more complex case. There are big HD screens vs. tiny iPod screens. TiVO and other appliances versus consumption on generic devices. Hulus and YouTubes versus big-studio programming. American Idol style SMS strategies and Lostpedia style Internet-fueled mainstream cults, as well as weird online-dominant shows. TV-and-social-media is also a litmus test for the whole SaaS+Appliance=END OF THE INTERNET fears of Jonathan Zittrain.

So how will it all play out? Define sides, pick one and weigh in!

Question 2: Conferences and UnConferences, how will they play?

Barcamps, co-working and meetups are creating a whole alternative culture around informal face-time. Regular conferences on the other hand, have a better business model and offer unique “scale” features, all the way from celebrity focused events like TED to industrial events like E2.0 and vendor-specific shows to academic meetings. Then there are the more alternative kinds like SXSW.

When and if the dust settles, how will the two play? Will large conferences provide an umbrella ecosystem for a concentrated burst of barcamp like activities? Will two cultures distinct cultures emerge?

Question 3: Google Docs vs. Zoho?

Or to make it more abstract, an office-in-a-box offering from a giant that offers a lot else, versus one from a focused small player that may be able to give the product/service better attention, but doesn’t have the deep ecosystem reserves of a large company. What would you bet on?

The Social Media Values Test

First, judge for yourself. Here is a two-column list, with individualist and collectivist values. Both lists are derived from William Whyte’s classic The Organization Man, with the “collectivist” values representing what he called the Organization Man’s “Social Ethic” and the “individualist” values being essentially those of the “Protestant Ethic” of the earlier Robber Baron era in America. Which set of values do you think better describes successful uses of social media that you’ve encountered?

You can extend the list considerably, and there are subtle cases where social media appears to be collectivist at first glance, but is really individualist when you look deeper. Consider creativity and innovation: the “Wisdom of the Crowds” only seems like a collectivism-vs.-genius model. The real insight is that the wisdom of the crowds depends on individualism and “private” knowledge. WoC mechanism designers strive to get people thinking independently during ideation. It is only in later phases of pooling, building-off-each-other and filtration that communication is encouraged. And it isn’t to compromise and create consensus, it is to do decidedly non-egalitarian things like ranking or “stock picking” in prediction markets. Early sharing, consultation and convergent debate actually makes the outcomes worse by fostering group-think and convergence to mediocre compromises. Collectivism, unlike WoC, encourages exactly these pathologies. Whyte describes this brilliantly (the guy got social media in 1953 better than many do in 2009!):

In group doctrine the strong personality is viewed with overwhelming suspicion. The cooperative are those who take a stance directly over keel; the man with ideas-in translation, prejudices-leans to one side or, worse yet, heads for the rudder. P1ainly, he is a threat. Skim through current group handbooks, conference leaders tool kits, and the like and you find what sounds very much like a call to arms by the mediocre against their enemies…The most misguided attempt at false collectivization is the current attempt to see the group as a creative vehicle. Can it be? People very rarely think in groups; they talk together, they exchange information, they adjudicate, they make compromises. But they do not think; they do not create…[The] fixture of organization life [,] the meeting self-consciously dedicated to creating ideas…is a fraud. Much of such high-pressure creation-cooking with gas, creating out loud, spitballing, and so forth-is all very provocative, but if it is stimulating, it is stimulating much like alcohol. After the glow of such a session has worn off, the residue of ideas usually turns out to be a refreshed common denominator everybody is relieved to agree upon-and if there is a new idea, you usually find that it came from a capital of ideas already thought out-by an individual-and perhaps held in escrow until moment for its introduction. Somehow, individual initiative must enter into the group…[We] must remember that if every member simply wants do what the group wants to do, then the group is not going to do anything. — William Whyte, The Organization Man, 1953.

I will not belabor the point, but even apparent collectivist successes like Obama’s social-media fueled victory lend themselves to individualist-ethics analysis.

So What’s So “Social” About Social Media?

Here’s why people fall into this confusion. The media are “social” not because they enable sociability, harmony and World Peace, but because people are the medium. You don’t connect to people through the medium. The people are the medium to connect you to value. The technology itself is just the material that allows humans to act like a connective medium. Here’s an analogy: specific social technologies like wikis and blogs are like metals, it is humans’ virtual activity that forms the metal into communication “pipes” that make the whole thing “media.” Twitter and email illustrate this best. I don’t realy get links to interesting articles through “email” or “twitter,” I get them through “people.” I don’t connect to people (in the sense of “making friends/contacts”) through the LinkedIn platform: I connect to people I don’t know through people I know, who are also on the platform. Remember McLuhan’s big idea, that the “Medium is the Message?” Here’s how the algebra works out:

The medium is social because it is made of people, and its “message” is the true nature of people. Love it or hate it, we are products of evolution: we brilliantly co-operate like pack dogs to bring down the bison, and then fight like crazy over the carcass. We groom each other as primates, but owe our brain development in large part to the evolution of social manipulation and exploitation skills. These are the human traits social media amplify.

This means all successful social media efforts are fueled by self-interest, not altruism. If it looks like altruism, look again. If it looks “free,” look for the hidden economy.

Implications: Six Easy Pieces

1. No Kumbaya: Like I said, the wrong sorts of people get attracted to social media, those who believe it will help make the world more “fair” or remove oppression. I’ve seen many such well-intentioned and classically socialist do-gooders get excited about social media and then give up in disgust at their failure in the face of what they see as rampant individual glory-seeking, and anarchic free-agent capitalism. When social good instincts succeed, it is by co-opting Darwinism by leveling the playing fields of access to information and capital (examples: kiva.org and hole in the wall project, which inspired Slumdog Millionaire).
2. The “Diffusion Editorial:” Free publicity isn’t. Marketers are phenomenally excited about the possibilities of Twitter and other word-of-mouth amplifiers. It sounds like “impressions for free.” But if you recognize the individualist, Darwinian nature of social media, you know you’re not getting publicity for free. Through me, you get past spam filters. I take my cut. Call it the “social margin.” The apparently “free” tweet just paid an attention tax because I added a comment that drained some attention away from you, even if I said something totally positive.  The cost to you is that you have to design your meme, at much higher cost, to resist mutation from piggyback editorializing and be infectious (a characteristic which, oddly enough, gets labeled “viral”). And the net impact will only be your partial share of the total attention generated, minus the part of the attention that went from potentially-positive to negative because of the overall, socially created “Diffusion Editorial.” If you want to control this, you’ll have to pay to hire much smarter creative staff and inflate the impressions you are shooting for.
3. Freeconomics, not Free: In case you didn’t notice, the noble “Information Wants to be Free” rhetoric of Richard Stallman is dead. “Free” is now a strategic and hard-headed business choice within an expanded space of business models. Once you factor in Stone-Soup economics, advertiser-pays and pay-it-forward dynamics, and extreme loss-leader and upsell-to-premium strategies, free is just sophisticated economics, as Chris Anderson says. Linux and Wordpress are no more “free” than highways, public parks and “buy one get one free” schemes. You just aren’t seeing the invisible web through which these things are getting paid for. You are paying too.
4. Communities of Competition, not Communitarianism: If you love collectivist utopias, “community” probably evokes visions of farmers’ markets, co-ops, kibbutzes or unions to you. Think again. The most successful communities are far more like Lord of the Flies or Survivor. A few “social capitalists” are reaping ENORMOUS dividends while the vast majority are bottom-feeders waiting for their chance. And this is the way it should be. Vast communities of roughly equal ba-baaing sheep are interesting to nobody (except wolves). It is the gambler’s instinct for disproprtionate rewards (in terms of monetary or social capital) that creates competition and value.
5. The Long-Tail Isn’t What You Think It Is: The “Long Tail” too, is often mistakenly considered a virtual version of that theatrical temple to 18th-century-nostalgia, the American Farmers’ Market. Vendors you meet at farmers’ markets are in it not for money, but for their values. Organic, cruelty-free, artistic, fair-trade, diversity, holistic, what have you. As a structuring of the economy, the “Long Tail” is much more primal. It is no more than a set of value-free conditions which shifts the balance of information assymmetries (and therefore power) among aggregators, distributors and producers of information work. The result is something more like a real Darwinian bazaar, the sort where vendors compete viciously and are liable to kill one another over customer-poaching disputes.
6. Seek Trade, Not Awe: Probably the BIGGEST mistake people make. by thinking in terms of collectivist values is to make up horribly misnamed concepts like “thousand raving fans” or “Tribe.” Unlike many delusional types, Stephen Colbert gets it: his “nation” is a tongue-in-cheek anarchy of anti-authoritarian types, unlike the earnest flock of believers that Bill O’Reilly rules over. These concepts do refer to real things, but the connotation of unthinking, sheep-like following is misleading. Yeah, you might attract a lot of these, and even make some money off them, but the borderline-moronic adulation isn’t worth a whole lot. Where you can really accummulate social capital is in the corners of your network where you inspire not gushing awe, but a spark of self-interested curiosity. This intelligent Darwinist, if you get him or her on your side through a productive and ongoing exchange of value, is worth ten sheep who pay you a dollar a year in AdSense clicks. Literally. I’d gladly take a hit of 10 in my RSS subscriber base in exchange for a great, regular commenter. And I’d take a hit of a 100 for a great regular guest blogger.

I could go on, but a word to the wise is sufficient. This “social media is not really social in that sense” idea takes getting used to. I myself was long puzzled by how unreasonably natural an apparently “social” medium felt to me, a certified and implacable anti-collectivist. The powers-that-be at my workplace once saw fit to send me to a leadership course, where of course, I scored “ornery, stubborn, recluse” on all those tests for sociability and introversion. I avoid parties and committee work like the plague, and I never yet met a consensus that I don’t itch to disrupt just for the hell of it. And I am not alone — most social media mavens I’ve met seem to be like me. I usually find them by butting heads with them somewhere, and then making up.

The lesson is unequivocal: radical individualists of the world rejoice. Despite all appearances, this is YOUR world.

Venkatesh G. Rao writes a blog on business and innovation at www.ribbonfarm.com, and is a Web technology researcher at Xerox. The views expressed in this blog are his personal ones and do not represent the views of his employer.