Social media is only a small part of the change we’re living through; it’s a surface indicator or a symptom of the times. The fact that all of it has been enabled by an omnipresent and ultra-cheap space race in technology tells us much more about why it matters. The wormhole goes deep, and social media is just the entry point to the hole that we’ve recently entered. We’d do well to think of social media as the introductory 101 course for something much more significant.

A focus on social-media strategy is flawed by definition. It’s too focused on the tool and not enough on the reason. The obsession that people, brands and companies have with followers, fans and friend accumulation won’t be the panacea to any marketing problem. The clues are even in the words we use to describe it. It’s a simple social conversation that’s digitally enhanced. Having a social-media strategy is akin to asking people whether they have a conversation strategy when they talk to people. While it may be overtly planned at some kind of networking event, it’s far from the way most people behave on a day-to-day basis. What we’re actually looking for is human interaction that makes us feel good, solves our problems and speaks with a human voice, rather than that of a corporate PR department or a telecentre. What we want to have are the interactions we never could pre-web. What we don’t want to hear is the voice that’s owned by those with the largest media budget. That’s a bit like high school when the class loud mouth got all the attention. Just as in our analogue life, we’d rather hear from those with something that’s worth listening to and conversing about.

In recent years the ‘social-media expert’ has arisen: the early adopter who makes a living from teaching others how to use the tools of the day. People and agencies have made big and quick money doing this. Showing companies and people how to get the most out of Facebook, or any new powerful tool, has always been a profitable endeavour. Let me make it easy for anyone who’s still curious about social strategies. The five, simple, human rules worth following are:

1. Speak with a human voice.
2. Listen more than you talk.
3. Be a resource to others and help them.
4. Be nice to people.
5. Don’t say anything you wouldn’t want on a daily news report.

The end. It’s a bit like life really.

Focusing on one node is a very tactical approach to a revolution. If social media is the focus of a business, it means we’re missing the bigger shift. It’s a bit like becoming an expert in the use of lathes at the start of the industrial revolution, or even worse, a particular model of lathe. Being expert at using a tool puts business people into the technician space, rather than the strategic space. It’s far more valuable to build a philosophy that can be layered on top of any new tool that happens to appear. Once we have a philosophical framework, the tactics become easy.

Tools are made redundant all the time. They’re replaced by new models and technology without notice. This time it’s likely to happen more quickly than it would have in the industrial era because we’re dealing with the non physical. This means we have considerable control over today’s social-media tools. We can move from one app to another in a matter of seconds with practically no switching costs.

There’s also the other complexity that comes with trying to grow fruit in someone else’s garden. We’re at their mercy if they change the game rules. Simple changes to algorithms by the owners of digital media can render a significant corporate investment useless overnight. Our best approach in this instance is a portfolio approach that de-risks the connections we’re forging. This must also include the development of direct connections with an audience.

It’s permanent

We can’t ignore social media and hope that it will go away. It’s equally foolish to intimate that it’s not useful in life or in business. The direct connection provided by digital social tools has incredible globe-changing benefits. Instead, the best way to think of social media is as another layer in natural human language. Social media — or digitally enhanced conversation — is really just part of the evolution in human conversation.

First we had body language: hunters and gatherers would act out scenes to describe a situation or occurrence using facial expressions, arms and legs, much as we do today. Then came grunts and sounds, which evolved into words, phrases and an audible language structure. After this came visual references such as cave drawings and pictographs and these eventually formed into written language types, enabling the development of permanent and transportable language through scripture, and eventually books. Each new form of code was built upon a previous layer.

It’s not unimaginable to consider early Mesopotamian people lamenting the arrival of the written word. I can imagine them discussing the latest trends around the campfire of an evening and saying how this writing thing is giving away all their secrets and will certainly result in the end of privacy and the decline of their civilisation. Or maybe this new form of written language would disrupt a thriving Mesopotamian business which, in some way, was based on the audible word, not this new written version. It sounds a lot like the tabloid fodder regarding social media we hear today, doesn’t it?

With each iteration of human communication tools there’s resistance, just as there’s resistance to any emerging and scary technology. But when the usefulness is greater than the fear, its eventual uptake is inevitable.

Regardless of what caused the evolution of language (there are currently a number of competing theories of how language arrived), it’s clear that those who mastered its use built themselves an evolutionary survival bias. The ability to master language has been the ‘killer app’ when it comes to hunting, farming, defending and all forms of civilisation development. Even today the mastery of a language — whether it’s one of a populous, the language of an industry or a particular computer code — usually comes with social and economic benefits. There’s a reason why autocratic nation states have historically restricted education, discussion and free speech: they stifle human activity and restrict change. What’s interesting from a social perspective is that when each new evolution of language arrived, it lived alongside the previous forms of communication. None replaced entirely the previous methods; they only added to the interconnected structure of how we communicate. Digital conversations are simply the next phase in the evolution of people. As for the languages that arrived before it, digitally enhanced conversation will live among them in a deeper mesh of human connection possibilities.

Digital conversations = collective sentience

Digital conversations enabled by social media take us deeper than any other form of publishing. The immediacy and geographic implications of being able to communicate with anyone or any collective tip us into the arena of collective sentience. It’s not so much reporting the story of what happened, or how to do something. It’s real-time communication about what’s happening. Twitter does this exceptionally well due to its brevity and ability to tag itself to other live conversations in distributed media by reaching the minds of people who are not within earshot but need to know something right now. Or, we may want to tap into a collective’s mind right now because we know that they know something we need to know at this very moment. People within our digital collective hold the answer we need. In this sense, semantic search is already here. I find myself asking Twitter the nuanced, complex and invariably human questions search algorithms are not quite adept at answering just yet. In some ways, these algorithms may never need to do this as we’ve now developed the technology to tap into the collective connected brain in real time.

From a business and social perspective, this is our best way of understanding what social media means. It’s a path to the collective brain and real-time human activities. This is what makes social media permanent and notable, not the digital distribution of the written words, images and video. We’ve had that for some time with email and other digital forums, but it didn’t inspire the same global transformation and attention that social-media proliferation has.

Social media as an industrial-system protest

The seminal moments in social media that made global populations sit up and pay attention weren’t the heady valuations of the technology companies serving up new social tools. (Remember when Microsoft bought a microshare of Facebook, valuing it at US$15 billion?) They weren’t even the moments of celebrity endorsement resulting from celebrities using the new tools and gathering swarms of followers. It was the instant global awareness brought to events that impacted real people’s lives, such as the Miracle on the Hudson, which was first reported via a tweet by people escaping an airbus sinking in New York’s Hudson River. It was the immediate global reporting of the terrible tsunami in Japan and the initial reports of explosions during the Boston marathon.

But most of all, social-media uptake is an industrial-system protest that says we want more than the one-way monologue served up by traditional media during the ‘TV-industrial complex’.¹ This couldn’t be better exemplified using social media tools than in what we saw during the Arab Spring. The Iran election protests in June 2009 and the revolution in Egypt in February of 2011 were the strongest demonstrations of the power flip we’re entering. Now we all have a published voice that can reverberate as far as a population is willing to carry it, rather than as far as a marketing budget will extend. Prior to technological and digital conversation tools, all our voices were largely private unless we were lucky enough to be picked by a powerful media conglomerate or publisher who would lend us their audience. It didn’t matter whether our voice was written, spoken or audio visual, if we didn’t have coverage, we didn’t have a voice. Now everyone is, or can be, a media company. We all have a technology-enabled megaphone for voicing an opinion, whether it’s courageously rising up against a tyrannical government or performing a micro protest to an industrial company delivering a poor customer experience. People have as much potential power as any organisation. It’s only now that most people — and companies for that matter — are starting to recognise the depth of the media power flip. Gathering attention in democratised media does take a compounded and consistent effort, but if someone publishes a view worth listening to the people-driven networks will do the rest. In the new media of today the most trusted voice is an independent one, something a corporation can never be.

Network diffusion

In simple terms, Metcalfe’s law² states that the power of a network is proportional to the number of connected people using the system. So, the power of a network increases as a function of the number of people using it. This law was first used to describe the network effects of fax machines or the number of telephone lines, both of which are useless with only one device. But the value of the network increases with each device because the total number of connections is increased. For example, two telephones can only make one connection, five can make 10 connections and 12 can make 66 connections. It offers a vast and noticeable difference from the one-message-to-all broadcast model of legacy media. Of course, this works the same way for internet connections and the social services and platforms that live on top of the internet. And everyone with electricity will be on this network in a short time. This is a certainty given that many technological companies no longer make money from the goods they offer; it’s the use of these goods that creates their largest revenue stream, being the advertising they serve up and data they sell. What this means is that companies that make the digital tools will do everything they can to get them in the hands of people. It’s not pure altruism that drives projects such as Google’s Project Loon and Internet.org.

Project Loon: a proposed network of high-altitude balloons travelling on the edge of space to widen internet coverage

Internet.org: a consortium of Facebook, Samsung, Ericsson, MediaTek, Nokia, Opera and Qualcomm aimed at bringing affordable internet access to the two-thirds of the world yet to connect with high-quality, low-cost mobile technology

That said, the human benefits driven by these commercial imperatives can’t be understated. The web will reliably appear in every global corner where electricity is available. This will result in a rapid distribution and connection of people the world over.

Digitally-enabled conversations and social media matter because conversation is the starting point for the diffusion of ideas and innovation. It’s the primary human method for releasing our creativity. The primary idea coming from the already connected societies is that we don’t just want to consume; we want to create. We have something to offer the world and it’s time we participated in the production process. We want to co-design the world we live in.

Soul-crushing corporations

Corporations were originally set up to protect people and to promote innovation via the removal of personal financial risk resulting from the behaviour of others we do business with. As we entered the industrial era, corporations grew to the point where they dominated the social landscape and shaped opinions. It’s not uncommon to read someone’s online social-media bio supported by the phrase, ‘Opinions are my own’ — who else’s would they be? Translation: ‘Please don’t sack me for allowing myself the luxury of some independent thought’. People have become so afraid of the corporations they work for — dehumanising the people they were invented to serve — that they hesitate to voice their opinions. Corporations became their own organism and forged a path, as a virus does. Cells came and went, but the thing itself grew and had its own agenda.

But people are back. And this time we’re armed with all of the technology and tools the corporation has. We can do anything they can do, but we can probably do it better, faster and cheaper. And the reason we can do anything they can do, is because we can access anything they can access in the commercial world. The only way organisations will survive through the great fragmentation is by building platforms that enable people to build on top of them and within them. Look at all the new media darlings, such as the free global television channel otherwise known as YouTube or the global production hub access directory known as Alibaba. They have spent the past 10 years providing us with platforms to produce on. Using these platforms we can get on with the more human needs of connection and creativity.

Now that we can all access the factors of production, access is greater than ownership. Now that we’re over our consumption obsession, we can aim for deeper meaning in our days than spending them filling up our spare rooms and garages with stuff.

Now that we’re re-connecting, we’re starting to realise we can create our own paths, not ones designed by the industrial system. It means that how we do business and live life won’t be defined by chance and proximity, but by desire and interest.