I led the consulting practice at O’Reilly Media after we coined the term Web 2.0, and I think we now find ourselves at a similar (though softer) inflection point. There are a lot of valid questions regarding the business models in social: Is Facebook not a scalable vehicle for advertising and thus overvalued? Is Groupon bad for merchants and thus doomed to fail? Was social gaming (and Zynga) overhyped?

Taking a cue from Web 2.0, I believe we need to look beyond specific applications of social media — even, God forbid, specific platforms like Facebook — in order to sort out the underlying design patterns that will endure and continue to disrupt marketing and communications.

So what are those design patterns? Here are four:

1. Responsiveness beats planning
2. Communities beat audiences
3. Reputation beats branding
4. Sociality beats media-mentality

I’ll focus on the first one for now: responsiveness beats planning. The kernel of my argument is that the social web is pressuring organizations to accelerate all forms of communications from “batch” processing to real-time interaction. The result is a fundamentally different approach to how a marketing/communications organization needs to be structured and serviced.

Human beings have spent millennia communicating in real-time. The acceleration of technology is simply an effort to catch up to our zero-latency experience of being. Whenever given a choice, we will opt for a service that delivers response times as fast as our own nervous system. The technology and processes around us are nowhere close to catching up — yet wherever they do, we see incredible value creation. Any information processing technology that moves from batch to real-time experiences a quantum leap in value, especially for those who adopt it first. Consider the arbitrage opportunity in financial systems capable of receiving prices in real-time, real-time trading desks that place advertising based on current inventory and effectiveness, the efficiency of inventory management occurring in real-time across the supply chain and you get the idea. All of the systems that surround and support modern life are accelerating into real-time systems. Social is moving into real-time precisely because that is the speed at which human beings prefer to communicate, and social technologies that have accelerated closer to real-time are now shaping customer expectations.

What are the implications?

With the rise of real-time, responsive communications, marketing and comms are experiencing a massive acceleration in the traditional timeline needed to create branded content. This goes well beyond customer care — it is more like a dynamic content production capability that marketers need in order to sustain brand relationships.

Examples:

• The Presidential debates: After Barack Obama’s first debate with Mitt Romney, a debate in which all sides realized Obama had turned in an incredibly poor showing, the Obama camp took just three hours to pour over the debate and edit together a commercial highlighting some of Romney’s more damning statements.
• Oreo’s response to the Superbowl blackout was retweeted 15,000 times and received more than 20,000 likes within 24 hours. The graphic released during the blackout was “designed, captioned and approved within minutes,” thanks to members of 360i — the cookie company’s agency — gathered at a war room during the game.
• The popularity of apps like SnapChat and Poke are creating time-limited content and offers based on immediacy.

This type of speed and responsiveness has less to do with strategy and planning and everything to do with logistics and coordination.

It calls on marketers to actually understand how organizations are structured, how governance needs to shift to enable more responsive organizations, how we staff our accounts to develop a drumbeat of meaningful content that engages, how we equip our clients to become digital publishers of real-time communications, and how we automate as many parts of the communications "supply chain" as possible.

In the next article, I will explore the design pattern that is rewiring business, "communities beat audiences."

We will spend the next generation coming to terms with the consequences.

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Once something is said it cannot be unsaid. True. But historically it couldn’t be shared to a wider circle of listeners. Speech is not permanent. Speech gives way to time and passes into the fog of memory. Therefore the social norms governing speech are more forgiving. We are expected, allowed even, to say things we without due consideration, in close company, knowing that we will regret some portion of what we say. We are able to use the full context of a conversation (who is there, what has been said before etc.) to nuance our speech and say things that wouldn’t look good when reduced to text. And yet on social networks we speechify, we talk and we are saying plenty of things we might regret. Such speech isn’t meant to be a permanent record. But it is. As Meghan Garber writes in a Nieman Lab post:

As a culture… we tend to insist on categorizing our communication, drawing thick lines between words that are spoken and words that are written. So libel is, legally, a different offense than slander; the written word, we assume, carries the heft of both deliberation and proliferation and therefore a moral weight that the spoken word does not. Text, we figure, is: conclusive, in that its words are the deliberate products of discourse; inclusive, in that it is available equally to anyone who happens to read it; exclusive, in that it filters those words selectively; archival, in that it preserves information for posterity; and static, in that, once published, its words are final.

We are hurtling toward a world of total information capture where email, texting, instant message and mobile video are documenting our everyday speech and action — in effect rendering all speech as text. There will be few places to “talk” without that talk being given weight and permanence.

We are then faced with two options: Either give up the liberties that speech allows — thinking “out loud,” using the context of the conversation to add meaning to a comment and so on — or become more lenient with speech that happens to become text. In the case of Weiner, his behavior is unacceptable in any context. As a society we understand his transgression and he is being punished for it. Fair enough. In the case of Chrysler, a mistake was punished through Chrysler firing both the Tweeter and the entire social media agency that person worked for. I hope in the future we are able to see the distinction and dole out our punishments accordingly. We all say things we regret. Now we all write things we regret. Perhaps as a result of this shared reality we will learn a bit more forgiveness for each other.

Joshua-Michéle Ross will discuss social media architecture at Web 2.0 Expo New York 2011, being held Oct. 10-13 in New York City.

Save 20% on registration with code WEBNY11RAD

Related:

• At the eG8, 20th century ideas clashed with the 21st century economy
• Privacy law needs a reboot
• Can privacy, social media and business get along?
• Public domain here, under copyright there

Speed is our default setting

Human beings live and operate in a constant state of now; we process extraordinary volumes of information in real time. The acceleration of technology is simply an effort to catch up to our zero-latency experience of being. Whenever given a choice, we will opt for a service that delivers response times as fast as our own nervous system.

The technology and processes around us are nowhere close to catching up — yet wherever they do, we see incredible value creation. Any information processing technology that moves from batch to “real-time” experiences a quantum leap in value, especially for those who adopt it first. Consider the arbitrage opportunity in financial systems capable of receiving market prices (or other data) in real time, or the efficiency of inventory management occurring in real time across the supply chain. All of the systems that surround and support modern life are accelerating into real-time systems.

Velocity 2011, being held June 14-16 in Santa Clara, Calif., offers the skills and tools you need to master web performance and operations.

Save 20% on registration with the code VEL11RAD

Speed is money saved

Walmart’s competitive advantage came from accelerating inventory information to near real-time throughout its supply chain. The result was incredible efficiency and huge cost savings that were the basis for its domination of the American landscape.

Speed is gratification delivered

When I worked in e-commerce in the mid ’90s, we quantified the obvious: faster page load times equaled more revenue. Our analytics showed that milliseconds spelled the difference between a sale and a lost customer.

Today we see the rise of flash drives in consumer electronics not because they are more reliable or durable (they are not) but largely because they wake your computer from sleep faster.

The magic of the new iPad 2 comes from its internal speed — it uses a flash drive — and speed via an external accessory: the Smart Cover automatically wakes the device and bypasses the estimated 3 seconds it takes to click and swipe.

Speed is loyalty earned

Money is a metaphor for our use of time. We pay attention and we spend time. Taking too much of a customer’s time is a form of theft that can cost your business. Conversely, if a product or service saves us time and costs less in attention we feel rewarded.

Speed equals certainty, delay equals doubt

I have heard it argued that Google won the search battle as much due to the speed of delivering results as the vaunted relevance of those results. They put their response times in milliseconds on every results page. In a social interaction, any pause before responding to a simple question ( “does this dress make me look big?”) qualifies the inevitable response (“absolutely not”) as less certain. My example is a stereotype and a bit whimsical, but it is emblematic of how we transfer these same emotions to our interactions with people and services. In other words, speed/responsiveness engenders feelings of trust, certainty and comfort.

Speed is a key facet of business strategy

All of this amounts to a simple edict: Consider speed as a dimension to your business strategy, not as a by-product of seeking efficiency but as a means of winning customers. I have used examples from the digital domain but the same premise applies to any offline experience — from hotel check-ins to the “out-of-box” experience of your new product. In more ways than one speed can deliver advantages beyond quality or efficiency. Speed can deliver intangibles like trust and loyalty.

Speed is a pain

Delivering on speed puts stress on an organization and, more importantly, on people. Our schedules get compressed, our deadlines tighten and the bar for competitive productivity keeps going up. While many lament the increasing pace of modern life, it is a futile complaint because it focuses on the effect rather than the cause of increasing speed. Over and over, we reward speed with our attention and with our business. As customers we demand speed from the products and services we purchase. The consequence is that as employees or business owners we find ourselves subordinated to an accelerating pace of work to deliver on that demand.

Speed is a choice we make

I believe that the terms of success for people in the world will increasingly reside with managing their own pace and flow of attention against the demands of speed. Those capable of strategically disconnecting and applying selective focus will be at an advantage in business or in life (hasn’t this always been the case?) because exercising foresight and judgment, two critical life skills, are not necessarily improved by speed. Quite the opposite.

But this isn’t the same as saying that we must slow down in business wholesale. As long as society rewards speed with equity, it will be the fundamental basis for competitive advantage and worth our attention.

Associated photo on index pages: Speedy Gonzales by blmurch, on Flickr

Related:

• Velocity and the Bottom Line
• Bing and Google Agree: Slow Pages Lose Users
• How Facebook satisfied a need for speed
• Preparing for the realtime web
• Quantum trading! And tunnels through the Earth!

Expanding people’s ability to communicate — from printing press to telegraph to telephone to text messaging — is always a revolutionary act. Communications technologies do not create the conditions for civic action (the unrest in Egypt is due to longstanding political repression), but they can accelerate the entire process by:

1. Dramatically expanding the number of people directly involved in gathering, distributing and consuming information.
2. Allowing a positive feedback loop to develop where people see the effect of their actions in real-time, which simultaneously reinforces commitment and recruits more members into the cause.

We tend to think of these technologies as inherently democratic. But the rub in all of this is that while these technologies democratize communications, they tend to monopolize surveillance and control.

So while more of us are capable of holding an open, peer-to-peer discussion, we are doing so with the consent and under the watchful (or subpoena-able) eye of just a handful of corporations or governments. And when citizen calls-to-action conflict with government calls for quiet, the government holds more of the cards. Vodafone has shut down cell phone communications in Egypt, the Egyptian government has effectively shut down Internet communications, and there are now calls for Ham radio operators to lend assistance as Egypt is being pushed back down the communications ladder.

In the “rich world” our experience of technology is often Utopian and our forecasts of negative consequences are framed only through our experience of current circumstance; we simply can’t imagine what it is like to live in a repressive government or believe that we will ever live under one. But the seemingly benign governments in which we reside are an historical contingency. If the past provides any lesson it is that governments will wax and wane in their concern for civil liberties and human rights. Yet our digital profile (purchase history, political and personal associations etc.) will remain. Through our participation in these technologies we are donating our data to a vast, indelible reservoir whose future utility is unknown to us.

I am actually optimistic about the future of the Internet as a medium to promote civil liberty, free expression, better government and corporate citizenship (if one can credibly use such a phrase). However, I don’t think it happens on its own. The Internet needs an architecture (legal and physical) to achieve such ends. Paradoxically I believe it requires some form of regulation to maintain its dynamic, emergent and decentralized properties so that any government or corporation has a limited ability to act in a crisis to shut things down.

Is access to communications a fundamental human right? If so, should a corporation have the ability to abrogate that right at the request of a host government? As we watch the battle between the Egyptian government’s attempts to throttle information flow (including how corporations defy or collaborate with these attempts) and the people’s struggle to maintain access to communications, we are seeing the contours of a struggle that will exemplify the next decades of political and policy changes as we try to define the increasingly critical relationship between technology and civil liberties.

Not surprisingly, Facebook makes assumptions based on behavior to ensure that it propagates people and information with the highest likelihood of gaining attention or engagement. For example, individuals whose profiles are “stalked” by others show up disproportionately in news feeds because Facebook assumes they must be stalked for good reason. They must be interesting.

As Facebook becomes an increasingly vital part of how businesses connect with customers, the algorithms determining who gets attention will become increasingly important. They shape business communications and behavior.

We have now a long history of content being written to accommodate the rules of search engines — particularly Google. We research keywords and then ensure they are placed at the front of our headlines and titles. We reorganize content into staccato bursts of bullet points and subtitles, and so on. Optimization of this kind now dominates all professional content production on the web and shapes our experience as consumers of that content.

As our social, economic and political lives are increasingly mediated through a few consolidated technologies such as Facebook and Google, software exerts a profound influence on the way we engage with one another. The natural, sociological secrets of how to gain attention are being codified. In turn, this creates a normative effect on how we behave. We conform to the rules embedded in the code.

We have always written lead lines with an eye to attracting readers, but there are two aspects here that are new:

1. The widespread incorporation of scientific rigor into the exercise. For example, the Huffington Post does A/B tests of its own headlines to favor the winning headline.
2. The uniformity of the resulting norms. We are conforming to a few dominant algorithms.

Gaining attention in this world becomes as much about the science of standing out as the art of being outstanding. And every link forged is a form of currency exchange where the market favors the heavyweights.

While I don’t doubt that we will see a continued wellspring of creativity emerge from an open web, these algorithms themselves represent a bias toward those who decipher the code. Doing so requires resources that favor the large over the small, and the organization over the individual. There is nothing new to this progression, but it does run counter to the heroic individual archetype (the lone blogger, the basement video show broadcast around the world, etc.) that the web often celebrates as its own unique progeny.

Related:

• Anderson: “It’s All About Attention”
• Search Engine Optimization and the Race to the Bottom
• Is Linking to Yourself the Future of the Web?

“In 1880 the community consisted of 2950 inhabitants, boasted 4 hotels, 6 bars, 9 café’s, a mounted brigade of gendarmes, a charity office, a city toll booth, a ferry-boat at Escafignoux, a flour mill and a suspension bridge! The 1999 census registered 2159 inhabitants.”

Three kilometers away lies the rather bland town of Prayssac; with ancient roots but clearly developed in the 19th century. Lying on the flat plain of the Lot valley, its nothing special to behold but its cafes, markets and festivals are bustling. It was something of a mystery to us when we moved here.

Why is picturesque Puy L’Eveque struggling while Prayssac thrives?

This is the topic of many dinner discussions among the expatriates here. Usually the blame is laid at the hands of incapable administrators. I believe the problem goes deeper. It is a question of architecture and urban planning. Puy L’Eveque’s siege architecture just isn’t built for the modern age. Its positioning on a hillside was chosen for its unassailability. The medieval town privileges control of all traffic (human and material) with choke points at top and bottom. Until very recently there was a single, one-way street leading up to the summit; a stoplight at top and bottom alternated the flow of traffic – for five minutes traffic led upward – the next five minutes, down. The prime vantage points are held by church and state. Puy L’Eveque is lovely but it is relic of the past: privilege of place, control from the top, constricted material flows, and strict regulation of its borders.

Prayssac makes no such assumptions or attempt to control – people and goods move freely in and out of its borders. Prayssac is a social town – it welcomes outsiders. Its hierarchies form naturally through assembly at any of a number of town squares and the town dissolves naturally into the surrounding countryside. There are no fortress walls. The Mairie and Church are discreetly nestled amidst the other edifices.

In short, Puy L’Eveque was not architected for the modern world where goods and people follow an accelerated flow… where commerce privileges open exchange and more porous, natural borders between town and countryside. The very thing that made Puy L’Eveque thrive in the 14th century makes it hard to survive in the 21st; its architecture.

Many of our 20th century behemoths resemble Puy L’Eveque . They are closed fortresses with strict, forbidding hierarchies. While information flow outside has radically accelerated (everyone has a real-time broadcast tower) the modern organization is marked by glacial response times and chokeholds on who is an “authorized” spokesperson. The world is divided between those inside (employees) with very fixed roles and responsibilities and those “outside” (everyone else) who can’t be trusted.

Hendrik Hertzberg’s insightful comment on healthcare as a by-product of the system of legislation rather than Obama, Nancy Pelosi or even (or especially) Joe Lieberman, provides a lesson not just for government but for business on how architecture is destiny:

“The American government has its human aspects—it is staffed by human beings, mostly—but its atomized, at-odds-with-itself legislative structure (House and Senate, each with its arcane rules, its semi-feudal committee chairs, and its independently elected members, none of whom are accountable or fully responsible for outcomes) makes it more like an inanimate object.”

We tend to blame people and let architecture off the hook. But the structures we live within shape our behavior and govern what is possible just as the physical architecture of our towns both emerge from and reinforce the way we see world.

As the social norms set by the Social Web – openness, sharing, participation, become the norms of business (this to me is the key insight behind the new term “social business”) and as the information flow outside accelerates, organizations will need rethink their structures. They will need to think about whether or not they are designed like Puy L’Eveque or Prayssac.

Architecture is destiny.

In this second of two videos Roger discusses some exemplars in the emerging field of Big Data. From the Radar community: are there any unlikely companies (read: outside of tech) that are doing a great job in managing Big Data or using analytics to drive their business? We would love to hear about them.

Part one of the video is available here.

Roger will be moderating a panel this Tuesday, January 19 at Stanford titled, “Data Exhaust Alchemy – Turning the Web’s Waste into Solid Gold”

I have been writing for some time that organizations needs to “get” social in ways that go well beyond marketing gimmicks or pushing press releases through Twitter. It is a different approach to doing business.

So I am excited to announce that I will be moderating an O’Reilly panel discussion with Boyd (Principal, The /Messengers), Kim (Managing Director at Dachis Group) and Owyang (Partner, Altimeter Group) on January 14 to discuss:

• What is the definition of Social Business?
• How can Social Business impact strategy, design, technology and customer experience?
• Who are the leading exemplars?

The panel will leave plenty of time for audience Q+A.

From the Radar audience I would love to hear about any questions you would like to see addressed.

You can sign up for the webcast here.

After the recent foiled airline bomb incident one thing seems clear; we are constantly retrofitting our security measures to defend ourselves against the last attack. Often these measures seem like what Bruce Schneier in a great CNN article calls “Security Theater“.<br

“Security theater” refers to security measures that make people feel more secure without doing anything to actually improve their security.

What seems equally true is that the media has ginned up a national hysteria over the incident that leads much of the senseless government action. In the wake of blanket coverage officials are pushed to show a proportional response… the more hand-wringing the more actions need to be taken regardless of whether those actions have any salutary effect. Most of the criticism that I have seen has been leveled at politicians lacking leadership. <br
Schneier concludes

The best way to help people feel secure is by acting secure around them. Instead of reacting to terrorism with fear, we — and our leaders — need to react with indomitability, the kind of strength shown by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill during World War II.

Amen. And yet it isn’t people around me that I see freaking out. It is the media, followed in lock-step by politicians. One has to wonder if the United States of 2010 is capable of the kind of leadership Schneier is asking for. Are our politicians capable of leading when they can obtain personal advantage in either fear-mongering or finger-pointing? Is the media capable of leading without the histrionics that sell ratings?<br

I am flying to London this coming week but I won’t feel any more secure – just a lot more inconvenienced.

This episode touches on new devices that will shape how we work and get things done in the future including Pico projectors and OLED screens.

I would love to hear from people about what type of devices we should be paying attention to and why.