Where are we now, Nov 2008, in the Communities Dominate space? Graeme Wood summarizes

This is an absoloute must-read blog posting for any readers of our blog.

Our friend Graeme Wood at GeekMedia has written a fantastic blog posting about where we stand, entilted The Future of Social Media. When you read it, the blog posting sounds almost like an updated book review of our book Communities Dominate Brands, the themes are all there and the ethos is precisely that of "Communities Dominate" except that when you read each his 49 points, you notice that his examples are all beyond our book, and in many cases the points he's now identified and separated, are distinct from our book (yeah yeah yeah, it is about time for Alan and me to work on a sequel, we know we know, but we've been kinda busy ha-ha).

But back to the fantastic article. It would not do justice to the whole piece for me to extract an excerpt. I urge you, please hop over to GeekMedia and read the whole thing, you'll find it makes fantastic sense, you'll find many familiar themes and the "right companies" and the "right people" mentioned, yet it all builds and makes so much sense. A must-read piece. Thanks Graeme.

Comments

[graeme wood]

Thanks for the kind words Tomi. And yes, you're right, I learned a lot from the book - is a sequel really in the pipeline?
cheers
Graeme

[Graham Hill]

Hi Tomi

You are right. Graeme has written a must-read post. Very inspirational. And very well pulled together from so many disparate sources.

But remembering my last visit to the supermarket, or my last visit to an international airport, or even walking down the Schildergasse in Cologne, I can't help but think that the future he describes is one for the 1% of people who are actively involved in social media, or the 9% who are ocasionally involved, rather than the 90% who couldn't care less. Or who don't even know that it exists! Not the online version anyway.

Or to put it another way. The vast majority of my social interactions are with real people, face to face, in person. And I suggest that is the same for the vast majority of other people too. We still live in networks of small physical worlds, not in one big joined-up virtual network.

Maybe that will change in the future. Maybe things will be different for Generation-C. We will just have to wait to find out.

Graham Hill
Independent CRM Consultant
Interim CRM Manager

[Tomi T Ahonen]

Hi graeme and Graham

Thank you for the comments. Will respond to both individually

graeme - thanks. It really was a great summary quotation. And yes, we both - Alan and I - want to put together the sequel, but we had our other projects, my convergence book (Digital Korea) and my mobile follow up to M-Profits (which was just released as Mobile as 7th of the Mass Media) and Alan has his customer analytics book project (hopefully coming to a bookstore near you very soon, I believe the book is nearing completion). So yeah, we do want to do it, but trying to find the timing for both of us - in this whirlwind industry of so dramatic changes - is difficult, as both of us also have a real day-job ha-ha, and even finding time to blog is often a big hassle...

Graham - good points. But I think it is a danger for us older people, digital immigrants - to assume the world and the customers are like us. Young people make no differentiation at all, none at all, between their friends on virtual systems like a social networking site or multiplayer game - and "reality" or real people. Mark Curtis of Flirtomatic was just talking about that at the IIR Mobile Content conference in London a week ago, when he said that when they surveyed their membership, the responses of young people who claimed they had "met" the flirting/dating contacts was almost 100%. It then emerged that young people define "to meet" differently, to them meeting in a virtual space is the same as meeting face-to-face in the bricks-and-mortar real world. It was only older members of Flirtomatic, who understood "to meet" to mean in the physical world.

So that world graeme is writing about, is spreading very rapidly among the youth and young adults, in the industrialized world - and very tellingly, on simpler systems, also starting to happen in the developing world.

But yes, lets monitor it and see how it evolves. The real world won't disappear, and we may well see various "backlashes" where some feel that there is a need to do serious human contact "things" - and it could be for example a fashion/pop culture thing, like punk rock was a reaction to the over-produced disco - glam rock - Europop of the early 1970s.

But yeah, the big trend is definitely more to social networks, digital communities, collaboration etc.

Thanks for writing

Tomi Ahonen :-)