The data flow wars

Way back in 2003 Tomi and I started working on a project called Communities Dominate Brands - today the very things that wrote about have become - well mainstream. Its a crowded house these days.

So - here's another road-sign for you - that data, and the extraction and refining of that data to support commercial communications is about to become mainstream - this new currency will becme the black gold of the 21st Century - in the future we will fight over oil, food, water and data. If we are living in a world that is increasingly networked, if we are living in a world where social intraction is a primary function online and on the mobile and on converged platforms, then you need data analytics that can understand these social data flows. This is beyond the traditonal fare

A piece in strategy and business was worth mentioning that examines Media Old world vs. Media New World

As unsophisticated and unreliable as traditional media measurement approaches may have been in the past, they did provide standards and currencies that enabled marketers, buying agencies, and media companies to transact business. Today, however, this equilibrium has become unstable. Marketers demand more effectiveness and efficiency from their media buys. Digital media are reaching critical mass with consumers. And the promise of more granular (or even real-time) data capture of consumer response to advertising is tantalizingly close to realization.

And we also had a point of view that we extrapolated upon here And IBM recently produced a report on the End of Advertising as we know it This was supported by PwC on How Consumer Conversations will Transform Business

What gets measured gets made

But the media metrics for the new digital media environment are still of uneven quality. They lack the standardization that would enable the simple comparison of advertising effectiveness both within the online environment and across other media channels. Marketers, agencies, and media companies all agree that improvements in these metrics are going to be essential; without them, it will be difficult to profit in an advertising market increasingly characterized by more choices among more media. In other words, there will need to be a wholesale shift to metrics that are both outcome based and comparable across many channels.

With refined data we can ask this rather pressing question: Do we want 6 feet of junk mail or a 29% response rate?

So we will go on a journey to socialise e-commerce - There is going to be energies focused on the design and analytics of social collaborative filtering and social systems

There is going to be work on Algorithms and system design connected to social tagging

The Media infrastructure will be rebuilt to understand and measure to collaborative social media eco-system - it will migrate from being the dumb machine - to a very smart machine as the audience has become not a dumb and passive audience, but an interactive and Participatory audience and a Participatory culture

The Swiss Role Dilemma
How do you separate data that is about seeking information vs. data that is about transaction? We build intelligent directories built around behaviour classification.

Dynamic data flows
Then these systems are integrated into self-learning systems that can process data flows that make petabytes look like kilobytes

The chart shows 90,000 communities of roughly 290 people, making around 25 million nodes.

Manuel Castells says that the linear process of our familiar analogue world has been inverted. Time is condensed and stretched. Past, present and future and altered and reconfigured. We need to take external and social structures into account when deciding how to provide better and improved communications and services.

Material existence becomes less relevant in a world of networked and information based social networks. And of course that asks questions as to how we map and measure that social networks. This is a world that is as mind bending as Quantum mechanics - why then should media not go through the same transformation? We witnessed the ripples on the seashore of the dotcom bubble that became the surging tsunami to our recent history, more powerful, more destructive, and more paradigm busting.

Revolutions, Paradigms and Great Surges of Development

A great surge is defined as as the process by which a technological revolution and its paradigm propagate across the economy, leading to structural changes in production, distribution, communication and consumption as well as t profound and qualitative changes in society. The process evolves from small beginnings, in restricted sectors and geographic regions and ends up encompassing the bulk of activities in the core country or countries and diffusing out towards further and further peripheries.

Further
Until the 1980's, the prevalent organisations was the one that serves as the optimal framework for deploying the mass-production revolution: the centralised, heirarchical pyramid with functional compartments.

This logic no longer applies - so what happens next?

These difficult long term processes of transformation are in the nature of the capitalist system and involve intense interactions between the economy and social institutions as well as profound changes in both, Each technological revolution is received as a shock, and its diffusion encounters powerful resistance both in the established institutions and in people themselves. Hence, the full unfolding of its wealth-creating potential as first has rather chaotic and contradictory social effects, it later will demand a significant institutional recomposition. This will include changes in the regulatory framework affecting all markets and economic activities as well as a redesign as a whole range of institutions.

And that is what we in right here - right now. The transformation of governance, of society and culture. Today we stand centre square in the gales of creative destruction

Comments

[Ne]

Very provocative thinking. I mean this as a compliment. Maybe you're point could be proven in this "naive" shift of sense. Provocative used to mean something destructive, negative. Now it signifies something that corrects mistakes and moves forward.