The “Next Big Thing” series: From Social Network to #Social #Revolution

{this is No. 3 of the “Next Big Thing” blog post series, which discusses the revolution to come through ongoing innovation in IT and the challenges involved with’em}

Along with Cloud patterns the delivery of large engagement platforms – essentially web applications architectured, of course, specifically to serve a vast amount of simultaneous access and a huge stream of information – became possible.

If one does take a look back into history of social media, these platforms step-by-step evolved from pure public-chat and tweet apps into full blown areas for (group) communications, gaming, advertising and (sometimes) simply storing information. Not by what they were originally intended to be (facebook’s core goal was – and still is, if you trust Zuckerberg – to connect everyone) but by how the consumers (private or business ones) developed themselves within them as well as developed and matured their usage patterns.

However, there is a “meta level” beyond the obvious: Observing youth and their approach to using technology surrounding them might lead to thinking: Those guys have completely forgotten about communication and engagement. I trust, the opposite is the case. When I talk to my kids, I learn that they read everything, absorb everything, have a much faster ability to notice news, information, consume different channels, etc. The only thing is: They do not react, if it doesn’t touch them. And that pattern applies not only to advertisement-backed social media feeds but also – and maybe foremost – to direct 1:1 or group conversations. And this is why I believe that the social aspect within the Nexus of Forces will have a much stronger impact than we currently notice.

I tend to claim a social revolution to approach us because – together with the other forces – social media will become the integrative middleware between what we want to consume, businesses want to drive us to consume and how we consume it. No advertising phone calls anymore, no spamming in our mailboxes (hurray!), but a social feed of information which is far better suited to create the impression of personal engagement while in truth being just an efficient aggregation and combination of data that we all have earlier produced ourselves.

Are businesses ready for that revolution? Can they adapt their marketing strategies to leverage those vast new possibilities? Orchestrating services and data in order to feed social platforms with what is considered relevant to the customers of a certain enterprise will become a core IT capability in order to be able to become a player of relevance in the social revolution.

{No. 4 of this blog post series talks about the challenges of the “mobile everywhere” culture – soon to come – stay tuned}

feature image found at AFAO talks (http://afaotalks.blogspot.com.au/2012/07/going-social_20.html)