Inchoate Curmudgeon

Robert Scoble just posted an entry titled “Steve Ballmer Doesn’t Understand Social Networking“. The article provides a reasoned perspective on the inability of some business people, notably Microsoft in this case, to understand the full implications of the social networking evolution.

The larger truth to the story is really about trust and how we converse. We are all very generally and homogeneously treated by most marketing efforts, businesses and the media. We are all part of some pre-defined herd, except to the extent that current limited technology is able to segregate us based on pre-concieved demographics. But we form social circles, in the “real world” and on the Internet, based on common values, experiences and goals that are not always cleanly reflected by common demographic analysis.

The next big thing on the Internet will disintermediate marketing processes that have traditionally built their value on the ability to target media, products and messaging based on demographic consumer characteristics. These yet to be developed and deployed technologies will dynamically leverage our natural tendency to form various social groups on the Internet in an way that is impossible in the “real world.”

The most likely early beneficiaries will be those of us that get our most trusted information from Internet sources rather than mainstream sources, by allowing us to find information vetted by trusted members of our social networks in less time. The most likely early losers in the equation are mainstream one-way media sources that derive significant value by careful editing targeted to a narrow set of consumer demographics.

Although this will not necessarily be enabled by some revolutionary, yet to be invented technology, it may be. The current social networking paradigms and mechanisms haven’t yet evolved to the point where editing, conversation, trust and targeting are completely embedded, in a zero-overhead fashion, into our use of the Internet, but platforms and technologies will hit this explosive seam soon enough.

(See also: Digg and the Media Triangle)

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