Of course humans will continue to evolve, and they will do so in sync with the culture that surrounds them. And yes, our environment (online and offline) will affect our future, both culturally and from an evolutionary biology point of view. However, those changes won’t happen over the course of one or two generations; they will occur over the span of thousands of years. So for the foreseeable future, we are stuck with the Hyper-Social Human 1.0 in business.
As this book comes to a close, we wanted to have some fun by venturing out and making wild predictions about that future. We would not call ourselves prognosticators, and we have no grand illusions that any of our predictions will come to pass. The purpose of this exercise, however, is not a vain one; rather, these predictions may determine certain changes that you could force your organization to go through. By envisioning bold scenarios for the future, you might see paths to get there that have interesting stops along the way—stops that might provide you with valuable competitive differentiators.
So let’s get started making some bold predictions, and hopefully we’ll have some fun along the way. You can submit your own bold predictions, and discuss others, on www.hypersocialorg.com.
As communities proliferate, we will inevitably reach a point where there will be too many of them, both internally and externally. At IBM, there are already more than 10,000 internal communities. Many of them may be redundant, set up by people who don’t bother to check whether communities with similar interests might already exist. Most of us won’t belong to multiple communities with the same topic, since we have only limited time and attention to spare. So what is going to happen to all of this overabundance? The answer: consolidation.
Ultimately, some communities will become like ghost towns, while others will become magnets that attract all the members and all the value. The “owners” of those communities, fans or vendors, will become Hyper-Social brokers for access to the members of their community. This new Hyper-Social role will be a tricky one, and one that many will misuse. You see, access to members is a valuable commodity, tremendously so, and the “owners” of those communities will be hard-pressed to monetize this newly found wealth. Some will do it the right way and respect the privacy of their members, the way Amazon and others have done it before them. Some will abuse the trust that exists within their communities, resulting in increased transaction costs for all the members and a potential mass exodus.
Those who can find the right balance in being Hyper-Social brokers for their communities in a way that provides value to both the members and those who seek access to them will find themselves in charge of assets that have unbelievable value and that can provide significant long-term competitive advantages—clearly a scarcity in today’s business environment.
It’s happening already. Companies that are getting their internal and external tribes involved with their business run the risk of being overwhelmed by their feedback. Look at the Dell IdeaStorm community:1 13,104 ideas and more than 88,000 comments; look at the My Starbucks Idea community:2 more than 80,000 ideas. How do you manage that many ideas? How much does it cost to review and triage them, even if you count only the ones that the community deemed popular? How many ideas can you implement in your next-generation product or service offering? How much does the cost of processing this user-generated content compare to hiring a team of really smart people to come up with the same number of implementable ideas?
You can just see it happening. Companies will get overwhelmed by the amount of feedback they get from their tribes. At some point, they will no longer be able to participate appropriately in those user-generated knowledge flows (remember that our Tribalization of Business Study showed that a majority of companies have only one person dedicated to their Hyper-Social activities, if they have any at all). Tribal members will perceive that lack of participation as a lack of reciprocity and become disillusioned. At the same time, the numbers people, who still dominate most companies, will start questioning the costs of it all.
So where does this scenario lead us? To many Hyper-Social failures on the horizon.
How do you fix it? By adding structure and process.
Remember what we said in Chapter 8? Too much process and structure, and your organization will freeze up; too little, and you will end up with chaos. The same is true for all your Hyper-Social activities. You need to add some process and structure to all of them in order to get them working. Don’t just have an open-ended idea community; add some structure in there, the way Pfizer does with its internal social innovation process3—with most of its innovation communities being centered around “collaborative problem solving” or directed innovation. Or the way Dell decided to complement its IdeaStorm suggestion box with Storm Sessions. As Erin Nelson, the CMO at Dell, said when we talked with her:4 “So, while we still have that large IdeaStorm suggestion box that will continue to be really valuable, we’ve incorporated now what we’ve called Storm Sessions. And it’s a means to, actually, further drive, kind of, period-in-time feedback and business value, and the overall IdeaStorm experience. What we do is we actually identify specific topics at specific times, and, I’ll tell you, the person who has the hardest job in Dell right now is the arbiter of whose questions get to be put out.” Adobe has a more radical approach to providing a “heartbeat” to its innovation communities: it periodically kills them, summarizes what happened, and restarts with fresh communities after a short hiatus.
In the future, we will see a lot more structure in Hyper-Social environments, either vendor-directed or self-directed. It won’t be anything like the vertical top-down structures that we have in most organizations today, but more of a fluid, frequently changing, horizontal set of structures. The companies that understand this dynamic today will have a leg up on their competitors.
John Hagel predicted it in the 1990s5—the unbundling of the corporation. Organizations would break up into infrastructure players, customer aggregators, and fast, agile product innovators. We may have finally arrived at this one. With the inevitable consolidation of Hyper-Social environments and the role that Hyper-Social brokers play in controlling access to their members, the advent of cloud computing, and the ongoing trend of outsourcing all nonessential work, we may in fact be witnessing the unbundling of the corporation.
Product and service innovators won’t have to worry about customer segmentation and targeting anymore, as most customers will be self-segmented into tribes, and access will be dictated by the Hyper-Social brokers of those tribes. We will see product and service innovators who also “own” Hyper-Social environments. In order for such endeavors to succeed, they will have to acknowledge the inherent conflict of interest that lies in that dual role, and keep a wall between church and state. It is like having doctors own a hospital. Doctors are supposed to be the patient advocates, and the hospitals are driven by profitability. When the doctor owns both, one part of the equation stops working. Companies that own both will have to have a customer advocacy group that is independent of the group that is measured on product or service revenue.
You ... all of you! If we are indeed witnessing the end of traditional media models and advertising as we know them today, who will play the role of information curator? “All of us” has to be the answer—but how?
Wikipedia may provide a model for the future of information curators, but there are also many failures in the area of crowd-based content creation. Self-organized publishing models like Slashdot and Kuro5shin have not replaced mainstream publishing yet, nor have they even come close to threatening the existing models. The “We are smarter than me” project, a crowd-based book publishing project that was cosponsored by the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, ended up hiring writers to write the book.6 Even InnoCentive, a crowd-based scientific problem-solving environment, isn’t all it is heralded to be. It’s hard to rely on the crowd to curate good content.
Organizations, however, have the wherewithal to pay for professional content curators, and while in the old model, they hired them for their own purposes, we expect more and more companies to hire them as a service to their tribes. The tribes will participate in being curators, but with professional curators as the catalyst, they will have a much higher chance of success.