In the 1990s, with the advent of the Internet, there was a lot of buzz about how revolutionary the Internet was going to be. In my own field, marketing, everyone was thrilled about the possibility of selling things directly to consumers online, in a disinter-mediated fashion. E-commerce was the name of the game. And added to e-commerce were online advertising, Webvertising, and pay-for-content as the other big deals. Each was enthusiastically marketed as the Big Internet Revolution.
But time has proved these proclamations of business revolution to be wrong.
Although the ability of organizations to reach out to consumers in new ways has been extremely important, and has altered the way in which business has been done over the last decade, they really weren’t all that revolutionary in their execution or implications.
Activated by the burgeoning Internet, however, there was another revolution brewing. Drawing upon the Situationist philosophers for inspiration, the great Sufi anarchist poet Hakim Bey wrote in 1994, “Meeting face-to-face is already the revolution.”
Little did Bey seem to suspect that the Internet would bring some of the powerfully subversive social forces that arise when people gather away from their institutionalized circumstances into the homes of the mainstream. From where we stand today, it looks as if the bigger Internet revolution was not so much about organizations stretching out to reach consumers in new ways, but about consumers using the Internet to reach out and connect with one another in new, and endlessly increasing, ways.
Technologically facilitated social connection is the big revolution, the social movement, the transformation of our times. And yet, given that this is such an enormous change, we have a relative paucity of understanding of it.
That’s where the book you are holding in your hands comes in. Revolutionary times call for revolutionary thinking. What Francois Gossieaux and Edward K. Moran have written in this book is nothing less than a guidebook to this new revolution, an initial charting of this new terrain. More than that, it is an action plan that not only enlightens managers and everyone else about what to do in these exciting, ridiculously scary new times of transition, but why to do it.
And that explanation makes a big difference.
I realize that there is no shortage of books about the Internet or about new technology and business. Over the last 20 years, I have read literally hundreds of them. I have stacks of what I tend to quickly dismiss as shallow pop business management books. You know the ones. Some of them are filled with examples, but there is no connection between the examples, and no principles that emerge from them. Some of them are loaded with how-tos and tactics. But although they tell us what to do, we never understand why we should do it, and with technology’s rapid pace of change, those tidbits of knowledge spoil more quickly than an opened carton of yogurt. Then there are the big-picture pop business books that promise to deliver a whole new way of thinking. But that way of thinking often tends to be composed of just one idea. Usually, it’s not even a great idea.
Academic books usually aren’t much better. You know the ones I am talking about? Those thick, erudite academic volumes, usually written by B-school professors, that use complex and rigorous research and strong, original thinking, but that cloak them in inaccessible language and abstract sentences forms? Often when I finish reading one chapter of one of these books, I can barely remember what it was I was supposed to have learned. And because they are so abstract and high-level, they rarely engage us with examples or tell real, functioning managers what it is that we are supposed to do.
It is quite rare indeed to find to find a book about such an important topic that is accessible, well researched, and substantively deep. I am delighted to say that The Hyper-Social Organization is such a book.
Into a marketplace that is virtually starved for insight about social media, and filled with trivial how-to books or popular management approaches that treat only a small element of the vast social changes that are rippling through society, The Hyper-Social Organization is the real deal: an authentic, informed, and organized organizational eye-opener.
In recent years, talented scholar-authors like John Sherry, Doug Holt, Bernard Cova, and Grant McCracken have convinced a growing audience that adopting an anthropological approach can add enormous insight to the practice of brand and marketing management. How powerful is it to bring this same cultural approach to the understanding of social media?
Talented practitioner-thinkers like Don Tapscott, Marc Gobé, Alex Wipperfurth, and Sean Moffitt have demonstrated to wide general audiences how a focus on communities is changing the world of business. How useful and topical is it, then, not only to bring, but to explain and develop how these ideas about tribes and communities ripple throughout and completely transform the new, Hyper-Social organization?
How ironic is it that a book about the way technology changes our world would ultimately be about recognizing the most human elements of our social life, an idea that these authors summarize so nicely in their notion of Human 1.0?
To this list of outstanding recent thinkers, writers, and influencers, we must add Francois Gossieaux and Ed Moran, for with this wonderful exploration of the expanding universe of sociality, they share new and important insights for us all.
And it is ultimately not in its technical knowledge, nor even in its practical business acumen, that the biggest successes of this book lie. This book succeeds so well because it exemplifies and develops the still largely nascent ability of the Internet to humanize human pursuits, to connect the disaffected, to reorient, to deinstitutionalize at least as much as it disintermediates. It is a book about talent tribes, about social networks, about messiness, gift economies, consumer experiences, and the convergence of marketing management and general management.
But, much more than this, it is a book about our increasing humanity, the expansion of the frontiers of our sociality and connectedness. And I find this topic endlessly exciting.
So treat yourself to some brave new thoughts about one of the most, if not the single most, important revolutions of our time. Don’t just buy this book. Read it. Absorb it. And use the ideas in The Hyper-Social Organization to humanize your organization and our world.
—Robert V. Kozinets
Professor of Marketing, York University, Toronto,
Marketing Researcher, and author of
Netnography: Doing Ethnographic Research Online