The net is not becoming a social medium. It already was one. In fact, it always was.
The history of the Internet can probably best be understood as a social medium repeatedly shaking off attempts to turn it into something else. Almost immediately after the first computer networks were developed for U.S. Defense Department use, system operators noticed something strange: Scientists with accounts were spending more time and bandwidth talking about their personal research interests than official business.
While the Internet (then known as Arpanet) was a technological success, it had become overwhelmed by social use. So, the government decided to give it away. AT&T turned down the offer to take it over. In what may have ultimately been a kind of wisdom, AT&T couldn’t see a business application for what appeared to be an academic social scene. The government ended up setting the Net free, to a large extent, with the proviso that it only be used for research purposes.
No one thought the Net would end up going anywhere. My first Internet book was canceled by my publisher in 1992 because they thought the Net would be “over” by 1993 when it was first slated to be released. (It came out in 1994 with a new publisher, and at least one reviewer still derided it as science fiction.)
A few years later, after a series of violations by small businesses looking to promote their services online, the Net opened for commercial use. At last, businesses figured they could use it to peddle their wares. Everyone got involved, putting a “.com” behind every word imaginable. And while a few businesses actually succeeded online, most of them failed—miserably enough to take the stock market down with them.
You see, the stock market had been looking for a new poster child since the “biotech crash” of the 1980s. This new medium, suddenly unleashed as the electronic strip mall for the 21st century, seemed like a great new place for all that investment money to flow. Problem was, most Internet businesses didn’t really need all that venture capital—much less common stock. The dot com boom was followed by an even louder dot com crash. And most people seemed to the think the Net was over, again.
Left to our own devices, Net users began to blog. And link. And comment. The Web still had businesses on it—don’t get me wrong—but all those connections, all those conversations were between people. It turned out content was not king—contact was.
AOL, Friendster, Orkut, MySpace and—most recently—Facebook rose to channel all this social energy into a single, centralized location where it could, hopefully, be monetized. Surely amidst all of these exchanges, there is marketing research to sell, modeling that can be done, some way to turn people’s contacts into, well, leads.
But people seemed able to sense when a social network was really serving some other purpose. Seemingly permanent monopolies on our online social activity lost their constituencies more quickly than they earned them. Users flocked from one sinking network to the next one, rebuilt their contact networks and went on with their socializing.
Yes, Facebook will ultimately go the way of its predecessors. The current anger people feel over Facebook’s privacy policies really has less to do with any invasion of privacy than the monetization of their friendships. It’s that the information gleaned from their activity is being used for other than social purposes. Friends are not bought and sold.
Which brings us to the current business landscape, in which every company of every size is looking for a “social strategy” through which to extend their brands. Everyone wants to build their own social networks of customers—or build Facebook pages and win “friends,” “fans” or “likes” from the millions of potential users out there. It’s as if having what amounts to an e-mail list will breathe life into brands already decimated by the Internet’s deconstruction.
What some companies don’t yet realize is that it is too late for a business to go social. Every business already is social. Transparency is no longer a choice for businesses in the Internet age—it is a given. Where there are people, there will be conversations. Those conversations are already happening, with or without you. The truth about what you do and how well you do it is already a topic of conversation—even if it isn’t happening on your site or Facebook page.
The real way to “go social” is not to get more “friends” or “followers,” it’s to get your friends and followers to befriend and follow one another. That’s how to create a culture.
Let them be social. If you are halfway good at what you do, the rest will follow. One+
DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF speaks and writes about communication, values, culture and organizations. His latest book is Get Back in the Box: Innovation from the Inside Out. This is his first monthly column for The Meeting Professional. He can be contacted via www.rushkoff.com.
