the internet is made of context.

Earlier this week I was asked ‘what’s next?’. This is as close as I can come to an answer.

The first major revolution online was search. It’s hard to remember now, but there was a time when search engines were both new and strange, when the idea that you didn’t need to know where to look for information was gamechanging. And when you compare it to everything else in the world, it still is. Search gave us the ‘what’.

Another major shift was the introduction of social. I’m not going to create a strict definition, but I’m referring to two specific aspects of social media - the creation of profiles, and the mapping of social connections. Profiles helped us to define ourselves publicly. Tracking and mapping our social connections provided an important context - giving a wider set of affiliated profiles (interests and favourites included) that would further hightlight potential interets. Social gave us the ‘who’.

Location based services are just cresting into mainstream acceptance. Both check-in based services, and continuous location awareness, are adding another key peice of context - geographical awareness. This can both mean what is around you, and where you are most likely to head. Obviously this helps determine what is important in yet another way. LBS gave us the ‘where’.

The reason I mention this, is because it’s time for what, where, and who, to be integrated into everything. And it is going to start happening soon. 

What’s next? What’s next is what who and where helping us to define relevance. What’s next is that feeding to our experiences meaningfully and passively.

I’m not necessarily talking about a heads up display situation. I’m talking about taking the main function of the internet, sharing and discovering information, and using these filters to integrate it into everyday actions, where relevant.

It’s not about needing to ASK for more information. It’s about finding information has made itself available, because the qualifiers necessary to determine need are becoming ubiquitous as smartphones become the standard.

The internet is made of context. This is why who, what, where, why and how are important.

What’s next? Finding new ways to determine context from behaviour on and offline. Everything else is application. New forms of context have power. And if, like Google, or Facebook, or Foursquare, you have a significant majority control over a form of context, your best move is to find a way to let others integrate your service into thier offerings.

The future is always more context. From the dawn of the hyperlink, this is what the internet has been about.

The myth of “lines”.

As everyone interprets things differently, the myth of a brand pushing the limits, or toeing the line, is problematic.

Everyone interacting with your brand has different limitations and acceptance levels. Therefore, toeing the line usually means crossing it for a significant percentage of your customer base.

When Eric Schmidt recently said that “Google is willing to go right up to the line of being creepy”, what he meant, intentionally or not, was “Google is willing to creep the hell out of a set percentage of our users”.

There’s no clear definition of what that percentage is. 10%? 20? 50? The ‘line’ is unclear, but it could be anything less than 50+%, logically.

Toeing the line means alienating a minority of users. And we live in the ultimate age of the vocal minority. Any group, when angry enough, can fake movement status.

You don’t push boundaries. You cross them by degrees. If your strategy doesn’t address the consequences of crossing a boundary (this could be as simple as WANTING controversy) then you haven’t actually thought it through. You’re still thinking of your market and audience as one collective entity, rather than a social entity held together by weak ties.

a few thoughts on culture

There’s a tendency to treat culture as an independent element of companies, which infuriates me. Culture is treated like something of a holy grail, a way to increase productivity, drive, and cohesion. Culture is a mixture of spirit, but also of processes and frameworks.

Dictating culture from the top down is like dictating an attitude - anything legislated will end up feeling fake or forced. Culture isn’t a checklist.

Culture also can’t be at odds with process. Process and structure are the purest expressions of culture, because they influence everything that happens in a company. You can’t advocate a culture of creativity and individual agency when every decision is top down. You can’t foster a culture of open and fun collaboration, while demanding that employees keep non-essential interaction to a minimum.

Your process and structure is a skeletal system. By the time you get to culture, you’re looking at developing a circulatory system, musculature, nervous system, and higher order thinking: if you don’t design core structure around a desired culture, you won’t be able to integrate ideals and actions.

Put more simply: when you want to make a major, positive life change, the first step isn’t to go shopping or tell everyone you know that you’re changing.

You need an honest examination of your underlying motivations, principles, and how you make choices. You need to identify the issues that are keeping you from being who you want to be. Then you go to the core causes of whatever the problem is, and start trying to change at that level.

Process is culture. Structure is culture. This is why watching culture driven companies get acquired always makes me uncomfortable - as the new parent company tries to create some synergy between the structures and processes of two disparate companies, there’s bound to be a backlash at a cultural level.

The hard part of an organ transplant isn’t getting the connections and vessels lined up; the difficulty is in fighting the natural urge to violently reject anything that wasn’t part of the system as it developed.

Long comments are blog posts, right?

[The following is a comment I made in regard to Spencer Fry’s blog post “Down with Social.”]

I think you’ve made a false (but interesting) divide between what is and isn’t ‘social’.

If you’re arguing that companies don’t need someone tweeting and using facebook exclusively, sure, you may have a point. But the assumption that CRM through email is measurably more valuable than CRM via twitter, facebook, or blog comments doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

If an email response is your definition of ‘measureable’ (even though 1 of your 2 criteria, ‘thorough’ is a qual judgement) then simply counting replies to mentions is the same version of measurable. Twitter is people talking. Facebook is people talking.

If email isn’t people talking, I’ve been using it wrong for 13 years.

The core issue seems to be your definition - you’re argument makes perfect sense if, asLaporte said, social media is exclusively an echo chamber to talk about yourself.

Laporte’s argument was that no one noticed when his tweets weren’t sending, him included. That tells me he was using a conversation tool as a broadcast tool, and probably shouldn’t be calling his use of twitter ‘social’.

”pumping content into the void”? I’d argue that someone who considers a social channel a place to ‘pump content’ isn’t the voice of reason, here.

Anyway, you’re obviously entitled to your opinion, and I may just be misunderstanding your argument. Thanks for sharing.

Defining ‘intellect’ meaningfully.

There’s a natural tendency to define intelligence by the traits we feel best reflect our mental abilities. Which is a nice way of saying, I’m at my best when communicating or in (a specific subset of) social situations, so I consider those skills a sign of intellect. Often to my detriment.

It’s at least partially a defence mechanism, but it’s also hard-wired. If I feel smart because of x, it makes sense that I would consider x a sign that someone is smart.

We spend absurd amounts of time treating people who are quite brilliant in different ways like children, because they don’t have the grasp of our specialty that we do.

Ignoring this behaviour in yourself and others is weakening you in every way.

Meet people, and spend your time trying to find out where their intellect lies, rather than how your specific brand on intelligence trumps theirs. We’ll all be better for it.