Social Nutjobbing

First, Jay Kidd is a good blogger, but he's a marketing guy so I'd expect nothing less. Second, the point he is making – while seemingly somewhat self-serving, is realistic. We spend way too much time trying to come up with catchy phrases to make our dumbed down efforts seem hipper.

Comcast, clearly reacting to ill-understood pressure, bought "social networking pioneer" Plaxo. Plaxo is a social networking pioneer just like Jehovah Witnesses are welcomed ice-breakers. Plaxo is a good idea – keep your contact list online and have it be automatically (almost) updated. The problem is they didn't stop there – they decided that once they had enough members they were a social network. They aren't.

A social network is one in which I decide to whom I wish to reveal myself (so to speak) and under what conditions. The social networks of the business world today are the modern manifestation of everything we've hated about consumer marketing of old, except now it's spam instead of telemarketers. I have received 11 billion Linked-In requests, to which I'm flattered. I ignored 99% of them, until one day I decided to see what it was all about. That was a mistake. There is little to no value to me in most social networks today – I suppose if I had nothing to do or knew I was in a perpetual state of requiring another job that might be different, but as it sits, being pestered online is no more fun than being pestered anywhere else.

Eventually there will be legitimate business networks that provide real value. People like and leverage Amazon because of user ratings. Amazon blows that goodwill (with me anyhow) by sending me 198 emails every day. I don't want the emails. If they gave me user ratings and left me alone, it would have value. When we grow up enough to apply true social phenomena to technological capabilities we have the chance to make really big changes in the way business is done – and that's going to be interesting. Along the way this step back to "boiler room" tactics thinly guised as "social" is annoying.

The real value of all of this to date is in the Web 2.0 delivery of Web 1.0 capabilities – it's letting me buy stuff online and more importantly, it's letting me store stuff online. The business implications thus far have been around monetizing eyeballs (Google) or finding a new usage/consumption model for infrastructure (cloud computing/storage) by enabling the consumer to create and store where and when they want. Today our kids take videos on their phones and immediately email them to their pals or post them on MySpace. Why hasn't Verizon offered an adjunct service to allow them to put their video's or pictures on the Verizon site instead of simply routing them to someone else? Verizon best learn to give those types of things away, less they get Googled up.

Thus far the economics of all of this are based on giving away the ability to create piles and piles of data – all of it file – and even giving away the ability to store and access it – in exchange for new, different monetization schemes. I'm more than fine with that.

What will happen is that traditional business not currently under attack by others attempting to pull the go-to-market rug out from under them will continue to feel like all this social networking/web 2.0 stuff is what it has mostly been – noise from the kids. The really big money and really big impact is going to happen when business 1.0 figures out that world 2.0 isn't going to operate old school anymore – and then they will panic. E-Trade was no threat at all to traditional Wall St. brokerage houses. No one would ever do that! Think again my friends. Just because we might have to wait for Web 3.5 before real business making real money becomes a real thing doesn't mean you should blindly dismiss what's going on as a fad. Life is in the clouds.