E-nough Already!: Doing Business Without The "e" (and other prefixes, acronyms and nonsense words)

Okay. I know there are many brilliant people out there in the marketing, social media and enterprise business arena - not to mention their customers - who are, like me, simply tired of the "e's"  and "i's" and other alphabetical prefixes, acronyms and nonsensical words stamped on products, processes and even in the names of organizations (forget the iPhone and eHarmony, look no further than "nMash"!).

Well, with 20 years in as a tech industry marketer, operator and consumer, I think I can represent many of us when I say "e-nough"! As kitchy and catchy as these tags are, they served a purpose at the dawn and juvenile stages of the Internet revolution: they helped identify and explain a new way of doing business (e-business); integrating systems (e-enterprise - c'mon, really? There's already an "e" in enterprise!); conducting government (e-gov); and, connecting to customers, friends, family and remote locations (e.g,. Wi-FI, GPS, tMobile (?). With next step into the reality of "Social Media" and "Social Business" we're now subjected to countless threads of "Web 2.0" and "Enterprise 2.0" (a new marketing twist to help us identify the latest phoenix) and, my personal favorite, "SocNet," ugly techno-slang for "Social Network" (really, I think of it as lazy slang for bloggers that is a result of years of "writing for the web").

What does it all mean?

Who knows, for sure? Certainly, additions to language are continual and new ideas, concepts and inventions spark the fire in entirely new genres of word families and usage. Unfortunately, there is an expiration date on language that hypes versus language that helps.

The time has come for us to drop the "e" and all of its baggage. Today, we need to help EVERYONE along and within the value chain (from manufacturer to retailer to consumer) understand and integrate their EVERYDAY life and work with these tools that were once "other worldly," but which are now "our worldly." (See further discussion on this, particularly Bert DuMars comments in Jennifer Leggio's "Social Business" blog  at ZDNet.com)

"e" and its brethren promote a false differentiation between business and communications online compared to those in the real world. Worse, extrapolations of these simple prefix monikers, which are pounded into our heads at every advertising and branding opportunity, further differentiate the meanings of the words they modify in an age when we should be focusing on how it all fits together, instead of on silos (of data, language, politics, budgets, demographics, etc.).

Just consider the difference in meaning we attach to the term e-commerce versus its original form, commerce. If you're in business today, or even if you're a consumer, don't these two ideas "mash" in your head (sorry to further the problem with a "mash" metaphor)? As a business consultant, I can tell you that a company that hasn't integrated some form of "e" into its commerce by now is in big trouble - "e" left the station 5 years ago, "SocNet" is making its final stops before rocketing into its own orbit. Just drop the "e" already!The two terms are synonomous!

I could continue ranting about million other "e's," acronyms and nonsensical words/names in this post, but you'll probably just shoot me notes asking about the whole other universe of symbols (@, #, ^, _ , etc.). Right?

Let's not go there....Instead let me know if you agree that the time for these prefixes and nonsensical terms is done, and that - as we organize and envision this new popular concept of the Social Web, inviting all of us to engage in conversations, together - perhaps, we can make our language more social again, too, helping instead of hyping.

~LP

Organizing the Social Media Universe: Big Bang and Cosmological Redshift

Not to get to enmeshed in metaphors, or science for that matter; but, one way to look at, and ORGANIZE, the emergence of new ideas like Social Media, and the technologies, processes and businesses that develop around them is to take the concept of the expanding space paradigm (or "cosmological redshift") first introduced by Hubble (of the telescope namesake) and overlay it onto today's most fascinating and popular area of dynamic business growth (and hype).
Let's use the current fascination of the world, techies, developers, newsies (and me, too!) surrounding the social media landscape (to mix my metaphors) as an example. And, let's extend our universe metaphor by adding in the theory of "cosmological red shift."
Now, I'm no astronomer, but I like the way this works when we think of emerging businesses, verticals and practices. For those unfamiliar with it (and too lazy to check out the link to its explanation, above), cosmological red shift refers (in very simplified terms) to the expansion of the universe, including all galaxies and planets in it, following the "Big Bang."
As an example of this theory, and to cite the Wikipdia explanation some more, we often find "the "raisin bread model" shown below, where one imagines a loaf of raisin bread expanding in the oven. The loaf (space) expands as a whole, but the raisins (gravitationally bound objects) do not expand; they merely grow farther away from each other.







Of course, "...unlike real cosmological matter, ...loaves of bread are bound together electromagnetically and will not continue to expand on their own after an initial tug."

What the heck does this have to do with Social business?

Okay. So, consider Social Media as the ever-expanding "rasin bread" loaf - the universe in total. Then, consider that there are raisins (galaxies) in this universe that are made up of the various tools (planets) for communication, development, marketing and transacting of social business (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Ning, Salesforce.com, Groupsite.com, Google Wave, Bing.com, LinkedIn, Foursquare, MySpace, Digg, Apple, etc.). Finally, consider that as each of these "planets" gains gravitational force (eyeballs, APIs, audience, participation, etc.), they begin to literally create satellites (moons) and even new galaxies in the form of businesses and applications  (i.e., just consider the results of developing with the Twitter API, the Apple iPhone application development business engine, or the Starbuck's community). 

As these galaxies expand further and further from each other (and as we discover new galaxies when ideas, technologies and practices collide in space), and their planets and moons grow mass, they increase their gravitational pull even as the universe, as whole, expands continually.

So, I leave you with the ever growing Social Media universe as an interesting (or not?) example of how to frame and organize your thoughts as new technologies, ideas and practices seem to come at us at the speed of light.

The big question for many will be:  How do I avoid the black holes and colossal asteroids?
ANSWER:  Read the stars and keep your rocket fueled.
P.S. One of the best visual maps of the current Social Media (Enterprise 2.0) TOOL UNIVERSE was compiled by Dion Hinchcliffe at ZDNet (someone you should definitely follow). Click here to see where I found the cool graphic map below (and to see it bigger), and to read more of the great stuff from Dion.....







~LP

Dialing up Stats: Gary Hayes's Social Web Counter

So, unless I'm missing something, Gary Hayes has provided us with the first real organized statistical perspective of the social web. In one of the coolest things I've seen in the last quarter, Gary's The Social Web counter (find it here http://www.personalizemedia.com/the-count/) takes a birds eye view of the vast and rapidly expanding social business universe :



It's plugged into this blog's sidebar for good, as a reminder of:

1. The mashability of all things web; and,
2. Just how big the social and mobile web economy is and continues to become.

Plus, it's just plain fun to click from "Now" to "+1 Day" to "+1 Year" and watch the "RED SHIFT" of the social universe...

As he says at http://www.personalizemedia.com/the-count/

The social web has exploded in the last year and below are some of the key data points that the ‘Gary’s Social Media Count’ is based on (many will be updated!).

• 20 hours of video uploaded every minute onto YouTube (source YouTube blog Aug 09)
• Facebook 600k new members per day, and photos, videos per month, 700mill & 4 mill respectively (source Inside Facebook Feb 09)
• Twitter 18 million new users per year & 4 million tweets sent daily (source TechCrunch Apr 09)
• iPolicy UK – SMS messaging has a bright future (Aug 09)
• 900 000 blogs posts put up every day (source Technorati State of the Blogosphere 2008)
• YouTube daily, 96 million videos watched, $1mill bandwidth costs (source Comscore Jul 06 !)
• UPDATE: YouTube 1Billion watched per day SMH (2009)- counter updated!
• Second Life 250k virtual goods made daily, text messages 1250 per second (source Linden Lab release Sep 09)
• Money – $5.5 billion on virtual goods (casual & game worlds) even Facebooks gifts make $70 million annually (source Viximo Aug 09)
• Flickr has 73 million visitors a month who upload 700 million photos (source Yahoo Mar 09)
• Mobile social network subscribers – 92.5 million at the end of 2008, by end of 2013 rising to between 641.6-873.1 million or 132 mill annually (source Informa PDF)
• SMS – Over 2.3 trillion messages will be sent across major markets worldwide in 2008 (source Everysingleoneofus sms statistics)

He's also developed one for the Mobile Web:



Excellent stuff, Gary.

Keep mashing n mashing! And, tell me what you think about all of this.

LP

Can Google's New Wave Out Do Cisco's Disco?

In a cursory look at the number of Twitter posts re: Google's Wave app, today (where I noted one poster said he's convinced Wave combines "the worst of email and IM all together in the same place") - I watched as, every 30 seconds, between 150 and 250 new tweets were posted on the subject. In contrast, only between 5 and 15 tweets were chirping every 30 seconds about Cisco's acquisition of Tandberg.

Not that I'm seeking intellectual understanding of the PR quotient here (I get it that Wave's cool factor, applicability to the everyday person, and, more generally, its "Googliness" makes it immediately more popular than chatter about two, crusty high-tech behomouths), but I ask you, if you mute the hype and look at the "nMash" business opportunities each of these items of public interest presents (one a new, potentially killer app; the other a deal that may highlight Cisco's next arena of complete domination [of course, until Google finds a way to usurp]: enterprise-level, secure digital video communications), which one really deserves more chatter in terms of immediate or not-too-distant-future application for good in business and life? Are they equally, potentially next-level news? Or, does Wave really hold more potential and, thus, is receiving its fair share of twittering and newsy-ness?

Google's Wave app, while still buggy, sure, is easily one of the most elegant idea mashes we've seen since Apple pushed iPhone and created a platform to launch millions of apps - many of them mashes. Clearly, Wave looks to have the same platform and revenue sharing opportunity for developer mashers as iPhone did and does.

Meanwhile, Cisco, the wired and wireless networking Olympian, just bought 3 billion dollars worth of Defense, Education and Fortune 500 client base as well as technology that it is sure to "improve" and mash with its current software and hardware assets. I wonder what this might mean for the future of mobile, secure video? What are the implications for Distance Learning?

I could go on, but it would be much more fun to read what you all think (?)...