The Crowd Came. The Crowd was Conquered. Now What?

Issues have been brewing for quite some time but this week, the news about how Facebook data was exploited to influence national elections has sent a cold chill through the technology community. For me, it is refreshing that people finally understand the implications and power of online networks - and their business models.

The business model and engagement model of social networks are at odds

Between 2000 and 2010 blogs, online communities, and early social networks flourished creating an intoxicating feeling of opportunity. This era was funded by early venture capital investment and experimentation was the norm. After some time passed and there were some well-publicized failures (remember Orkut? Friendster? MySpace?), there was pressure on social networks to find a business model. Advertising was the most obvious choice since it was a pre-existing business model and budget item. 

However, the advertising business model was in direct conflict with the engagement model and how those who participated received value. It was clear to me that this would cause big issues, although I didn’t imagine the scale of the issues that would unfold. In the short term as new adoption drove growth, the advertising business model worked. It also triggered a race to create content that then flooded social networks in an ever-escalating attempt to garner attention. That was at direct odds with user value and the more streams were flooded with noise, the less value users received. At the same time, social networks realized they could use all the data they were collecting to sell increasingly niche audiences to advertisers. This all seemed OK and useful to mainstream audiences until it started conflicting with federal election laws by allowing some political candidates to pay less for an impression than others. It also allowed, through a loophole, for a smart but ethically challenged organization like Cambridge Analytica to match advertising with an individual’s psychological profiles.

Individuals are starting to opt out, giving executives pause

Turned off by the trolling, the constant triggering of anxiety, the abuse of data and privacy, and the irrelevant noise, individuals are starting to opt out. 

For many executives too, the Internet can seem like it is ruled by mobs. It’s easy to see the social web as worthless and destructive. 

However, it’s not inevitable that crowds turn into mobs. 750,000 people go through Grand Central Station every day with no notice taken. There are billions of people on Facebook, the vast majority of whom don’t suffer from any notable harassment. Over 3 million people participated in women’s’ marches in 2018 with little incident. 12 million people participated in the #MeToo movement on social media. 

We have the opportunity to get it right 

The Internet allows people to gather at a scale which is simply not possible in the physical world. That is both a huge opportunity and a huge challenge as we work to minimize destructive and abusive behaviors while supporting and rewarding constructive behaviors. By doing so, we can help crowds evolve into communities, where they can collaborate to take meaningful action after they’ve been energized and empowered by joining a crowd.

The opportunity for harnessing the voices, power, and energy of more individuals is staggering. For individuals, especially for those have been disenfranchised by social status, gender, race, geography, or education, online communities give them an avenue to lead, advocate, and influence in ways they never could. For organizations, the social web provides the opportunity to harness the efforts, advocacy, and influence of every individual who shares their purpose and mission in ways that are more efficient and trusted – allowing them to increase their relevance and trust far beyond their current scope of influence.

We are at a critical juncture

The risks of this opportunity have been dramatically misunderstood, underappreciated, or ignored. Because of bad actors – whether individual trolls or business entities – the Internet is exploited to harass, misinform, and manipulate power. This has been writ large in the U.S. and Great Britain where political actors have gained an outsized advantage from using data that has never before been available about people’s behaviors, beliefs, and associations. 

With the risks now abundantly clear, taking advantage of the opportunities feels unsettling. The opportunities are as misunderstood, underappreciated, and ignored as the risks. 

The opportunities are not simply to connect people, although that has value. The biggest opportunities come in the ability to create value in new ways by bringing more people into the creation process and engaging people in different ways to harness the value that is created. It will blur the lines of what is an employee and what is a customer and require radically new business models and contracts. It will combine agile and open source development methods with new contract management mechanisms like Blockchain to create atomized value chains controlled by those interested in contributing to or extracting value – without any formal role or approval for doing so. Organizations will exist to provide the vision of shared value, governance, communications, and financial infrastructure to streamline these constantly recombinatorial value chains. 

How will organizations transform for the digital age?

While technology is certainly a big part of the equation, it will prove to be the easiest aspect. People change much more slowly than the technology does. Those organizations who learn how to learn – and design themselves for constant change – will win. By investing in optimizing the system constraint (the people), they will outperform and adapt more quickly to the changing market. It will require, among other things, a new accounting approach that recognizes the value of human assets and investment as well as better recognition of long-term investment.

My work in the community space has convinced me that building and facilitating communities is the single best way to empower individuals because it gives them both the emotional support they need to take risks and the challenges they need to learn and grow. Done well, they help individuals take agency for their work, explore new opportunities, have fun playing with ideas, and connecting with peers and experts that are in the best position to stretch their thinking. 

Communities are the mechanism to create cultural agility

Not surprisingly, technology companies themselves are the most likely to use community mechanisms to support both customers and employees. Communities are seen as a key element of learning and development. Technology is evolving so quickly and being released constantly via cloud applications that the traditional methods of training and documentation can no longer keep up. Employees and customers cannot be supported without a constantly evolving discussion. This is increasingly true of organizations across sectors as they move their technology to the cloud, offer products as a service, and need to constantly update integrations with partners. There simply is no other way to get an agile value chain aligned. 

Investment is required for exponential returns

Unlike technology, ‘renting’ relationships and influence is not cost effective. There is only one way to effectively and efficiently develop relationships and influence: through dialogue. This is frustrating to executives who have an annual budget and goals to accomplish a set amount of transactional objectives. Great communities require work in the beginning - work that does not scale. This is ironically the only way to eventually get to the exponential value that communities can generate. 

Executives are still hesitant to invest at a scale which will transform their organizations, in spite of all the research and documentation in how much value communities generate.

The longer organizations wait, the more runway and flight time they give to competitors - and it will be very hard to catch up.