Chapter 9:
The New Success - How to Survive and Thrive in Content Nation

Social media challenges many of the fundamental ways in which people have used pubishing through human history to build successful societies and civilizations. Yet at the same time social media is a very familiar way to communicate with people. We are publishers by our very nature, collaborating with one another as peers to achieve objectives and to build social bonds using innovations in communication. With social media, though, we have gained the tools that have the potential to scale our peer-level communications to any level of human organization.

As the potential power of social media unfolds in full our reliance on the centralized institutions that have dominated much of history's civilizations to organize ourselves for success through their publishing is likely to diminish. Through social media people can build and maintain more flexible bonds of trust at a personal level on a global basis that will guide us not just to surviving in a changing world but to thriving as the world offers new opportunities and challenges to us. We can now respond to such changes more rapidly, more flexibly and more broadly as citizens of Content Nation than at any other time in human history.

At the same time it is not just individuals who are making use of social media tools to succeed in the world. Today's governments, enterprises and other major organizations making use of social media will learn how to adapt themselves to a changing society and to take advantage of the full power of social media to develop new ways of succeeding. But unlike previous publishing tools, social media challenges these organizations to relate to the world in ways that traditional publishing didn't require of them. Social media in its various forms is by its nature a set of tools used for conversation, not dictation.

In many ways social media's ability to put producers more in touch with markets on a conversational level will accelerate the development of products, services and relationships that will meet people's needs on a global and local level. For those who master social media there will be great rewards. But it will also challenge people to think about the inherent value of economic and social activity to human life. In other words, how does the very notion of success change when we are all connected as peers via social media?

Value in an Age of Excess and Scarcity - What Constitutes Success in the Age of Social Media?

When publishing was established as a communication tool thousands of years ago, people lived in an era of relative scarcity. Resources and finished goods were hard to obtain and to transport oftentimes, making the value of these goods relatively high. In this early era of human history the publishing that expanded the scope of organized human behaviors was key to civilization's expansion, but with limited amounts of information shared with the public through pubishing the social value of publishing was relatively limited. Success in an era of relative scarcity was largely about complying with the laws and the policies of a small group dictating large-scale social and economic structure to others through publishing.

As technology and transportation improved, mass manufacturing ushered in an era of plenty, enabling global access to a far wider array of resources and finished goods. More affordable publishing made possible by mass manufacturing enabled publishing to have a far wider social act. Ideas, information and experiences could be disseminated widely far more easily, though the range of new ideas was still fairly limited and filtered through central publishers. Success in the era of mass manufacturing was largely about facilitating the policies of private and public institutions that were competing to dictate large-scale changes to the social and economic structure of civilizations.

As mass manufacturing continued to grow, however, there began to be far more resources and finished goods available for consumption in developed markets than were really needed for survival. This era of excess has changed the balance of power in society as a whole as well as in publishing. Advertising arose as a vehicle to enable people to obtain what was becoming the new scarce commodity in an era of excess: people's attention and trust. At the same time an excess of electronic and print publications made available through mass manufacturing made it increasingly difficult to reach mass markets with ever more fragmented and specialized interests. This excess of contexts in which to communicate with people combined with a scarcity of attention and trust has made dictating to people through centrally controlled publishers less and less efficient. Success in an era of hyperabundance is largely about finding the right people at the right time in the right social context to get them to pay attention to the dictates of central institutions and to trust them.

Even as much of the world suffers from too many people demanding their attention about half of the world suffers from people paying far too little attention to them. The United Nations Human Development Report for 2007/2008 notes that about three billion people - almost half of the world's population - lives on less than $2 a day. For these people left to deal with a life of scarcity the role of publishing remains mostly as it was thousands of years ago - a tool that others provide to communicate the dictates of socially distant central authorities.

Both for those people who suffer from overabundance and for those who suffer from extreme poverty it would seem that traditional publishing is not helping them to build successful lives. Publishing was designed to extend social contracts to people beyond small clans that would bind them to one another as their own genes would bond them. But centralized publishing in our current time has been losing its power to forge bonds that bring people together in true social contracts. Those who have an excess of available supplies are treated by commercial enterprises using traditional publishing as "consumers," points of disposal for mass-produced goods and services more than people who are bound together at a social level by their true needs. By contrast those who suffer from a scarcity of supplies are considered to be disposable people, who sadly and ironically find themselves oftentimes picking through the mass-produced refuse of people disposing of the overabundance in their lives. These people are also largely divorced from any real sense of a personal social contract with central authorities through publishing.

What's missing in this model of a society driven by overabundance on the one hand and extreme scarcity in the midst of plenty on the other hand is that in both instances there is not a strong formula for widespread social bonds between people driven by highly centralized publishing. Manufacturers, governments and other central institutions need to understand more realistically what people really need and want to be successful on a personal level: centralized pubilshing designed to dictate messages to the masses does not provide this insight efficiently. Calls to nationalism or to consume global mass-marketed brands that once benefitted from highly centralized publishing do not ring as clearly as they did in earlier eras. The choices that were available then for social commitments that would lead someone to perceived success were far more clear and limited.

Similarly, the everyday people of today need to understand more realistically who can enable them to meet their own needs and wants effectively on a personal level when the leading institutions of civilization seem to have left their personal interests behind oftentimes. There should be a "win-win" equation for success that people reach through publishing that is more representative of the real-world relationships based on the kinship-like trust which it was intended to foster. 

Social media is a key tool that can help people to build more effective models for successful human interactions in our current era. Social media helps people to establish personal bonds with other people seeking commercial and social success without relying on central authorities to cement that social bond formed and enhanced through publishing. The technology underlying social media services may be centralized in many instances to enable it to be highly scalable, but inherently social media is about people forming and reinforcing their relationships with people through publishing for a wide variety of purposes without intermediaries controlling how those relationships are formed at a personal level.

Through social media, the bonds that form success are no longer about just what major institutions would like them to be but what people would choose them to be. We tell the world about our needs and wants independently; we form global personal and professional networks of relationships independently; we collaborate on building insight and achieving goals independently. Some of these relationships we establish through social media may appear to be superficial and fleeting at times, but, considering the instability of many supposedly long-term relationships such as employment, nationality or marriage in today's society, social media appears to offer already in many ways the means towards trusted relationships that can lead to success in our personal and professional lives over extended periods of time.

Chasing the Mammoth: Surviving and Thriving in the Contexts that Matter Most

The model for success suggested by the interactions that people have using social media publishing tools is in some ways a very old model. Social media enables people to survive and to thrive in a culture that is in some ways reminiscent of our pre-historic roots as nomads who were hunters and gatherers in search of prey and seasonal plants. Like our ancestors chasing the wooly mammoth and other daunting animals social media enables people to come together rapidly to collaborate for a common purpose that meets our needs in very specific contexts.

Our opportunities for success are increasingly fleeting in a rapidly changing world, making on-the-fly collaborations like those that people used to hunt down the wild prey of an earlier era all the more important. The expected rapid changes to our natural environment in the years ahead will accentuate our need for flexible, oftentimes short-lived collaborations that make use of far-flung skills and resources to solve common problems of immense value. Civilizations used to be devised to last thousands of years under relatively stable conditions. It could be that after more than 7,000 years of experimentation with managing civilizations based on centrally controlled publishing that we are about to put that model aside and to use a new model based on social media to adapt our earlier model for human civilization to a new kind of publishing tool more in tune with our natural ability to survive and to thrive in rapidly changing environments.

Does this mean that we're all about to put on a bearskin and pick up a spear to go hunting? That's not likely, of course. Our solutions for surviving in the world have evolved: we can apply lessons from our early human history and move on with new tools that draw out the best of that distant past and the best of our present era to evolve new approaches to successful living in an era of rapidly changing social, economic and natural conditions. Social media will enable a broad and diverse array of models for success to help people to forge the gene-like bonds of civilizations through publishing in ways that will ensure a variety of new approaches to successful living.

Instead of publishing favoring one particular model of civilization as a means for successful living social media will enable a wider array of options for civilizations to emerge. The genes in our human bodies may not be very diverse, but with social media we have a tool that has the potential to create an enormous genetic-like diversity through publishing that will make the best use of our natural abilities as creatures who can survive and thrive in rapidly changing environments.

The formula for success in a culture driven by social media emphasizes different kinds of human attributes than those emphasized in civilizations driven by centralized publishing. Many of our attributes being higlighted by social media call upon us to remember what helped us to survive and to thrive before the rise of modern civilizations. Some of the key elements of culture found in our ice-age ancestors that are important for success in an era of social media include:

• It's about owning the moment, not owning things. While there were some items that were owned by individuals in ice-age culture for the most part there was neither the time nor the inclination to focus on ownership as a survival mechanism. In a nomdic culture focused on hunting and gathering the only thing that people really owned was the ability to exploit what they had available to them at any given moment. Maybe the mammoth would be there to hunt today; maybe not. Your clan relied on everyone to succeed in those fleeting moments of opportunity in order to survive.  Social media's ability to focus on contexts in the moment as opportunities for marketing and influence-building underscores its ability to help create high value at key moments that come and go.
  
• Keep your social bonds close but flexible and scalable. Sometimes larger groups of ice-age clans would gather to take on a large beast like a mammoth or a group of animals. They would celebrate their success in the hunt and then return to their usual clan gatherings. Social media also encourages both close social bonds and bonds that come together rapidly to take on important but fleeting opportunities. The key attribute that social media adds in the modern era is that now anyone and everyone could be a part of a clan. This means that it becomes far more important in a culture driven by social media to share your success with others who will help you in the future.
  
• Share your ideas. In ice-age culture it appears that the use of particular styles of tools for hunting and gathering grains was widespread. Intellectual property rights didn't appear to have been much of a bone of contention: concepts like patents and copyright were certainly unheard of. When your survival could depend on your neighboring clans being able to help you on a moment's notice sharing ideas for success made a lot of sense. In an era powered by social media your neighboring clans could be anyone living anywhere on the planet: collaboration and sharing ideas widely to accelerate everyone's progress towards success therefore acts as a very important strategy for success when your survival depends on rapidly changing conditions.
  
• Learn how to succeed on the move. While there is evidence that ice-age clans would camp in specific places for a period of time usually people were always ready to be on the move as weather, shifting food sources and competition from other roving clans kept their lifestyles mobile. The "where" of success wasn't as important as being in the right place at the right time to take advantage of fleeting opportunities. This was quite to the contrary of the models around which modern civilizations evolved, which assumed that stationary settlements were far more advantageous in a world of stable climate conditions. In today's era of social media much of its growth is being powered now by people with mobile communications devices, enabling people to succeed almost anywhere at any time with help from anyone in the world. This extraordinary mobility and the increasing advantages that people are gaining from it through social media is a strategy for highly scalable success that draws on both our ice-age roots and our modern capabilities.
  
• Have a strong code of conduct. Ice-age clans were largely small autonomous social units, but they appear to have had strong codes of conduct established through generations of traditions that helped people to have a sense of firm social boundaries. These internalized codes of conduct enabled conflcts to be resolved successfully according to accepted practices with broad support from the clan community. While known by some for their freewheeling exchanges successful social media services work best when there are explicit social boundaries and codes of conduct that guide people towards acceptable practices - or, if one is not conforming to these practices, expulsion. These enforced social boundaries are also reinforced informally oftentimes by members of social media services who have internalized their values. Social media allows people to succeed through explicit and implicit codes of conduct, taking advantage of people's self-interest and their appreciation of their peers to create lively and generally constructive interchanges with minimal interference.
  
• Accept your vulnerabilities. Although ice-age people had enormous strength through their power to communicate and collaborate they were still largely at the mercy of the elements, animals, competitors and the acceptance extended to them by clan members. Modern inventions such as fortifications or sytems of stored value such as money and granaries were not available to offer people extra security and comfort. These people relied first and foremost on their strong social connections to make the power of many people working together their strongest path to success. In a similar way people who succeed in social media learn how to be one of many people who need one another to realize their success to its fullest extent. This requires a willingness to expose personal vulnerabilities at times, but it's a risk that leads oftentimes to successful support from people who realize that their willingness to support others willing to open themselves to a social media community as the key to their own future successes.
• Accept regular conflict as a part of life. Ice-age societies had conflicts constantly, usually in small skirmishes over personal issues but oftentimes over the best resources and territory. Lawrence H. Keeley, the author of War Before Civilization, estimates that 87% of prehistoric tribal societies were at war more than once per year, and some 65% of them were fighting continuously. Modern crime, gang conflicts, terrorism and ongoing wars are undercurrents which remind us that regular violence remains a key part of human society. Social media will not change our genetic tendency towards war any time soon, but when the whole world has the potential to be in your tribe via social media many types of conflicts are likely to lessen. Social media encourages personal conflicts to be out in the open, expressed regularly through language and technology and moderated by the members of a publishing community. This war of words and images that builds rapidly scaled bonds of altruism is likely to help people to succeed who choose more selectively when to resort to the weapons of last choice.
• Leverage natural abundance, not artificial scarcity. While oftentimes the most coveted kinds of game and crops were not always available in abundance in a particular place, for the most part the world at the end of the last ice-age period was a world of abundant resources.The struggle for resources was not about scarcity so much as making the best use of the world's abundance. It was not until humans adopted the concept of storing materials that they had gathered and hunted that artificial scarcity could be used as a means to manipulate supply and demand independent of nature. Social media has helped to make more content resources available to the world than ever before, making the most scarce resources people's attention in the midst of this plenty. The most successful social media services have demonstrated that enabling people to make the most of that abundance in the most valuable contexts is a strong strategy for economic success. Much of our current global economy still tries to manage artificial scarcity in the face of abundance as a means for success. Social media suggests that artificial scarcity may be a strategy for success that is not going to be effective when people can engineer diverse abundance through social media.
  

Using Social Media to Form Localized and Globalized Tribes

These key traits of social media that build upon both the experiences of ice-age culture and advances in modern technologies are providing us with tools to survive and to thrive in rapidly changing circumstances. With social media we are gaining the ability to draw upon the best lessons of both ancient and modern worlds to create civilizations that conform themselves to the shape of today's rapidly changing world in a wide variety of new patterns. Traditional civilizations could count on on large and relatively stable geographic groupings of people with a common heritage and ethic background to bind together altruistic extensions of tribal culture through publishing. But in today's world global migrations of populations to new nations are breaking down many of these bonds of traditional civilizations and inviting new ways to define the bonds that lead to success in society.

The trend towards global migrations of ethnic groups is found everywhere in the world but it is perhaps most noticeable in the United States. A recent U.S. Census demographic study indicated that young minority populations, many of them recent immigrants, are beginning to emerge as the dominant ethnic grouping in many widely dispersed U.S. counties already - not just in the large coastal cities but in large and small communities all across the nation. Just as our ice-age ancestors sought out success through nomadism across the face of the earth so have many people in today's shifting populations transported themselves to cultures in which their geographic origin is but one factor in determining their success and their social alliances.

Through the highly scalable communications found in social media these modern nomads are already acting out the future's global culture, keeping in touch everyday with the cultures of their origin across the world even as they learn how to participate successfully in the culture of local surroundings that are constantly on the move. A nation built on immigration and rapidly shifting social boundaries is already in place to take full advantage of the potential for success to be found in Content Nation - with the global population of Content Nation participating actively in the growth of this culture that is at once both nomadic and rooted in ancient traditions. The world may or may not look more like America as time goes on, but it is most certainly going to look more and more like Content Nation.

Success in Content Nation: New Ways to Empower Old Models

Social media enables people to pick the best of old and new models for success in ways that allow us to make the most of rapidly formed bonds of altruism through highly scalable publishing. The great news is that there are so many new opportunities for success through social media - not necessarily opportunities that will benefit established institutions always but ones which promise a bright future for people everywhere. Let's take a look at some of the ways in which people are suceeded with social media in ways large and small that challenge us to think about how we can organize ourselves for success in new and exciting ways.

Music Inside-Out: The Entertainment Industry Adapts to Social Media Models

One of the first casualites of social media's rise was the music publishing industry, which saw its sales of music CDs plummet as people discovered file sharing as a way to experience new music and new mobile devices made CDs an increasingly inconvenient format for listening to music. There are any number of reasons why music publishers are suffering, but the primary reason is that like other institutions that relied on centralized publishing for their success their primary tool for ensuring profits is controlling the production and distribution of copies of content. In a world in which there are billions of devices that can copy and distribute content to anyone in the world this model is becoming an increasingly weak engine for music publishing success.

The other important reason that the music industry has failed, though, is that it has not managed the social aspect of music effectively. Music is by its nature a social experience, binding people together with common emotions and values. As music publishers focused increasingly on distributing music from a small number of highly popular artists they lost track of the origin of most of these artists as figures in folk culture - in other words, people sharing their experiences with peers. They also lost track of the tradition of people sharing their compositions with one another, each person adapting their own take on a song from an original artists with pieces of their own experience, just as songs and folk tales traveled from the campfires of one ice-age clan to another. Ownership of the rights to things - in this instance, copyrighted sheet music and recordings - became more important than the value found in the experience of music in a given context.

Musicians who have been frustrated with the limitations of this business model are exploring many different ways to use social media as a model to succeed as professional entertainers. In March 2008 Nine Inch Nails, a popular group of rock musicians, decided to release nine of 36 songs from its latest album of songs for free downloading to consumers under a Creative Commons license. People could redistribute these songs for noncommercial purposes without restriction and could remix them and share their remixes as they pleased. For $5 people could buy the complete album and for $300 they could buy a special high-quality vinyl version of the album.

The promotion was a success: millions of people downloaded the free songs from the album and shared their remixes with friends. Within a few hours the album registered more than $750,000 in sales and $1.6 million in the first week of its release. Allowing music to be purely social allowed the commercial transaction to succeed by leveraging the social relationship established though sharing the music online. Other musicians such as the group Radiohead have experimented with free online music releases also, knowing that the recordings help to promote their concert appearances, from which they tend to make more money than from recording royalty payments. Instead of trying to monetize the comoditized act of copying content they focus on making money from the unique social experience of a live performance.

Last.fm, an online music service, leverages social media for several of its key functions, but its most important innovation is a system that enables musicians who have not signed a contract with a music publisher to receive revenues from music that is played by the members of its service. These independent musicians are able to get exposure via Last.fm's social media functions that would be impossible through commercial radio stations and music download services, which rarely feature any music other than that released by commercial music publishers. This allows artists from around the world to build social networks of fans who share their enthusiasm for independent artists with others through Last.fm. Instead of relying on a dwindling group of large music publishers and radio stations building markets for a handful of artists around the world Last.fm enables independent artists to build up limitless direct channels to local and global audiences who can support their creative efforts directly as a social experience. Since artists make only a small fraction of total revenues from typical CD sales anyway eliminating unneeded distributors helps them to succeed as folk artists among peers.

Content Nation Success Rule #1: When you don't have to rely on a central publishing authority to reach a market, peers can build social bonds that create value for everyone.

Success Without Money: Commuto Brings Us Back to the Roots of Human Economies

When the new abundance at the end of the last ice age enabled clans to trade goods with one another regularly there was no known system of money to facilitate trade. Instead, goods were bartered with trading partners based on their perceived value to those offering and asking for goods. Bartering remained an important part of many economies well into the 19th century, with currency used to acquire goods and services that could not be aqcuired through bartering.  In an age of electronic payments bartering may seem to be an antiquated way of conducting commerce. But through social media bartering is regaining an important foothold as a means of people exchanging goods and services that bring value to people in a community. Barter ad postings are increasingly popular on Craigslist and services such as Swaptree for swapping media such as books, CDs, DVDs and video games are exploding in popularity. If trust is the underlying emotional component of trade, then social media is enabling an explosion of trust to open up new channels for bringing value into people's lives.

A new service being developed in Toronto, Canada promises to take bartering to a new level. Commuto is designed to help people to make in-person bartering exchanges, enabling people in local communities to build upon their relationship for good service with other members of the bartering community. With its Facebook application that people can add to their personal Facebook pages Commuto can extend its barter listings into existing social media communities, enabling people to offer a new level of interaction with one another in the real world that might not be possible otherwise. When people look at social media they may see only people sending content to one another, but the ability of bartering services such as Commuto to extend those publishing relationships that people develop via social media directly into things that they value reminds us that there are many ways that we build up value in our lives.

Content Nation Success Rule #2: Just because money doesn't always change hands through social media doesn't mean that people aren't building material success through it.

Carrotmob: Social Media Turns Profits into Social Change

Carrotmob is the brainchild of Brent Schulkin, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who was realizing that the profit motive could become a very powerful tool for social change through social media. Schulkin tried an experiment to test this theory that proved to be quite compelling. He chose a neighborhood in San Francisco and put out a proposition to twenty-three retail business owners in that area. Carrotmob would assemble a group of local residents gathered through social media channels and have them all shop on a chosen day at the store in the neighborhood that would commit the greatest percentage of their profits for the day to making their stores more energy-efficient. Stores bid against one another to get the "mob" that Carrotmob was willing to send. The highest bidder was willing to commit 22 percent of their profits for the day to energy efficiency improvements.

On the Saturday of the event about 300 people attracted to the store by Carrotmob streamed in and proceeded to buy lots of merchandise - about twice the merchant's estimates and about four times its normal income for a Saturday. The 22 percent from that day's income was more than enough to pay for the energy. Just a little effort from social media and a cause that a community supported seemed to have motivated someone to change how they managed their business - through the profit motive.

Content Nation Success Rule #3: Social media's promotion of community values can motivate people to take action that can help everyone in that community to succeed.

LocalHarvest: Bringing Community Buyers and Sellers Together through Subscriptions

In an era of mass-produced food distributed globally many farmers find that they need to be able to compete on more than price alone to make a good living. One of the solutions that some farmers have used is to penetrate local markets more effectively. This is not always easy in places where major supermarkets dominate food sales with high-volume goods. http://www.localharvest.org/

LocalHarvest is a service that offers people across the U.S. the opportunity to connect with local farmers and markets that provide high-quality produce and meats. People can use the social media features of LocalHarvest to connect with these community suppliers on a personal basis, but they can also opt for a subsription relationship with a specific farm in their local area. A subscriber commits typically to a seasonal commitment to the farm which in return provides regular access to its seasonal output. LocalHarvest provides members the opportunity to rate and review suppliers and offers suppliers the ability to display its available products and to communicate with existing and prospective customers.

Offering subscriptions is an old idea which is finding many new uses through social media. Where subscriptions were used mostly for delivering content in centralized publishing models, the highly scalable global distriubution capabilities of the Web have enabled subscription services to tie together buyers and sellers in communities who can build relationships with one another through social media to form and enhance their bonds with one another and with their community. Social media can enable these types of personal commitments to unfold at a scale large enough that can help niche businesses to thrive with a committed clientele, while helping their clients to feel that the bonds of altruism that were formed through publishing are as much about bringing people together into a network of committed community relationships as they are about getting goods and services. Sometimes the communities that help people to succeed through social media are global: sometimes they are local. Either way the "Big Sombrero" economy promises returns on personal investments that can easily overshadow traditional corporate approaches to meeting a market's needs.

Content Nation Success Rule #4: Highly profitable long-lasting relationships can be built through social media that can enable communities to succeed together.

Kiva and MicroPlace: Building Small Businesses Globally Through Person-to-Person Lending

Small entrepreneurs who are very poor have limited access to funds to help their businesses succeed, with traditional banks focused on major investment projects and few other options to raising financing to make a very small business more successful. In recent years the concept of microcredit was popularized by people such as Muhammad Yunus, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for his work in establishing microloans from Micro-Financial Institutions (MFIs) as a form of investment for poor individuals nations around the world. Microloan repayment levels have been very high - some claiming as high as 97 percent - and have already helped more than 100 million people worldwide. Online social media services have taken on an important role in attracting people with money to invest to this concept.

In the instance of Kiva and MicroPlace, two social media Web sites established to support MFIs, people get to know individuals who need microloans through their personal profiles and through journals kept by MFI managers who learn about the needs of people in their communities who need microloans to grow their businesses. Kiva was the pioneer in this effort, inspired by the work of Mohammad Yunus and Grameen Bank who were early proponents of microloans, but the acquisition of MicroPlace by eBay in 2006 enabled them to start offering investors in microloans modest returns on their microloan investments - about what one would expect from a low-interest savings account, but a true return on an investment nevertheless.

While more financing is still required to enable these tiny businesses in the hands of poor people to grow into larger, more successful businesses the social media Web sites that promote microloans play a critical role in getting people to rethink how they invest in society. Traditionally most people give money to charities to help poor people and then place their private investment money into funding major companies or public institutions. Social media helps to extend the concept of investment into person-to-person relationships with people in their own nations and in nations around the world, facilitating economic growth while helping people who become part of their own social fabric. This is an old concept that has been swept aside in many economies - and one which can be brought back to life via social media's ability for us to see how our small investments enable real, everyday people to succeed.

Content Nation Success Rule #5: Social media helps people to invest in the human fabric that makes economies and societies work.

Rethinking How Companies Work: How Collaboration Tools Can Change Basic Work Patterns

You would think that an advertising agency would be by its nature a highly collaborative enterprise, with people devising creative strategies for their clients' problems. That may happen in a lot of ad agencies, but it doesn't happen by accident - and it doesn't always happen when you don't have the right approach to publishing in place. Unit 7, a relatively small advertising and market strategy agency in New York City, was having problems with its productivity. "The creative side was invisible here," noted Joe Gupani, the firm's creative director, in a recent case study by Cisco Systems Inc. Unit 7 engaged the services of Marsha Shenk, a business anthropologist, who pointed out to Unit 7 that their sales and marketing staff was separated from their creative staff, who were separated oftentimes from discussions with clients. Ideas from both clients and staff that could have flowed into one another were being lost.

Today Unit 7 ensures that members of the creative staff are a part of client meetings and uses technologies from Cisco that enable team members to collaborate using social media publishing tools. Innovative ideas that come form junior staff members get the same kind of exposure as ideas from senior staff through social media's peer-oriented publishing environment, which in turn combine with input from clients and suppliers in the collaborative publishing environment to keep everyone on the same page in the same framework. Unit 7 productivity and sales have improved dramatically as a result of including social media technologies, but more importantly social media has helped to form a foundation for ensuring an ongoing cultural shift in their organization. So even in relatively small organizations social media can help to power more effective communications.

Hierarchies serve a purpose, but in general managing communications amongst people serving and served by hierarchical organization leads inevitably to filtered communications, miscommunications and lost communications when information bounces up and down chains of command within an organization. Yet in spite of this many organizations spend billions of dollars every year trying to improve comunications in their organization without adopting the fundamental concept of allowing people to publish information to their entire organization as peers. Social media will not eliminate hierarchies but its ability to build value in working relationships independent of hierarchies will reward organizations that are able to reduce their reliance on hierarchically controlled publishing with greater productivity and better client relationships.

Content Nation Success Rule #6: Reducing the control of hierarchies over publishing through social media allows problems and solutions to be identified more quickly and effectively.

Ford Models: Turning Any Brand into a Conversational Brand through Social Media

Ford Models is one of the world's top agencies providing fashion models and professional services for advertisers and clothes designers from offices in major cities around the world. While a powerhouse in its own right, the decline of print as a medium for attracting younger audiences has posed a problem as to how Ford would manage its future. Major brands use their models and services to support their own marketing, but how would Ford establish the value of its models in an online environment when millions of fresh faces are available for people to look at every day?

Part of Ford Model's response to the challenge of online content is to build their own media brand through social media services. Equipping their models and staff with video cameras, Ford posts content online that carries the Ford brand and which enables the models to chat informally about clothing brands and other key products in an informal, conversational style similar to videos uploaded to the Web by everyday people. This allows them to use Ford Models as a brand that can help to endorse the brands that are featured in their videos - in effect creating their own channel focused on fashion and glamour that does not rely on others to leverage the value of their brand directly with audiences. On the YouTube video service the Ford Models channel is one of the top 100 most subscribed-to video channel and regularly ranks in the top twenty of YouTube branded channels visited every day, with comments from YouTube's audience providing valuable feedback. 

It helps to have a service that lends itself to video presentation easily, but the Ford Models experience is an important reminder than any brand could be a very effective media brand if it provides content regularly through social media that engages its target audience effectively. While product placements or direct endorsements in social media can help to strengthen the awareness of a brand it's the ability to present people in their natural surroundings doing what they do naturally that creates the strongest brand appeal for enterprises trying to build relationships with a markeplace through social media. As much as the Ford Models brand has been about glamour marketed to professionals, it is now becoming successful as a brand that knows how to market itself directly through the informal, conversational appeal of its talent to everyday people. If anyone can become glamourous online, then it may as well be you.

David Meerman Scott: Thought Leadership as a Personal Brand

While major companies such as Ford Model have been able to build brands with personal appeal through social media, individuals have created their own very effective personal brands through careful management of their publishing through social media. David Meerman Scott was a well-respected professional in online publishing and public relations several years ago, but he wanted to create a market niche for his speaking and consulting services that would stand out from others. The key to David's success turned out to be a multi-layered social media strategy that catapaulted his career into a global profile. His WebInkNow weblog allowed him to write about his take on key insights into best practices for online marketing in a breezy, easy-to-read style that attracted subscribers to his newsletter compiled from weblog entries.

These channels for conversational content proved to be a great launching point for offering free eBooks written by David that focused on his key professional focus. Bolstered by these successes David was able to start landing book deals, speaking engagements at major conferences and seminars focused on his key topics - all promoted in his weblog and through other social media available on his blog. Today David Meerman Scott's books have skyrocketed into international business bestsellers and he speaks around the world to business gatherings and conferences - having turned a good career into a highly succcessful career through learning how to turn his personal brand into a high-performance brand through social media. With social media any professional or even someone very enthusiastic about their avocation can focus on the right tools to build their insights into influential content that can build profitable relationships.

Twittering Mars: NASA Learns How to Turn an Interplanetary Science Project Into a Conversational Brand

The U.S. National Aeronautical and Space Administration has launched several major unmanned probes to study planets in our solar system, many of which have had their moments of media glory as they have sent back compelling photos and scientific data. But after a few fleeting moments of fame most of these scientific experiments disappeared from the media spotlight - a problem for a government agency trying to keep up its funding during times of intense political pressures to hold down its budget. An important effort in brand-building through social media used an unlkely channel to promote an unlikely candidate for success through social media.

NASA's Mars Phoenix probe landed near the polar regions of the planet Mars in May 2008, a huge success in itself but one that exposed a new problem - how to generate excitement and awareness about the mission for a probe that was stationary and could relay little of new visual interest once it had landed. Mars Phoenix' primary mission is to scoop up samples of soil and ice and to analyze its composition using equipment inside the probe. This wasn't the kind of mission where the machine itself could generate much appeal. The unlikely solution to this awareness problem came through NASA's use of the Twitter messaging service. Twitter is able to broadcast out short text messages and Web page links to people who choose to follow them using PCs, mobile phones and other Web-enabled devices.

NASA team members set up a Twitter account for Mars Phoenix and began to send out short conversational text messages telling people what they were doing and seeing with the probe at the moment. Instead of formal press releases distributing information about a stationary device millions of miles away Mars Phoenix had a voice and a community of personalities pumping out regular conversational updates that helped their science to get in the flow of the conversations of influencers following Twitter messages. In just a few short weeks more than 32,000 people were following the moment-by-moment exploits of the Mars Phoenix probe and its team members. Sometimes you can have scientific measurements which tell you that you're a successful mission, but with social media even a lifeless machine can build a successful brand with a chatty personality.

In ice-age society there was no such thing as brands as we know them today. Brands were more equivalent to clan members whose reputation became widely known over time by story-telling and word-of-mouth influence. With the rise of centralized publishing, though, major institutions were able to project their power to the masses through their own branded content - pictograms, flags, family coat of arms and eventually corporate brands projected the power of institutions broadly. Social media is helping to return brand-building back to its roots by enabling anyone to build their own highly scalable reputation rapidly. Whoever scales their reputation to their audience most effectively through conversational marketing will become the most powerful brand in social media.

Content Nation Success Rule #7: In social media anything and anyone that people relate to strongly can become its own brand.

Expresson for Everyone: Keitai Novels Use Mobile Phones to Create Popular Literature

Reading on mobile devices has been extremely popular in Japan for some time, but a newer phenomenon is people creating literature on their mobile phones that have become amazingly popular. Everyday people are creating keitaishosetsu, or mobile-phone novels, oftentimes on their way to work or wherever it suits them. They post their content on Web sites where people can read  the evolving books online, but they are also becoming extremely popular in print form as well. It estimated that currently about half of Japan's in-print fiction books are originating as mobile phone novels, with the most popular titles selling hundreds of thousands of copies. Half of the top ten Japanese fiction titles in print in 2007 originated as keitai novels.

The people writing these novels are no literary masters: one of the most popular "thumb novels" was written by a nursery school teacher from Kokura, a community far away from Tokyo's bustling national media scene. But people find these novels to be compelling anyway, perhaps because they are the unfiltered storytelling of people like themselves. Thinking of our ice-age ancestors, stories told around campfires did not pass through formal editors and distributors before making the rounds from one clan to another. Everyone contributed their own little piece to the story-telling circle, with popular tales being told again and again and embellished over time as they were passed along. Social media is enabling the ancient art of popular story-telling to be returned to everyday people - people who can now invite and entire nation or the whole world into their story-telling circle. With social media, our natural ability to succeed as communicators is regaining its central focus in human culture.

Content Nation Success Rule #8: In social media anyone who knows how to influence their peers can succeed on any scale.

Challenges to Success: Where Social Media Creates New Exposures

Social media is empowering everyday people as well as the powerful to succeed as never before in human history, but that doesn't mean that it's a style of communication that's always well-liked or well-understood by people encountering its power. To many people social media is a threat to established forms of communication, empowering groups of people who create more competition for their own messages. To others the novelty of being a publisher is something that creates challenges as to how to live in a world where people are constantly in the public eye through social media. Part of the success story of social media, then, is learning how to feel comfortable as a person who lives a relatively public life as a publisher.

Some people respond to the challenge of being a public publisher by adopting online identities and personalities that are very different from their real-world personalities, using pseudonyms and online graphics to project an artificial representation of themselves - an avatar - the way that some people might assume a role in a play or a movie. Many people create these hidden online identities for fun, while some such as journalists assume a pseudonym to protect their sources of factual materials. There are some people, though who assume false identities for malicious purposes, either to satisfy their personal motivations or because they're paid by someone seeking to create a positive or a negative sentiment that's supposed to appear as if it came from a genuine person. People using false identities in social media to spread malicious content are called "trolls" sometimes, reminding us that like the nasty mythic trolls of fairy tales sometimes people consider socially negative goals as their version of success. Social media does not make us perfect humans: it is only a tool to express whatever is human in us.

Fantasy and hidden identities can play important roles in online publishing, but for the most part they are balanced against the more powerful opportunity to experience success as a publisher who promotes their own personal interests and their own brand value as a person who knows how to represent themselves to others as a trusted person. Deception is not a great way to build one's ability to be a trusted person who can influence others. Deception can get people to react to our fears and our unspooken desires, but deception as a tool for influencing people is far less powerful in a society in which anyone can state the truth to the world easily. Social  media gives people the power to enable anyone to tell everyone what things are really like in an infleuntial way that allows others to value them for the truth that they provide. In the face of such global honesty, deception and negative techniques used to influence people has limited value at best.

Lonelygirl15: Acting Can be Powerful but it's Stll Just Acting

In June of 2006 a stream of webcam-recorded videos featuring a person who identified herself with the YouTube account name lonelygirl15 made their debut on the Web. The videos featured a young woman calling herself Bree sitting on the edge of her bed and other informal settings talking about her life and her relationships as a sixteen-year-old girl and about increasingly bizarre twists in her life. The videos became popular very quickly, generating over 100 million views of her stories in the two years that lonelygirl15 was talking to the world through a webcam.

There was just one little problem with lonelygirl15: she wasn't real. In September 2006 it was revealed that Bree was a fictitious character played by Jessica Rose, a then-nineteen year-old actress who had agreed to play the part of Bree for a couple of aspiring video producers. The revealing of the hoax by lonelygirl15's producers was prompted in large part by YouTube member comments which pointed out odd inconsistencies in the videos that made it doubtful that they were an everyday person's own tales. The lonelygirl15 series of videos continued to be highly popular nevertheless for about two years before production ceased. The producers of lonelygirl15 and Jessica Rose have moved on to produce other online video stories revolving around the fictional world created for the lonelygirl15 series, creating new dramas that are in part like personal storytelling and part traditional media storytelling.

It's easy to forget that publishing original fictional stories is a relatively new concept: Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, a story about a castway on a desert island that is recognized widely as the first novel written in English, was not published until 1719. Folk tales, poetry and other original works of fiction were created largely by everyday people before that time, most of them long forgotten and only a handful surviving through publishing and folk traditions. Storytelling is a natural human trait that publishing enabled to be carried into fictional settings of all kinds. In some ways lonelygirl15 has become the Robinson Crusoe of social media, surprising people with a new kind of storytelling adapted to a powerful new medium.

Yet in some ways the lonelygirl15 pheonomenon was a failure as much it was a success. People were identifying with Bree as a real person: once it was clear that she was not a real person her power to lend personal influence and endorsement to others withered away, a deception not unlike Orson Wells' famous radio play The War of the Worlds that capured people's imagination in a then-new medium on a Halloween evening in 1938. Many people tuning in the radio broadcast of the play thought that the world was really being attacked by creatures from the planet Mars. But people saw this as something frighteningly real for only a moment and then sank back into accepting the play as entertainment typical for those times.

Jessica Rose remains a relatively obscure actress, in many ways locked in to her lonelygirl15 fame as much as many other character actors and actresses who become too strongly identified with their roles in highly popular television shows. The lonelygirl15 phenomenon should remind us that although fictional worlds can be attractive as a means of escaping our everyday lives for short time trying to deceive people as to what is real and what is not real is not a very strong strategy for constructive success in social media.

Content Nation Success Rule #9: Honesty about your intentions and motives is essential to building a successful reputation in social media.

Life in the Fish Bowl: Learning How to Be Public in the Social Media Era

Being real and honest is of great benefit in social media, but being real and honest in social media is not always without real consqequences. Many people who are honest about their personal thoughts and tastes through their personal publishing discover only later that there is an entire world that is able to see what someone is doing online through social media. An interesting example of this happened recently when it was reported that a young intern at a major bank in North America told his boss in an email that he would be absent from work one day due to a "family emergency."

His Facebook-savvy boss, though, discovered a freshly posted picture of his intern at a costume party that was held that day - and emailed a copy of the photo to everyone in his office. This email in turn made the rounds on the Web to other people and eventually made its way to prominent weblogs, making the intern's public publishing all the more a public event. It's also fairly common now for people who are applying for jobs to discover that prospective employers may not take kindly to some of the materials that they have posted on social media Web sites. For a generation of young people used to being very open and honest about their personal lives through social media their oftentimes blended personal and work lives are requiring them to think about how to have both social and professional success as an adult in a world that is very aware of them through social media.

As much as employers are watching social media to understand their employees more clearly they are also discovering that their own companies and executives are in the social media spotlight as well. Websites such as Glassdoor.com enable people to share anonymously what it's like to work inside their organization and what their senior managers are like.

These employee reviews of company cuture are quite unflattering sometimes but even when they are their honesty can surface some constructive suggestions. An analyst at a major consulting firm notes of their company on Glassdoor.com: "Stop looking for big projects, which are stretching company resources past breaking point...But [most] importantly, start listening to your employees. Ever since you went public, you stopped listening." So even if an enterprise thinks that their image as a successful company can be projected in a particular way social media has the power to let people know whether people think that they're really successful as an organization. The anonymity of such a service always carries with it the dangers of malicious intent but overall itallows people to treat people to tell the truth about their work lives to their peers without fear of reprisals.

The openness of social media is a challenge to organizations from around the world to manage their affairs with the knowledge that anyone could speak the truth to the world about what they are really doing and who is involved in doing it. Many Web sites have sprung up in recent years to facliitate the leaking of sensitive documents and information from governments, companies and other organizations whose private operations are unknown to the public.

Wikileaks.org is a social media service has become one of the world's most notable sources for anonymously sourced leaks of facts and documents. Anonymous sources are used widely in major news organizations to reveal sensitive facts, but with Wikileaks information is made available that commercially supported news outlets might be hesitant to share with the world. This approach to openness amongst peers can be threatening to many organizations - including those with the power to fight back. In 2008 a whistleblower leaked documents to Wikileaks.org from the Julius Baer Bank & Trust Co., a Cayman Islands division of Swiss-owned Bank Julius Baer AG, that revealed alleged improprieties in the bank's operations and management. Bank Julius Baer retaliated by getting a U.S. court to compel the company providing the technology for the Wikileaks.org  Web site to shut it down. The court's order was rescinded shortly thereafter, but in the meantime other Web sites that provide leaked documents were willing to make the controversial documents available on the Web. Although some governments are willing to block access to controversial content in general the worldwide publishing capabilities provided by social media makes it hard for facts to be suppressed if there's a willingness to reveal them.

Content Nation Success Rule #10: In a world where anyone can publish anything to everyone those who succeed by being open with others will prevail.

Towards an Open Source Civilization: The Future of Content Nation

Does the rise of social media mean that we are losing our privacy forever? Probably not. People who want to keep confidences will always find ways to do so. But social media changes the value of privacy in a world which is tending to reward people who are learning how to succeed by being themselves in a more public world. Highly centralized publishing tends to reward those who can filter and control the truth to make their version of the truth the one that is most advantageous to themselves. In a sense centralized publishing tends to create an artificial scarcity of the truth, just as centralized distribution of goods tends to lead to artificial scarcity of these materials. When the power to survive and thrive tends to come from openness rather than privacy, though, people tend to focus more on solving the problems of real scarcity rather than focusing on exploiting artificial scarcity.

The shift towards social interactions based on openness that is being facilitated by social media will be crucial to the future success of humankind as we begin to shift from an era of human-engineered excesses to an era in which our ability to respond to natural scarcity arising from rapdily changing conditions will become the leading factor in our ability to survive and thrive. We will have to be willing to rethink our concept of what is the most productive way forward as a society. The more people who own a part of a solution to a key challenge to human survival, the more people will be available to help us to find the next solution to the next problem. The potential "gene pool" of tools built through human intellect will be broadened to ensure that we have the widest range of options in choosing our path to survival and prosperity. When our clan built through social media includes potentially anyone in the world, the world as a whole will tend to win.

Social media facilitates this kind of global problem-solving the way that open source software helps to create more value for more people more rapidly in many instances than proprietary software. With open source software, a computer program such as an operating system that runs a computer's core functions is developed on a voluntary basis by people who want the software to be as good as possible for both their own purposes and for the purpose of contributing to the success of others. People are usually free to use and to modify open source software for their own purposes as long as the authors of the original software are acknowledged and as long as any copies of the modified software that are distributed to others are also made available for their use and modification without a fee.

You would think that open source software would lead to commercial failures, but in fact open source software has been the backbone of many large-scale successes. It's estimated that more than 70 percent of the computers in the world running Web sites are using open source software to operate the core functions of those computers. This has freed up an enormous amount of capital for investment in other functions that have added a tremendous amount of value to the electronic publishing process. Instead of people investing in the mass production of similar things, open source software has encouraged people to invest in the mass production of unique things. This enables people to spend their most valuable resources on diverse and autonomous solutions built around a common core of mass-scale solutions that are available to everyone.

If publishing defines the genes that form a society, then the openness enabled by social media is enabling humankind to move towards a major mutation in society's genes. Social media is leading us towards an open source society, one in which our ability to collaborate openly as individuals on our most fundamental needs for survival will allow us to focus on a diverse array of unique solutions that will help us to thrive. Our path to success will be through combining our commonness as humans with our widespread uniqueness through social media. Social media will allow us to work both as an open and highly integrated society through commonly available social media publishing technologies and standards and as a highly diverse and overlapping set of societies that leverage those social media tools to create more specialized value globally and locally. We will still gain from supporting the mass value of the crown of the "Big Sombrero" economy but most of our personal and financial successes will be found under the edges of that sombrero, supporting unique value on a smaller scale that adds up massively. We will become a true Content Nation, ready to act as one global people for our common success and also ready to act as just everyday people influencing other everyday people for our highly scalable personal successes.

The Joy of Publishing is the Joy of Being Human

The beauty of society moving towards the model of Content Nation is that it encourages everyday people to experience success by just being themselves. We don't need to be massively similar in our thoughts and actions to succeed massively, nor do we need to be extraordinary people: we can be relatively ordinary and enjoy how our shared uniqueness can create new common value globally or locally. We will reap the rewards available through mass production but avoid surrendering our most valuable human traits to its processes. We will participate in society as an organism that responds to our collective leadership and insight and that also allows us to express our individual humanness in unique and valuable ways. We will unite to chase the mammoths of the day's great challenges, celebrate our success, and then go back to whatever pattern of life suits us best. We will be one when we need to be one, many when we need to be many, all at a moment's notice.

The success of video producer Matt Harding is perhaps one of the best illustrations of the joy that comes from this model of Content Nation. His unique, lighthearted videos have been seen by tens of millions of people worldwide. Who is Matt Harding? No one. Anyone. And, through his videos, someone who is anywhere and everywhere, with anyone and everyone, doing nothing of great importance that requires no great skill - just for the joy of doing it. Matt just does the same goofy little dance again and again in front of his video camera, pumping his arms up and down and trotting in place, like a little boy trying to get someone's attention as best as he knows how to.

Matt dances alone. Matt dances with others. Matt dances in Mumbai, India. Matt dances in Bhutan. Matt dances in Ireland. Zanzibar. Kuwait. Mexico. Iceland. Matt dances with crowds of people in Spain, France, Madagascar, Argentina and Australia. Matt dances with headhunters in Papua, New Guinea. Matt dances with schoolchildren in Mali, Yemen, Zambia and Fiji. Matt dances with a border guard at the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea. Matt dances in Japan, Texas and Florida. And almost everywhere that Matt goes the world dances along with him in the same simple, silly way.

And why not? It's fun. It's easy. It comes naturally. It's harmless. It makes you laugh. It makes you human. It makes you part of all of humanity without giving up your unique humanness.

It's publishing - the thing that makes us who we are as a human society united by our citizenship in Content Nation. With social media at our universal command, the joy of publishing has returned us at last to the joy of surviving and thriving just by being our most true and human selves. Our success as publishers through social media has become the success of humanity itself, ready to begin a new epoch of our evolving history.