The Ingenesist Project Community concerns itself with the value of social reach since this will most certainly impact he relevance of those conversing as well as the relevance of the conversation to some business activity. Obviously, innovation is about having the right team in the right place at the right time.
Furthermore, business activities such as marketing and advertising need to make their communications more relevant and less wasteful of their audience’s limited bandwidth – lest they risk being perceived as “anti-social”.
Stated somewhat more clinically; the most worthy knowledge surplus must be matched with the most worthy knowledge deficit in order to produce the most valuable outcome.
Brynn Evans offers the following observation:
The future of search involves social networks, social graphs, or social filtering in some capacity. Companies will live or die by whether they get the “social” part right: creating the right level of intimacy, trust, reliability, social connectedness, and accuracy in their results listings. Of course, this specifically means that their user experience must at least meet or, preferably, exceed that of Google’s.
To achieve this, we must first stop arguing over the different flavors of search.
Real-time search. Social search. Semantic search. These distinctions are essentially meaningless, especially when we can’t even agree on definitions and when each of their boundaries remain undefined. Instead, we should recognize that they’re all part and parcel of personalizing and contextualizing search for individual users. Let’s stop playing the “name game” and start thinking holistically about how each (and all!) affects and improves what we think of today as “search.”
Defies analysis, defies control:
Ms Evans’ excellent analysis continues to identify numerous problems with attempting to classify Social Relevance – each system is merely trumped by new issues related to semantics, context, and proximity. It seems as if the more you try to “control” social media, the more it defies control. The more you try to study it, the more it shows you a mirror of yourself. Introspection is the irony of extroversion.
The great big Sucking Sound
While nobody, including Ms. Evans can tell you how to increase your social relevancy, we can probably all agree on what does not. If your message sucks, your social relevancy will also suck. If you are trying to sell a product that does not actually save people time and increase their net productivity, your product will fail and your social relevancy will suck. If you are in any way trying to match unworthy knowledge surplus with unworthy knowledge deficit, your social relevancy will suck.
Give up Control in order to gain control:
Business intelligence is the science of knowing what sucks and what does not. Let Social media carry your message wherever it wants to carry it. The sooner the market tells you what it wants, the sooner you can adapt your products and services to meet the needs. Things happen fast in social media space and the corporation needs to be faster. This may mean corporations need to give up control in order to gain control of both the threats and opportunities of the future. After all, even by the playbook of Corporate America : survival of the fittest is the only relevant social rank.
(Ed: Brynn Evans is a PhD student in Cognitive Science at UC San Diego who uses digital anthropology to study and better understand social search)
