Social Media for Business, the Clay Shirky perspective

Sometimes, its best to leave the words to someone else to express. Clay Shirky talks about how social media is changing business and discusses some social influence marketing concepts too. Also, don't miss his new book - Here Comes Everybody.

What do businesses need to know: Businesses need to know that the old simplicities of dealing with their customers are disappearing, because customers are now able to coordinate their actions in groups. The old model of engaging with your customers involved two modes -- en masse and personal. Messages were sent out over mass media, in hopes of affecting the behavior of individuals.

Now, thanks to social media, customers are part of active groups, groups that form and dissolve quickly in response to people's interests or needs -- most messages in this media flow within social groups, rather than from businesses to individuals.

Sometimes these groups are creative, as with the group that has created Wikipedia almost literally out of thin air. Sometimes these groups are oppositional, as with the amateur group that has brought the airline industry to heel with new laws regulating their treatment of passengers.

The airlines spent millions trying to prevent that from happening, and they failed, beaten down in less than a year, by a bunch of loosely coordinated amateurs with no budget to speak of. What the amateurs had going for them was that they now have media like weblogs and mobile phones that let them join together and take action quickly and effectively.

There is both opportunity and threat in this environment. The opportunity is getting these groups to amplify your message or help improve your product. The threat is that the group can upend your strategy, or even abandon your offering in favor of self-created material. (It's a bad time to sell encyclopedias.)

What do you think? Is coordinating actions in groups at the heart of the issue for businesses as they think about social media affecting their businesses. Can these groups amplify or improve your product significantly? I believe they can and have talked about it quite a bit (see previous post). But maybe there's more to this than just that. Only time will tell.