How Social Computing is Changing the World

This week's highlighted research:

Forrester Research. "Social computing."

EMarketer. "College students online: Social networks and the Net generation."

Outsell. "FutureFacts: 2006 and beyond."

The last time I worked in an office, "social computing" was when I took my floppy disk of data and walked across the hall to another department, and my co-workers and I would then go to the pub next door for a long lunch. During lunch, we would sometimes talk about computers and our various technology projects. That was, at the time, the extent of social computing.



In fact, what we know today as "social computing" isn't entirely new, but is rather a different approach to technology we already had. The pervasiveness of computing, and the fact that it has long since left the exclusive domain of academia and business, has turned it into a social creature. A true definition of social computing is hard to pin down, and in fact, it has gone from business to personal life and back to business, as companies are now adopting social computing technology that was originally designed for individual use (such as blogs and instant messaging).



Forrester reports that the easy connections that social computing has given us has made a major impact not only on the social structure that exists outside of the business world, but also on the global economy. Because of the pervasiveness of social computing, Forrester suggests that individuals take information from each other more often, rather from institutional sources like mainstream media outlets and corporations. For a company to survive, Forrester suggests that their marketing initiatives must fundamentally change from a top-down information flow, to one where communities and social computing initiatives are made part of their products and services. It may well be that instead of spending millions of dollars on a Super Bowl ad, a corporation may use those resources better to establish online customer communities, informal blogs that contain useful information related to the company's product line, and other such social resources.

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