How Social Computing is Changing the World

by Dan Blacharski

February 27, 2006 —

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.

A report by eMarketer looks at college students and how they use social computing and social networks. This market alone represents an enormous opportunity for marketers, particularly since university students tend to be a very active online audience. The report notes that social computing is still a work in progress. I'll go a step further to say that social computing will in fact, always be a work in progress. That's its very nature. But although it's hard to put your finger on what it is and how it works, especially in the university environment, marketers still must make the effort to survive the future. Nonetheless, the eMarketer report accurately says there are still some pitfalls, including privacy and safety concerns.

Social computing is also having a big impact on mainstream media, and Outsell's report notes the slow growth of the News and Trade segment, which has been impacted by several new trends, specifically, a shift from subscriptions to ads, from print to online, and the growing expectation on the part of consumers for free content. The greatest competition faced by the media today, according to the report, comes from social publishing trends such as blogs, citizen journalism, and P2P networks.

Information has always been a "top-down" proposition. Outsell says this model has been disrupted for good. However, it's not disappeared completely, nor should it; top-down information flow has advantages: specifically, a solid base of financial support (for doing things like paying full-time journalists), a system of accountability (editors and fact-checkers), and professionalism. If I say something outrageous and untrue in this space, for example, my editor will call me on it and it won't see the light of day. If I say something outrageous and untrue on MySpace, it will stay there forever. But there does exist a less formal system of checks and balances in social spaces, and that's the thousands of readers that now have the technological wherewithal to respond directly to those outrageous statements, and post countering statements of their own.

Outsell makes some interesting predictions for the future, suggesting that direct-to-consumer publishing will become more popular, and authors and content creators will do an end run around traditional publishers. They also suggest that to a degree, social publishing will displace publishers, but at the same time, mainstream publishers will have to change to embrace the social computing model.

ITworld.com