Stowe Boyd

Social Strategy and Social Architecture

In a recent post, Umair Haque reminds us of McLuhan’s famous insight: “The medium is the message.” And how McLuhan explained that was this: ”The ‘message’ of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.” And then Umair takes flight:

Today, the meaning is the message. The “message” of the Internet’s social revolution is more meaningful work, economics, politics, society, and organization. It promises radically more meaning: to make stuff matter, once again, in human terms, not just financial ones. And that’s never mattered more. Industrial era business was “meaningless” because it was antisocial.

Yes, meaning is the message. I have made the argument in various talks about social business recently that ‘meaning is the new search.’ Our social networks that connect us to the others that are most important to us, these will be the source of what we need to know, replacing the algorithms of Google search, which really is just a way to find what we already know. And yes, business has an antisocial cast to it. It seems to try to stamp out what makes us human, so often, and to reduce what we do to some mechanical version of what we should be doing. Umair goes on:

Most “social media” strategies have one or more of three goals: to “push product,” “build buzz,” or “engage consumers.” None of these lives up to the Internet’s promise of meaning. They’re just slightly cleverer ways to sell more of the same old junk. But the great challenge of the 21st century is making stuff radically better in the first place — stuff that creates what I’ve been calling thicker value. Organizations don’t need “social media” strategies. They need social strategies: strategies that turn antisocial behavior on its head to maximize meaning. The right end of social tools is to help organizations stop being antisocial. In fact, it’s the key to advantage in the 2010s and beyond. […] Using the social to “build buzz” and “push product” is about as smart as using a warp drive to visit your local Wal-Mart. Social tools today are used mostly as a new “channel” to push the same old useless stuff of the industrial era at hapless “consumers.” That’s meaninglessness at it’s finest. It’s the least productive — and most soul-deadening — use of a formidably powerful tool. Social media strategy fits inside a marketing (business, corporate) strategy, and is shaped by it. Social strategy fits outside business and corporate strategies, and shapes them. Social strategies are about rewriting the logic of the industrial era entirely, shifting gears in how we think, envisioning a broader, more powerful, more challenging use of social tools. They are about developing the capacity to understand an organization’s role in society, and how to play a more constructive one, wielding sociality as a source of advantage — by acting radically more meaningfully than rivals. Social strategies are about reinventing tomorrow. Their goal is nothing less than changing the DNA of an organization, ecosystem, or industry. Want to get radical? Stop applying 20th century principles (“product,” “buzz,” “loyalty”) to 21st century media. The fundamental change of scale and pace that social tools introduce into human affairs — their great tectonic shift — is the promise of more meaningful work, stuff, and organization. Start with “the meaning is the message” instead.

The architecture of social business will require this sort of quantum shift in thinking: the active and intentional putting aside of worn-out modes of operation that stunt the growth of companies and the people that make them up. [I confess that I tried to get Umair to speak at the upcoming Social Business Edge in NYC next week, but we couldn’t make the scheduling work. But, next time, I hope.]