Social business design and management

There’s a significant difference between metadata, messages, stories and conversations that impacts on how we take ourselves to market and organize when being social.

Attention spans are being strung out these days by the mass of information available on the web, leading to the rising value of metadata as a currency of information.

RSS feeds, web trends, information visualization, analysis tools, the output of most social monitoring platforms, they’re all sense-making mechanisms that reflect a growing dependency that we have on metadata.

As connection, co-creation and learning iteratively through social networks are happening increasingly at scale, metadata is an aggregator and, as many a frustrated advertiser might testify, as the mash-up that everyone makes it’s drowning out many a marketer’s individual message. Which is partly why advertising spends are going down and social media spends are going up.

And a migration to metadata has another knock-on effect, namely the need to distil large volumes of insight into a good story. Storytelling and the telling of an ongoing narrative’s becoming crucial to powerful communication when the plain truth is simple messages are hard to hear and stories are by comparison more captivating.

At The Story event in London last week, about 400 people each took a day out of their lives (that’s more than a year of life in one room) and gathered together in London to hear and think about stories. Stories being told had their day as an antidote to information overload and overcomplication. It was a day that went refreshingly back to basics, a day of reminiscing, stirring deep seated memories of communities and cosy camp fires.

The Story was a great success and the level of interest in it was perhaps an indication of how we have deep and unmet needs, as Matt Locke who organized it put it, to connect with the ‘visceral emotions that good storytelling can create’.

How well any one or any organization tells a story reflects the kind of valuable experiences they can engender. It reflects the degree to which anyone might want to get involved with it, and stay involved.

Yet the key to a good story goes well beyond having a good storyline. Subtexts support storylines and give them breadth, depth, relevance and intrigue, the subtexts make the story one that’s fascinating, one that lingers in the mind.

The onward march of metadata means reading between the lines can get easily obscured. We seek dominant narratives that can crowd out important insight and subtexts. This rich granularity, this silt within the storyline is where you’ll find the staying power that insiders and true advocates know of, the value that well goes beyond the initial hit-and-run headline.

The interesting correlation is that business models are increasingly becoming dependent on working the fringes of their stage to generate value too.

Communicators have a duty of care to seek out equivalent truths in order to fully support them, the type of communication that goes well beyond easily broadcastable tweets and obviously packaged facebook pages.

Alongside the clarity of a storyline is the part that includes involvement from others, the part that makes messages and stories into fascinating dialogue and compelling conversations.

This part involves an understanding of who’s telling a story and how it unfolds, and understanding the nature of one’s social storytelling voice. That social voice is a significant identifiable aspect of a brand’s identity, something that many organizations are only just beginning to appreciate they might need to determine and develop.

Because somewhere, in amongst all the information, the goal for how sustainable businesses take themselves to market and organize involves initiating conversations that are multi-dimensional now.

Conversations that can draw out the nuances beyond the dominant narrative and become valuable learning experiences, each different, all connected by a common thread are part of what Robert Scoble, in a brilliant piece that’s music to our ears here, has called ‘the coming age of molecular information’.

Atomistic messages are ineffective when planned to stand alone in a worldwide web; advertising is being replaced by networks of active and passive recommendations, by the semiotics of the web (which doesn’t have a commercial break) and by affinity, relevance and trust. These are the attributes that story-telling can bind together that go well beyond the ‘drive the message’ mindset of old style marketing, or trying to sense out a singular message out of metadata.

Scoble’s identified that technically we’ve still got a long way to go when it comes to curating and parsing large volumes of related information well, whether it’s metadata, messages, stories or conversations.

In the meantime however, everyone on the web has an opportunity to look at their inbound and outbound communications, and ask themselves how the metadata, messages, stories and conversations they’re involved in are weaving together. That common purpose is the kernel of a terrific story, and a whole raft of meaningful relationships, that are waiting to happen.
What’s clear is simplistic ways of information digestion, whatever the label, can only take us so far.

All our communications skills of the past millennia suggest that it’s the visceral experiences that matter and that mean we internalise the message, and those experiences come from how the information impacts against us, in what context, how, and who with.

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