ZackBrandit being located in Belgium, is in the center of a cultural crossroad. The country has 3 official languages as well as Germany, UK, the Netherlands, Luxemburg and France as neighbors - each one with its own language, communication and entrepreneurial culture. Belgium developed Netlog, The Netherlands brought Hyves and the others introduced their own set of social networks and other media.

When Brian Solis, a prominent new media thought leader, introduced the Social Media Prism, most of the brands that were included were from US based start-ups. In the meantime new prisms were created for other countries such as Germany, Japan and China while international start-ups were added to the original one.

In February 2010, Brian Solis wrote a blog post about
the state of social media around the world where he uses a study by TrendStream to explain that although Facebook dominates the market in most countries, social media usage can vary from one place to another.

For a complete analysis I invite you to read Brian’s blogpost. What interests ZackBrandit the most is the evolution of the blogosphere. Projections of the research show us that in most western countries we mainly use social media to upload pictures and manage a social network profile. Only 10% of people who have internet access (average of 50% of the population) write their own blog. On the other hand, if we go to Asia or Latin America we notice that blogging has a predominant position; often much higher than social networking; yet, rates of internet access remains proportionally much lower (except for South Korea and Japan).

Most social media technologies originated in western countries; which also means they mature faster in western societies. Whereas Asian and Latin cultures, where life isn’t as fast-paced, show that online communication is also evolving at a slower speed.

At first glance this may not sound alarming, but we may expect a further decline of blogging in western countries and probably also in the rest of the world on the long run.

Larger and more influential social networks will start looking to expand beyond their virtual borders. It has already started with Facebook Connect, but with time we may anticipate much more interaction between the different existing platforms.

This also means that companies with a business model revolving around social shopping, affiliation and online marketing will start to see local and international shifts in their communication strategies. Thus, can we start talking about glocal online communication?

How does this influence ZackBrandit’s model?

Though we originally developed the Zilhouette and our affiliation model for bloggers, we value being active on different platforms. This of course demands a lot of energy; priorities must be established. When we decided to create ZackBrandit about 5 years ago, we expected to see Europe follow the US lead in social media. With time we realized that cultural and perceptional differences were telling us otherwise. This complexifies ZackBrandit’s model and its goal to push conversation forward.

So, where are we going to? What direction will social media take?
We can only guess, but we expect to see standards and interconnections popping-up.
Language remains a strong barrier; however automatic translation is also improving.
Server costs can be very expensive and partnerships to reduce them are also viable.
3D, virtual and augmented reality will become even more immersive. Today we connect to the internet; tomorrow the internet will connect with us.
Indeed, social media is still in its infancy…

This post aims to be thought-provoking, yet I hope you won’t skip it.

While Twitter works as a messaging tool with limited local aggregation (though some call it a social network…), Friendfeed is a pure aggregator linking different platforms. Both offer a direct or indirect way to respond and provide comments to others, which helps develop a conversation-like appearance.  

However, can we really call it a conversation?

Does it sound revolting to your ears?
Please don’t refrain from leaving a comment…after reading the rest of the post.

Darren Rowse from ProBlogger and Sonny Gill shared some thoughts on the subject in the following two posts:
1. Do you Converse or Broadcast? & 2. When is Broadcasting OK on Twitter?

While both talked about the importance of conversation, they also show that the basis of Twitter is broadcasting (call it irony) and that new users will intuitively use it for self-branding. According to Sonny “Twitter is often mistaken as a broadcasting platform for people to spit out anything and everything. In the end, adhering to the Twitter culture and being respectful of the tips listed above will influence your experience…”

Aha! So there is more to Twitter than just a piece of software! The users have made it evolve from a broadcasting tool to a conversational platform by incorporating guidelines or a culture. At the end of the day, a tool is a means and not an end, and its value lies in the way it is used and not necessarily its original purpose. Text messaging on mobile phones has already proven this in the past. Some countries have serious education issues due to text messaging since teenagers have adapted their writing to the limited writing space for text messages, and ignore correct grammar. So why not call it a cultural evolution?

Whether we are talking about blogs or micro-blogs, both share one common value: content. There are millions of bloggers around the world and many have started using micro features to obtain speed, visibility and simplicity. Most users share information about their life, business, ideas and recent discoveries that they’ve made. People connect to others based on quality of the content, updating speed, but also for the prominence of the communicator. This is human and even Lemurian (don’t forget I’m a Lemur); we all act the same way. While many use the latter reason in order to develop their own personal network and obtain visibility, all this actually shows one important trend:

By placing information at the centre, the Internet has trivialized people. Think about it: only a minority puts the source in their tweets, except if published by a paper, and social network members often place the relationship before the actual person. If information were the main concern, wouldn’t it imply that the most important fact would be to know where to find the most suitable or original fact and not the most convenient one? In this case, popularity does not guarantee the best result, even if the size of the network helps. Since many tweet about online discoveries, they may add a link to the place where they found it, which in turn can be the result of aggregation or word-of-mouth. In other words, authors can be happy to see their news-piece propagating, but their name might get lost in the process. Great minds are less than often capable communicators.

The world is made up of a few mavens and many connectors (read Tipping Point for more info) and the virtual world might have become more beneficial to the second category. Today, only a handful of mavens who share their knowledge also have a large direct readership. Most connectors redirect the information while adding some personal insight.

Are these disparaging ways part of our new culture, where popularity overtakes value? Is this the new facet of Pop culture? Was Andrew Keen that far from reality with his book The Cult of the Amateur?

Some say that popular culture and the mass media have a symbiotic relationship, as each depends on the other in an intimate collaboration. Kings of the past used entertainment and bread to raise their popularity rating; which could justify saying that popularity might have been king for ages. Does this mean that by spreading information using addictive means and increasing their readers base, a few popular bloggers (and micro-bloggers) are the kings of the 21st century and the new conveyors of trends & cultures?

If Twitter and the other micro-blogging tools are indeed broadcasting channels, then we can count ourselves lucky that a participative and conversational culture has been developed. But here come the two major differences with all the other facets of pop culture: firstly, we are not talking about something tangible or even sensorial such as music, cooking, or clothes. Instead, the focus is the information about those subjects (did you say “magazine”?). Secondly, most “artists” have managers, agents or counselors; yet, in our case the one conveying the message is also the one managing the flow and the cultural guidelines.

Popularity also brings its share of fans and followers, in turn creating the bandwagon effect. Can we really talk about conversation and equal participation when some prominent bloggers are connected 24h/day?

There are many questions in this post and no answers. We all believe that social media has and will have a huge impact on our society. The fact that companies and some institutionalized people are trying to get a hold on it might bring a shift in power.

Nietzsche considered knowledge as power, but in today’s world isn’t it the game master, the one controlling the rules and the flow who has the power?

In his post about cloud computing, Hutch Carpenter tells us that “it’s not the database software that matters, but the data that it holds, and the services that can be built against that data”. We have seen that the way we communicate depends on the technology used. Whether a text message from a mobile phone forwarded through Twitter or an inmail in a social network, we adapt our own language to the software. With Web2.0 and social media, platforms have been developed to bring people together, have them join tribes that exchange information and share all they want.

Until recently, all these platforms have been functioning as islands, separated from each other. Most have started seeing the potential in converging and integrating those different services. Yet, we are far from the promises of Web3.0, where connectivity between software platforms, language and hardware will provide more relevance to the given content. If information has become central today, it will be king tomorrow.

Our belief is that there is still a long way to go and that we will increasingly work with connected clusters. A cluster can be defined as a group of the same or similar elements gathered or occurring closely together. In physics, the term clusters denotes small, multi-atom particles. Gradual development of collective phenomena, such as the color of a body, its electrical conductivity and its ability to absorb or reflect light, and magnetic phenomena, can only develop through the aggregation of a large number of atoms. In other words, clusters or a collection of clusters could change the physical form of the whole, even transforming gas to liquid or solid state.

The clustering concept in business was made popular by Harvard Business School Professor Michael Porter. Clusters are geographic concentrations of like-minded interconnected companies or institutions that manufacture products or deliver services to a particular field or industry and are willing to work in a complementary manner.

We can simplify this by stating that a cluster is a connected network that elevates all its members to another level. The virtual quality of the internet provides us with tools to conceive such clusters without any geographical constituencies. Let’s use LinkedIn as an example to explain what is possible today and to where we are heading.

LinkedIn has created groups to which people can join for several reasons. One can join for knowledge, another for the network and self-promotion, or even for recruiting purposes. A group therefore contains a heterogeneous mix of members. But such groups have to provide an added-value otherwise people will not join. Interested members can join discussion threads and ask questions, share news items, or reflect about a given topic or share their insight. Although we consider these as conversations, half the time they are a collection of monologues, where each person has provided an opinion but does not necessarily build on others.

Each discussion topic or news subject is a cluster. Both are part of a larger cluster which is the group, and in turn, this group is part of a larger one which is the LinkedIn network. Today, there are no connections or bridges between those clusters, except for members joining several of them. This means that a cluster has a “physical” limit.

By complementing our blog posts with answers from our LinkedIn group questions, we create an external bridge for the information contained. As our blog can be perceived as a nod or as a little cluster of its own, we have provided some interactions between two independent platforms.

Click image to enlarge Companies have started to understand the importance of integration and multiple platform connections. This is why LinkedIn added the applications feature very recently. It is possible now to include blog posts and presentations in the profiles, but even more interesting are the applications that provide collaboration tools. This actually creates new layers and new clusters inside LinkedIn. Yet, even though we have those new applications, there is still no real interaction with the outside world.

An IBM survey from 2006 found that 80 percent of senior managers say that it's imperative to share information with people outside the business, yet fewer than half say they are equipped to do so. Enterprise 2.0 is the step taken by those who understand the importance of clustering and the creation of bridges between those clusters, whether they’re part of a company or represent an external stakeholder, such as a partner, supplier, retailer, customer, etc.

Business collaboration platforms such as Jive’s, feedback platforms such as Feedback2.0 or crowdsourcing such as NameThis or Kluster (clever name), are paving the way forward. The idea of building new clusters and creating new categorization models are the logical step. With cloud computing, semantic web and other Web3.0 features, we might expect to see bridges erected that interrelate those clusters, once again creating new layers of exchange.

How will this all be done?

With insight, a lot of negotiations and coding!

 

There will be different solutions and we hope the one we wish to provide will support this vision.