What’s actually happening is quite profound. There is a cultural shift happening at the moment that every retailer needs to come to grips with – or risk fading into obscurity.

During the late eighties, through the nineties and into the new millennium, the progression of technologies touted as ‘bringing everyone together’ have actually had the reverse effect. This, partnered with the increasing pace of globalisation, has resulted in a decline in local community sentiment. Many social sub-groups have begun to feel disenfranchised.

By the time social media platforms like MySpace and Facebook entered the scene, there was already a groundswell focussing on our the human desire to feel more socially connected. The technology that underpinned social platforms had already been around for a very long time. Facebook and the like did not create the ‘social’ craze, they essentially capitalised on a social movement that was well under way.

This new connectivity has evolved quickly, driven in the most part by innovation meeting demand. The space is now beginning to mature. Many of the social interactions are somewhat superficial, but this too will evolve.

By contrast, traditional retail has become dominated by chain stores with highly impersonal brand experiences – exactly what people have been moving away from.

Online stores can gather data about users and demonstrate an understanding of them as people. Your name is displayed, your preferences can be stored, and you can connect and communicate with people directly from the online store – people you know, or even people you don’t know but share similar interests with.

The offline retail industry needs to learn how to provide this level of connectivity. There is a need to blend social media and mobile technology into everything the retailer does. The data generated by the customers should be viewed as the most valuable asset retailers have, as the best online brands do. Online sales and offline sales need to be viewed as a single brand experience – because this is how your customers see it.

Social media is not going away. The brands, platforms and tools will change, but the culture of online connectivity and social sharing is here to stay – and is only going to gather momentum. The time to understand social media, and utilise it as a strategic growth tool, is right now. Your customers are looking for a connection with your brand, and it is possible to make that connection more meaningful both online and in-store.

In this new world order, where experience is everything, not changing means the end. The evolution of retail is not about foot traffic – it’s about social traffic.

Online networks, including social ones, evolve and take on a life of their own. In the real world, for multi-celled organisms to exist a number of cells must work together to make something bigger. When individual cellular components work together multi-celled organisms evolve and these can evolve into complex life forms over time. A branch of these complex life-forms have evolved and eventually became humans. Human civilisation has in turn evolved to where we are now because we have mastered the art of continually grouping together into teams, tribes, cities and nation states to create something that is bigger than the sum of its parts.

Networking and collaboration are fundamental to what it means to be human. In our bodies are atoms working together to create cells and cells working together to create our organs. In our brains neurones work together to create our thoughts, feelings and language. In your company people are working together – to create something bigger and more exciting than the sum of it’s parts.

We can take this thinking and look at the development of the personal computer and see a very similar pattern emerging…

Before anyone had a computer or a smart phone, everything was a social event. Meetings were face-to-face, or over the phone at least, and communication in general was human to human based.

In the last 30 years things changed. Initially the personal computer made everything a private and secluded affair. Games, for example, could be played without the help of another human and work could happen sitting in front of a screen. The advent of the early internet showed how powerful many computers networked together could be, but from a personal perspective ‘computing’ was an insular activity.

The first social networks, forums and blogs worked with a huge number of anonymous users. While this was a step forward in person-to-person networking, the anonymity allowed people to behave in ways that they would never dream of in real life. This left many of these networks to be the domain of the very early adopters and special interest groups. The ‘rules’ that govern effective social networks were yet to be developed.

What has happened recently, particularly with Facebook, is that is has become far easier to transport your real identity around the web. This means that increasingly people are joining new social networks with their ‘real identity’: their real name; their place of work; and other details that define them as a person in a movement – sometimes referred to as the ‘Open Web’. Naturally this makes people think more carefully about what they say and how they behave on social networks – because they ‘own’ their comments the common rules of society come into play. When a person’s reputation is attached to what they say it makes them think carefully about what that comment might mean to others.

Of course people can still misbehave in social networks, like they can in real world networks, but the networks are now being governed by majority rule so this behaviour is quickly dealt with. This makes cooperation and collaboration much easier and because of this the barriers to entry are dropping at an astronomical rate. Companies can now start to feel more secure in setting up their own networks knowing that majority of users will join to get value out of the information that is provided and quickly deal with other users who lessen the overall value of that network.

So when thinking about why social media has become so widely adopted and pondering about where it is going avoid getting distracted by in the leaps in technology. These are important, of course, but it is the behaviour of the network and the developments of new social norms that are really driving the progress. Every individual in this massive network is doing what he or she is pre-programmed to do – communicate, collaborate and continue the march of our civilisation’s evolution.

The future of the Social Web will see openness and ownership of communication adopted on a much greater scale as the tools to do so become more wide spread and easier to adopt. The potential economic benefits of social media will force this to happen. Companies can and will want to access to increasingly granular data about their ‘stakeholders’ – employees, supporters and consumers. Knowing what individuals are saying what, how they are behaving and who is influencing them is critical and valuable information.

When Facebook releases it’s new developer tools in April this year there will be an even bigger push towards the Open Web – something that many market analysts are predicting will make the eventual float of Facebook bigger than that of Google’s IPO.

The rules governing online social networks are beginning to mature. Unsurprisingly they closely reflect those that exist in offline world.

Many of you may have heard that markets across the globe are fracturing into ever finer segments. You may have also heard that this is been driven by the rise of social media.

But if people are getting together to discuss specific interests and this is leading to an emergence of ‘new markets’ to emerge then surely these interest groups must must have existed already. It just we didn’t know about them. So in this sense social media doesn’t ‘create’ new markets and market segments. It just identifies them.

The mountain of data that social media produces can now shine a light on who these people are, and what they like. And voila – we have new identifiable and serviceable markets.

Want to grow in this brave new world? Then learn to collect and read the data and then use the tools to communicate with them as they progress down the path towards making a purchasing decision.

All the tools are there and the people are waiting.

One of the developments to emerge from of the recent financial crisis is the birth of a new breed of SME. They are niche companies born out of a need to fill a void in an increasingly small global market. They work in a market of ever finer market segments that mass marketing and generic products can’t cater to.

Affordable ecommerce solutions, coupled with cheap outsourced manufacturing or product sourcing, are connecting with market segments identified through social media and providing them the products and services that suit them. Social media is allowing consumers to congregate and be heard in a way that is revolutionary.

Australia is in a unique position to be launching pad for many of these ‘new SMEs’. It has come through the GFC better than any other developed country. That means as markets are still growing, funding is readily available and the Federal Government spending on the new broadband infrastructure will only make it easier for these new business to get off the ground. The cost of setting up and operating a business drops dramatically with online software services that provide accounting, project management, and a myriad of other management and business tools.

This is not something to be feared. These new businesses are not ‘stealing’ market share. They are creating new market opportunities. And they need help ‚Äì maybe from you.

There is a fundamental change coming to our economy and it’s going to be driven by the little guy – and everyone will want a piece of the action.

Published on Marketing Magazine Blog http://www.marketingmag.com.au/blogs/view/the-new-sme-1946

Thanks to TED for providing brilliant speakers to us all, again.

“Social media hit a tipping point in 2009 as sites like Facebook and YouTube increased their presence in mainstream media while sites like Twitter and Digg emerged. On top of the obvious, thousands of new and legitimate social media websites hit the scene with hopes of being the “next big thing”.

While most credit and attention are being given to Facebook for unofficially winning the social networking battle with MySpace, Bebo, and others, Twitter and Digg were the real winners in 2009 for very different reasons.”

Click here to read it all

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