Commanding Heights

[The name of this post was inspired by the Commanding Heights documentary.]

Four years ago we launched the Multitude Project with the aim of understanding the effects of the new digital technology on our socio-economic institutions. We convinced ourselves that humanity was fast approaching a transition point, and that a new social order was about to emerge. But, unfortunately, we now realize that the future doesn’t look as unidirectional as we would like it to be.

Three possible worlds

One possibility, the one we would like to see materializing, is another step of emancipation of the multitude. It is a world in which individuals have greater control over what they want to become, over the value they produce, in all dimensions of value and, as a matter of fact, a world in which individuals have greater control over their own lives. It is a continuation of an undeniable historical trend of emancipation, as the multitude became more cohesive with the advance of communication and coordination technologies. We have finally reached the era of real-time peer-to-peer coordination, with practically no spatial barriers. The multitude is now more coherent than ever. It is able to generate very powerful large-scale effects, surpassing the containing forces of any social system previously designed to constrain it. The will of the people can now be expressed in massive global waves. The #occupy movement is one recent example of such manifestations.

The use of social media as a tool for marketing

A few months ago we warned corporations to be very careful in using social media as their new playground for marketing. They don't control this medium! They don't control the narrative anymore! It was easy for them to make you believe almost anything they wanted in a society provided only with one-to-many communications, controlled by them. Many-to-many communications are changing the game. The message doesn't  move directly from them to the consumer. It propagates from person to person, and at every step anyone can play with it. In order to get your message around it must be a powerful meme, it must resonate with people to make them push it further, share it with their peers. If the public perception of a company is bad, the message released by that company WILL get distorted and WILL play against. It's harder now to fool everyone...  If you do things wrong, sooner or later the shit will hit the fan. The certain way to prevent a branding and marketing disaster is to be honest.

Social media will make organizations responsible by making it harder for them to lie and to hide their dirty stuff.

A lesson in AT&T's Facebook approach

More companies are embracing social media these days for marketing purposes. But at the same time, there's always the risk of PR disaster. Kenny Malone reports on one approach companies can take when Facebook turns unfriendly. Read more...

By AllOfUs