Information broadcast with group messaging

Group messaging services allow groups to communicate in real time, through mobile apps or on the web. Multiple parties can interact, receive updates simultaneously, and possibly see the location of others and transmit their own.

Some of the big names in the space are beluga (acquired by Facebook in Nov 2010), convore, textPlus / GOGII ($15 million financing raised in February 2011), and groupme.

Group messaging is like many examples of NewTech - it was initially created to solve a problem, but through use, novel functionality becomes more obvious and new classes of applications are developed. In fact, it is starting to look like group messaging is not about communication, but rather multi-channel information broadcast.

One new class of functionality that is enabled is large-scale operations. Going beyond work groups and activity coordinating with friends, there is no reason that groups could not be arbitrarily large. An obvious recent use case is crisis management. Group messaging could be used for crisis alerts (for example, to issue the 80-second advance warning in the Japanese earthquake), and search and rescue. Another large-scale application is voting, or any kind of opinion-measurement. Presumably, group messaging could be a better version of the current real-time pulse of the web, Twitter. Twitter is operating at scale, recently reporting 36 million tweets during the 2011 Oscars, and more during the Grammys and Superbowl, but could benefit from the additional aggregation, stratification, and interaction functionality of group messaging.

Youth mentoring adults

As Don Tapscott suggests in Grown Up Digital, for perhaps the first time in history, youth knows more about something - social media and other technologies - than adults. So it could be quite valuable for youth to mentor adults, despite the issue that most adults do not perceive a need for this. Adults may start to think that they should hire a social media consultant for business purposes, e.g.; “How should I be using The Twitter for my product?” or “Oh, virtual worlds are for more than gaming? I could actually run my worldwide customer community groups at an in-world sim for about 300% lower cost?” but most adults have not yet appreciated the pervasive personal and professional impact that social media could have on their lives.

Mentoring 2.0
A more experiential concept and format of mentoring than it is traditionally conceived together with the conventional 1:1 conversations could be most effective. Traditionally, it would certainly be informative to hear youth’s views on all manner of personal, community and global concerns, and to learn from the way youth makes decisions; one example is contemporary youth having many more options and a deeper consideration of the trade-offs between options (e.g.; work on my Internet startup or my homework; stay working for a startup or go to college).

Experiential mentoring

The new mentoring’s interaction medium should be experience not dialogue.

For example, the venue could be a café setting with youth and adults and their laptops, mobile and other devices with Wi-Fi and refreshments. Everyone is just hanging out, not formally interacting, not in 1:1 match-ups but in small groups where everyone might feel more comfortable. Adults could see what tech is being used and how, and ask youth about it and try to understand it and install and try the apps on their machines and think about how they would apply it to their personal and professional contexts. The mentoring could be two-way, with both groups benefiting.

Social media and Enterprise 2.0

There is a much deeper application of Web 2.0 technologies and concepts possible in the enterprise than is currently being contemplated and implemented. Some companies have an early effort to use some of the tools but have not noticed that the concepts themselves can be applied to generate significant benefit. Worse, misapplication is also occurring such as the creation of Social Media Officers oblivious to the bottom-up rather than top-down property of social media.

Future of social media
The long-term future of social media is lifelogging - the auto-capture and permissioned auto-posting or archiving of every person’s every thought and experience. Feedhavior’s digital footprints continue to drive individual actions. The corporation goes away. Artificial intelligence becomes the most efficient form of outsourcing. People and organizations spend more time in simulation worlds than physical worlds. Entrepreneurs and organizations provide goods and services by making offerings proactively to groups of potential customers aggregated through their web-based interest communities. Marketing must be relevant to avoid being perceived as advertising.


Applying Web 2.0 Technologies to the Enterprise
There is no part of the firm at present that cannot make use of Web 2.0 and social media technologies. There are two dimensions for application:

External and Internal
Externally, a firm can use Web 2.0 and social media technologies for branding, re-inventing and testing business models, product and service sales, customer relationship management (CRM), partner ecosystem management, R&D outsourcing and recruiting. Internally, firms can use Web 2.0 and social media technologies for communication, collaboration, work assignment, task and project management, resource allocation and performance feedback.

Tools, Concepts and Values
Some examples of the direct application of social media and Web 2.0 tools are using blogs to supplement or replace marketing, APIs to supplement or replace business development, and crowdsourcing ideagoras to supplement or replace R&D. Applying concepts is for example not just using Digg for the firm’s industry news feeds but Digg functionality to bid up and down work assignments or performance feedback. Using Web 2.0 in the enterprise is not using mash-ups but mashing up internal applications, putting a virtual world front-end on any data application to represent the information in a high-resolution way. Internal trainings and meetings are conducted as open space unconferences. Everyone can participate in everything.

The values of social media are also applied internally and externally: authenticity, openness, transparency, participation, creativity, perpetual beta, new linkages, asking the wisdom of crowds (web, twitter), acknowledgement that everyone can have good ideas and contribute and using freemium and open-source business models (free + fee-based).