If you are the type of person who likes to think about where things might be going I’d suggest you start watching the evolving competitive battle between Facebook and Google.  Both firms want to know who you are and whom you connect to, e.g. your “social graph”.   To date, Google knows a ton about what you search for, but only Facebook, LinkedIn or another social network knows your social graph.

As most people know, the value of Google is that their software crawls the web and uses its page rank algorithm to generate a giant “influence graph”, and thereby they serve up the most influential sites that match your search query, along with ads.  The social graph starts from a very different place.  It begins with you as a real human being – not just an individual searching for stuff – and because Facebook knows not only who you are, but whom you know, how often you “talk” with them, and what you chat about, Facebook has the potential to start mining this data for many commercially useful things.

In 1984 as a doctoral student my colleagues and I performed an extensive analysis of social graphs within three large organizations and from that experience I know that any firm which has a clear articulation of the social graph of a group can make an informed guess at who is the leader, who has power, who is listened to, and who is isolated.  Back then we performed these social graph analyses on itty-bitty personal computers with simple academic software.  Facebook and Google are building some of the world’s most powerful computer systems for their own use and I’d bet they will be able to easily show:

• What groups form around which subjects and why (something any media company, or politician would want to know);
• Which individuals are the most influential on any product or service decision in social group (something any marketer would desire);
• Whose star is rising and who’s falling (something a placement firm would like to understand).

To date, Google’s efforts in social media have been marginal at best.  Its Buzz service is not even close to Facebook’s popularity, and Orkut the social network they bought is popular in Brazil, but not strong elsewhere.  Yet, Google is undaunted and they recently invested an undisclosed sum (reported to be between $100-200,000,000) in the very popular social game company Zynga.  The Zynga game network, which includes Farmville and Mafia Wars, is visited by over 200,000,000 people a day within Facebook.  By investing in Zynga, Google might have a chance to get at the social graph – because the games show the connections among people.  Zynga is ready to create games outside of Facebook and Google may use Zynga’s games as an end run to get to the social graph.

Even if you are not interested in the competitive battle for the world’s attention, you should be asking yourself is your firm using the social data that is available to you?  For example, if Harvard Business Review wanted to, you could add the LinkedIn widget I have on this site which shows you all the people you already know in LinkedIn who are working at our firm Diamond.  Imagine how you could use that at your firm.  Any time a person “comes” to your web site, and if you encourage your employees to add their names to LinkedIn, the visiting person not only sees your content, but they find out if they already connected to people within your organization.  This social functionality can be very helpful for making useful connections.  This is just one simple application, there are many more possible.

We all know that relationships are vitally important and my question is, how well is your firm to take advantage of this new, social world?

The New England Patriots are installing a 164 x 41.5 foot high definition television for this upcoming season, which is puny compared to the Dallas Cowboy’s two 180 x 72 foot LED screens!  Besides the fact that I’m simply amazed by the technology itself, I think it is yet another signpost that the next digital revolution will be the change of the social space.  Put another way, every location has the potential to be like Times Square.

This means that all merchants will eventually have to think through their digital skin both inside and outside the firm.  As a society, it means that there will be a continuing merger of “television” and spectacle.  It will influence architecture, politics, retailing and sports to an even greater extent than it already has.  My friend Chris Curran points out that you need to think comprehensively about how to improve customer service.  The Cowboys have the interface, but some of their fans need to wait a long time to get into the stadium!

Overall this means that every company will have to think through how it creates and maintains its audience over time, as I wrote about the other day.  All companies will need to think more carefully about their visual imagery because everyone will be accustom to a constant, visceral, image-filled message about all the major brands.  Put another way, we all need a little Walt Disney in us for this coming world.

How well managed is your firm’s visual innovation and the overall customer service?

More From jjsviokla

• Why Amazon Will Innovate Past Kindle and Microsoft’s Bing Will Never Win
• Your Innovation is Hard? Lessons from the Brooklyn Bridge
• The Fifth Wave: Why social media is here to stay

jjsviokla Recommends

• IT Planning is Broken (CIO Dashboard)
• New CIO IT Assessment (CIO Dashboard)
• IT Czar – A New IT Leadership Role? (CIO Dashboard)

eBay recently guided Wall Street to lower numbers.  I’m always amazed that eBay can’t grow faster because they have lots of information on millions and millions of people’s desires.  Moreover, they know not only what is being sold and bought, but also what people are searching for and what they will pay.  More broadly, it seems to me that lots of companies don’t do a very good job of engaging existing, former or new customers in helping to create new types of solutions for their desires.  It seems they don’t hear their customers well enough!

For example, it would be possible for eBay to either buy, or compete with Indie-Go-Go, which is a company that helps people raise money for any type of project or creative act.  If you are building a movie, or want to write a book, or create a new company, you can go and raise the money through Indie-Go-Go.  Why can’t eBay host this pre-production financing.  They are locked into a mindset in which they only “sell” “things”.  If they could shift their thinking to being a market in desire, both for things that already exist and for things that might exist if enough people are ready to pre-buy it.  Also, Indie takes 9% off the top which is a bigger fee than eBay takes on things. This is a very different type of listening to the market.

The famous example, Threadless, the  company that creates custom t-shirts, and only builds to order could have been part of eBay as well if they had a “pre-thing” mindset.  It lets people provide content, and they have a business model that listens to demand by letting people pre-buy the shirts, and thereby lower the risk by having no inventory, and no marketing costs because people have already committed to buying the shirts.

This way of thinking is vital to the new world of search and social media.  Both Google and Facebook, like eBay, know  what people want before they have consummated the sale.  This is very valuable information, and innovative companies like Threadless create innovations in the way that their suppliers and customers interact with them so that they can let the market unlock this nascent demand.

For your firm, or for your career, how well do you listen to your customer’s or possible customer’s interests?  Can you craft a way for them to interact with you as you listen?

More From jjsviokla

• BP's Tragedy Has Lessons for Innovation
• The Fifth Wave: Why social media is here to stay
• Innovations in Use: Is the iPad to computers as transistors were to radios?

jjsviokla Recommends

• The CIO Role: One of Influence or Control? (CIO Dashboard)
• The Problem With IT Benchmarks (CIO Dashboard)
• The Life and Death of IT (CIO Dashboard)

Coke & Pepsi are very active in social media and I think their hard work is helping to build up a “trust bank” with their audience.  As has been widely reported, Pepsi took their Superbowl ad budget and instead of creating a set of iconic commercials they launched their “Refresh Everything” campaign, in which they asked their audience to come up with ideas to “refresh the world”, in the categories of health, the planet, art & culture, food & shelter, neighborhoods and education.  They are giving away over $30,000,000 in tranches of just over a million with individual  grants running from $5,000 to $250,000.  The “fans” submit descriptions which are then posted on the site and voted for by the audience, after which Pepsi awards the money.  The company does retain the control of what gets posted and funded, but it engages their market in an entirely new way.

I believe this is a very, very smart move because in the wild and woolly world of social media where brands can be skewered overnight the only true protection is to have a great relationship with the market and audience at large.  The Refresh Everything Project is a bold experiment and I’m sure there are many skeptics, but I bet it not only pays for itself by being an incredibly efficient way to collect direct relationships with existing and new potential customers, but also helps to build good will toward the company.

Coca Cola also has been working in many different ways to create trust and relationship with their audience with social media.  For example, Coke has the second most popular page on Facebook with over 5,000,000 fans, second only to President Obama.  During this past Super Bowl, Coke partnered with Facebook to inspire fans to send digital gifts to friends and, in return, donated $1 for each gift sent to the Boys & Girls Clubs of America, with which Coke has had a 64-year relationship.  Coke’s Facebook presencewas started by “Dusty and Michael”, an actor and screenwriter from Los Angeles who together had gathered a few hundred thousand fans on their Facebook page dedicated to everything Coke.  Instead of trying to wrest control of the effort from them, Coke smartly decided to join them, and build on the existing audience.  Coke could have given coupons or other monetary consideration, but they felt a donation was a much better way to build relationships in this new medium.  Coke believes that there is a lot more psychic gratification in gift giving than in a simple price-off coupon.

Firms who don’t have a strong trust bank risk being skewered by disgruntled customers.  I’ve written about how Musician Dave Carroll had his favorite Taylor guitar broken by United Airlines while on a flight from Nova Scotia to Nebraska.  His hilarious video about the incident and United’s indifference has been viewed over 8,000,000 times and reported widely around the world.  I believe part of the reason this video was popular is that they have very little in their “trust bank” with their customers.  In contrast, when Kevin Smith, the iconic director of the popular movie Clerks, who has over a million followers on Twitter was refused a seat on a Southwest Airlines flight, there were many people in the social media sphere who came to Southwest’s defense which I believe was due to the large trust bank Southwest has with their customers.

Given the ubiquitous, uncontrollable, and growing power of social media, all firms should be asking themselves:

• How deep is our trust bank?
• How can you improve it?

I’d love to hear what you think what companies can do with gifting and other means to increase their trust bank.

Back in 1993, Jeffrey Rayport and I were trying to understand the implications of the exploding information world. It was about a year before the first browser, Mosaic, was created. Below are our “ten propositions for the virtual age”. I’d love your reaction to our thoughts of that time…

More From jjsviokla

• Why Amazon Will Innovate Past Kindle and Microsoft’s Bing Will Never Win
• Sometimes It’s Just Genius
• iPad: The Remote Control for Everything?

jjsviokla Recommends

• The CIO Guide to Dashboards (CIO Dashboard)
• Does the CIO Control IT Spending? (CIO Dashboard)
• Innovation for the Rest of Us (presentation) (CIO Dashboard)

The Kaiser Foundation recently released a study documenting the astounding fact that 8-18 year olds in the United States have increased their media use from 8hrs 33 mins per day in 2004 to 10hrs 45 mins in 2009, which means that except for when they sleeping or in school they are almost always consuming media. I call them the 10:45 generation. Regardless of whether you think this is bad news signaling the demise of our children, or good news expecting our progeny are on the way to be becoming more literate in rich media world, as a business leaders we all must face this new reality. In particular, this short post will deal with the issue of managing your brand for the 10:45 generation.

I do not need to recount here the facts that the combination of the cell phone, the personal computer, wireless communication and overall miniaturization has lead to an anywhere, anytime, anything world. What is interesting is to ask yourself, when did companies have to begin dealing with this always on consumer — and thereby continuous brand management? I think the modern need for continuous brand management started with 800 numbers, which was the first time that customers could effortless call a company at will. 800′s were invented by AT&T as “automatic collect calling”, and the concept took some time to catch on, but by 1992, 40% of AT&T’s calls were 800 number calls. What did this do to management? Well, the first thing companies needed to learn was how to have a dialog — not just a monologue with their customers. They needed to field large call centers to answer the phones, and they needed to train thousand and thousands of people to follow the service script. Over time, firms learned the power of cross selling, and outbound calling for selling. In short, most consumer-oriented companies needed to upgrade their ability to field and answer customer requests. These early contact centers were followed by the world wide web and now the mobile web — extending a customers ability to reach any company, anytime, anyway.

What will the 10:45 per day generation expect? First they will expect a continuous brand experience. For example, Facebook is very similar across the iPhone, the web, the BlackBerry — and even the PlayStation 3 has Facebook incorporated into its interface. Despite the fact that some look at the 10:45ers as the poster children for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, better known for ADHD, if you look a little closer, by using these various devices they are creating a new continuity. Google is everywhere; their friends are too, as is access to communication. From their point of view, their experience may look more continuous than the “old days” of separate television, radio, phones and mail. So you need to ask yourself, how “continuous” is your brand and the service that supports it? Do people “see” the same company across the web, phone, call center, and in person? In our work with companies we have found great disconnects among the customer contact channels.

Second, they will desire transparent service. Anyone can “see” where they are any time of the day or night. Why can’t you and your organization show that same transparency? They expect to be able to get status on any order, any service, or any request — immediately! (See my early post on the reinvention of customer service for more on this transparency idea.)

Third, they will want to see word of mouth on you — long before they believe what you have to say. We already know that people trust other customers much more than they trust the company selling things to them. They know that legions of people who use your product or service will be online — because they always are. So, word of mouth will be as continuous to them as a stock ticker was to John Pierpont Morgan, but the markets never close.

You have to ask yourself in this new, continuous world is your company like Richard Nixon, losing on TV but winning on radio?

Starbucks has announced that they are fielding two applications, in test, that help users find their stores, explore the menu and nutritional information.  They are have an application which allows customers to recharge their Starbucks card, and enables the phone to display a bar code — which acts as a payment mechanism.  Both were created due to the feedback they got from their site: My Starbucks Idea, a crowdsourcing location for the firm.

As helpful as these ideas are — aren’t they obvious?  Is there ANY retailer who should not have an iPhone application that allows people to find their stores, and get information about their products and services.  Given the value of stored value cards to the merchant, where the store gets the money up front, customers often “lose” them — which is pure profit, and there are often charges to use the card — all of which create profit for the vendor, on top of the things that the customer purchases in the store — shouldn’t every store create these applications right away?  In addition, we know from behavioral economics that people are much, much more likely to spend money that has been already allocated to a category — like Starbucks — then they are to spend undifferentiated money from their wallet.  My friend Dan Ariely calls this “mental accounting”, and its a powerful incentive to use.

In short, there are some things on the iPhone that are becoming as obvious today, as certain web-site features were in the late 1990s.  It’s time for every retailer to get on the bandwagon.

More From jjsviokla

• Your Innovation is Hard? Lessons from the Brooklyn Bridge
• Sometimes It’s Just Genius
• BP's Tragedy Has Lessons for Innovation

jjsviokla Recommends

• Two Organization Questions Facing the CIO (CIO Dashboard)
• Application Architecture’s Waxy Build-Up (CIO Dashboard)
• Thinking Globally – Where Should a CIO Begin? (CIO Dashboard)