Read an interesting survey today that kind of confirmed some of my suspicions, at least preliminarily. You can read it here. The gist of the survey is that people are using social networking to chat with and build networks of friends and colleagues, but not buy stuff. That makes sense to me. I’ve always thought that the social media piece, as it pertained to growing business or selling products, seemed kind of questionable, at least and unproven at best.

I come to this opinion first and foremost as a user. I like to get my hands on stuff that I hear my friends talking about, and that has influenced a lot of purchases over the years, but there’s a higher likelihood that I’ll read about something, hear a review on NPR, or just generally pick up something that I heard about through word-of-mouth. I’d love to get other folks opinions on this, as the monetization of these services and the possibility of growing business through social media is getting a lot of press these days.

Closed… that’s how many companies today think they can operate their business and successfully employ a digital strategy.

In a world where the lines between what’s work and personal become more blurred, and folks are reviewing message on their Blackberry’s in bed at night, or doing more and more work from home, how can any organization expect that there won’t be some blurring between not just the work into the personal portion of life, but also the personal part of life bleeding into work. They’re hand & glove, and in a world where business wants to leverage social media, transparency and openness for business gains, that doubled-edge sword cuts both ways when social aspects of the business can’t be contained in quite the same way they were in days of old.

This makes businesses very uneasy, and this Business Week article: Web 2.0: Managing Corporate Reputations serves to illustrate this. While a fair journalistic effort, at least from the model of closed, and old model business communications, the story offers very little in the way of what it means to be open, and how openness and transparency can transform corporate reputation, and in some cases define it (Read: The truth will set you free… or when there’s nothing to hide, there’s nothing hide from). However, we’re in a transitional phase, so it makes sense that an open and transparent perspective can be lost especially when you’re talking about big businesses who’s business it’s been to keep things cloaked in darkness.

It’s not fair to think that business can expect employees to be on Blackberry, Facebook, or Twitter dealing with clients, customers, reputation, etc, thus leveraging these new outlets… and that somehow the personal aspects of people’s lives won’t enter the fold. The human experience is messy business, and if you don’t want those lines being crossed then make those lines very clear, and eliminate these pieces from your strategy, because they’ll just be inauthentic in a forum where authenticity rules. Otherwise, the fact that humans can have off-days and make bad decisions is inevitable, and it’s also inevitable that some of that may bleed into business. It happens to everyone, all the time, let’s just be with that, and move on. If a company is authentically open and transparent, nobody will care about an employee’s drunken mis-step or other unsavory details of their life getting out.

An organization with a successful digital strategy embraces openness, transparency and the reality that we’re operating in a world that’s forever out of our control.

I’ve only been subscribed to Jeremiah Owyang’s Web Strategist blog for a couple months, but I’ve found his perspective to be very thought provoking. Yesterday, he posted an article from 2007, as an aside to a more current post, and I have to say the title, Web Strategy: How To Evolve Your Irrelevant Corporate Website, caught my attention. While I don’t talk specifically about Jeremiah’s core ideas, his thoughts stimulated a different discussion for me regarding the future of the corporate Web site.

The idea that the corporate Web site might be outmoded is something that’s been on my mind over the last couple months. There are so many new tools, and in the current paradigm many companies see these as a fragmented communications approach that lacks focus. However, a new paradigm might categorize the various modes of electronic communications, RSS, micro-blogging, wikis, blogs, Facebook, and other tools as the full communicatons picture when done in concert together with the same emphasis that the company Web site gets, rather than pursuing these new modes as a secondary, not necessarily as pertinent communication mode, as many organizations do. It’s a bold idea.

However, this approach would have to be open, and open to all… and that’s a scary idea.

Jeremiah nails that here:

“Content will have both negative and positive views about your products
“This one is hard to swallow, but how do you build the most trust? By being open, authentic, and transparent to the marketplace.”

This is the beauty of the Web. This the power of the Web in its rawest, most unadulterated form, but you can’t control it, management can’t control it, and the board of directors can’t control it, it’s people driven, and while a scary prospect at first, it’s the people that we’ve taken the responsibility to serve. We should absolutely want an environment where we can know what the people want with perfect clarity, and then be prepared openly and honestly evaluate those requests.

Reading about the social Web, Twitter, Facebook, etc, today got me thinking about the problem of over-communicating, and then I remembered a nugget of wisdom that was handed down to me:

The surest way to not communicate with people is to try and communicate too much.

Somehow, it’s just that simple.

I wanted to post a response to Simon Dumenco’s Advertising Age, Media Works article The Coming End of YouTube, Twitter and Facebook Socialism (read the article here).

Dumenco posits the question that with the growing costs of Web services like Twitter, You Tube and Facebook and the amount of venture capital that it takes to subsidize them, as non-money-making entities, how can they be anything but doomed. Admittedly, Dumenco has taken up a position that’s quite unpopular in the Web world right now. People want to believe that these services will make money and that they do provide value. I have videos on You Tube, and I have a (somewhat inactive @mattborghi) Twitter account, and for a time I was seduced by Facebook, but I’ve always come back to the value proposition.

I’m an early-adopter in the sense that if there’s something out there that brings value to and/or makes my life easier, I’m the first to get on-board, but if the value doesn’t continue, and/or the novelty wears off, then I’m moving on.

I’ll give some examples, YouTube when they first came online was pretty cool, and I enjoyed it. I also enjoyed that they were the first to make really wide use of the .FLV (Flash Video Compression format). However, after a while the content was just kind of so-so and I lost interest in general, daily usage. On the other hand, when I’ve needed to do home repairs, plumbing, electrical or otherwise, YouTube’s the first place I go, because they have some great tutorials. The service of being able to find home repair tutorials is awesome, but with sites with specific content of this kind like Expert Village, are YouTube’s days numbered? I don’t know. I guess I have a profound faith in Google’s ability to innovate and defy critics.

With Twitter it’s a little more complicated. I think that in certain situations Twitter is a great tool, and one that could also be very valuable. I think of the fact that much of the information that came out of the November 2008 Mumbai siege was done through Twitter, and many of the first reports of Scully’s skillful landing of US Airways 1549 on the Hudson River came from folks sending tweets via their blackberry’s and iPhones as they waited to board life rafts. As well, the Los Angeles Fire Department used Twitter to communicate during the October 2007 wildfires, and Twitter was also used to great success on the campaign trail during the 2008 elections by all parties for community organizing. However, with all of this said, I can’t think of a comparable model where a tool that you don’t pay for is used so freely. I could see Twitter being acquired into a mobile provider, or some kind of usage royalty being appended to a mobile bill, but as a stand-alone application, I just don’t see it yet.

With Facebook, there are many great aspects, but I just don’t see Facebook ever being monetized as a service. For instance, I like how I can send short message or just “poke” a friend to let them know I’m thinking about them, but don’t have anything to say to them. I like how you can publicize via your status your likes and dislikes. I like the in-window chat and the email functionality, but even with a very significant improvement on the MySpace model complete with Twitter-esque additions (in the redesigned Facebook), I just don’t see it making money. The subscription idea floats around, but I don’t see that ever taking off. There are other iTunes-esque ideas of tagging products and services with purchase options, but the logistic collaboration with more brick and mortar vendors and distributors would be a huge undertaking. Facebook has something, though; they’re different, and they just might be the Google of social networking, but that will remain to be seen.

Getting back to Dumenco’s article, I have to say that some of the best aspects of the Web are free. It’s always been challenging, and sometimes downright impossible, to monetize the Web. On Charlie Rose, a few months ago Marc Andreessen, Silicon Valley entrepreneur and board member for Facebook, said something that stuck with me, and I paraphrase ‘if you can get a million users, you have to be able to do something with them…’ Andreessen might be on to something, but it’s hard to know the future, and it’s even more difficult to know what people are willing to pay for on the Web. With a little luck one of these three organizations might just show us the way…