Back to the Future, and Face-to-Face

by Douglas Atkin  |   8:33 AM March 10, 2011

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The big new thing in social technology is the ability to do something really old: talk to people face-to-face in real time.

The norm very soon will be live video conversations with our friends, family, people who share our interests, colleagues, whoever. Anyone with school-age kids knows this. They’re on Skype or ooVoothe moment they get home.

We’ll continue posting, tweeting, and commenting, of course, but I believe they’ll take a decreasing share of social interaction on the web as we lean towards what comes more naturally. These other more compromised forms of communication will cede ground to what our species is wired to do: use facial expressions, intonation, body language and laughter. The dreaded ‘LOL’ only exists because, well, we couldn’t laugh out loud!

What does this mean for business? Richer interaction will lead to stronger and richer communities and networks. As more is communicated, more emotions shared, more passions pursued in this much more vivid medium, we’re likely to see stronger bonds between brands, consumers, networks and causes.

So business is welcoming this, right? Kinda.

More natural, richer forms of communication will demand more of what the smarter brand managers are already doing: letting go. As business has embraced social technologies likeTwitter and Facebook, they’ve also had to learn that the old marketing model of command-control with its militaristic terminology of ‘campaigns’ and ‘targets’ has had to be abandoned in favor of strategies more suited to the world of community-management: nurture, support, and being useful vs. interruptive, domineering, and disruptive.

As cofounder of Yackit, a new platform that enables live video conversations between people who share passions and interests, I’ve seen, first, excitement, then fear, then caution, sometimes leading ultimately to inaction. In meetings with major brands and media companies, there are, initially, genuine exclamations of enthusiasm at our new platform, and vigorous agreement that live video will be The Next Big Thing in online social communication.

But when it dawns on executives that people will now be able to engage in face-to-face conversations like the human race has been doing since, well, since we were human, with the expectation of having natural unimpeded interaction, a barely disguised look of panic spreads across their faces.

Of course our platform has all the necessary and scalable flagging controls, and the ability for conversations to be moderated and obnoxious people ejected with the speed and dispatch of Blofeldcondemning his underlings to be back flipped from the table into a fiery hell. But it still seems scary.

Considering where we’ve come from, the fear is warranted. And I know attitudes will change. But they need to change fast because live video will, I believe, enjoy fast adoption by users simply because it comes more naturally than many of the social technologies that we’ve adopted to date.

So how should business managers adapt to this new world?

Here’s some perspective from someone who’s lived in the worlds of both brands and social technology, on how to realize the full potential of rich interation, and how to protect both your users and your brand:

1. Learn to let go. This means letting people use your platform and tools in ways that are useful tothem. It even means enjoying the surprise of unintended consequences and encouraging them if relevant to the brand. Social technologists are the true masters of letting go and look forward to people using their technology in ways they never anticipated. It happens all the time, and they observe, build and iterate to develop even more useful tools that people really want.
2. But remember, letting go doesn’t mean abdication of rules and responsibilities. More open and engaged interaction is good; chaos is bad. You need the same kinds of rules and norms that successful communities and networks have had to enforce for millenia in order to be successful. A very few can ruin it for the many unless all operate within certain minimum civil bounds. The founders of eBay and Flickr were early in their discovery that this applied to social technologies as much as it did to a tribe, church group or village.
3. Avoid anonymity. People behave better if they’re accountable. We’ve found that F2F video together with registering on Facebook Connect and Twitter (plus other safeguards) actually reinforces good behavior because people can see others’ reactions to them live (vs. anonymous and asynchronous postings in a forum or comments on a blog). And they know they’re traceable if they misbehave.
4. Use the community to police itself. People generally are decent and will discipline and eject others who aren’t. EBay started with this ‘decency principle’ and built tools to enforce it that have become a model for community self-management. In fact their business model relies on its reputation engine. And of course self-policing is scalable in a way that hands-on moderation alone simply is not.

The ideas of self-organization and emergence are the oxygen of the social technology industry. We make platforms. They’re places where people play out their lives unimpeded by our agendas. Letting-go, watching, and developing tools for what we see is needed is the minimum we must do for success. Media, brands, and other enterprises should learn to experience the thrill of the unanticipated (with reasonable safeguards in place). In fact I would say it’s mandatory if they want to make the most of the next generation of social tools: ones that let people be themselves.

Douglas Atkin, in addition to being cofounder of Yackit, is former Chief Community Officer of Meetup, and former brand strategist at Merkley and Partners. He is author of The Culting of Brands: Turn Your Customers Into True Believers.

More blog posts by Douglas Atkin

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DOUGLAS ATKIN

Douglas Atkin, in addition to being cofounder of Yackit, is former Chief Community Officer ofMeetup, and former brand strategist at Merkley and Partners. He is author of The Culting of Brands: Turn Your Customers Into True Believers.