Kate Niederhoffer, and her colleagues have posted about her groups move into a space they term Social Business Design. In a sense, what they describe is a reaction to the siloing of thinking around social media brought on by the term ‘media’ itself. This is, perhaps, an extension of my dismissal of the term ‘consumer generated media’ due to its origination in the world of marketing and advertising. Kate and friends are making the point that the social part of the future of online ecologies is not just about ‘media’ per se, but about the entire end-to-end, front-to-back dissemination, assimilation and synthesis of information and its integration with business processes and models.
While this is an interesting direction, it reminds me of terms like ‘democratization’. As anyone in a large organization can attest, capitalism doesn’t scale through democracy. Good companies succeed via Philosopher Kings. The idea that social effects will permeate a large organization without accommodating hierarchy is a little far fetched.
Niederhoffer et al’s thesis centres on four core notions. As Kate puts it:
- Ecosystem - a community of connections
- Hivemind - the socially calibrated mindset of individuals
- Dynamic Signal - the constant multi-faceted means of collaboration
- Metafilter- a method of finding signals in vast amounts of noise
The later two are clearly about information flow. Hivemind (which I’ve always taken to mean the aggregate psychological process of a group, not that of an individual moderated by social context) is also about information diffusion and the assimilation of social cues in moderating that information and republishing.
Perhaps the key to understanding what this topic is about is to understand the scale at which is intended to be implemented. I’m excited to follow where their thinking leads and what impact it will have on reshaping existing businesses and forming new ones.


