Our idea of how we should work a part of a society has been very individualistic, up until very recently. As from the rise of the  web (or probably a bit before) we’ve started to create more collaborative projects that have their most outstanding success in the Linux operating system and the myriad of Open Source alternatives generated from there. Since them we’ve witnessed the demise of an economic model based on individually acquiring wealth mainly because the results of this approach have been really disappointing. In the January edition of Harvard Business Review on the piece “The Age of Customer Capitalism” showed that focusing on shareholder and stakeholder well being has been delivering worse performances of stocks in the last decades. So this tells us that we’ve been running on a model that seemed to be the right one, but wasn’t. This is very good because now we have the opportunity to start building a new model based on active collaboration. 

Trusting more gives us an insight on how natural is this for humans. We’ve usually been afraid of talking to strangers because of all the warnings our parents gave us as kids. Media usually portrays really bad news which have made us cautious of with whom we establish a physical relationship with. Social technologies have taken off that fear of initiating a relationship as we’re physically safe when we first meet people and get social references from their friends or people they know. So if we are physically safe the fear that has installed in us is automatically out of the game and we’re able to thrive socially again. After we’ve met online it’s easier to meet offline and enhance collaboration, so this social technologies have eased up the process of being social off-line too. After we’ve met each other it’s easier to gather together around shared values and goals to thrive. 

So now we’re paying much more attention to our social life. Even watching TV has turned into a social event. We rarely watch TV shows or movies alone and if we do we then comment it on twitter or directly with our friends. So we’ve truly became the social beings we were supposed to be. Since the beginning of the last century and with all the innovations in entertainment we grew isolated from each other, in that time individualistic societies thrived and goals in business became to accumulate wealth to the individuals owning them. All this changes denatured our being and business which were the vehicles by which we decided to pursue our life goals started to influence what values we decided to follow the most creating a dehumanizing loop.

Since the rise of the web we’ve decided to use it as a social platform that has made almost every action we perform a social event. This has brought a huge change in the values we appreciate and follow. This has been happening since some early adopters in the open source movement and some outstanding businesses decided to collaborate and spread the love as a way of achieving their higher goals and not following the usual focus on monetary results and individualistic goals. As the social life began to regain it’s popularity more and more people joined in going back to our human values leaving the business values in a still important second place. 

This, of course, has brought a change in how consumers expect businesses to act and interact with them. This change has be triggered by the new forms of organizations that have provided us with products such as Linux, Firefox, SQL and by businesses that have changed the values businesses used to run with such as Apple, Google, Skype, Flickr, etc. This change in the way of interacting has changed a lot of things on our life. We don’t listen to ads any more or read them on magazines. We for sure will like to be informed by an ad, like an ad announcing the new Android Phone from HTC. But we’ll only buy it after we’ve talked with people that have an Android Phone or listen it from trusted experts (which sometimes are not mainstream or famous). So ads can’t influence us that much any longer, we’re more influenced by either word of mouth or word of f*** obvious. (Note: WOFO means that a company is so good at something and so many people talk about it that it’s effing obvious what is the best option. For example for search it’s effing obvious you need to go with Google.)

And yet after all this businesses want to enter out social space and bombard us with ads. This has been slowly changing, but still most of the approach on Social Media is about creating buzz for the company rather than building relationships. This is because the business values only valued relationships that were known to produce a profit. These relationships were with existing customers while potential customers were seduced but they were never followed with detail or nurtured by the company.  Relationships need to start whether we see a person is a potential customer or not, this is because we never know when someone will be needing us or when we’ll need them. There needs to be a priority list of course, but not only one person needs to be social in the company. Little by little all the business needs to learn to be social and more company reps need to be empowered to represent it in the online world.

The relationships created need to be true, because people are now only expecting to have real relationships with people & organizations. This new form of meeting will lead to more collaboration that we’ve seen before and the values shared ( appreciation of contacts and relationships, honesty, transparency, solidarity, etc.) will for sure make a huge positive impact on the world. Some early cases of this are the myriad of aid solutions that were built for Haiti, the Ushahidi project to map disasters and harmful events. To that we’ll have to add the myriad of collaborative or community sites that are emerging to help people be better informed about health, nutrition, the environment, sexuality and many other subjects that weren’t often covered by traditional media and people were afraid to ask publicly. 

This creation of tribes has also changed how people spend their leisure time and the things they learn. Right now communities of people with less mainstream preferences gather and share together online. For example, all the Rugby fans around the world can be united together on forums on the internet while before there were just a few dozen players in some countries. This has integrated the Rugby community throughout the world.

The online tools have helped us regain some humanity, while many people thought we will lose it because of it. This has changed not only how we organize ourselves socially, but also professionally and the line between the two is fading away fast.  We’re expecting new things from businesses and while many new ones are embracing it, the big businesses are still resilient because their values aren’t changing as fast. If they want to survive and thrive in the future (long term) they’ll have to make a change in values and in business processes. (Note: Adopting social technologies and measuring is a good thing, but measuring a new way of doing business with an old mentality is not the way to go.)