Dan picks up on the Cap Gemini CTO blog.

Dan Dickinson » Snakes on a [your industry here]

Think this doesn’t apply to you? Wrong. It applies to everyone. As of today, no one controls their own marketing.

This post Dan refers to, is written by Andy Mulholland Global Chief Technology Officer, Capgemini

Peter Drucker, the management guru, made some highly relevant remarks a whole generation back …His point was that the first technology revolution had been printing, and that this had been initially a technology revolution with the ‘printer’ being in control. In time the power had moved to the Publishers, or the providers of information. His direct link was from hardware products to software applications, but he failed to mention two other points. Not sure that the first is totally relevant, but it is a fact that printing did put an awful lot of monks out of work.

Andy goes on …

Well seems that both points have come true again, i.e. we have cut out the middle layer, for monks read managers, and we have added a new life skill, hence the term ‘social computing’. Why is this different from business computing? Well, for lots of reasons, but to start with the difference between training users to use a specialised computing application and say e-Bay, then there is the funding model, capital or by use, etc. But let’s park all of this to one side for a moment and deal with the bit I really wanted to get to. At the time of the printing revolution there was no such thing as fiction, all handwritten books dealt strictly with recording facts or at least educated treaties.

Dan builds on that …

Fast forward a few hundred years and things haven’t changed much; a tiny minority of publishers hold all the power in deciding what gets bound, distributed and sold
……
Continuing the analogy, this (blogs) is not unlike Gutenberg delivering one of his presses to every household who wanted one, complete with a team of messengers who could run printed copies around the world in a few seconds.

And Andy finishes off with a question.

So does where does Social Computing fit? Is it a convenient title, or the beginning of a new part of society that will need to develop its place in overall society?
….
and a chart courtesy of Manyworlds Inc.

The chart paints a transition from the early days of the web, of documents and portals through todays blogs, wiki’s, social sites and tags, to a future of adaptive knowledge networks. This scale is explained across the categories of:

• web site management
• document digital asset management
• social networking
• social tagging and taxonomies
• enterprise fit and sustainability

And why does all this matter? Well back to Dans post.

So what does this mean? Who cares if everyone can now blog about their cat or what they ate for dinner last night or whether Ubuntu Linux is better than OSX? Well, it goes beyond that. Consider this other example I found this morning on Church Of The Customer: given the interesting way in which Snakes On A Plane has developed, Samuel Jackson is advocating an open-source, script-by-committee movie.

How people learn and interact is evolving. That is at the core of social computing. Web sites as we know them are in a state of evolution.

This impacts how consumers learn about everything, and that includes bank services, and their quality. So, yes, this does apply to everyone.

Technorati Tags: consumer+trends, internet+evolution