Business Models for the Social Mobile Cloud: Transform Your Business Using Social Media, Mobile Internet, and Cloud Computing

Chapter 2

Social Means Connected

Compete with Yourself, Collaborate with Others

In Chapter 3, I will talk about how to use mobile devices to stay connected and how the cloud provides the infrastructure to be connected. But what does it mean to be connected? Social technologies take the most basic building blocks of human society and exponentially accelerate them. By eliminating the limitations of time and space that have previously governed how we organize our interactions, new software systems radically transform what people can achieve together. Embedding these new capabilities into your organizations, your products, and how you engage with your markets will be essential to your success.

Cheap computer systems and networks have reduced the cost of communication to practically zero. It is no longer necessary to own a printing press or a broadcasting tower to deliver your ideas to a marketplace. Social media takes advantage of this change and gives everyone the ability to publish ideas—blogs and specialized content sharing sites all create the opportunity to deliver your idea to the vast audience using the Internet.

But social media is only a beginning point, not an end point. And if you are only talking about social media in your business, you are missing the forest for the trees. Having every person in the world as simply a broadcasting tower would result in cacophony if there were no way to organize people and ideas, and this is where the power of social technologies really ...