CHAPTER 1

How Did We Get Here?

How Social Media Drives Hyper-Sociality and Why Businesses MustChange

Most companies that are thinking about leveraging social media as part of theirbusiness—whether in marketing, customer service, new product innovation,employee communications, or public relations—see it as a new way to reachpeople. They focus on the media in social media. Missing fromthis strategy is the idea that social media is not about media, nor is it aboutWeb 2.0 tools or the new rules that govern them. Social media is all about oursocial nature growing to levels never seen in human history. Social media isabout certain Human 1.0 behaviors finally taking hold in the business world,where they've been long absent.

Industry guru Tim O'Reilly calls social media a "platform of participation," andthat is exactly what it is: a massive platform of participation. Social mediaallows us to behave in ways that we are hardwired for in the firstplace—as humans. We can get frank recommendations from other humansinstead of from faceless companies. When things don't work out, we can get madat people instead of organizations. Our reciprocity reflex, which enables us tobe the only Hyper-Social species without all being brothers and sisters, canonce again take center stage. We can help others and be helped. We can formtribes again—except that this time, our tribes will not be bound bygeography, and we can belong to multiple tribes at the same time.

Social media is what has enabled the hardwired Human 1.0 behaviors to scale tolevels never seen before in business; we call it Hyper-Sociality. Andwhile some people will argue that our social behavior changes when it becomesvirtual and large-scale, as we are seeing now, early research on the topic hasthe social science community thinking that our social behaviors won't change.

Human 1.0

We may be living in a Web 2.0 world, but the behaviors that this new environmenttriggers are solidly Human 1.0, and they can largely be explained by theevolution of humans to become the only Hyper-Social species without all membershaving to be related.

What we buy and how we buy have been studied extensively by evolutionarybiologists and behavioral economists. For instance, the way people seem to wantto help others and be helped is caused by a reflex called reciprocity; the factthat we like to mimic others is caused by what are called mirror neurons; thereason that we like to look cool, at least on a subconscious level, is that itmay help us find a better mate; the reason we buy the same things over and overagain, even if it makes no sense, is that we are herding animals and in somecases self-herding. What this means is that if we buy a jar of fruit preservefor no good reason, and we sort of like it, we will keep buying that brandforever. We are creatures of habit, perhaps because that consistency makes iteasier for us to make decisions. All of these behaviors have been hardwired intous over thousands of years of evolution, and have permitted us to be assuccessful as we have been.

In contrast, the modern business organization is quite young. Throughout itsshort history, business structures required us to behave in ways that wereunnatural. Think, for instance, about the specialization of skills, or about theunnatural interactions resulting from the information imbalance that existsbetween producers and consumers of goods, or between employers and theiremployees. That unnatural environment has also caused companies to develop manybad habits along the way—both with customers and with employees.

It wasn't until recently that customers were asked to provide input into thedesign of new products and services, and for a good portion of the history ofthe enterprise, people had very limited choices—you could buy a Ford aslong as it was black. Fake-sounding commercials touting the virtues of goods andservices became commonplace. These messages worked because they were the onlysource of information that consumers had, and because there were few otherchannels of communication that were vying for their attention. In typicalbusiness jargon, companies started using war metaphors to describe theircompetitors, suppliers, and customers—and in some cases they startedbehaving as though they really were at war. Marketers "mounted campaigns" topitch new products, and "fought for marketshare," against "entrenchedcompetitors," all the while fighting to "win" new customers and "raise barriers"to entry.

Internally, some companies came to treat their employees as commodities, orinterchangeable cogs in a big machine. Transparency was something to be shiedaway from; instead, companies embraced secrecy and sometimes deception. Therumor mill at the company water cooler had very limited reach and little impact,and it could basically be controlled. Command-and-control methods of managementtook hold (and to a far greater extent than efficient organizational theorywould call...