Mediaboss Marketing

Summary:A seemingly esoteric question actually turns out to be vital for dealing effectively with the trend toward silos of communication everywhere, from social networks to online communities.

A funny thing is happening along the way towards connecting all of us together via social media: We've ended up at a place where we have thousands of seperate islands of communication, instead of the seamless, pervasive mass connectedness that seemed to be happening early on.

Admittedly, Facebook and Twitter, and their counterparts in Asia and around the world, have created very large social worlds where it doesn't seem like there are many barriers to connect with one another. But it turns out that the reality couldn't be further from the truth.

There is however little question that the basic change in approach -- and the fundamental innovation -- that social media brought to digital communication, specifically that information should be shared with everyone by default, stood things on their head and fundamentally changed the game. Because openly posting and sharing knowledge has proven to be much more powerful than automatically hiding it from non-recipients, as in older systems like e-mail, social media has since become the leading activity online and the top form of digital communication globally.

But the evolution of the industry ultimately led to a land grab that is still taking place. The key decision was made early on by the large commercial social networking services to build their social platforms as digital walled gardens. They could have made things interoperable but they didn't. In reality though, the early technologies and standards to enable it just weren't capable. And, I've pointed out in the past , there was little incentive to connect services together because maintaining ownership and control of a service's members, which are the real product in a commercial social network, has been key to the success of their business models and valuation.

That's not to say that there isn't enormous value in today's largest social networks. There certainly is and nearly two billion people seem to agree or they wouldn't use them. But the side effect of having a) poor technologies for interoperability from the outset and b) the business need of the large social networks to capitalize on their members is that in the end there is still virtually no way to connect with or engage between these services.

Related: How we can create open standards for social business

In practice, this isn't always a big deal, in particular in the consumer world, for which most people are already members of the largest social networking services. But it has a very different effect in two important places: 1) Out on the edges of the social Web where special purpose communities and social networks have formed, and 2) in the business world where communication -- while it can greatly benefit from the open sharing model of social media -- by necessity is more private and in internal social networks.

So there is a good reason why e-mail is still the top form of communication in business, namely that you can talk to anyone with an e-mail address, no matter where they are. On an individual social network, you can only really communicate with those on the same network. This is essentially a non-starter for business, and a growing problem for newer social networks and online communities, where it's increasingly difficult to grow participation because everyone is already a member of so many different services already.

Of course, we didn't start out with social media fragmentation, and we don't necessarily need to end up with it. But to resolve it requires a concrete solution that is 1) friendly to the business needs of the large social networks, 2) makes it very easy to communicate between any two social environments, and 3) can be readily realized without complex technology implementation or esoteric standards which would slow down adoption or make it unwieldy and unreliable.

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Where is interoperability for social media?