Swarms, Storms and Flocks
As a Director of Ecommerce I became fascinated with swarms, storms and flocks. Things happen inside the world’s largest content network for reasons that are beyond logical explanation. As the founder of Cure Cancer Starter, a crowdfunding platform for cancer research, I am fascinated with swarms, storms and flocks again.
Swarm Storms is my name for the strange combination sentient mob behavior. Much like ants and bees the web forms with a collective consciousness that can feint and move like a school of fish or a flock of birds.
If you've ever been fishing just prior to a storm you know the activity gets fast and furious before stopping almost entirely. Fish feel changes in pressure and react. Storms influence the creation and path of swarms.
Much of Internet marketing is weather forecasting. You model and predict where you thin your Internet marketing and website need to go. Sometimes you want to be out of the path of the storm while other storms you want to ride like a wave.
All Internet marketers are weather forecasters and swarm storm creators. The linked post is the first post on swarm creation from Swarmise, a new book by Swedish political activist Rick Falkvinge. His a piece from the post describing a "swarm organization":
Excerpt
"A swarm organization is a decentralized, collaborative effort of volunteers that looks like a hierarchical, traditional organization from the outside. It is built by a small core of people that construct a scaffolding of go-to people, enabling a large number of volunteers to cooperate on a common goal in quantities of people not possible before the net was available.
Working with a swarm requires you to do a lot of things completely in opposite from what you learn at an archetypal business school. You need to release the control of your brand and its messages.
You need to delegate authority to the point where anybody can make almost any decision for the entire organization. You need to accept and embrace that people in the organization will do exactly as they please, and the only way to lead is to inspire them to want to go where you want the organization as a whole to go."
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Rick is sharing the book one chapter at a time online. Stay tuned and buy the book when it comes out in the summer.
The Relativity Of Everything
Social media is the most relative of media. The more territory social media captures the more relative things become. Relative in the sense that it is impossible to really KNOW anything.
There are simply too many variables now. Patterns that seem so convincing may be worth a double down, but those patterns may have so many interconnections you are betting on a horse you may never see or fully understand.
This is NOT to say we can't trust or use our metrics as maps to help create greatness. It is to say that our zero sum habits, this OR that, need to be replaced with AND.
This AND That are impacting our metrics and Internet marketing. Great infographic that speaks to the value of a single social signal.