Plane Conversations

My father is a forester.  At one time, his chief role in his company was to evaluate a stand of timber and negotiate with the landowner for the rights to that timber.  Those kinds of deals weren’t made by men in suits in conference rooms or over the phone.  They were made by men in dusty boots on the front porch over a cup of coffee.  Contracts were agreed upon with a handshake before pen was ever put to paper.  There was a protocol for making those deals and, if you rushed it, you lost it. 

The landowner might not have all the latest facts, figures and price indexes for whatever hardwood he was trying to sell, but he wanted a fair price for his resource.  To be sure that he was getting the best price and was being treated fairly, he had to know who he was dealing with.  He might have known a guy who knew a guy, but, even then, he wanted to make the judgement for himself.  And he made that judgement sitting on the front porch drinking a cup of coffee with the potential buyer.

I don’t have land with timber on it.  To be honest, I don’t have a front porch to speak of, either.  But when I’m spending money, I want to know who I’m spending it with and I don’t think I’m unusual.  As a front porch for consumers and vendors alike, Social Media helps me do that.  I tell people regularly to check our commercial site to see what we do; but, to see who we are, check this blog, our Facebook pages and our Tweets.  You’ll see the issues that are important to us – aviation industry issues and advances, marketing and human resources articles, environmental issues and hockey.  (Hey, I’m a fan and since I post many of our updates, well…..)

We can’t shake hands and or make eye contact over a blog, a tweet or a status update; however, with continued exchanges, we can get to know one another.  As a customer, we can watch how vendors treat other customers.  We can see the rate and the quality of interaction.  As a vendor, we can see customers’ interests and viability.  If either party is presenting counterfeit social currency, they won’t be able to hide it for long.

Sure, we can teleconference, video conference, read brochures and websites; however, those things tell us only what their authors want us to know.  By reviewing a vendor or even a customer’s social currency, we can see how closely their actions match their words.  We may not be literally looking each other in the eye, but by exploring a person or company’s social presence, we will find evidence of the each other’s ethics, activity level, responsiveness and global awareness.  Social media gives us all the opportunity to either credit or discredit a company’s claims based on information we find in the company’s own social media offerings and on reviews written by their customers.

The Web of today and the Deep Web right around the corner offer fewer skeleton-hiding closets.  The wide open platform gives consumers and vendors the opportunity to see each other as they are and as they’d like to be seen.  We still may know a guy who knows a guy.  Social Media gives us the chance to look each other in the virtual eye before we make the deal - even without dusty boots or cups of coffee.

Every time someone posts something online the context of their content reveals an intent. Intentions have become transparent and discernment of intent is becoming the wisdom of crowds.

The aggregation of consumer conversations enabled by technology has fueled awareness of market methods and intents. Consumers have found influence and have begun to “opt out” of the old methods created by old market methods of intent to capture and sell.

Social technology has created a transparency of intent. Intent is a relational attribute that reveals motive. The “markets of conversations” are no longer motivated by old methods used by the markets over the last 40 years. Doc Searls says “The Intention Economy is built around more than transactions. Conversations matter. So do relationships. So do reputation, authority and respect. Those virtues, however, are earned by sellers (as well as buyers) and not just “branded” by sellers on the minds of buyers like the symbols of ranchers burned on the hides of cattle.”

A Brands Letter of Intent

A letter of intent or LOI is a document outlining an agreement between two or more parties before the agreement is finalized. Such agreements may be for employment, acquisitions, mergers, purchases of services or products. Agreements which aim to specify the intents of parties engaged in a relationship for specific purposes.

The purposes of a LOI may be:

• to clarify the key points of a complex or simple transaction for the convenience of the parties
• to declare officially that the parties are now engaged with an intent implied or specifically spelled out
• to offer safeguards for when the relationship collapses during an engagement with intent

A LOI may also be referred to as a memorandum of understanding (MOU), term sheet or discussion sheet. The different terms show different styles, but do not show any difference under law. Social letters of intent exist when and where buyers and sellers engage on-line through the exchange of information and later a transaction which has certain expectations of delivery.

Social Agreements Represent LOI’s

When people engage with other people or entire organizations on-line there is an implied social agreement represented within the communications. The social agreement may be in response to an inquiry, a comment on posted content or an intent to investigate or take action from an ad or marketing message. The social agreement may also simply be a response to a need or an exchange of communications centric to topical discussions.

Given the reach of social technology and the engagement of markets, buyers and sellers, the underlying social agreement is similar to the traditional letter of intent. While social agreements are not legal instruments the expectations of fulfillment by both parties remain the same as if they were legally agreements.

The very nature of social technology and the emerging dynamics are raising people’s expectation to fulfill implied intents contained in context with the content (communications). It is clear that traditional marketing and advertising methods are being rejected because the intent of such methods are not what buyers expect. Today’s buyers expect honesty, integrity, responsiveness, performance and respect for their time, attention and intentions.

Cluttering buyers time, attention and relevant intentions with irrelevant ads and slick marketing messages does not show respect. Treating buyers like cattle waiting to be herded does not show respect. The currency of communications represents the value of ones intent to fulfill or fail to fulfill the intent of a social agreement. Failure to fulfill a social agreement means the buyers currency, both in the form of money and communications, will not follow you rather both will be spent and shared elsewhere.

Social letters of intent are not created by or from the supplier rather from the buyer. To ignore or not fulfill these intents means you lose the buyers currency and that of their “friends”. That represents a return, or lack thereof, from this thing called social media.

The Next Economic Paradigm is a very simple idea yet the overwhelming majority of people have absolutely no idea what we’re talking about.  The strangest part of this work is the knowledge that eventually this will become completely obvious to everyone and the transformation, from beginning to end, will take a very short period of time.

My greatest curiosity is imagining when and how this moment will arrive.

I recently saw the latest Star Trek re-boot where an old Dr. Spock encountered the exiled young Space Propulsions Engineer named Montgomery Scott who had been convicted of attempting a mash-up between warp drive and atomic particle transporting with the commander’s pet schnauzer – where the term “mash-up” was implied to be quite literal.

Um,…the dog wags the tail.

The epiphany came when the older Spock suggested that Scotty’s approach was backward.  Instead of assuming that Space was stationary and the spacecraft was moving, Scotty should assume that the Space is moving and the spacecraft is stationary.

In one fell swoop, all the calculations finally made sense.  A good theory became practical.  All those nasty side effects – like bringing the schnauzer atoms back together – were no longer a problem.  Lo and behold, the Federation was saved.

Of course everyone knows what warp drive is and what transporters do, yet the science involved with their actual construction of these devices remains intensely complex.  The same can be said for our financial system. Everyone knows how to buy a can of tuna fish, but the actual formulation of that transaction is intensely complex.

We have developed a vast set of processes, techniques, and infrastructure around the basic idea that markets are dynamic.  Everyone knows that markets change and move and they behave in many strange ways in response to price inputs, scarcity, surplus, legislation and ideology.

Meanwhile, people are defined by what they consume – like red dots and blue dots on a political district chart, demographic data points, owner/renter, winner/loser, jobbed /not jobbed, young /old, first class/coach, etc.

And that is just the way it is … and the only way it can be.

Now suppose Dr. Spock was to beam down and suggest that markets are static and people are dynamic.  Imagine everyone staring at the can of tuna just sitting there, lonely, dusty and static, doing absolutely nothing except being a can of tuna on a stationary shelf, in an inanimate “market”.

The epiphany is that human knowledge assets are completely and irrevocably tangible in every way, shape, and form. Humans allocate and trade social capital, creative capital, and intellectual capital with each other in infinite ways, sometimes resulting in a can of tuna in a market.

All knowledge assets are tangible in the right exchange system.

I wonder what they will call it?