The world is changing it's course, it's our task to keep our foots on it.

Every now and then the world suffer big changes. Now we are on the middle of one of them, just as the world suddenly became smaller with the radio, or lives easier with personal computers. Our world is becoming social, and in a way we could never imagine. People has been writing blogs and forming communities for a while, sharing their experiences and feelings, but that didn't worth the attention of big companies since they markets were in the real world. Now, there's finally something that big companies can't ignore. The Social Web.

"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change." - Charles Darwin

The Social Networks are here to stay, and they are becoming an integral part of our lives in the way we communicate. There's nothing more interesting to companies that communicating his ideas to the correct people... That's when communities enter into the business. Thanks to tools like Facebook, Twitter, Delicious and many others, now the communities are starting to shape the way that companies interact with people, either the products they design, the experience that the consumer gets or the marketing strategies used. That's why companies needs to evolve with people and make wise decisions to survive. This is evidently shown in the power that an unhappy customer have to let the community know about his bad experience and get a hit on the company, no matter the size of the business.

Since (at least some of ) this communities has been here for 10 years or more, can be saw as a phenomenon more or less mature, that companies can't influence, or not as much as they want, so the only choice left is to adapt themselves to the forming and growing communities instead of doing what they have been doing with conventional advertising... making campaigns that identify people and gathered people attracting their attention around a single point of interest... the idea they wanted to share. The case now is completely different, where the ideas has to be born on the communities and companies need to share this idea in a way that it get accepted, since an early reject can lead to very poor penetration... although, this can lead to a unique opportunity to get early feedback and counteract, possibly generating even better result.

"In this new world, spreading an idea is not a matter of how much money you put on it, but the triggers you create to make people spread it"

This new form of communication relies on people communicating with people, and making every node of this (social) network a potential content feeder that will share their experiences and thoughts. This unleashes the power of the ideas to spread not only directly from the source, but get into the brains and crawl back into the network into a new form, the idea is not anymore a way of promotinc certain idea, but a honest communication from a person i care of what he has to say, may be a friend, someone that i follow, some guy that I admire for his achievements, a familiar, or even a random guy... even not having involved interest is a plus to a speaker when transmitting an idea. In this new world, spreading an idea is not a matter of how much money you put on it, but the triggers you create to make people spread it, and the very best of it... it's free, just as free as it is the spread of a negative comment on your idea, so you better take care of what people is saying instead of focusing on what i'm telling to people.

This implications on don't stop on the marketing, but in every way that people inside the company communicates, even between workers, with suppliers, with competitor companies, or more dramatic, to know crucial facts about the (probably private) life of a worker to take proper actions at the workplace (like firing him). We have seen this on the news a few times, but surely can be used for good things like letting a stressed worker go early, or simply asking him about his situation to make him feel the boss' support.

"When the world changes and it's a once in a lifetime opportunity for those who are prepared"-Malcom Gladwell

Of course the implications don't finish here, but this 3 points are the most important from my point of view, and what really will make the difference in the near future. This difference will be undoubtly user driven and the best that we can do, is to get ready to it, no mater if we are users or companies... as Malcom Gladwell wonderfuly says in his book Outliers, when the world changes and it's a once in a lifetime opportunity for those who are prepared. Probably we don't have time to get the ten thousands hours that he says we need to make full use of this opportunity, but certainly every single bit counts towards the survival of the fittest.