Though this shift toward de-centralization and customer power cannot be turned back by any organization, it can be turned into an advantage – but only through one thing:  Anticipation. Correct anticipation of huge tides have led smart ocean communities to build channels and walls in order to avoid destruction, and in some cases even to generate energy.  Correct anticipation of the “customer first” movement led organizations like LL Bean, Spalding and others to implement policies which were able to not only meet, but also to exceed stringent customer demands and thereby create fierce customer and employee loyalty throughout the 80′s and 90′s.

To anticipate these shifts a good deal of education, imagination and strategy is required.  Once the event or the shift is upon the town or upon the organization, it may be too late to change.  The era of heavy customer social media use is already upon us.  Organizations that hope to thrive must begin to strategically do the following if they are going to anticipate changes:

1. Educate ourselves on the history of media, business and culture which have led us to our current point in time.  Without an understanding of the past, it is difficult to anticipate the next few years of market shift.
2. When we’ve begun to understand the past and how it has led to the present, we must then imagine how our future could and should look.  The organizations who anticipate have a chance to shape their own future.
3. Strategically begin to build the human, structural and procedural organizational capabilities which will allow us to move toward that desired future.
4. Be careful of overly-simplistic “best practices.”  Many best practices work or appear to work in the current environment and in a particular context.  They may not work for every organization, and they may not continue to work forever as things continue to change.  Most organizations will be better off concentrating on coming up with their own “next practices instead.”

In my reading of the history and potential future of markets, organizations who are right now merely dipping a proverbial toe into the social media ocean – who are putting off making any sort of strategic long-term investment into understanding and ramping up for the use of social media – run the very real risk of misjudging the height of the oncoming tide and building the wrong sort of wall and/or waiting so long that they will be laying blocks down with the waves crashing over them.

After a talk yesterday at the Indiana Chamber Executives Association’s annual conference, i had a great discussion about the powerful generation gap between the baby boomer and the younger generations that have now entered the work force (in terms of their attitudes toward social media).  He explained his personal experience of the gap in a very interesting way.  I will do my best to paraphrase it here:

“I distinctly remember watching, with my parents, the episode of the Ed Sullivan Show on which the Beatles first appeared.  I absolutely loved the music, and my parents hated it.  There was a distinct generational difference between how i experienced that music and the way that my parents did.  I think the same dynamic is at work with social media, but this time I am in the role of the older generation.”

He went on to point out that, though many people explain the social media generation gap as a lack of fluency with the tools or a misunderstanding of its utility, there is a much deeper, more fundamental dynamic at work.  A dynamic which is similar in some deep way to the one which also meant that millions of American families had nearly identical experiences of that first Beatles appearance.

I could not agree more.  The shift toward mass social media adoption is a part of a much deeper cultural shift which requires more than a mere re-tooling.  Instead it must begin with a deep understanding of the role that technology (social media, television, Beatles records, printing presses) plays in how we change our ways of organizing, communicating with and relating to each other from generation to generation in business and in society.