Its done! In the past we have operated on some classic assumptions, the influence rested neatly on the three C’s: Crown, Capital and Clergy. It was through these vials of power that things changed. Presently, we have three new C’s: Connection, Conversation and Community. It’s a huge shift, governments, religions and money still have huge clout but the barricades are being removed, playing fields leveled and access to all areas, no matter your position, becoming the norm.

There seems to be a huge helping of unchartered territory these days. Yet its a paradox. It can be overwhelming, scary and daunting, yet at the same time, it can be exciting, natural and amazing. We won’t need the state, church and lots of capital to make things happen in the future, just being connected, having conversations of affinity and being engaged in a community that inspires will suffice. All delivered by a mobile device in our pocket or under our arm that enables real life experiences (IRL.)

The idea, “an audience is gathered to listen; a community gathers to contribute.” clanged like a pot in the sink. Benjamin Ellis’ post a few days ago did more than land a side swipe to the head, it revealed a development around social media that demands further exploration, in fact, deep excavation. After much thought the model seems so obvious, but the most obvious things in our lives are often the most important!

There is no audience versus community, the two should co-exist. As the online world becomes an equal contributor to a brands profile, equity and commerce, we have the opportunity to build significant numbers of people around the hub of our offering. Then there is the challenge of managing, influencing and engaging with those numbers. Perhaps by segmenting the followers, fans and friends via audience and community, a way can be found to manage Kevin Kelly’s theory number of a 1000 and Dunbar’s 150?

As Chris Brogan has said “Audiences are those folks who gather to hear what you have to say. But that’s not a community.” Not everyone around you will want to be part of the community you create, most will just want to be a spectator. People who are amongst the audience may want different content, communication and conversation. There is some explicit dissimilarity. I offer the following as a start:

Characteristically, the difference between an audience and a community is the level of engagement. You can be in the audience around a brand or want to take a more active part in its community. For example, I’m a great fan of Adele, I’ll go to her concerts enthusiastically as part of the audience but I’m not that bothered about being part of her community. Likewise, I’m a participant in the media140 community and certainly not just a part of the audience, although I once was. We all have similar stories.

There are common features amongst the two. Such as both serve human emotional needs and both are knitted together by communication and conversation. The pair demand some degree of interaction whether it be purchasing or contributing. However, every organisation needs to know the difference.

As online and social evolves, as it challenges the nature of how we communicate with the people around our brand, we need to consider what to provide our audience with and what our distinct community actually needs. Is you’re social/marketing strategy built for an audience or a community or both? Whatever you’re approach each needs a different offering, set of guidelines and perhaps even communication and conversation.

You can build very interesting models around this concept delivering customised content and solutions. But perhaps a word of caution from Clay Shirky “You cannot simply transform an audience into a community with technology, because they assume very different relationships between the sender and receiver of messages.”

If I were to make any prediction in 2011, it would be this; that how ‘social’ has affected marketing will be small in comparison with how it will change leadership behaviour. Its impact will be far more reaching. With social media, we have just had to change how marketing, sales and customer service departments and executives work. With social leadership, it will mean every department and every employee changing how they behave, lead and spend time with each other.

This all leads to leadership being less about the product the brand is delivering and more about what the people in and around the brand are liberating. The future of leadership is very much around the interdependent model alluded to earlier. As we cross into this new world of web 3.0, sharing, collaboration instead of competition, co creation and connection, its easy to see the demands the leaders of the future will need to deal with. Harvard Business School’s Linda Hill has interestingly talked about “leading from behind,” a phrase she borrowed from Nelson Mandela. In 2009 Gaurav Mishra proposed a Social Media Framework centred on what we will need to lead and manage in the future:

Content – customers become creators as do employees

Collaboration – refers to the idea that social media facilitates the aggregation of small individual actions into meaningful collective results. Collective action goes one step further and uses online engagement to initiate meaningful action. Collective action can take the form of signing online petitions, fundraising, tele-calling, or organizing an offline protest or event.

Community – Most people understand that a community that has a large number of members (size) who have strong relationships and frequent interactions with each other (strength) is better than a community that doesn’t. However, a community is more than the sum total of its members and their relationships.

People don’t build relationships with each other in a vacuum. A vibrant community is built around a social object that is meaningful for its members. The social object can be a person, a place, a thing or an idea.

Collective Intelligence – refers to the idea that the social web enables us to not only aggregate individual actions, but also run sophisticated algorithms on them and extract meaning from them. The great thing about collective intelligence is that it becomes easier to extract meaning from a community as the size and strength of the community grow. If the collective intelligence is then shared back with the community, the members find more value in the community, and the community grows even more, leading to a virtuous cycle.

I submit that leaders of the future no matter what product or service they offer, what geographical location or industry or sector, are going to need to have in depth, responsive and critical skills in enabling and facilitating its employees and customers to ‘bang their heads together’ on a regular basis. This does not mean forgetting about past leadership skills. Making decisions, problem solving, constant innovation is still critical. The way in which we arrive at those destinations, however, may have changed. Peter Drucker’s thinking is full of contradiction but he did say “Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done.” He also added “A manager is responsible for the application and performance of knowledge.”

Future leaders will need to be sLeaders (social leaders.) They will need to have a firm grip on the reality of the four C’s highlighted earlier as they will be measured on these new performance indicators. This will all be supported by the strength of the leaders connecting and his or her ability to build solid firm, intimate relationships with people. It will mean new business models, new infrastructures, new values, new processes and a new breed of leader to deliver it. The brand has always been at the centre of any organisation, however it will increasingly be employees at the forefront of that engagement not customers.

We are encountering a shift from shunning the true human factor in business and confronting head on the acceptance that organisations must, at some point, travel down a path of social orientation. One of those dominions is that of leadership. I propose that with the exposure of social, it will be its arrival into leadership that will cause more upheaval than it has done in marketing.

If our customers and employees are demanding social experiences, social networking, social marketing, collaboration, co creation, connection, attention and a very human, intimate relationships with our organisations, our leadership style, behaviour and delivery is going to have to modify and refine itself considerably. Future leaders will not direct the work but enable and facilitate the new skills people are acquiring.

Why? Well technology is not a novelty anymore and neither is social media. The days of being a luddite have disappeared. Technology in all its forms has entered our lives and taken up a position of prominence. It is no good avoiding it and we are in trouble if we ignore it. Web 1.0 was challenging enough. Web 2.0 even more so and with the advent of Web 3.0, there will continue to be disruption in the way in which we use technology not only to be efficient but also to provide us with that competitive advantage. Adapting is not an option, understanding its impact, its role and its ability is an obligation. Not being able to talk the same language nor understand the cultural changes its is bringing about is tantamount to insanity.

The web is changing and its people that are changing it. In Web 1.0 it had 45 million users, it was read only and about owning content. Very much focused on companies via PC/Mac usage. Communication was at the forefront, it was driven by transaction and ecommerce and largely centred on directories. Bring on Web 2.0; 1 billion users, we move to read and write, sharing content through communities using a laptop, focused on content and the start of building true relationships and tagging!

Now we are entering Web 3.0 with 4 billion users (2020) through mobile/personal experiences and the entrance of the semantic web where lifestream/communities by using a mobile/tablet will allow mass connection driving niche communities through user engagement!

Web 1.0 was all about a read-only content era and static HTML websites. People preferred navigating the web through link directories of Yahoo! Websites were in their infancy and replicated the corporate brochure. Web 2.0 has been about user-generated content and the read-write web. People are consuming as well as contributing information through blogs or sites like Flickr, YouTube and Digg. The line dividing a consumer and content publisher is increasingly becoming blurred in the Web 2.0 era. Web 3.0 will be about semantic web, or the meaning of data, it is about individualism and personalization. This includes intelligent search and behavioural advertising among other things.

Price Waterhouse Coopers in their report “How Leadership Must Change To Meet The Future” regard agility, authenticity, talent and sustainability as the new leadership behaviours of the future. All of this has huge implications and leaders need to re shape how they lead. If their customers and employees are behaving differently and expecting a new approach, it is the leader that will need to adapt not the people. It will mean overturning some basic principles of management we have all been taught. Its unlearning again!

We are very delighted to announce a formal partnership with media140 . It’s the result of a number of creative meetings between the two brands to co create dynamic content, inspiring events and leading edge ideas. Andrew Gregson Founder of media140 commented “This is a really interesting time for media140, as we welcome Ann Holman into the organisation as the first of many associates, who we will be working with collectively to create new ideas and value for our global community.”

There are a number of offerings in the pipeline including the hosting of a series of lectures in London considering topics such as community, social media, social capital, innovation, individualism and leadership. The partnership is seen as a route to sharing future thinking on the socialisation of business and the impact of technology on culture.

Ann Holman who will also contribute to media140’s blog added, “We are very excited. We see this collaboration taking us down deviant streets of intrigue and curiosity that will inevitably lead to some joint discovery around the future of social.”

It’s a statement of the obvious; we are living in unprecedented times. Uncertainty, ambiguity, volatility and complexity are challenging even the most successful companies. Technology is moving faster than we, as individuals, can keep up with and it’s increasingly difficult to master anything. Bring on launch and learn in innovation, full-scale experimentation and fluid leadership roles.

We visualize quite vividly the leader as a military one. They are heroes, people we used to aspire to. Recently though, the likes of Jack Welch have been replaced by leaders like ‘Joe Bloggs’ who are more apposite in a future world. Many of the ‘great leaders’ of the past actually disempowered us. We mass conformed instead of mass created. Future leadership will depend on complex knowledge and inspired, constant innovation. May I suggest we are going to have to largely rewire how we lead? Employees performance appraisal forms will re structure to recognise the new returns on investments leaders will be seeking. Teams will be less permanent and centre on cherishing collective intelligence and making that deliverable over a sustainable period of time.

Many will say this is what companies have been designing Human Resource departments to do for years. Frankly, they have failed. Ruled by system and procedure rather than participation and engagement. They have have an identity crisis and become left behind in the rush to a world where the Internet has removed geography and which continues to rearrange its influence on culture. The one, sole leader making the decisions is currently departing, taking its last breath. Harvard Business School professor and author Bill George recently commented, “Can’t we all finally agree that the great man is dead?”

This supports the concept that in a progressively more democratized society where the workers are collectively more capable than one individual, where innovation is not dependant on geographical boundaries and we are all connected constantly to each other in huge numbers, we just do not respond nor gain inspiration from a top down approach even if its communicated in a respectful manner.

Some leadership skills will remain enduring and intact, but there is a momentous rise of a different logic. Charles J. Palus in his 2010 article “A Declaration of Interdependence” cites how companies are now shifting towards a state of interdependence. If you consider the dependent organisations in the UK, The Post Office, Local Government and Banks. They all require command and control to get things done. They rely on systems, procedures and rules. Boundaries are strict, flexibility inert. Innovation and change are slow to be achieved. And, from a brand equity stand point becoming very isolated.

Some businesses are independent. It’s an evolvement from the 1980’s and individualism. These companies are full of experienced, talented, high achievers. People experts in their field. Great for a world about to reward people with niche skills. However, it is still about the individual being king.

Our recognition that we are not independent but interdependent is a huge step. Today everyone is and can be connected in economics, technology, culture and people. This new reality challenges the traditional principles when it comes to leadership behaviour and delivery. Interdependence is about collective intelligence and capability, collaboratively working not just across cultural boundaries but geographic ones too. Brian Solis mentions the future currency is about relationships and connection. Interdependence supports that. The net generation downwards is more akin to this style of leadership and management.

The next few blogs are going to consider the emergence of a new type of leadership that reflects the movement towards our organisations becoming more social. Seth Godin believes “Leaders have followers, managers have employees.” For now, I’m calling it ‘social leadership.’ But that may change, it’s the nature of the environment we live and work in today!