The Many-To-Many Problem

Rachel Happe posted on Scaling Relationships tonight, characteristically insightful and including this gem:

Social media tools have enabled better individual scalability.  So that helps in the one-to-many situations – an executive communicating with employees, an account manager sharing information with customer contacts, marketing communicating with a customer base.

But how do you scale many-to-many where all parties are communicating at the same time? Communities and social networks are part of the answer – but how do you keep individuals from going off deck with a small subgroup?

It reminded me of a similar lament voiced by Bernard Lunn at ReadWriteWeb just yesterday, where after a long critique of the current generation of CRM systems he observed:

Lots of Web 2.0 services did great with minimalism. Twitter is the most obvious example. Basecamp is great because it doesn’t try to do too much. Google’s apps are loosely coupled, with no attempt at lock-in.

But this comes at a price. We have to be able to move between systems. We have to sync and transfer. All of that takes time, and time is the one commodity we cannot create more of.

So, they need to be integrated. But also simple. And mobile-native. I should be able to access my contact graph seamlessly. Have I seen this perfect tool yet? No. But like great art, I will know it when I see it.

Hmmmm.

I think Rachel’s system and Bernard’s system are the same system. It boils down to enabling the people distributed within an enterprise to coordinate their communication with the people distributed outside of it. The network of each participant enriches – and is enriched by – participation in the collective whole. It is cloud-based, idiot-proof, transparent, device-agnostic, and has as a core asset a kind of universal adapter that enables seamless interaction through whatever established social network each participant wishes to use at any given time in any given place.

It creates a kind of social inter-network as a tangible, manageable, productive asset of the enterprise at it’s core. It grows and evolves with the organization, returning “interest” on the social equity each person contributes.

Is that what we need? Is that just another way to articulate the unrealizable promise of OpenSocial, or the Internet itself? Or is there a product in there that wakes the product managers at Salesforce.com and Microsoft Exchange sweaty and screaming in the darkness?

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