The Future of Social Media and CRM May Not Be What You Expected — SMC Seattle February Event Recap
by Jaremy Rich
If someone were to ask you what social media, CRM and online relationships would be like in ten years, how would you respond? How about five years? Well, at SMC Seattle’s February 2010 event, Adam Sarner, research director at Gartner, offered up a few predictions:
2011: More than 2 billion people will have gone online (some estimate more).
2015: 2% of people in the U.S. will be married to people they will never meet in person.
2020: A city will elect an anonymous persona for mayor.
It’s not Personal, it’s Persona
The future of social media and customer relationship management (CRM) is built around anonymous virtual personas, says Sarner. So much so, that by 2020, that marketing and sales of products for virtual personas will outweigh traditional B2C spending. What will that future look like? Think fragmented. Whereas we currently see many social media professionals currently try to aggregate their profiles and keep a common persona, Sarner argues that the general population will have increasingly fragmented personas (ex: one for Second Life, one for parenting, one for Amazon, etc). He believes that companies will move more towards selling to the persona, rather than the person.
During his talk, Gartner’s director of research pointed out that the meritocratic atmosphere of the internet helps fuel an optimal environment to satisfy Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs. As we continue to utilize the internet, Sarner believes it will be more and more important to seek self-actualization, and the beauty of the internet is that it can fulfill any human need from physiological (food, water, breathing) to self-actualization (creativity, problem solving, personal growth).
Sarner claims that we have gone from an era (Web 1.0) of fulfilling the most basic human needs (eCommerce) to an era (Web 2.0) of fulfilling our needs for esteem and belonging (personal/social voice – e.g. social media). He stated that we will not be able to complete the top of the Maslow pyramid (self-actualization) until we move to a more virtual world based entirely on personas.
The Personabot
As we move forward to fill these needs in the future, Sarner raised his most controversial prediction: the idea of “Personabots”, calling them “the killer application for Generation V[irtual]“. Personabots would work to fulfill some of the most basic physiological necessities, and human needs at the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid, while managing the most mundane social media tasks and the ever-increasing amounts of data that we’ll consume.
So what exactly is the Personabot?
“The Personabot is an automated, personality infused, self-learning, self-replicating, virtual representative that will be used as a tool for facilitating life events, from tactical to the strategic.”
-Adam Sarner
Got it? Well, imagine a world where you could set up a Personabot to set up bids for you on eBay based on your personal preferences and ideas. Imagine a world where your Personabot shops for what you need at the store automatically depending on a budget and your needs at home. Imagine a world where a Personabot goes to a hundred job interviews for you, and comes back to tell you which ones are the best fit for you.
These are all ideas in the realm of possibility for the Personabot, says Gartner’s director of research. In fact, during the Q&A afterwards, Chris Pirillo referenced a website that is already doing something similar to the idea of a Personabot called Alice; a service that manages the stock of products in your home so that you “never run out of toilet paper again”. Even still, a life ruled by sentient robots created by our preferences handling a multitude of our tasks seems far away.
Sarner answered a handful of thoughtful questions at the end of the talk, ranging from how the Personabot would truly work, to how people will be able to manage multiple virtual personas. Few topics are better at sparking provocative debate than bold predictions and prognostications of the future. This was no exception.
Only time will tell what the future will be like. At last night’s SMC Seattle event, Gartner’s Adam Sarner raised a number of bold possibilities and ideas. Though the social media world may never be like what Sarner describes, there are many aspects that we can analyze and embrace, and some probing questions we can ask ourselves about what lies ten years away. Just think: just ten years ago, the term “social media” didn’t even exist, and neither did Youtube, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. What do you think the future of social media and CRM holds ten years from now?
Jaremy Rich is the curator of Seattle [Startup Digest] and the creator of heart it hate it.
This does sound provocative … and although I missed the event last night, I’ll take the bait now.
I can imagine that Linden Labs (producer of Second Life) or Blizzard Entertainment (producer of World of Warcraft) may be open to interviewing Personabots, and I can even imagine that a slightly broader range of employers may have a preference for WoW guild masters over lower-level WoW players (or non-players), but I believe even they will still want to interview physical persons rather than digital personas.
The claim that the Internet will fulfill our physiological needs seems especially dubious to me. Personas might thrive on virtual food and a virtual home in Second Life, but persons still need physical food and a physical house. The Internet can connect us with sources of food and housing, but it cannot fully satisfy those needs.
I interpret actualization as an ultimate mode of integration. Maslow describes it as “the desire to become more and more what one is”. I interpret Sarner’s prediction of increasingly fragmented personas as disintegration (or, at least, disunity).
If anything, with the growing popularity of Facebook pages and Twitter handles, not to mention RSS and aggregation, I believe social media is helping physical persons reach a state of convergence with our digital personas or identities, rather than promoting increasing divergence and multiplicity.
Finally, while I believe that social media can promote posturing in the short term, over time, it tends to reveal more of the real person behind the persona, increasingly approaching the much-heralded age of authenticity and radical transparency.
Joe, I absolutely agree with your points on fulfilling physiological needs and convergence of digital personas. With regards to Sarner’s belief of fragmented personas, it should be noted that he expects there to be a colossal privacy SNAFU within the next few years. I think his thought is that we will have multiple profiles for 2 main reasons. 1: We each have different ‘faces’ that we put on for different people (one face at the PTA, one with friends, one at a concert), and that those personalities will show through on the internet; and 2: If there’s ever a huge breach in privacy, it may cause people to become more wary about what information they share with certain companies.
I think Sarner’s idea of a Personabot for jobs is very interesting. It absolutely will never happen in the near term, but FWIW, more and more hiring managers and recruiters are reviewing resumes electronically rather than reading them. If there was a way to optimize more of the interview process electronically in order to save personnel hours, I wouldn’t be surprised if HR departments took advantage. Still, we’re talking a long, long way out.
Thanks for the comment, Joe. Sorry you couldn’t make it to the event!
When I first read this I was thinking, “Did he just base the future on the SyFy TV show Caprica?”. This is how Cylons take over the earth.
The idea of “personas for different purposes” already exists. How long have we indulged in things we wouldn’t want to bring up in a PTA meeting or possibly to your own parents?
We have lived in a world of personas (screen names) since the inception of the web. I think the direction we are heading in is just the opposite of what Sarner suggests – there will be more visibility. Look at the web in its beginnings. You would never share your first let alone you last name, address, phone number etc… MySpace, while a pioneer for web 2.0, played in that realm, create a profile with a username, not your own – now look at LinkedIn and Facebook. We are creating visibility by saying “I have a name, I have a job, I have a partner, this is the city I live in, the bars I love… and I want to share this with you.”
We will always have “personas” whether in bot form or fulfilling a fantasy. I personally do not think we will become so disconnected from each other that we won’t want to leave our homes to go on a first date. Maybe one day that will be “old fashioned” but I doubt it. Just my $0.02.
P-
The best tangible future scenario for a “bot” would be… getting into a vehicle and saying: “Take me to a good Italian restaurant I’ve never been to before.” The car would know what your definition of “good” is, where haven’t been yet, your distance preferences, etc. Moreover, it would drive you there. It’s a good mix of serendipity (your ad hoc choices) and your preferences.
Chris- I like that idea. I think ideally that’s what a service like Last.fm does with its technology for listeners – takes your preferences and past listening history (since you can log music you’ve played through iTunes/WMP) and goes “this is something awesome you’ve never listened to before that you’ll really like. It’s getting there, but the step from that to what you’re describing is still another huge leap. I’m still waiting for society to all be driven Minority Report-style by total automation.
I have already started making a digital persona – I have converted The Art of War by Sun Tzu into a digital persona. The current means to replicate yourself into data, and then incorporate ‘thinking’ and getting it to fetch and evaluate goals on the internet AND make sure you don’t run out of toilet paper at home – that is a long way way.
However, many people are starting. I predict in a few years I can make an adequate digital personas of you (that can answer interview style questions) for about $5k.
Also remember that creating your own personabot will be a lot more difficult than filling out your Facebook profile.
I wasn’t able to get tickets to the event, so I appreciate your recap, Jaremy.
The crux of Sarner’s presentation is a bit out there for me, but it certainly raises some interesting questions. I’m with Joe and Phillip on this one. The average user is drawn to social media sites because they give him an outlet for sharing pieces of information about himself, learning about his friends and connecting with new persons, NOT watered-down virtual personas.
People clearly value the genuine interaction that social media allows, and that’s tough to replicate.
We use the Customer relationship management 4.0 sample data for demos. Have you thought about making your examples consistent with that data?