Emergent Business Networks

2007 was the year when Social Networks were in the news.

In 2008, the generation that grew up with social networking tools in College start coming into the workplace. The Net Generation is hitting the business world at a pretty interesting time:

* Creative distruction – normal in the technology marketplace – is hitting all knowledge intensive industries and, as Peter Drucker told us a long time a go, all industries are becoming knowledge intensive.

* Globalization – hundreds of millions of new knowledge workers and consumers joining the global workforce – raises the bar for everybody, makes competition way more intense and creates huge new opportunities.

“May you live in interesting times”.

Online Business Networking encompasses a range of tools and services, such as:

* Six degree contact managers like LinkedIn to help manage relationships
* Blogging to describe what we are thinking about
* StartPages, RSS tools and other ways to filter what we want from the stream
* Old fashioned CRM and email as they morph into this new world
* SEO, SEM and other ways to get noticed
* Databases and other push based marketing services

The one big change is the dramatic reduction in transaction cost between companies, known as Coase’s theorem. This will create a lot of disruption in the large, vertically integrated Global 2000 enterprises as they search for relevancy other than minimizing transaction cost. The reduction in transaction cost will enable a lot of new, small businesses to operate globally, working together in semi-formal networks.

I call these new networks “emergent” as their structure will emerge from lots of little interactions rather than being centrally planned.