Social media seems like a fairly self-sufficient activity - it's all about changing the way companies communicate, right? How they engage?
I doubt this is a sufficient definition. In fact most of us in social media lack some of the knowledge we need to understand how business is really changing. The wider world of innovation and transformation is moving as fast as social, and indeed enables it.
To help raise the wider issues of innovation I had help from Mashery, the API management and strategy company.
At the F.ounders conference at the end of last year I got talking to CEO Oren Michels about how we could better explain the importance of APIs - the obvious answer is just use the word APP but still we need to convey the enormity of change that comes with the API revolution.
Mashery produced the infographic below in a kind of visual interview we've been doing over the past month. In this interview we've been refining what we could show rather than looking for quotes from Oren. It's our contribution to social media week.
APIs are one of those concepts, full of technical mystery, that deter the wider marketing community from really grasping the opportunities in front of them.
Lately the language of APIs, though, has been replaced by the language of APPS, and suddenly marketers are more comfortable contemplating an apps-based, hyper-channel future.
APIs fundamentally enable social activity. Expedia's new API strategy for example transformed its affiliate network into a developer network that is more deeply engaged with micro-markets than it could ever have been under an old affiliate model.
But that still leaves the question of scale - how big is the opportunity and what examples might you follow?
To get an overview you can read Dan Woods' book on APIs and strategy .
But to get a quick view take a look at the infographic. It shows the profound difference that APIs are making to the marketing of products like Expedia.
The future belongs to companies that can address many, many fragments of the marketplace, companies that get take advantage of the move to a hyper-channel future, one where markets become more and more granular and are addressed by micro-market apps.
This is illustrated in the hyper-channel graphic below:
All data comes from Mashery's Business of API's conference.
