There’s the Social Media Summit and the the Social Business Summit, the Social TV Summit, , and the Social Good Summit, but I’d like to present a different view on the Social Business Summit.

Brian Vellmure – Backpacking in the Himalayas. 2004

In 1856, buzz grew as people first began to hear that the tallest peak in the world had been identified in the remote kingdom of Tibet. Mount Everest was officially measured to be over 29,000 feet and the thought of standing on top of the world appealed to adventurers the world over. The first real (documented) attempt to climb to the peak was in 1921, with a 3rd and notable attempt by Andrew Irvine and George Mallory in 1924. Mallory’s body was not found until 1999 and Irvine’s has never been found. No one knows if they ever reached the peak, but on Britain’s 9th expedition in 1953, New Zealand’s Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reached the peak for first time, and are widely regarded as heroes. In 1978, Reinhold Messner (Italy) and Peter Habeler (Austria) made the first ascent without supplemental oxygen. The following year, Messner was the first to do the whole thing by himself. Since then, an 80 year old man, a 73 year old woman, and a 13 year old girl have all ascended and stood at the top of the world. Apa Sherpa has reached the summit an amazing 20 times.

Exploring and mapping new routes, leveraging improvements in technology and communications, training, and absorbing and applying lessons learned by thousands of pioneers before them has led to a slow and steady explosion of people across the world who can claim that they have reached the peak of the mountain formerly called Called Chomolungma in Tibet and Sagarmatha in Nepal.

In fact, during the past half century, more than 3,500 people have reached the peak, more than 10% of them have reached the peak in the last year alone. And since, climbing to the top has almost become commonplace, Valery Rozov decided to be the first to base jump (video) off Everest just a few weeks ago.

Reaching the Social Business Summit

I have no doubt, that leveraging social and collaborative technologies have a similar future for those who can understand and harness the power of digital interactions. A future of massive success, build on collaborative networks, and rapid innovation, where the lessons and experiments of the early explorers are passed on, and course corrections are made along the way. We’re currently in the equivalent of 1960′s or 1970′s on the Everest timeline from a progress perspective. Proven successes. Some best practices are emerging, but the best is still yet to come.

McKinsey & Company’s 2012 184 page study highlighted that up to $1.3 Trillion may be created by leveraging social technologies. It’s important to highlight that their research and estimates only included analysis of 4 sectors, which infers that the potential for value creation is much higher.

IBM also recently published a useful paper titled “Social Business: Patterns in achieving social business success by leading and pioneering organizations” The diagram below highlights ways that social has actually already created measurable business value.

So What’s the Problem?

You see, there are a few giant crevasses that stand in the way of most social business endeavors. Not many people want to talk about them, either because they’re still evangelizing or they’ve quit on the whole idea and labeled it ineffective nonsense.

Some data points:

(1) 77% of employees never use their enterprise social network, and only 3% use it once each day. (Forrester Research)

(2) A recent survey found that “96% of respondents indicated that there was no meaningful integration between what the company was doing externally and internally with their social collaboration platforms.” (IBM)

—> Value isn’t being realized because social and core business functions are still detached.

The towering peak of success is bright and visible in the distance, but the winds, freezing weather, and lack of oxygen still stand before us. It took 30 years and 13 attempts to for a human to successfully get to the peak of Everest and back down. Fortunately for us, innovation cycle times are short and getting shorter.

There are 3 huge crevasses to that still need to be successfully crossed for most organizations to make the a successful ascent towards the Social Business Summit.

Leadership Evolution

A large majority of today’s leaders grew up in a different era. Leadership is evolving. Contrary to what some would argue, I still believe leadership still matters, even as we progress towards a networked world increasingly being able to leverage swarm intelligence. But since the old models of organizations are not equipped to handle the rapid shifts in markets, leadership is taking on a different face altogether. The ability to find, harness, inspire, and mobilize new and existing networks to respond to rapidly evolving needs in a fluid landscape is not a core capability that exists in most of today’s leadership. If the old paradigm and understanding are deeply embedded at the top, the ladder across the crevasse won’t be built. In order for the chasm to be crossed, leadership must adapt and evolve from managing a strict command and control hierarchy to forming and managing dynamic networks of content and talent.

Cultural Transformation

Hand in hand with the evolution of leadership, most workers today have been taught to learn something and then do what they’re told to do, in a repetitive fashion. Traditional knowledge workers work in a siloed environment with a narrow scope of knowledge and contacts. The evolution towards a networked organization that is constantly learning and can sense and respond in near real time requires that a new culture of connectors and sharers be cultivated. As the research shows, if the culture of sharing and learning and connecting doesn’t exist, new capabilities will be under utilized.

Technology integration

It’s slowly becoming consensus (finally!) that in order for social or collaborative technologies to be truly meaningful, they must be tightly integrated with the existing flow of work and core business functions. Social, when most effective, is a layer that enables speed and amplification across the core functions of a business, both externally and internally. While this will mature over the next several years, organizations moving forward who can weave social technologies into the existing flow of work will experience a steeper trajectory up the mountain.

In the next post, we’ll address how to build bridges (ladders) to successfully cross the crevasses.

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet. I’ve been compensated to contribute to this program, but the opinions expressed in this post are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

Over the past several weeks, I’ve had the privilege to have hundreds of conversations with technology vendor executives, resellers and system integrators, consultants and companies of all sizes (enterprise, mid-sized, and SMBs) across a variety of industries; high tech, professional services, retail, manufacturing, financial services, biotech, etc.

The common thread is that organizations of all sizes are building and evolving in order to adapt for the next era of commerce. Smaller technology vendors are racing to build point technology solutions that are easily consumable, deployable, and integratable, while major enterprise vendors are racing to add capabilities to provide a one stop shop for business applications.

Salesforce buys ExactTarget (not Marketo)

Yesterday, Salesforce.com shared that it intends to purchase ExactTarget for $2.5 Billion. It took about 18 months longer than expected, but Salesforce finally filled a hole in its marketing cloud with marketing automation capabilities. I didn’t necessarily see ExactTarget coming as Marketo was the obvious choice to fill the hole, especially since Oracle scooped up Eloqua last December.

ExactTarget brings with it a long history in email management, and the marketing automation capabilities of Pardot, which will need to be retrenched to enable its capabilities to be leveraged by enterprise customers, following the up-market path that Salesforce has already been on for the last several years.

With ExactTarget, Salesforce picks up a company with a large install base with at least twice the revenue of Marketo and for likely less than twice the multiple of trailing twelve months revenue. In short, it was simply a better deal.

The ExactTarget install base also likely leads to more new business opportunities as their customer mix is more diversified from a CRM perspective than Marketo is. A disproportionally large percentage of Marketo customers are also Salesforce customers. Marketo CEO Phil Fernandez wrote this response to the announced ExactTarget acquisition today.

The messaging from Marketo at its recent Marketo Summit seemed to be well positioned to make a run as an independent software vendor as they began to expand their messaging from being just a marketing automation vendor towards a complete marketing platform. They now own mindshare as the leading independent marketing automation vendor, and there is certainly market opportunity to create a more robust and integrated platform for marketers to manage their activities, especially if the forecasts that the CMO will control more technology budget than CIOs actually comes true in coming years. It will be interesting to see how Marketo competes with the larger vendors and more integrated platforms.

For more on the acquisition, Craig Rosenberg has collected some great input from the community over on the funnelholic blog.

Speaking of Oracle…

In late April, I spent some time with Oracle at Oracle Analyst World and heard and observed how they are working towards integrating their entire stack of offerings. It’s a herculean effort, and they are making progress across a number of fronts.

Oracle is very uniquely positioned. They have nearly 4,000 software products and introduced more than 270 new ones during the last 4 quarters alone. They’re breadth of coverage and depth across the entire technology stack is impressive and mind blowing. Their market cap is in excess of $160 Billion.

This creates a number of challenges: The technology challenge is a large enough one. Messaging internally and to the marketplace is still clearly a work in process, and held hostage to an identity that is simultaneous beholden to a large install base of enterprise customers that are 10 years behind and cloud innovators that require agile and hyperspeed change. A massive sales force who has predominantly sold “On Premise” software is having to be retrenched to speak the language of the cloud, and product domain expertise is still undergoing a large transformation, and is likely in the midst of a multi-year effort.

As deep as Oracle’s coverage is, they’ve been on a heavy acquisition spree in emerging spaces where they want to rapidly fill emerging capabilities holes. The following applications have been acquired in recent years to fill the functional requirements in a rapidly evolving business landscape that places a higher focus on data & analytics, social, and customer experience, respectively:

• RightNow – Customer Service
• Taleo – Recruiting and Learning Mgmt
• Eloqua – Marketing Automation
• Collective Intellect, Involver, and Vitrue – Social (trying to position the collective capabilities of each of these products as the only end to end digital marketing platform. Salesforce sort of just blew that up a bit.)
• InQuira and Endeca – Knowledge Management, Big Data & Analytics

Often, as these emerging technology companies get acquired into the massive technology behemoth, talent from the acquired organizations quickly leaves. We’ve seen this with the recent departures of former RightNow CEO, Greg Gianforte, Eloqua’s CEO Joe Payne. Several folks from Endeca have also left post-acquisition. Oracle also recently lost Anthony Lye, a polished leader who was leading Oracle’s positioning as a customer experience leader. The hole left is apparent. However, conversations with folks from Involver earlier in the year indicated that the opportunity to leverage the talents and expertise of Oracle, and the opportunity to sell in to the massive and well respected client base was a dream come true.

Oracle also continues to make slow but steady progress with their Fusion applications deployments, primarily in the world of CRM and HCM, acquiring over 100 new customers last quarter, the vast majority opting for SaaS deployments.

Lithium

While Oracle races to develop and integrate an entire portfolio of offerings, other players race to develop core competencies in emergent white spaces. Lithium is one such company. At their Linc conference, Lithium highlighted customer stories of the emerging digital peer to peer economy. Lithium recently positioned themselves as leading providers of social software that powers the social customer experience. Essentially, what this means is that they help power customer community platforms that enable brands to provide savings in customer support, crowd powered innovations, digital word of mouth marketing, and in some cases, even enable new business models to be pioneered. At Linc, Lithium did a great job of highlighting customer stories like Barclay’s Ring Credit Card and Australia’s Commonwealth Bankfinancial services innovation products, as well as customer support innovations from organizations like Time Warner Cable. They also announced forthcoming innovations in data analytics and insights that enable organizations to sense, respond, and share with greater effectiveness. While Lithium executives shared that they intend to go IPO in the near future, they appear to be a good acquisition target for a certain German enterprise giant who is also racing to fill in holes in its offering.

Speaking of analytics

SAS Institute held their Global Forum in San Francisco. SAS Institute has an impressive resume. They are repeatedly mentioned as one of the top places in the world to work. They have increased their revenue for 37 consecutive years. They have a dominant market position when it comes to analytics and a customer base that would be enviable to anyone. SAS highlighted their continued foray into predictive analytics, and the capabilities they have to process huge amounts of data in record speed. By the way, they also hold top notch events. As great as SAS is, while I don’t have any hard data that I can present here, I get a sense that SAS can be disrupted by analytics vendors who can provide a cleaner, more user friendly interface that is quickly deployable.

SAP also filling in Holes

SAP announced today their intent to acquire e-commerce player Hybris, further adding to their commercial offering. SAP has a ton of innovative initiatives at present and is betting big on HANA in memory database as a unifying layer to speed transactions and access to information. SAP’s answer to the social collaboration question is SAP Jam, which is making steady progress and is being positioned not as a standalone product, but as a communication layer that intersects more common functional systems. SAP is touting 360 customer, but still has a ways to go in creating clear differentiation to the markets of which products or mix of products fits for certain use cases and scenarios.

SAP is a constant competitive target for Oracle, and has been for a long time, but I was surprised at the frequency and depth of attacks that SAP received at SuiteWorld in San Jose just a few weeks ago.

NetSuite

Rising from the Mid-Market is NetSuite, who continues its desired ascent into the enterprise. NetSuite founder Evan Goldberg left Oracle about the same time as Marc Benioff, with a fundamental belief that organizations should run their entire infrastructure in the cloud, not just their sales organization. As Salesforce continues to build their platform to meet the needs of CMOs and customer facing personnel, NetSuite continues to build an integrated platform to meet the needs of fast growing organizations.

NetSuite has a deep history working with small to mid sized enterprises and they’ve carved out a niche without many competitors. Evident at SuiteWorld 2013 was their attempt to continue to move upstream as multi-billion dollar global customers Qualcomm and Williams-Sonoma talked about how they had leveraged NetSuite to rapidly evolve their businesses in the cloud.

New partnerships with AutoDesk and CapGemini also help to add validity to their Enterprise capabilities.

The addition of greater e-commerce capabilities, improved customization and development tools, discreet manufacturing capabilities, and deeper vertical offerings will continue to make them a viable contender for both fast growing SMBs and divisions of large global enterprises.

As an 8 year NetSuite customer told me yesterday, however, “NetSuite is not necessarily best of breed at any one function. However, they are best of breed as an integrated platform to run your business on.” That’s a compelling value proposition for many organizations and is a clue why NetSuite continues to grow at a healthy pace.

In Summary

While the technology vendors were highlighted in this post, companies in all industries are trying to adapt to a new speed of business and are looking for answers on how to prepare their organizations to compete and win in an environment that is increasingly digital.

Trials and experiments are slowly paving the way for emerging best practices, but the paths to a common destination are still being defined in a race towards relevance and market leadership.

To discuss the right strategies for your organization moving forward, please drop me a note.

Disclosure: My travel expenses and conference registrations were paid for by Oracle, Marketo, NetSuite, Lithium, and SAS, respectfully. I have received no request or remuneration for this post and these are my candid views based on my research, observations, and personal experience.

This morning, Mary Meeker and Liang Wu of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers released and presented the 2013 version of the always insightful Internet Trends report.

Key takeaways:

- China and India are far ahead in most added users to the internet over the past 5 years
- China far in excess of USA internet users (564 million vs. 244 million) 2012
- China iOS + Android users surpassed USA in Q1 2013
- Mobile continuing to grow fast – largely untapped advertising market
- iOS, Android, MS controlled 5% mobile global OS market in 2005. 88% share in 2012
- Content sharing still growing exponentially
- Mobile growth ramping fast, tablets ramping up faster, wearable computing growth launching
- Typical smartphone users check phone ~150 times/day
- 60% of top 25 Tech companies founded by 1st & 2nd generation Americans
- Significant skills shortage in computer science / STEM degrees over the next decade
- Industries being re-imagined: Financial Services, Education, Healthcare, Manufacturing, Logistics, Transportation, Content, Design, etc. (Everything!)

The entire 117 slide deck is below:

While I get to see and hear about hundreds of product announcements, this one is particularly interesting. The race to leverage computing power to synthesize incredibly huge amounts of disparate data in real time to meet the needs of customer demands is the next frontier of customer relations.

Today at the IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit in Nashville, Tennessee, IBM plans to launch the Watson Engagement Advisor, aimed at helping organizations provide better customer service and product recommendations in real time at scale. The same technology that once outsmarted humans to win Jeopardy and has recently been used to diagnose cancer will now be used to help organizations sense and respond in real time.

From CNBC:

Big Blue announced five new clients working on using Watson’s cognitive computing and ability to crunch so-called big data, to help enhance service to their customers. The companies include Malaysia telecom provider Celcom, financial firms Royal Bank of Canada and ANZ Banking Group, IT services provider IHS, and the consumer research firm Nielsen.

“We’ll be exploring ways to use Watson for helping our agencies and their client brands engage more effectively with consumers across all devices—from TV to tablet to smartphone,” wrote Randall Beard, chief of Advertiser Solutions at Nielsen.

While it still seems early, this area is certainly something to watch.

Location, location, location.

The concept immediately brings back to mind college marketing classes and textbooks; clear lessons from industrial age distribution models. The focus has slowly faded away, however, over the past couple of decades with the invention and growth of a digitally connected, flat economy in which we can buy anything… from anyone… from anywhere.

Except… for most of us, where we are is actually a huge driver of what we do. Mitch Lieberman, has recently been placing more emphasis on context. For a few years now, I’ve heard and seen statements floating by my activity streams like “Content is king, but context is queen”. Robert Scoble and Shel Israel are in the process of writing about the “Age of Context”.

They’ve all picked up on the fact that we’re moving from an era of BIG, CRUDE, AND MANUAL TO SMALL, MEASURED, AND AUTOMATIC.

All of us, in our personal and professional lives, are desiring requiring more relevance, more alignment, and more accurate filters to help us navigate the bombardment of information we encounter in our daily lives.

Relevance. Context. All of a sudden, location matters again. Though, it’s contribution to customer behavior is manifesting itself in a different manner.

Even with the dramatic rise of e-commerce, most consumers still purchase from brick and mortar stores. According to a 2012 study:

Though consumers are using their mobile devices more than ever to find deals and research products, they still love their brick-and-mortar stores, a new study shows. Despite the proliferation of devices, shopping applications and growing consumer comfort with the mobile channel, the vast majority (90 percent) of both online and offline shoppers involve a store visit in many of their purchases.

Until recently, e-commerce and brick and mortar business models have been largely detached. Even for many major retailers, stock, pricing, returns were not connected. That era is giving way to a connected experience where consumers interact with brands across channels (brick and mortar, 3rd party retail, e-commerce, social), with the increased expectation of a unified experience across them all.

If I’m at the beach, please don’t send me an offer about printer cartridges. If I’m out to dinner, an offer about a local gelateria is much more likely to get opened than an email about gardening services.

A growing sea of online technology companies allow our location patterns and habits to be tracked (and hopefully used for mutually beneficial purposes).

Companies like Facebook, Foursquare, and Yelp allow users to check in, sharing with their network where they are. At the same time, they’re also sharing their information with a growing cadre of location based advertisers. By knowing which areas consumers frequent, more relevant ads can arguably be served. In addition to understanding the sum total of checkins and locations, patterns can be detected, and psychographic, sociographic, and demographic profiles can arguably be constructed to recommend offers that are relevant based on previous behavior.

Some consumers can’t be bothered with checking in, however. It takes time, effort, and giving away information to “big brother in the sky” isn’t all that appealing to most people, especially when there’s limited value in return.

Other emerging startups like PlaceMe, Banjo, Sonar, Friday, and Highlight automatically tracks your whereabouts and the whereabouts of others near you, offering serendipitous and/or more targeted “people discovery” opportunities.

But, without opting in or participating in any of the above, those little smartphones in our pockets are already tracking and providing plenty of information to the mobile platform vendors and application providers.

This controversial 2010 Wall Street Journal article highlighting an interview with Google’s Eric Schmidt provides clues related to role location plays in the future of context, commerce, and marketing.

“I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions,” he elaborates. “They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.”

Let’s say you’re walking down the street. Because of the info Google has collected about you, “we know roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are.” Google also knows, to within a foot, where you are. Mr. Schmidt leaves it to a listener to imagine the possibilities: If you need milk and there’s a place nearby to get milk, Google will remind you to get milk. It will tell you a store ahead has a collection of horse-racing posters, that a 19th-century murder you’ve been reading about took place on the next block.

Merging location data with transaction data

Until now, the emerging benefit and value of location data has struggled to find it’s legs in a meaningful way. However, when I was offered a discount on a purchase from American Express last year if I connected my AMEX account to my foursquare account, I immediately saw the benefit for AMEX. They already know what I spend money on. If they also know where I go, they can find all sorts of things out about me.

• What % of my spending do I put on my AMEX card?
• By merging transaction, demographic, and geogrpahic behavior patterns, they can begin to construct a psycho-graphic and/or deeper socio-graphic profile of me
• By understanding who I am connected to and/or communicating with, they can potentially begin to understand purchasing behaviors within my network
• Finally: the unknown. Like many emerging big data initiatives, finding unforeseen patterns in data models can provide new unforeseen opportunities.

Even without real time location data, merging data collected from the digital realm with other data sets presents new opportunities for contextual marketing. From AllThingsD:

Ticketmaster is doing all the normal stuff you’d expect to help users share with each other when they buy tickets to events. But it’s also the only partner that I saw mashing up multiple Open Graph applications.
If you listen to music on an Open Graph application like Spotify, Ticketmaster automatically detects (with your permission) and tells you when those artists are next playing in your town. Usually these apps depend on which artists you “Like” or explicitly follow. It seems smart to use real, dynamic listening data to figure this out.

VinTank is working on a technology that indexes preferences and buying behavior of premium wine lovers, sends alerts to wineries in Napa Valley when a potential fit for their products are nearby, allowing them to send a message or offer that should offer high appeal for that person.

However, Jack Dorsey’s Square, which is in the process of disrupting the world’s commerce payment systems, is approaching location based marketing from the opposite end of the spectrum, and thinks they’ll actually be able to make location more useful. While many first generation location apps vendors know where you are and perhaps what you’ve done, they typically don’t have any data on what you purchased. It’s the merging of location, transaction, and social data that some might describe as the next holy grail. Creating a recommendation engine based on financial transactions, and using location as a contextual filter for commercial transactions holds significant promise.

Deeper customer understanding at the center

At the center of customer focused innovation is understanding your customers better.Understanding where people go, and what they buy when they’re there will be a significant input for next generation commerce.

The data being collected by the payment gateways (Mastercard, Visa, American Express, Square, PayPal, GoPayment) is arguably more valuable than the transaction fees they are collecting. More intelligence is being built in to the purchase and sales cycles, respectively, and at the center of both sides are recommendation engines. Consumers are coming to expect Amazon.com-like suggestions that make their life easier and shorten the investment of discovery and analysis.

Understanding transactional and behavioral patterns and merging them together will arguably allow marketers to offer more precise offers and interactions based on a deeper understanding of their customer’s current context.

• How is your organization leveraging location data?
• What are the primary barriers you see?
• How will privacy issues come in to play as technology advances?

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet. I’ve been compensated to contribute to this program, but the opinions expressed in this post are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

Seth Godin does a phenomenal job of providing insights. Below is something he wrote that I wish I did, but I’ll be saving this and committing it to memory. In many ways, it’s marketing 101, but the clarity with which it’s presented is something every marketer can benefit from

From Seth’s Blog:

The best approach is to not try to write things that will go viral.

No, the best approach is to write for just one person. Make an impact on just one person. Even better, make it so they can’t sleep that night unless they choose to make a difference for just one other person by sharing your message with them.

The rest will take care of itself.

I’ll never forget meeting some people in a remote village of Laos (Southeast Asia) a few years ago. The village had no electricity. Not only was it a journey across culture and geography, but a journey back in time. Our translator helped us to ask about how they lived. They told us how they farmed, harvested, dried, and prepared rice manually. They made fishing nets with their hands, and fished with their handmade fishing poles from their hand made boats as they rose and slept along with the sun. We finally asked if they had any questions for us and there were just blank stares. It struck me as odd. There were no questions.

Were they shy, embarrassed, indifferent? Was it a cultural thing that I wasn’t aware of? Here we were, with skin colors, and eye colors that had rarely been seen, from a land on the other side of the planet (which may have well been on the other side of the Universe), with clothes and technology and language that was largely unfamiliar, and there were no questions!

The era of asking great questions

We’ve known for centuries that asking great questions (and finding the answers) is core component of innovation. Entire fields like physics and psychology have been developed because people started asking questions that needed to be answered. That’s nothing new and there’s plenty that’s been written about the importance of asking great questions.

But, we’ve never before been able to ask and answer questions as fast as we can today.

• What is my friend in India doing right now?
• Who do my friends know that I know?
• What the best selling widget is in a category I’ve never heard of until today?
• How long it will take me to get from any address in the United States to the Rapid City Regional airport based on current traffic conditions?
• Who currently lives in San Francisco that is from Laguna Beach?

Here’s a partial answer that I found to that last question via facebook in about 10 seconds:

We’re all being faced with an increasing array of new problems to solve on a path that hasn’t necessarily been traveled before. Google helps me get up to speed in minutes on words and concepts I’ve never even heard of before. Problem solving is a central competency of today’s knowledge workers.

New landscape. New questions.

What’s interesting is that discovering the answers to age old secrets isn’t the only new frontier that’s opening. As technology advances, new uses are being invented on the fly by the marketplace. Never before have customers had the capability to be standing in a store, holding a product, and checking prices offered by that same store and a million others online in real time, while instantaneously getting feedback from friends and hundreds of strangers at the same time.

Simultaneously, product and service vendors have unprecedented access to watch prospects and customers interact with products, media properties, and people, en masse, in real time.

Job requirements and roles continue to evolve, at a faster pace. We all face this and organizations of all types and sizes are racing to keep up. But solving the problems you’re faced with reactively, and identifying new opportunities by creatively thinking about what could be is perhaps even more important, and more rare.

Asking new, creative, and unique questions is the key to unlocking new value for your organization. As markets shift and evolve and a new landscape comes into view, those that are asking the best questions have the opportunity to find the best answers.

Since answers to the questions of yesteryear can now often be answered in seconds, perhaps it’s time to ask a new set of questions. Questions that would have been impossible to answer or preposterous to ask just a decade ago.

• Can cells heal themselves?
• Can machines create new products by themselves?
• What happens if the world moves away from a fiat banking system?
• What patterns exist across domains that we thought were previously disconnected?

Why do we make enough food to give everyone on the planet 2,617 calories a day, but almost a billion people are hungry right now? Why can’t we change that?

The rapidly growing fields of Nanotechnology, bioinformatics, neuromedicine, augmented reality; None of these would be possible if someone wasn’t asking great questions.

What’s your most preposterous question?

What’s the most preposterous question you’d like to ask, but have never dared to ask it? Perhaps when you type in the comments below, it will be the first time you’ve ever thought to ask. Ask it, and then let’s sort out the answers together.

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet. I’ve been compensated to contribute to this program, but the opinions expressed in this post are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

Not too long ago, I was having a casual but meaningful digital conversation with a couple of gentlemen that I respect. They both have large networks, good street cred, and active digital profiles.

I asked the question: “Who are the top 3 people you respect in “the space”?

The response from one was thoughtful and quick. 3 names with brief reasons why.  I benefited as relational capital and intelligence were quickly transferred. It was one interaction in a regular stream of sharing between us. I quickly found each of the mentioned names online.  None of them have high digital influence scores, nor significantly active social profiles or presences. However, I began following them and evaluating some of the work and comments of theirs that was able to find.

Quickly I recognized that this was influence in action. Someone I knew, respected, and trusted had given me a gift, pointed me in a new direction, and even though in just a very small way, had changed my behavior for a few minutes, and perhaps my scope of view and thinking for a longer period of time.

What I also recognized that this interaction was not visible to any of today’s “influence ranking” systems like Klout, PeerIndex, Kred, or the recently released Little Bird.

I shared this observation with my two friends and asked “Will we ever have the technology to connect the dots between what just happened and true influence?”  My other colleague quickly replied “when our neurons are connected to the net”.

But will we need to wait that long?

• Are the reputation systems of today void of any value at all?
• What if I don’t want everything I do and everyone I know to be available for consumption and analysis?
• If I opt out, will I essentially be opting out of future society?

The concept introduces a whole slew of new considerations, opportunities, and privacy and transparency concerns.

Om Malik riffs in a recent post:

At present we rank photos, rate restaurants, like or dislike brands, retweet things we love. But if this idea of collaborative consumption takes hold — and I have no reason to think it won’t — we will be building a quantified society. We will be ranking real humans. The freelance workers — like the Uber drivers and Postmates couriers — are getting quantified. The best ones will continue to do well, but what about the others, the victims of this data darwinism? Do they have any protection or any rights?

We continue to leverage machines to help us to our jobs better. We continue to teach them more and more – how to reason and think like a human. The traditional response is that it can never be done. But IBM Watson‘s jeopardy perhaps requires us to take a deeper look and do a closer analysis. It is predicted that in just a few years, the processing power of IBM Watson will be contained in the size of a smartphone. We can and likely will have a super human intelligent friend with us.  What is worthy of world wide fame and media coverage today may arguably be just part of human existence in just a few years. We’ve seen this pattern continually reinforce itself repeatedly over shorter and shorter time horizons over the last few decades.

Some will quickly reply that Watson is capable of finding facts, but the things that make us uniquely human, namely emotions;  Being funny, being sexy, being loving, these are very complicated and intelligent behaviors may forever be separated from the realm of machines.

It’s a reasonable argument and one I currently subscribe to, but there is a dissenting argument that perhaps emotions are simply the highest form of humanity, may also be able to be taught and learned by machines.  In fact, Ray Kurzweil predicts that in less than 20 years, computers will be capable and will perhaps surpass a full range of human capabilities.

This computer is thousands of times more powerful than the computer I used as a student, and it’s 100,000 times smaller. In 25 years, it will be a billion times more powerful in price performance, a billion times more powerful per dollar, and 100,000 times smaller.

It’ll be the size of a blood cell. They’ll be going through our body and keeping us healthy from the inside.

Not as futuristic as it sounds. People have already been doing that in animal models. There are people walking around with computers attached to their brains, like Parkinson’s patients, the latest generation of which allows you to download new software to the computer that’s connected into your brain from outside the patient. Right now that requires surgery because it’s pea-sized. But it will be blood-cell-size in 25 years, and we will be able to introduce it noninvasively.

We’re collectively on a unprecedented journey that surely holds unprecedented disruption and opportunity for individuals and organizations alike. We’re about to witness the next experiment be unleashed as Google Glass begins shipping to early adopters in the coming weeks. If you haven’t seen it, the video below provides a 2 minute preview of what’s possible today along the road to deeper human and technology integration.

• What will these changes mean for your personal life?
• What new opportunities are being unlocked for your organization?
• How can you leverage the deeper integration between technology and humans to understand your customers better and deliver superior experiences for them?
• What are the biggest barriers to leveraging these new technologies, internally and for your customer base?

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