As it turns out, there is something called the Dunbar’s number, 150, which according to Wikipedia “is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships.” This has come out of hundreds of years of communities developing and growing. Once they reach around 150, they need to split off and form new ones. This principle has been applied to many different areas of business, including organizational design and company growth patterns. Companies like Intel and Microsoft  have taken this to heart, which explains how their corporate campuses consist of many small buildings rather than huge single monoliths.
Enter Scoble’s Number. It is a new way of looking at social interactions. Instead of the focus on “stable social relationships” it is more about setting up types of relationships and having different levels of engagement and expectations for each. This dramatically expands the absolute number of people you potentially communicate with. So, unless you allocate more time to maintaining your network, this setup reduces the amount of interaction you have with each of them — something has got to give.

Perhaps this is the way forward; segment the type of connections you have and maintain a larger set of weaker connections for a diversity of opinion. As social networks continue to expand, this may well be the future. [Update: Check out David Armano’s recent thoughts on social becoming “to look less social.”

There’s nothing new about syndication. It’s been around for decades, notably in newsmedia and TV. Then the web came around and RSS made it really easy to syndicate just about any piece of content you could think of. But what about syndicating experiences? Is that something that can be done?

Yesterday, Facebook announced that it would open up its status stream to developers. This has a number of implications for how we experience brands. It means we can experience Facebook in ways that Facebook didn’t originally intend but more importantly, it cedes control of the consumption of content from facebook.com to myriad other sites. It’s sort of like RSS for Facebook updates.

While many will say this is a move to better compete with Twitter and it’s very extensible API, this is a win for developers who want to take advantage of the rich data available through Facebook. While this approach has already been somewhat legitimized by RSS years ago with everything now becoming available in feed-form, with Facebook we’re now talking about protected content. How much of this protected content that gets included in the stream isn’t clear.

For a while, I’ve been advocating that e-business is about engaging with customers wherever they live. Facebook knows that it doesn’t want to be a destination, it wants to be a service — a service that can live everywhere, and one that follows customers wherever they wish to spend time. This is an example of “social functionality” as described in Jeremiah Owyang’s “The Future of the Social Web.”

Facebook may end up losing ad revenue because their content is being consumed outside of the site, and presumably with or without ads. But to me, the benefits could outweigh any drawbacks. Benefits include:

• Scale: Opening up the stream gives Facebook content an infinite number of venues to come to life in without having to build the infrastructure; you rely on others to build it.
• Ubiquity: You’ll now be able to get Facebook streams anywhere there’s an internet connection and a screen.
• Extensibility: Developers can slice/dice the content in ways that were not previously available.

(We’re also going to have a whole set of new metrics too, but let’s save that for another post.)

I’ll be keeping my eye out on how creative developers get with the Facebook stream. Something tells me we may be learning more about our friends in ways we hadn’t previously imagined.

A recent post on Mashable got me wondering about the effect of diluting proprietary intellectual property when it’s shared through social networks, Twitter and the like. It used to be that quality of original thought determined whether or not you were making a valuable contribution, particularly in academia. This was valued above all else – and it generally still is – but today, what you decide to share and what idea you encourage through reposting, linking, retweeting and such, is another facet of value. Shifting from being strictly content creators to being content curators and sharers as well is a new responsibility that falls in our laps.

The question now is, what goes into determining the quality of what you share? I would say it involves the following:

Timeliness: Spread content that is fresh in people’s minds. It doesn’t need to be minutes after it happens, but do try to share it if it’s made the news or has reached critical mass on blogs/Twitter. A week after it hits the web is probably too late for anyone to care about.

Quality: Try to do a bit of due diligence before randomly re-tweeting or passing along blog posts. It behooves you to at least read to what’s being linked to if only to see if the link still works. Making sure it’s “safe for work” is also part of good sharing etiquette. Unless of course, you want to punk your audience.

Frequency: Regular posting is also important. Aim to share something good once/day for a couple of reasons. First, it keeps you in the minds of others, but also because it becomes habitual for you. If you’re on the web enough, there should be no shortage of valuable content to share and the hard part is actually editing it down to the few impactful items.

Relevance: Please, please, please describe why someone should be clicking on a link to a piece of content be it a blog post, news article, image or video. A dozen or so words to contextualize something will often save a lot of time and frustration.

There are probably more criteria I could add, but let’s use these for starters.

Enough already!

When are we going to just drop the “Digital” and call them what they really are? It’s easy to think this is a minor point, but qualifying something as “digital” is old-school, traditional thinking. No wonder companies have such a hard time becoming digital. This is not a new topic by any stretch and it’s generally created by the incumbent as a way to distinguish the traditionally accepted way of doing things with potentially new and disruptive methods. It’s a subtle change, but an important one because in some ways, de-legitimizes the new way of doing things and forces the new to prove its worth. Fair enough.

In the “Innovator’s Dilemma,” we learned how disruptive innovation often starts off as an low-performance substitute for the incumbent technology. No one believes in it initially, but then after a few key iterations, it takes off and takes over as the dominant technology.

This theory has played out over and over again in nearly every industry from steel mills (b-school case studies galore) to telecom to photography. It is only a matter of time before we see this happening to digital and social marketing. As the tools to connect brands to customers and to other customers get better, more reliable and trustworthy, the more we will see a shift away from traditional means. If we apply social marketing to the graph above, I would say we’re still at the beginning part of the trajectory.

Those who are in traditional industries, like TV, need to adapt rapidly and learn to use the new technology to become relevant to their audiences. Take new Late Night talk show host, Jimmy Fallon. As an avid tech guy, he has made use of Twitter to generate a following of nearly 300,000 people whom he can directly engage with. He invited Engadget editor Joshua Topolsky on and Digg founder Kevin Rose. (The guy is clearly in touch with the digerati.) He asked his Twitter followers for questions to ask Cameron Diaz. He has even used it to help generate enthusiasm for his show, but even members of his audience. The other day, he picked a random guest — Bryan Brinkman –  and asked his Twitter followers to follow Bryan on Twitter. Within a day, he went about 30 to over 20,000 followers. This is how to use social tools to connect with your customers. Those who get it have already hit the ground running and are ahead of the curve and are betting their futures on digital.

So, what does this mean for businesses? Even though it’s been over a dozen years since the web started taking off, it confounds me that web and digital marketing accounts for a small percentage of overall marketing budgets. At some large Fortune 500 companies, I’ve seen them allocate less than 10% of their budget on digital; the cost of creating and running a commercial can often buy them an entire years’ worth of digital marketing effort. Despite this, I’m not particularly concerned because it’s still early days and digital and social marketing will eventually take over as the dominant and become the incumbent way of marketing. At that point, they will simply be referred to as “marketing.” Period. That is, until another technology comes around to once again, disrupt the value chain and take over as the legitimate incumbent. You can bet that the smart money is already on it.