There’s no doubt that life has reached a level of speed where communication is coming at us in unprecedented and almost unmanageable volumes. Web and mobile nets give the literati and twitterati constant access to information — and the ability to create it — that we could only dream about ten years ago.

Changes that used to take generations — economic cycles, cultural shifts, mass migrations, changes in the structures of institutions — now unwind in years. Since 2000, we have experienced three economic bubbles (dotcom, property and credit), three market crashes, devastating terrorist attacks, two wars and a global influenza pandemic.

Consumer products and services (iPod, games consoles, YouTube, Twitter, blogs) that historically might have appeared once every five or more years roll out within months. In what seems like weeks, one giant industry (recorded music) has been utterly transformed, another (the 250-year-old newspaper business) is facing an uncertain future and half-a-dozen more (including magazine publishing, network television, book publishing) are desperately adapting to revolutionary changes in consumer habits.

American authors Tom Hayes and Michael Malone have called this phenomenon the “the ten-year century”: a metaphor to express the compression of events which once took place in the course of a lifetime, into the duration of a childhood. To understand how this is happening — and what it will take to cope — take a look at the underlying forces:

• Faster computing power. Moore’s Law — the doubling of semiconductor chip performance every 18-24 months has become the metronome of modern times. Yet the extraordinary changes we have seen since the invention of the transistor in 1947 are only a prelude to the emerging world of single-molecule silicon gates, nanotechnology, light switches and advanced bioinformatics (which uses information processing in molecular biology).
  

  This experimental set-up was used to show that it is possible to make a transistor that acts using laser beams, not electric currents (Image: Martin Pototschnig)

• Network amplification. Metcalfe’s Law says that networks grow in value exponentially with each new user. The biggest network in the world is the Internet and thanks to the advent of cheap, Web-enabled cellphones, the Internet is about to see a critical network expansion point: the arrival of two billion new users from the developing world, nearly tripling its size.
• Shorter decision cycles. Think about what quicker access to vast caches of information, available instantly almost anywhere, to be applied and analysed using ubiquitous and powerful processors — all with the knowledge that competitors are doing the same thing — means for business enterprise. The emerging environment is not one for reflection or hesitation. It means bold, impetuous initiatives, while banking on the fact that the information is not just complete but accurate.

Our human metabolism and ability to absorb information is not adapting at this warp speed and we as individuals, and organisations, need to plan how to simplify our processes of absorption, analysis and planning.

In our relatively small, if important, world of marketing, eminence grise Philip Kotler includes the phrase ’social process’ in his definition: “Marketing is the social process by which individuals and groups obtain what they need and want through creating and exchanging products and value with others”.

In this ’social process’, effective use of digital and social media help us, in a personal and organisational sense, with the process of information assimilation and expressing what we want and need. Social Media Marketing, in particular, helps an organisation to create and exchange value by immersing itself in the fastest moving communication medium in Internet history.

Organisations need to listen to social and other digital media (buzz monitoring), plan a response and then execute plans so that the flow of information is optimised for accessibility yet sensitive to etiquette. The key point about Social Media Marketing is that it is performed at scale to attract consumers. It works closely in combination with websites, blogs and email marketing to enhance individual relationships even at this mass scale.

In this sense, Social Media Marketing is not just the latest marketing communications fad. It represents a fundamental shift in corporate communications practice and needs to be backed-up with real change in marketing philosophy, corporate transparency and honesty. Get it wrong, go for short-term hits and the twitterati will slay you, as a number of high-profile corporations have discovered.

Social media is a very effective way for individuals, and organisations, to express what they need and want through creating and exchanging products and value. Drag your heels in this environment and it may be more than your marketing that suffers. It may be survival itself that looms large.

Tom Hayes is author of Jump Point: How Network Culture is Revolutionizing Business (McGraw-Hill 2008) and Michael Malone’s most recent book is The Future Arrived Yesterday (Crown 2009).