Punctuated Equilibrium and the Next Web Thing.

People that I respect have been pushing on the topic of transparency for a while now. The point being that interaction, status updating, etc., will eventually be platform-independent. Perhaps a better way of saying it is that (per Justin Kistner’s notion) everyone will be a platform unto themselves: sending status updates, sharing links, and blogging/shopping/living within their own portable domain.

It’s my belief that social media is following an evolutionary model similar to punctuated equilibrium (species remain fairly constant, with sudden moments of mass speciation, where diversity takes center stage and a large number of new species emerge). I think we just posted one such “punctuation mark” and that we’ll see some stability in the way consumers adapt to, and adopt, new modes of communication. However, unlike the biological model, I think the timeframe between speciation events is pretty condensed; in other words, all of this will be old news by mid-2010.

With an extreme rate of change comes both opportunities and pitfalls for anyone hewing too close to a single platform for collaboration. My suggestion is that you place hedges around your social media campaigns, so that your “media buys” are as diverse as possible but still deliver to your core audience. From a consumer standpoint, that means that, for now, the Burgerville model is a good one - home base is Facebook, attract people in other channels to visit you there. This is because the big part of the bell curve spends time on Facebook, and you can attract the outliers (from both ends) to go there.

But don’t assume that this will always be the case. Upheaval is guaranteed.