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business newsSocial Media Trends: We'll All Soon Be Naked in the Data Economy
With social networking, it's about creating data for everything about us and our economic and social relationships -- then integrating it, analyzing it, and monetizing it.
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"Well sweetie, we'd go talk to a recruiter or our potential boss for an interview, and we'd bring in a resume, and they'd take a brief glance at it and talk to us for awhile and based on that we may or may not get the job."
"But how did they know any of it was true? Did they look at your long-form college transcript? How did they know you were good in your field, were an influencer, and had a valuable network?"
"It was just a gut feeling I suppose. Sometimes they might call a few references we'd provide."
"Wow, how primitive."
There was a time when we'd apply for a job or an apartment or a mortgage and not have to worry about a credit score. That's because credit scores didn't exist. Today, in our debt-based economy, credit scores are everywhere, are at times the subject of criticism, and their shortcomings during and since the 2008 crisis has created an opportunity for companies able to build a better mousetrap.
Up until now, the only reputation metric for individuals has been credit scores because an assessment of financial risk is deemed important when lending money, and for the most part only financial data has been readily available. That, of course, is changing.
When I read stories like this, I can't help but think that 20 years from now we may look back at a world where we only had to worry about our credit score and think it was quaint. I am an avid user of social media. Perhaps you are too. Ever hear of Qwerly? What they allow you to do for now is enter an email address or a Twitter name and pull back a list of all associated accounts for an individual. Just by plugging my email address into Qwerly it pulls back my accounts for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Quora, and Klout. Klout tells me how much influence I have on Twitter and Facebook, the true size of my network, and how likely my tweets are to be amplified. That's where we are in May, 2011.
A year from now, or five years from now, where will we be? Perhaps a single site will be able to take in an ID for a user and spit back the quality of their career history, the size and value of their family, friend, and professional networks, and quantitatively judge the person's ability at everything from differential equations to balance sheet analysis to fixing a leaky faucet. It'll say what kind of food that person likes, where they shop and take vacations, and what their favorite bar is. There are definitely pros to this: a superstar individual with a lesser pedigree will get his true value, whereas the legacy underachiever who went to Harvard may see his silver spoon slightly tarnished, but on the other hand, it could be devastating for a "subprime individual." It's one thing if you're stuck with a 580 credit score -- so you're stuck renting for awhile instead of buying a house. There are worse things in life. But a low social score? We'll need a new term for "repairing your credit."
I bring this up on a site like Minyanville knowing that this is in the early innings technologically, not to mention as an investment theme with these sorts of companies in their infancy. But over the next 12 months or so we're going to see these personal data-linked companies start to go public. LinkedIn, Groupon, Pandora, Facebook. And I continue to believe that while everyone's focused on the cloud, mobile, local, and social, the real pot of gold is going to be creating and integrating all of this new data for robust analytics, especially data about people.
The trend of "social networking" goes far, far beyond figuring out advertising and micropayments on Facebook, or job hunting on LinkedIn. It's about creating data for everything about us and our economic and social relationships, integrating it, analyzing it, and monetizing it. "Moneyball" for everyone. Exciting and scary, don't you think?
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