I promised in December that I would share a social media capability maturity model that I've been sketching out, so here goes. Capability maturity models (CMMs) are a standard part of our conceptual vocabulary when talking about organizational change, but applying the idea to social media presents some special problems which I need to discuss first. It is not a simple matter of drawing a little evolution curve and labeling some arbitrarily chosen levels of competence. In other words, if you are thinking in terms of a diagram like this (with indicators like "Level 1.2: some employees blog; Level 1.8: many employees blog, most people twitter"), STOP!

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But across the board disruption of business models, dramatic as it sounds, isn't the most profound impact a capability innovation can have. There is an even more dramatic level -- disruption of the axioms of the economy itself. The economy, remember, consists of a set of businesses that manifest business models. Business models are expressions of design patterns within an architectural space created by an organizing technology, and for the last 100 odd years, this organizing technology has been the modern corporation. All process/capability innovations in the 100 years before social media merely expanded the vocabulary of the language known as the "corporation." When Amazon.com appeared in the nineties, it merely added another variety of "bookstore corporation."Fertile capabilities "merely" redefine markets throughout the economy, and cause some shifting of boundaries, creation and destruction of a few sectors, and redistribution of wealth. Once every few centuries though, a vastly more powerful force comes along: an organizing technology capability. A capability that changes the very language with which the economy is written."Organizing Technology" CapabilitiesYou think I am exaggerating? What else would you call an economy where previously minor market externalities start defining the dynamics of markets? Look around you: it isn't just "non-profit" corporations like open source foundations that are messing with markets. Some economic organization forces aren't even any sort of legal corporation, like the effort that came together to respond to Hurricane Katrina. We've seen flash mobs and Barcamps. We saw crowd journalism (we are way beyond gentlemanly "citizen" journalism led by the "professionals") substituting for regular journalism in the Mumbai attacks. We've seen consumers get uneasily redefined as prosumers, often with no corporation at the center at all.Not even the original Internet had an impact like this. The organizing technology we know as the "corporation" is being threatened. There are only four other organizing technologies that caused economic-axiom level disruption on the scale we are about to see: fire (night-time economics), the wheel and domestication of draught animals (large-area economics), farming (settler economics) and movable type (democracies and corporations).And that, by the way, is why I did not call this an Enterprise 2.0 capability maturity model, despite the name of this site. We need a CMM that can help you navigate your way to whatever weird new species you and your company might morph into. We need to countenance the possibility that the smartest way for you to "go 2.0" might be to dissolve your corporation altogether, and reorganize your employees as a network of freelancers who hire each other by the project. Or maybe your company needs to become a non-profit.Before you ask "what is the ROI of social media" you need to consider the possibility that your market is organizing itself around nonprofit institutions that don't even look for dollar ROI. Before you wonder how to use twitter in marketing, you might want to consider the possibility that twitter is undermining the very function of marketing.When I continue next time, we'll get started. You'll need a spreadsheet tool. I hope you see the significance of the choice you have: one of your options is Google spreadsheets. It is free.Venkatesh G. Rao writes a blog on business and innovation at www.ribbonfarm.com, and is a Web technology researcher at Xerox. The views expressed in this blog are his personal ones and do not represent the views of his employer.