

At various keynotes, on Twitter and in interviews, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff has talked about Occupy Wall Street and its connection to a new kind of organization that mixes cloud computing, social technologies and mobile.
He makes the connection to further show why Salesforce.com has had its success. Beyond that, he aligns with the movement to underscore what is increasingly apparent. The crowd is not silent anymore. They crowdsource and their movement will flow across any network or medium that will carry its message.
The demonstrations are on the streets through occupations and marches. But like any cultural movement, the community uses physical objects to symbolically express its voice. What’s different now is the rich depth of our online networks that act as a voice for millions of people through any number of mediums.
For example, Occupy George provides people with a DIY kit for creating infographics on dollar bills. The infographics come in four varieties, each illustrating a fact about America’s disparity in wealth. The site shows how to make the infographic graffiti. It has a download with templates and instructions. It shows how you can use it to have a shop make a rubber stamp of the infographic and how to make your own print outs.
For the purposes of this blog, Occupy George illustrates the point Benioff makes. These movements flow through services that act as a court of discourse. It’s a new political theater. Occupy George is a an artistic byproduct of the movement. People learn how to make the art online. The art itself is used as a mean of protest which directs people back online. Like in business, the data moves back and forth between the physical and the virtual worlds.
This is how business now flows. We move between the digital and the physical universe. It’s not seamless. But it is getting close. The medium between these universes will be through social fabrics that have its coordinates online and are communicated with various, mobile and physical devices.
Occupy Wall Street is as much a movement about our society as it is about the power that new services provide.
So kudos to Benioff. His voice does make a difference. Hopefully it will help more businesses and organizations see the connections between movements in the streets and the way data flows to form a new economic context.
THANK YOU