It doesn't matter whether I'm talking to an investor, C-suiter, or an entrepreneur. Most of them — like most of the general public — answer the question, "What does social media mean to you?" with "It's stuff that helps you make 'friends, digitally!! Do you want to be my friend?" "Sure" I usually reply. And then I say: "But thinking of social tools that way is a little bit like using a positronic brain multiplier from the 25th century to tie your shoelaces faster. Here's a more powerful, resonant — and disruptive — way to think about social media. At the end of the day, conceiving of it purely as tools to help people build larger quantities of less and less meaningful, potent, relevant "relationships" is to minimize its potential — and that might just be exactly what's holding you back. Think of the "social" in social media the way economists use the word: to represent society. The right function of "social" tools is to give yesterday's creaking, rusting institutions social — as in societal — significance. Social doesn't just mean friends — it means society."

The untapped capacity to create significance (and all the stuff that follows on from it — higher purpose, a sense of meaning, animating passion, intrinsic motivation) has never been more important: I'd gently suggest it's the wellspring of 21st century advantage. As I've discussed at length both here and in my book, The New Capitalist Manifesto, the real roots of this crisis are that 20th century institutions, whether banks, governments, or corporations, are becoming more and more useless to people, communities, and society. They're extracting wealth from them, instead of creating enduring, authentic value for them. And that game of musical chairs is this Great Stagnation writ large. Hence, if it's advantage in the age of austerity you seek, start with significance — not mere competitive superiority.

What is "gamification" from an economic perspective? As I've noted for several years now, the future of strategy is about learning to leverage markets, networks, and communities. The unwieldy term "gamification" is a case in points: it's about making markets in stuff, to unleash competitive dynamics. When I compete for a badge, medal, rank, or prize, I'm essentially bidding with my time, effort, and energy for a scarce resource. So think of gamification as making demand-side metamarkets: markets not just for products and services, but for prices, discounts, relationships, information, and more, that shape the value of products and services.

Hence, I'd see it like this: gamification is about putting the "market" back into marketing — and I suspect that it has the potential to unlock some pretty serious efficiency and productivity gains, especially in moribund, plodding ecosystems like food, retail, leisure, and especially banking, matching more ardent fans with higher-quality stuff (and thereby creating competitive pressure for yesterday's lumbering giants to shape up or ship out). Conversely, in areas where we're prone to biased, irrational decision-making — like deciding what to eat, buy, or wear — gamification can help turn them literally upside down, and bias us to make choices that are more authentically beneficial.

Social media needs to enlarge its blinkered, myopic perspective on what the social really means. Trivialization, dehumanization, enslaved by the promise of a point, a badge, or a trophy, another friend, follower, or fan — that's the very definition of antisocial. That definition of "social" isn't: it promises to make tomorrow's organizations even more Kafkaesque, meaninglessly overquantified, hyperpoliticized, and tightly controlled than today's — and hence, of even littler use to society (hard as that may be to imagine). Let me rephrase that.

Social is significance. The real promise of social tools is societal, not just relational; is significance, not just attention. You've got to get the first right before you tackle the second — and that means not just investing in "gamification," a Twitter account, or a Facebook group. It means thinking more carefully how to utilize those tools to get a tiny bit (or a heckuva lot) more significant, and starting to mean something in enduring terms. The deepest test of a 21st century business isn't just whether it glitters, but whether it can create thick value, that endures, benefits, and multiplies: whether it matters. Read more at blogs.hbr.org