The digital landscape across Asia-Pacific has seen significant change in recent months, with enthusiasm for social media driving the broader adoption of a wide range of connected services and tools.

Although Internet penetration levels remain low in many Asian countries, the sheer size of those countries’ populations means that the numbers must be seen in context; for example, internet penetration in China stands at just 34%, but the number of social media users in that country exceeds the total population of Russia.

It’s also critical to understand how people in the East access and use the web.

We know mobile phones are already an indispensable part of life throughout Asia, and given the faltering state of infrastructure in much of the region, these are often the predominant means of communication and entertainment. Digging into the latest numbers still has the power to give us pause for thought, however. In India, for example, Mobile penetration is 50% higher than TV penetration.

As a consequence, the Asian internet revolution is skipping a step, with many people accessing the web and web-powered utilities uniquely through mobile devices.

In many Asian countries, this entails access via basic ‘feature’ phones (i.e. non-smartphones), but as in so many other areas, Asians approach these devices with a remarkable sense of resourcefulness. Simple apps and hacks for social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and their local equivalents abound, and this simplified access is helping to fuel astonishing adoption rates across the region.

Importantly, many tracking studies miss this mobile-only behaviour – a reality borne out by the fact that the number of Facebook users in Indonesia appears to exceed the total number of internet users.

To help make sense of all this data and the broader Asian picture, BBH Asia-Pacific has been profiling the digital, mobile, and social media landscapes of a number of countries around the region.

You can see the latest China report above, while reports on India, South-East Asia, Indonesia and the Philippines are all available to view and download via SlideShare here.

For more info on any of these reports, please leave a comment here or get in touch (@eskimon).

*** *** ***
Author: Shannon Bain, Principal Designer at XING AG, Hamburg, Germany

Source: Quora.com

Quora is still getting a lot of press, both positive and negative, much of it in the form of a debate about its value. Is Quora a good, valuable information service or is it simply a platform for SV self-aggrandizement? As far as I’m concerned, we’ll never get an answer to this question (mainly because it’s actually both). What we should be looking at instead is what the negative reactions tell us about the dangers of designing for social content creation on a platform that’s primarily positioned as a knowledge resource.

Quora is officially “a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it”. So it’s a Q&A platform, but a fundamentally social one. This puts Quora in a tricky position because there’s an underlying tension between the product’s official proposition and the activity it must “afford” through its design to be a successful social product.

Quora’s Q&A focus primes knowledge-sharing expectations in users. But a reality of social functionality design is that you must always “afford” user display: give users the domain-appropriate means to show-off, shine, look good, whatever. Display is a powerful and perfectly valid motivator of social activity, even if we like to pretend it’s not. In this case, it incentivizes good questions and smart answers. And since Quora is effectively a community talking to itself (it’s by us pros, for us pros), there’s no way to avoid display even if you (foolishly) wanted to.

So here’s the tension: when we’re primed with strong knowledge-sharing expectations, but are faced with brazen self-promotion instead, we get annoyed–– even when it results in good content and drives a lot of our own activity. The product’s official, expectation-priming proposition is so clearly about altruistic knowledge-sharing, we can’t help but feel weird about the selfish display activity necessarily afforded by the platform.

To understand why, we need to look at the product’s framing, the norms in play, and users’ perceived motivations. A product’s frame is the big interaction type that structures it, guides design and primes user expectations. For Quora, it’s a Question & Answer frame. One way frames work is by embedding norms, the informal rules and conventions coordinating and smoothing our daily activities and interactions. When you hear about a Q&A platform, it’s partially your grasp of the frame’s norms that give you that immediate, high-level understanding of what’s supposed to happen. There are at least two roles (Questioner and Answerer) whose interactions are temporally structured (Qs before As) and whose performances can be judged as appropriate or inappropriate (e.g. did the Answerer actually address the question).

It’s the last bit that’s interesting here. Norms can provide the means of evaluating performance appropriateness. But they often say more than just what behavior is appropriate or inappropriate. They can also say what motivations are appropriate and, more importantly in this case, inappropriate. They determine the frame’s legitimate behaviors and motivations. For us, the interesting Q&A performance norms are about knowledge sharing, and, specifically, the inappropriateness of knowledge flaunting.

But on a platform essentially dependent on user effort, display is a powerful incentive you can’t ignore. It’s also unavoidable in the product’s strategic “by us, for us” positioning. So, the product necessarily affords transgression of the official Q&A frame’s “no flaunting” norm.

Elsewhere, I’ve argued that in addition to display there are two other big reasons people use social functionality: knowledge and connection. If you think of these as defining a space within which a piece of social functionality can be plotted according to how it mixes the elements, you can visually represent the mismatch between Quora’s “explicit” position and it’s “afforded” position.

Notice I’ve also included the “enforced” position. This represents the backlash apparently being enacted by some members against transgressions of the no-flaunting norm. My impression is that it’s even stricter and less display-lenient than the official position.

I can think of three approaches to mitigating the mismatch:

• Shift official positioning… bad idea.
• Monitor and enforce an officially “elevated” layer of user-admins. This is probably too Wikipedia-like and counter the communitarian, party-line rhetoric of SV and Quora.
• Structurally and functionally foster the definition and communication of member-negotiated, product-specific norms for appropriate display on Quora.

The last one gets my vote. Display is necessary for Quora to succeed and is going to happen no matter what. Indeed, as the backlash suggests, product-specific norms for legitimate display are already being negotiated. Why not improve the tools for negotiating, communicating, and enforcing legitimate means of display. For example, beyond the current sanctioning (voting) and elevation of “quality” performances, consider a menu of user-applied content tags – e.g. “flaunting”, “advertisement”, etc. Or socially reward users that review and rehabilitate tagged content, possibly even elevating them via a light status system. There are a lot of design possibilities in this direction. And though there’s a real potential for gamesmanship, it’s still  my favorite option. It’s not about iron hand enforcement of official rules. It’s about giving users the tools to define, enforce and communicate what they collectively decide are the normative bounds of performance on the platform.

*** *** ***

Author: Leslie Barry (@LeslieCBarry), Founder of Iphso

What is intent?

According to The Search by John Battelle, the holy grail of search is to interpret the user’s intent and direct them seamlessly to the content, or ideally, provide the answer directly.

If we assume that intent is not WHAT I’m asking, but WHY I’m asking it, then I believe that Quora is closer to solving the intent of search.

So how does Quora get us closer to it?

Quora’s approach is to get the best qualified people (through credentials or experience) to create some rules (boring to some, but necessary to prevent chaos – even Wikileaks has rules), then leverages the serendipity effect to overcome the constraints of similar services, like LinkedIn, to refine the best questions to elicit the best answer.

What makes Quora unique is that it uses serendipity more effectively than other services.

What is the ‘serendipity effect’?

Wikipedia defines serendipity as ‘a propensity for making fortunate discoveries while looking for something unrelated.’

An example is the real-world benefit I’ve experienced from social media, specifically Twitter, where I meet useful people that I would never know existed without a serendipitous network – i.e., people that I didn’t know I needed to know.

Quora is leveraging this extremely well: connecting the right ‘people I didn’t know I needed to know’ to clarify intent of the question, and as a result, shortening the path to the answer.

Intent is only relevant past a certain threshold of question. Something as simple as ‘What is the capital of Maine?’ is clearly better answered via Google. No rocket-science behind the intent there, but asking something slightly more complex and ambiguous like ‘How do you consume news? Has this changed in recent years?’ presents a greater challenge. When you Google it, Google assumes:

• The question is correct
• Keyword/location/context matching is adequate

So here is what Google thinks the answer is:

…and then Bing:

They both completely missed the point without the Quora results!

Conversely, this is what Quora’s users think the answer is:

Clearly, Quora is more efficient at interpreting intent.

This is because Quora doesn’t assume the question is correct. Instead it provides the ability to ask a question and have it clarified and modified wiki-style to help shape and tease out my intent. Often as a user, I’m clear on my intent, but am not the subject matter expert and therefore unclear on how to frame the question. The iterative, near-time editing of the question helps solve this issue. Also, Quora doesn’t focus on keyword/location/context matching like a mind-less search engine. Quora’s process of refining the question by subject matter experts eliminates the extra steps of sifting through multiple, non contextual answers.

And yes, there are many planted questions (Google Link-bait pages, anyone?, LinkedIn self-promotion?, mindless waffle on Yahoo Answers?), and self-promotion, but so what?

All I care about is the quicker path from question to most valuable answer that addresses ‘what I meant’, not necessarily what I asked. My intent.

Why can’t Google or Bing use other people’s answers to opinion-type questions to decide the most relevant options to serve you? I think this is because of their strong focus on the search algorithm, which values content over context and popularity over intent. Also, Google is one-way traffic, without an iterative, refining feedback loop; we have to stumble blindly along hoping for one or two interesting search results out of ten or twenty.

As a result, it’s Quora, not a traditionally defined search engine, that’s helping us take a step towards the holy grail of intent.

It’s not perfect, but it’s challenging our approaches and thinking about teasing out intent from users. Maybe Google indexes them and learns from them? Once again, it doesn’t matter – we will have taken a huge leap from accepting that indexing and search is better than curated, considered, intelligent answers.

YeoTube, the brand's YouTube channel (never knowingly afraid of a pun).

It seems every food brand on the planet wants to be “100% natural” these days. In the face of rising ethical consumption, even the unlikeliest of brands – McDonald’s, Muller and Walkers crisps to name a few – are responding and staking a claim. Always outspent in marketing terms, organic food producers – just at the point they should be claiming their day in the sun – face being outpositioned too. If you care about it enough, you only have to Google the term to find out that there are real and significant benefits to sustainably produced organic food, but why bother when even a celebrity chef tells us conventional foods are good enough?

Ask a mainstream UK audience in a recession-hit early 2010 what they had to say about organic food and the impact of all this showed: top responses included increased scores against “expensive”, “worthy” and “a bit dull”.

By contrast, when a team of us met Tim Mead (whose family started making dairy products under the Yeo Valley name in 1974) in March this year, two things were striking:

1. His approach: an unapologetic marriage of entrepreneurialism and down-to-earth common sense. An organic farmer for the 21st century if there ever was one.

2. Their vision: Tim and his mother, Mary Mead, believe organic, sustainably produced food should be accessible to everyone.  Philosophically and practically it’s a virtuous circle: the more people eat sustainably produced food, the better it is for all of us and the planet. But “accessible to everyone” demands prices that are competitive to conventional products and that in turn makes a volume-based strategy for Yeo Valley both an economic possibility AND an absolute necessity, if the company is to prosper.

Which was where they saw a role for marketing: to drive demand amongst a necessarily broader, more mainstream audience, along the way helping people to remember Yeo Valley’s name and what it stands for – not least the fact it’s a real place in the West Country.

Our strategy was simple: tackle the perception issue head-on by reversing the expectations of how an organic brand should behave amongst a mainstream UK audience. Goodbye: worthy and earnest. Hello: open and social, populist and proud.

For more on the anatomy of our approach take a look below. First up, some results and what we’ve learned so far. It’s still very early days and we’ve resisted writing about this until we had some (hot off the press) commercial data. We’ll have more substantive conclusions once we’re further in, but here’s what we know for now:

- Furthermore, Yeo Valley spontaneous awareness as a dairy brand had more than doubled just 2 weekends in to the campaign (7% to 15%). Source: Nursery brand tracker

- Of the online mentions since launch in October an average week records a 94.9% favourable sentiment score – fuelled no doubt by over 550 blogposts and the odd celebrity tweet. Source: Sysomos sentiment analysis

10 THINGS WE’VE LEARNT

Perhaps few surprises here, but at the very least a strong reinforcement of some evolutionary truths about modern fmcg marketing:

1. Be true to the people who live the brand, not the perception. In this case, organic brands don’t have to wear sandals.
2. Broadcast can still play a crucial role. If you want to reach a discrete audience (cf Marmarati or Stella Artois Black’s Night Chauffeur) it may be far from necessary, however if your task is mass appeal and you deliberately want to make a public statement about your brand, then broadcast is hard to beat. The trick for Yeo Valley in this respect was three-fold (points 3, 4 and 5 below):
3. Strategy is the art of sacrifice. There wasn’t a huge marketing budget to blow. In terms of bought media, instead of attempting to be everywhere, we brokered an exclusive deal with ITV and Fremantle around X Factor and went big with it. One 2 minute spot, first ad in the first break of the UK’s TV biggest show would, we hoped, act as a rocket launcher for the brand. Subsequently, an on-pack promotion and a mix of shorter time length ads appeared, only ever in X Factor on ITV1, ITV2 and itv.com.
4. Super bowl, super social: we began the process believing the answer did not lie in choosing between social and broadcast, but in committing to both wholeheartedly. To borrow @willsh’s analogy, ‘fireworks bring you to the brand, you stay for the warming fire’. In Yeo Valley’s case, this meant live event TV every weekend, with an ongoing bedrock of conversation and additional content on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube which extends, deepens and personalizes the brand’s relationship with new customers.
5. As we’ve said before, it’s not about now, it’s about the trajectory. The basics of the brand’s behaviour and presence online were laid down months before the TV ad launch and will continue long after; amongst other things getting to know like-minded bloggers, who came to Yeo Valley over the summer to see for themselves how a sustainable dairy farm is run.
6. Reward the fans – by recognising the very best remixes and spotting what they like and giving them more (in our case, letting Ted the owl take over @yeovalley for a day on Twitter and produce his own edit).
7. If you can, change the rules of a category. Quite simply, the conversation around Yeo Valley was fuelled by content and behaviour that caught people’s imagination in a surprising way. A brand trending on Twitter a few days in a row may not be a result in itself, but since the sentiment stayed largely favourable, it gave us a useful indicator of early impact and most importantly where earned media could come from.
8. Haters gonna hate? Maybe, maybe not. Sure, some criticism should be ignored, but we’ve gained a lot more by listening, taking a deep breath and responding.
9. Have an organising thought that can cross platforms and time. “Live in Harmony” sums up Yeo Valley’s world view and also gives the brand and its audience the licence to have some fun with music over time, even playing with the sounds of the farm itself: Click here to view the embedded video.
10. Brands that get better under scrutiny, not worse, will win in social environments online. With Yeo Valley this was never a problem. But it’s worth thinking beyond your carefully planned editorial calendar: what are the issues and opportunities that just *might* arise?

THE ANATOMY OF ‘LIVE IN HARMONY’ TO DATE

The engagement plan set out to splice bought, earned and owned media. It was necessarily quite complex – this is the simple version:

If you’d like to find out more drop us a comment here, check out the brand’s website or YeoTube for more Yeo Valley videos. These include a Making Of together with a series of films featuring Tim & Mary Mead, each offering a window on Yeo Valley as a real place in the West Country (one example below):

Finally, look out for “Farmony“, our Yeo Valley online game teaching kids how to run a sustainable farm, launching in early 2011.

CREDITS

Yeo Valley:
Tim Mead, Managing Director
Adrian Carne, Commercial Director
Ben Cull, Head of Brands
Alison Sudbury, Marketing Manager
Niki Martini, Assistant Brand Manager
Sally Laurie, Customer Services Manager

BBH:
Rosie Arnold, Deputy Exec Creative Director
Kevin Brown, Director of Engagement Planning
Mel Exon, Strategic Business Lead

Simon Pearse and Emmanuel Saint M’Leux, creative team
Eric Chia, Digital Creative Lead
Glenn Paton, Producer

Mark Whiteside, Team Director
Simeon Adams, Strategist
Lawrence Kao, Strategist
Jim Hunt, Head of Technology
Craig Dodd, Tech Lead
Ebla Salvi, Digital Team Manager
Josie Robinson, Team Manager
Sarah Barclay, Digital Project Manager
Daniele Orner-Ginor, Digital Intelligence
Emile Doxey, Data Analyst
David Pandit, Head of Data
Richard Helyar, Knowledge & Insight
Rebecca Levy, Team Assistant

PR: Bell Pottinger
Richard Moss, Director (PR Planning)
Kate Griffiths, Account Director
Jacquelyn Redpath, Account Manager

Brand identity redesign: Pearl Fisher
Tess Wickstead, Planning Director
Natalie Chung, Creative Director
Matt Small, Client Services Director
Michael Dye, Senior Account Manager
Henry Leeson, Head of Realisation

TV Production Company: Flynn
Julien Lutz, Director
Emma Butterworth, Producer
Alex Barber, DoP

Post Production: Framestore
Editing: Steve Ackroyd at Final Cut
Sound: 750mph
Exposure: TV, UK

 ”There is no longer any interaction that an individual may have with a brand, company, product, or service that disconnected from all the people they know, and the people that share their interest in that experience.”

So we were more than a little taken aback by the findings of the latest Edelman Trust Barometer that shows we trust our friends and peers as a source of information considerably less than we did two years ago. The decline is particularly marked in the US where just 25% of respondents view friends and peers as very/extremely credible-a decline of 20 percentage points on 2008-but is also reflected in the global data.

It’s an extraordinary finding which calls many of our assumptions into question. The trust consumers place in peer to peer recommendations versus corporations has been one of the primary drivers of the social web, the excitement we feel about the potential for social business and the shift of marketing dollars from above the line to social media.  

So has all our excitement been founded on a false set of assumptions? Is this simply an anomaly in the data? Or is social media sowing the seeds of its own demise?

 It seems to me that there are a few different factors at play here:

In difficult times, we are drawn to authority: we want there to be expert opinions and definitive answers. There was a strange exhilaration around the collapse of corporate institutions 12 months ago which coupled with the explosion of the social web and the power of the Obama effect created a mood of revolutionary empowerment. Never mind social, people were talking outright socialism. But change has proved slower than expected and economic turmoil has led not to a new world order but to a tougher and leaner version of the old.

As the network expands, connections weaken: It is perhaps inevitable that the bigger our networks get, the less absolute trust we have in the individuals within them. There is, after all, a limit to the number of people we can possibly have meaningful relationships with. Leaving aside for a moment the challenges pay-per-tweet creates in itself, it’s interesting to note that it appears to perform better on smaller networks-to quote Jan Schulz-Hofen of Magpie:

 ”Smaller accounts tend to have a more hands-on approach with their followers and this results in a higher interest in advertised tweets. While the initial reach per post may be smaller, the response is overwhelming when compared to larger or celebrity Twitterers.” So can social media scale or do we need myriad small initiatives?

As social media adopts the behaviours of old media, it loses credibility: We’ve pay per tweet, but the influx of blunt commercial messages into Social Media does seem to be impacting trust. The very forces that drove the social web and the power of peer-to-peer networks- authenticity, independence, touched before on the potential problems of individuality-are challenged by the adoption of old world tactics in a space where there is so much opportunity to deliver genuine utility.  

Genuinely useful and relevant uses of the social graph have been slow to emerge: Some of the developments we’ve collectively been most enthused by seem to have stalled in development. Adoption of Open ID or Facebook Connect by those services where it would be most useful is slow. The compelling vision of having our friends everywhere we want them on the web offering recommendations and advice still feels, for the most part, a long way away.

So if these are some of the challenges we face, what, as lovers of the social web and indeed as marketing professionals should we be doing? I certainly don’t have all the answers and I’d love to know what bigger and smarter brains think. Some starters for ten that occur though are:

Learn how to marry authority and inclusiveness: Too many brands in recent years have taken the undoubted truth that consumers no longer want to be dictated to and concluded that, therefore, consumers no longer want brands to have a point of view. “Marketing” has become a dirty word. But what the data tells us is that oftentimes, and particularly in uncertain times, certainty is compelling. Demonstrating expertise, confidence and authority is not a relic of a dictatorial past. It’s just that today we need to find new and engaging ways of demonstrating that authority, making consumers part of our experiments or our evidence.

Ask yourself if you’re offering anything useful: If you’re not offering something genuinely useful or entertaining in the social space, you’re simply polluting the stream. As tempting as it may be to simply get your brand’s name in there a lot, ultimately you’re damaging a medium that could do much more for you but may not be around forever if you don’t think carefully about how you use it. As Elin Sjursen of Made by Many points out, the current state of Facebook marketing may well be digging its own grave.

Find new ways to use the social graph:

As I’ve touched on, genuinely compelling uses of social data remain thin on the ground. So why aren’t we mashing up social data with purchase and location-specific data more? Why can’t I quickly and easily see what my friends are buying, rating and rejecting today? Innovations in social and real-time search are a major step forward but there is so much more we could do with e-commerce and beyond.

Consider the possibilities of smaller, tighter networks:

Smaller, more meaningful networks was one of David Armano’s key predictions for 2010. At the time, it seemed counter-intuitive as I considered the all-conquering power of Facebook and the wisdom of fishing where the fish are. But now, when I consider the potential of scale to dilute influence I begin to wonder if there is a role for smaller, specialist communities of interest or at least for a much more nuanced and selective approach to filtering. As my network expands, I may not want everyone with me everytime but I may want my movie-loving friends to come to Netflix with me, my geek friends to come phone shopping with me, my fashionista friends on Net a Porter with me encouraging me to buy more shoes…

But how else can we prevent social media from self-destructing? Thoughts, comments, inspiration welcome…

In the early weeks of 2010, there’s already been considerable debate (and indignation) around brands, businesses and even bands incentivising users for Tweets. Twincentivisng, if you like (and I must admit I can’t resist a pun).

Is everyone an advertiser? Image by Mike Cogh, Flickr, under a creative commons license

Should brands pay for tweets? Should twitterers take the cash or resist? Is there a sustainable paid for media model here or a fundamentally misguided reaction to the rise of social media? Is pay-per-tweet the end of the Twitterverse as we know it?

In many ways this is an inevitable response to a number of factors:

• The extraordinary rise and equally extraordinary media profile of Twitter
• The increased premium placed on peer to peer recommendations
• The collapse of on-line display advertising and the rise of SEO
• The socialisation of search

Any and all of these factors suggest a pressing need for brands to find a way to harness the power of social media and for media agencies to find a way to monetise it. Viewed from one perspective, the asymmetric nature of Twitter relationships make it particularly ripe for the adoption of a “broadcast” model.  1 in 5 tweets already mentions a brand so monetisation of these mentions seems, from that perspective, to make eminent sense.

So it’s inevitable that  businesses will experiment with a range of commercial models in this space from pay-per-tweet to pay-per-click to promotional access for tweets. I don’t personally feel huge moral indignation (perhaps it’s the ad-girl in me..). Brands will experiment with these businesses. If we don’t experiment we won’t learn. Some initiatives will be more successful than others and the ones that have a measure of success will probably involve some combination of:

• Transparency: Are the brand and the user open about their commercial relationship?  Disclosure policies are becoming an increasingly important aspect of the pay-per-tweet business
• Authenticity: Does it sound like the user is talking? Is it something they would say or a product they would endorse?  (Quite a challenge with auto-tweets and a point in favour of those services allowing users to generate their own copy)
• Complicity: Does the brand feel like they understand the platform and its users? Does it feel like a tech-savvy brand talking to tech-savvy individuals? Early FourSquare drinks/dinner promotions for example tapped into users’ mania for checking in and racking up points and so, although fairly basic, felt like they “got” it.  Playing with the currency of the Platform-the mayorship-also created that sense of complicity and playfulness. Likewise, the Pearl Jam tweet-for-download mechanic felt like a way of engaging and rewarding fans rather than anything more cynical.

Four Square promotions

Yet while I don’t feel outraged or betrayed, I do feel a little disappointed and a lot sceptical.

The ease with which we can identify influencers and super-users is a hugely welcome benefit of the social web. Once upon a time, identifying opinion formers was something of a dark art (usually involving lurking in hipster bars). Now there are any number of algorithms designed to map patterns of influence, identify lovers and loathers of brands and quantify their sway.  If we’re feeling unloved, we can even quantify our own Twinfluence.

But if identifying the influencers has become a science, influencing and activating the influencers remains an art. There is a huge opportunity in marrying the skills of PR experts and cultural mavens with hardcore data analytics to deliver robust, strategic, quantifiable (and cool) peer to peer programmes.  Yet pay-per-tweet feels like a fairly blunt instrument.

Treating users as media spaces to be bought and sold seems to me to impose an old world model on a very new medium-and as we are constantly reminded, the old model is broken. The age of interruption is over. Where it still scores is when we need serious scale (10s of millions of eyeballs), seriously quickly. But to impose an interruption model on Twitter seems to offer the worst of all possible worlds-interruption without scale.

So as business model, paid-for Tweets seems fraught with problems. But it does arise from a set of very genuine problems and opportunities. So what more exciting uses could we make of these opportunities?

Co-creation: If we want smart, engaged and opinionated people talking about what we’re up to, why not involve them early? We are Social’s “The Marmarati” work for Marmite is a great example of how bringing super-users into the development process pays dividends. Using a brand’s super users as its consultants, collaborators and Beta-testers drives genuine excitement and dialogue.

Social gaming: I’m pretty sure no money changed hands, but boy did Spymaster pop up in my Twitterfeed a lot at one point. Likewise FourSquare. Imagine if either one of these properties-or the juggernaut that is Farmville- had been branded. A surefire way to rise through the social search rankings in an organic and entertaining way.

Surprise and delight: Now we can identify who’s talking about our brands most and quantify their sentiment surely there is much greater opportunity for pro-active, real world customer service? Take the recent Eurostar PR traumas. Or any of the many airlines experiencing delays or cancellations in the poor weather. It’s relatively easy to spot the most vocal and influential users of social media and to see when they’re experiencing peak moments of frustration. So upgrade them. Give them free lounge access. Give them a cupcake (please). I guarantee they’ll tweet about it-we all love surprises.

The Marmarati campaign

Simple social sign up should become a no-brainer and of course, if we want to get people talking the fundamental imperative remains to do something interesting. But what else could we do with the data now at our disposal, with the ability to spot influencers, quantify sentiment and micro-target? Am I missing something and is pay-per-tweet the wave of the future? Or are there more interesting futures out there?

One of the easiest (and laziest) answers seems to be that it’s about making friends-being sociable. But it’s interesting to  note that while “social” does derive from the Latin “socius” (meaning friend) it does so via “socialis” meaning allied. Somehow enabling allies and allegiances seems like a much bigger and more transformative idea than simply socialising.  

Some of the most interesting social sites at the moment actually seem to me to have very little to do with friending people, or poking people, or checking out their holiday pictures. The most interesting initiatives seem to be those that bring individuals together around a common purpose, enabling them to achieve things together previously only possible for major corporations. Ideas that allow individuals not simply to friend one another but to be useful to one another-that cut out the corporate world or conventional distribution mechanics and create a consumer to consumer value exchange.

As Jyri Engestrom puts it in his excellent post on “object-centred sociality”: “The fallacy is to think that social networks are just made up of people. They’re not; social networks consist of people who are connected by a shared object. That’s why many sociologists, especially activity theorists, actor-network theorists and post-ANT people prefer to talk about ‘socio-material networks’, or just ‘activities’ or ‘practices’ (as I do) instead of social networks”

I recently attended the inaugural IPA “Game Changers” event where among other great speakers Giles Andrews from Zopa inspired the crowd by explaining the genuinely radical thinking behind “the social lending company”.  For those who aren’t familiar with the proposition, Zopa is a service that puts individual borrowers directly in touch with individual lenders. It not only offers a welcome stream of credit in these increasingly crunched times, it also offers a win-win by offering compelling rates for both parties.

This is a genuinely transformative piece of thinking that uses the fundamental characteristics of the social web-the ability to bring individuals together for their common good, the ability to start conversations-but has relatively limited interest in the sociable web. Concepts like Freecycle, couchsurfing or quirky work along similar lines: I don’t need to be intimate with other users to be of use to them, collaborate with them, fund them, enable them.

Perhaps the most interesting point this raises is that the future of the social web may be driven not so much by friendship but by a new kind of trust. Trust in individuals versus institutions. Trust in people I don’t know (that I’m not friends with) but who I instinctively prefer to the plc and who are brought to me by editor and enabler brands I believe in. As crumbling faith in institutions meets technologies that can genuinely empower both the individual and the crowd, the possibilities are endless (and a little scary). The future of the social web may in fact be less sociable, more (dare I say it) socialist….

So what does this mean for the corporate world? Well, the end probably isn’t nigh just yet. Deriving real utility from social media requires an investment from the individual-in terms of time and in terms of reciprocity. So it will probably remain for a while the preserve of the digitally savvy and time rich. But it may be time to start thinking now about which other services that could previously only be delivered by the might of the corporates that may be socialised next.   If lending can be socialised, what’s next? Venture capital? Real estate? What are we already doing on a micro-social scale that could go macro? What else can we congregate around to our mutual benefit? Would be fascinated to know your thoughts….