In the 1990s, digital was all about browsing.  The following decade brought search engines, and today we talk a lot about connecting online.  Facebook connects us to people from our past and those we meet in the present.  We can follow anyone and everything on Twitter, and now we can use social technology to create a spontaneous connection to people around us with similar interests.

This latest evolution in digital is called ‘social discovery’, and was the hot topic at this year’s SXSW festival.  Social discovery brands such as Highlight, Kismet, Sonar and Ban.Jo are GPS-enabled apps that allow users to learn more about others in their vicinity.

There are several interesting developments here.  To date, many of us have put a huge amount of effort into connecting and expanding our social network online.  Social Discovery changes this dynamic, encouraging users to emerge from the comfort of the digital world into the real one.  It’s great news for brands, as roughly 90% of all money is still being spent in the real world.

Second, social discovery apps leverage our interests rather than our existing networks to spark a connection.  Using information on our personal interests, these apps “passively monitor” the space around us, searching for people we should meet.  Paul Davison, founder and CEO of San Francisco-based Highlight explains his inspiration:

“What if you just sort of had this bird’s eye view of the world? [You could] play God and take two people and put them together… [We] love the ambient intimacy we get from looking into other people’s lives.”

I believe that in the pre-digital dark ages, this intimacy was often a result of being in the right place at the right time: an act of serendipity brought to us by fate.  My first reaction is to ask: where’s the romance? What is serendipity without its unpredictability? As we continue to share more and more personal moments online, I’m forced to wonder: are we losing out on real connections?

One thing is for sure: a fundamental shift is taking place in the way all of us are connecting as people.  We are exploring and hunting for more meaningful connections, which leaves me feeling optimistic about the future.  After all, all of this creates an incredible opportunity for brands to create more meaningful connections with consumers – and perhaps even be there for the moment when sparks fly!

Every time I log on to my RSS feeds recently, I seem to be greeted by a score of stories about Twitter; and never more so than in this past week.

The news that the social site had hit 20 billion tweets last Saturday – doubling its volume in just five months – was followed by proposals to allow tweeting of court cases, an announcement that Twitter would now pair you with your ideal ‘stalkers’; and what’s been hailed as the first anti-celebrity in the form of student Steven Holmes.

So it’s interesting to see that a study from US/UK digital agency 360i has concluded that Twitter is still a long way off claiming a place in the marketer’s kit of essentials. Twitter & the Consumer-Marketing Dynamic examined a statistically significant sample of 1,800 tweets over a six-month period, and found that just 12% of tweets sent by individuals included any reference to a brand – and most of the time, that brand was Twitter itself.

Admittedly, if you consider the study’s finding that 94% of all tweets sent by real people were personal in nature, the figure becomes less surprising. Consider this: how many of the personal emails you’ve sent in the past two weeks made mention of a brand? If you end up with a figure that comes in much above 12%, I suspect you’ll be very much in the minority.

Just as with other new media channels, Twitter has been hailed as a ‘bright new path’ for brands to communicate with consumers. Again just as with those channels, early adopting brands have tended to use it as a broadcast medium rather than to establish any form of dialogue.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying that tweeting will never be a useful medium for brands. Nor am I saying that there isn’t any interesting brand activity already taking place on Twitter. As we saw in the early days of the internet, email and social networks, any new technology will gain immediate advocates and naysayers from within the marketing community.

The polarity is not unexpected: we marketeers have long been haunted by the idea of a ‘holy grail’ of communication: a tool to teleport our brands directly into the minds and repertoires of consumers. Perhaps the only revelation is how much people want to believe each new development will be that tool; naivety from an industry that prides itself on a reputation for hardbitten cynicism?

Actually, there’s support here for something I began to suspect some time ago: that we marketers are actually more susceptible to messaging than other people, rather than less. Talk to enough consumers and you’ll see a growing unwillingness to articulate any connection with the vast majority of brands. Even the hard-core loyalists feel a need to ‘justify’ their loyalty with rational explanations around value, quality or service.

But all that is by the by; a topic for another day, perhaps.  In the meantime, the fact remains that Twitter is still very much a consumer-to-consumer medium, not brand-to-consumer or vice versa. Will that change?  In due course, I’ve no doubt. After all, as the new British Gas radio campaign has reminded us, it’s not so very long ago that people were claiming that the telephone could never be a brand medium…

• ‘The value of a social network is defined not only by who’s on it, but by who’s excluded’ (Paul Saffo)
• ‘The more elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate’ (Joseph Priestley)
• ‘A website should be a holistic experience channel’ (Anon)
• ‘If content is king, then conversion is queen’ (John Munsell)
• ‘New marketing is about the relationships, not the medium’ (Ben Grossman)

Borrowed with pride from all over the place.

Social networking is moving firmly out of the consumer market and into the business market.

There ae increasingly pressing business reasons to capitalise on social networking.  Below are 5 key reasons to boost a companies involvement with social networking:

• the power of recommendation – almost 40% of us trust our friends recommendations completely (this drops to about 10% for brand websites) – linking with social networking sites can build brand trust and engagement
• the power of the transient – short, personal, time linked tweets from brands and companies that we know has a street crediblity and vibrancy that traditional media lacks. A good example of this is Mission Pie, one of their bakers started sending out tweets about new pies and also alerts to interested customers about poetry readings and other events – they now credit their business growth to their growing band of followers.
• the power of the personal – social networking allows and encourages two way conversation, brands can build up rapport with consumers who want to get involved
• the power of engagement – Facebook and Twitter can help employees in large companies interact and share ideas in a more informal way, helping ideas to flow more quickly – they can even share and create with consumers
• the power of serendipity – geo-networking will allow brands to provide personalised location and time relevant information and incentives

But the real power is the mobile revolution – currently 140 million of us use our mobiles for social networking but this is forecast to increase to 600m by 2013.

So get twittering!

Continuing our series of favourite kids brands it was fascinating to juxtaposition the brand & media inspirations for the different generations of kids. Literary classic Roald Dahl was the choice of Joss Clayton and as both a book and movie franchise, these fantastic stories continue to captivate audiences today as witnessed with the recent ‘Fantastic Mr Fox’. However it is clear that today’s children are equally enthralled by the interactive world demonstrated by Anna Eggleton’s choice of Club Penguin. This website has a huge following and provides kids with a uniquely engaging means to stimulate their imaginations and socialize with their online peers.

“Roald Dahl is my official favourite kids brand – I love the books and as a brand I would say it perfectly communicates the way in which children are naturally drawn to the gross, weird and cheeky bits of life. The fact that they have a dual appeal to both kids and adults is of course a plus from a sales / endurance point of view but for me these were the books that it were ok to laugh with, be revolted by and quote. They are 100% un-naff and champion the child, not the parent.” Joss Clayton, Marketing Analyst

“Club Penguin is an MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) involving a virtual world containing a range of online games and activities. Using cartoon penguins as avatars, players waddle around, chat, play minigames and participate in other activities with one another in a snow-covered virtual world. Where else can your children learn how to use a PC, earn money, look after pets, buy and sell items of clothing? They can even undertake missions to become secret agents. For the children a great mix of constantly changing fun and interaction (you play and meet other people online). For parents it represents a safe place for your children to pick up those all important computer skills (as well as the bonus of some peace and quiet!).” Anna Eggleton, Director of Closeness