Think back to how relationships form: through many, lightweight interactions over time. However, once that relationship has formed, and people are deeply committed on an emotional level, heavyweight interaction has a place. Although the vast majority of our interaction is lightweight, we will sometimes do heavyweight things for people we love and trust. We will go the extra mile. The same is true for brands. Once you have built a deep emotional relationship over many, lightweight interactions, you can introduce something heavyweight. For example, you can ask true fans of your brand to tell their friends about your new product. Or you can organize something  knowing that true fans will rally behind you and bring in their friends.

So the advertising strategy of the future: The majority of effort and spend will be supporting an always-on strategy based on many, lightweight interactions over time to build deep relationships and loyalty. A minority of effort and spend will be supporting a small number of heavyweight interactions with true fans to achieve specific goals (mostly around driving awareness of new things).

Thanks to @jpmaheu for stirring my imagination and memory regarding heavyweight interaction.

To be a successful advertiser on the web in the future, you will need to build content based on many, lightweight interactions over time.

Following is the context explaining why I think this is the future of advertising.

We build relationships with brands the same way we build relationships with people.

We build relationships with others through many, lightweight interactions over time. We often meet people for the first time through friends of friends. Maybe we chat, maybe we don’t. Maybe we meet through friends of friends a few times, get talking and find out that we plenty of things in common and maybe similar interests. Maybe we both like skiing. So we go skiing together with our mutual friends. Maybe we go a few times. Then we go just the two of us. And slowly but surely a deep friendship develops. It takes months and years. We don’t suddenly become close friends overnight. We become  close friends through many, lightweight interactions over time.

Our species has learned this pattern of relationship building over the past tens of thousands of years. It is how our brains are wired and so isn’t going to change anytime soon. Because marketing and branding is very new relative to the history of our species, only 150 years old at best, it makes sense that we would build relationships with brands the same way. Many, lightweight interactions over time is how we’re wired to build deep, emotional connections. Therefore, our marketing plans should be built around this insight. We have intuitively and sub-consciously made rough attempts at this by spreading our messages across multiple media – magazines, billboards, TV, radio, web banner ads. Add on the other lightweight interactions we have with brands – in the retail store, chatting with our friends, seeing other people use the brand – and we have an interesting framework: many, lightweight interactions over time.

We talk about brands in passing – lightweight, not heavyweight.

We like to think that people talk about our brands in-depth, mentioning specific attributes we have seeded, but that is not how people talk about brands. People talk about brands in passing. They tend to be talking about something else, and the brand rises and dissipates incredibly quickly. For example, I’m talking with my friend John, who tells me he met our mutual friend Matt last week. He is telling me what’s happening with Matt, then mentions that the weather was crazy hot, that they were in Starbucks, that he had a new Frappuccino that I would love, and then back to telling me more about Matt. These kinds of conversations happen over and over again. Brands being mentioned as part of a bigger conversation, and brand perception being built through many, lightweight mentions over time.

Disruption and attention as a framework for marketing and advertising is ending.

One of the dramatic shifts happening that is changing business is the rise of accessible information. Only twenty years ago, our access was bounded by the books we owned, the TV shows we watched, and the books in our library. Today, because of the web, we’re seeing an exponential increase in the amount of information that we have access to. We are sinking in information yet our capacity for processing all this information remains the same. It took our brain tens of thousands of years to evolve to its current state and because it evolves incredibly slowly, it’s not going to noticeably change within our lifetime.

Dramatically more information, and limited processing capacity, means that anyone in the game of grabbing attention, and disruption is in a race to the bottom. The web is destroying disruption as an effective and efficient advertising mechanism. Disruption is a terrible user experience and is damaging to both the publisher and advertiser. In a world of too much information, the only way to be successful will be to fit in seamlessly and naturally into people’s lives. You can introduce new content and new ideas to people, but it will need to feel natural or it will be ignored at best, infuriating at worst. The best way to do this will be through people’s friends, because in a world of overwhelming information and choice, people will turn to their friends to help them decide. They will turn to their friends because that is what we have learned to do through thousands of years of evolution.

Because the web is being rebuilt around people, in the very near future, maybe 18-24 months, almost every website you visit will be personalized to you. Every website will feature information about the people you care about. What they read, what they bought, where they went, what they think. In this environment, where all content is competing with people’s friends, advertising based on disruption will lose. No brand, and no advertising campaign, is more important and interesting to people than their friends. Display advertising as we know it today will die. Banner ads will die. Because TV is also going to dramatically change in the next couple of years, standalone 30 second TV spots will die.

The future will be built around always-on strategies with many, lightweight components.

Because we build relationships with things through many lightweight interactions over time, advertising will need to do the same to be heard. Although specific short-term campaigns around launching new products and new product variants will exist, they will be built on top of a solid ‘always-on’ foundation. The ‘always-on’ foundation will be far more important than short term campaigns because that is how people act in real life. Our real life relationships with friends are ‘always-on’. Our real life relationships with brands are ‘always-on’. Advertising will need to be the same.

This is very different to how we currently do things. Almost all advertising campaigns today are based on heavyweight experiences. Heavily branded content – product shots, taglines, icons, logos – everywhere. There is a huge movement towards building deep, immersive, heavyweight marketing experiences. Marketers are building web apps. Ads that you can interact with. Ads with animation, motion and multiple layers of interaction. Everyone building these “immersive” experiences are swimming upstream. Almost every app built for a brand on Facebook has practically no usage. Think about it – when is the last time you used an app built for a brand? Heavy, “immersive” experiences are not how people engage and interact with brands. Pitched against strategies built around many, lightweight interactions over time, heavyweight experiences will fail because they don’t map to real life.

Many, lightweight interactions is an incredible creative canvas.

Many creative practitioners don’t like the sound of this, but they are blinded by their current practices. Everyone is looking for the ‘big idea’ and the hero TV spot. Sight, sound and motion. Sexy visuals. Yet many, lightweight interactions over time is an incredibly flexible canvas. It allows you to have non-linear stories. No longer do you need to tell everything at once. It allows you to fit seamlessly into conversations between people who trust each other. It allows for adaptive storytelling.

This canvas is not worse than the canvas of large sight, sound and motion experiences. It’s just different. The best creative people will seize this opportunity, create amazing experiences, and every client trying to understand the evolution of the social web (which is almost every Fortune 500 company by the way) will come flocking to those creative people’s door.

In summary, change how you think before your competitors do.

I recently gave a talk at fMC on how to create successful content on Facebook. Afterwards, the most common question was for examples of brands doing a great job using many, lightweight interactions. The truth is that there aren’t many. But that is changing. Brands who embrace this early will see incredible success. Brands who don’t may go the way of the dinosaurs. The future of advertising is many, lightweight interactions over time. Don’t be the last to realize this.

If you want to learn more about the huge shifts in how the web is structured, and what that means for marketing, check out my book Grouped. It also contains references to dozens of research studies illustrating where things are headed.

HOW AND WHY WE COMMUNICATE WITH OTHERS

WHY WE TALK

We talk to survive

The desire to communicate is hard-wired into all of us. It was an effective survival mechanism for our ancestors, who shared information about food supplies, dangerous animals, and weather patterns, and it continues to help us understand our world, including what behavior is appropriate and how to act in certain situations. People talk because sharing information makes life easier.

Our motivations for sharing online are the same as the motivations of our ancestors. We often update our status because we need information. Research has shown that the majority of tweets that mention brands are seeking information rather than expressing sentiment, and one in five tweets is about a product or service. (1)

We talk to form social bonds

Decades of research in social psychology has shown that people talk to form and grow social bonds. Conversations ensure that we understand one another. One key aspect of this is communal laughter. Research has shown that if people laugh together with strangers, they are as generous to them as they are to their friends. (2)

Talking to someone sends out strong social signals. It shows people that we consider them important enough to spend time together. This is also true online. People update their status to produce a feeling of connectedness, even when people are geographically distant. (3) Status updates often contain social gestures and people often respond by liking or commenting on the content, not because they actually like the content but because they want to send out a social signal to build the relationship. In many cases, the conversation that follows a status update is much more important than the status update itself. More than the act of sharing content, marketing campaigns need to support conversations.

Research has shown that social bonds are central to our happiness. The deeper the relationships someone has, the happier they will be. (4) Women talk to form social bonds more often than men. Many of their conversations are aimed at building and maintaining their social network. Men more often talk about themselves or things they claim to be knowledgeable about, often because they are trying to impress the people around them. (5)

We talk to help others

When researchers have studied why people share, they have consistently found that many do it to help others. This is an altruistic act with no expected reciprocity. For many, it is important to them to be perceived as helpful, and so they try to share content that they think other people will find valuable. (6) This is especially clear when we see people share information that may not reflect positively on themselves.

We talk to manage how others perceive us

While people talk to make their lives easier, to form social bonds, and to help others, most of our conversations are a form of reputation management. (7) Research has shown that most conversations are recounting personal experiences, or gossiping about who is doing what with whom. Only 5 percent is criticism or negative gossip. The vast majority of these conversations are positive, as we are driven to preserve a positive reputation. ( 8 )

Our identities are constantly shaped and refined by the conversations we have. Our values were passed on from conversations with our family, community, society, country, church, and through our profession, and are continually refined by the people we spend time with.

Quick tips

Build marketing campaigns that grow social bonds. For example, for Mother’s Day, the online florist 1-800-flowers.com used Facebook to have mothers vote on the products that they would prefer to receive as a gift. this generated stories in the News Feed, to be seen by their children.the motivation to grow social bonds led to four out of the five top-selling Mother’s Day products being the ones voted for on Facebook.

Build marketing campaigns that enable people to help each other. Sephora fans on Facebook organized to send each other unused cosmetics samples. One person starts a box of 30 samples, sends it to someone else who takes 15 samples out and adds 15 of their samples back, before sending it on to a third person who does the same, and so on.

WHAT WE TALK ABOUT

Many of our conversations are about other people

One study on what people talk about found that about two thirds of conversations revolve around social issues. Another study found that social relationships and recounting personal experiences account for about 70 percent of conversations. Of the conversations about social relationships, about half are about people not present. The anthropologist Robin Dunbar described these conversations as “Who is doing what with whom, and whether it’s a good or bad thing, who is in and who is out, and why.” (5) Conversations about other people and their behavior help us understand what is socially acceptable in different situations by revealing how the people we’re talking to react to the behavior of the person not present.

Understanding how others have acted, as well as how the people we care about and trust react to those actions, shapes our behavior. It shapes what ideas we agree with, and how we may behave in the future. Supporting conversations about other people is critical for social products and for marketing campaigns based on social behavior.

We share feelings, not facts

Creative agencies the world over try to create content that people will spread. In order to do so, they need to understand what people share, and why. The vast majority of “viral” campaigns don’t spread at all, and this is often because the content is factual. Many research studies have shown that people don’t share facts, they share feelings. (9)

Jonah Berger and Katherine Milkman studied the most-emailed articles on the New York Times over more than a six-month period, totaling 7,500 items. They expected to find content that included factual information that might help others, such as diets or gadgets, but instead found that people shared the content that triggered the most arousing emotions. This included positive emotions such as awe, and negative emotions such as anger and anxiety. Emotions that were not arousing, for example sadness, did not trigger sharing of content. (10)

Content that is positive, informative, surprising, or interesting is shared more often than content that is not, and content that is prominently featured is shared more often than content that is not, but these factors are minor compared to how arousing the content is.

These findings have important implications for advertising. BMW ran a successful campaign called “The Hire,” which induced feelings of anxiety through elaborate car chases and generated millions of views. Content that is non-arousing, for example, content that makes people feel comfortable and relaxed, is unlikely to be shared. Public health information may spread more effectively if it induces feelings of anxiety rather than sadness. (11)

We talk about the things that surround us

Our everyday offline conversations tend to be about whatever comes to mind, independent of how interesting it is. And what usually comes to mind first is what is in our current environment (we’ll see later how this works for brands). If we’re talking to good friends, even our desire to appear interesting takes a backseat to environmental cues. Although we do craft our conversations in order to shape others’ perceptions of us,6 most day-to-day conversations with people we know well are about everyday things and are cued by our environment.

Conversely, our desire to appear a certain way to others is a bigger factor in what we talk about online than offline. Offline, many of our conversations are driven by a need to avoid awkward silences. While people most often talk about what is visible or cued by their environment offline, when online they don’t need to fill a conversation space so they can think more carefully about what might be interesting to others.

We talk about brands in passing

The research firm Keller Fay estimates that people talk about approximately 70 brands every week, an average of 10 a day. (12) We might imagine that people talk at length about the pros and cons of competing brands, but most of the time this is not so. Most references to brands in conversations happen in passing. People are talking about something loosely related to the brand, the brand comes up for a few sentences, and then disappears, as the conversation continues about the core topic. When people talk about brands, they are usually not motivated by the brand but by the instinct to converse with others and fill conversation spaces. We need to understand the incidental nature of brand conversations when planning marketing campaigns.

Research has shown that around Halloween, when there are more environmental cues about the color orange, products that are orange (Reese’s Pieces, orange soda) are more top of mind. (13) Other research found that products that are cued by the surrounding environment are talked about 22 percent of the time, versus 4 percent for products not cued by the environment. Products that are publicly visible are talked about 19 percent of the time, versus 2 percent for products that are not publicly visible. For example, in one research study, upcoming concerts were talked about much more often when there were CDs in the room. (14) We talk about eating much more often than technology or media, yet many assume that the latter are objectively more interesting.

This has profound implications for understanding how people talk about brands. Products that are visible and accessible will be talked about more. Products that are not naturally in people’s environment need to build associations with things that are in people’s environments. Yet, samples are not a substitute for the actual thing. Coupons and samples do not drive more conversations, but giving people the full product to try, so that it is consistently in the person’s environment, can lead to a 20 percent increase in conversations about that product. (14)

Interesting (arousing) products are talked about more initially, but once the novelty wears off, they are talked about less than things cued by people’s environments. Frequency of use also drives conversations, as products used frequently are easier to recall from memory and are therefore more top of mind. (15, 16, 17) People talk about big brands far more often than smaller brands. This is not surprising, as bigger brands are more accessible—more visible and easier to recall from memory.

Because we communicate much more frequently with the small number of people we are emotionally closest to, about half of conversations that mention brands are with a partner or family member. (12) Of these brand conversations, 71 percent are face to face, 17 percent are on the phone, and only 9 percent are online. (12) When it comes to spreading ideas, we need to target people’s closest ties.

Quick tips

Online posts that ask people to talk about others are likely to have high engagement rates. Many brands ask people to mention others in their responses, like this example from Jameson Irish Whiskey.

Polls are a great way to drive conversations about your business because the lightweight nature of interaction makes them more aligned with how brands bubble up and dissipate in natural conversations, like this example from Target.

Build campaigns around content that generates strong feelings, as it’s more likely to be shared. Marmite is a food brand in the uk that is either loved or hated by people.to generate sharing from the people who hate Marmite, they created a Facebook page called “the Marmite Hate party.”

if you’re trying to get people to talk about your brand, put it in their physical environment, as people will talk about things that surround them. Huggies had people upload their favorite photos of their babies to Facebook and then had the most popular photos printed on buses and in subway stations.

WHO WE TALK TO

Most of our communication is with the people closest to us

We like to think that we talk to a wide and diverse set of people, but the reality is that we talk to the same, small group of people again and again. Research shows that people have consistent communication with between 7 and 15 people, but that most conversations are with our five strongest ties. We communicate with the same 5 to 10 people 80 percent of the time. (2) Keller Fay found that 27 percent of our conversations are with our spouse/partner, 25 percent are with a family member, and 10 percent are with a best friend. That’s 62 percent of our conversations with the people closest to us. Only 5 percent of our conversations are with acquaintances, and only 2 percent are with strangers. The remaining 31 percent is with the rest of the people in our social network. (12)

Research shows that people use social networks primarily to strengthen the bonds with their strong ties, and secondarily to build relationships with weak ties. When we looked at how many different people members communicated with directly on Facebook every week, including private messages, chats, wall posts, and likes and comments on status updates, we saw that the average was just 4 people. When we looked at how many different people they communicated with every month, it was only 6 people. This is despite the fact that these people are checking Facebook almost every day. (18) Other research has shown that the more people see each other in person or talk on the phone, the more they communicate online. (19)

We can map how frequently we communicate with others onto our social network structure:

We communicate more with the people toward the center of our social network, the people we are emotionally closest to.

Who is listening to us changes what we talk about

Who we talk to online has a large impact on what we talk about. Many people think carefully before posting status updates. Sometimes they have an explicit audience in mind for the post and need to consider whether it will be interesting or offending to the rest of the people they are connected to.

People are very conscious of being seen to be communicating information others will find interesting, funny, or useful. As they usually see only positive feedback, for example “likes” or comments on Facebook posts, it’s hard for them to know what other people find valuable. For many people the only way is to look at posts that receive no feedback, assume people didn’t find it interesting, and factor the characteristics of that post into future decisions about whether to post something. Sometimes people post updates broadly, as receiving serendipitous replies outweighs any risk of communicating uninteresting information to others.

We communicate differently to explicit groups of friends compared with larger groups of people.

When we talk in public, we’re very careful about what we say. For example, online public ratings tend to be disproportionately positive when they’re linked to our real identity. This is especially true when the other party involved can reciprocate. When people post anonymously, their ratings tend to be almost 20 percent lower than when they use their real names. When ratings are not visible to the party being rated, people give negative reviews more frequently. (20)

Quick tips

We need to build marketing campaigns around the people we’re closest to. When BMW launched the new Mini cooper in the us, they didn’t target people in the market for a car or people who fit their customer profile.they instead targeted existing Mini owners, as they knew that these people were the best way to influence their friends. (21)

SUMMARY

People talk for a variety of reasons: Sharing information makes life easier, talking helps to grow social bonds with others, and choosing what we talk about allows us to manage how others perceive us.

We talk about other people, what’s around us, and things that generate strong feelings. Most conversations involve recounting personal experiences, or gossiping about who is doing what with whom.

We talk about brands in passing, often driven by what we see in our environment, and to fill a conversation space with someone else.

Most of our communication is with the people closest to us. We communicate with the same 5 to 10 people 80 percent of the time.

FURTHER READING

On my personal Twitter account, I’ve generally tried to keep the signal to noise ratio high (I post about my personal life on my Facebook account). I only tweet once every day or two despite reading tons of articles every day. This reading helps me form my thoughts, and as one of the most common pieces of feedback I’ve received about the book is that the references are really helpful, it made sense to create a new Twitter account for the book, where I will tweet the stuff I’m reading (with some quality control . Think of it as a living extended bibliography for the book.

So, you can follow the book here @GroupedTheBook. I’ve dropped in a few articles I’ve recently to give you an idea of what I’ll post there. I’d love to hear thoughts if you read the articles I link to, and I hope to find new articles through the books’ followers. I hope you find the ongoing conversation helpful!

Thanks to the web, our access to information is increasing exponentially, and is not going to stop. A single query into a search engine produces millions of results. People are adding information to Wikipedia faster than we can read it: 1000 unique articles are added every day, on top of all the edits and additions to existing articles. We’re creating 2000 tweets per second, 48 hours of YouTube uploads per minute. In 2002, we recorded and replicated 23 exabytes of information. We now record and transfer that much information every 7 days.

This increase in the information we can access has two important side effects:

1. The capacity for information processing and memory is not increasing at anywhere close to the same rate. In fact, it’s barely increasing at all. Our capacity for processing information and remembering it, has formed over tens of thousands of years of evolution. In this sea of information, people often complain of “information overload” and although the amount of information we can now access is unprecedented, the feeling that we’re drowning in information is not new. In fact, it was first felt and described after the invention of the printing press. The word “deluge”, which means a sense of drowning, was a common metaphor for information in the 1600s.

2. This increase in information will have a profound impact on the world of marketing and advertising. Over the past 50 years, the predominant model in advertising has been to attract people’s attention – mostly by interruption, sometimes by surprising people with a juxtaposition of different aspects of society, creating new memes. Marketers and advertisers built systems that interrupted people from what they are currently focused on, to get them to focus on something else. We have long lived in a world where our TV shows are interrupted, our magazine articles are interrupted, our car journey is interrupted. If billboards were invented today, we wouldn’t know what they are because they would be banned by the road safety authority. The exponential increase in information we can access, combined with the fact that our brain has limited processing capability, means that a strategy based on interruption is now a race to the bottom. More advertisers, delivering more information, in an already overwhelming sea of information, competing for the same volume of attention. This ends badly for everybody.

While it’s important to understand the increase in information and the static nature of our brain’s processing capabilities, the critical thing to understand is how these relate to what is holding people’s attention. We’re watching less TV, and spending more time online. We’re spending less time online consuming content from broadcasters and businesses, and more time communicating with other people – most often with our friends. Advertisers are competing for people’s attention by going head to head with those peoples’ friends. It’s easy to see who wins here – we care a lot more about our friends and family than about what brands have to say, no matter how interesting or relevant the message. It’s annoying but acceptable to interrupt a TV episode of Friends, it’s not acceptable to interrupt a conversation amongst real-life friends.

In this eco-system, interruption is never a good experience. Imagine being at a party, talking to friends, and being interrupted by someone you didn’t know well, who immediately tried to change the topic of conversation to something that revolves around themselves. We have words to describe those kinds of people, and they’re not pretty.

Marketing and advertising is about to experience a paradigm shift. In 5 (maybe 10) years, we won’t see much advertising built on interruption because our information overloaded world will have rendered it ineffective and inefficient. All advertising will be context sensitive, personalized, and relevant. The distribution channels for this advertising are the technologies being invented now.

This post is the first in a series describing five huge shifts happening now.

1. It’s a huge missed opportunity. Imagine if the organisers had decided to embrace social media from the volunteers. Imagine the moments that would be captured that couldn’t have ever been captured by the official TV crew. The best moments will be spontaneous and serendipitous. TV cameras won’t be there. Athletes winning, athletes losing. This highly emotional, and therefore engaging, content would have driven huge increases in interest because it would make the athletes more human, more like you and I, and would bring plenty of people in who will be on the fence about the Games. Many people in the UK are opposed to the Games. Many people globally have no interest in the Games. This increase in interest would create huge increases in viewership, and would build strong emotional relationships between ordinary people and the Olympics as a global event.

2. It’s not enforceable. People post under pseudonyms all the time. People can easily post anonymously to their friends who will then share the content. Loads and loads of content will leak out. Some people may be tracked down and fired, but most won’t be found. Remember, this is a group of 70,000 people who have no vested interest in TV rights, athlete rights, etc. They will be much more interested in sharing one of the highlights of their life with their family and friends.

3. It’s based on an understanding of a world which no longer exists. Any PR firm who believe that they can carefully control brand messages are deluded and are going out of business – slowly but surely. The role of PR has changed from command and control to engaging in conversation, and encouraging positive debate.

This is a really short sighted plan. I don’t buy that they are trying to protect the safety of athletes and VIPs. Are they also banning the Paparazzi? Are they worried that social media helps terrorists? In my opinion, this move is motivated by protecting the rights of those who paid extreme amounts of money to broadcast Olympic footage. It’s keeping all the major broadcasters happy. And maybe deep down they know the rule is not enforceable but have to toe the right line in public. But I worry that some people in the IOC with a lot of power have absolutely no idea how the world of media is changing.

I predict that we will see tons and tons of footage leaking out from the 70,000 volunteers, and that the best footage from the Games will come from regular folks, attendees and volunteers, and not from official TV crews. I also think that by the time the 2016 Olympics rolls around, this decision will be laughable, and the enforcers of this rule will look like dinosaurs.

1. The amount of information we can access is increasing exponentially.

2. The web is being rebuilt around people, rather than being built around content.

3. For the first time in humanity, social interaction, and influence, are measurable.

4. Technology is driving a large increase in understanding how we make decisions, and it’s not how we assumed.

5. Mobile technologies (phones, tablets, etc.) will change society in ways we can’t yet predict.

Is Facebook a fad? Why do people spend so much time using it?
How does Facebook work? Why are businesses on it?

In almost all cases where these set of questions arise, the person asking me doesn’t really use Facebook. My advice to them is simple. Start using Facebook every day. Look at what people are doing. Think about what they are not doing. Look at what businesses are doing. Look at what they are not doing. Study businesses that have high engagement (look at the ‘people talking about this’ number on their page) and figure out why. Look for patterns across posts that have high engagement.

It always surprises me when I hear from very successful business people who are trying to understand Facebook by reading third party reports about it. You won’t learn much about Facebook by reading NYT or WSJ articles about it.

Same goes for Twitter, Google+, etc. I’m shocked at how many people mention Facebook and Twitter in the same breath as if they are the same. People are using these two platforms in completely different ways. Facebook is for communication with people you know in real life. Twitter is a way to get information about celebrities, sports personalities and news outlets that you care about. The vast majority of active Twitter users have never posted a tweet. The same appears to be true for Google+. It is unlike Facebook or Twitter. The people who are using it, are using it as a way to connect with people they don’t know in real life around niche hobbies, currently skewed heavily towards technology and photography.

It also surprises me when I hear from people building on the Facebook platform who don’t understand how it works. People complain that it changes too often. This is an understandable complaint, but it’s not going to change. This is the world we now live in. The only certainty is that things will continue to change fast.

The only way to understand a new type of media is to spend time embedded in it. Get your hands dirty. The future of your business probably depends on it.

Let me show you an example of each.

I really like A List Apart. But in their reader’s review of 2011, where their readers talked about the biggest changes they saw in 2011, I think they missed the biggest change of all – that the web is being rebuilt around people. They talked about apps, mobile first, emotional design, measurement. But social design was a glaring omission. All designers should be recognizing, and should be on top of, this shift. Yes, “social” has become a buzzword, and there are many charlatans selling themselves as “social media gurus”. But this shift is very, very real.

At Le Web a couple of weeks ago, George Colony, the CEO of Forrester, gave an interesting talk where he described three social thunderstorms. The first and third thunderstorms were interesting – moving from browsers to local apps interacting with the cloud*, and the rise of social design within enterprises. But the second thunderstorm is where George missed the same shift as the readers of A List Apart.

George misunderstands the shift with the social web. He said “social” is:
- Running out of hours: people have a finite amount of time in the day and are already interacting with social applications more than many other activities such as exercising.
- Running out of people: penetration of people interacting with social applications is hitting 80 to 90% so doesn’t have much room to grow.

This analysis makes no sense. Social is not a feature. Social is not an application. Social is a deep human motivation that drives our behaviour almost every second that we’re awake. It doesn’t matter if we’re online or offline, on a browser or using an app. Humans are social creatures. George says 86% of US online consumers are social, and describes a “post-social” world. Again, this makes no sense. 100% of online consumers in every country in the world are social because it’s deep in our DNA to make connections and interact with other people.

The big shift that George is misunderstanding is that the rise of the social web is a structural change being driven by online life catching up with offline life. The winners in this world will be the ones who assume social behaviour in everything they do. It won’t be the ones thinking about social as a feature or product in isolation. The winners will be existing businesses who build on top of social platforms to rethink how their business operates. Here are three recent, and simple, examples:

- When you buy tickets on Ticketmaster you can see whether any of your Facebook friends have bought tickets, and if so, where they are sitting. Simple. Want to spend time together? Sit next to them. Want to do your own thing? Sit far away, or don’t buy a ticket.
- When you book flights on Air France, you can see if any of your Facebook friends are on the same flight and where they are sitting. Same as Ticketmaster – sit close by, or far away.
- When you browse for gifts on Etsy, you can use the things your friends have liked on Facebook to filter your results. Your friend likes Bill Murray? Here are all the products about Bill Murray. This moves the experience from a random and almost limitless set of options, to deep social personalization.

These are three dead simple integrations that substantially improve the core product/service experience. The leading businesses are recognizing that the web is moving away from being centred around content, to being centred around people. That is the biggest social thunderstorm, and all of us are going to have to understand it to succeed. So stop talking about social as a distinct entity. Assume it in everything you do.

*You should watch George’s talk to hear his pitch about the first thunderstorm. I’m not sure I buy it, but it’s a fascinating perspective.

People I talk to are always surprised at how low the number is – only four people per week, and only six people per month. What’s more, the majority of people in these small groups remains consistent from week to week – for example, our partner, our closest friends and family. Changes in people from week to week is usually posting a like or comment with a much weaker tie, for example seeing someone we went to school with get married, run a marathon, or have a baby.

When telling this story, I usually gloss over an important related fact. Although the average Facebook user is only communicating directly with four of their 130 friends in any given week, they are consuming content from a much larger number of those people. After all, over 50% of active Facebook users come back every day. If you include consuming updates from people as communication, then people are interacting with many more than four, but much of the communication is asymmetrical in nature. I may not communicate directly with you, but I do keep up with what’s going on in your life.

This isn’t a new phenomenon. In years gone by, we kept up to date through word of mouth – chatting with people in our town or village as we went about daily life. We spoke to a small number of people regularly, and because approximately 70% of conversations are about other people, we learned a lot about many others through interacting with a few. We gossiped, because gossip helps us understand how others behave, and helps define social norms. Many of the same motivations exist in consumption of others’ updates online.