I wrote about this in an article for Connect! (which you should buy, sorry to be pimping it but it’s for a good cause – proceeds go to Susan G. Komen for the Cure): if you can’t help people build their social capital in some form, then your business model is flawed. Gareth referred to a similar concept when he said ideas are divided into social and anti-social ideas. Social capital is an idea that dates back to the 1960’s, when Robert Putnam first mentioned it in his book Bowling Alone. The book, which spoke about the trend of Americans interacting less and less with their immediate community and how that would have ramifications for American society as a whole, started a revolution to revitalise the country. We are at a similar crossroads now. There is plenty of work still being produced, but the communications industry is feeling the change in the direction of the breeze because some ideas are not necessarily social even if they are good, and so are slowly being rejected in favour of those that are, by the people that they are directed at. They’re not just ‘users’ and ‘consumers’, it’s you and me we’re talking about. Us. ‘Consumers’ are not a race from Planet Xenon. 

Digital/interactive is rising up in the overall scheme of things because it is easier, all said and done, to use them to create social ideas. TV will never die, but as a chunk of the pie it is shrinking in size, whereas the interactive medium is growing. And that is simply a reflection of the social reality – families don’t cluster around TVs to watch programmes the way they used to before. The individual members of most families probably spend more time online – that’s why Facebook and Twitter continue to grow, the latter at 1382% in the year from February 2008-2009, while Facebook has more people in the 35-54 age group joining (that demographic grew at 276.4% in the last 6 months) than ever before. 

If you read Howard Gossage’s 1960 document about billboards (still relevant!), he says that billboards are an intrusion into our private lives because you cannot get rid of them, if for example, you happen to be driving along a highway. Whereas in the case of a magazine, TV or radio, you can close the magazine, or turn the TV or radio off. 

One-way modes of communication are OK if you simply want to tell a quick story or relay a message. 30 or 60-second stories are the kinds that brands are most used to. But that was in the old days – the Mad Men days. Today, the ideas that last are the ones where people have a stake in them. Even TV shows have online versions so that fans can interact and comment. In fact, hardcore fans wind up creating their own sites focussing on a show, as with We Are Sterling Cooper. It’s simply in keeping with the natural progression of society’s and technology’s characteristics. If you don’t give people the mechanism they’re looking for, they will create it on their own sooner rather than later. People are now spoken to, not just at. And ideas have a better chance of succeeding if they mould themselves to the needs of the people that use them – if they are social and agile. Tim did a great job of explaining the ‘how’ of those kinds of ideas, the kind of ideas we try to come up with at Made By Many, here. 

Agile ideas that promote social capital in some way, and I’m going to go out on a limb and say that a social idea is automatically useful – those are the kinds of strategies we all need to be thinking about. Period.