Rory Sutherland's Blog

Rory Sutherland

It is time for me to acknowledge what anomalous Welsh papist Mark Earls has been telling us all along: we really are a herd species. (Humans, I mean, not just the Welsh.)

And I finally came to this conclusion when I found myself checking Facebook or Twitter every morning before I turned to a newspaper or opened up my email.

Why would I do this?

In other words, why is it more compelling to know that one of my friends is buying a latte than to read news of geniuine importance? I think Mark provides most of the explanation in his recent and excellent Twitter article in Market Leader... but there is one more thing I would like to add.

In Market Leader Mark describes much of the anthropology that lies behind social media. That people, quite simply, like contact with other people. And that interpersonal communication does not exist simply for the transmission of information but as a form of bonding activity.

Indeed I was very taken recently to hear of a practice that has arisen in Africa. In that continent, many of the mobile operators allow users (they are rarely subscribers) to send anyone unlimited free SMSes reading simply "Call me" - the reason being that at any one time many people have no available call time left on their PAYG accounts. Every day millions of people take advantage of this, even when they have no wish to hear from anyone else: the sending of "call me" has come to mean "I care", "I love you" or "I am thinking of you"; a kind of digital "Ca va?". If you actually want the person to call, I understand, you send the message twice.

It's a super illustration of the value of a kind of communication that is as high in value as it is low in bandwidth. The very kind of communication which has been most persistently undervalued and misunderstood.

While people have waxed on endlessly about the possibility of video on mobile*, rich media 3G networks, WAP and Video over Broadband, most of the real successes have been those minimal, short forms of interpersonal communication (such as SMS) where a) the effort required is small and b) the level of self-importance exhibited by the sender is relatively low. Forms of communication whose analogue equivalents are far closer to the saucy seaside postcard than the two-page A4 letter on headed paper. 

Why are these forms so popular, Simply because people like DollyMessitering - sharing myriad (often unimportant) facts about their lives with others. But they are inhibited from doing so when the effort is high (a phone call demands five minutes of pleasantries which an SMS does not) or when the form of communication has too great an import or level of intrusion to justify the content (you can reasonably use the post to send a wedding invitation but not a minor item of news).

Facebook and Twitter add something altogether new to the individual's communications palette - in that they are the first ever forms of digital communication to be semi-addressable. What I mean by semi-addressable is that they generally confine your outpourings to a community of friends - but the message is not addressed to specifically named individuals.

As a result of this, they enable communication to take place at a gloriously trivial** level. If I were to email you daily with news of my plans for the day, or to tell you of a vague intention to take my kids camping, you would think me an astondingly self important person (if you don't already) or perhaps insane; had I any sensitivity at all I would also feel that the addressing of the email to you imposes on you an obligation to read it out of all proportion to the importance of the contents. If I Twitter or Facebook the same information indiscriminately to my friends, it is on the shared understanding that noone need read or act on the information at all - indeed it may not be aimed at them at all, but some other friends on my list.

That, in short, is the value of the semi-addressable medium. They are the natural home for peripheral or tangential information. The birdsong of social intercourse. Analogous in many ways to the noticeboards we used to have in agencies before email seemed to kill them. Except these boards are visible worldwide.

So far, fine. But why does this matter to brands? Actually for a very good reason. Quite simply because, contrary to what you may have heard from the odd agency claiming that "your brand belongs at the centre of consumers' lives" this simply isn't true.

At the centre of people's lives belong their families, their homes, their communities, their religions and their closest friends. Brands - with very few exceptions - have a natural place either at the periphery of people's lives or occupying the network spaces - the interstices - between people.

As such I truly wonder whether these social media, as natural homes for matters of peripheral importance, and for incidental information - aren't a more natural home for brands than radio or TV.

After all, perhaps the greatest value of many brands is as low-bandwidth, highly compressed form of telegraphing to our friends the more trivial aspects of who we are. For this, social media seem perfect.

And what of brands which actually enable us to project ourselves to our network of friends? I have just suggested to American Express that they issue a card which posts your every purchase (the location, though not necessarily the amount) to Facebook. I think they believe I am mad - but I'll keep trying.

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* Mobile TV was described by one pundit as "like sex out of doors - often desirable but rarely practicable."

** Trivia actually derives from the Latin word for "crossroads" - the place where most minor gossip and twittering took place in the ancient world.