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James Fowler, co-author of the book “Connected: The Surprising Power of Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives” dropped by The Colbert Report recently to promote his new book.

While the interview contained the usual Colbert grilling (I like how he threatened to turn the interview into 400 requests to play Mafia Wars), it did raise some interesting points about Social Networks and their abilities to influence our family and friends.

James Fowler on Colbert Nation

With your standard friends on Facebook, you actually assert little or no influence on them for things like music tastes, movies or brand interactions (and vice versa). This all changes if the person has uploaded and tagged a photo with you - these friends now exert the same amount of influence as close friends and family in the real world.

So if you are a brand trying to influence Facebook users, remember that your targets may be much smaller than you think - while a person my have hundreds of friends, unless they appear in photos with the person, you may be wasting your time.

I am posting pretty late in the game on this one, but Skittles have recently implemented a new overhaul to their website that essentially does the opposite of traditional strategy - completely remove the website and replace it with their Social Media presence. This experiment is a pretty gutsy move by the brand, but one that seems to have generated huge buzz and success.

Essentially, if you go to the Skittles homepage, you now access a Skittles “Channel”. After confirming your birthdate and the Terms of Service, you are directed to a default page (their YouTube channel), while a small widget in the corner lets you navigate to areas of Social Media for the brand, such as their Twitter feed, Facebook page, or Flickr page.

What this means is they have completely removed a Corporate Website, and have now leveraged their entire web presence into Social Media tools, letting consumers drive the content and provide comments and feedback. From Twittering about the your love for the product, to posting photos, or commenting on their amazingly random videos, consumers are now driving the dialogue and creating a community of like minded individuals.

This may be the most impressive thing about this new strategy - essentially Skittles are only a candy, but have found a way to create a massive amount of free PR and engagement online that has generated a massive amount of awareness (and a huge amount of talk of the Internet). 

Will this be the death of a traditional Corporate Website? Probably not, as any brand to follow this model probably won’t capitalise on the huge amount of free press that followed Skittles move. But they should be applauded for trying a bold, aggressive experiment in the Social Media landscape.

I have just finished flipping through two books by the late, great Paul Arden, ”It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want to Be” and “Whatever You Think, Think the Opposite“, and it reminded me again why I make it a habit of revisiting these at least once a year.

These books are a must read for anyone - be you a Creative, Suit or on the Client side in Advertising (although there are beneficial insights for anyone in business).

If you haven’t had a chance to read them, grab them and do so. The ideas may seem simple and obvious, but it is amazing how quickly you can forget when you get snowed under in busy periods at work.

I have recently been catching up online on all of the controversy surrounding two recent viral campaigns - the Witchery “Girl in the Jacket” and the Tourism Queensland’s “Best Job in the World”. These have really seemed to polarise both consumers and industry folk alike once they were revealed as “fakes”.

At the negative extreme, both campaigns have been labelled deceitful, misleading, and a new form of Spam attacking us virally on video sites like YouTube (although how 14 year old girls complaining about their lives or cute hamster videos aren’t considered Spam before these I will never understand).

What they fail to realise is the new opportunity for consumers to not only be involved with the brand on a personal level, but to be actively be involved in the story - even if the end result was not what they expected.

What this begins to do is enter the world of Alternate Reality Games (ARG’s). Essentially these are games or narratives played in the real world, with active participants across the globe working together to move the story forward (often solving puzzles to do so).

ARG’s have recently been used to promote brands or products. My favorite example was the ARG created by 42 Entertainment for the band Nine Inch Nails, for the release of their album Year Zero. I won’t go into detail of what was created to promote the album (check out the NINWiki to get the full details), just that it involved everything from coded messages, leaked songs with hidden information, live stunts, and a massive amount of websites ‘discovered’ online. This allowed the fans to actively participate in the album in the real world or online, outside of simply listening to the songs.

So with Witchery and Tourism Queensland, they turned out to be fakes. But consumers got to interact with a narrative, and feel like they were part of a community (either helping a girl in distress, or competing for a great prize against other like minded people). Added on to regular advertising (like print or outdoor ads) and this opens up a whole new and exciting world of audience engagement.