Hugh Macleod has a great post that helps explain what is at the heart of the social networking phenomenon, namely the social object.

It can be anything that arises passion in people. Sports, technology, a cause, whatever. People gravitate towards the object (the node) and then the network forms (and hopefully, the network effects take off)

So, coming back to the oft-cited idea of the "raving fan," the marketing challenge for Microsoft (and our partners) is

1. are we social objects around which people organize? I dare say, yes.
2. what are we doing to foster the social network around us as objects? I dare say, very little.

At least now we have an idea of where to focus our efforts (I hope).

There are no comments yet...Kick things off by filling out the form below.