Social Marketing - an explanation

I am not claiming any credit for these words of wisdom - I can't actually remember where they came from however, as a simple explanation to people not internet savvy I think it does the trick!


We are natural villagers. For most of mankind's history we have lived in very small communities in which we knew everybody and everybody knew us. But gradually there grew to be far too many of us, and our communities became too large and disparate for us to be able to feel a part of them, and our technologies were unequal to the task of drawing us together. But that is changing."
More quickly than anyone really imagined, humankind is rediscovering, via its digital technology, the ability to reconnect with itself. it is this phenomenon that is at the heart of the connected world.
To put the concept in context. within my village 250 years ago you would have known the business of most people. You'd have known who was sleeping with who, who brewed the best beer, which baker added sawdust to their bread and who slacked off at harvest time.
What digital technology has done is recreate this world, or at least, recreate the mechanics of it.
For 250 years, as we've burned hydrocarbons and industrialized, the importance of these connections was downplayed, even considered "dated". Instead we learned to rely on 3rd parties - businesses we had no personal connection to - to inform us as to who was brewing the best beer. We even got to the stage where our sense of self became caught up in these messages. We'd lost a personal connection with "the brewer", we became "alienated".
As people thinking about how to engage other people in the digital world, this concept, that we are "natural villagers" needs to be at the heart of our thinking. Only by recreating and harnessing the inbuilt desire to connect can we be effective.