I’m very taken with Hugh’s recent ponderings on the term Social Object. It is a great way to explain how marketing succeed and fails.
The Social Object, in a nutshell, is the reason two people are talking to each other, as opposed to talking to somebody else. Human beings are social animals. We like to socialize. But if think about it, there needs to be a reason for it to happen in the first place. That reason, that “node” in the social network, is what we call the Social Object.
Hugh’s blue monster is a Social Object.
Here is another Social Object in the Microsoft context.
(photo from Andreas Solberg’s excellent flickr series. Thanks)
Brings me nicely to a point I’d been planning to make about Social Objects. You don’t get to chose the Social Objects, your customers do.
January 7, 2008 at 1:30 am
[...] Street art as a social object – I have very mixed feelings about this concept. It seems to work fine at the consumer level but I doubt it holds true once you get beyond commodities or impulse buys. [...]
January 7, 2008 at 12:05 pm
Dennis,
The Social Object concept works equally in both the “enterprise” and the consumer space. I think sometimes we all build far too much into the consumer-enterprise divide.
Social objects are at play in SDN, for instance.