Users want Social. Brands want Media.

Remember when we bought our meat from the corner store owned by the Carlson family? Remember when that meat was raised by the Anderson family from the next county over to the east? Remember when you could go talk to the owners of what you bought and consumed? Remember when you could develop relationships with these people because you lived in the same community; your kids went to school with theirs?

Yeah, I don’t either.

But I know people who do and did. It wasn’t that long ago.

The Industrial Revolution changed our communities and our relationships. We could do a couple neat new things almost overnight. We could make tons of stuff and we could ship it for fairly cheap. This included our food as well as most everything else. The distance between supplier and consumer grew until recently I bought vegetables—organic ones from Trader Joe’s—that were literally grown on the other side of the world.

During and after the Industrial Revolution the presence of Brands grew in importance rather rapidly. Corporations made our stuff, not our neighbors. Time became an issue. Both parties—Corporations and Consumers—needed a shortcut, a mechanism to spread and trust the word about products and services, quickly, efficiently. It became less and less about the truly personal (e.g. “I got my leather bag from Farmer Anderson on the east side of the valley.”) and more and more about the invented-personal (“I like Brand X’s leather bag because their brand is like me.”).

Advancements in media only made it more so, and quite often, only so. Brands became synonymous with Media. Capital B. Capital M.

But now we’re living in what I see as an Interaction Revolution. And that’s a threat to Capital B and Capital M.

Overnight it seems, we can do a couple of really neat things. We can, unlike anytime before, connect and share with others and interact across distances and with little connection to geographic location. Increasingly, relationships and work groups are separated by large physical distances with little perceived loss in the quality of those relationships. In fact, some claim they are richer because of it. We appear to be more geo-agnostic as the months go by. Our social relationships are exploding, fueled by digital.

It seems that we are, in some sense, returning to our pre-industrial revolution social graphs. We’re sharing life with others across distance, fueled by what I call the Digital Porch—that place where we all meet in public to share life together. We had a similar shared experience before, when our communities supported the notion of a physical porch. Now we’ve recreated it in what is being called “social media.”

I’m interested in the order in which the term “social media” is approached and appreciated by Corporations and Consumers. It’s pretty clear that people approach the “social” side of social media first. The media, with a small m, is theirs (photos, and videos and text). They’re making media themselves for the purposes of sharing with others. Corporations, on the other hand, are typically approaching “social media” because of the Media side of the term, with a capital M. It’s about purchasing audience share.

Here’s the crux—people want to build relationships with others first, as a path to creating trust. Call it Relationship before Brand. Corporations are not well practiced in having relationships (despite decades of practice inventing the idea that a relationship exists between you and a brand). They prefer Brand before Relationship.

My money’s on the people.

My money’s on the tiny grains of conversation that merge to build relationships, then community, then tribes, then nations—a cumulative, snowball effect just as powerful as the mechanized chain of Paid Media Branding from the last century. Of course it will take a while. The current empire wasn’t built in a day, either.

To survive this evolution, brands need to be redefined as the individuals inside the company—versus messaging and media outside; to become less about the volumes of media inventory anyone can purchase, and more about the interpersonal connections only each employee can nurture. Brands need to be oriented towards Social (capital “S”) first and media (small “m”) second.

Let’s talk about this out on the Digital Porch.