Yesterday I posted about Media Spend, Trends to Watch and Social Influence Marketing (SIM) from Razorfish’s Digital Outlook Report 2009. Today I wanted to cover social objects and their idea of the connect class.

Social Objects
Razorfish believes that social objects are the key to having a successful social media campaign. Social objects can be anything from a photo, video game, bookmark, video, event, Facebook app, product(s). Three keys to a good social object are highly portable, easily copied and can be reformatted for distribution on other digital media channels.

For example, if I’m speaking with my mothers about the flowers I sent her, the flowers are the social object.

Razorfish goes on to talk about social objects and gives some examples. It’s one of these examples that I don’t agree with. I don’t believe a URL can be a social object. Where the URL points to whether it be a video game, article, or a photo of a plane in Hudson river.. all those are social objects. But the URL is not. If I sent around a URL to my Twitter people and it’s not valuable as deemed by them, then they won’t send it around. However, if that URL leads somewhere great then they’ll pass it around. I think for a URL it’s more important where it leads then anything else. What do you think… is Razorfish correct or are they drinking to much of their own kool-aid? However, their look at the connected class was bang on I think.

Connected Class
The connected class are our early adopters and innovators. Razorfish interviewed people 18-25 as they are typical of the connected class. However, people outside of this age range are also showing signs of being the connected class. It’s not only the younger tech savvy generation anymore. The connected class are starting to show the following signs:

• Paring down how much social media they use and focus on quality connections vs the quantity of the connections (a la MySpace cica 2005)
• Are more fussy in what digital media they use and how they use it
• More of them are using applications that were once tied to the desktop but are now mobile thanks to the iPhone
• Building deeper relationships with their connections
• Staying connected to different digital devices longer then the average user
• Increased use of short forms of communication like text messaging, Facebook status updates
• Watching more online content vs TV

These are just some of the trends that the connected class are starting to show. As a connect person myself, I know this to be true as I’ve done a lot of these tasks over the last 8+ months in my life. A lot of these trends are only going to continue to pick up as the next iPhone gets released and these trends move past the connected class and onto the majority of society globally.

Conclusion
I think Razorfish has it bang on about the connected class. I’m 27 years old and feel strong about myself within that group as I’ve been showing signs of those traits for the last while. However, I don’t agree with their idea that a URL can be a social object now or ever. It’s where that URL leads to that is more important as we start to see the traits of the connected class take over. Marketers are going to have to tap into the traits of the connected class and integrate them with how they build their social objects for their digital campaign, which will surely include social media in one form or another.

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