Networks have power. Politicians, mafia dons, matchmakers, Freemasons and photocopier salespeople all have something in common - their ability to nurture and exploit those invisible social ties that bind us. Whether it be trading favours or swapping information, the network has always been the most subtle and powerful weapon for those astute enough to use it. So there is something deeply perverse that in the moment that online networks offer such dazzling new opportunities to connect, that we have found ways to punish people for it.

And there is a deeper irony. Even as HR and IT departments crack down on their in-house digital dissidents, marketing teams are doing their best to curry favour with the socially networked. This holiday season numerous large retail brands partnered with 'haul video' kids, whose YouTube shopping confessionals have become rallies for pampered tweens. Elsewhere, fanboy bloggers are courted aggressively by consumer electronics firms, amateur Twitter celebrities leverage their influence for social media consulting dollars, and surgically enhanced netstars trade their geek fame credentials for commercial endorsements and b-grade Hollywood roles. For now, at least, it looks like a motley parade. But the underlying trend is worth considering.

What if you could assess someone's online social standing and influence as easily as checking a credit score? Eventually employers will have access to highly sophisticated systems that will allow them to do just that. When that happens - instead of being castigated for their blogs, tweets and friend lists - job applicants will experience the opposite. The best hires will be the ones that bring their networks to the table. 

Limited social analysis software is already in the market. There are already some interesting applications like Twitter Grader, Twitalyzer, TweetLevel and Klout that use algorithymic voodoo to estimate your Twitter authority. When I tested my own handle, I was given a wide variety of different scores and curious facts which did not mean very much to me, other than it was fun to discover that I joined Twitter on the same day as eBay founder, Pierre Omidyar. More comprehensive analytical platforms are needed, with some targeted smarts that look at the relevance of networks for particular industries or goals. Sheer brute connections are not enough. Its better to have just 100 people in your network, rather than a million - if they are the right 100. 

I know what you are thinking. There is something sickening about all of this - the rabbit like multiplication of networks and connections. Surely it should be enough to be good at what you do, without having to also ape the online promiscuity of Kim Kardashian and Ashton Kutcher. But in the future, who you know will also be what you know. And to misappropriate Yeats - the best lack conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

Of course, the hot hire to make these days are social media experts. A terrible title, to be sure. Like ‘horseless carriage' or 'moving staircase', 'social media' is a retro tautology that only highlights how attenuated our conceptual models have become. My favorite is one most people don't notice - 'mobile phone'. Think about kids. Have they ever used a phone that isn't mobile? Or for that matter, ever experienced media that isn't social? Every savvy marketer today is grappling with the question of how to resource themselves in a world where consumers are often better at leading brand discussions than they are. But does the world really need more twitchy Twitter junkies ready to jump on every consumer bleat with a canned corporate response? I'm hoping that your future digital A-Team will be somewhat different. 

With the war for attention looming, here are three new recruits that should be on your list:

1. The Quant

As any diehard Tron fan will tell you, the geeks shall inherit the earth. And if Wall Street is any indication, the same guys who transformed the business of money during the eighties with their algorithms and super computers are set to take up permanent residence in the marketing space as well. We are still in the early days of consumer monitoring. Marketers are starting to listen to what consumers are saying on social platforms, analyzing traffic spikes and studying keyword search behavior. Its a good start, but horribly primitive - equivalent to trying to run a sophisticated hedge fund with a slide rule.

If you really want to understand where we are going, spend some time with an affiliate marketer. These guys are like forex traders - constantly scanning the online world for traffic arbitrage opportunities, and creating revenue programs that slip between the gap between acquisition costs and performance margins. Your future marketing quants will be a lot like this - part ethnologist and part math savant - they will use state of the art technology to monitor the shifting networks of consumer memes and traffic flows, always looking for new opportunities to exploit and conversations to 'lean into'.

2. The Storyteller

Media has always operated on a simple premise - professionals create content so that marketers can hitch a ride to sell their messages to unwitting consumers. But increasingly brands are realising that in an age where consumer networks are capable of mass distribution, they need to be in the content business themselves. Luxury brands do this better than anyone. They tell seductive stories about provenance, family history and craftsmanship - to gloss over the less salubrious truth of third world factories, conglomerate ownership and mass production.

The storyteller role in your marketing department will soon be filled by clever creative types, who will work with professional writers, photographers and filmmakers to spin brands into engaging pieces of entertainment capable of standing on their own. Media companies will still have a role providing eyeballs and context for branded material - but I believe the creative imperative will shift from the traditional custodians of content. As I wrote in my book Futuretainment, in the future media companies will need to think like brands, and brands like media companies. 

3. The Makers

As Johnny Vulkan, founder of Anomaly likes to point out - we always forget the first P in Philip Kotler's classic 4 P's of Marketing (Product, Price, Place and Promotion). So the final role that I believe you will see more often in marketing departments are true product evangelists. Not just product managers mind you, but true 'makers' who have responsibility for the total consumer experience.

If you have ever watched one of those fan boy videos of an 'unboxing' you will realize the power of product and packaging as a platform for branding. The maker role in the marketing department of the future will be the link between the creators of the brand and the creators of the stuff. They will be alchemists of the physical - from the design of objects to the beauty of packaging, from the tone of instruction manuals right through to the design of retail stores and experiential marketing events. 

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No doubt, some of the more enterprising of you will already be wondering if you fit any of these roles. And the really ambitious ones might even be asking yourselves, if you were to pick being a quant, storyteller or maker - which has the best chance to take the reins of CMO? But as before, I'd suggest that you are asking the wrong question. If the new marketing department of the future will be so central to a company's core brand and product, the real question is not who will be CMO, but what successful CMO should not be CEO?

I was quoted in a magazine article on the office of the future, appearing in the December 2010 edition of Virgin's inflight magazine, Voyeur. In the piece I discuss the rise of 'immersion rooms' capable of modular virtual stacking, equipped with pressure mats, motion sensors and full screen wall projections.

There was a game I used to like to play when I first started traveling. When I arrived in a new city, I'd set out with a map, a notebook and a coin. Rather than follow a plan, I'd delegate all choices to a coin toss. Heads, turn left. Tails, walk into that book store. Heads, walk three blocks and then take the first left. A flick of the wrist, sunlight catching shiny metal on a downward arc - a decision made. As I recorded my random adventures on my map - a new world would gradually render into being, like one of Calvino's Invisible Cities. I thought about those maps the other day when one of my clients asked me how they should embed innovation into their culture. Chance has always been a willing mistress to creativity - but could it also play midwife to innovation?

Sadly, companies often talk about innovation like it is a form of calisthenics. We have all read those over enthusiastic internal memos encouraging staff to be more innovative - as if, like sit ups or star jumps, it was just a matter of exercising a previously unused muscle in your brain. Some years ago, the Singaporean government was so worried that its citizens were hard working but not innovative, that they instituted a series of creative programs at schools. During the appointed creativity hour, kids were strongly encouraged to all be as innovative as possible, naturally in a quiet and diligent way. It was not, as you might expect, a stellar success. The problem is, whether you are a kid or a corporate VP - being innovative is not something you can just switch on. Inevitably we face a ‘white paper problem’.

One of my favorite artists is Max Ernst. Despite his prolific output of surrealist landscapes and images rich in personal mythology - he sometimes complained of the paralysing effect of a blank white sheet of paper. With an infinite number of possible things you can create, how do you simply get started? To get around this problem, he would begin some of his works by rubbing black lead over a piece of wood or a section of floorboard. From the randomness of the resulting images, he would be inspired to then create a masterpiece. 

You will often hear people talk about Google's 20% program - the policy that their engineers can spend a fifth of their time working on their own pet projects. Interestingly though, this is not the really smart part of how Google builds a culture of innovation. Simply telling people they can spend time working on their own stuff is to invite a 'white paper problem'. When I recently interviewed Justin Baird, an 'innovationist' (yes, that is his real title) at Google he told me that they have an internal online forum that allowed people to list projects and ideas that interested them. When you were looking for a project to innovate around, you didn't have to just stare at the ceiling and think up something entirely new - you could browse a database of ideas, people and initiatives to look for areas where you could contribute and collaborate. Sure - its great to stand on the shoulders of giants, but sometimes lots of very small people stacked on top of each other is just as useful.

I think we can learn an interesting lesson from Google’s innovation forum. Despite the persistent hype about the information revolution, we are still at the very early days of how we leverage the information, ideas and intellectual capital that is hidden in the substratum of businesses. Knowledge management was the hot buzzword in the nineties - but most projects, which required people to create masses of useless documentation - failed to engender either participation or inspiration. But what if we could introduce a little more randomness into the process. 

A colleague of mine, who visited the CEO of Best Buy told me that he saw three screens in his office - that constantly updated with what consumers were saying on Twitter, blogs and other social networks. This is just the beginning of a new way of visualising innovation triggers in real time. In coming years, the business analytics space will need to be overhauled with a bit more creative flair. Rather than relying on just formal reporting and planning processes, we should be presented with attractive infographics that randomly display customer comments, unusual transactional patterns, cross referenced data, and even random images and videos sourced from the Web. The true starting point of innovation is pattern recognition - seeing possibilities in changing consumer behavior or deeper truths in everyday business processes. 

So, if you could put your business on shuffle what might that look like? Are there opportunities you are missing because you are not exposing yourself to a wide enough set of new possibilities? If you look closely you will probably discover that the best ideas are not waiting for a brillant demiurge to invent - but are already lurking in the minds of your staff and customers, ready for the right opportunity to spring into being. 

Flip a coin and find out. 

After a long hiatus of not wearing a watch at all, I recently took possession of my dream piece - an IWC Perpetual Calendar. Intricate, complicated, and ironically - unrepentantly analogue. But the mystery deepened. As I opened the box containing the watch I discovered a small glass vial, sealed by wax and containing a tiny, perfectly machined part. 'You, or should I say - your great great descendant will need this on January 1, 2200', said the brand manager in response to my puzzled expression - 'it is the replacement slide for when the calendar year moves into a new century'. That set me thinking. We always assume that digital is the logical evolution of analogue, but could it be a relationship more subtle?

First, a confession. I love analogue. I take pictures on an old film Leica, I write with a leaky fountain pen on a small Moleskine notebook and I aspire owning my favourite albums on vinyl and a real valve driven hi-fi. Part of the motivation for my retrograde lusts are aesthetic. I like the look of film grain, the feel of paper, and the warm sound of records. But there are also powerful emotions attached to the idea that things can still be crafted.

A real part of the appeal of ‘steam punk’, where the high tech is re-imagined as a mechanised baroque fantasy of cogs and flywheels - is that we regain the feeling that technology is not magic but the results of human engineering. Like the Eloi, as our hardware has advanced, we lost our knowledge of its workings. Modern electronics can no longer be fixed, merely discard and replaced. Worst of all - the lack of permanence in the things that surround us is mirrored in the constant stream of social media and status updates. In other words, momentum gets routinely mistaken for meaning.

I think that is why Neal Stephenson’s novel Anathem is so seductive. Imagine a world strictly divided between a technological and commercial saecular society and a group known as the Avout, intellectuals who live monastically in cloistered communities. The Avout are forbidden to communicate with people outside the walls of their monastry except during certain periods in which giant gates open - like clockwork - every year/decade/century/millenium, depending their vows. It is like a societal coping mechanism to prevent the loss of knowledge through progress.

You can easily lose perspective in the perpetual present. Think about your world. User generated content is already on the way out. Few create, most consume. Blogging is a dying art. Eventually, we won't even tweet. Our devices will simply automatically check us in, and signal silently to each other - until we ourselves resemble human sized packets in a distributed network.

I doubt that my little glass vial will survive into the hands of a great, great grandchild, but in a way that’s not really the point. Its just nice to be reminded that while the chaotic universe might not operate like Isacc Newton’s perfect celestial clock - through our devices and desires, we still have the capacity to create small moments of perpetuity.