Getting a little help from your friends was easy enough for Lennon and McCartney, but in an age of Google Circles, Facebook lists and Twitter followers - it is far from clear what friendship actually means. Worse still, marketers are muddying the waters. Brands used to want to brainwash us - now they want to be our friends. But consider this for a moment. What if social marketing was not about getting your customers to like you on Facebook but rather fixing a much bigger problem? Namely, trust.

I grew up in a retail family. My old man used to manage department stores and when I was a kid, one of his favourite 'father and son' activities was to take me around the store and check whether the products that had been advertised in the newspaper that day were actually in stock. Perhaps it was his very Irish way of giving his nine year old a home-made MBA. Anyway - one Saturday morning, I remember him pointing out one of displays and asking me whether I knew why there were so many mirrors on the walls? I shook my head, puzzled. 'When people see themselves' he explained with a wry smile, 'they are less likely to steal things'. 

Like it or not - 'being seen' - is one of the strange, uncredited forces that keeps civil society in balance. There are a lot of things that people would do if they thought no one else would see them doing it. And in rare moments, like the London riots in 2011 - you get a glimpse of just what those things might actually be. But ironically - the very social platforms that have been behind so much revolution and unrest in recent times, also have the potential to improve the way that your customers behave online. And it couldn't come a moment too soon. 

The Web has changed - and in some ways, not for the better. When was the last time you tried to buy or sell something on eBay? What was once a friendly community of amateurs and garage sale enthusiasts now feels to me like an unruly mob of fraudsters, identity thieves and shady offshore merchants. When I recently tried to sell a camera - my advertisement was deleted halfway through an auction. A terse email informed me that my listing was considered potentially fraudelent, and when I re-listed the item and it finally sold - the transaction was voided one final time - because the seller was apparently a fake. Hardly the model of friction-free commerce.

Some argue that new sharing models of commerce will change everything. After all, isn't the popularity of new platforms to share your home, your car, and other posessions indicative of a more responsible online community? Perhaps, but potentially not for long. In my view, like eBay, once digital platforms become mainstream, it is inevitable that the community spirit forged by early adopters becomes tainted by the actions of a few willing to abuse the system.

One solution may be finding better ways to use the social graph to make your customer's networks more transparent. Already, to defeat spammers, many websites require you to login with Facebook before you add your comments to an article. If you connect AirBNB with Facebook, you can see which property owners have common friends with you. Co-working space provider, Loose Cubes, offers a similar feature. Picking an office where friends of yours have worked before helps customers choose between the listings and also provides the owner with a sense of who they are. However, these integrations are only the beginning of what might be possible when you start to combine data with smart consumer pyschology. 

The strategy of making your customer networks transparent is not just limited to the digital world. When Grameen bank makes a micro loan, they hold the borrower responsible not only for their debt, but the repayment actions of those in their lending circle. You can see how this logic can be taken a step further ont he Web. Imagine if AirBNB allowed householders to only rent their places to people within one or two degrees of friendship from their network? And when someone did make a booking, the system showed you the pictures of their common friends so that you knew who you would have to answer to should something go wrong. It would be like catching a glimpse of yourself in a store mirror, just when you were thinking of shoplifting.

True - there is something slightly distateful about this. No one likes to be reminded that we live in public. And rightly or wrongly, many still believe that the Internet is some kind of protected space from the rest of society where different rules might apply. That's a delusion. Consumers may want to be Mark Zuckerberg by day and Julian Assange by night, but you can't have it both ways. Either you are connected and you take responsibility for your actions, or you are anonymous, cut-off and on the run. 

As social media matures, consumers will discover that their networks, recommendations and behaviour will become a passport as valuable, if not more relevant, than their credit rating. And for business, reaching such an agreement with their customers will be equally essential - literally, a new social contract. Without it, increasing levels of fraud, spam, and abuse will cripple the new economy. 

So the next time your marketing manager tells you proudly how many new fans you have on Facebook, ask them to think about the more interesting question. How can you leverage social networks to better shape your customers' behaviour?

Now that it is fashionable to be sociable, those wretched share buttons are turning up everywhere. Read an article, book a flight, buy some shoes, finish a book - you are endlessly encouraged to let other people know. Surely it won’t be long, before they even ask us to tweet about paying our traffic fines. But here’s the problem. Making it easy for people to share is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for social success. People are happy to share things when they feel like it. The real question then, is what motivates them?

No one wakes up in the morning thinking they need to share something on Facebook. Perhaps you could argue that spending time on social networks nourishes the ‘belonging’ phase in Maslow’s infamous 'Hierarchy Of Needs'. Personally, I’m not convinced that human desires are even hierarchical to start with. But there is no doubt that when it comes to our online behaviour - we are just as emotional, irrational and driven as we are in the physical world. From my observations of digital consumers - I’ve created a list of seven motivating factors for why people share. Here they are in no particular order:

1. To be a network alpha
There is always someone in your group who likes to be the first to discover and share the latest pop culture meme, interesting article or crazy statistic. This is no accident. ‘Network alphas’ spend a considerable amount of time and effort to establish themselves as the primary node in your circle of friends. They share content because it establishes their status in their group. If you want them to pay attention to you, make sure you feed them your material first.

2. To be more attractive
If you thinking about human motivators, you can’t go very far without acknowledging the magnetic compulsion of sex. People share inspiring quotes, their dreams and passions, pictures of themselves having fun on exotic holidays or driving glamorous sports cars - not for the sake of pure content creation, but rather to signal their suitability to the opposite sex. If we reveal ourselves through what we share, ask yourself this - will sharing your content make someone look sexy, or a complete dork?

3. To think out loud
Sometimes people also share things for organisational reasons. Everyday I share dozens of articles on del.icio.us - not because I care whether anyone is subscribing to my feed, or because I’m trying to vote up a particular article - but for the simple fact that tagging and sharing means that I can come back later and access my research from the Cloud.

4. To be part of something bigger
Sharing can also be a way of participating in a groundswell of collective action. We can add our ‘likes’, comments and votes to a big idea, a timely charity, or an election campaign. The visibility of our sharing behaviour during this process is important - because it binds us closer together with people with similar views and passions. That is why the share counts on posts or webpages can create momentum effects.

5. To build social ties
Have you noticed that after a party or a work function, there is generally someone in your network who insists on uploading photos and videos and tagging everyone in them? Sometimes it is a nice way to relive the collective moment. Other times - it’s an embarrassing reminder not to drink Tequila in public. But social cohesion is a powerful force. Groups - social or work related - become more dynamic with a greater sense of common purpose when they participate in collaborative sharing behaviours.

6. To get feedback
Content creators are motivated to share content to get feedback on their ideas. There is nothing less inspiring than writing a blog post or editing a video, for it then to languish in isolation on your hard drive. People who write and produce, do so increasingly for a public audience. We share what we make with people we hope will in turn share it with others.

7. To be famous
The final, and perhaps the overriding motivation for online sharing behaviours - is to get noticed. There are many figures in the digital community who are largely famous for being famous, and who have used social media and frequent sharing as a way of building their fan bases. Super sharers like Robert Scoble, Gary Vaynerchuk and Guy Kawasaki have built large followings as a result of early adopter domination of new social platforms. Sometimes you don't have to offer free iPads or discounts to get people to share. Help them become more visible in their networks, and they will move mountains to share things for you.

A few caveats. Firstly I'm not the only person who is thinking about this. The New York Times and Latitude Research recently put out their own research on this subject. You can read it here. The other thing you should bear in mind is that any list like this needs to be taken with a cultural grain of salt. Consumers will behave very differently online and on social networks depending on their cultural programming. To be considered ‘digitally social’ in Brazil means something very different than what it does in the US, or in China for that matter. Nevertheless, if you are a brand or a professional marketer - understanding the true motivations for why your customers are willing to share your content and products is essential for your long term survival.

The future of marketing may be social - but the brand consumers care about is theirs, not yours.

Selling out your friends might not seem the best way to nurture your relationships, but if the transaction involves hooking them up with their dream job - they just might forgive you. Top Prospect is an innovative new startup that connects with your existing contact networks on platforms such as LinkedIn, and then allows you to suggest friends for job roles. If they get the job - you get paid a bonus - anywhere between US$5,000 and US$20,000 depending on the role.

Before you get too excited at turning your colleagues into cash, at this stage most of the job roles are in the US, and there is also a heavy tech sector skew. Nevertheless, Top Prospect is an intriguing concept and one of many new services that I predict we will see in the future that enable hyper-connectors to better commercialise their networks.
By attaching a financial reward to the matching process, companies like Top Prospect may actually enable the recruitment ecosystem to work more effectively.

Think about it. Much of the talent acquisition market is broken. You hire an headhunter to fill a role. He either strip mines his own network of people he has placed for another client, or charges you to advertise the role with either outdated web ads or expensive print notices which tend to attract the disenchanted and perpetual job changers. For the very top positions, industry focused recruitment specialists generally know who the best performers are, and are well placed to defend their turf. But for middle tier roles, connected professionals may have better knowledge of who is smart and open to moving onto a new opportunity. It is in this space, that I see emerging platforms doing the most damage to the traditional model.

During the first digital revolution, the Web killed print classifieds. Now that we are in round two, headhunters should stand warned.

Interesting piece on Techcrunch today about PhotoBucket - a hosting and publishing service for consumer videos and photos. The have just announced a $10.5 million Series B round with Trinity Ventures, largely on the strength of their 15 million members and their claim to drive drives 2% of total U.S. Internet traffic.