“Johnny, what were you saying to Eddie? ”

 ”Nuthin’” 

  “I want you to repeat it loud so the whole class can hear you!”

…this was the type of social experience that we sought to avoid.

Not all teachers were the same.  Some teachers really didn’t seem to care about our interactions.  And the most clueless ones didn’t flinch when we told jokes about them and laughed about them in plain sight.

The cool ones laughed with us, wisely, and we loved them.

Kind of like some brands are today, in the online social web. Some plug in, some are clueless.

There are lots of articles about how brands are using online social web tactics, successfully.  They use data and watch their markets carefully as they muddy the waters. 

Obvious comparisons to the childhood example – the teacher is an authority figure by position, but still has to earn the respect with every interaction with the students.  Yet she runs a risk every time she tries to mingle with the students on their turf.  A risk worth taking, and learning from. 

And, the teacher writes on the blackboard (”the wall”) and everyone can read it, re-write it, or start writing other ideas on other parts of the room.

These instructors are (usually) paid to be there, and the students know they get to move on to other teachers… that the relationship is only temporary.  Unless their teacher is so influential to their lives that they keep the relationship going for a long time.

And in another parallel with online brands, teachers can only effectively connect with students up to a certain class size. After that, they need helpers… teacher’s aides.

But in the modern world, will brands dilute the impact of their social media interactions as they run up against a corporate version of Dunbar’s Number (the theoretical limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships)?  For individuals, the number is claimed to be 150 inter-personal relationships.

Yet some people “maintain” thousands of relationships online.  They swim (as Robert Scoble said to me) since it’s not possible to interact with every bit of social media as your network grows gigantic.  But swim-strokes are okay if at the heart of it you’re a real person.

Brands have it both easier and harder… like a teacher, they have implied authority and a mutually-respected “I’m not really your friend” attitude in their core, yet they also have to reach people on a personal level.  Odds are, like teachers and their pupils, some brands will get it wrong, and some will work with each day to find something to evolve the relationship to have rewards for both sides.

“Everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes“

is now a quaint anachronism from the 20th century.  Thanks to the social internet, everyone is now capable of being continuously famous.

Perhaps not world-famous, but famous among enough people around the globe.  Some personas will break out into mass stardom, assisted by traditional media.  Some will be famous only in online communities, and they will be quite happy & successful there.

There is plenty of room for stardom. In sports there are often farm leagues – the minor leagues that feed up talent to the major leagues.  In the online stardom arena, it’s a free-for-all, but the concept of farm leagues might apply, especially among the thousands of niche areas.  The rumors of enough social media experts in the niche are far from true, as experts continue to share advice on how to make your own star rise.

There will not be a practical cap on the universe of online stars anytime soon.  As the rise-and-fall cycle is, well, happening in “internet time”, it is viciously fast.  This aspect allows for more stars. And, in a sense, “once a star online, always a star online”, as the social proof via metrics such as video view counts and written feedback & conversations may never go away.

Now let’s forget about the old days where everyone knew the 1st and 2nd-tier media stars, as the growth of India’s Bollywood, China’s film industry , and other production locales such as Dubai create their own stardom centers of gravity.  Being world-famous can happen in niches, as has been proven on sites such as YouTube and MySpace.

Every day the worldwide online social network grows by tens of thousands, and should do so forever.  One simple metric:  every day there are hundreds of thousands of new teenagers in the world and many of them are already online (of course there are almost as many new ex-teenagers every day).  Whatever the online coming-of-age threshold, user-generated-content (UGC) will always have thousands of new creators annually who can draw fans from tens of millions who were not online the year before.

Are you cut out for stardom? Even the introverted can find more fame than the mere quarter hour Mr. Warhol envisioned, and they can do it on their own terms online.  So are true introverts headed for extinction?

The internet introverts of tomorrow may seek stardom in spite of their base personality.  They will be updating their status continuously, always quick to tell-a-friend about what’s important in their lives, and these social introverts will blend seamlessly into an extraverts-only society online (as they perhaps conquer fears about the dark side of online notoriety).

Who won’t be a star in their community? The non-star list includes those people who are not networking online.  Some non-networking behavior will be situational, such as people who cannot use a computer for physical, mental, religious, or emotional reasons.  And there are generational aspects that stop older people from adopting online social networking techniques, along with digital divide factors that limit who can build or accidentally obtain their online social stardom.

After notoriety, one base necessity for web stardom is content. Usually this content is self-generated, and self-promoted.  To be social on the internet implies interacting in form of content creation.  Even someone’s RSVP to an event, or joining a group, creates a snippet of content.

But ubiquitous stardom for all may be limited by our own inertia, as revealed in the currently-accepted rule of thumb that 90% of us don’t create real content, and only 1% of us create the bulk of content.  And many people have other life goals, ensuring that they do more with their lives and their influence to help others than simply chasing or embracing stardom.

[The next post here will continue an earlier post about online social capital and influence, and touch on how to utilize aspects of one's social stardom.]

But, keep marketing and sharing and soon everyone will discover the joys of being social online, yes?  With over 2,000 web 2.0 and social-genre sites vying for mind share, it is a crowded field in which surprisingly everyone can win.

Hmmmmm…. can win? Most of the people I know think twitter is a sound made by birds, rather than a popular web 2.0 site. But winning can (notice I don’t say will) be accomplished.  Among the social website winners will be the ones that got first & got lucky, sure.  But the other winners will be the ones who started small, low-or-no-budget, and grabbed their niche.  Some of these potential winners are still being launched, as the barrier to entry to create a social site keeps dropping terms of both cost and technology. 

Assume the average human brain already has remembered, say, 1,000 existing brand names for automobiles, computers, soap, banks, designer clothes, etc.  If so, then another 2,000 new web 2.0 brands are pretty much battling our organic memory capacity as much as battling each other, yes?  But a boating enthuasiast only has to remember a few sites such as TheBoaters.com, and not the other 2,000+ general and niche communities vying for her attention.  A dog-owner enthusiast only has to remember dogster, and not catster and all those websites for other species.

And as you probably know, the winners will also be the ones who blend into the social fabric, with widgets, social apps, voting buttons to embed in blogs, and perhaps a solid social media campaign. Maybe this post is a little rambling from the title question, but maybe there is an answer. Awareness improves with usage (by more people who share with others), and usage increases due to the awareness of social sites by the Aunt Ednas & Aunt Mabels out there.  One supporting aspect of this growth cycle is improvement in the usefulness and ease-of-use of the communities.

But, as someone who loudly writes that it’s not cool to overly do online-social activity as a substitute for offline-social interaction, I see us rubbing up against the attention paradox.  Everyone is pushing us to stretch the online attention envelope, and the sound of the birds I hear right now becomes real solace, pulling me offline to go jogging, to relax, instead of doing the rather unnatural act of channeling my social time & activities through the tips of ten fingers (… and into the keyboard… over to some web server).  Sometimes we can all feel too lazy to type. What will help online social growth is the same old same old – improvement of the platform – but also… something that better integrates this interaction with the rest of offline life.  Can we have a hands-free social networking technology, perhaps some sort of real-time social tagging via spoken words at a party?  How about microblogging (tweeting!) our location selectively as we travel, involving something other than typing in a cryptic message while perhaps driving a car into an airport?  We’ll get there, and you’ll find out about some of these types of improvements here via Chief Social Officer posts.[post-writing update: the sound of nature did in fact pull me out for a jog after drafting the post, followed by some real-world socializing.]