Social Media Beachcombing: Survival of the Twittest?

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That's what made a recent Burger King (BKC) campaign that rewarded people with a free Whopper for sacrificing 10 Facebook friends so brilliantly mischievous. Based on this insight about the devalued nature of relationships in a virtual world of "never-ending friending," the brand played with social media conventions while driving the redemption of coupons to influence sales. In this case, online friendship in a large social network was worth about the same as one-tenth of a cheeseburger, or 37¢.

The way to make digital media truly social is by combining it with objects in the physical world. For example, MIT Media Lab's Fluid Interfaces Group is testing a tiny digital projector, connected to your mobile phone, that beams Amazon.com (AMZN) reviews or recommendations from your social network onto products as you pick them up in a shop. You can access this information like a "sixth sense," as naturally as using sight, sound, smell, taste, or touch.

Waiting for the Next New Thing

We're now seeing real-time data streamed from tiny sensors in objects and and shared through social media. Take the Botanicalls experiment, where plants tweet whenever they need watering. BakerTweet from digital agency Poke is an interesting e-commerce example: Local bakers tell Twitter followers when freshly baked goods have popped out of their ovens. This clever semi-automated system combines virtual community with real-time inventory information about perishable products like doughnuts. And it's not limited to smaller players: Dell (DELL) has used Twitter as a sales channel, already selling more than $1 million of discounted products through alerts to followers.

In truth, we won't be able to point to the Next New Thing in social media for a while yet. It always takes time to separate temporary fashions from long-term trends. Remember how long it took for Web 2.0 to emerge after the dot-com crash. It will be three to four years before the current waves of social media innovation recede and we can comb the beach to see what fascinating new digital life forms are left behind.

Andy Hobsbawm is European Chairman of Agency.com and co-founder of Dothegreenthing.com.

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