Celebrity endorsements and billboards on Times Square is soooooo last century. A paradigm shift in marketing is taking place – wanna join in? Paul Adams (Facebook) suggests you follow these three simple steps:

1. The web is being rebuilt around people

The human being has always been a social creature. Ages before the Internet was born people would eat together, work together, and, well yes, sleep together. This hasn’t been relevant for online marketers the past decades as the communication so far has been one-way: Companies paid thousands of dollars for an add on Google and hoped for people to click it and perhaps even buy the product.

However, what happens when the costumer you’ve been aiming ads for - with everyone from Roger Federer to David Beckham elegantly lounging in the couch your company has spend ages marketing – brings a friend to the furniture shop and the friend says: “I don’t like that color. How about the other couch over there?”. Chances are you just lost your costumer!

We listen to our friends and we trust them in a way we would never trust a company trying to push a couch down our throats – so to speak. This means you should reorient your business around people. Understand what motivates people to act the way they do. The different technologies are actually not relevant. It is however relevant why people use them. Don’t spend hours looking at Foursquare, Facebook and Yelp. Spend hours looking at how people use Foursquare, Facebook and Yelp.

2. People live in networks

Even though we often think of ourselves at individual consumers, we are not. We drink coffee together, we shop together, we have dinner together, we commute together. Our social network can be divided into three:
• Strong ties – Our inner circle of friends which usually doesn’t exceed more than 10 people.
• Weak ties – People you know that you are not too close to which is usually around 150 people.
• Temporary ties – People who comment on your Youtube video, buy your old bike from ebay or answers your question on Quora.

3. We are influenced by the people of our network – mostly by our strong ties

The amount of information we try to digest is increasing on a daily basis but the size of our brain stays the same. We turn to our friends to help us process the information and help us make decisions.

It is not about making sure that your advertising reaches as many people as possible. It is more important to reach one person who will then affect his or her strong ties of ten people – who will affect their 10 closest friends etc. etc.

Stop focusing on the most influential people – look to the people you want to like your brand and it will scale up very fast. If you have a thousand passionate fans of your company and they tell 10 friends and they tell 10 friends – that’s 100.000 people who have been told about your company by someone they trust. And that is the new way of online marketing!