Over the last few years Social media has grown at an exponential rate. The founders of Facebook, Myspace, Youtube and twitter could not have foreseen the uptake, or the impact that they have on popular culture. With elections being contested, news of earthquakes alerting the emergency services and fan bases emerging from the broad to the niche, social media is a new defining force in our everyday lives.

This has mean that some things which in the past we have become accustomed to purchase, have been forced to go free - nowhere is this more visible than in sites such as Spotify, Zattoo and lastFM, plus of course file sharing sites like BitTorrent,, Graboid and Napster.

Chris Anderson, author of “The Long Tail” recently penned a soon to be best seller, “Free” (which incidentally if you visit his site http://www.thelongtail.com// , you can download for free) in which he argues the free model has a basic premise - offer content for free, then up-sell to your consumer the benefits of purchasing whatever it is they have taken.

The free model in music was taken to a whole new level in 2007 when Radiohead released “IN RAINBOWS”, the first totally free album, downloadable from their web site - it was a worldwide success, but fans didn’t just want a digital copy, instead 100,000 people pre-ordered the album and original EP’s at full cost and the physical CD still sold 1.75 million copies worldwide, which puts them alongside Lil' Wayne in proving that making music free digitally doesn't necessarily impede sales. Interestingly despite the album being available to download for free on Radiohead's website, 30,000 Americans paid full price to get "In Rainbows" from iTunes in its first week of release (go figure!) - it was Radiohead’s second largest selling album in over fifteen years.

Each of these free sites subscribe to Anderson’s model - Spotify do offer free music they do offer a three tier model - free music, with an audio advert every five songs; pay £0.99 advert free for a day, or £9.99 advert free for a month. The site has over 30 million users, 1 million from the UK alone.

Zattoo is free TV over the net. No more paying your TV license, and with more channels subscribing every month, it’s soon to be a force to be reckoned with – at present digital MPU’s are the only distraction however I am sure that there is an income generation model coming soon.

File sharing remains extremely popular. It was estimated that over 2 million files are shared every day. TV programs, music, Films and so on. A legality question ensues, and sites are being taken to court every year and being forced to close down, but you have to ask, are you, the user just as responsible as the administrator sharing those files?

What remains is this. The net will continue to grow, and whilst technology will develop and allow us to continue benefiting from free forms of entertainment and purchases at faster and less intrusive ways, the models need to adapt just as well. The free model can’t continue to be sustainable forever. Independent sites will need finance and advertising to keep going, which could be to the detriment of your viewing/audio pleasure; big retailers can only give so much away for free, you will eventually have to purchase items and services, to keep them in business.

But what makes this truly different is the landscape. Businesses now have a choice. Attract new customers by giving them what they want for free, gain loyalty and then start to sell. As for the consumer, if they truly want something, they too have a choice.

As Chris Anderson says, “you can listen to music for free, but going to a concert has never been more expensive”

I have waited for months now to write a post with that title and when I saw a campaign that Nissan ran recentl y I found the perfect excuse. In short to promote their new car, the Cube in their words "they avoided the usual mainstream quadrangle of TV, radio, print and billboard to trumpet their car launch" and instead used a social media led campaign targeting the creative classes to spread the word according to Jeff Parent, Nissan Canada's vice-president of sales and marketing "The creative class is what's motivating everything these days they are the ones that other people coalesce around. Creative people make their art to infect others. For us, it was a natural fit."In short five hundred finalists were assigned a blank webpage on Nissan's hypercube.ca website and invited to creatively "audition" for their chance to win a free vehicle - one of the winners award winning Canadian artist Greg Sczebel ended up generating more than 4,000 votes and 21,000 profile views.
So what is the point in the title ? - well the point here is not the campaign - it is not particularly innovative or different - but rather that a huge company chose the launch a new car in this manner and spent (according to them) a third of the amount they would normally would for a car launch of this type as PHD's Rob Young says "The thinking here is that you could spend $5 to reach 1,000 people in a TV commercial at a relatively low level of involvement, or spend $5 reaching 10 people at a high level of involvement. The high level of involvement – if you get the right consumers – is a better payback." My issue is that that this is not a UK based campaign (it is from Canada) and it is by no means normal and the reason is not because of agencies not presenting these ideas (I am convinced that any agency worth its fee will be pushing social media activation wherever relevant) but rather that Clients at best do not understand the opportunties afforded by this approach or at worst are not willing to embrace the myriad of opportunties that are available in the new media landscape and "think outside the cube"
So the conclusion has to be fairly aimed at Clients to raise their game - and the although the risks are high so are the rewards, as Ice T says in the aforementioned song "If you out for mega cheddar, you got to go high risk" but I am sure the rewards will be worthwhile.