My name is Christopher and I have spent the better part of my life in pursuit of the rarest social circles this planet has to offer.  I have slogged through the densest jungles of Mallamoorana in search of the Bitϑaru, a people who communicate solely through vigorous and vexing movements of their eyes.  Deep within the Arctic Circle I espied the elusive Ťavѩ and watched in rapture for hours as they poked one another with icicles in a befriending ceremony never before seen by outsider eyes.

In my travels I have come across people who communicate with animals, ferns, stars, and even the soil of the earth.  And yet I believe even these most exotic communications pale in comparison to the coming age of digital sociality.  From Minneapolis to Marrakech, Neath to Niigata, people are joining social circles for which the limitations of proximity and the ready availability of icicles no longer apply.

They poke, friend, chat, tweet, and follow.  They get linked in, blogged about, hung up on, and stabbed in the back by level 5 wizards they totally thought were their friends but were, in the end, only using them to get to a stash of magic crystals.  They struggle to decipher texts, determine whether friends are JK or entirely serious.  IYKWIM.  They flounder and accidentally Reply All.  They apologize profusely in wall posts.  And through it all they share ideas, forge friendships, commit facebook faux pas, but forge on.

I have spent my life as an adventurer.  And now I should like to take my adventure from the tundras and highlands to the vast electronic plains, exchange my mud-caked boots for a keyboard.  As a copy O-Tern at Olson I hope to use words and ideas to clear paths connecting people to the things, companies, and people that excite them, much like I once blazed trails through the dense underbrush of Karamanduro and Pikinanuhara.

But before I trade my machete and travel adventure beard for metaphors and alliteration, I offer you these two items of film I have gathered in my travels; the strangest social circles I have ever had the pleasure of observing:

Item 1 -

When I think in terms of social circles, I think about how people define one another through their circles. In this wonderful world of ours everyone has their unique perspective, but that perspective is constantly changing and is heavily influenced by our respective social circles. We talk with our families, hang out with our friends and interact with our coworkers and classmates. Even if we’re feeling too lazy to leave the house we can (and some people do) spend hours surfing social networking sites. How each of us is connected to the people around us may vary, but the fact that the way we think, feel and make decisions is influenced by the opinions, actions, and ideas of those people remains constant.

Everything we experience has the potential to influence us. Our social circles are a means of sorting through the clutter. We connect most strongly with people who have interests similar to our own. We decide these people can be trusted, and we respect what they have to say. These are the people with whom we enjoy shared experiences. We exchange ideas and introduce one another to new things because when we find something we like, we want to share it. And we share it with the people we know to have similar tastes and interests.

For the purposes of branding, the better we understand this idea of social circles, the more effective we can be. We don’t want our brands to be splashes of color in the mass of clutter. Thinking in social circles allows us to position our brands more effectively, in ways that make it easier for them to become a part of and facilitate those shared experiences that are truly influential.