It has been hyped as a profound development in the advertising and social media landscapes: Facebookers are being transformed into "fansumers". We can choose to "friend" a product or brand as part of our Facebook profile and that brand can pay to promote that affiliation to all our friends via our feed. To marketers, this looks like gold dust: large scale word-of-mouth endorsement via trusted friends.

This raises a couple of interesting questions for me:

1. Are we being manipulated horribly? Or will this actually mean more power to the consumer?

2. If a brand is going to be my friend, how will it really need to behave?

More Power to the consumer?

Marketing brought emotion into the business / consumer equation long ago. Brands play on our emotions and promise us certain feelings. But these days, more of us are seeing through the hype. Customer experience, the reality or interacting with a product or service, is where those brand promises are kept or broken. We soon stop believing the brand messages if the staff are rude or the product is hard to use.

The new Facebook model suggests that the rewards for providing a good customer experience (CX), and the fallout from providing bad CX, will be clearly visible to marketers, and quickly too. People will only carry a brand message if that brand delivered the customer experience it promised. No-one likes to be friends with a person, or a brand, who breaks promises.

Friendly brand behaviour

Not breaking promises is a good start. But brands that want me to affiliate myself with them in any proactive, substantial, and ongoing way, will need to do more.

Firstly, they'll need to work hard to avoid psychopathic tendencies that their parent organisations can display (in an ironic postscript development, Facebook's implementation of the new model has felt like 'callous unconcern' to many and the fallout continues).

Secondly, they'll need to be interested in me, rather than talking about themselves all of the time.

Ultimately though, if I am going to become a firm and vocal friend of a brand, it will need to share my values and have a purpose I can respect. For me, that means brands will need to become more active in protecting and improving the world we all live in. When talking to me, and many like me, brand opportunities and corporate responsibilities will morph into each other, towards something that looks like the triple bottom line.

So here is my message to my future brand friends:

Do you want to become a more meaningful proposition to me? Do you want us to bask in the glow of one another's friendship? Do you want me to introduce you to everyone I know and tell them what a marvel I think you are so that your sales hit the roof?

The show vision. Have purpose. Be more. Do more. Make cool stuff that works really well, sure. But to inspire my genuine regard you will need to address the pressing problems that affect and concern me at local, national and global levels. Ignore these problems and you ignore me. Contribute to them and you'll probably be shunned by everyone I know.

As brands become more 'alive', humanised, and socialised, in order to compete in increasingly competitive markets, I expect the successful brands will be those who use their energy and immense leverage to address the social and environmental problems that we all face.

It will be corporate social responsibility but evolved, collaborative, and with teeth.