I think something extremely important has happened in the last year or so, driven by things like Facebook and smart phones reaching mass scale. And it’s simply this: There is no virtual world anymore. The part of people’s lives that they experience through interfaces like computers and phones has become just as “real” to them as the part they experience directly through their senses.
What happens in social networks doesn’t feel separate or less real to people, any more than it feels like phone calls happen in some artificial alternate universe.

There are a lot of impressive statistics that show how much time people spend online and with their social networks. But the point is, a quantifiable shift in mass behavior is one thing. A collective psychological shift in what we all perceive as reality is something else entirely.

A lot of interesting things fall out of this. One big one is that for our industry, it means the moment we’ve been anticipating for years, where digital finally and forever stops being thought of as some kind of geeky side experiment and truly becomes the way brands connect with people, that moment is now.