One of my good friends just forwarded me over an interesting whitepaper penned by the New Media branding and marketing group Mr. Youth. It’s an interesting paper that outlines the guiding principals, as they see it, of marketing within the new ecology of a social media dominant world.

It’s not hard to find evidence to support their premise.  CNN and Facebook are regularly featured on cable news programs as more viable avenues of communication with the hosts and the public than any other means, be it electronic or not. The velocity with which these online melting pots are growing is virtually unmatched in the history of the web.

Here are the rules, as Mr. Youth sees them:

Authenticity Trumps Celebrity: Consumer 2.0 responds to honest, relevant messaging from peers over marketing speak and celebrity endorsements.
Niche is the New Norm: Consumers 2.0 do not form a mass market. They relish in choices and look for products and services that speak to them personally.
Bite-Size Communications Dominate: Consumer 2.0 digests short, personal and highly relevant messaging in bulk while growing increasingly adept at blocking out noise.
Personal Utility Drives Adoption: Consumer 2.0 chooses to consume what they find useful in their lives over manufactured marketing needs.
Consumers Own Brands: Consumer 2.0 will speak about, repurpose and associate with your brand as they see fit.

It more or less enumerates succinctly the workflow and characteristics of life online.  In most social indexes, Kevin Rose and Leo Laporte rank in the same level of popularity as Ashton Kutcher and Shaq. This speaks to the niche nature of the net and their skillful utilization of shortform media like Twitter.

These are things we know – perhaps more interesting is the last two rules: personal utility.  This is something I’ve always used as a whipping boy for years (with relationship to podcasting), and even though it’s cliche, it’s something Twitter and it’s inventors are a perfect example of.

Look at Twitter as compared to it’s parent idea Odeo. Twitter’s initial form and what it’s evolved to was designed to be something effortless.  It’s built into your natural instincts when you use your portable computing device and your workstation – chatting. 

Podcasting takes effort, mostly due to the fact that the developers of the major podcast clients have never wrapped their heads around what it takes to seamlessly integrate media consumption with the habits of the typical media consumer. Consequently, unless you are a New Media fanboy like me, you’re likely saying “Odeowhat?” while you have no problem identifying Twitter from a lineup.

All in all, there’s a lot of good information in the whole whitepaper. Take a gander and come back to discuss what other rules that may have been left off the list.