"Follow the crowd" ... But which crowd?

I'm getting senile so I may have mentioned this before. My favourite pub is The Cheshire Cheese in Fleet Street.

I love it because Dr. Johnson used to drink there 250 years ago, and I love Dr. Johnson. Also, the food is not bad, the interior is fascinating, and they sell Samuel Smith's - the only sanely priced beer in London.

Dr. Johnson said many fine things, one being that "man is a gregarious animal." This has reached its apogee in the present social networks craze. We do like to flock together.

I have yet to understand the arrogance of people who ask me to be their "fan" when I have never met them, let alone the stupidity of those who ask me to be a fan of their company. Who wants to have a relationship with a company? Only a pervert or friendless drudge.

But one infinitely powerful medium has been slightly underestimated in the rush to make money on-line. Yet what do most people spend much of their time doing? What little instrument is likely to replace the PC?

Experts predict the rise of sms messaging would level off by 2010 and be overtaken by a new form of instant, low cost alternative. Not so. In the UK we send 11 million text messages an hour. In 2009 there was a daily average of 265 million text messages and 1.6 million picture messages. The annual text message total was 96.8 billion, with over 600 million picture messages sent.

This subject has interested me for a while, and I interviewed one of this country's leading practitioners not long ago. What he had to say made me think a lot of people are missing a lot of business. More to come if you're interested.