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I wrote on Monday about the role of social networking in new brands: about how much value it can add to your brand, and in particular about why some companies have trepidations about employing it. I argued that these trepidations are a consequence of a sort of means-end confusion. Specifically I argued that because of a long historical tradition, many people have conflated visual control with the trust relationships it has been used to engender.

Today, I’d like to add a corollary to that discussion about what this means for companies in terms of the kinds of policies that their brands underwrite.

There’s a nice little article at Micropersuasion that touches on this with the slogan, "trusted search trumps untrusted search." What this means, to ape a bit from a good comment on the article, is that the only way for Google to ensure quality search results is "to assume that all URLs [are] spam, and require them to ‘earn’ their place” in the index. Call that machine filtering. The ‘earning’ algorithm can get smarter, but the core principle can’t.

Now, enter some potential future of deeply searchable social networks: since the search is built on top of a network of trusted sources, the ‘earning’ algorithm for finding information is already better than the best possible machine algorithm, because it is reliant on a trusted set of human filters. Call this a social filter.

Coca Cola loses my trust.

What this means for brands is that their future success depends on being able to persuade not just a clever algorithm, but large network of individuals, including individual network influencers, of the value of their content. What this means is that they’re going to have to develop trust. I spent two weeks in December arguing that the only way to do this was to make and keep meaningful promises.

Social networking is just another bit of writing on the wall that the various old-world advertising and promising models are dead, dead, dead.