We’re connected. Now what? Social marketing experts hail start of connected decade.

Ecademy Chairman Thomas Power, recently heralded the launch of the connected decade. In the connected decade we will learn how to manage the phenomenon of a connected world.

Thomas Power:
The technology is enabling communities to be reconnected, rebuilt, and uniting humans together again, if you like, in a single cause. I think in the past we've been pushing disconnection. I think we're now pushing reconnection. But to me the technology is just an enabler -- it's just making things go a bit faster

Social media expert Louis Gray says the connecting the planet has major implications for business communications

Louis Gray:
In the last couple of years there's been two major developments. The first is a debut of the real time web in that people can put content on the web and have it appear immediately and have that data transmit from one site to another in near real time. The second is most corporations waking up to the world of social media or they're not just aware of it but they know they need to do something. With those two things coming together, what I see is everybody's going to be involved in social media, and everybody's going to be producing content and responding to content in real time. It's no longer acceptable to wait until the weekend is over to respond to something that's happened, which has been bad. You can not wait a couple of hours, because that decision and the picture of what your company represents will be made for you whether you involve yourself or not. It is always advantageous to watch these trends and to be aware of the need to respond in real time as your customers are in all of those places where they have it and take place there as well.

While technology is the enabler, Power and Gray agree that whats really radical is the ways people are sharing and distributing information.

Thomas Power:
They're connected into these systems, but they haven't yet got connectedness, and connectedness is when people start sharing your stuff. …. when people start sharing your stuff, then it's magic. And right now people are just joining in and plugging into these groups and thinking what do I do with these groups, but they haven't yet shifted to how do I get Mark to share my stuff and move my stuff around. Nine our of ten people will say the opposite of giving is taking. The opposite of giving is receiving, and most people get that question wrong on all the courses I do, most -- nine out of ten get that question wrong, and it's not a trick question. And you can only receive once you've given. Whereas we live in a society right now where people just try and take or push things on you. So we're seeing actually society really invert, actually invert its behavior worldwide, and the online groups are just the starting vehicle to get it going.

Louis Gray:
The generation that's just behind me has grown up with the worldwide web. They've been told that they spend as much as 10 to 15 hours a day looking at a screen, whether that's a screen on their cell phone, it's a screen on a laptop, or even if it's a television. They are consuming media and they are producing media and they are getting connected. The type of standoffishness, which used to be the norm 10 or 20 years ago, is no longer acceptable. There's this open, random connectedness, which is becoming the standard and letting you get influenced by new people with new ideas. The most successful marketers are going to be those who get in there and make connections.

Louis Gray:
In the connected decade, marketers are going to change from massaging a message and massaging a brand and wanting to get things perfect, to ones that are going to be talking about getting things done quickly to the best of their ability. It's not so much a challenge as it is fun. It is fun to be involved with customers. I think as a marketer, the best kind of activity that you could possibly have is direct connection with your customers and learning exactly how they're using your products. Traditionally there's always been this barrier, be it by geography, be it by time, be it by corporate walls that were there where you didn't have that direct access. Today you do. By the end of this decade, that's going to become so commonplace you're going to wonder how it used to be any other way.

And will all business activity connectedness is a high stakes game. Power predicts the companies with the most connections will change the way we live forever.

Thomas Power:
The winners are all based on who gets the names first. Logic says it would be somebody like Google or Microsoft because they've got lots of capital. But it could be Apple -- they already have a 100 million credit cards on iTunes. It could be Facebook, it could be Twitter. But the winner of the game is the one with all the names -- whoever gets the names first wins, game's over. And everybody is starting to notice that that is the game. It's not about search, it's not about video, it's about collecting the names.

And most executives haven't really woken up to that yet.