July was a big month for social media. Facebook hit 500 million users, and Starbucks became the first brand to hit 10 million fans. Clearly this social media thing is starting to catch on… but it got me thinking about a question that comes up often:

Can social media scale & get ‘TV’ numbers? Clearly it will.

The season premiere of Season 5 of Lost got 11.4 million views (yes, the nerds out there will argue Season 5 was lacking, but still…that’s a lot of eyeballs). To me, it’s impressive that Starbucks has the potential to reach almost as many people as a prime time TV show on ABC.

WTF.

Clearly, there is a lot of potential for brands (and individuals) to create their own new media networks. While this is hardly a new idea, it does beg the question: Where will the future content creators go? Five years from now is the next Conan O’Brien going to hawk his show to a major network in hopes of a pilot or go to a Starbucks with instant reach in the tens of millions?

Facebook and Twitter have allowed brands and individuals to work in reverse and create the TV network themselves. Isn’t Conan O’Brien essentially accidentally building “The Conan O’Brien Network” after he got the boot from a traditional media venue? The man made a Twitter account that had 300,000 followers in 24 hours.

Take that to the next level: you know that Old Spice campaign a few people talked about? It turns out the star of  the brand’s viral videos caused so much of a buzz that he actually got cast in a new movie with Jennifer Aniston. If that’s not an instance of a brand’s online network launching the next big Hollywood star, I’m not really sure what is.

Plain and simple: brands are becoming the television stations of the future. People have talked about it forever. The only thing is…

We’re finally watching it happen.

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Not all of you know this but Jason Harris, the Prez here at Mek, is a bass player and used to play in a local SF band by the name of Lucy. While the band may have broken up, that hasn’t stopped Jason from continuing to rock out. Here he is practicing for his upcoming one man show. Enjoy:

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Is YouTube looking to leverage your social graph to encourage sharing to expand their usage?

It would seem that way.

YouTube has been making a ton of changes over the last couple months, from minuscule design changes to drastic ones, such as changing their default viewing page from most viewed to the ambiguous ‘most popular’.

However, in the last two months Google has been tying YouTube users to their Gmail accounts more and more. I believe that the next logical step will be to enable YouTube users to tap into Gmail contacts without ever having to leave the site – no more cut and paste url’s, users pull up their contact list without ever leaving YouTube.

It’s likely the changes Google has been making are a symptom of the social tie-ins that are to come. Here’s a quick recap of the YouTube/Gmail integrations that have occurred so far:

* January 2009, YouTube made changes so that “If you receive (or send) a link to a video in a chat [gchat] message, you’ll see a preview of the video right in your chat window.”

* Early March 2009, a new feature was added to Gmail so that videos that are emailed will show up inside your messages.

* Late March 2009, YouTube and Gmail made it easier to log in with your Google credentials, “If you have your YouTube account associated with your Google account, you no longer have to go to a separate page to log in to YouTube with your Google account information. It’s all in one place at sign-in.”

Google has also added the ability for users to send an invite to YouTube with a  personalized note to a username or email address.

Considering people love to share YouTube videos, it makes sense to more closely tie contact lists to the site. YouTube has already hinted as much – recently stating, “The process of connecting with your friends on YouTube will see some bigger improvements soon.”

The ‘share’ template YouTube currently uses (pictured below) is perfectly set up to call up user’s Gmail contacts, much in the same way Google Docs already does. For those who are not familiar with Google Docs, it’s a web service that lets users create word and excel files in the cloud and easily share them via email and with pre-existing Gmail contacts.

YouTube Google Docs

With expensive premium content deals on the way and Google’s need to get a return on its multi billion-dollar investment, monetizing YouTube has become a top priority.

An integrated Gmail/YouTube will allow more relevant advertising, benefiting Google and marketers who are looking to more effectively target their audience by encouraging sharing among user’s social graph.

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