Billion dollar Instagram: The culture and commerce of sharing

The excitement was a drumbeat in his ear. Face flushed red, fingers trembling, he dragged the footstool over and climbed on to the pedestal that only sometime ago had seemed too high. He grabbed the light that hung overhead and swung it towards his face - an act of triumph that proclaimed: look at me, the hero of my story. 

But was someone interested? Oh yes, the whole world. It started about a decade ago. Today, roughly one billion people have such a pedestal of their own, hooked to others on the widest network ever known - social media. With such an audience, there is so much to give, so much to take. 

Someone out there wants to know why you like peanut butter with salt rather than with sugar. Another wonders if you are joining a candle march scheduled tomorrow. A fan pleads with you to give Lady Gaga the edge over Adele by sharing "Bad Romance" more than "Rumour Has It". A jealous neighbour is secretly impressed that you attended a Gunter Grass seminar the same weekend you head banged at a Metallica concert. 

This sharing is one-of-a-kind. For it is more than just an exchange. It is shaping who we are, what we do and why we do it. It is the biggest thing to hit us in the last decade. No one knew there were 39,000 blogs worth stories to tell every minute, 4.5 million things around us to post on Flickr every month and 48 hours of moving frames to upload every minute on YouTube. Social sharing, as experts call it, has made us many people in one: zany on Pinterest, laconic on Twitter, flashy on Facebook and sober on Tumblr. 

Maybe this is why it's difficult to pin down what makes it such a phenomenon. Psychologists and social anthropologists have tried. But that one big reason is elusive. The best-sounding answer we've got: social sharing fulfils the highest need on Maslow's hierarchy of needs: self-actualisation. 

There is another set of people, equally baffled and more desperate to know what makes social sharing click - the marketers. They have an unprecedented peek into their consumers' lives today. Yet they still don't know to leverage it.