The day after the iPad was launched, I was working with my small 4×9-inch laptop computer while having dinner at a Bangalore restaurant. Suddenly, a seven-year-old girl, as she was returning from the washroom to her parents a few tables away from us, spied my computer, got distracted and rushed to our table. Her eyes lit up, and stayed glued to my Sony Vaio laptop, ?Is this an iPad?? she asked. It totally disappointed her that the little computer was not an iPad. She said she had seen the iPad by going to Google. She and her friends were already chatting about it on Yahoo. She was very keen and confident about iPad functionalities and wanted to use it as soon as possible. She didn’t say she saw an advertisement or heard the news, her reference was the Internet.

So iPad has done something really special, much beyond traditional advertising, that on the second day of its worldwide launch, a seven-year-old Bangalore girl was awaiting it with bated breath.

Adolescent users of mobile phones all across the world do not use them for talking but for social connect, SMS, MMS with video streaming. They have devised a new telegraphic type of text language that their generation is adept at using. With the mobile phone and the Internet totally connected, video streaming, watching movies, accessing YouTube are an important part of their lives. While on research in rural Kerala last year, a young boy wearing the mundu, T-shirt and earphones was intently watching a regional film on his mobile phone screen even as he was keeping an eye on the cattle he had brought out to graze.

Marketing departments of companies are naturally thinking of this cyberspace as an alternative media for their brand promotion. But calling this space Internet social media is a misnomer-it’s in fact social connect through cyberspace, through Internet social networking (ISN). It would be a mistake for advertisers to consider it another medium for communication without customising their connect beyond the advertising message. I would divide the cyber groups in terms of their different age groups for social connect. The child group of five to 12 years, the adolescent teenager, the 20 to 30-year-olds, 30 to 45-year-olds and the 45 plus group. In addition, there are different social groups. However, the main zone of social connect is below 30 years of age. To reach out to these groups, the message has to be in a different tone and manner for each.

These cyber social platforms present a completely new opportunity to instantly deliver messages to millions of people. Its efficient use in Barack Obama’s Presidential campaign records its tremendous potential. Every company is trying to enter this space to connect to the 300 million who are active on the Internet, but these ‘advertisements’ remain ineffective because one-on-one conversations do not happen. The brands remain faceless. Trying to give the same message to all at the same time may spell the death knell of organised, traditional advertising as we know it, because the young generation does not care about what you want to promote. You have to leave it there for them, be provocative and give a disruptive form or message. Don’t sell the obvious, make them decode what they want using their own intelligence. Internet social networking is clever as it is interactive, private and non-lucrative.

Privacy is a big issue, and, of course, there can be abuse too. The new generation counts their virtual connections as their real friends. People are very familiar and ‘talk’ endlessly to like-minded people they have met over the Internet. In fact, such friendships have even resulted in marriages.

In my travels, I find the mentality of a city boy either in Mumbai or Bangalore to be the same as that of one in New York or London-a big change from the 1970s, when as a 19-year-old I arrived in Paris and found nothing in common with a French boy my age.

As I was writing this column, I got an e-mail from Bernard Offen, whose rescue from the Auschwitz death camp I had written about here. We became friends through e-mail. He has included me in his tour to Auschwitz to explain his experience at the Nazi death camp. Writing to ensure that the horror of the Holocaust is not obliterated from history, he said Supreme Commander of Allied Forces General Dwight Eisenhower had ensured photographs and films were taken to record the death camps because somewhere down the road, someone will say this never happened.

Offen wrote, ?This week the UK debated whether the Holocaust should be removed from its school curriculum because it offends a certain section of the population who claim it never occurred. It is not removed yet. However, this is a frightening portent of the fear that is gripping the world and how easily each country is giving in to it… This e-mail is being sent as a memorial chain in memory of the six million Jews, 20 million Russians, 10 million Christians and 1,900 Catholic priests who were murdered, raped, burnt, starved, beaten, experimented upon and humiliated while the German people looked the other way. How many years will it be before the attack on the New York’s World Trade Centre ‘never happened’, because it offends some community in the US? This e-mail is intended to reach 400 million people. Be a link in the memorial chain and help distribute this around the world.? The life of Offen and others in the death camp would have been different if the Internet existed at that time. The difference is that someone then could have as easily sent this personal message addressing 400 million people across the world and things would have been different.

?Shombit Sengupta is an international creative business strategy consultant to top managements. Reach him at http://www.shiningconsulting.com