Remember when it was exciting to receive an email?

An email. One. Because, maybe twenty years ago, your email inbox didn’t get an awful lot of action. Heck, you probably didn’t even refer to it as in inbox. It was just “my email”. Email zero as a concept did not exist, because it was a given. You received an email, and you read it. Done. No more email to read. Until the next time, which might be in another day or two.

There are parallels here, of course, with regular mail. Snail mail, if you will. Twenty years before email, being sent something in the (actual) mail was exciting. It was almost always personal, and as such demanded your attention – which you were happy to give. And then, slowly but surely, what started to come through the letterbox changed. You still got those lovely letters from friends and family, albeit occasionally, but now you had bills, too. And direct mail shots. Then junk mail. Flyers for takeaway restaurants where you would never eat and postcard-sized promos for businesses that you would never use. Endless, endless junk mail. So much, in fact, that it ruined all of mail for you. And everybody else. Those personal letters stopped arriving. Pretty soon, it was almost nothing but demands and aggravation. Who looks forward to that?

Email went the same way, of course. It’s now just part of your job. Something you have to do. And, accordingly and so often, impersonal, automated, and cold.

Is this what’s happening to social media marketing, too?

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How did we get here?

Where did the concept of Facebook likes really come from, and why have images become irreplaceably crucial in marketing? How did we get from Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press and metal movable type in 1450 to the mobile ads of today?

Avalaunch Media just released an interactive look into the history of social media. And it’s pretty fascinating.

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Social networking seems like a very new phenomenon and, certainly for the younger generation, it’s hard to imagine a world without Facebook and Twitter.

But social isn’t (and never was) just these two platforms – in fact, it actually predates both of them by over thirty years. Yep. The history of social media is, essentially, the history of the internet, and you will find its roots in email, usenet, the world wide web, blogs and (gasp) AOL.

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Despite appearances, social media isn’t all Twitter and Facebook.

Indeed, the foundations of the movement are scattered across numerous platforms, many of which have come and gone, and it’s generally accepted that the beginnings of social media date back to the very basic (but hugely popular) bulletin board systems of the 1970s and 80s.

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In celebration of the Advertising Research Foundations 75th anniversary, the folks over at PeopleBrowsr (utilising the talents of artist Adam Long) have created an image-rich history of social networking, told somewhat uniquely via cartoon strips.

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