Thinking Digital has been one of the most varied and stimulating events I’ve been to and it’s no surprise there’s been a lot of talk about social media and engaging your consumers.

Alex Hunter (@cubedweller on Twitter), who was also a panellist at the social media masterclass, had a talk of his own at the conference yesterday. Alex is head of web at Virgin Group, and a true social media evangelist. He talked about how he’s reshaping the Virgin Group website and transforming it into a social platform for Virgin’s customers. Much of his talk drew from the Cluetrain Manifesto but wasn’t just a rehash of that; he shared his own thoughts. He emphasised that people don’t want to talk to brands, they want to talk to people – and so Virgin has put people as part of its strategy, helped by the fact it’s one of the few brands already inextricably associated with a person, namely Richard Branson.

Interesting, of all the corporate blogs, Alex regards Digg‘s as the best – not just because it’s written by the guys at the top like Kevin Rose, but because there is a multiplicity of voices and they respond to their fans. But then, as a social media site, Digg know the audience they’re blogging for, and as a new brand they’re more confident in experimenting. It’s harder for non-tech brands, so I’d use Digg as one example of good corporate blogging, but not the only one.

Alex was evangelistic about embracing social media in the business word, and made it clear it works for brands big and small (citing Qype and Zappos as examples). We also got some insights in the new Virgin philosophy – they have “labs”-style projects at Explore Virgin, which has produced Virgin Eye a beautiful visualisation of mentions of their brands on the web (from over 5,000 sources).

This isn’t just dabbling, however. Virgin plan to relaunch their website as a social platform, opening up to allow people to talk about their brand and products and upload their own content. They’ve been savvy to link up with Digg and Facebook Connect to utilise existing social media properties rather than reinvent the wheel. They have also put an impressive effort into research – a year and a half listening, researching and creating before launching their new social platform to make sure it fits the people who use it. It was an impressive example to others: not just in how to embrace social media, but how important it is to know the community you want to build around.

This week I am at Thinking Digital (#TDC) as a guest blogger. It’s a collection of some of the foremost thinkers in the UK and beyond on the future of digital and it’s a real privilege to be here. We kicked off yesterday afternoon with a social media masterclass, which turned out to be less a stuffy lecture and more a shared discussion from a variety of perspectives.

Stowe Boyd, the chair of the talk, kicked off with what he called the “strip-malling of the Web”. Controversially, he declared blogging as ‘dead’, claiming it as a transitionary stage between traditional web and ‘social media’ – which he says doesn’t exist (at least not yet). There are valid points – blogging’s format is derived from traditional news outlets’ own, and they have found it very easy to adapt to blogging as a result.

Boyd likens the takeover of the blogging to “strip malling” – likening the blogosphere to an urban landscape, where some big players in the mainstream media end up crowding out the smaller independent blogs. He says those bloggers have since fled to streamed, more social and more egalitarian, media such as Twitter – within that there’s a comparison with the phenomenon of urban flight.

It’s a nice metaphor but I don’t agree with it – not least because blog platform traffic is steadily on the up. Some blog traffic will be disproportionately allocated to the big players, but we’ve known about the power law effect for over six years. And Twitter is no more egalitarian than blogs – some, such as celebrities and news organisations, have tens or hundreds of thousands of followers, and with the exception of a few web gurus, ordinary users have followers several orders of magnitude fewer.

With Twitter is capable of was very nicely enunciated by Paul Smith, aka the Twitchhiker, who used Twitter to hitch-hike around the world for charity: water. Twitter to him was more than just a social network and to call it a social network was to do it injustice; it was a geographic network, a professional network, a news network. It’s all these things at once, and the beauty of projects like Twitchhiker is that they’re able to tap into all of these at once, rather than merely treating Twitter as another media outlet, or just to converse – it did both, but worked it into an exciting social project that did good. And this is only just the beginning – we’re only just starting to use these tools to their full potential.

OK, that’ll do for now. In the meantime I’m livetweeting the conference over at @conferencebore and you can follow everyone’s tweets on #TDC. And if you’re here then don’t be shy – come and say hello…