Flash forward, and we have more choice than we could ever need. Do we really need 285 varieties of cookies, 75 of iced tea, 230 soups, 175 salad dressings? We define happiness as having choices, and yet give us too many choices and we get stressed and would rather walk away and not make a decision than put in the effort required to make an informed choice. This is the subject of the book “The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less” by Barry Schwartz.

Happiness is when we feel like we have the time, the knowledge and the choice required to make the best possible decision. We need filters to help us make these decisions and live in that yellow zone. The Happiness Zone.

As a brand, you have to help people wade through choices and find you. You also have the following related problems to solve:

1. People don’t trust nameless corporations and advertising messages anymore (if they ever really did).
2. People are looking for ways to simplify life, and often make their buying decisions by tapping into trusted sources. According to Forrester Research, “83% of online consumers trust the opinion of a friend or acquaintance who has used a product or service”
3. Your brand is not special to your customer. It’s not the center of their life, as it is to you.

So what should brands do? How do you sell products and have your brand heard over the constant drone of your competitor’s messages? How do you cut through the noise and connect with your customer and have them ‘hear’ you.

Traditionally, brands have done some user and market research, built a product, advertised it’s Unique Selling Proposition (USP) and repeated the process to keep the product fresh and relevant in the market. This is a throwback to the industrial revolution and no longer relevant. In this world of flux and speed, the touch points with the customer need to be more natural, immediate and constant. Your brand needs to meet your customer where they are most comfortable, and truly engage with them.

Introducing social media. Social Media is the big broad term that takes many forms, from Facebook to a white label wiki. From media sharing sites such as YouTube, LastFM or Flickr, to life-sharing sites such as Twitter or MySpace. Forget stale forums where people post questions and no one relies, GetSatisfaction delivers the promise of community, by allowing companies and their customers to have lively exchange about products.

As brands grapple with the concept of social media, some view it as just another channel to advertise. But that’s one very thin slice of the possibility pie and dates back to thinking from a 100 years ago. Yes, you can create brand awareness, but how do you actually get your customer to care about you, and make you their preferred choice? Instead of using ad-copy, social media allows you to have a more real, meaningful engagement with your customer. You can now discuss things with your customer. And use language that is more natural and accessible to your customer about every subject that matters. To you and your customer.

The wide, wild, undefined world of social media is in it’s infancy. And brands that ‘get it’ are starting to see it’s true potential. It holds promise for creating deeper relationship between organizations and the people they serve, whether that organization is an online company, a bank, or a non-profit organization. If you have something to promote, and communicate about, social media will be a vital part of your communication strategy going forward.

The concept is simple, really. Don’t look at social media as an advertising vehicle. Instead thinks of it like a party. Your customers are attending this party. You are attending the party too. You are not the host, you are just a participant, as are they. Conversation is lively, noisy and on various subjects. How will you join in? How will you introduce yourself to others? How will you mingle in this party, get people to get to know you, appreciate your presence and really want to keep in touch with you, even outside of this party? In short, how will you become the life of the party?

Guido doesn’t get far anymore. People see through the greasy sheen of falseness. Here’s a suggestion: be authentic, and useful. Be(come) the nice guy. The brand that is helpful, and confident. Knowledgeable in what you do, and not arrogant. Proud not full-of-yourself. Communicative not sale-sy. Marriott has joined Twitter and won kudos for creating great conversations with travelers around the world. Even this hot dog vendor in Vancouver has leveraged their geek central location, to talk to their customers on Twitter with great success.

Before you jump into the social media pond, consider how best you will join in the conversation and what do you have to offer.

Here are a few questions to ask, that will help you humanize your brand, and make authentic decisions on his/her behalf:

1. What would your brand be like at the party? (E.g. The clown, the shy one, the chatty kathy)
2. Where would your brand hang out? What online communities would she or he be drawn to?
3. Who are your brand’s best friends? Who trusts your brand and loves them?
4. What are brands that your brand would buy? (Example: Starbucks or the local neighborhood cafe?)
5. What will your brand do or say at the party, that is typical of her/him, that will make people remember her (in a good way)?

On a somewhat related note, you will find DesignStamp on Twitter, but you won’t find us on Facebook. We haven’t figured out why/how we, as a design studio need to be there. And we refuse to attend the party unless we know that we’d look good going in. So we are talking about it internally, dressing for success (a new website is in the works) and making sure we are drinking the Kool-aid we serve. Be authentic, be useful.

We encourage you to contact us and let’s get to work on your social media strategy!

So what does it mean to me to be good? I am not sure as yet, but here are a few words that come to mind. I told myself that I won’t spend hours and hours on this blog and write from the heart and not the head. So here goes in no particular order:

• Respect. Yup that word again. I believe in this so much that I chide myself when I don’t follow the mantra. It helps me see things more objectively.
• Curious. To want to learn more because I owe it to my craft to be ‘good’ and more importantly, to always be searching for the ‘better’ way to solve problems.
• Caring. From telling someone that their shirt’s tag is showing to giving a team member timely feedback, it is important to “see” people and demonstrate that noticing and acknowledging behavior and yes, even appearances.
• Educate. This I need to do more. I strongly believe that through education you can positively change a life, and this planet’s course is via education. That is why I teach, and if I ever accumulated wealth, that is what I would want to do with my money. Facilitate learning.
• Question. If I want to improve how things are, and make them how they ought to be, I need to remember to think outside the construct and question status quo.
• Happy. If I am happy, I do better work, and I am good to those around me. I owe others to be happy, so I should take the time to do things that make me happy.
• Travel. What better way to appreciate different cultures and ways of living than to see the world. My work, my attitude to people who are different than me is informed by what I think I know about them. I don’t understand how traveling can not be a priority. It’s mine.
• Give. I need to do more of this. But related to “Educate”, for me giving people money or the basics for living (food, shelter) is not the most productive way to change their life for the better. You have to empower people to be able to make choices, to see the world for what it can be for them, and a way out of where they may be stuck. (Gawd, I sound like a preacher, but I have a story that is too long to type, so ask me and I’ll tell you)
• Voice. If you don’t got one, you ain’t going to be able to change nuthin’. If it’s good, than I need to be able to talk about it, start discussions and challenge others to follow. So it’s important to have a clear message about that good thing, and a voice that can be heard.
• Relate. Even if you have to fake it for a bit, you should try and see the other point of view and ‘relate’. World politics could be very different if we stopped trying to vilify nations and whole continents. How about just trying to relate with those people? Why are they hating us so much, and what did we do to make them feel this way?
• Humility. My mamma taught me this. To do good, to be good, and want good things for those around me, I must remember that I am not the best. I am only one person trying to become better because it’s my obligation to do so. Ego is destructive and I am a designer because I want to be constructive.

So there you go, a blog post more for me than you, but I hope that it will ignite a desire in someone, somewhere to not just do, but think a bit about what they do, how they do it, and why they do it.

1. Keeping a customer is cheaper than finding new ones.
2. If you have high churn, you are viewed as selling a commodity not a brand people care for. You will need to start to compete by lowering price which is not a winning game unless you are a volume behemoth like Walmart.
3. Happy customers are more likely to become loyal customers, and loyal customers tend to become cheaper to maintain than servicing the needs of newbies that are partially willing to “try” you out.
4. History is littered with brands who became too big for their own shoes, and started to forget about who made them big in the first place. The happiest brands are those that keep their customers close, and value their experiences as they do their bottom-line.
5. What can your brand do, to make people say “I love [name of your brand here]“. Make people become irrational about their feelings about your brand. The glow that radiates from people in love is infectious. Try telling a Harley-lover that a Honda is better.
6. In the lean times, it’s your brand advocates that will stick by you. Loyalty is difficult to create, and once you have it, you must hold on it, by frequently checking every customer service point within your company (At Rouxbe, the CEO of the company reads every contact form that comes in).
7. Marketers should be part of the design process, so they understand the product that is being built and who it will satisfy. Slapping on marketing messages after the fact doesn’t work. It’s simply too late.
8. Designers should be part of the marketing process, they are trained to be stand-ins for the end-user. Tap into their knowledge to keep the design and the message unified. Apple does this best.
9. Do things differently. The best way to beat your competition is to stand out and be different. Be less annoying than your competition (maybe my bank machine can start to remember what language I speak, and not ask that question each time?), be more caring (don’t tell phone customers they will get through faster by staying on the line, offer to call them back) and more human (WestJet flight attendants crack jokes when making the same old boring “fasten your tray tables” announcements).
10. Be your own customer. Use your product before you unleash it to a market. Design things for yourself, and design the after-sales service for your family and friends. People who don’t know jack about the intricate details about your product. You owe them a good experience.
11. People talk. And in a myriad of new ways. If you run a business that has customers, you ought to be keeping an ear to the ground to listen to what people are saying about you. You should know about the various (new) ways people communicate.

And now a story:

I am on the phone with Fido (BC, where I live, has only 3 major cell phone carriers, sad). I have a nasty customer experience. The agent is unprofessional, absent and not helpful. He has asked me to repeat my mobile number 3 times now. I have been handed from one department to the next, and no one seems to be able to be able to tell me why my account balance is not being accurately displayed online. The call ends with me hanging up in frustration when they finally decide to blame my computer (Mac) even though I KNOW that there is no way that could be the problem.

My tweets during this call:

Sweet revenge.

Flash back, it used to be that when we would have a bad customer experience, we’d grumble about it to others, if the topic came up. Now, I tweet.

Generation Is uses Twitter. A Tweet refers to messages exchanged on Twitter to let people know what you are doing right now. Or what you think or feel about a particular subject. (Learn about what is Twitter and why it’s so popular and stats on it’s usage). So get searching and find out what people are saying about you on Twitter!

So be good to your customers. Bad stories are more fun to tell than good ones. Revenge is more important at times than spreading joy, and more and more,  your consumer understands the power she wields, in this hyper-connected world.

As I have mentioned before, very often we get people asking for us to design Web 2.0 sites that incorporate community to some level. And while I am all for shorthand (e.g. coffee ordering at Timmie Hoe’s) and I have already written about what web 2.0 means to me, this time let me unpack what community is not. Because sometimes by figuring out what something is not, we get to the core of what it is.

Words that I will use interchangeably to describe community: village, watering hole, gathering place…you get the idea.

Here’s what community is not:

1. It’s not a label to throw up on your site. If you ain’t got community, it’s OK, you’ll get one soon enough. Just stick to what you do best and aim that thing at people who care and sure enough they will gather around and talk you up. You have to have something substantial behind the label to merit making your user click on the “community” button!
2. It’s not what you want it to be. If there is no freedom, there is no community. Censor people, tell them what they can or cannot do inside “your” community and you lose the game even before you start. While communities need a sense of order, people will hack the system to make it what they want it to be, and if the system is too rigid, they will move on to the next gathering place.
3. It’s not a one-way street. Look for perfect circles. I give you feedback on your app. You read that feedback (let people know you read everything they send!), and find that it’s a really good point. Celebrate my input, make me a beta tester, give me “special” access and I will become your brand advocate. Look to complete the feedback and communication loop and you have a lasting relationship with your audience.
4. It’s not just about belonging. People used to join clubs and professional associations just to put that membership on their resume. That’s not enough anymore. People expect communities to be useful. People also like communicating, so let them. The best online communities have strong communication. LinkedIn is not just a professional network, it also offers tools and features that allow people to ask questions, post jobs and communicate with each other in meaningful ways. Providing useful ways to communicate and abiding by personal choices around privacy and noise levels creates stronger (more loyal) communities.
5. The world ain’t flat, and neither are communities. People also like a pecking order, so give it to them. Give people someone/something aspirational, reward them for valuable contributions, so they keep making them. Leading from #3, giving people special status either based on contribution or quality of input is a great way to encourage increased community involvement. Call it karma, call it ranking, call it badges, but provide some sort of tangible, recognition for those that help others. Last fm doesn’t provide any type of rankings beyond what you get if you pay them for the service. But do a search on google for last.fm badges, and you will find people who have created graphics to celebrate the momentous event, when your playlist at last.fm reaches beyond a certain number of songs. Apple provides points that add up to status levels in their support forums. People aspire to receive points by answering questions. Apple wins by having a free support system for their products. People win by being celebrated as Apple gurus.
6. They don’t need it, you do. Because there is big money in online communities, everyone’s got one! So if you have a topic worth talking about, it’s being discussed within an online community somewhere. So don’t create community because you think your user “needs it’. They don’t need your community. You need community features because you want to be loved or at least make people care enough to gather around to talk about you. If you want loyal users and you want to be transparent about everything you do, the best way you can do that is to create a dialog with your consumer.
7. Communities are not just a bunch of people. I want to watch a movie tonight. Flashback to 15 years ago > pick up the newspaper > choose a pretty poster from the movies section > take my chances > go to local theatre > pay $4.99 cheap Tuesday price. Today, it costs over $20 for a movie and I got little time. I also don’t trust my eyes to pick from posters because let’s face it, my mum reads the paper; I scroll, point and click. So I pick online communities to find out what people thought of a movie. I don’t just read individual reviews; I look to see what a bunch of people as an aggregate said about a movie because a bunch cancels swing votes from the the easy-to-please and the gripers. Subjectivity is lost in an aggregate made up of large numbers, I hope. I can also follow specific people that seem to mirror what I like/hate and they become my gurus to help me make decisions. Check out Rotten Tomatoes or Riffs. Communities can be a sophisticated glowing ball of wisdom.
8. It don’t get built overnight! Actually, that’s a lie. It seems like Twitter’s success can be solely attributed to its insanely popular introduction at SXSW. But most online communities need to be seeded, watered and tended to, like a delicate plant that could become a really big-ass tree someday, but not tomorrow. See above for all the seeding, tending things you should consider doing. Love your community and dedicate the amount of resources that you believe is worth building a loyal audience for your product.

So to the gym bunny grandpa: I agree that real people are great to have a conversation with. But in terms of levels of trust, this is how I see the world:

Highest level: I trust my inner circle of family and friends to give me opinions on things because I know them well. I know Robina loves every movie she sees, I know Jo-Ann won’t probably like most “hollywood” flicks, and so I can take their opinion, and self-adjust their subjective opinion to balance out what I have felt about their reviews in the past.

Second level: I would tap into what large crowds think about one thing at an aggregate level because I believe about the power of the collective wisdom of crowds for most things *.

Bottom of the trust totem pole: You, my gym-schmoozer friend. Not because of your oh-too-tight tank and the hefty weight belt that hangs below your beer belly. Only because you are one voice and I can’t rely on your solitary opinion. It’s too risky.

Communities have power, and strong communities can strong and have immense value when they work well.
(* This mp3, points out when crowds don’t work!)

To those who care to know (and Starbucks, if I were you, I would be searching Google everyday to find out what people think of you), here are the reasons why I have made it my mission to seek out alternatives sources to feed my caffeine addiction:

1. Starbucks coffee sucks? To me, the coffee has always tasted burnt. I am not a coffee connoisseur like the good people at 2paths but even to my relatively unsophisticated coffee palette, Starbucks never felt ‘good’.
2. It all began with ‘No free internet’ (Starbucks has changed that, but it’s too late)? Ok, so this is geek reason, but it had a ripple effect that lead to #3. Basically, I don’t understand why I would have to pay a zillion dollars for a “tall” coffee and then pay for a service that should be as basic as providing lighting and mind-numbing muzac.
3. I found ‘others’. Leading from # 2, I started looking for cafes that had free internet. Free internet lead me to cafes with great coffee! Take 5 café in Vancouver is great, as is Caffé Artigiano which has amazing coffee (and terrible baked goods). Lesson: sometimes your ancillary, supporting services are the reason why people buy into your primary brand offering.
4. I heart community. In this world of remote offices and telecommuting, cafés are the new networking opportunity. Starbucks tries to create a strategically comfortable environment with its big arm chairs and carefully positioned mood lighting, but I am thinking that it takes more than just soft cushions to make for a successful third place ! For example: Take 5 café lends its location to geek events in the evenings after open hours (fringe benefit: geeks tend to drink lots of java, and do so during these events too). Result: Now geeks flock to the café at all hours of the day! If you are looking to hire your next freelance coder/designer, chances are you will find them huddled in the back of the café, working on their laptops and guzzling down their third cup of java. Lesson: big brands need to work harder to give managers the freedom to operate each store as an independent business and make ‘authentic’ community contributions not the catch-all ones that are dictated at a corporate level.
5. Anonymous service. I have worked in retail and I have worked for a large global brand, so I know that customer service training can sometimes takes the humanity out of that service. It all becomes a timed science of making eye-contact within x number of seconds and saying thank you in just the right way. Again, I suggest that Starbucks and every other mega retail brand consider going back to the idea of creating “villages” around their stores. Look to hire people who genuinely enjoy people. Look to make each store unique, different and while it can have the comfort of leveraging familiarity of the same logo, same product, it should be courageous enough to respond to a particular community’s needs. Treat that 65 year old customer differently than the 30 year old who buys a low-fat, soya latte with extra foam from you every day. Keep your humanity, and don’t correct the customer when they order a “small” coffee.
6. Laughable brand extensions. OK, I guess I am a bit of a brand Nazi but I don’t want to give my hard earned money to a brand that thinks it’s so beautiful that it should be able to sell just about anything with its logo on it. How many types of tumblers does this world really need? What do plush toys have to do with the primary product i.e. a decent cup of coffee? Lesson: create a brand that is known for what it does best, keep a laser focus on that strength and don’t deviate from that focus. You seem wasteful and self-congratulatory when you overdo the logo placements.
7. I like local more then I like global. When I go to Europe, I resist the temptation of going to any American brand restaurant. Sure it’s easy to order a Royale with cheese at McDs. And it’s a linguistic and cultural challenge communicating with the owner of a petit bistrot. “I am asking for a medium rare steak but I would prefer if the cow were not still breathing when it is served to me”. But McD’s ain’t Paris. And Starbucks doesn’t feel local. If I want to feel posh, I go to 49^th Parallel. I want to feel like I am doin’ the drive so I go to Calabria café with its somewhat garish, fake Italian statues and unpretentious attitude. I want the local environment to impact my coffee experience. I don’t want the same lighting, same music and same artwork comfort but maybe that’s just me.
8. I want to curb the infection and not encourage it. Even if you love Starbucks and can’t live without it, you too would admit that the sheer number of stores that have cropped up in the last few years is a bit nutty. Do we really need a Starbucks store across the street from..another Starbucks? Vancouver seems to be hardest hit by the fungal growth of the green logo stores. “I’ve never seen so much coffee in all my life. The whole town is on a caffeine jag,” said Bette Midler, when she performed in Vancouver.
9. If I were a coffee shop I would be. Picture it, a little cafe with the bubbly, friendly tattooed crazy coffee girl (barista would be too pretentious, and not sure why she is a girl! Frued?). The smell of food and coffee would be mixed and the air would be warm and the music would be Radiohead-ish. Strange but hey, that’s me. I tend to try and use my money to vote up the brands that reflect who I am (or want to be). Little bit of narcissistic anthropomorphism . If I were a coffee brand I hope I am not seen as a Starbucks. Apparently a study of 8000 consumers found Starbucks to be “arrogant, intrusive and self-centered“.
10. I can’t stand the thought of sameness. I said it time and again in this little list, but one of the reasons that I am so fascinated by brand creation and management. I think we need to challenge how good brands are built. The whole idea of sameness is unnecessary. The idea of wrapping a marketing message around a product is such a throwback to the industrial revolution. We are now living in emotional times. I think the future of successful brands flips the equation on its head. As this brilliant article suggests, grassroots brands are cropping up that start with an emotion or thought and then manifest into a product that reflects that emotion best, not the other way around. Starbucks started that way but along the way it seems to have shifted its focus from coffee and experiences around that drink, to growing exponentially. Something got lost along the way and got replaced with this sameness/safeness that I question.

We Belong

Tribe members are a brand’s strongest advocates. They feel like they helped build something (I am…trying…to resist another 80’s pop reference…but I can’t!!) and will go to bat for the website they are a part of. Brands have relied upon way tribes before social networking became cool. Avon and Mary Kay cosmetics relied upon women selling to women like themselves. Amazon relies on book lovers sharing their love for the written word with others like themselves. The key is to be driven by niche. If you share a deep love for something with someone else, you already have something in common, so relating with them becomes that much easier. And if you side with the small guy fighting the big guy than the community feeling is even stronger. Consider the linux community or the teeny bopper MySpace community. Both rely on people sharing what they have in common. Music, code, wanting to belong to just belong, whatever.

The Future of the Future

I love the promise of what they are about to become. I love them and I promise to love whatever they do next. I am in love with the future of this brand. Basecamp became successful even before it launched because it could rely on a strong fan base that read the 37 signals blog everyday. Google has future fans who flock it’s official and ‘fan’ blogs and scour it’s labs. This user consumes not just based on subject but based on what their idol is currently interested in or promoting. They are fanatical about their idol and will irrationally support it’s future endevours. So Google completes its grid and we follow and invent rationale to use their next beta app. Firefox built itself a brand by having loyal fans that cut and pasted banners promoting the new browser even when it was a fledgling. They had bought into the promise. Into the future.

I Just Can’t Stop Loving You

What started as a hobby has become something much bigger. And this love must be shared with others and celebrated whenever, wherever. The love could be for a hobby, a technology, a gadget, a game or even food. This person probably trolls sites such as mac rumors or wii’s world, has RSS feeds to sites dedicated to their favorite subject. They might be closet junkies choosing to only revel with others who share this love. They appear normal from the outside. Inside, however they hunger for new information and sharing with others (sometimes under aliases). They will spend some time everyday keeping up with their interest. This person will also sign up for newsgroups and even meet people IRL about a subject that is close to their hearts. It was love at first click. My friends at Industrial Brand are “out” as big-time foodies!

Don’t Forget Me (When I’m Gone)

Just browsing as they call ‘em. The surfer starts out not knowing where they are going, just that they got time to kill. They bounce from one site to the next, clicking on blogrolls, del.icio.us links or just clicking for the sake of it. But sooner or later they realise that the web is really a small place and end up coming back to the same site. There is huge oppurtunity here as this user can be seduced into staying or coming back. They got time. Surfers will come back to sites that look, feel and behave differently than other sites because, they are more memorable and somehow managed to stand out from the other 50 sites that were pinged earlier that day. Give them a newsletter or a contest, get them to sign up and chances are they may just click their way back to you.

Daddy Cool

Give me the latest gossip. Tell me about the latest trend. Show me something new. I am a cool hunter on the prowl. I got people who rely on me to tell them the latest greatest and I can’t dissappoint! This person thrives on sharing and being the first. They depend on finding and dispersing information about new things to maintain their ‘cool’ status. They will forward, post on newsgroups and comment about the latest, greatest just to be the first to do so. This type of user created the buzz factor that surrounds the front-page of Digg and makes Tech crunch spit out one of the top RSS feeds on the internet.

Got to tell you, writing this article made me want to gel my hair, stitch some pleats in my pants and wear white socks (again). Not!

happy prosumer

1. The eBay seller who put up the camera for sale, listing it’s features, putting up photos of the camera, to get me to bid on that camera.
2. Me: I had a ability to take that photo of my dog, and then add meta data to that photo in Flickr by adding the photo to a set, submit it to a dog-lovers group, and add comments to the pic.

The Good: Power to the People

We can celebrate the power of being able to share content instantaneously. Tragic events such as the London Bombings are instantly found on various sites through “citizen journalism” around the world with cell-phone videos, podcasts, blogs and photos from every angle. Unedited or censored.

And let’s acknowledge that it is kinda cool to skip traditional distribution channels (and the tax-man?) by being able to buy and trade things even wholesale products from each other in easier ways than ever before.

The ability to create and distribute content has shifted power of content creation from the few (read media mogul Rupert Murdoch who interestingly enough owns MySpace, a cluttered example of user-generated content) to the many (at least to those that have the access to increasingly cheap technology). Get free web space, spit out your message and you have just created content for all to consume. You could have the attention of millions. No censorship , no barriers. You are now a publisher, a distributor and you could even surround your content with ways to monetize on your new found powers. If you are a musician, you are finding ways to get famous without the help of record companies. And you can even gain celebrity status for yourself by just picking on famous people. Just find your niche and create content for them. And they will consume it.

The Bad: (The Reason why user generated content…umm…sucks?)

The problem with this whole scenario is this. No one stopped me sharing that photo in the scenario above.
I might suck at taking photos but no one stopped me from adding that blurry photo to the trash heap that is the internet today.

Let’s talk about YouTube: how many videos are actually worth the bandwidth that was spent uploading them and then serving them up to unsuspecting bored explorers? And sites that accept user-submitted content realize this problem, so every user generated piece of content must offer features such as ratings, reviews. Tell the system if the piece of content is good, tell the system if it is miserably useless. Help us bury it or float it to the top. And even then fake content or hoaxes ends up tarnishing the credibility of good websites.

And while bad content rarely ever makes it up the ranks, it still leaves someone, somewhere having to take the time to watch the content to censor or celebrate it. And time is precious. The world is melting, we have crazy weather outside and frogs are going extinct at an alarming rate. But we are spending our time flagging content that should never have been made in the first place. Worse yet, we are provided more and more choices everyday to showcase our small lives in duplicate ways. And no one is asking why.

The Inevitable J.Lo Syndrome

Luckily, the system has a way of correcting itself. It’s called the the J.Lo syndrome. Remember when we couldn’t get enough of J.Lo’s well-endowed behind, her bling and her men? Well at some point we got bored and we turned away. She went into hiding, came out made a couple of movies but has not generated the same tabloid frenzy again. User-generated content is here to stay, don’t get me wrong (just like J.Lo’s behind). But we are going through the dreaded “Ben Affleck engagement” phase of the J.Lo syndrome at the moment. Over-hype and over-saturation. We have been provided too many ways to share pointless content.

At it’s best user-generated content gives us incredible, unprecedented power to share, contribute to a collective intelligence and find new ways to communicate with each other. But it is the emphasis on quantity (with ways to weed through the abysmal, to get to the average) that has to shift. We all want good content, not millions of ways to submit and access bad content.

Once the saturation point hits and websites with identical business models that live off or leverage user-generated content start to cannabalize each other and starve each other of investment dollars, we will gravitate back to sites that offer us good content, whether that content is created by one or many. Good content always wins. The author can be a “user”, a “pro” or a prosumer, it don’t really matter! What matters is that the focus will be back on quality and not the aggregation of masses of content submitted by the masses. And no more talk about seeding and weeding a gigantic compost heap of content.

We frequently work with companies that in the process of establishing, building or redefining their brand.

On the key exercises that I like to emphasize when building a brand from the ground up or focusing an existing brand is the importance of a brand voice.

Here’s how I see it.

Problem: We want to speak to our customer, but there are a lot of other voices that are screaming the same message to our customer. We have something unique to sell to our customer, but we are afraid that they will not be able to hear us over the din of our competitors.

1. Also called Step ZERO. Let’s forget about the competitors for a minute. You have obviously made it this far based on the assumption that you have a unique product or service offering. Or you were able to prove that there is enough room in the market for you. Hence you were able to raise the capital needed to be in existence. So, you and I both know that you have something to offer your customer. But what is it? Before we attempt to speak with “them”, let’s make sure we know WHAT we want to say to our target market. What makes our product/service worthy of their time and why should they care to keep us in business. How are we helping them?
2. Let’s talk about HOW we want to speak to them. What is our brand voice (that being the reason for this article). Country music or Country Grammar? When they exclaim “that’s hot”; do they mean the temperature of something is uncomfortably high, or do they mean that sh** is phat? Knowing your target audience’s brand voice, tells you the style and tone that your brand must have to be accessible to its market. Brand voice is not just a vocabulary; it is how successful brands clearly express their membership (or leadership) to their tribe. A brand’s voice communicates its values, principles and just who they are, to their market.

When a brand communicates clearly, it has a voice. And a brand with voice has power. Because then it can do a multitude of things and yet always find a way to communicate its brand message clearly in everything it does.

Brand voice must resonate with its target market to be successful.

Trying to fake your brand voice to make it accessible to its target audience is as offensive to your target audience as Ted Danson doing black face. Your brand shouldn’t just speak in the voice that you define, it must become it.

Defining a brand’s voice, means bringing a brand to life. Get rid of big brand standards documents that teach you how to use that logo. Instead think about making your brand into a real person. Think about who your brand is. Where do they hang out. What parties do they go to? Would you invite them over to your house? And if so, would your personal style, appeal to them or hurt their sensibilities? How will they sit at a party? In the middle of a young crowd or huddled with the small group of suits discussing the benefits of investing in tech stocks?

Knowing your brand voice means that you now know not only what you want to say, but how you want to say it.

Looking at a few 404 Error messages online, it becomes clear that even errors can speak volumes about a brand’s voice and how it communicates to it’s users.

Consider the following error messages: Basecamp, a project management tool, is both authoritative in its error messages and calm. Flickr is like your buddy, irreverent yet cool. Apple knows text lists will bore you while Windows is geekier. Google has the manner of a guy who has one piece of furniture in his one-room apartment which also houses 5 computers!

Marcus Graham takes the concept of brand voice one step further. He takes the concept of brand voice very literally. He researched 100 brand voices by recording the official automated phone greetings. So if you go to Top 100 voice brands you can actually compare what say Starbucks voice sounds like, to that of Microsoft, Apple or Charles Schwab. While I am not sure if every company has the budget to hire the best voice talent to record their company’s automated systems, the study speak to the importance NOT being seen as gruff, robotic and un-human. It’s more impactful to be personal, trust-worthy and human.

Finding your brand voice is making the definitive statement about who your brand is, and who it is not. And it is also proof that the brand really “gets” its target audience. That it doesn’t wait to speak to its market through focus groups and feedback forms. It also lives in the world that its target audience inhabits.

A brand with a clear voice manages to have enviable shorthand with its core market. Sometimes it leads the tribe, sometimes it is just one of the tribe, but whatever its position, it is identifiable, tangible and ultimately very human.

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Most businesses rely on statistical data to learn about there customer aka user. Be it demographic info such as age, income, occupation etc. But we find that the richness of talking to the actual users and learning about their experiences cannot be found in the best drawn statistical chart. Statistical averages are useful for large scale projects such as deciding where a highway should be built, but a humanized approach works better when designing software or marketing collateral. We find that creating user profiles helps us remain objective in our process, validate our design decisions and intuitions about potential problem areas. This is an example of a user persona that helped us conduct a usability study on our client’s existing web service.

Besides those good old statistics about demographics of your user, try and get some empirical data about your target audience. Do you know about how and why your user buys your product? What is their current perception about you and where did they get this impression? How different is this impression from the marketing message you put out there? Here’s a brief checklist of items to find out about your user:

• Experience: How long have they know about you, and your products? How did they come in contact with your brand? What similar products do they use currently? This will teach you not only your competition but also about your users experience with your product domain.
• Relationship to you? What do they know about you? What do they NOT know about you? This will help shape marketing, and brand awareness initiatives. Good branding is about creating top of mind awareness. And if you haven’t got to that stage with your core audience yet, there may be some work ahead.
• Relationship to technology: An easy way to figure this one out is to really hear how people talk about technology (Phrases such as ‘That thingie to click on…’ speak volumes about your user’s comfort level and exposure to technology). Alpha geeks (those who adopt early and often) have different relationship to technology than laggards. And both may impact your bottom-line differently even if your product has little to do with cutting edge technology. After all there is no point creating a complex interactive flash movie about your product, if it’s controls will frustrate yourt users and take focus away from your product.
• Language: Pot-taah-toh or Put-tay-toe? Do they use the same words that you do to describe the end-product? If you work in the music industry for example, does your user think of their music as songs or tracks? Use the language that works for your user. If you are a b2b enterprise, what does that business call their target audience? Use that word (example: subscriber?) to refer to their customer
• Humanize your brand: Ask people that if your company were an actor which actor would it be? It’s probably better to be seen as a Brad Pitt than a Jack Nicholson if your company deals with cutting edge technology. Not good if your brand is seen as a Dame Judy Dench when your aim was to attract a young, energetic crowd.
• Drivers of purchase decisions: What is important to your user when it comes to your product domain? You may be surprised by the answers you get. You might think that people only care about price, but they actually base decisions on credibility. You might think that people look for deals, but turns out they just trust what their son, daughter, niece or nephew tells them to buy. Finding the decision drivers will help focus your energies in the right direction.

I could go on, but the idea is that we want to find ‘human information’ not numbers. Wisdom not data. No one has 2.24 kids and is of 30 to 40 years of age. Averages only get you so far. We think better design happens when we can imagine who it is, that we are designing for.

"When I design, I design for people, not for an abstract entity, a market, but for real people. People I know, people I love."
— Konstantin Grcic (European furniture designer)

Welcome to Web 2.0.

Much hyped, equally maligned. Web 2.0 is celebrated at events, taught in classes and even predicted to have the same horrible end that dot com’s had back in the day.

So what the heck is Web 2.0 and what’s all the fuss about? I give you this link to go do your homework about Web 2.0 . Long and short of it, Web 2.0 gets a lot of buzz in terms of the technologies and programmatic functionality that is now possible to deploy on the web. You have programmers and designers collaborating and making new businesses everyday of products that only they themselves will ever find a use for. At its worst, Web 2.0 is a narcissistic, self-congratulatory, self-referential and gimmicky me-too’s that have made their first attempt at selling a product for a niche market. Themselves.

At its best, however the evolution of the Web and its potential is only now beginning to become clearer to all that work for it (?), and those that have used it ever since they care to remember.

To me Web 2.0 is about doing what we never thought we would do on the web. Share.

Yah, you heard me. Share.

That’s the big word of the moment, and that is what at its core, Web 2.0 helps us do.

Web 2.0. Sharing. You can use words like ‘platform’ and ‘web application’ and ‘Ajax’ and ‘desktop functionality’ but really in essence the most amazing thing about the web today is the concept of sharing is becoming increasingly OK. We are slowly coming out of our cocoons, testing the waters and sharing out things that we know, and things that we love or hate.

(Caution: Words are used in the following part of the article to weave a tangled web of links!)

We rant and we celebrate. We collaborate like never before. We share things illegally, or legally. We share things we were too shy to share before and we share things that we just couldn’t share as easily before. We still spend thousands of dollars for things that we are told not to share and some of us go ahead and share those as well. We share out seemingly useless things, and then someone goes out and makes something out of that pile of information. We find many things by sharing, as we lose things in an increasingly big messy pile of unsorted information. Then we go invent folksonomies to find those things. We hold a finger up at old ways of categorizing things (Dewey Decimal system be damned) and instead we put several tags to describe one thing. Much like how our brain thinks of things.

People are finding that micro-communities are more meaningful to them than the large ‘one-stop-shop‘ portals. They are even buying and selling things without the aide of mega-fee sites such as eBay.

We are living in a brave new world, but this onslaught of power hasn’t done much to ease our worries or workload. In fact, we seem ready to trade bits of our privacy at times if someone can make sense of our crazy digital world. And sometimes we just give away pieces of information about ourselves unknowingly. And sometimes we share out more than we had ever bargained for.

You call it a Platform; I call it Collective Wisdom. You call it Web 2.0. I call it Sharing.