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.

status

1. I have only updated it once (and it’s 2pm). Usually I would update it at least twice by now. My friends seem to update theirs every hour!
2. I woke up from a dismal 3 hours of sleep, and the first thing this morning, I stagger to my office and instead of checking my email, I update my Facebook status first. Before checking my email? Wow.

For those of you hiding under the rock that hides the internet phobic or privacy hounds, Facebook provides you the option of finishing a sentence that begins with <Gagan is…>. That becomes your status for all to see. Some of my status messages from September (from the inane to the informative):

Gagan is telling his dog that wet dog don’t smell good

Gagan is Monday

Gagan is in meetings

Gagan is actualizing (and using big words)

Gagan is CPC, CPM, CPE and every other acronym

In fact if you have any kind of RSS reader , you can keep getting pings throughout the day that will display your friends’ statuses (statuii?) without you doing much of anything at all. The only caveat is that you cannot remove the “is” in

That leads to the name of this post. Generation Is.

I am part of that blurry-eyed generation that is not neatly defined by world politics , war, dreams or the lack thereof . Instead I am defined by the desire for the “now” of information. I don’t have favorite websites, I have favorite RSS feeds. I don’t go out looking for information to be typed up on the pages of a newspaper or even a website for that matter. I rely on my social network to recommend movies, not a corrupt reviewer sitting behind an oak desk. I trust no credentials, but instead I trust the intelligence of masses and look at how many people have saved a link on delicious to decide if a link is good or bad. Give me a bad experience on a website right now, and I make swooping statements about your brand at many cocktail parties. I don’t waste time sorting through spam as Gmail does that for me quite nicely thank you. After all, my status on Facebook can never be as wasteful as “cleaning my inbox”. My here and now status message must wax poetic or be set apart by productivity or philosophy. My networks come with a dot com prefixed to them (LinkedIn, Flickr, Newstoday or, you guessed it, Facebook). I know when a contact has quit their job because she can text me as she walks toward her boss’s door. I know what she tells people about her job officially (LinkedIn) but I also know how she felt day to day at that job (Facebook status). Nothing is hidden from me even information that I have no desire to go search for in the first place. My life, and the information that fills it, has a sense of immediacy to it. My head is constantly filled with ’stuff’. Up-to-the-minute world news, how the planet is going to s#%$ and how people are dying in countries I will never visit. I can now also find out just how my employee or boss really feels about their day or me! A sense of now. A sense of is.

Where is this going?

Gagan is not sure.

Is this good?

Gagan is on the fence.

I look back at how my parents lead their lives. They wrote letters to relatives who lived in other cities. They sent telegrams when there was a sense of urgency and hoped that the news of birth, death and train arrivals got to the recipient within a day or so. My parents actually picked up the phone to arrange dinners and parties. They didn’t even have a day-planner or PDA and instead relied on the calendar with pictures of pretty flowers that hung near the phone. My parents completed a crossword together each day with their morning cup of tea before breakfast. They also read the paper every morning, along with that tea and crossword, to get their daily news. Cup of tea, crossword, newspaper reading and a sit down breakfast. All this before going to work? How did they have the time?

Flash forward to the now and the “is” of me. I just got back from Europe and paid a lot of money for that vacation so I could have the luxury of checking my email only once every couple of weeks. However I couldn’t help it. I fell right back into the “is”. I updated Flickr photos and wrote back to panicked clients and curious friends/family. I even found myself greedy in the “is” of being a tourist. I rushed around taking in sights, food and drink. I was exhausted every evening just from the is-ness of the day. I felt forced to relax by siesta in Barcelona and couldn’t get used to everything coming to a standstill and shutting down every afternoon. I was “is” more often than not, running from one gallery to the next. But truth be told, I wish I had taken the time to just siesta! I guess now that siesta is no longer an option; I yearn to be less “is”.

But it ain’t all bad. I love technology and the immediacy of communication and connection in the world I have bought for myself. I love what all my devices and machines let me make, play and enjoy.

That said, I have to disconnect from IM, email, Skype, Facebook and the phone just to get work done sometimes. And I don’t think everyone I work with understands that need to disconnect, to create. Sometimes a work day is made up of communication. Where does all that communication about the “is” of projects really get me, or for that matter, the project?

I is tired of pings and updates. I is going to log off. I is done for the day.

Client X (in email): XYZ referred me to you. We saw your work for Rouxbe and were impressed. We need a serious web2.0 redesign.

Me(in email): I would really appreciate it if you could complete our project initiation survey (it is only a few questions). This will help us to be better prepared for our meeting on Thursday.

Client X (in Survey): We want a best of breed, slick website that is just like myspace, linkedin, facebook, flickr and digg. Our site needs features from all of the above but be different.

Me (reading Survey): …Scratching head…

The above scenario is familiar to most designers. Everyone wants to be part of the big bandwagon called Web 2.0. Most have no idea what Web 2.0 is or it’s value. What they do know is that their current site doesn’t work and they want something better. I attended the DocTrain conference in Vancouver and the folks from Adaptive Path shared similar stories. In fact, they go one step further, and now use Web 2.0 as a shield to break through traditional bureaucracy. Tell people that what you are proposing is very web 2.0, and the cool, vague term opens doors for new ways of doing things.

This article is broken into several parts because this is a loaded topic, with lots of unknowns to unpack. This month, we look at how to know if it’s time to freshen up your website and redesign it. We will then make sense of the process of redesign and then apply Web 2.0 innovation , where appropriate, to bring the website in line with where we want it to be.

So…

Your company already has a website. And without knowing who you are, what your company does, and why you have come to DesignStamp to help you redesign your site, let me tell you what is probably wrong with your site right now:

1. Old, and Not In a Good Way:You had it designed about 5 years ago, and while it looked good then, it’s starting to feel tired today. It’s failing to display correctly on modern browsers, and the look and feel of the site is very 1990’s. Like a pair of jeans, it hugged your butt for a while, but now it’s starting to sag.
2. The Site Map ala the Winchester House .Time has taken it’s toll on planning as well, and every reactive addition to the website has resulted in several hundred orphaned pages. If you can’t draw a mental site map of your site’s structure, chances are your user most certainly cannot, so they may never find what they came looking for. You’ve inadvertently built stairs that lead to the ceiling!
3. Your Copy Lies About You. The market has done a 360°. Your customer has changed and so has your competition. You are no longer selling the same vision, and in some really bad cases, not even the same product(s). Your website is, essentially, lying about what you do and why you do it.
4. No Funnel, No Conversions, No Happy. Most websites that were designed in the 90’s and early 00’s lacked one small detail on their home page: stating the reason to exist or what the french call raison d’etre.Which means that while attention was paid to adding cool animations, we lacked the wisdom(that comes from failure), to make sure that people quickly understood what the website (and company) does, and then lead the user to the crux of the matter in the most targeted manner. See the home-page of Rouxbe.com: nothing stands in the way from telling people about the site and getting them signed up and all set to watch food videos. Now look at http://www.sap8.com/. Enough said.
5. Your Brand’s Clothes Don’t Match. Make sure the logo and colors of your website match with your biz card, your delivery van and the trade show collateral you just got designed. Your corporate identity are the clothes that your brand wears, and they need to match! A consistent, well-matched corporate identity builds trust and trust leads to the magic money-in-the-bank word… credibility!
6. You’re doing all the talkin’! In this brave new world, companies now have to have the courage to have a two-way conversation with their customer. So if your website features a lowly contact form as the only way for your customer to speak with you and create dialog, then perhaps, it’s time to consider creating a community around your website, and more importantly, around your brand.
7. Accessibility is a Dirty Word. Chances are that when your website was designed, the possibility of someone coming to your site unable to use a mouse was an edge-case not worth considering. There are several compelling business reasons to ensure that your website is accessible. One compelling way to think about accessibility and having xhtml standard compliant sites today is that they have a better chance of working on handheld devices and nifty little cell phones and Wii consoles. You never know where your customer thinks about you and wants access to your site.
8. Your Sales Staff Shudder, Your Tech Staff Dream Bad Dreams.Old websites usually have un-fresh first point of contact information and offer poor after-sales support. After all if the content is difficult to update then who will ever want to update it? And if the content is difficult to upkeep, your tech staff (or the guy who knows a lot about computers) is stressed out by just having to do simple text replaces in this very cumbersome website.
9. Your Competition Looks Better. While a me-too approach is never the best one, we do need to keep up with the Jones’ in this case. If your competition provides helpful features such as side-by-side comparisons, external online resources etc, they are stealing your online business from right under your nose. Your customer is turning to them as a trusted source for what they are looking for.
10. You Know It. Most organizations know that their website needs a refresh. While some may disagree about the extent of that refresh (a makeover, or a new beginning), most will acknowledge that the website has stopped meeting the organization’s needs. This checklist may just help you advocate internally for that change, and the need to hire professionals to do the job right!

Related footnote. I made a presentation entitled web design makeover in conjunction with VFS and Vancouver Public Library. Check out the PDF

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.