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!

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.

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.