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It use to be that brand creation was governed by the product manufacturer. If a company had the marketing dollars and the marketing talent, a company could make about any product a successful brand. Think bottled water, cars, cell phones, and so on. Now with the advent of social media, digital-based products, and the internet, brand creation has become a shared endeavor between the product creator and the social community that consumes the product. The definition of the word “brand” changes. With the birth of social media and the internet, the word “brand” becomes more than “a trademark or distinctive name identifying a product or a manufacturer”. The brand becomes more of an experience and it has a social community that is centered around the particular product or service. Think iPhone, PlayStation III, and so on.

Brand Creation Between the Product and the Community

ServantOfChaos’ posting, Life at the Edge of Your Brand, describe this paradigm shift in brand creation as follows: “On the one hand there is the product of service that a business has spent time and effort creating. On the other is the population of consumers you are hoping will engage with your offering. And in the place where the two collide is the brand – but this is not your grandfather’s brand – it is the brand that is created in the flux and chaos of interaction between your offering and those who consume, use, engage, love or hate it”. Now, there are less and less opportunities for manufacturers and service providers to control their brand creation. Product owners can no longer control the users of their product using mass media. Now, more and more brands are being created by the user community where the manufacter’s intended marketing and branding plan does not survive “first contact” with the user community.

With internet media, brands are experienced, used, engaged, loved, and hated. On one side of brand creation, the Arc of Satisfaction, you have users that are using the product as it was intended. On the other side of the brand, you have the Arc of Experience where users come up with new ways to use the product or do a “mash-up” or re-mix of the product with other products. The social community now controls the brand. The product owner can at best collaborate with the user community to improve and transform the product.

It use to be that Business-To-Business (B2B) eCommerce had all the exciting technologies. There was RFID, EDI, internet (yes internet started with Government and businesses), broadband, fiber optics, electronic payments, cloud computing, wireless, and so on. This was neat stuff. Now it seems that person-to-person (P2P) communications is using all the neat technologies. Things like cell phones, wireless internet, YouTube, social networks, Twitter, and so on.

B2B eCommerce

Most businesses seem to be still caught in the Dot.com bubble of 2001. Web sites still look about the same as in 2001. Seems like most companies print more paper per employee than a decade ago. Businesses have limited information on their customers and what they should be selling them. Companies have limited B2B ecommerce and integration with most of their trading partners. Many companies have spent too much on technology with nothing to show for it. Other companies have spent too little on technology as they are unsure how to us it.

Hopefully soon, we will breakout of this B2B logjam. Technology integrators need to do a better job of selling B2B ecommerce solutions that add value to the businesses. Businesses need to do a better job of understanding B2B ecommerce technology and how they can use it to provide superior products and services. Seems like both IT and businesses have focused too much on the “shiny, new” technology instead of figuring out what works for a given business. P2P ecommerce and information exchange has rapidly outdistanced anything going on in B2B ecommerce.

See Scobleizer posting, What are the tech bloggers missing? Your business! on how tech bloggers get too focused on the “shiny, new” technology instead of communicating the value the technology can provide to a business.

Humans have always communicated with each other, but the ways we communicated with each other until recently changed very slowly. All of a sudden communicating over the internet has gone hyperactive. Some people are calling this Web 3.0, others are calling it 2010 web, and others are calling it real-time web. Internet communications is re-inventing itself in ever increasing cycles.

Beyond Social Networks - What’s Next?

How did we arrive at using hyperactive internet communications? Thousands of people started communicating over the internet decades ago using FTP, Telnet, and bulletin boards. It slowly evolved over many years to where millions of people started communicating using e-mail, digital communications, and the World Wide Web (WWW). In the last couple of years it has expanded in terms of tens of millions of people using more internet communications channels to include instant messaging (IM), virtual worlds, open-source applications, and social networks like Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn. Now something new is going on. It is not just Twitter It is something more. It is hyperactive internet communications involving billions of people. I am sure some of this is a fad that will just fade away like website guest books and internet portals, but some of this hyperactivity is going to change our world.

What is changing with internet communications to make it so hyperactive? Here are a few things. It is going real-time and decentralized with things like Twitter and Google’s Wave. It is going mobile where the software and telecommunications are beginning to support useful applications. Internet applications like search engines and social networks are getting smarter delivering information to you before you ask for it. Widgets continue to evolve where now anyone with no technical skills can produce web pages that are useful and entertaining. Social networks and internet communications are getting where they are self-organizing and integrated to where information can flow seamlessly across social networks and internet communications channels. Hardware and network infrastructures continue to evolve through virtualization and cloud-based approaches to support all this hyperactive internet communications. Lastly, a whole new dimension is evolving where the whole world will be using all these internet channels instead of the elite few. See Scobleizer for more on current trends with internet communications.