I recently visited the new, very beautiful and video rich Stella Artois experience. The above screen grab is from Le Courage. Around the same time I had been thinking about the future of the virtual islands advertisers tend to create for brands and whether or not it makes sense to continue positioning a brand's communications in this way. Then I came across this image which intended to make fun of the danger of falling off the edge of the earth when Stella's brewers were first gathering hops in the 14th century. Despite Stella's new site being a technological achievement for a video rich branded experience I still couldn't help but wonder why Stella had spent millions of dollars to build an island on the Internet. In that moment the site itself seemed as equally anachronistic as the belief that the earth is flat.There was a period of time in the near past when the Internet, for all intents and purposes, was flat. Websites functioned more as islands of isolated activity and interests. Portals pushed preferred content. Surfers bookmarked favorite virtual discoveries for a return visit. Search was quickly dominated by one engine and the act itself took on the engine's name.
Thanks to a resurgence of visionary thinking about what the Internet could be and perseverance through a stretch of post .bomb malaise interesting new web-based models began to emerge. Programmers and developers were rethinking the underlying protocols of the Internet and architectures of websites so that community could be fostered through revealing shared interests. Alongside this social networking evolution of the Internet a virtual arms race ensued fueled by google's unrelenting drive to shift computing to a web-based model giving way to a growing collection of interconnected gadgets, widgets, aggregators and web-based applications. Collectively these modular tools and services aim to free people from being tethered to any one computer. Program preferences, social networks, email, RSS feeds, dapper apps, bookmarks, blogs, music, maps, news, etc., are all virtually persistent and accessible through a variety of devices. Not just a desktop. Intrinsically, the web is a decentralized network. Along with the advances in how data, media and communication interchanges online there have been parallel advances in wireless, cellphones, GPS, PDAs and data storage that are enabling further physical decentralization. The obvious examples of this are working from home or remotely, getting directions from a WAP application on your cellphone, OnStar remotely unlocking your car door, using Twitter to broadcast to your friends up to the minute as to what you are doing.
Increasingly, users are creating dashboards of personal expression by configuring, tuning and arranging their FineTune player, weather.com gadget, mashable news feed and youtube play list widgets. This demand to be able to freely aggregate content has created a growing market for mash-up tools that enable anyone to grab and combine bits of code to create their own delivery "windows" for their blogs, myspace pages, youtube channels, whatever. Meanwhile, the networks a user participates in takes on a "knowing" of that user's interests and desires tirelessly spinning a web of meaningful connections to data, people, retailers and services. This is all made possible by the network members posting personal information, tags about themselves, their interests; posting media and streaming play lists that tap the world's archives of media and it's their continuous grooming, organizing and defining of these blocks of data with descriptive meta data that makes it possible to find whatever they may be looking for whether in their own collection or in the collections of others. Through the searchable ease of semantically organized pools of data and media we find relevance. People find one another following the clues provided to others in the profiles of our many affiliations. These networks facilitate discovery of commonality among others, a unique kind of comfort made possible through the visualization of easter eggs found in vast amounts of interconnected data. Individuals coalesce into micro networks and naturally proliferate into ever-refining communities. There's even a community for virtual personas and avatars created in Second Life, World of Warcraft and Sims at Koinup.
None of this is breaking news but it is worth taking a moment to note that the Internet has reached a certain level or critical mass of interconnectedness, of agency. The methods of communication are numerous and the number of platforms and frameworks are multiplying. It's a medium forever in flux teeming with possibility. Content distribution is non-linear and the masses rule by tagging, rating, posting and passing along the relevant content and disregarding the rest--tending the data garden in massively parallel. Individuals pull, filter and push content. It's an amazing time. If a brand can position a message or provide a relevant offering in this dynamic system of interconnected networks it will quickly spread and the message will have resonance because it is relevant.
Brands can no longer sit back waiting to see if their highly produced and locked-down bits of interactive communication living on an island are going to be discovered and blow-up into a viral hit. There are more interesting possibilities available to marketers now to leverage the viral potential of the web that offer consistent, and if deployed smartly, persistent returns. By enabling consumers to borrow and share bits of embed code (widgets, gadgets, photo loops, video players, custom tools, desktop apps, etc. that are integrated with existing networks and databases) to use wherever they choose the brand is then acting as a facilitator of culture and community that the consumers integrate with their browsing behavior.
Recently there have been some interesting branded applications that follow a decentralized model launched in Facebook—Gimme Love aims to extend 1-800 Flowers existing loyalty program and Lemondade Stand puts a new spin on e-commerce. It will be interesting to see how these applications fair. I imagine that they will find their way to the right people like capillary action through the Facebook networks.
