My surname “Brandit” stands for Branding Bandit.
This name has indeed had a strong influence on my life and the path I have chosen.
Everything we do or say and every action we take has an impact on ourselves. Whether as an individual or a company, we exist in part through the perception of others. This leads to us developing a personal brand. My desire is to link and intertwine our personal brands with others, creating a flow of interactions. Does it resonate like a social network or is it more than that?
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(Adidas World Cup 2006 advertisment)
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Companies require advertising to provide information and conviction that their product or service is valuable. It is a necessity for them to survive and grow. Our society actually depends on advertising – it provides work to many and information to countless more. Without advertising our world would indeed be a dull place.
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Online advertising is one of the major trends on the Internet. There are a lot of advertising networks and new methods in an industry where everyone wants to get a piece of the pie. Lots of advertising networks are popping-up while start-ups use those same platforms hoping to monetize their project.
But let me ask you one question to put my proposition in perspective…
What if advertisements could be published for free?
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Will it not provide the same advantages while limiting costs per impression (CPM) and click frauds?
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Wouldn’t it help companies and organizations with small marketing budgets?
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What if companies could invest part of their marketing budget into something more valuable?
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Will it not become an incentive to the way information is conveyed to consumers?
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What about publishers, shouldn’t bloggers find a better way to monetize their blog’s value?
Online “social” shopping is gradually enforcing change in the way individuals, groups and retailers interact. The trend is increasing in pace and progressively moving towards evolved affiliation techniques. In the same way Social Networks are fuelled by User Generated Content (UGC), manufacturers and retailers can benefit from social shopping platforms and their User Generated Recommendations (UGR).
Dion Hinchcliffe, founder and CTO of Hinchcliffe & Company and one of my favourite Web2.0 bloggers schematizes online communities in the following way:
He also expresses the need for companies to interact and presents best practices here.
But what if there is something more?
What if those three types could be entwined?
What if services and their promotion could be based on perception and abstraction rather than surfing behaviour?
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Let me explain, I like this picture a lot. It shows the way people connect and interact. It perfectly represents what we expect from a social network. But more than that, I love the individual reflections. They symbolize something.
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On turning the picture upside-down, we realize the result is the same, but from a different perspective. Our perception provides us with a new image for the same thing, but the action we’ll take might ultimately differ. Reflection and original are transposed.
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Our perception alters our behaviour. Hence, developing an algorithm profiling the perception we have instead of the resulting behaviour might become highly valuable. A question though, is it even feasible to create such an algorithm and does it make any sense in an environment shifting to Users Generated Content (UGC)?
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Having had a vision, I decided to gather trustworthy people and start this community. Each one of its members wishes for change and substance. Why not join us in providing this added extra?
If the Web is to provide value-added content and opportunities based upon interactions, then it is time to work on it together!
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