Back Seat Marketers

The social web has brought forward a shift change in how people will view how they interact with others. Economically, professionally, and culturally, communication has shifted towards a new kind of openness. Tools like Flickr, Del.icio.us, and Last.fm, Linked In as well as MySpace, Facebook, Wordpress, Twitter and other collaborative social net tools have taken a person’s life and made it far easier to relay working and personal lives for everyone else he or she interacts with. Is this technology in search of use or a solution to a need? I’d suggest that we’re sorting through a bit of both, but in the end, we’re at the beginning of a trending shift change in behavior.

Many of us seek openness from companies and public facing people relying traditionally on some intermediary press/media function. Times are changing as transparency takes hold, and people have increasingly gotten ahead of media scrutiny… and people around them are ready to consume these options. Soon, we’ll all be intrigued in having direct access to anyone (we may not always take advantage of the option, but like a 3rd row of seats in a SUV, we’ll take it). Company CEO’s and high profile employees are pushing their messages externally via video and blogging. They don’t have to, increasingly they want to.

Backlash can be anticipated for those that want to be black holes within these new information transmission platforms. Identity anonymizer services can allow the opposite option: not being transparent.

What will this lead to? We’ve talked between us BSM guys that we’re our own brands, and maybe having our own domains, our own servers and our own media developer tools that allows us to deliver our own messages for our companies, for our families and with our colleagues.

Transparency has yet to go from early adopter to mass consumption in many of our lives, mostly because the steps to be open takes writing blogs in code and working to get movies and pictures onto platforms to deliver them seamlessly. As those tools move into our work and home lives, more and more people will be asking why you’re not easy to find, approach and see what you’re up to.