With all the social media, engagement, crowdsourcing, transmedia, and UGC sentiment flying around lately, sometimes we forget that people don’t want to have to do anything with our brands or ads. It reminds me of Your Brand Is Not My Friend but to a higher degree. Sometimes a good value prop is all we really need.

This (fictional?) situation, along with a lot of what is being pushed lately, strikes me as one of those “if you have to ask, you’ll never know” scenarios, in that if you’re trying to manufacture brand interaction, you’ll never get it. It shouldn’t be our job to beg, borrow, and steal people’s attention and time. Instead we should focus on creating an environment that encourages, facilitates, and highlights that kind of engagement.

Kid build a room full of furniture out of your FedEx boxes? Send him more and see what he can do. Start a contest and buy actual furniture for whoever builds the best FedEx box furniture.

Bros Icing Bros? Let them run with it but start a campaign encouraging people to be Brosponsible ™.

You get the idea. Now leave me alone…for some reason, all I can think about it sausages…

The entire “People Are Talking” idea certainly makes sense for bigger brands. Sure people are talking about Coca-Cola, and Nike, and Ford, but what about Every Man Jack? What about Optimum Nutrition? They’re both (very good) national brands, but there isn’t a lot of online chatter around either.

What about your brand? How many people are talking about you?

My point is this: Unless you’re a small Mom & Pop operation (and sometimes even then), people are probably talking about you. However, unless you’re a bigger brand, odds are they aren’t saying that much.

In the case that you’re not Microsoft, you probably don’t need a team dedicated to “listening” on the internet, you probably don’t need Radian6 (but if you’re big enough, they’re awesome). Empowering your employees to take pride in their brand and respond online should be enough.

And hey, if you’re not happy with the quiet? Just take some advice from Paul Isakson.

Length shows intelligence and depth.

Make sure you use a little of both.

If you can’t read the quote, it’s an Irish proverb that says “When we count our blessings, we count you twice.” Pretty nice stuff. And the thing is, how hard was that?

It’s a little refreshing to see, in the middle of these tough times, a bank that cares about its customers. It’s easy to say “Hey guess what? It’s customer appreciation month! We appreciate you!” and then leave it at that. In fact, at my last job during “Employee Appreciation Month” they laid off 1/5 of the company.

But that little card was like a fortune cookie style complement. And you know what? It felt good.

Well played Wachovia.

10/29 Update: I’d like to learn a little more about this idea. So if someone from Wachovia is reading this, let’s talk!

So while there’s a lot of talk about the “net-generation” and “digital natives”, at the end of the day, the “older” crowd is still just as important. The beauty of the internet is that it’s the great equalizer. Any random person with a blog can become as important/relevant as anyone on CNN. It also means that any 47 year-old soccer mom could be the most important person in your blogger outreach.

The moral of the story is: We can’t afford to leave anyone out.

The case for “Heck yes, it is”

-You can have profiles
Xbox Live requires you to have a unique handle, or GamerTag (mine is Situation3), to exist on their network. With this profile you can choose an avatar, and edit your name, location, and motto (which is essentially useless). Pretty soon however, Xbox Live will be getting a major overhaul in this department, adding in avatars which fall in between something from Second Life and the Wii’s Mii character. It’ll be interesting to see how Microsoft utilizes the new functionality brought about by these changes to focus on the more “social” element of XBL.

-You can have friends
Just like with other major social networks (MySpace, Facebook, etc.) you can build and maintain a list of friends on Xbox Live. The process is fairly easy, all it requires is that you type in the name of the person you’d like to friend. You can even attach a text or audio message with your friend request, which is a great feature. Once you’re on their “friends” list, you can see when they’re online and which games they’re playing, join games that they’re in, send them messages, voice chat, and even look through their list of friends for other people you might know.

-You can keep in touch with people
Actually, you don’t have to play games over XBL. Once signed on, through the dashboard you can voice or text chat with your friends or send audio or video messages (if you have the camera). Obviously XBL is a gaming platform first, but with a worldwide member base, it might be cheaper to chat with your friends in London or Dubai for a couple hours via XBL than it is to call them over the phone.

The case for “Absolutely not!”

-You have to buy specific hardware
Unlike most social networks, you need to buy a few things to have access to Xbox Live. First off, obviously you need an Xbox 360. At $199 for the basic Arcade model, it’s cheaper than most computers, but even given that, it still doesn’t come close to the functionality of a simple PC.

-You have to buy a subscription
This is a deal breaker for a lot of people. In addition to buying the Xbox 360, you have to also purchase a membership to Xbox Live. If you go for the whole year up front, which runs about $50, it comes to a little over $4 a month. While this may be less than almost everything on the menu at Starbucks, it’s still more than most other major networks (which are free).

-All you can do is talk and play video games!
When it all boils down, this is totally true. Some will say that without the ability to share files or pictures, add aps, set up groups and group pages, etc. that Xbox Live falls short of the functionality that defines a social network today.

My Decision – Yes it is.

When you look at the arguments, the biggest factors against XBL being a social network is the higher barriers to entry when compared to traditional social networks. While I think this is certainly a differentiator and a worthy argument, I don’t think it’s a enough to discount XBL completely.

What say you?

Create your own here.

First off, if you haven’t seen Paul Isakson’s The Future of Advertising + Marketing, then do it. Now.

A recent post from Paul talks about how a former CD at Urban Outfitters is moving to Anomaly. The best stuff is towards the end when he says “As more and more advertising gets ignored, agencies have got to come up with better, more meaningful ways to help their clients reach and connect with people.” and then wraps it up with “Maybe the title of the post should have been, “The Future of Advertising Is More Than Communications.”

And speaking of communications, the Conversation Agent, Valeria Maltoni had a great post about RSS, Email, and the whole push vs. pull argument. She talks about how, “It is so much better when you have people sign up voluntarily, when they choose to pull your content and give you permission to occupy a space in their reader and day.”

Both are great ideas. Here’s where things get interesting:

In the middle.

If the future of advertising and marketing is more than communications, and the next step in communications is based on “pull”, then the future is a place where more than just communication is “pulled”. This could be design, production, interaction, delivery, or any other part of the process. All on demand.

How would things change if we could “pull” something like design, and get something how we wanted it, when we wanted it?

So while the neurons are still firing, enjoy this great talk about mobile phones from Jan Chipchase a researcher at Nokia (and if you like Nokia check out their unbelievable Morph Concept)

If viewing in a reader, hit the link for video. It’s worth it.

Jan brings up a lot of great points in this talk. The last 5 minutes are especially insightful. Everyone can benefit from the lessons he’s learned in his years studying people and the way they interact with their environment.

5:15 – …the point of reflection, it’s that moment when you’re walking out of a space, and you turn around and quite often you tap your pockets..”
I’m sure all of us do this, I certainly do. In almost a ritualistic way I tap my right pocket, left pocket, back pocket (keys, phone, wallet) every time on my way out the door. It’s such a simple act, but it’s funny to think of it as almost a universal human trait.

6:05 – “The absolute 100% guaranteed way to never forget anything ever…is to have nothing to remember.”
A great quote.

11:18 – “…and it’s all about the social network, and the knowledge floating around.”
Common knowledge is important, but the application, as with the people that actually fix the mobile phones, is what makes the difference. Great knowledge without application is not great.

14:30 – “And actually the benchmark for a big idea is changing. If you want a big idea, you have to embrace everyone on the planet.”
If you’re going to innovate, to be future ready, you have to go outside your comfort zone. No longer are ideas only locally relevant.