Today’s wiki is tomorrow’s brand
Techdirt points out that Google Maps is increasingly behaving like a wiki, allowing users to edit and annotate map information to provide more local relevance. This strategy may allow Google to play a greater role in users’ lives, creating platforms of brand innovation and brand trust that can carry over to other Google applications and services.
A series of Google videos explains how this works.
The wiki context is brand context
A wiki is no substitute for a complete brand structure and strategy, but it may be the dominant brand context going forward. Framing the brand as a wiki makes sense, because a brand is a collaboration in context and in value between a company and its customers. It’s a shared work in progress rather than an icon imposed from above. In a wiki, customer’s don’t just “buy in.” They pitch in to co-create value that the brand alone could not produce.
A wiki context also helps ground the brand in the real world of customers. A wiki keeps brands honest, sparing them the death spiral that can occur when a brand falls prey to its own limitations—or fantasies.
Brand principles behind “wiki-like” Google Maps
A map is a context. It can rise to the level of a brand context when it becomes vitally relevant to its users, like a second skin. With its new wiki-like features in Google Maps, perhaps Google understands a few brand principles that traditional brands still struggle to comprehend:
- Your customers are your greatest competitive weapon. Enabling customers to add relevance to Google Maps makes the maps more valuable to users, and potentially makes the information on the maps more valuable to Google advertisers.
- Brands are enablers, not controllers. The more you enable customers to embrace new freedoms and to create new relevance via your brands, the faster your brand can innovate, leaving competitors in the dust. Brands that aim to control or contain customers eventually wall themselves in.
- A great brand aims to put more customer in the product. Opening doors to customers opens customers to new dimensions of you. Some of these may be quite valuable, and quite possibly, new markets.
Some related posts: Techdirt and TechCrunch.
March 26th, 2008 at 12:46 pm
absolutely!
One thing brands need to consider with wikis and wiki-like objects is the need for a good wiki gardener. You don’t want to change comments, but make them more readable and provide richer internal linking. Most people who use wikis do this poorly.
The process of doing this will help you learn from those you partner with by selling goods and services (I hate the term customer).