The importance of a brand to stand for something more than its product or service is almost mandatory these days. Many think that this is a relatively new concept to stand for something outside of what you sell but it’s not.

There’s this mentality in marketing whether traditional or social that as long as things are moving or action is being created then that’s success. Too often we mistake moving bricks for building something. I had this conversation with a friend and how some people are so satisfied moving bricks. They like the notion that they are doing something and if questioned about their involvement they can always say they’ve been doing the hard work of moving bricks.

It’s been said that with age comes maturity, guessing by a few of my friends though you might think different. When the email newsletter was but a teenager struggling to find it’s place amongst business it would often have outburst of unruly behavior. Much is the same with social media design. How can we take the lessons email learned about design and apply them to social media?

Lately it seems as if the market for social media 101 and 102 have hit critical mass, unfortunately I think it’s just beginning to grow. Everyone will get into the business of telling you how to leverage, game, manipulate, and pendulate wants against needs. The more we become a “friending” society the more we need to be reminded that we are still human. Yes, there are ways to help nudge or further expose a desire into a “friending” action but the incessant documentation and rules for social media needs to find a plateau. This isn’t to say that those who are creating materials for those just becoming acquainted with social media are wasting their time or creating useless chatter amongst the internet. It does seem, however, that we are wanting to abandon our humanity for something more enticing. This happened with the advent of email and email newsletter campaigns, still heavily used but often tossed to the side for more social fields, email has been through this and maybe we should learn some lessons.

When I was fourteen I started attending computer classes at my local community college, one of the basic theories was whether computers would ever become self-aware. This fascinated me, at that time I was thinking that all of the sci-fi books I’ve read could possibly come true. In hindsight, that would have also meant the enslavement or extinction of the human race but when you’re fourteen that isn’t on your mind. As we began to talk about every element of what makes us human versus mechanical elements the sense of hearing was discussed. The professor began to talk about how as humans we have the ability to hear everything but can essentially tune out what is not relevant to us at the current moment. Computers have a much more difficult time to distinguish which sounds are relevant and then to eliminate the irrelevant sounds from current processing. This has always fascinated me, we innately understand what to do and how to do it. This got me thinking about the social web, of course, we are all listening to who’s talking about our brands or keyword interests but that still creates a lot of noise.