As part of a back and forth thread on the Power of Brands with John Hagel, Chris Anderson has written a compelling post where he espouses that in the information age, brands will be associated with people and not products (see Brands: Think people, not products AND Brands: Response). Specific to this assertion, he goes into some detail on what he sees as the three types of Long Tail lines of business -- Filters, Aggregators and Producers.
Three comments come to mind here. One is that in thinking about brand creation and propagation, Anderson's thesis has a "kissing cousin" in Malcolm Gladwell's 'The Tipping Point,' which talks about the inter-connects between Mavens, Connectors and Salesmen in launching new ideas, trends and products in the marketplace.
Two, when people talk about "new" social searching mechanisms, it seems that they forget that several years back, collaborative filtering was all the rage as an algorithmic means of linking the product recommendations of liked minded individuals to one another. Amazon has certainly embraced the model by adding capabilities like "People who bought this CD, also bought this one."
One wonders, though, if this isn't the logical successor to the raw "popularity" search model popularized by Google's Page Rank. If consumers in the blogosphere could more easily rate the posts, books, movies and music they encounter in terms of "more like this" and "less like this" you would have the underpinnings of a very powerful Long Tail-oriented brand amplifier. The structure is clear, collaborative filtering has been around for a decade and you have a large enough community base for the results to be meaningful. Plus, I think this reconciles some of the issues Hagel raises about why he trusts the recommendations of his local wine shop who knows his taste more than the Robert Parker guide.
A final comment is that what this all looks like from a UI, usability and workflow perspective has been well contemplated by others including Mark Pincus of Tribe Networks in an excellent post The People Web and myself at a past consumer information management company that I did called Verdada (see user profile UI below).
What's your take? Is this just a case of people who've already drunk the Kool-Ade working themselves into a frenzy? Or an inevitable trend that will change the face of customer marketing?
