your brand is my friend

I was talking yesterday with my friend Sasha about branding & website design. Sasha, who is a partner in a well-known digital marketing agency, complained that if looked from a slight distance, all the sites they created for their very different clients looked the same to him. Truth is, they were exceptionally well designed, both visually and in terms of interactions, and had seamless navigation and were SEO-ed. But, the question was, where the clients' brand had gone? Figuring out digital branding is a gruesome task. Mostly because the conversation gravitates around 2 areas: brands using or not using social networks (hence the title of this post, as an anti-thesis of Alan Wolk's idea that "your brand is not my friend") or mindless ads & even more mindless branded destinations like minisites, videogames, viral videos, and, of course, in the category of its own & impossible to surpass (in budget, time invested, and lack of ROI) Coke Happiness Factory. I think that the truth is in between. And by in-between I don't mean some crazy social networks-widget combo (people already tried that. doesn't work). I mean designing interactions that are not only useful & usable, but that are, well, human. Adrian Chen talked about something similar, but his analysis focuses on how "social" interactions differ from UX and ID. I, on the other hand, think all IDs should be human. This mostly means that interactions are designed as gestures and rituals between people (open-ended, prone to breakdowns, interactive, funny, playful, accidental, confusing, surprising, but at the end of the day, mostly seamless). And this is where the brand-as-your-friend interaction talk comes in. Again, I am not talking about "brands managing relations" in social networks, I am talking about interaction design. Interaction design is all about people: how people connect with others through products and services and information they use. All of it right there on the brand's site. Isn't that where the real engagement resides (in keeping the interaction going)? Adopting this approach probably means studying how people interact with each other, their rituals and gestures, and super-imposing these insights on the already-streamlined standard interaction design. Sure thing, sites need to be clean and easy to navigate, but they also need to be messy enough to be human. This is where any relationship (brand relationship included) starts. This is possible even with the sites that are meant to be super-functional, like banking or online flight booking sites or shopping. They can be functional as if we are dealing with a real person and not with an interactive interface. Also, success in these interactions is a much more long-term project: failures are temporary (see the image above), and the most important thing is to build a (brand) relationship. Why do only social networks care about this kind of stuff today? And why do brands think that they exclusively need to go to social networks in order to be (or not) someone's friend? The friendship can start right there on the brand's site.