“Where you at?”

Do you remember those commercials from Boost mobile where they made rappers and their friends into bubble-people to represent the dots that show where your friends are on a Boost phone?
It strikes me that I haven’t seen any ads like that in a while; not just the creepy bubble-people, but ads touting the ability to ‘find your friends’. With how frequently people post their location on tools like Twitter or Facebook, I still don’t see much adoption for GPS location pin pointing your location.
I think it may have something to do with the fact that people want to choose when to tell others where they’re at – and when that’s the case, there isn’t ENOUGH sharing to make those GPS location tools worthwhile. I’m not rushing to check where the three or four people I know using Google Latitude are at. There’s just not enough critical mass. Tools like Dodgeball, Google Latitude, Brightkite, Loopt and many others have been available for some time now. Maybe we’ve found a limit to what people will share? Or maybe this is just an idea who’s time hasn’t yet come.

Social Media Packaging?

It surfaced this week that Pepsi’s got a new package design for Pepsi Raw for the product stocked in the UK (originally covered by Brand Republic, also source of the picture.) I saw a discussion started on LinkedIn about this topic, and it sparked something in my mind…

Pic from Brand Republic via Mashable (whew!)

The original commenter wondered (as Mashable does, too) if this is jumping the shark and if such a thing could last.

I’m going to argue that it won’t last WITH A SINGLE OUTLET like Twitter. However, more and more, brands are claiming consistent ID’s across social networks and with tools like OpenID it will become easier to have a single identity across networks.

All this comes together to prove the perfect storm for brand to include their social media identity on their packaging. And why not? Twitter is increasingly becoming a tool for customer service, brands like Skittles are replacing their homepages with crowd-sourced content from across the social web, and so on. Why shouldn’t I as a consumer be able to expect to look up a brand using their published ID any place and be able to contact them easily using my choice of tool and at my own time and pace? Why should I have to call a published 800-number and sit on the line? I’d by far prefer to publish my question/concern to an asynchronous tool and get better customer service, too.

As a business person, it makes sense for me, too. If I direct everyone to their selected way of reaching me, I could then offer click-to-call technology for those who want to use the phone (between the mobile web and VoIP tools, this is easy to do TODAY and isn’t a shot for the future, though I think it will increase in popularity) and asynchronous communication via IM, microblog or social media site. The asynchronous communication takes some of the pressure off a call center and is easy and efficient to use (as we’ve already seen with companies like Comcast and others).

The social web is not just changing our online world – be ready to see it start to impact your packaging, too!