If we look back at the creation of the internet as a medium, we can see that from its inception, there have been specific principles guiding its development. These principles have become more pronounced as the internet has continued to evolve and expand in importance as a communication (and marketing) channel.
In our previous article on the Principles of Web Design we discussed five very important principles. These are:
1) Creating Communities – We Belong
2) Power to the People
3) Give and You Shall Receive
In today’s article we will discuss the final underlying Web Design Principle, Collaboration. I have saved it for last as in some ways it is the least understood and the most intriguing.
Collaboration:
While Creating Communities is about the users of the web coming together in diverse niches of shared interest, Collaboration is about the companies and marketers who are using the internet as a channel in the hopes of reaching and engaging those users.
With the emergence of Web 2.0 and the increasing desire, as we discussed in Power to the People, for users to be a part of the message, marketers are having to learn to let users have a say in creating their brand image. Communication has moved from a one-way model to a two-way model. If that wasn’t enough to freak marketers and company’s out, which it continues to do, on top of that, web users increasingly want convenience when it comes to searching and interacting with the web. This means, for example, that when looking for videos on line, users do not want to have to look all over the place to find them. They want a one-stop shop where all their video needs are met. So, whoever creates the all-in-one best video website will gain a lead on the competition in capturing this audience and their subsequent purchasing power. Fox, ABC, NBC, all of them now have to think about collaborating to create this type of site. The race has already begun, showing that some of the networks are starting to understand this principle and its potential value while others continue to drag their feet.
Collaboration is hard for most marketers to grasp because it is so foreign to all their thinking to date. And, they must weigh the costs of losing brand uniqueness versus the benefits of collaborating with competing brands. Does their brand value diminish and if so, does the value of the collaboration out-weigh these losses? How can you make your brand stand out and at the same time share space with competing brands?
The underlying principle of Collaboration has its origins in the beginning of the computer age. The PBS TV show, Triumph of the Nerds does a great job of documenting the excitement and collaboration of those early days, when everyone shared their discoveries and pooled together to create breakthroughs that benefited everyone. As Jim Warren, the founder of the West Coast Computer Fair put it, "Everybody won."
Some brands are refusing to collaborate at all. Apple’s iPhone comes to mind. They have outright slapped the hands of their customers who dared to install third-party software on their phones. This is a brand that values its brand and guards its reputation to the extreme. They will move towards collaboration kicking and screaming.
On the other side of the spectrum is Google, which continues to, in my book, be purists, using and championing these early established principles of the internet, including collaboration. One of their latest examples is their initiative to compete with Facebook by creating an open source social network called OpenSource. As Mathew Ingram of ReportOnBusiness.com writes in his article Google Aims to Win by Being Open, "it's an attempt by the Web giant to create a kind of platform for social networking - one that would allow users of different networks such as Facebook, MySpace or LinkedIn to move their data from one to the other and to use applications or services that could draw from all of them." and "it's starting to look as though being open may be a more respectable competitive approach than it has been in the past."
Collaboration is not just for large companies with large websites. It applies to every company with a presence online. Every website owner needs to consider how they can incorporate this principle into their web design to benefit the user and give me them a competitive edge. It is a question that will only become more important as this principle’s role grows in importance in the ongoing evolution of the internet.
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