I was eavesdropping on a fascinating conversation last week with some incredibly smart media makers, including Julien Smith, Chris Brogan, Hugh McGuire and Mitch Joel.

[Pause now to go and subscribe to Mitch's podcast and other brilliances over at Six Pixels of Separation. I'll wait.]

They were discussing the future of media and how, in particular, print publication and consumption of the written word is evolving in the face of social communication. Each of them was drawing on examples from their own experience about why they felt reading, writing, and publishing was changing, and how. Do listen to the episode; some amazing insights in there.

At the end of the show, Mitch put a challenge to the crew: stop talking in terms of “I” and start looking at things outside personal perspective. There’s interesting implications in that challenge.

Personal Perspective
That’s what we have to draw from. I can only make statements and observations about things from my perspective because, well, that’s the one I have.

I can *speculate* about what it might be like to look at something from a different point of view. But I’m not sure there’s a way to completely remove the personal lens. True objectivity, by the very nature of human intelligence, is impossible.

You can do everything possible to remove or downplay bias itself, but the fact is that every observation comes from a distinct and singular point of view, regardless of how well we attempt to level that difference. You can only consider what the view might look like through someone else’s eyes. You can never experience it for yourself.

The Value in Shifting Viewpoints
What I realized is that Mitch hit on something that’s been nagging at me for years in terms of the way we were taught to communicate as brands.

We characterize our brands in the terms in which we’d like others to see us. We craft a vision, or an idealized perspective of our brand, hoping that others might be influenced or intrigued by that viewpoint. Maybe see things our way. We even give them things like taglines, or brand attributes, or magic marketing terms.

But social communication and the power that companies now hold to capture the conversations around their brands changes all of that. Brands aren’t viewed from a singular viewpoint (they really never have been), and now that brand is a composite of everything. As David Alston is fond of saying, a brand is now the sum of *all* of the conversations that take place around it. Branding isn’t myopic any longer. And that multi-faceted perspective is searchable, shareable, and visible to the world at large.

So while I still think you can’t necessarily completely immerse yourself in someone else’s perspective, there are massive amounts of information out there today that allow you to at least *observe* and absorb that perspective, in the words of the people that impact and drive your brand.

Another reason listening is so important: hearing how the community is describing you, in their own unedited words, so you can learn from their perspective. As a brand, it’s the ultimate evolution from looking from the inside out, to seeing things from the outside in. Putting the illustration of your brand in the hands of the people that know it best: the people that interact with it every day. What insights that can give.

What say you?

Image credit: S.Su