Building Social Objects into Objects

Just found this cool new cycling product. Basically it’s a hybrid electric motor for your bike that is fully contained in your rear wheel and controlled by your phone. It generates energy when you hit the brakes and gives it back when you step on the pedals. For those of us who are cycling enthusiasts that’s cool enough on it’s own, but this product has more.

The Copenhagen Wheel also logs your mileage, power output, calories burned, miles traveled and maps your rides. It pushes that information to your smartphone and lets you share it socially to compare your stats to others, track fitness or training goals and interact with and around the data. For those of us who are also data geeks, that’s pretty sweet. For environment geeks it also logs atmospheric contaminant and traffic congestion data and reports it to the community site for the benefit of everyone, even those who never ride a bike.

Brands need to create social objects

Web 2.0 was generally a rise of social web functions that allowed us, the users, to self organize and interact around social objects that had been around for decades.

As inventors create physical products in the web 3.0 semantic world, interactivity, connectivity and social objects need to be engineered into products, not spontaneously found and developed by communities, or by crafty marketers after products become popular.

John Baichtal of Make Magazine, calls this, “a giddy, improbable project by the MIT Senseable City Lab.” However, from the perspective of interactive marketing, the depth of social objects represented by the Copenhagen Wheel is far from giddy.

Social Products

This model has already proven to be highly probable and profitable. The Nike+ system has accomplished this quite well by merging the functionality of shoes, mobile devices and social networks. “By combining a dead-simple way to amass data with tools to use and share it,” writes Mark McClusky in Wired Magazine, “Nike has attracted the largest community of runners ever assembled—more than 1.2 million runners who have collectively tracked more than 130 million miles and burned more than 13 billion calories.”

GPS device maker Garmin has also begun to capitalize on the social objects created by their products with Garmin Connect. This site lets users track their activities, store the data online and post their adventures to Facebook. You don’t need a GPS to ride, run or hike, but for many of us having the data and being able to interact with your experience in multiple ways after the fact is now an integral component to outdoor activities.

What this means is that interactive marketing and social media strategy are becoming part of the product development process in addition to long term marketing strategy. The social object potential of a product will become as important to a product’s success as the strength of the screws that hold it together.