Confusing the tool implementation with the solution.

I don't know how many times I've come across the situation where people describe their technology problem by stating the solution they've arrived at. "I'll be all set, once I learn to use product X."

It's frustrating because I think by and large, people in my line of work do a perfectly miserable job understanding how to help people get their work done with technology. We get settled in so quickly on what the solution is that is pitched to us, that we never get at what the problem is.

I find this to be never so true as when we talk about social media. People have completely confused the tools with the concept. I blogged a while back about how we'll look on twitter as a fad like CB radio in a couple of years. It's not because it's a bad idea, or because social media doesn't have staying power. Social media has a lot of staying power. It's helping to even out what had been a gender gap on the Internet. It's become easier and simpler than ever to keep a wide network of people up to date with what is happening in your life. But connecting the dots and proclaiming that twitter will change the world is a rather large leap. What will change is the way people communicate and see your brand. It will be dictated by social media. Much the same way it always had before we had mass media. Having an experience that was wildly popular or unpopular with your brand and communicating it with your family and friends has always had a stronger impact than advertising. What's changed hasn't been the underlying human behavior, it's been the ease of which that experience can be communicated, searched, and retold.

The problem we're trying to solve is how can I communicate to the world at large, specifically the people who are interested in what I'm saying, more effectively?

Is that answer twitter? Well, for now, maybe. But there are problems with the underlying architecture. Maybe I want to tweet my location, but only to my family. Or maybe I want to share a picture of the office building, but only to a group of co-workers. These are obvious extensions of the functionality. Things that people discover they want after they've been in the tool for a while. Things you don't know that you're going to need when "You have to get on Twitter!"

I use the metaphor of a sixteen year old wanting a new car. Yes, they can drive the car, and yes they are absolutely certain of what they need in the car. They will vigorously defend the things that they think they need. But by the time they are twenty five, they will have discovered that the things they thought they needed at sixteen were absolutely unimportant.

Social media is another wave in being able to communicate more effectively with the people around us. The technology around it will continue to innovate. It will discover methods to implement status tagging so that you can define your followers into groups of who can see what. It will allow you to define feeds of information that you are interested in being told about, but aren't interested in talking back to.

The problem for Twitter is that Facebook has the groundwork in terms of technology to execute on those sorts of improvements. All that Facebook needs to eat Twitter's lunch is option to expose status feeds to the general public. And if you followed the mistaken release of a new beta flavor of Facebook, you'll see that's something they are getting ready to roll out.

Want to be ahead of your customer's expectations? Start to listen to what the pain points are for them. What are the things you'd wish you could do. If my time in the brand management group taught me anything, it was a new-found respect for the work in discovering the unmet and under met needs of the customer. That's all about asking the right questions, not about shoving a solution at them.