There is a need on the Internet for a new service. There is a crucial element of business and social networking online that is currently not being met. This service would be useful on everything from IM to forums and especially networking and micro-blogging services. With a little ingenuity and a bit of effort this space can be quickly conquered as a profitable business: individualized branding services based around the creation, storage and delivery of personalized avatars.
I first became interested in this topic years ago when I was participating in a mountain biking forum that permitted photos to be uploaded. The idea is quite elegant; provide a graphical mechanism to brand posts so that users could easily identify quality posts or improve comprehension on discussions by more correctly tracking the participants. It follows through into micro-blogging like twitter to allow a reader to identify in a split second if the tweet is something that they should read immediately. Yahoo! went a different direction and provided a set of customizable cartoons for their environment. This permitted future advertising avenues, but must outlets are allowing user uploaded content.
My early efforts at creating my own brand were poor. I have enough graphical tools knowledge to be very disappointed in the quality of my own work. And beyond simply the appearance of the graphic, there are other details that should be addressed about the overall branding strategy. For example, I might want my business facing brand to carry over to a technical discussion forum but not to a forum focused on political discussion. Once I realized my own limitations I reached out wildly into the community for a solution, this was my Tweet;
Thinking about a new microblog picture. Any creative tech photographers in Carlsbad or San Diego? 10:41 AM Aug 12th from web
And the response:
wolfpaulus Creative Tech. Photo in NorthCounty: http://photos.wolfpaulus.com/ http://www.flickr.com/photo… 11:29 AM Aug 12th
As an aside here; I actually had been looking at Mr. Paulus’ profile and work when I sent the tweet. I rudely never followed up, primarily because I was looking for more than a simple photographic representation, I was looking for a whole personal branding campaign.
So let’s look at what this new service would entail:
First, it would provide simple free service for uploading, editing and serving of avatars for Internet use. Users would be asked to crop images for different geometries.
Second, it would provide a mechanism for third party sites to get access to deliver this image. Specifically, the consumer of the image (e.g Twitter) could select a form factor and resolution of the image and a link to that image would be provided in return. This link would only work from the referrer that initiated the request and the request would require authentication of the avatar account holder. These precautions would provide a slight speed bump on the road to brand hijacking.
Finally, it would provide convenient tools for small changes to the avatars. For example, there seems to be a significant proliferation of Santa hats on Twitter lately. I would assume that we would see a similar trend toward Oxen around the second new moon following the Winter Solstice. Frames, badges or even personal decorations could be added to an image and applied for certain date ranges or to specific consumers.
Premium accounts would permit a much broader range of content, banners, animations and links. They would permit multiple simultaneous branding efforts via the same account. And some measure of brand effectiveness through surveys. Finally a pay for brand service would use a profile to build an avatar that suited the needs of the account holder. This service could do everything from simple touch ups to a digital photo to a full custom art avatar.