Brands play an important role in helping us to communicate our tribal position and social status. Not only as a status quo but also as part of our way. It's a natural and consistent way to show ones roots, status and desires for the projection of our own image.
Brands that provide digital assets to the members of their tribes (or friends, old-speak: consumers), should embrace the opportunity to mine on the data, social networking can lever.
Entering the space of social networks by providing tools, assets and content to the community is not reserved to the most popular and well-known brands. The long tail has plenty of space, a multitude of brand enthusiastic users out there. A small nod of respect and acceptance from the brand is sufficient to engage them and gain respect, a community and more content a budget restrained campaign could ever buy.
In the digital currency, this value is expressed in google-hits.
With providing key elements of a brand identity to their friends, for sharing an image, logo, a video clip, a sound snippet, a flash game or a mp3 file, a huge amount of valuable data pops up and tells the brand manager a lot about the brands network, trends and the social position..
Every access, every click, every pageview on these assets generates valuable referrer-information, cookie-metadata or special keys in a url path that can be measured, traced, extrapolated.
So a brand can identify their most valuable evangelists and ascend their status in the community with access to exclusive information, gadgets or special treatment. This process will feed itself, everybody wins and the brand claims important territory in the wild west of social networks.