Let the users do the talking…if you dare!

Is aggregating your product’s lifestream the new brand website? Is Twitter the new black?

Witness Windows 7’s “what people are saying” social media mashup. Yep, someone’s even chronicling the OS’s debut on Flickr.You can’t get more wisdom-of-the-crowdsy, peer-influenced, he-said-she-said-recommendy than just aggregating your product’s lifestream & letting the users do the talking. What’s going to become of copywriters?

Of course Skittles kinda bombed with this approach last year when it was discovered that given the opportunity to mess with an intrusive brand, Twitterers will gladly take your hash tag on a terrifying unauthorized branding adventure. It helps to have a long awaited product like Windows 7 to get users excited, rather than having them focus on the execution as in the Skittles experiment.

Way to go, Microsoft – this is pretty darn useful! Blog posts, reviews, quick 140-char impressions. Having just got my latest Dell Vostro in July, I think I’m eligible for the free Windows 7 upgrade, and all this chatter is actually serving to get me excited!

Update: I’ve just learned the term for “aggregating your brand’s lifestream”: storystreaming. As in, telling your brand’s story by pulling in real time testimonials from the cloud.