*supercollider

On paper, I should love web 2.0 travel service Dopplr. In reality, I never got in the habit of using it to track and broadcast my travels.

So when I got my personal annual report today, it looked like this:

It has bookended trips to Berlin and Argentina, and then a big old gap in the middle where Vancouver and about twelve trips to Amsterdam should be.

The first thing I thought upon seeing it was “Sweet piece of personalized info-porn. Nice one Dopplr. But I wish I’d entered in all my trips through the year so it would look as cool as it should.”

What I love is that instead of sending me a selfish and spam-like reminder that I haven’t used Dopplr in a while, they’ve created something valuable that both reminds me that it’s a cool service and motivates me to use it this year. How good is that?

And if you did use Dopplr this year, then this is a nice bonus that reinforces why you use it in the first place, and makes it n times more likely you’ll use it again next year, with your 2009 annual report in mind.

That’s a good day’s work right there, but on top of that these personal annual reports are likely to be shared and printed and generally used as social currency by a decent percentage of their audience, and thus spreading the Dopplr gospel on their behalf.

It’s a great example of how using providing value to customers can be the best type of marketing. This does so many things an ad could never do.

I just read Maschmeyer’s latest post analyzing the very interesting and spirited discussion happening around Bruce Nussbaum’s post on Transformation as 2009’s key idea.

Lee concludes his post by talking about a shift that has been brought about by the networked economy:

It’s increasingly becoming a reality that companies no longer make and/or deliver value. They FACILITATE it. This is a huge leap in business models, customer relationships, marketing and the generally accepted concepts there-in.

One of the early and obvious manifestations around this for business can be seen in most of social media best practice cases. The success stories are almost always based around facilitation.

There are lots of different manifestations of this:

• Creating a platform to allow people to make their voice heard and influence the brand
• Giving people a chance to contribute to product design and development
• Allowing people to customize and personalize products
• Connecting like-minds together and supporting their goals
• Providing exposure and promotion
• Providing unique content and tools to energize and enable creators

It’s a wholly different type of marketing, and it’s not news to anybody who’s read marketing news over the last few years. But despite all the talk and hype and early experimentation, it definitely feels like we’re still at the tip of the iceberg as to what’s really possible.

As if to punctuate that point, the next article I read in my RSS stream was from Ed Cotton at Influx Insights, who points us to Landshare.

Landshare is a web-based service that connects people who want to grow their own food with people who have land to grow it on. It’s a simple but powerful idea that is made for our times, the best kind of idea.

I’ll echo Ed’s words here: “It’s a great example of a big idea that a brand or agency could have got behind and created. Instead of mere talk, this is all about action and change that could make a difference.”

And he’s right. For all the talk about branded utilities and social media and new ways of marketing, there’s still precious few success stories about how companies have used the revolution in communications and in networks to truly help create value for their consumers.

But the point is we’re trying, we’re knocking on the door. And it feels to me like 2009 could be the break out year where it all comes together and we see some real breakthroughs, where marketing starts to clearly take a new, more positive role in creating value for brands and people alike.

Although many companies will simply focus on sales to stay alive, some will have the luxury and foresight to look at how to take advantage of the unprecedented change our networked world has brought to how people interact with each other and build on that to transform the nature of their category entirely.

As the adage goes, “in chaos lies opportunity”.