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As of today, it’s official: Charlie Trotter is our new developesigner.

We’ve highlighted Charlie’s skills before and our charms apparently worked. We encouraged anyone in need of design to hire him, but because he’s ours now you’ll have to go through us.

He’ll be writing here and on Open Source CU, and he played an integral role in designing NAPUS FCU’s new site (which launched on Friday) and in designing for the upcoming launch of NIHFCU’s new site.

Today on the train, this little kid hopped on with his mom. He never stopped looking around, drinking everything in. The adults surrounding him stared straight ahead, focused on their newspapers, or worked in other ways to avoid making eye contact with anyone else. Meanwhile, he stared people down without shame, shouted “Hi!” to strangers, and asked me “what’s that?” when I pulled out my iPod.

I once heard someone say something like, “As you grow older, your experiences whittle you down to a finer and finer point, until you become so specific that it becomes difficult to relate to anyone else.”

The logic that drives that mindset says that experiences provide more and more answers and understanding as they happen. But that’s not true. Experiences create perspective, yes, but not answers.

Staying child-like in observation means that your experiences unveil more questions than answers, as they should. In this mindset, the more experience you have and the older you become, the more fresh, wide-eyed curiosity will drive your life, your joy, and your ambitions.

What some people call “the ideation process” or “brainstorming” or “strategic planning” our brilliant friend Cam calls “playing.” I love that.

Blogging, podcasting, and this whole drive to deliver “quality relevant content” can make me feel like I need to be delivering answers and understanding constantly…like a pizza guy delivers pizza.

Honestly, I just have a lot more questions than answers.

Media consumption and interaction are no longer linear. What in the world does that mean? I’ll tell you -

With the accessibility of on-demand media, it means that from the content-producer perspective, time is no longer a huge factor in consumption. To use our own Matt Dean as an example, it means that he doesn’t watch The Office on TV at 7:30 on Thursdays. He downloads it through iTunes and watches it whenever he pleases.

Meanwhile, consumers themselves are creating distribution channels through blogs, podcasts, bittorrent networks, text messages, YouTube, water-cooler conversations, the effects of links on search engine results, and a slew of other things I haven’t thought of. The majority of this consumer generated content is on-demand too.

Because of this, communications do not move along a specified path, they bounce around willy-nilly. Marketers, this is especially important to you because you can no longer think in terms of top-down distribution for your marketing. When you speak, it’s important to understand (and capitalize on) the channels that message will fly through.

We’ll call this “sideways marketing,” and it involves viewing and reaching consumers by recognizing their distribution channels, and making yourself accessible and deliverable through those.

A few examples

Campbell-Ewald’s Chief Contact Officer (cool title) Ed Dilworth (less cool name) gave a session at ad:tech entitled “Navigating the Current of Participatory Communication” that broke down how his firm was flipping clients on their sides.

For their clients, it means everything from setting up corporate blogs to asking consumers to create an ‘07 Super Bowl spot to setting up farmer’s markets throughout the U.S.

Separately, Jay-Z and Coca-Cola distributed a live performance video, embedded with promotions for Coke, through illegal file-sharing networks. Jay-Z’s stereotypically-named lawyer, Mike Guido, said this about the strategy:

“The concept here is making the peer-to-peer networks work for us. While peer-to-peer users are stealing the intellectual property, they are also the active music audience…this technology allows us to market back to them.”

On your own site

Because many search results point directly to internal site pages, the homepage is less significant. People are gaining sideways entry into your site, and your design should reflect this. Embrace this by:

• Tracking the search results that are pointing people to your site using tools like Mint.
• Tracking which internal pages are receiving the most traffic.
• Making sure your internal pages have calls to action and links that cross pollinate the rest of the site.
• Design a clear information architecture that is easily navigable even in the deepest reaches of your site.

Listen

Step one in all of this is to listen to and understand your consumer. How else can you understand how they’re communicating, where they’re creating content, and how they’re accessing and redistributing yours? Once you understand this, it’s simply a matter of working with them.

This week I’m in New York attending ad:tech, an interactive and digital advertising conference. After the first day, my head is spinning with new ideas and inspiration.

Today I heard some of the most respected people in the industry discuss consumer generated media, the future of search, dynamic vs. static campaigns, the valuation of engagement, podcast production, the cultural and market effects of mobile media, and on and on.

Not to mention – I got to spend a few minutes talking with Ze Frank, host of “the show,” after he participated in the CGM panel discussion. Anyone who knows me knows how much I respect and love that guy…it was an exciting moment for me.

On a totally different level of satisfaction, two other celebrities I saw were The Question Mark Guy and Elmo. I’ve posted a few photos after the jump.

Huffington Post Founding Partner Jonah Peretti and Ze Frank:

The Question Mark Guy, Matthew Lesko:

Me, Chad, and Elmo:

I plan on going deeper on many of the topics covered after I come home and have some time to digest. But for now, I’m about to fall asleep while I type, and tomorrow is another day of more special goodness. Stay tuned, this is exciting stuff.