Remember the Borg?  It was a race on Star Trek that assimilated worlds into a collective intelligence to conquer the universe.  It used the thoughts of billions to outsmart the thoughts of millions.  They collaborated throught telepathy.  Well, substitute digitally for telepathy and you can start to wrap your brain around the collective intelligence of the Net Generation.

The Net Generation lives in a world where it can collaborate with its members spontaneously.  Want to know about life at a university, find a FaceBook page on the university.  Go to Youtube.  Look for student produced videos.

Insert any product that the Net Generation is interested in and you’ll find a collective intelligence about that product.  You’ll find ideas to make the product better.  And you’ll find members feeding off one another to brainstorm and develop better products.

If two heads are better than one, are two million heads better?  Maybe when it comes to creativity.  If you believe one creative thought leads to another, potentially better creative thought than maybe two million brains working on a problems is better than two.  Regardless, marketers can use this drive to collaborate to their advantage.

We’re doing market research using social networking sites as a platform to involve respondents and it’s working very well.  The involvement of our respondents is deeper than typical focus groups, we’re not bound by a 90 minute time frame and we don’t have to sit behind a mirror eating Peanut M&Ms.  We’re exploring brand identities, testing strategies and learning better ways to engage this audience.

If you’re selling to the Digital Borg, otherwise known as the net generation, they will gladly help you improve your product, communications or service delivery.  All you have to do is tap into the collective intelligence.  You may not immediately know what they’re thinking, but you can beam yourself in digitally.  But remember, Captain Picard always won.

Live long and prosper.

Remember “Bait and Switch?”  An advertiser lures you in with a fantastic price only to tell you they are out of that particular item but they have something much more expensive that would fit your bill.  That hacked everybody off to the point that it’s a pretty rare occurrence today.  If a marketer does that today, they get skewered by ratings and social networks.  Pretty painful penance.

The bar for business integrity gets higher still when marketing to the Net Generation.  Not only do they expect more, they know how to complain by attacking the business where it hurts…in the cash register.

On the same hand, have integrity firmly on display in your day-to-day dealings, and you could create a customer for life…even an evangelist.

As you think about touting your brand, make sure you live your promise.  As you think about running your business, make sure you do it as green as possible.  Do what you say you will do and put the customer first and you’ll have loyal Net Geners as customers.    Pretty simple.