Did story author Valentine Davies have a premonition of Internet transparency and the consultative power of social media? He might as well have. As characterized in Miracle on 34th Street, Santa Claus is the ultimate 21st century brand: an expert adviser displaying not only an intimate knowledge of the customer but an ability to literally speak the customer’s language (the tear-inducing moment without which the film would not have the heart connection it does). The source of the customer solution is immaterial, and Kris Kringle (Edmund Gwenn) even says so:

KRIS
The only important thing is to make the children happy. Who
sells the toy doesn’t make any difference. Don’t you feel that way?

WOMAN CUSTOMER
Who, me? Oh, yeah, sure. Only, I didn’t know Macy’s did.

The use of two real-life retail brands in the picture, Macy’s and Gimbels (it’s rival across the street, closed in 1986), gave studio executives at Twentieth Century Fox a real-life challenge: They had to agree to screen the finished film to both department stores, and if either did not approve, the film would have to be reworked to their specifications, potentially causing cause significant delays and additional expense. Fortunately for the studio, both Macy’s and Gimbels were delighted with the final product.

In Miracle on 34th Street, the spirit of Christmas is evidenced in the way corporate interests are subjugated to the needs of the consumer for the sake of, well, corporate interests. It’s a lesson from which many brands could still benefit, even as the digital marketplace makes customer needs and the advisory role more prevalent and powerful than ever before.

WOMAN CUSTOMER
Pardon me. The guard said to speak to  you. You’re the head of the toy department?

SHELLHAMMER
Yes, madam…

WOMAN CUSTOMER
Listen: I want to congratulate you and Macy’s on this wonderful new stunt you’re
pulling. Imagine, sending people to other stores. I don’t get it. Why, it’s…

SHELLHAMMER
It certainly is…

WOMAN CUSTOMER
You said it. Imagine a big outfit like Macy’s putting the  spirit of Christmas ahead of
the commercial. It’s wonderful. I never done much shopping here before, but from
now on, I’m going to be a regular Macy customer.

SHELLHAMMER
(dumbstruck)
Thank you, madam…

Click the image to view a movie capture of the ad interaction.

Kodak may have been late to the digital game on the product front, but its marketing is clearly seeking a leadership position in digital, spearheaded by its ever-increasing YouTube presence. After a well-publicized launch of its ForMom channel just a month ago, Kodak ups the ante with a mosaic-inspired wrap-up to its True Colors: Video Portrait Challenge contest.

The mosaic idea deserves major props as a smart visual enticement for user interaction (I simply had to try it — the true test), but as so often seems the case, the concept starts to fall apart in the execution. And because users are (properly) invited to comment, what may have seemed like minor compromises in the face of deadlines and budgets become characterized as epic fail through the very social media tools Kodak wants to leverage for brand benevolence.

The most obvious compromise also seems like the most unnecessary: The video clips used in the mosaic — even in the truncated ad banner version — are repeated. It only took a few clicks to discover the same content in two different locations (you can see this in the brief video clip I made of the ad banner interaction). The second compromise is to my mind less egregious, but seemed to be a favorite fail point on the part of the user commentary: that the image of the man which appeared to be formed by the mosaic of video screens was in fact a mock, a ruse; simply an opacity percentage overlay instead of a true photo mosaic like this. Brands need to realize that users like to point out pretense even more than they don’t like to be duped, even by seemingly trivial things.

The big miss for me, though, was the absence of any sharing enablement on the interactive ad banner itself. I still see far too much of this, even on fully-enabled rich media ad units where sharing capability is easy. As a user, I may not have had the time or the inclination to click over to the full campaign page (located within the YouTube site, by the way, at www.youtube.com/kodaktube), but I may well have wanted to show the ad to someone else, or save it for a time when I could explore it further.

Conclusion: Kudos to Kodak for risking backlash on some executional compromises because, in the end, the brand benefits from the courage displayed in engaging user commentary in the first place, over and above any specific negative sentiment. In today’s user-enabled media, the true epic fail is assuming you can do anything to stop negative sentiment other than being a better brand citizen.

In a way, social media and the virtual marketplace are returning us to a time before the advent of the brand itself.

Before the industrial revolution, products and services were associated with people rather than with organizations. The qualities and values brought to the marketplace by individuals — tradesmen, shopkeepers, builders, tavern owners –  were as much personal attributes as they were professional ones. Indeed, businesses were commonly co-located with residences, with the shop on the street and the home above or in back.  The geographical separation from work life was a distinctly modern idea, brought on by the arrival of the factory, and by the growth of business districts that were the habitat of men; women and children were sequestered uptown or in the suburbs. Even the concept of an employee was rooted in the notion of apprenticeship, which implied not the formation of a group identity, but a combination of service and education leading to a single proprietorship. In modern parlance: The individual was the brand.

The industrial revolution altered what had for thousands of years been the human construct for the transaction of business, and what set the foundation for what is now being upended by the social media revolution (it’s no wonder that steampunk culture is so popular with the digital gamechangers). In the late 19th century marketplace, identity became increasingly associated with an idea rather than with a person. At first, this idea was represented by a label, a corporate identity, a recognizable symbol of quality and consistency — the paramount attributes of mass production. Then, with the advent of mass, one-way media, this “label” evolved into a much more comprehensive set of ideas and associations — functional, emotional, and self-expressive. This 20th century notion of The Brand reached its zenith in the 1990s, with reams of books and consulting firms advising businesses on the vast and sometimes esoteric aspects of brand strategy.

Ironically, the promise of today’s social media revolution, with its multidimensional forms of broadcast and connectivity, was already in place in the 1990s (albeit in somewhat rudimentary form) on “solid state” services such as CompuServe and America Online. Similar to today’s social networking platforms, these were closed systems. As such, they could offer many of the collaborative features that the initially flat, open-source environment of the Web could not. The transition to the Web was exciting from the standpoint of access and reach, but it took another decade before the confluence of technology and adoption actually delivered on the early implications.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the digital media revolution is the way in which the empowerment of the individual is changing the very concept of brand as defined so exhaustively at the end of the millennium. In a business context, the access and proximity to individuals facilitated by virtual connectivity is effectively placing people in a position at least commensurate with the once-lauded brand idea. This represents a clear challenge to many of the established principles of branding, particularly and especially around the rigid adherence to representational consistency, one of the earliest and deeply-rooted tenets of brand strategy. There is no better symbolic illustration of this evolution than the vast array of icon permutations for the social networking brands themselves.

And then, of course, there is one other brand that not only embraces the individuation of its identity, but instigates and celebrates it.

The first major difference one encounters is that Yahoo requires a birth date. Now, many people are sensitive about supplying their birth date, not only because of age sensitivity (and Yahoo! provides no advance notice that public display of the information is optional), but because of identity theft and other security concerns. Brands looking to advocate the de-cloaking that encourages legitimate personal and professional socialization online should communicate an understanding of security issues and give people a stronger sense of comfort about personal information use.

If you leave the birth date field blank — or even if you attempt to leave out just the year (as if Yahoo! merely wants to send you an e-card on your birthday) — you are informed, complete with a warning icon and an angry red font, that “your full birthday is required.” As you complete this field, a seemingly reassuring message appears beside the entry claiming, “Knowing your birthday lets Yahoo! provide you with a better experience.” Oh, sure. It’s for my benefit… I’m not even halfway through the registration procedure and I already know that Yahoo! is full of crap. If you’re going to provide such a dubious rationale, at least use it as an inducement to fill out an optional field. Then I might buy it.

Google doesn’t even ask for a birth date. (Of course, Google probably has algorithms in place such that after a short period of activity tracking, they can pinpoint not only my date of birth but the time, the hospital, and the name of the attending nurse.)

But the biggest differences in the sign-up sequence is in the degrees of personalization offered the user in the actual profile section. Although Yahoo! is forced to to accommodate digital behemoths by enabling a user’s twitter feed display, for example, it is readily apparent from what is highlighted that Yahoo! wants to encourage users to update, share, and blog directly from the Yahoo! platform itself. There is no enabling for either WordPress.com or self-hosted WordPress feeds, for example, and — in a miss that seems inexplicable even for Yahoo! — no way to even post simple links to any of your other online locations. As is almost always the case with these kinds of inane decisions, there is an obvious but inelegant workaround: Use the Yahoo! sponsored blogging element to post a link to your real blog. The thing of it is: Transparency exists whether brands acknowledge it or not, and the fact that Yahoo!’s preferences are so obviously prioritized over the user’s preferences is plainly and painfully evident.

Google’s profile set-up is a different animal altogether. It has the feel of an open source platform: options instead of requirements; fewer barriers to completion (Yahoo! has not one but two required password recovery questions, plus a captcha code verification). The display area of the Google profile offers the freedom to post links in a simple and well-organized manner. A series of optional questions  also convey a bit of brand personality (“What is your superpower?”), even as they deliver a clear message that your personality is what is valued. Good stuff.

Which approach to the user is likely to succeed over the long term?

When it comes to what is valued, respected, and trusted online, any missed opportunity for user empowerment is a ding on the brand. Transparency and authenticity are not just about resisting the old-school inclinations for hyperbole or pretense, “keeping it real” also means extending to the user, in the form of functional options, an acknowledgment that their choices are vast and only a click away. Any brand that tries to limit user options for the sake of “protecting the brand” — failing, in other words, to not only recognize but facilitate access to potential competitors — is cutting off its nose to spite its face. Users don’t get angry at these naive tactics so much as they pity them.

And clueless is not a particularly valuable brand attribute.

JDKEMU44HHYG

Certainly part of the historical barrier lay in technology itself: The absence of APIs or similar source-driven update functionality was a high wall. At one time, desktop applications didn’t even have self-prompted version updates (oh, for a return to the user experience of Word 97). Today, persistent connection and constant updating is one of the most powerful features of information technology, and it won’t be long before “disconnected” desktop applications feel segregated from the rest of the world. The lack of collaboration opportunity alone will drive the desktop application into…

The cloud.

Ah, the cloud. The fluffy migration that will undoubtedly be a boon to marketers: constant connection, direct eyeball access, a single click away from engagement. It won’t happen all at once, of course. Adoption — getting people accustomed to the idea of their work product residing somewhere other than in their very own machines — would only be jeopardized by the an initial confrontation with ads. But it will happen. As applications of all kinds, heavy lifting or otherwise, take up residence in the cloud, the advertising opportunities will become irresistible.

For centuries a mark that designated the relationship between quantity and price — 24 pomegranates @ $.12ea — the symbol was appropriated (reportedly from monks in the Middle Ages seeking greater pen-stroke efficiency for “at”) by Ray Tomlinson in 1972 for the purpose of sending individual messages from one computer to another.  Like many of the Internet founders, Tomlinson worked for Bolt Beranek and Newman as an ARPANET contractor, and selected the symbol from a keyboard display. For anyone using Internet standards thereafter, it was simply a matter of designating name-of-the-user@name-of-the-computer.

Employed in this fashion, individual users are associated with a particular location. Even if that location is essentially virtual, there is nevertheless a tether to a particular domain — communication is exchanged between people residing “@” a specific virtual place. Indeed written messages are sent, as they have been for thousands of years, to an address where a person is presumed to be. Now, however, we are starting to see what may someday amount to a paradigm shift.

The use of the @ symbol in front of a name instead of an address — @rpgranger, my own Twitter designation — suddenly removes the address altogether. It doesn’t matter where I am. I no longer have any direct association with a location, virtual or otherwise. I am the destination. Even if the technical aspects of this shift are not as profound (it only requires being inside a closed system, or networked with other closed systems), the symbolic and metaphorical change is unmistakable. It represents an evolution into a world where not only physical but even virtual location is irrelevant, and where domain (and, potentially, brand) association can be marginalized or even eliminated altogether.

The further empowering of the individual in digital media presents both exciting opportunities and unusual new challenges for marketers. On the one hand, sales efforts — especially on the b2b side — can become more direct and personal, leveraging values that have long been identified as critical to complex transactions. On the other hand, the ubiquity of the brand can be easily lost without the corporate associations and controls that have been in place since the advent of mass media.

More than at any other time in history, @ is evolving to mean that which is directed toward an individual rather than toward an address. What may be most intriguing about this progression from a metaphorical standpoint — and a possible balm to brand managers — is not what this new permutation contains but what it’s missing. Where once the there used to be a name in front of the @ symbol, there is now a new and alluring emphasis on the message that goes in blank space in front of it. And we all know what advertisers do with blank spaces.

There are a number of sophisticated thinkers and writers on the vanguard of social media (Olivier Blanchard is one) who argue that what is really happening is a return to a pre-20th century way of doing business that was based much more on direct communication with “the people who are the brand” than on the 20th century media model of one-to-many messaging. Many things have made this possible — everything from the saturation of Internet use itself to the simple but game-changing notion of short-burst communication or micro-blogging (Twitter, Yammer, Socialcast, etc.). Smart companies are empowering their people to have their own individual, professional presence in social media — brand-connected, to be sure, but with a clearly individual profile.

Because social media is all about transparency and authenticity, it should focus on the individual, not the organization as a whole (it is also helpful to have corporate Twitter accounts, blogs, Facebook profiles, etc., but they serve a different purpose).  The idea to establish your people as experts in their areas. Then, by extension, the affiliated corporate brand has expertise. This is not to the exclusion of the effort to brand the corporate idea, or indeed to eliminate larger brand messages — but that is decidedly not the way to look at or use social media tools for individuals.

Think if it as a shift from people being associated with brands to brands being associated with people.

A lot of people have the mistaken impression that what these tools offer in terms of core functionality is new. It’s not. Not even on the Web. The ability to connect, interact, broadcast, respond — communicate — has always been a fundamental component (indeed, a founding principle) of Internet technology.

Two factors have made the difference:

1. The tools are no longer esoteric. Much of what social networking offers is remarkably familiar to anyone who has participated in any of the “forum” structures that have been around since the neolithic days of CompuServe, and which were eventually ported onto the Web to serve the geekdom associated with special interests. “Affectional communities” flourished within these networks, but went largely unnoticed by business because the tools were isolated, various, and highly distributed. This wasn’t the town square, it was the back rooms.

2. Adoption has reached critical mass. The key factor to widespread use was, as always, the confluence of the right tools at the right time. Just as the technology reached a point where it could offer both simplicity and sophistication, the overall cultural adoption of the Internet as an inevitable and fundamental part of personal and professional life had arrived. Geekdom for all.

Much of business remains reluctant to embrace social media in part because new tools represent that dark room before you turn the light on: You have no idea how big it is or what obstacles you may confront. But in fact the real work is not in learning the tools but in determining how best to use them. And that requires a degree of internal brand analysis and fresh thinking that is always challenging to business because it represents change, and change is hard.

The important distinction is to focus not on what the tools do (they connect and communicate) but what to do with the tools. What interactive technology (now ubiquitously referred to as social media) enables is for people to have a true presence in the virtual marketplace. Wrap your head around the idea that what is valued now is not the presence of a brand idea but the presence of a branded person.

Social media relies on a personal presence. Be the tool.

Is this fundamentally different than the kind of paid search positioning that eviscerated the Yahoo brand and allowed Google’s democracy and authenticity to rise and reign in the first place? The approach is undoubtedly more sophisticated, nuanced, and — in its own limited way — democratic, but is Google on a slippery slope to undermining what makes Google Google?

We are currently working with a smart new brand bringing a terrific innovation to the senior living market. Even though it is substantially different in terms of features and benefits, its relationship to the Personal Emergency Response System devices (I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!) is close enough that the comparison is vital to speeding understanding of the offer.

I think the key here is that short cuts are critical to capturing attention and identifying a familiar category or reference point. All too often, though, business owners or product managers reject the notion because it’s an approach that doesn’t feel complete or accurate enough. That’s brand out thinking rather than brand in thinking, and it’s a big mistake. The more nuanced and comprehensive you try to make lead messages, the longer and more convoluted they become to your audience, and you lose them before you’ve even gotten their attention.

Remember to forget. Forget all the features and details you know about your offering — pretend to be ignorant — before you evaluate the impact of a lead message. And remember the purpose of a lead message: It’s not to explain but to generate interest in more information with a trim equation of familiar + different.