As someone captivated by semiotics, the contemplation of what is happening to the @ symbol as a result of Twitter is fascinating to me.

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.

Business leaders of all kinds, not just those from the marketing and media industries, are taking advantage of social media in exciting and effective ways. One of the prevailing models is for senior people at organizations is to create individual profiles for themselves — Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc — and write and communicate about their particular area of expertise. Although these individuals are clearly connected to branded organizations, they understand that social media is about people first and brands second. The leading-edge thinking on all of this is that the very paradigm of doing business is now shifting — as a result of the new prevalence of social media — away from the notion of business living in the marketplace primarily as a “branded idea,” and more as a distributed network of “branded people.”

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.

The technology of tools like Twitter and Facebook is not what’s impressive or important about what social media offers to business. In fact, I would argue that what makes these tools special — and successful, especially in the case of Twitter — is how unimpressive they are. And by that I mean how simple they are.

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.

Shelly Palmer is positively euphoric over Google’s new approach to music searches (mmmmmm… I can search, sample and buy all at once… uuuuhhhhh) but I can’t help but think there’s a potential dark side here. The partnerships Google has established with the likes of imeem, lala, myspace, Pandora, and Rhapsody (full disclosure: I am positively euphoric about Rhapsody) for music access and distribution may well be a model for future content partnerships of all stripes.

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?

Here’s a refreshingly simple and cogent commentary from Dan Heath, co-author of Made to Stick, in a chat with Fast Company on how to think about conveying innovation.

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.