Image: Courtesy of MusicPhilosophy

This post was featured a few days ago at my weekly column at Jack Myers’ MediaBizBloggers.

When people were consumers, brands lived in this exclusive universe of commerce and communication meant to sell products through emotions with one end goal: make money. Lots of it.

People are not consumers anymore. This is particularly true when people are online. We have transformed into citizen activists, journalists, lawless pirates, producers, protagonist and, more often than not, curmudgeons. People want much more from a brand than just a good offer, relieving them from the tyranny of too many choices or some fancy lines and images.

People will vote with their wallet for things they believe in rather than just buying stuff. Marketing constructs such as brand image are meaningless in a world where people expect brands to “do” rather than show, sell, spin stories nobody believes in anymore.

Successful brands will become social movements, fully committed to a cause. They will connect with people by either sharing a passion or fighting a common enemy. Brands have to come down from their Ivory Tower of branding and stand shoulder to shoulder with people sharing their passion, and helping each other to co-create and collaborate. A brand that shares my passion and is committed to a cause (We’re talking real dollars here…) will be seen as credible, committed and a real change agent.

Ultimately, we have to redefine the nature of commerce. Profits will continue to be important. Brands that define themselves solely through Wall Street results will not survive. The pursuit of a higher good than just selling stuff will become the admission fee into people’s mind.

We used to look at government programs to better the world, improve our surroundings. The stranglehold of debt will severely reduce opportunities for government institutions to be a change agent. Brands need to step up and become a cultural change agent. They have the monetary power, they have a better organizational structure than any government institution and they understand the power of democracy better than anybody else: Their constituents vote with their wallet not because of some ideology, family history or flawed loyalty.

There’s nothing wrong with making money. But making meaning is so much more powerful.

Image: Courtesy of Behanceserved

I was raised in the traditions of Western schooling with the goal to develop a workforce for the industrial age. If I knew the answer, I was rewarded. My intelligence was measured on standardized tests and all those tests were about knowing the right answer. When I started to manage people, I was rewarded for my certainty – we had a goal and I knew how to get there. Often I had no clue and was filled with fear we would never reach that goal, but I was able to hide my fears and create this aura of knowledge.

Those days are long gone and forgotten. The construct of knowledge and predictability seems laughable when computers can cause a market meltdown, pricing Accenture down to $0.01, when we struggle to prevent a major ecological disaster, when the world is filled with black swans. Our world gets more complex by the day and any thought of certainty seems ridiculous. Information is now consumed in streams and the idea of “truth” transforms right in front of our eyes and mutates into something we have problems defining.

We have to sacrifice certainty.

Our whole belief system is based on certainty and we are defined by our positions, our explanations. In order to survive and prosper in our complex reality, we have to embrace uncertainty. Everything we believe in, everything we “know” needs to go. Time for spring cleaning. Don’t throw everything out, just store your knowledge in the garage and let it sit there. Open the doors and invite new positions in. Listen to what other people have to say, embrace the opposite position, the weird opinion, the unimaginable. We have to live Winston Churchill’s famous quote:

“True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information.”

These uncertain times create spaces for invention. We need to let go of old positions and jump into the not-knowing space to discover new ways of thinking. Life goes in inevitable cycles and we need to embrace the ebb and flow to experience real happiness.

Enjoy disruptions and weirdness.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not Tony Robbins or some other life-changing guru. I feel that our need for certainty is so limiting because we don’t really listen. We’re constantly looking for confirmation of our own knowledge. Instead, we need to look for disruptions of our belief system. How beneficial is it to embrace only like-minded views? Your echo chamber gets louder and louder while the box you put yourself in fills up with sameness.

We need to look for disruptions, not similarities. What kind of world can we create when we enjoy weirdness and cherish differences? We don’t have to agree on anything. That’s fine. But every time we experience disruptions, a door opens in our mind to a world that was closed off before.

Companies have challenges embracing uncertainty, especially when business leaders continue to use the machine as the dominant metaphor. Industrial age thinking leads to massive failures since the executives have no clear feeling how their actions affect the collective action of the company. Dynamic organizations are still very rare because sameness is rewarded, certainty lauded and opposing voices pushed aside. Companies need to routinize the exercise of imagination. They need to store all their “knowledge” away and open the doors to new ideas.

Many organizations believe in a culture of fear. Fear is not a good path to creativity. It forces people to focus on incremental solutions, on safe choices. The successful managers of the future will facilitate listening, learning and imagination. And successful companies will embrace this credo:  ”We are door openers. Everyone here is an explorer. How could we possibly live our lives looking at door and not open it.”

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While the Facebook Privacy debate rages on, we have to accept a few facts:

• Facebook is making a play to own identity on the web.
• Not only that: Facebook is making a play to own everything associated with identity on the web.
• Facebook is banking on a value exchange between sites and their own database: We give you site traffic and data, we keep all the data to build a semantic map of the Web.
• We are entrusting personal data to a company that has a problematic record of dealing with user privacy.
• The majority of Facebook will continue to share information. Why? Because we want to share information.

Does this mean Facebook will continue to be the de facto Social Web? Absolutely not.

Facebook presents a huge opportunity and promise for brands: A data pile of personal information that should enable marketers to deliver more relevant and targeted advertising. Sounds like Behavioral Targeting 2.0. This model implies that people want to receive more targeted and relevant messages. And that’s where the whole model falls apart.

Most of the day, people want to be invisible to advertisers. They want to read or entertain themselves without any disruption of the advertisers. And there are times when I want to hear from advertisers or would love to have a comprehensive profile I want to share with companies. During that limited amount of time, I would love for Acura to know what kind of car I’m looking for and have an insight into my purchase history to develop a personal proposal for me. I would love for Travelocity to know that I’m looking for a hotel close to Heathrow Airport.

We just don’t want this information stockpiled, used against our wishes and used against us during a time when we don’t want to hear from brands. We don’t want information that we shared with one company sold to another company to deliver more disruptive messages.

What we want is to share our digital DNA on our terms. Not on the terms of data mining companies and marketers. On our terms.

Which leads me to the second reason why this model won’t work: My Facebook profile is not the real me. Nobody is the real self on Facebook. We’re revealing a very small part of our real self. Nothing more. Most people stay away from politics or religious topics. We never hear from major conflicts in anybody’s lives. Facebook reminds me of kid shows like Cailou or Berenstein Bears. Sure, there are some minor conflicts but, overall, we’re doing great and everything is awesome. We’re all playing a part in the Facebook world, just like the avatars in Second Life. How do you expect to deliver relevant messages to me if you don’t know the real me?

Last but not least, if Facebook becomes the Social Graph, innovation will stop. Imagine Internet Explorer as the only game in town. No Chrome, no Firefox. Only IE allows you to access the web. If that’s scary, think about Facebook being the only Social Graph in town. No innovation. Stagnation. The Social Web would end before it even really started.

That’s why we need for people to claim ownership of their data. Allow them to store their personal data in a safe and secure space. Share any data on their terms:

• Dental records with their periodontist and general dentist, avoiding lengthy approval cycles and wasteful document exchanges.
• The intent to purchase a car with preferred brands. Allow them to send personal proposals. Eliminating the guesswork and sneaky, behavioral tactics of marketers.
• Their food preferences and budget with restaurants through a location-based application. Allow restaurants to send time-sensitive offers based on personal profile.

Advertising, as defined by Wikipedia, is a non-personal form of communication intended to persuade an audience to purchase or take some action upon products, ideals or services. The current landscape of advertising feels more like a battleground and not a persuasion lounge. We have done the same thing over and over again. More efficient. More relevant. More targeted. It’s still not working.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t really see the benefits of living in a world where brands constantly have to fight for and with customers. I’d rather live in a world where brands and people co-create and collaborate. And people share what they really need. On their terms. And advertising could get back to its core business: charming and persuading people.

Image courtesy of 24.media.tumblr.com

During the dot-com bust, I interviewed for a position with a digital consulting firm. The job description sounded like a good match, the company had a good reputation and strong growth: I was excited. After speaking to the CEO for 5 minutes, I knew his company wouldn’t be my future home. Why? Because I had no idea what he was talking about. Every other word was a buzzword, he must have made up words on the fly and the sentences were so long and convoluted, I felt he was filibustering the interview.

One reason brands have problems connecting with people is their use of language. A few examples:

Dachis Group: “Social Business Design helps companies reinvent themselves into dynamic, socially calibrated organizations that gain constant value from their ecosystem of connections.”

Dell: “Increase workforce flexibility while storing data or secure servers – enabling highly centralized control over your distributed environment and aligning clients with their organizational needs.”

Ford: “Covert aerodynamic design and critical technology such as the class-exclusive PowerShift six-speed automatic and 1.6L Ti-VCT Duratec® I4 engine with twin-independent variable cam timing make it a responsive and fuel-responsible driving experience.”

I chose those 3 companies because they’re often heralded as the pioneers of Social Media and Social Business. Did you have any clue what they were talking about? I had some idea but became bored a few words in.

We have developed a lexicon of contrived gobbledygook meant to confuse people not to enlighten them. How can you claim to be social when your outward language is anti-social?

Just go to digital conferences and half the words abused have no real definition (Engagement), 1 million definitions (brand) or their meaning changes day by day (Success Metrics). We tend to use imprecise words to cloud our confusion and hide the fact our thoughts are not that well-thought-out. A refined thought doesn’t need to come in a convoluted package. Or, as Winston Churchill said: “Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.”

Amidst the corporate gibberish, brands have a unique opportunity to stand out from the masses by speaking plainly yet intelligently about the matter at hand. Not only only will you be seen as having a stronger grasp of the issues, but people will form stronger connections with companies.

In a complex world, any effort to simplify will be appreciated.