Brilliantly executed, the videos show what a company with a good deal of advertising and media dollars can aspire to and how they can formulate a comprehensive plan for engaging customers.  But even the rest of us, without those mega media dollars, can adopt some key concepts from this strategy into our own social media interactions.

Here are some key take-aways from Part 1.

• Tell a story that relates to your brand or concept – storytelling engages the reader and helps to develop deeper emotional connections between you (your brand) and your customer
• Encourage dynamic storytelling from customers by engaging in conversations around your stories and the stories of your customers – invite their stories to become a part of yours
• Adopt the “live positively” principle whereby you strive to make each encounter one that has a positive influence – you may not be able to change the world, but you can change the experience of those you interact with

As collaborative and open as the strategy sounds, there is also a great deal of “directing” built into the plan. Should the definition of dynamic storytelling really include the words “systematic” and “coordinated?” Maybe, but customers can and will spontaneously change the direction of the conversation and you need to be able to “go with the flow” without feeling like your grand plan has been hijacked.

Stay tuned for insights from Coca Cola Content 2020 – Part 2.

A key difference between a blogger and a columnist is that the latter doesn’t traditionally involve reader commentary – at least not in real-time, devoid of editorial filters, and appended for all to see. Blogging proliferated as the first large-scale instance of user-generated content online because self-publication and distribution was suddenly easy and immediate. Three cheers for instant gratification. But the medium is also interactive. Readers can publish just as easily as the blogger.

It is perhaps ironic, then, that the blogger with the largest reported readership, Andrew Sullivan, disabled reader comment capability years ago. Andrew ticks off a lot of blogging boxes, including being something of a provocateur, but without the addition of reader commentary to amplify, deconstruct, cheer and ridicule, I would argue that Andrew is not really a blogger at all. Despite his swagger and self-proclamation as a blogging trailblazer, Andrew is in reality a columnist who publishes at a hyper-blogging pace.

But I digress. The example I wanted to highlight is the great Olivier Blanchard, author of “Social Media R.O.I.” and a prolific blogger in his own right, who yesterday published a post proclaiming “the death of the personal brand” (or at least his fervent hope for its demise). Olivier’s premise is that the recent emergence of a cottage industry devoted to “personal branding,” fueled mainly by the demands of social media, is, in his words, bullshit.

“Don’t be a fake,” he advises. “Drop the personal branding BS. You don’t need it.”

This may not be good advice, but it’s great blogging.

And the nearly 100 comments appended to this article in less than 24 hours is clear proof of that.

For the record, I agree with much of what Olivier advises when he gets down to brass tacks; the article is a very worthy read, but more because it aptly defines what personal branding ought to be, rather than debunking the very notion of personal braining in the first place.

If I were to take his premise seriously, I would argue that the “personal brand” is not an analogue of the corporate brand oriented toward the individual (his central proposition), but a convenient way to describe how individual professionals need to carefully and effectively construct virtual versions of themselves in a digital world. The question of whether this effort is phony depends entirely on how it’s done – not on whether it’s done at all.

In our own work at Arch Digitals we see again and again capable, accomplished, authentic people – people who would cringe at the idea of promoting artificial or exaggerated versions of themselves – who haven’t the first clue of how, for example, to produce an accurate, professional, well-crafted series of online profiles. To those of us like Olivier Blanchard who tend to play on the bleeding edge of the emerging virtual world, these prosaic concerns may seem sophomoric or trivial. But they are in fact precisely what make up the category of personal branding for most business people.

Undoubtedly, Olivier well understands this. What he is doing here is using semantic gymnastics to attract attention, incite controversy, and create discussion and sharing – otherwise known as buzz.

I’d argue that as much can be learned from Olivier’s shrewd blogging technique as from his thoughtful analysis of personal branding.

Major retail brands advising their customers to go elsewhere for the right product to suit their needs.

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 the film, Santa Claus is the ultimate 21st century brand: an expert adviser displaying not only an intimate knowledge of the customer but an ability to  speak the customer’s language – literally. The tear-inducing moment when Kris Kringle (Edmund Gwenn) suddenly begins speaking Dutch to a war-orphaned little girl is both a plot point (sowing the seeds of possibility for Natalie Wood’s character, Susie)  and a heart connection.

The source of the customer solution is immaterial:

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…

The notion of being a thought leader, driven by a customer-centric imperative that creates a brand halo even at the sacrifice of an immediate transaction, is a social media precept, the basis for entire business philosophies such as those of the great Chris Brogan.

But Santa Claus got there first.

Happy holidays!

Two high-profile videos do not a zeitgeist make, so let’s call it a mini-trend. Both current spots take culturally iconic images and animate them – quite successfully, both – to achieve a fresh expression of the deeply familiar. The right combination of fresh and familiar is media gold. When we talk about making emotional connections in marketing communications we are mining the territory of the familiar, tapping into primal triggers located deep within the limbic system of the brain.

Familiar visual and auditory cues – images or music that we’ve made associations with over the course of a lifetime – serve as shortcuts to these triggers. They can be extremely powerful. The high price for licensing such cues is a reflection both of the value of that power and the need for preserving that value through some inscrutable formula of exposure and exclusivity. I dare say that allowing Michael Jackson’s Thriller to be used for Party City advertising was probably not a wise application of this formula.

These two spots succeed in preserving the delicate balance of value in familiar cultural cues, and do it in an entirely captivating way. Good stuff.

Hat-Tip to Fast Company