Brands are like people.

At least that’s what they need to become. Because today, most brands are like corporations — stogy, slow, monolithic… Many consumers might love a certain brand, but the brand rarely loves them back. And that needs to change if brands are going to stay relevant in today’s social web world. It also needs to change because well… companies just need to be nicer.

Now look at me talking in these fluffy terms: “brands should love” … “companies should be nice.” What biz exec will take that advice over quarterly earnings?! One that believes today’s companies’ most important asset is their brands, and that consumers make or break a brand’s worth and value.

So with that in mind, I created a framework called PEOPLE to help companies think about their brands as living beings. The PEOPLE framework has six key principals:

• Participate in conversations, rather than just being a subject of them.

• Embrace and accept how other people interact with your brand – never try to censor consumers.

• Open-Up your company’s processes and become a transparent organization.

• Platform, as in become a platform for consumers to communicate with each other, and to express themselves.

• Listen closely to what consumers are saying about your brand.

• Empower consumers to become advocates, rather than just fans.

This framework is very basic — and meant to be that way. So it can be easily digested and internalized by executives as a guide for helping their decision making and strategy.

I’ve made a presentation of this framework. You can view it online. I’m hoping you’ll enjoy it. And if you do, please tell others — maybe I’ll get to present it for real sometime. :)

And with the “O” of the PEOPLE framework in mind, here’s some more about my reason for creating this presentation. I’m in the very early stages of starting my own consultancy called 9teen9d creative research (as in consumers born around the year 1990).

Before even making a web site for the firm though, I wanted to establish some thought leadership out there around the social web space. The “P.E.O.P.L.E” framework is that first step.

I’d appreciate any thoughts or gut reactions you have… be OPEN! :)

Bruce Nussbaum asks if New York is the new innovation and design center. I say “Yes” to design hub, but no to NYC as an innovation center. Here’s why:

Big Design companies are focused in NYC
Advertising Age recently came out with their 2008 agency report, which has a list of the top 25 ad agencies by revenue.

Ad agencies are not design companies (yet), but the line between product and marketing is blurring rapidly, and at the same time, digital marketing is growing as an industry — in the double-digits. Some of the big shops out of NYC: BBDO, McCann Erickson, OgilvyOne, JWT — all with interactive arms.

And then as s Bruce points out, there are a sh*t-ton (yes, that’s a technical quantifiable term) of small but leading design firms moving to or newly focused in NYC (Jump, IDEO, Frog, fuseproject).

But Innovation comes from small shops elsewhere
It’s no secret recipe that innovation comes from areas with strong academic environments — learning hubs like Boston (MIT’s Media Lab, Harvard), Pittsburgh (Carneige Mellon U and the Entertainment Technology Center), or Chicago (Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology).

In fact, Pittsburgh is a great case study — Google opened up an office there because of the rich talent coming from Carnegie Mellon.

So yes, something is brewing in NYC — the ad/marketing industry is undergoing a transformational shit to a design-focus — and NYC has always been a hub for advertising.

And innovation can still be found where you might least expect it — the dark corner room with the jolt-cola fueled masters candidate. Ahh, I miss those days at the ETC.

There’s exciting thought brewing right now about how user-centered design and customer experience thinking can impacting, not product or website design, but the very building blocks of business, like org charts, process flows, even manufacturing. As companies realize they need open up their marketing mentality, so are a handful applying that thought to other areas of business.

I came across three great ideas which tie together nicely as a process for large companies to transform themselves into Customer-Centric Organizations — plus a fourth step of my own.

Step 1: Restructure your organization through you customers’ eyes
The customer-centric org cuts out silo-thinking, which is an efficient yet dated approach, and focuses on defining business structures by their end state. Adam Richardson has an idea called Org 2.0: “a new business organization - one that is optimized for complex systems of problems and solutions, rather than based on silos focused on specific functions, and which treats user experience as a core organizational axis rather than a meddlesome add-on.

Step 2: Redefine areas of your business to focus on the customer experience first
Zeus Jone’s Adrian Ho takes his idea of marketing-as-a-service and came up with Operations as marketing:

A quick What-if example: What if every Netflix DVD was tagged with an RFID chip, so that Netflix customers could log-in any time and track how many DVDs of a hit title are left to rent, or where their DVDs are in the mail — so they can know exactly when they’ll arrive? Adrian’s idea what to have RFID attached to American Apparel products, and create a social network based around American Apparel’s employees — get to know the people who actually create your clothing — which ties deeply into that companies anti-sweatshop brand.

Step 3: Transforming into a Customer-Centric Org requires an Agent of Change
What’s needed to get there? An executive leader with empowered with full authority and responsible for the customer experience. That’s what Bruce Temkin’s research on the Chief Customer Experience Officer is all about.

(Bonus) Step 4: Empower each employee to become an owner of the customer experience
Great customer experiences ultimately don’t come from executive leadership or biz processes, but from those employees on the front lines, dealing directly with customers (and earning far less than people who never see a customer’s face — ironic isn’t it?)

Design personas and brand positioning documents — two tools used internally by design teams — can actually be shared across departments to help employees better understand their customer and how to speak with them. What if a call center rep had brand positioning statement that gave them a better sense of what the company they’re portraying stands for. Or what if a business analyst had a design persona, to make process flow decisions based on users, not shareholders. Ultimately, its your customers that effect stock price, not the daily emotional roller-coaster of Wall Street.

Here’re a few essentials I’ve come across from the past few days…

George Lois says “Advertising is Poison Gas” … and uses the word “bupkis” in this AdWeek video. He seems like he’d be a kick-ass guy to have a beer with.

Wal-Mart backs down … from suing it’s own employee that was left severely brain damaged for the $470,000 it paid for her medical expenses.

Microsoft Surface Launches in AT&T Stores … and now we no longer have to wonder: “if I touch an iPhone to a Microsoft product in an AT&T store — will the world implode?”

Need to relax? Blow some s**t up! … A new study in the U.K. has found that playing online violent games actually reduces anger and relaxes gamers.

Microsoft Research and the future of human computer interaction … says that by 2020, the field of HCI will finally replace the term “user” with “human.” To paraphrase my CMU professor Randy Pausch, ” i like to say ‘guest’ rather than ‘user.’ We’re creating products and inviting people to participate, not making things for druggies.”

Sending Out An SMS - About Youth Volunteering … Gen Y wants to be socially active — but only if you make it easy for them.

10 Social Networking Trends … that I apparently have not been paying attention to include “continuous partial attention.” I’m sorry, what did you say?

Questions a job candidate should ask in an interview … Advergirl continues her career-focused posts to help youngin’s like me make in in the industry. But she also cites me as a “favorite agency leaders.” What’s the emoticon for blushing?.

Drop it like it’s hot — in India … last but not least, Indian “baby dropping” makes it on to mainstream media (CNN). Is anyone else kind of freaked out by this?

…TGIF.

A bunch of bloggers have responded to a meme about the impending 10^th anniversary of The Cluetrain Manifesto — a set of 95 theses proclaiming that the business world needs to humanize and be more communicative with consumers.

Now, pardon me if that brief synopsis wasn’t accurate — I’ve never actually read Cluetrain, just have heard of and about it from numerous colleagues. But the essence of the book is so agreeable and obvious to me — it’s what Forrester’s Social Computing (Groundswell) is about. It’s Web 2.0, social media, yadda yadda (although Cluretrain having been published in 2000, was way ahead of its time).

But as Jason Falls points out in his meme response, the business world still hasn’t caught up after a decade:

“We’re nowhere. Social media and true consumer-centric brand behavior is prevalent in the technology bubble and few other places. While adoption has been steady and progress has been made, the premise of the book hasn’t exactly “gone viral.” Businesses in general still think bottom line and “what’s in it for me,” first. Advertising still sucks, is loud and intrusive. And consumers still have little reason to trust brands, companies and even folks like me – marketers trying to connect them with products and services that fit their needs.”

Time and again working with Forrester clients, I notice how they struggle to “get it.” Even execs at great, well-respected brands have a hard time embracing social media and allowing consumers to own their bread and butter, and an especially difficult time getting buy-in for things like social networking or participatory design from higher-ups. And I can’t help but wonder how much of this is a generation gap — and will simply take a generational leap.

I’m 26 — the end of “Generation Y,” born 1981. My so far short career in the business/design/marketing world has always lived both feet in the Web (I first signed on when I was 12 on a 486). I read up on black and red boxes, hacking into the phone system, before I graduated high school — the hacker movement in essence being that democratization of information and access that people see the Web as today.

Just in the same way that, when I look at my 18 yr old brother typing at lightning speed on a Sidekick, I’m kinda blown away by what he can do with technology. There’s just that “digital-native” leap that’s going on with 40-something execs unwillingness to fully embrace social media. Perhaps it will just take a few years until my generation has our time running the companies of the world for that change to happen? The Zuckerbergs of the world sure get it.

Which brings me to the title of this post. In Purple Rain, Prince beats out the antagonist pop local celebrity, who’s main song is the trite “Bird Dance,” with the emotive pop anthem Purple Rain. And then tops it off with I would die 4 U. He overcomes the popular thought of his time — candy-coated marketing fluff — with honest, emotional sincerity.For the past decade we’ve been saturated as a culture from marketing messages, at all angles, and channels, that are surface-y rather than cerebral, comical rather than emotional, pedantic and trite, rather than meaningful,and usually based on popular cultural symbols, rather than deeper human truths.

What we really long for as individuals though are meaningful connections. Emotional, personal and significant moments. That’s in essence what social computing is all about. A revolution (or revolt-ution) against the trite, pedantic marketing that we’ve been fed for so long. We don’t want to be talked down to — we want to communicate with each other. Messaging vs. meaning.

Anyway, I’ll get to reading Cluetrain. One of these days.

Summary: I took on Leigh Householder and did a makeover of my own resume. The key lesson I learned is that you need to showcase your individual personality on paper every way you can.

The incomparable Leigh Householder has been doing a series of posts on Advergirl where she takes a readers resume, and fully redesigns it — both the content and the visuals. Her latest redesign of a new ad account exec was such a huge transformation that it inspired me, nay, made me realize how awful the resume I’ve been sending out has been. And since I’m hunting around for a new job… well, now or never for a resume makeover.

So, I started with a few visual elements Leigh used and completely re-did the layout and some of the wording of my own resume. Thanks to Marilyn Matty for her suggestions on how to rework some of the content. Here’s the final product (PDF), which leapfrogs what I had before:

Here are some of the changes I made:

• Expanded to TWO pages. It was drilled into me in grad school that your resume should be only a page. Bullshyte, I say. If you have valuable content to share that on a quick glance by a manager will impress, offer it up. So I expanded my resume to two pages by dedicating the whole second page to my Forrester reports — which are writing examples basically.
• Created a “Who I Am” section. Before I had an “Objective” at the beginning of my resume. But it didn’t add much value, just seemed like the standard thing to do. And in the recent job interviews I’ve had, I’ve noticed HR people don’t know how to make sense of my background. I’m a game designer…. web strategist… young consumer design aficionado… huh?? So this Who I am blurb I found in a Ms. Householder redesign should hopefully frame me upfront.
• Visual treatment matters. There are a ton of career portals and company sites that will only let you submit a WORD (.doc) resume. Some will even only let you submit raw text! So it’s pretty easy to get dismayed if you want to use a nicer-looking PDF format. But especially in the marketing/design space, the look you achieve and the way you organize information counts enormously, and can say a lot about how you approach things.
• Use simple tools to express yourself. For changing the look, I started by creating an eye-catching header, selected a few complimentary colors, and added some torn-paper backgrounds. I used Word 2002 and Photoshop, and then Adobe PDF maker. One thing I realized is that after I agreed to expand my resume to two pages, I could really open up the font size, which looks so much better.
• Cut out the filler. If there’s a job from your college years, or some description that is not totally unnecessary or descriptive, delete. It’s probably much better to showcase a few diamonds, and leave out the lumps of coal. Yea, I can’t think of a better analogy right now.

Below is what my older resume looked like, from just a few weeks ago, as of April 2008:

I’m glad that sucker is gone.

But looking back at some of my resumes from even longer ago, it’s surprising to see the stark contrast. Want to see what got me my current job as a Researcher at Forrester? I’m embarassed to put this up on the web, but I’m sharing it because it shows just how much can change if you keep refining and iterating.

I’m working on a big post about what an “interactive design strategist” is and why every ad agency and product design firm needs them. Ya know, an “account planner” for the digital age.

‘Til then this was worth checking out — a Slideshare presentation with a bunch of young consumer factoids. Not sure where mobileYouth gets their numbers from, but worth a look.