This is a cross-post from Mashable.

Google has raised a lot of digital hackles with its new policy requiring real names for Google+. Cory Doctorow says that real identities are bad because they make it easy to sell us to advertisers. danah boyd goes further, saying that the policy is an abuse of power, because it may compromise users’ safety.

But they vastly understate the case, and ask for the wrong solution.

The hugeness of Google’s error is in misunderstanding the basic human need for a flexible framework for identity creation. People change and evolve, and throughout the entirety of human history, we have been able to shed old versions of ourselves, and construct new identities. This is so universally true as to be a cliche. How many films have this arc as the first act: A stranger comes to town. What is the mysterious secret he hides? What did he run away from?

Our identities are complicated. In fact, the need for multiple identities only accelerates in today’s internet culture. Digital natives understand the notion of curation so much so that they curate their own existence on social networks. Julia Allison and iJustine are extreme examples of this phenomena, but it happens all over every Friday night when young people spend more time shooting photos of themselves to upload to Facebook to show how great a time they’re having, instead of, you know, actually having a great time.

The act of identity creation happens on the social network, through the curation process. Not by the things that are really happening to the person.

In this context, we are becoming more like celebrities. We manage our personas by curating which pictures get tagged on Facebook with our identity (hint: only the ones where we look good). We portray the most interesting aspects of our lives through status updates (“I found a dollar on the street!” gets 27 Likes not because it’s important, but because it’s interesting.) We understand that parts of our personalities are most appropriate for different audiences.

The rise of celebrity culture is actually an attempt to create shared experiences for a large, fragmented society. Smaller countries have smaller celebrities in the U.S. (Incidentally, that’s why Kylie Minogue had to redeem her post-Locomotion career in the U.S. with the wonderful “Can’t Get You Out Of My Head;” and why David Beckham left a hugely successful career in the U.K. to bring soccer to a country that would rather watching boring old baseball than see a low-scoring soccer game.)

So, as our own social circles continue to grow, we become more like celebrities ourselves. So, we can learn something from celebrities about the importance of alternate identities. Increasingly, artists have created alter egos for themselves to make space for a different or new part of their personality to emerge. As they get boxed in by the expectations of their fans, they need to create an outlet that allows them to risk something by creating work that is outside of their traditional oeuvre.

Madonna took the persona of Dita when she released Erotica and her Sex book in order to explore sexuality in a deeper way than she could as the Material Girl.

Sean Combs became the rapper Puff Daddy, then P. Diddy when he needed to refresh his stale 90s image. Instead of creating a new personality, he just kept beating that dead horse, and when it stopped working, he dropped the “P” and just became Diddy. But, for his serious menswear clothing line, he uses the moniker Sean John.

Marshall Mathers became Eminem, and when there was still too much darkness and bile, he created the persona of Slim Shady.

The most extreme example is Nicki Minaj, who has taken the notion of alter egos to the insanely logical extreme. She has only released one album, but has no less than eight distinct personas:

1. Onika Tanya Maraj is her given name

2. Cookie is the first identity she created to escape her troubled home life

3. Harajuku Barbie is the playful Minaj

4. Nicki Minaj is her primary performing identity

5. Roman Zolanski is the hard charging, angry brute

6. Martha Zolanski is Roman’s mother

7. Nicki Theresa is a Mother Theresa-inspired saint

8. Rosa is her Spanish moniker

The value of multiple identities to these artists is indisputable. One of the most extreme examples is Roman’s Revenge, the 2010 Nicki Minaj and Eminem duet. Both rappers spend the entire song spewing hate-filled lyrics at their fans. This is not a song that a musician would want to present to the public as part of their late night talk show personality. Without alternate identities, this song could not exist. And while it’s a tough song to listen to, the world is a better place for having the song in it.

One single name will never be able to contain all of the aspects of any individual person, in all their complicated, contradictory glory. That’s why Google+ will ultimately fail in its attempts to create an “identity service” with their real name policy.

Quora also has a real names policy. But it never came under serious scrutiny because it was always clear about what kind of community it was: a serious-sounding, wonky intellectual place where deep-ish knowledge, packaged well, is appreciated. It’s a very specific niche, and it is more interested in keeping quality high than getting lots of users to interact.

Google+ wants us to give it everything, which means that we will end up giving it nothing of value. By requiring real names, Google+ is sending clear signals that it wants to be a specific type of community: the kind where people share cat videos and links about current events that can inform Google’s own search rankings. Paradoxically, even this banality will still create a huge amount of value for Google, because of how bad computers are at truly understanding people. Google’s ability to sell advertising will still grow tremendously, even from this crappy level of information.

Critics of the Real Name policy want Google to change its mind and see the error of its ways. That is the wrong solution.

The right solution, of course, is to do nothing. Allow Google+ exactly the kind of community they ask for: the one where you use your real identity, but in return, only share a certain, specific part of yourself: the part that you don’t mind being indexed by Google’s servers and made available to the entire world. In other words, the most boring, unimportant, and universal version of yourself.

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Take a peek around. You might find some things interesting – here’s some content curation ideas, mobile thoughts, of course, you’ll see a lot about social media marketing.

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Thank you for sharing!

Fundamentally, people are attracted to social technologies because they like sharing their lives and experiences with friends. In fact, the ability to share is one reason that Jeremiah Owyang has said that email was the first social network. Before Friendster or Tribes, people emailed cute cat videos to each other.

That desire to connect and share with others is the driving user need for Janrain’s Invite Friends functionality. Invite Friends is different than Social Sharing. Where a social share event is a broadcast message to all social connections, Invite Friends allows the user to send a targeted message to selected friends. It’s the difference between a “come one, come all” poster to the Friday night party, and a party invitation delivered through the mail. More targeted, more personal.

This functionality can be used for a number of purposes, like sharing a deal or offer, telling friends about an achievement, targeting a sensitive message to the best connections in the user’s network, or asking a friend to join the user in a new social experience.

Janrain offers Invite Friends functionality for Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, and Windows Live (Hotmail). The end result in social networks is a network message (e.g. a Facebook Message or Twitter Direct Message) from the user to their friend; for Google, Yahoo and Windows, the end result is an email from the user to their contact’s email.

The Invite Friends functionality is very easy to implement. It’s based on Janrain’s Contacts API. In order to implement this functionality, you must first ensure that you have asked for the correct permissions from the user. In Facebook, the user has to authorize your site to access their contacts. In email providers, the user authorizes access to their email address book.

The contact list that is returned from Janrain is normalized and available in XML or JSON. If the user has connected multiple identities, contacts from multiple networks can be displayed. Now, you can render those contacts in the way that makes the most sense for your users.

There are a two common options for rendering contact lists.

You can queue them up to be auto-populated from a keystroke trigger, like Gmail:

Or you can import photos and allow users to check which contacts they want to communicate with:

Make sure to allow the user to select all or none of their contacts easily, in addition to toggling a selection for an individual contact easily. Also note that Janrain won’t return any information from a Facebook user’s friend that the friend has not authorized for the user to access.

 

Another way to leverage your user’s social graph is through a Refer a Friend experience. This is a highly targeted way to maintain the exclusivity of an experience, by limiting access to social referrals. You can enhance the velvet rope feeling by limiting the number of friends that can be referred.

Inviting friends with a targeted message is important functionality to consider for higher value, or more sensitive experiences that don’t make sense for users to broadcast to their entire network. Not surprisingly, they are also more effective marketing messages than anything you could send directly from the brand. Open rates on messages and emails from known contactsare 43% higher than from email marketers, and transaction rates are 2.5 times higher.

Janrain has detailed documentation on using the Contacts API to start this process, and please contact us if you have any questions on how to build your own Invite Friends experience.

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Thank you for sharing!

Over the past several years, I have seen a variety of organizations wrestle with the enormous implications of social media. Nothing less than the very DNA of the company must shift in order to take advantage of the power of your own customers.

The most advanced organizations are working through Jeremiah Owyang’s 8 steps of integrating social media into a corporate website. Step 7 of 8 is using social sign on, which allows users to log in with existing identity providers, like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google, Yahoo and others.

Social sign on is, in fact, the core functionality that opens the corporate website to true social media experiences.

That’s why I’m excited to join the team at Janrain, as their digital marketing and social media strategist. Janrain has been the pioneer in social identity management for years. They understand better than anyone how crucial social identity management is because they have been focused on creating huge value for their clients by bridging the fluid, quicksand of social media fashions (since before My_____ was called MySpace) and real marketing challenges.

So far, most brands have just toyed with the idea of bringing social functionality into their websites, and those early experiments have not gone very far. But Janrain’s partners are different – they have a deep, institutional understanding of how social media is reshaping customer relationships, and therefore, marketing strategy. Janrain stands at the front door of creating social experiences, with critical technology for nearly every website.

Janrain Engage, their social sign on solution, makes it easy for digital marketing teams to integrate existing identity providers into their website. That means more sign ups, more sign ins, and more conversions. It means more opportunities to personalize messaging. It means a more relevant and useful site experience for every visitor.

And that’s just the start.

Janrain’s other products aggregate social profile data to feed into existing CRM systems, and create single sign on for website networks.

This is infrastructure that must just work - marketing teams need to focus on creating experiences, not on the plumbing. And Janrain has built the tools to take the pain out of creating social experiences.

I am incredibly proud of the Emerging Media practice I built at White Horse. The social media methodologies and the mobile marketing resources I created there will continue to move forward with a strong group of marketers, creatives, and problem solvers. And White Horse’s clients will build even more successful marketing programs than ever.

Thank you to everyone I worked with at White Horse. Your passion, commitment, vision, and downright grit got me to dig deeper than I ever have before.

And, I expect to dig even deeper still at Janrain. The solutions are real, and substantial. The biggest challenge now is seizing the fullness of the opportunity. Janrain is ready to deliver outstanding solutions to all of the marketers who can benefit from our technology – which is every website in existence. A tall order, to be sure. But that’s just how I like it.

Onward!

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This is  cross-posted from the White Horse blog.

If you’re trying to develop your geolocation marketing strategy, but don’t know where to begin, look no further than your social media strategy. These two components go hand in hand, and spending energy on geolocation without tight social integration will lead to a marketing program that’s dead on arrival.

White Horse recently conducted a survey of smartphone users to determine how geolocation apps like Foursquare and Gowalla were being used by consumers, and how marketers should integrate check-in functionality and location information to their marketing plan.

The results were clear: Facebook Places was, far and away, the most utilized geolocation check-in service. And that has big implications for every brand with a digital presence.

Facebook Places is deployed on far, far more phones than any other geolocation service. Foursquare has about 7.5 million mobile users, Facebook Places has well over 150 million mobile users (this number is from July, so it’s a bit outdated). You are 20 times more likely to find your prospects on Facebook Places than on Foursquare.

For marketers, then, the choice is clear. When looking to build out a location-based marketing strategy with a strong digital component, Facebook Places will yield the greatest success right now.

By leveraging your existing investment in social media, to promote your location-based touchpoints, you will also ensure that there is strong brand affinity and purchase intent with your geolocation initiatives.

When a marketing geolocation strategy starts with your existing Facebook Fans, it’s easy to build successful engagements with an incremental, test-and-learn approach. It also provides valuable insight into your social media community and drives additional value for your most connected and most important customers.

This is just one of the insights from our new webinar on mobile marketing strategies. We’ll review original, proprietary research on how consumers are using location-based applications, and how to show quick results in mobile marketing initiatives. Sign up for the March 30 5 Breakaway Mobile Marketing Insights webinar now.

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This is cross-posted on the White Horse blog – go there for all types of digital marketing goodness.

Recently, Downy fabric softener and Macy’s bedding department sponsored an event where comedian Mike Birbiglia slept in a Macy’s store window display for a week. People all over the world could watch “Mike in the Window” on Downy’s Facebook page, and see videos of him trying to sleep.

If you’re asking “why?” right about now, you are not alone.

I imagine the pitch meeting for this concept going something like this:

AD AGENCY: See, we’re going to watch this guy sleep in the store window. It’ll be really cool.

BRAND MANAGER: Why would people want to watch that?

AD AGENCY: Don’t worry about that. We’ll get some STAR POWER and combine it with THE SOCIAL MEDIA, and get MACY’S to put in some co-promotion dollars. The bar is set pretty low on the INTERNET and we will get a lot of people to LIKE us on FACEBOOK.

BRAND MANAGER: Wow, so many buzzwords! Let’s do it!

I’m not trying to denigrate the fine people at P&G, but I am saying they got some terrible recommendations from their digital agency, Digitas.

According to Sarah Pasquinucci, the P&G social media strategist on this project, the goal of the campaign was to increase Facebook Fans. She is happy with the results – increasing the Fan base from 50,000 Fans to 183,000.

But the fatal flaw of this campaign was that Downy was extremely disrespectful of its Fans. Downy asked people to take a positive action for the brand – but offered nearly nothing in return. Fans received…a live video stream of Birbiglia in a display window. That’s it.

Even Birbiglia was bored.

The 3 minute “highlight” clip is nearly unwatchable – some of Birbiglia’s friends come by. They talk about…nothing, really. A woman outside sings “Mike Is Not Alone” – song she wrote to the tune of Michael Jackson’s “You Are Not Alone” (for which Downy surely did not pay the rights to Michael Jackson’s estate).

It’s like watching “Seinfeld” – the show about nothing. Except with no jokes.

Downy may have improved its Fan base, but those Fans did not engage with the brand at all. The comments on the Facebook page are unusually dull – “cool” “nice video” and “THIS IS RIDICULOUS” are some of the most recent. This is hardly the mark of a highly engaged customer base.

The biggest downfall in the execution is that Downy didn’t give Fans anything to do, once they had opted in. The promotion was boring, and could never go viral because of it. There was no reason for anyone to share this with their friends.

You can see just how underwhelming the promotion was when you look at the rest of the social media echo chamber. During a 30 day window that included the promotion, Downy netted 133,000 new Facebook Fans, but only generated 26,072 social media mentions in all other social media channels (I pulled this data from Radian6, reviewing all brand mentions during 1/15/201-2/14/2011). That means that less than 1 in 5 Fans thought the promotion was interesting enough to tell their friends about off Facebook.

Here are some of the brand mentions that Downy got from this campaign:

At its core, this promotion failed in social media because the goal of getting Fans is not a valuable goal at all – it’s what you do with those Fans once you get them. And the strategist on this promotion didn’t think about that at all.

Did you Fan Downy? Let me know in the comments.

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There are a lot of things that get my goat – but people that claim that social media is solely responsible for getting social media results is probably the worst.

In fact, there’s an entire marketing campaign ecosystem that goes in to pushing consumers into social channels, and then, if it’s good, they will share it with their friends.

That’s the subject of my new webinar with Lisa Osborne, White Horse’s Director of Media Services. Lisa and I approach marketing campaigns with an integrated mindset from the start – and we don’t get bogged down in territoriality between what is paid and what is social.

We talk through the benefits of this approach, and how to structure your own marketing efforts this way in our new webinar – which you can join for free tomorrow!

Register for the big event, and I look forward to the conversation!

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This really happened to a friend of mine, who wishes to remain anonymous.

It’s sad (or hilarious, actually), but true – this stuff happens every day. You have to love the creative process to keep going back for more punishment.

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