Digital Identity has long been a fascinating area but it wasn’t really of interest to the mainstream because, for a long while, only geeks had online identities of any significance. Obviously that has now changed. Twitter, blogs, Etsy, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn and Quora are just a few of the many services that people use to maintain their digital IDs. As a result, the everyday influence of these identities is growing. Even limiting the view to the professional sphere we can see how important the world of online identity has become. A LinkedIn profile can get you a new job but a crass comment on Twitter can get you fired. A great YouTube channel can earn you a living as can a shop on Etsy. An informed blog can help you turn a hobby into a job; whereas a photo on Facebook can be ‘career-limiting’. And these IDs are here to stay. In fact, we can expect the range and depth of people's digital identities and the extent to which...
...they are intertwined with their real world lives to accelerate and deepen as we increasingly rely on digital devices to help navigate our way through life.
In short, our online identity is now one part of our overall self-identity: that vital thread in the relationships we maintain, the progression of our lives and the sense of self-esteem we experience. Not trivial stuff.
However, for the most part, the growing importance of people’s online identities hasn’t registered with the marketing industry. Brands see digital personas as lesser, shadow-versions of people’s ‘real’ lives. A view that has led to an onslaught of poorly-judged requests for participation by companies looking for a sprinkling of that most coveted of brand values – authenticity. The problem being that brands approach real people as hired actors auditioning for photo-shoots and TV spots – ‘Hi there, please check-in your real-life and read this script with feeling.’ The understanding that when borrowing someone’s digital identity you need to treat it with respect just isn’t there.
A memorable example of this is from a few years ago when Heinz ran a YouTube campaign asking people to make and send in an advert for their famous ketchup. Maybe because of the trust people had in the brand, a decent number were happy to put forward their ideas, and lend their identities to help Heinz add some authenticity to its 57 Varieties. Unsurprisingly, the results ranged from the weird to the wonderful. However, this was not what Heinz had in mind. So, bizarrely, the company used the New York Times to describe their disappointment with the quality of what they had received stating that, ‘Many entries are mediocre, if not downright bad, and sifting through them requires full-time attention.’ In doing so, Heinz signalled that it viewed these people as auditioning for a part in their branded, beany soap opera, not as customers with real identities. They chose to give them all a big thumbs-down with a Cowell-esque raspberry thrown-in for good measure.
But that was back in the heady days of 2007 when it was OK to use the term consumer-generated media. Brands have moved on and no one would ever drop such a clanger in these socially-powered times, right? Unfortunately not. Richard Huntingdon points to a few more recent examples of brands trying to use and abuse people’s identities. Here the approach is to straight-jacket individual's rich-and-varied lives so they fit neatly into a storyboard. The result is an uncomfortable, cringing-feeling rather than that oh-so-valuable ring of authenticity. All of which puts people off the next time a brand approaches them, as no one aspires to become a tactical execution in an FMCG advertising campaign.
As the tools and resources available for people to build scrapbooks of their lives online grow, an understanding of digital identities and their importance is going to become a crucial aspect of modern marketing. Some ID services will allow people to offer explicit ‘social signals’ to the world, as John Battelle describes them, about their everyday routines, such as location check-in. Others will create implicit trails that we leave as the devices we use track our behaviour, location, preferences and intentions, including analysing the content we snack on. All of which will give the machines and bots scouring the web trying to understand who-knows-who and who-likes-what increasingly rich pickings. Or as James Governor memorably described it in a comment on this blog: ‘I like to call it Declarative Living and Tag Gardening. We skip along our path through the garden strewing tags behind us. These digital petals can be picked up and acted upon’.
As people’s digital identities develop and mature, the opportunities for them to help brands advocate, like, promote, curate, contribute and lend their credibility will boom. However, only brands that recognise the high value people now place on their digital IDs will benefit. Marketing executives that see consumers (aka people) as giant click-farms populated by dead-eyed drones just waiting to offer themselves up as a brand's voice will find that contempt is returned in a very authentic manner.
Comments