Business writer Mark Schaefer asked: what if you combined social-media Klout scores with facial recognition in a new app?  You could hold up your phone to any crowd and instantly pick out the heavies.  Interesting, no?  I asked for comments on this and my fellow brand anthropologist Aurora, a charismatic and much-beloved woman who is a HUGE user of social media and has every gadget and gizmo, sounded off this way:

“We are being treated like robots and experiments of marketing and forgetting that we are social human beings with the ability to communicate with each other with our natural faculties. Sooner than later we will all rise against the machine and go back to basics.”

The intensity of Aurora’s response reflects a new trend I’m tracking which is the counterpoint to FameUs.  In the FameUs trend, each of us lives in vicarious intimacy with celebrities and we feel more and more like celebrities ourselves.  But then, one day, our spirit “rises up” in the same disgust expressed 23 centuries ago in the Book of Ecclesiastes:

“Vanity, vanity, all is vanity…  

…A fool’s voice is known by the multitude of his words;  

Of making many books [blogs], there is no end.”  

All trends have their roots in our enduring humanity (if they don’t, they’re just fads).  Who of us has not had this same weariness and desire to unplug, to do something deeper and more fulfilling than tweeting, blogging and skimming the latest celebrity gossip?

Therein lie the roots of the countertrend I call AnonymUs, a perennial response to vanity—and one more powerful than ever in our culture of explosively-growing social media.

AnonymUs: the growing conviction that so much of social media is communal narcissism, the impulse to unplug from a culture of celebrity worship, and the spiritual inspiration to seek relief from self-obsession in pursuing a greater social good.

You can see this trend at work when a friend of yours declares that they are observing a “social media fast” or “sabbath.”  Or when friends of yours decide to winnow down their Facebook “friends” to people they are actually close to.  Or, as a friend of mine recently wrote, “try celebrating your birthday by turning off Facebook and remember what’s real.”

Time Out New York recently asked “Is Social Media Bad for New York?”  It pointed out how “the compulsive documentation of our lives detracts from the experience of really living here.”  Are we forgetting to enjoy the dessert we were just served by focussing on tweeting a picture of it?  How can we be in the Here and Now if everything we do is a social media photo op for the Then and There?

Anthropologist Thomas De Zengotita’s book Mediated documents how the media shapes our world and the way we live in it.  His key insight: we live in a “Times Square world” in which the media obsesses about…us.  Therefore we obsess about…ourselves.  And as a wise man I know once commented, “a person all wrapped up in themselves becomes a small package indeed.”

The Harrisburg University of Science and Technology recently conducted a week-long experiment, banning all social media on campus for a week and asking students to write essays about their experience of being cut off from Facebook and Twitter.  However naive this experiment was (can you say “smart phone”?), its inspiration clearly came from a growing awareness that the authentic life of the mind requires regular social media withdrawal.

Sociobiologist Peter Whybrow in his book American Mania: When More is Not Enough looks at our culture’s epidemics of obesity, depression, addiction and compulsive spending and traces their origins to our endless quest for novelty and pleasurable sensations which, in an age of hyper-abundance, have no natural “off” switch.  He believes it’s up to each of us individually to learn how to spend more time with our friends and families, to eat more slowly, preferably in someone’s company, and to stop compulsively checking our computers and mobile phones for social media messages.

So what is a modern marketing manager to do, particularly when their management is pining for a hot new social media strategy?  Here are four ideas.

1. Be quietly real.  

I know.  It sounds like the opposite of good marketing.  But look at Muji’s runaway success. 

It’s a telling presage of the future.  It is starting with the creative class as so many trends do.    And it comes from a desire to escape LOUD branding.  What if brands offered their consumers a way to strip away all brand graphics from their packaging once purchased and what if they made the form of their packaging more pleasing and functional?  This is a huge arena of opportunity and, as always, the race will go to the swiftest.

2. Stand for something transcendental.  

At the most recent Future Trends Conference, August Turak, author and entrepreneur, took a look at what he called “the business secrets of the Trappist Monks.”  Like AA and the Marines, a high over-arching mission guides them.  They offer their members an opportunity to be personally transformed.  And they have a process for bringing about that transformation.  They are not successful in spite of their high, ethical standards but because of them.  Capitalism is not the problem in modern society, he argues; it is the lack of selfless service and the maniacal focus on profits alone that poses the greatest threat to human happiness and fulfillment.  His vision: harness your business to a transcendent value, think of your work as service and you will know a new creativity, dynamism and spontaneity.  The Trappists, by the way, generate a tidy profit, without obsessing about it.  

I think Levi’s call to be a “worker among workers” in their “Go Forth” campaign and their mobilization to rebuild the broken-down town of Braddock, PA is noteworthy step in this direction.  But the possibilities are endless and more brands will find traction in this fertile space in even bolder initiatives.  

3. Give people a mask to wear.   

I recently listened to a group of guys in Austin talk about the coolest things they had ever done and, suddenly, I experienced that privileged moment when one of the parties my company, Mirrorball, put together for Dos Equis, popped into the conversation. The part of the party one of the guys most remembered was when he and his friends put on knight’s chain mail armor and brandished pikestaffs and swords.  You could hear his excitement as he remembered the RELEASE of becoming a completely different person.  This is the same enjoyment that playing video games online offers.  

How does your brand offer its fans the means to play roles and adopt alternative personae?  I think there’s great potential here because each of us is ever more weary of being constantly and self-consciously ourselves.  

4. Offer people a means of changing for the better.  

Pepsi’s Refresh Project is being watched carefully.  It pulled its 2010 Superbowl advertising and plowed the money instead into community-building projects, using social media to crowd source the ideas and to judge the merits of each of them.  Advertising Age reports that,  so far, it has helped bottlers “snap up more shelf space and media interest but it hasn’t yet proved whether it can lift sales.”

Chances are Pepsi will pull the plug on this or let it fizzle out slowly.  Just because that’s what big companies are most likely to do with ALL ideas, good and bad.

But it would be remarkable if they persisted.

And it would connect Pepsi back to one of the most powerful moments in its history when it used community involvement and good will to build distribution in the underserved African-American community.  This story is beautifully told in Stephanie Capparell’s The Real Pepsi Challenge: How One Pioneering Company Broke Color Barriers in 1940’s American Business.  This is the original Project Refresh and thanks to it, Pepsi STILL  has a higher share among African Americans than the uber-brand Coca-Cola.  Read it and you’ll be proud of what marketing can be.