What if every corporate leader was as singularly associated with a positive impact on society as Steve Jobs was for humanizing design?

What if all companies offered unparalleled transparency and accountability for their impact on the environment as we see with Patagonia?

What if every social game makers tethered virtual goods to donations so that giving became scalable and fun as Zynga did?

What if all corporate leaders committed to executing purposeful strategies at the holding company level like Indra Nooyi has at PepsiCo?

What if every brand adopted a global leadership strategy as Nike has using its Environmental Apparel Design Tool, Nike Green XChange, and work with the Livestrong foundation to address issues larger than itself?

What if all competitors chose to work together as we see with Nike, Adidas and Puma, who have partnered with others in the Sustainable Apparel Coalition?

What if every heavyweight challenged itself and its supply chain to reduce their carbon footprints in a matter of months rather than decades as Wal-Mart has?

What if all Wall Street firms recognized that their greatest assets are not their buildings or bonuses but the customers protesting at their doors?

What if corporate America shifted from defending itself to attacking social problems?

What impact would that have on consumer respect for business leaders? What would it mean to your employees? What would it do for your bottom line? And, most importantly, what could it do for our country?

Which begs the question: What will it take for you to change?

This week Apple employees joined the ‘It Gets Better’ campaign in support of gay, lesbian and transgender rights. The campaign got started last year after college student Tyler Clementi jumped to his death from the George Washington Bridge after his roommate used a Webcam to film and broadcast Clementi’s sexual encounter with another man.

In response to these tragic deaths, Dan Savage began the “It Gets Better Project,” a YouTube video collection of testimonials from celebrities, politicians, and regular people telling their own stories or offering support to those who are currently suffering in silence or being bullied.

It is a truly powerful phenomenon when a brand of makes a stand for what it believes in. This is even more true with Apple that has such a loyal fan base built on their deep understanding of its customers needs. It enables those customers to better understand who the brand is, what its core values are and to renew their support for the brands on the basis of the values they share.

Campaigns such as these are no doubt polarizing, and Apple runs the risk of perhaps losing some supporters. But those customers that share the same values will become far more deeply invested in a brand that shows it has courage behind its convictions by sharing its point of view with the marketplace.

As with most things Apple, this is a powerful demonstration in leadership. Yes, there is a distinction between the brand and the employees that appear in this video, but the support of the brand behind the campaigns message is undeniably powerful.

In the social business marketplace brands that hope to build loyal and growing communities do so most effectively when they demonstrate their core values and allow a community to build and engage around it. This approach humanizes the brand and automatically allows it to enter a conversation taking place across social media platforms that both the brand and its customer community care about.

Apple is not alone in its support of the Trevor Project. Other brands such as Google, Levi Strauss & Co., AT&T and Wells Fargo are also involved. Not to mention President Obama and Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. Together they serve as a powerful demonstration of a We First attitude in which brands, employees and consumers partner to bring about positive changes to the thinking and behavior that shapes our world each day.

Sadly Clementi was only one of many teens who took their lives recently after being bullied for their sexual orientation. To lend your support to the Trevor Project, visit their website here and follow their progress on twitter @TrevorProject.

Do you believe its important for brands to stand up for social issues? Do you agree that it makes their supporters more loyal?

The CEO of Activision, Bobby Kotick, appeared on CNN this week and said something very powerful and portentous:

“The audience of ‘Call of Duty‘ is probably greater in terms of size than in any other interactive form of entertainment. If you look at the 500 million people who are on Facebook and the way that people text each other and instant message and use video chat, there is now an evolution of media. Those are the characteristics and attributes that a generation and audiences feel are very important to their media and entertainment experiences.”

What Kotick was doing was drawing a important parallel between the expectations of social media users and gamers, and the growing importance the same complex dynamics across all media. Whether you’re a gamer, advertiser or long form content creator, your audience increasingly expects a multi-dimensional experience in which you simultaneously interact with the content and with each other in a free flowing social conversation.

You see the same multi-dimensional dynamic at work as more and more people watch television with their laptop, tablet or iPad at their fingertips. Not content with one form of content they watch and surf simultaneously filling every second with inbound content that they scan and abandon just as quickly. In fact Nielsen reports:

In Q1 2010, Nielsen data showed that nearly 60% of people were watching TV and using the Internet on their computers simultaneously. With more and more consumers going on online while they watch TV, many viewers have already been engaging in a two-screen experience, primarily using social media for ‘background chatter,’ or activity in the margins.

Not surprisingly media sync technologies (like ABC’s My Generation iPad app using Nielsen’s Media-Sync technology above) are on the rise, but that doesn’t make the challenge for marketers any easier. How do you capture and keep the attention of customers darting across different media?

The challenge for media companies, brands and advertisers alike becomes how do you monetize such behavior and how do you measure it? Each media, whether its the iPad, mobile phone, television, movie, VOD, Xbox, game console, tablet or Hulu, has its own ‘use case’ (why someone is selecting that device) that has to be cross-referenced with the others and then measured as a whole. Only then can you know if your marketing spend is having any impact on share of conversation, brand awareness or sales.

In truth, I doubt there is any definitive answer for two reasons. Firstly because the market is in such a high degree of flux right now that any stake in the ground would be quickly swept away. And secondly, because the very presumption that there should be a simple or singular answer is false. The marketplace now demands that companies demonstrate a long term entrepreneurial spirit that welcomes and accommodates shifting technologies, profit centers and consumer behavior, rather than seeking to carve out, own or monopolize a certain category or media.

As the process of integration accelerates in the next few years, more than likely dominant players will get the chance to monopolize large proportions of consumers behavior seamlessly across different media. Or perhaps an increasingly fragmented media and content marketplace will promote countless micro-communities that must be won and maintained individually?

What is sure is that technological change is accelerating in all directions and, like children playing in a fountain, consumers are reveling in the experience. On such shifting ground the best hope for brands is to know who they are, to clearly define their purpose and to work tirelessly to integrate the daily dynamics at work across the different media.

Do you believe dominant players will emerge or that the marketplace will become increasingly fragmented?