Blessings and thanks to The Daily Beast for reporting that Story Worldwide, the agency that brings you this blog, has launched an experiment to use the social web to find a true, authentic and sustainable brand for the Republican Party, presently a total and humiliating disaster. To join the struggle to find the new soul of the G.O.P., go to the site we've created: Call Me, G.O.P. (as in "Call me anytime for help or advice").

Here at Post-Advertising (and at Story), we're deeply interested in brands, of course. We continually question how best to create and launch a great brand, or how to turnaround a profoundly troubled one in the era of post-advertising, web 2.0 and all that. A lot of folks out there, tired to death of shallow or phony advertising claims, have come to understand "brand" as a euphemism for "slick lie." And such skepticism isn’t entirely unwarranted; brand is a statement of identity, and such statements can, of course, be either true or false. But in the post-advertising age, where everything is fighting for attention and openness and honesty are valued above all else, a brand simply has to encompass the most resonant central truth about a product, a company or an organization. Your brand must be a compelling story about why you exist, or you will cease to exist.

Now, it's a fact, Jack, that there is no more troubled brand in America than the Republican Party. Nobody knows the G.O.P.'s story anymore; it doesn't have any apparent reason to exist. Voters are disavowing the party in droves. Nearly 4 in 10 Republicans don't even like the Republican Party, Gallup tells us.

Prominent South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham actually told ABC News that he doesn't want the G.O.P. to be a party of "angry white guys...that nobody listens to." So we know that "We're angry and white!" is not a promising Republican brand position. And it's equally evident that something less angry, like favoring taxpayer-paid flights to Argentina to get laid, also isn't the rallying cry to rebuild a Republican majority. (Remember what we said about humiliating?)

Where should the G.O.P. turn for an authentic new brand at this moment? Given the widely accepted truth that brands now belong to their audiences, not to their marketing departments, we'd argue that the social web is not just the best place, but likely the only place where the Republicans can find a core story around which to rebuild. So that's what the Call Me, G.O.P. experiment is all about.

The Republicans, for better and worse, are not paying us to do this. They are NOT a client. Many of the folks at Story who are involved in this are NOT Republicans (although some are). (This experiment is the first to be fully funded by our newly founded Story Innovation Labs, our internal R&D arm, dedicated to testing new aproaches and tools before making them available to our clients.) The idea: If the G.O.P. wants a bigger tent instead of an ever-shrinking one, they need to reach out to everybody for ideas and comments. So tha's who we're reaching out to: everybody.

Over the next eight weeks, we're going to use the tools of the social web and some tools of our (Story's) own to listen to and analyze people's ideas and conversations and to craft the story that can rebrand the G.O.P. into a viable force in American politics once more. As a (very) liberal Obama supporter, I'm ambivalent about this whole enterprise. But my (very) conversative partner Jim Small (@Jim_CallMeGOP) adores the idea and is tweeting and blogging hard for the future of the G.O.P. (Jim tells me that Michael Steele is now following Jim on Twitter. So the party is listening.)

If, like me, you're one of the 6 or 7 of every 10 Americans (depending on which poll you cite) who do not care much for the G.O.P., you may be thinking, "Why should I help these bozos — the party of W., Cheney and Limbaugh? They made the mess they're in. Let them wallow in it for a few decades." I'm not saying that's the wrong thing to think, but try thinking this, as well: Democracy depends on vigorous debate. So we barely qualify as a democracy when we have two functioning national parties. What's going to become of us if we only have one?

As Barack Obama said at a press conference back in February, "...the strongest democracies flourish from frequent and lively debate, but they endure when people of every background and belief find a way to set aside smaller differences in service of a greater purpose." If that doesn't move you to help out, I don't know what will.

Whatever happens, we're all going to learn a lot about how to make the best use of the social web — blogs, Twitter, Facebook, email, and on and on — to help brands find their true souls and tell their most powerful stories in the much altered terrain of modern communications. So even if you're apolitical and just fond of marketing experiments, join us and follow the action at Call Me, G.O.P.