As the holiday season is upon us once again, we’ve put together a new site. One that the idea for it has been simmering in its own starchy juices since last year.

I give to you The Christmas Yam (if Christmas isn’t your holiday of choice, just click the bow in the upper left corner until it works for you).

I won’t lessen the wonder and whimsy of the thing by over explaining it. Instead I invite you to visit the site and just play around. It’s a beautiful interface featuring fantastic photography by RushWade2.

If you tweet, you’ll also want to make sure to follow @thechristmasyam on Twitter. It’s a lovely supplement to the idea that brings it all together. You can also send messages to the Yam by giving it an @reply.

I’ve said enough. Enjoy.

Luckily, there was a voice of reason. Deep Focus, AMC’s interactive agency stepped in and helped show the error of the network’s ways. According to a post on Silicon Alley Insider, a Deep Focus spokesperson said that they advised that in this case it would be “better to embrace the community than negate their efforts.”

As I stated yesterday, these profiles represent a community of people passionate about the Mad Men brand, and as such were acting as powerful ambassadors of the brand through authentic communication. To take the profiles down was a mistake, and I’m glad that they were savvy enough (or at least scared enough of the growing negative online publicity) to reevaluate their decision.

I agree with Adrian Ho’s comment on yesterday’s post that AMC needs to hire these rogues to continue maintenance and development of these online personas. However, even though AMC could then control the quality of the content by offering creative guidelines, they need to be very mindful of the fact that the communications need to remain authentic and not commercially forced. If they were to control these profiles too tightly, they could ruin the integrity of what was created and find themselves back at the top of the online community’s shit list.

Finally, I have to tell you that my wife and I had a fantastic conversation about the takedown decision on the drive home last night. She brought the legal side of the decision into the conversation and made a great case for why the decision was made in the first place. I don’t really think we agreed with our opinions on the decision, but that was what made it great.

I really, REALLY wish we had been able to record it as a podcast because there was lots that she had to say that would be of great interest to everyone following this story. I’d be afraid to try to recreate the conversation too much because the spontaneity of the dialogue would be completely absent, but we may try to record something just because it was definitely worth sharing.

Stupid lawyers, why must you ruin everything?

What I’m referring to is today’s discovery that the Mad Men characters that have been happily coexisting on Twitter for the past few weeks have been unceremoniously taken down as a result of a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) complaint on behalf of AMC Legal.

These profiles were not being maintained by AMC, but by (semi) anonymous individuals with a passion for the characters and the show.

These profiles were brilliant. They interacted with each other and the Twitterverse as a whole. And they did it in character so convincingly that many marketers I know were pretty convinced that this whole thing was being beautifully orchestrated by AMC and perhaps the writers for the show.

Maybe that’s why AMC had the profiles pulled. Perhaps the rogues behind the idea were doing too good a job of pulling it off, and AMC had a “why didn’t we think of that?” moment. However, I’m thinking that’s not the case.

It’s very obvious by this action that AMC has no clue what today’s age of conversational interactivity is all about and that whether companies like it or not — the user is control of brands now. @soseman said it best in a comment on the original blog post:

Rogues don’t do things the way YOU want them to, they do them the way THEY want to do them. But clearly someone with such a passion for any brand just wants to help.

This was a terrible move on behalf of AMC. What initially started as what many of us saw as the best use of Twitter yet for a commercial property has become a black eye on corporate America’s perception of social media and its ability to stifle conversation surrounding its brands at any cost.

// UPDATE: Here’s another excellent point of view on this issue.