Last week I was in Atlanta to support Brent Leary’s Social Business Atlanta event.

When Brent called me last year and said he was putting together an event I said “sign us up” without even knowing what he was planning. I trust Brent and have confidence in his ability to pull together an interesting roster of speakers, participants, and most importantly, an audience to engage with.

Trust… let’s talk about that for a minute. The social technology industry has come up with an entire array of words that ultimately just convey the notion of trust between and institution and constituent, or person to person. These words include the ever popular “authentic” but also words like “transparent”, “open”, and “honest”. Whatever you name you give it, it is TRUST that we are talking about and the ultimate objective for companies using social technologies to engage the world around them should be using trust as a currency for influence.

The night before the event the speakers had a little dinner and over the course of the meal I learned a lot about the audience, the market, and my fellow speakers. After dinner and the next morning I put my deck together and assembled my thoughts into speaking points. I began my presentation by sharing this chain of events and then started with:

“Why did I tell you that at 11:00 last night and 6am this morning I put my deck together for you? Well it’s because I want you to trust me and know that what I am saying to you isn’t boilerplate, scripted, or slickly presented, because if nothing else I say makes an impression upon you let it be this, brands are lies, half truths and good intentions.”

Why are brands lies, half truths and good intentions? Keep in mind that I don’t subscribe to the notion that companies are inherently untrustworthy or that the people in a company, any company, are dishonest… I am part of a company, you probably are as well. The reason why brand statements are untrustworthy is that they reflect what a company, specifically those in the leadership of a company, want to believe about their organization, not what the customers of that institution reflect back to them as their values.

50 years of broadcast advertising has conditioned people to not believe what companies tell them is the truth, which is why Edelman’s trust barometer regularly ranks “people like me” as more trustworthy than any institution. As a society we have a generalized trust issue with institutions of all kinds and yes it should concern you as much as it does me because institutions of government, private enterprise, and everything in between form the backbone of society, and the demise of institutions has historically been a leading indicator for the demise of a society.

I have been thinking a lot about the notion of brands lately, but what I have been focusing on is how the communications revolution we have been participating in, also known as social media technology, is thrusting forward a notion that companies and customers need a better way of talking to each other.

Let’s not call them consumers… please, they are people and people have an inherent desire to be treated as individuals. The construct of consumer is something that companies created to group customers together because they lacked the ability to address each customer individually. Today we can reach customers as individual people so why do we need things like focus groups, demographics, and behavioral segmentation?

Well they do serve a valuable purpose, which is to roll up things which are best addressed in the aggregate, like product definitions and advertising strategy but when it comes to customer service and a collection of marketing functions we need to drill down to the individual level and treat customers as individual people.

Another aspect of this that I find particularly fascinating is that customer are behaving in a very different way that in generations past, not only do they have needs that have to be met with products and services but they also want companies to intersect them on the basis of values. In generations past we cared a lot about what the brand symbolized, the fashion appeal of it, but today we care about the values of the people that make up the company. Wow.

Couple this with another observation I have, which is that brand loyalty is easy to achieve but hard to hold… a direct inverse of what was the case even just a few years ago when brand loyalty was hard to achieve but very durable once acquired. We quickly embrace companies and products with a profound advocacy but one slip and a company quickly gets black listed. From heros to zeros in no time flat…. just ask the Komen Foundation.

So what does all this have to do with the idea that brands are lies? Well it all came together for me with something that Dion Hinchcliffe passed around on Twitter yesterday titled “Culture Eats Strategy for Lunch“. You should read this in it’s entirety but let me quote this one passage for you.

(…in successful companies) Employees are actively and passionately engaged in the business, operating from a sense of confidence and empowerment rather than navigating their days through miserably extensive procedures and mind-numbing bureaucracy.

Just as we need to recalibrate our thinking about customers as people rather than consumers, we need to appreciate that in successful businesses today, and tomorrow’s leaders, the organization exists as a unified body of individuals acting with single minded purpose and empowered with the ability to carry forward on the basis of what is right and wrong for the organization. Wow.

Last night I made a dish that I was truly proud of upon the first bite, and I am not sure whether to be pleased or concerned that I had each of the necessary ingredients in my freezer and produce bin without having to take a single trip to the market. I strive for a well stocked kitchen…

Here’s how it plated out, duck breast with a blueberry sauce on sautéed bok choy, shallots, pancetta, and mushrooms, served with rosemary roasted potatoes.

I paired it with a moderately acidic Sicilian rosé, thinking that the acid would offset the sweetness of the blueberry sauce, however it really deserved something a little stronger to work with the duck breast so in retrospect a traditional syrah would have been a better choice.

The prep on this dish is not complex but there are several things going on in parallel so you have to multitask. Start with the potatoes, I cubed some russets and tossed with olive oil, dried rosemary and thyme, salt and pepper. In a baking dish arrange in a single layer and bake at 400 degrees for 30 minutes, or until they start to brown.

The blueberry sauce is 1/2 cup of apple juice, 1/2 cup of water, 1/2 cup of sugar and 1 pint of fresh blueberries. Bring to a boil and simmer until you achieve the consistency you like.

Sauté 2 or 3 pieces of pancetta until crisp, set aside and reserve the drippings in the pan. Slice 4-5 shallots (depending on size) and add to pan, slice shitake mushrooms coarse (couple of handfuls) and add to pan. When softened you need to remove mushroom and shallot mix and set aside. Slice 5-6 heads of bok choy an add to pan, sauté for 5 minutes or until soft, add back the mushroom and shallot mix and add pancetta (slice thinly). Remove from heat.

Next take the duck breast and season with salt, pepper, dried rosemary, and thyme (same as the potatoes). It is best to let meats come up close to room temperature so that they cook more evenly so I would suggest taking it out of the refrigerator an hour before you plan on cooking it. In a 12″ pan melt 2 tbs of butter and cut with some olive oil to increase the burn point (I used grapeseed oil which has an even higher flash point than olive oil and is pretty neutral in flavor). Heat over medium heat and place the duck breast in fat side down, letting it cook until the fat achieves a moderately brown color, then turn it over and cook until it registers 150 degrees in the middle.

Let the duck rest tented for 5 minutes and warm the bok choy to serving temperature. Slice the duck breast medium thin, plating on a spoonful of the bok choy and drizzle with balsamic vinegar. Top with the blueberry sauce and serve with the potatoes.

Despite having a well documented affection for the kitchen, and being a geek at heart, I do not have much of a gadget streak when it comes to kitchen appliances. In fact, it’s safe to say that I am a skeptic when it comes to kitchen appliances and have a pretty high bar to overcome in order for something to show up in my kitchen.

I have had the same blender for about 15 years and decided it was time to retire it while upgrading my capabilities. I wanted something with more capacity primarily and when I took my wife shopping yesterday I made a trip into Bloomingdale’s appliance section, finding a pretty nifty blender and soup maker… basically it is a blender with a heating element built into it. Very clever.

First question I had was about clean up because a lot of appliances are great to use but a pain in the ass to clean up and stow. I think juicers pretty much all fall into this category… with food processors and blenders not far behind. The heating element on the Cuisinart is a sealed unit that is embedded in the jar, it achieves a connection with 3 sealed pins that mate with a receptacle in the motor base.

Today I used it to make some roasted red pepper soup and the results were nothing short of great. I heated olive oil in the mixer jar, adding diced garlic and shallots to achieve a saute in about 6 minutes. The heating element is very powerful and it preheated the oil in less than a minute. Next I added roasted red pepper and thyme, cooking it in the blender jar for 15 minutes, then simmering for another 3o. When finished I blended it for 3 minutes and what came out was a perfectly pureed red pepper soup steaming hot.

Combining a blender with a heating element is highly logical, I’m surprised that it hasn’t been done (in the mass market) before. I give high marks to the appliance and look forward to using it again… I have some acorn squash that I think will work nicely in a soup with sweet potato and curry.

PS- The glass of wine in the background is a 2008 Karcher Gewürztraminer that paired perfectly with this soup.

I remember the first time I saw someone take a picture of a whiteboard, thinking at the time how clever it was but also how it rendered the expensive whiteboard printing devices we had utterly useless by comparison. Over the years the creeping utility of the camera phone has permeated so many aspects of my day to day life that it’s hard to imagine life without one.

Tonight I was involved in an accident, the driver of the other car ran into me at a stoplight, while I was stopped, and did some pretty significant damage to my vehicle. Almost immediately I began snapping off pictures of the 2 cars and location, and when it came time to swap information I took images of his drivers license and insurance information.

When I arrived home I took a couple of minutes to capture a Google Maps image of where the accident occurred, and I sent my images straight from my camera to my insurance agent, with a bullet point list of what/when/where/how details.

The entire process was so different than if I had been in a similar situation even just a few years ago, and for bonus points I used the flashlight application on my Samsung Galaxy S II to inspect the damage before attempting to drive home…

Gilt Groupe was one of the pioneers… the concept is simple, create scarcity for highly desirable merchandise in a time or unit limited online sale that relied on social channels for promotion. Wham. Slam dunk. It’s been all the rage in online retail and shows no sign of abating.

Gilt has expanded into multiple categories…

HauteLook quickly followed (and then got acquired).

Amazon launched their MyHabit site with sales starting at 9am PST every day and quickly selling out of the most popular sizes.

American Express launched VentePrivee, which is probably better described as a joint venture between Amex and VentePrivee.

Bluefly recently launched Belle & Clive, which is interesting because of what it isn’t… exclusively devoted to high volume fashion brands densely packed in pixel packed pages, instead focusing on streamlined design in the Gilt template that included mainstream brands but also high end fashion brands, so if you want to buy your significant other an Hermes angora robe coat for $3,300, this is your site.

Ideeli.com is another popular flash sale site, as is RueLaLa.com.

I’m surprised that Net-a-Porter.com, a high end fashion retailer with a mens focused site called MrPorter.com, hasn’t launched a flash sale site, although they do have a site called OutNet.com that mimics many of the attributes of a flash sale site.

Look for retail sites in all categories to get in on this, and what is interesting is that these sites are not necessarily the lowest price options available online. If you look at the positioning closely what you find is merchandise selection, private sale exclusivity (brick and mortar retail has used the notion of private and pre-sale for years, this is not a new thing), shipping and return convenience, and yes, good prices all forming the differentiating factors that separate flash sale from traditional online retail.

I’ve had a long relationship with Patelco Credit Union, they were the first financial services company I became a customer of when I first entered the work force and even though my needs have exceeded the services they offer I do rely on them for a credit card that I use almost exclusively. I like the idea of community banks and have tried to support them over the years.

A few months ago I started having problems with my credit card where transactions were being declined and only after calling the bank did I learn that a fraud block had been placed on my credit card. After having this happen a handful of times, with vendors that have repeat transactions in my history and therefore should not have triggered any alerts, I asked the customer service agent what was going on. I learned that Patelco had replaced their existing fraud detection service with a new vendor, almost precisely when I started having problems.

Here’s the thing about fraud detection on credit cards… it doesn’t protect you as a consumer, it protects the credit card issuer. Fraudulent transactions on anyone’s credit card can be disputed and reversed by the card holder, therefore fraud detection services are designed to protect the bank from excessive exposure as a result of disputes that are unrecoverable from merchants who are as much a victim of fraud as the cardholder.

After having experienced, if I recall correctly, the 8th incident this morning (weekend purchases seem to be the culprit) I have had enough. Patelco needs to work with their vendor to fix what are some obvious weaknesses in their system because I my patience is at it’s limit and my relationship with this institution will end if improvements are not made.

To add insult to injury, the most ironic aspect of this running saga is that I recently was the victim of real credit card fraud and it was me, not Patelco, that discovered it… so their track record is 8 false positives, zero legitimate alerts, and 4 missed actual fraud events. This is not a record they should be proud of.

I have a unique background among small company (I’m loath to write “startup”, Get Satisfaction is more substantial than that) executives in that I have venture capital, and very large company to very small company experience. I don’t think this makes me more or less prepared for the daily challenges, it just gives me a different perspective than most people and it’s something I have been reflecting on over the New Year break (I’m still on it with my family).

There are few overnight successes in this industry, which sees the rare success among a sea of failures as a result of a thousand incremental developments and course corrections. The worst thing, I am convinced, that any executive can say to the market or his/her team is “if we just do this” because a single product feature or customer win or positive review or key hire will not make a company.

The long hard slog to a product that can deliver compelling customer value and withstand competitive attack is what successful companies are made from, and while it sounds a whimsical and naive when you consider all of the shitty products that are commercially successful for reasons that have nothing to do with customers, I’ll still take it.

Coming from a big, very big, company I always resented the fight against inertia that resulted in all but certain late arrival with the next new thing. Big companies are slow because of the number of people that have to be brought into alignment to do anything… an abundance of resources that are already committed to other things which would likely be affected by something new and different.

Another asset and liability for large companies is the large customer bases that they already have, customers which generally dislike disruptive changes to things that are perceived to already work. Sure you have all those captive customers to sell to but what you end up selling them is a compromise controlled by what you would like to abandon in the quest for new and better.

Ironically, small companies have a similar inertia problem but it is the reverse image with the same effect… instead of having an abundance of resources that are unavailable and a customer base that resists change, you have to fight an abundance of resources that are unavailable because of company focus and capital constraints, and a customer base that, generally, demands more progress than you can deliver.

This is where the “just one thing” argument comes into play. The Run Like Hell startup management culture creates a really complex dynamic where you are constantly balancing multiple outcomes and all too often the desire for singular focus as an antidote to complexity results in people saying “if we just do this” when in fact the one thing they are proposing just leads to a new “just one thing”.

Complexity is the other demon that small companies fight but it’s misguided to thing that stripping away complexity will result in something that is inherently more appealing. Things are not complex because someone set out to make it that way, complexity is quite often the result of things just being, well, complex; stripping away of things that are not considered “core” or “on model” may sound great in a powerpoint presentation but for the people who are facing customers and prospective customers every day this often results is something that is a lot less compelling and appeals to a much smaller audience.

As I go into 2012 I am striving to take on new challenges with a holistic attitude. If I start with putting what is best for customers first, team stability and accomplishment second, and avoid saying “if we just do this one thing…” then I think I will be able to close out 2012 with a sense of success that I can feel proud of.

Gamification… the buzzword is all the rage and one thing I can’t help but observe is that it means different things to everyone you talk with, even though the core concept of creating incentives for users of an app or service to do specific tasks is pretty well accepted.

Here’s what the functional breakdown means to me. This is not a complete list, please add as you see fit by posting a comment.

Challenges: Defined missions to complete or goals to accomplish, with awards or virtual items earned upon completion.

Points: Basic virtual currency. Points can be spent on virtual items or simply accrued.

Avatar System: When people create something it’s uniquely theirs and it expresses their individuality, which reinforces their connection to the app or service. Avatars are the most basic mechanism for doing this… and are a virtual good that can be acquired with points or currency.

Avatar Catalogs: Enable a user to buy virtual goods and customize an avatar.

Trophy Case: Show a user all the available awards, the ones that they’ve completed, and their progress.

Levels: Enables users to earn defined experience or level status and attain rankings to demonstrate their status within the community.

Leaderboards: Enables the app or site to keep track of, and publicize, the activities of end users based on statistics determined by app.

Canvas: Enables users to place graphical assets in a 2D space and customize a virtual representation or space, such as an avatar, or virtual room.

Groups: People like being part of something bigger than just themselves, and competing with small groups of individuals or as teams. Group activities compliment individual activities and can be used in combination in order to achieve new level status.

Competitions: A way to allow users to compete against each other, and mini-challenges that users can create and send to each other. 

Gifting: Enable users to buy each other gifts for their avatars, digital canvas (virtual spaces).

Trivia: Embed a multiple-choice game widget into a site, and spin up new games on any topic you like. Slideshows are another example, increases clicks and drives simple engagement with content submitted by users.

Friends: Encourage selective participation and promote. Friends have denote strong and weak connections to other users on the system, inform group participation, and provide audience for user submitted contests and challenges.

Social Network Connectors: Enables users to enable/disable posting to, for example, Twitter and Facebook from your site, and displays “missions” for users to complete on respective social networks.

Star Rating: Enables users to rate pieces of content and see the average rating by other users.

Comments: A comment wall on your User’s profile pages. Asynchronous communication gives users additional reasons to check back to see how the conversation is evolving.

News Feed: Enables a continuous feed of the actions of various end users.

Notifier: Provides feedback and notifications to end users, such as to alert users to points that can be earned or, challenges that can be undertaken, or site features that should be investigated.

It’s the time of year when predictions are thrown out left and right, so in keeping with the spirit I have put together a list of things I would like to see happen in the year ahead.

1. The Business of Social Networks: We have seen a coalescing of business models form around social networks and not surprisingly the vast majority of them are evolutions of advertising models. This will work but as companies demand more (see next prediction) the ad driven model will evolve in ways not previously seen. What that will be I do not have a clue but sponsored tweets and ad campaigns simply cannot be anything more than a starting point.
2. Brand Marketing Meets PPC: In most companies marketing exists in two forms, brand management and promotional marketing. On the latter we have seen a revolution in how companies advertise, increasingly around the notion of pay-per-click (PPC) that provides immediate and detailed performance metrics upon which ROI can be calculated. This level of performance management has not existed on the brand side but it’s coming because brands have an inherent desire to manage brand metrics to the degree that they measure online campaigns, and social factors into brand benchmarks as much as campaign objectives.
3. Social as a Service: If you are a SaaS application there is an increasing portfolio of services that you can plug into your application to bring social capabilities as a layered service. There is another very nuanced view of this that speaks to the increasing sophistication of analytics services that measure social activities that contribute to application success in the market.
4. 3 Mobile Form Factors: If you follow the mobile space you have no doubt paid attention to the rise of the super-size smart phone with 4.3″ and larger displays. For app developers there will have to be a standardization around template sizes and simply saying “tablets and smartphones” isn’t adequate. My view is that 10″ tablets, 4.3″ smartphones to 7″ tablets, and sub 4″ smartphones will co-exist as separate UX development paths.
5. Integration Layers Matter: When it comes to social and SaaS applications a big challenge for consumers and developers alike is integration of activity streams and social services across platforms. Somebody will figure this out and deliver, to developers first, a service layer that normalizes and routes social activities across services based on rules and contexts.
6. Customer Support is (increasingly) the New Marketing: Okay, this one is self-serving but dovetails nicely with some widely held views about how company-to-customer engagement is driving more than just customer sat but also revenue. Leaders in every business segment are figuring out that competitive leadership is directly linked with how they sell more stuff to the customers they already have.
7. Loyalty Programs and Virtual Currencies: Everyone is familiar with the concept of loyalty programs, and their shortcomings. Virtual currencies are gaining in awareness and consumption inside games but there is a convergence happening with loyalty programs whereby points exist as just another currency with an exchange mechanism.
8. SoLoMo: Social Local Mobile is on for 2012. The proliferation of location aware mobile devices and a service layer that enables mobile apps to take advantage of these capabilities is creating an entirely new technology segment that valuable companies will arise from.
9. Messaging Explosion Continues Unabated: With Facebook giving companies a private messaging capability to reach fans we see yet another vehicle through which people-to-people and company-to-people communication will take place. If nothing else what this suggests is that people like talking on a phone less than ever.
10. People Will Buy Stuff Through Facebook: Actually this prediction speaks very broadly about how retail is moving outside of a purely web experience. Facebook commerce is going to be a big deal, and mobile already is so there is no reason to expect that retail channels will consolidate… the opposite is more likely, multi-channel retail will become mega-multichannel.

The nice folks at BabbaCo sent my children a BabbaBox, which is a giftbox stocked full of projects, reading, and activities built around a theme.

Targeted to 3-6 year old boys and girls, the BabbaBox is well put together and features imaginative projects and storytelling activities designed to stimulate and engage young children on a values based theme. This month the theme is gratitude and the activities include drawing and painting activities as well as a really neat camera that kids can use to take pictures of the things they are grateful for, assembling the images in a “gratitude journal” that they can share.

All of the included items are very high quality and reflect thoughtfulness in their selection. The box itself is fun and my youngest son, in the target age group, was very excited to open it.

Available as monthly subscription, several options, and as a gift option the BabbaBox is clever and imaginative. There is also a tie-in to games and apps that you can download.