Many hands have been wrung about the future of music. The music industry has seen year over year of increasingly steep declines for a decade. Think about that for a minute: in 2001, the business fell by 3%. In 2002, it fell another 11%. In 2003, it recovered slightly. But the dead cat bounce was confirmed in the subsequent years. The industry has posted double digit declines in 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009. In 1999, the industry was $14.3 billion. In 2009, it was less than half – $6.3 billion.

Can you hear the clanging death bells? Music will surely die! This fate has been proclaimed everywhere, but, of course, misses the point completely. If we learned nothing else from the housing bust, let us at least remember that more isn’t always better – sometimes it’s just more.Often, growth of an industry is confused with the health of that industry. While it’s true that in the aggregate, growth of a nation is essential, the prosperity of the country does not depend on that growth happening in certain sectors. In fact, another basic premise of economics is that creative destruction is good. Not that it’s easy, mind you.

Most recently, Megan McArdle wrongly declares that we are “ruining the future of entertainment” in her May column in The Atlantic. She hedges a lot in the piece, but ultimately worries that we will kill the industry before it has a chance to reinvent itself.

And, therein lies the mixup: McArdle confuses the music industry with the art of music. She uses the declining size of the industry to wring her hands about the future of the art form. And, of course, this is a completely false comparison. By every objective measure, the amount of recorded music that is created has exploded right along with the imploding music industry. MySpace and YouTube are likely the largest legal distributors of music in the world right now, but they are not considered part of the music industry. We are exposed to vastly more professionally-created music than ever before. From satellite radio, to Pandora, to playlists in malls, to TV soundtracks, to baseball stadiums, music is more interwoven into the fabric of our lives than ever. Lest I forget the 250 million iPods hanging off people’s ears.

Music is just fine. It’s the industry that is having trouble.

But, it seems that the demise of the industry might be very good for music as a whole. After all, the business has always been built on the mega-hit. Big labels invest R&D in lots of small acts, and a few of them break out and sell millions of units. Those that break out make tons of cash for the whole label. Those that don’t end up with huge bills that they can’t ever cover. For a fascinating account of how bands are more like indentured servants, check out former Semisonic drummer Jacob Schlichter’s book, in which he lays out how you can sell hundreds of thousands of records, and still not make any money.

Even more compelling is the lengths that the music industry had to go to to keep juicing the books. If you are concerned with the art form of music, I would think you would be appalled by the way the most important records decreased in artistic integrity as time went on. The best selling albums worldwide have become increasingly inane and embarrassing for everyone. Here are the worldwide 30 million+ sellers in date order (I took out greatest hits compilations to emphasize the quality issue):

Especially in the final years of the music industry, I’m struck by the vapidity of big selling music. Could anyone seriously claim that Shania Twain’s Come On Over or the Backstreet Boys’ Millennium will make a lasting impact on the cultural landscape (and this coming from someone that owns both albums)?

So, if the fortunes of the industry do not align with the fortunes of the art, then how do we evaluate the future of entertainment? One clear trend we can predict is that more people will be involved in the creation of music. From elementary school concerts, to teenage phenoms, to songs about guitar breaking, individuals are making music for their own circles – not for the masses.

The guitar breaking saga is actually a great example of what the future holds for music. By now, everyone knows the social media angle: Dave Carroll’s guitar was broken by United Airlines. He got the runaround instead of a reimbursement. So, he took his plight to the masses with a trio of songs about how United broke his guitar. The songs went viral, reaching a total of more than 8 million views.

The business side of the story is just as fascinating: Carroll was on the road playing roadhouse gigs more than 6 months out of the year previously. After his social media success, he scaled up his operations and hired several new people to handle CD order fulfillment, plus a web and marketing team to spin his brief success into something longer lasting.

Perhaps music just got too complacent. And a huge industry disruption was just the thing to restore the soul and the passion to the art.

If that’s the case, I look forward to the future of music – it will be bigger and brighter than we can imagine.

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In The Great Reset, Richard Florida asks the question that all policy makers should be asking: what happens after a Depression?

This shockingly simple question opens the door to look at history as a guide for what is to come for the U.S. economy. Florida reviews two different  economic slowdowns in American history, the Long Recession of the 1870s, and the Great Depression of the 1930s, and compares those to our most recent financial meltdown of 2007-present.

While there are a number of accounts of what went wrong, and whose fault it was that the economy tanked (Big greedy banks! The dollar-hungry, exchange-rate fixing Chinese! Government’s insatiable quest for higher levels of home ownership! Homeowners’ binge-spending, house-as-ATM profligacy!), Florida largely leaves the causes of the crisis aside. This is really for the better. Florida is a metropolitan sociologist – primarily concerned with what makes cities, and what makes them better.

But, Florida hits on a larger theme that has so far been ignored by most Great Recession books: what now?

We’re on the back side of the crisis. Even as the recession grinds on, the causes are in the rearview mirror. So, what should we do to move the U.S. forward into the next wave of growth? How can we set the stage for the next era of the U.S. economy?

His answer is somewhat surprising, given much of the conversation about the economy. But, it is also in line with Florida’s decade-long crusade to understand fundamental truths about economic development. Florida recommends a sensible course of public works projects designed to promote the country’s strongest assets: our megalopolises.

To make the case, Florida looks back at his breakout book, The Rise of the Creative Class. Much hay has been made trying to tear holes in Florida’s metrosexual approach to city development. Critics oversimplify his ideas, and claim that he boldly declares that cities just need to throw open the doors for gays and artists, and magically, their meatpacking districts will turn from areas where actual sides of beef are carved, to the trendiest nightclubs – fueling the city’s growth (granted, Florida stoked these conversations in introducing this concept originally).

Of course, what critics confuse is cause and effect. Cities aren’t successful because they attract gays. They attract gays because they are successful. You don’t build a nightlife in order to grow. A nightlife comes out of having a dynamic cityscape.

When I studied under Florida at George Mason, in 2006, Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat came out, in which Friedman boldly declared that it would be better to be an A student in India, than a C student in America. This, of course, was in direct contrast to the world order for several generations previously.

Florida responded with an important clarification. The world wasn’t flat, he said. Instead, the world was spiky. When we look at where economic development is most advanced, the trend is clear: economies are more focused on cities (all over the world) than in any time in history. The C student in Shanghai has more in common with the C student in London than the A student in a rural Chinese town.

Florida looks at spikiness in more detail in The Great Reset. And the results are striking. 85% of the economic output of the U.S. is focused in just 7 “megaregions.” These 7 regions have names that only a sociologist could love: Char-lanta (Charlotte, NC to Atlanta, GA), Chi-Pitts (Minneapolis, Chicago, Pittsburg, Cleveland), and Bos-Wash (Boston, New York, Washington, DC). But the implications are clear: if you live in one of these regions, you have a reasonable chance of being successful. If you don’t, you won’t.

But, of course, all of these regions face some challenges. Mostly, Florida looks at these challenges from the standpoint of restricting economic activity. His logic is sound: if economic activity is now primarily driven by ideas, and propagated by personal networks, then giving people the ability to access their networks is the best way to spur ideas, and therefore growth. This brings in the strongest recommendation of Florida’s: improve transportation options for these regions. His answer? High speed rail that interlinks these megaregion corridors.

Train policy has always been anachronistic in this country. It seems anathema to spend millions of dollars on resources that, until now, basically no one has used. Even the Acela line is a money-loser. But, within the context of recovery after recession, the notion is a logical conclusion. After the Long Recession of the 1870s, cities grew, driven in part by streetcars that pulled disparate neighborhoods into a central downtown for commercial activity. After the Depression, the suburbs were a convenient live/work alternative because of the new highway systems. Older suburbs were about 10 minutes from the city center in the 1950s (Can you imagine a 10-minute commute from Arlington, VA into Dupont Circle?! Wonder of wonders!) . So, the original suburbs were a natural outgrowth for construction to fuel the economy out of the Depression in the 40s and 50s.

The transportation infrastructure has twice set the foundation for economic recovery to accrue to cities. There is no reason to think that it won’t work a third time. And, with Florida’s more expansive view of megaregions, he sets a new framework for defining what a successful regional transportation policy would look like.

He doesn’t spend much time talking through how to get these projects done. The Washington DC “purple line” – the ephemeral second ring subway line that would connect the outer-lying suburbs of Maryland – has been in the planning stages for more than 20 years. In Portland, OR, the outcries from discussions of expanding the I-5 bridge between Oregon and Washington is over 15 years old, and no closer to resolution. Regional, county, city, and municipal governments must work together to make an integrated transportation system happen. But, with the carrot of federal transportation dollars coming forward in a new round of economic stimulus, now is the right time for regions to come together.

The other conclusion that Florida does not spell out, but is very obvious, is that the concept of living near your work is not a new idea, but instead a return to tradition. The suburbs were an anomaly in human history. Separating your home location from your work location was a result of having increased access to transportation – this artificially introduced a false incentive to split up these activities.

Now, the costs outweigh the benefits for many urbanites. More and more, it makes sense to work from home, to put your office on the first floor, and have an apartment on the second floor, or commute in to a shared office space only occasionally. In previous eras, people both worked and lived on the farm, or had their merchant shop directly below the bedroom.

It’s also clear that separating our work life from our personal life was also an anachronism in human history. Historically, people are defined by their work – after all, many last names are actually professions; the Smiths came from a family of blacksmiths or silversmiths somewhere; the Goldbergs came from bankers at some point.

So, the 120 years of the industrial era was one long anomaly. Leaving your work on the factory line at 5 PM, and not thinking about it again until 9 AM the next morning was the result of needing lots bodies, and not many brains. Now we need the brains way more than the bodies.

Which brings us to Florida’s final point: we have an obligation to use all of those brains better. Harnessing the great ideas from the janitor and the lunch lady are the way to bring those people forward from this economic shift. And systematizing that process is the way to reset our economy for a new wave of growth.

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The magazine industry is running a new campaign that declares that people surf online, but “swim in magazines.” On the one hand, it’s a rather obvious way to distinguish the (in some circles) questionable future of magazines. On the other hand, the ads are right.

The experience of reading is not the same online as it is in a serious magazine or a book. Take, for example, The Atlantic. Reading The Altantic is highly stimulating. Each 5,000 or 10,000 word essay is dense with ideas. Writers effectively share knowledge by carefully unpacking ideas, laying them side by side, and deciphering their import for the reader. The linkages and interconnections that are so obvious to the thinker need to be painstakingly parsed for the reader, to ensure that they can follow the natural flow of the concepts.

(Granted, sometimes it’s cloying, as if the author wants you to believe that they are incredibly pithy all the time. They seem to say, “See how I can pull in disparate references to the success of anti-feudal 12^th century city-state experiments and Meryl Streep’s It’s Complicated character standing for a new breed of female empowerment – all in the same paragraph?” And, the pressure it puts on regular conversation is tremendous. Because, naturally, Atlantic readers start to think that all conversation should be as stimulating and engaging as one of these magnum opi, with insights coming at the rate of about 6 per minute, and a grand unifying theory concretely developed by about the 10 minute mark in the conversation.)

Online, the experience is absolutely the opposite of this. The user is put in charge of their own path. Often, this means that they are guide-less in the jungle of information, related links, search results, crowd-sourced Wikipedia, and gads of uninformed opinion.

Reading a long magazine article or book  is so completely different from online reading, it’s really a different type of activity. Maybe the UX concept of information foraging should widely replace the term “reading” online.

Writing online is largely about collecting information. It’s not about sharing knowledge.

Now, I’m not denying the importance of access to information. When Wolfram Alpha can tell you in 2 seconds if you could save 15% on your car insurance, that’s a net gain. It’s a clear win for everyone.

But, information does not equal intelligence. And access to information does not mean understanding. In The Shallows, Nicholas Carr discusses how flitting from one site to the next, without destination, without signposts, and without context, ultimately leads to poorer recall of facts, and lesser understanding of concepts as a whole.

And this is one of the central challenges of user-centered design. Everything is focused on task-completion success. “What is the user trying to do?” “Are they able to get what they want easily?” Certainly, that’s a helpful model for an e-commerce site. But, if you’re trying to impart  understanding, pathing and breadcrumbs don’t help much. After all, how is the user expected to know where to start, if they don’t know anything about the subject matter?

Enter resources like Demand Media, which churns out thousands of new pieces of content every day. eHow fills a gap in information, by outlining in the broadest and least knowledgeable ways, how something works. If you want to learn how to make an apple pie, Demand Media’s solution might look like this:

1. Locate a recipe book that contains a dessert section.
2. Find the recipe for apple pie.
3. Follow the recipe to completion in order to successfully make a pie.

But, really, you don’t learn anything from this. If you were an alien, this might be a helpful framework. But, no one is empowered to actually make a pie at this point.

So, the user returns to their search box, and looks for “apple pie recipe.” Now we are getting somewhere – millions of pie recipes populate. Still, these are unlikely to get a delicious pie made. The recipe and instructions likely contain instructions on making a crust, like:

“spread out the flour, and slowly work in the room temperature butter, adding a slight bit of water at a time.”

This is correct, but still doesn’t give the user much information about how to be successful. Pie crust is supposed to be flaky. The way to get flaky crust is to have the whole crust barely held together, so the bonds of the water are so light that it causes natural breaks in the sheet of dough to allow crisping on multiple layers. But, without explaining that to the user, there is no way for them to know how good of a crust they were making. Or how to tell when it was just barely held together enough, so they should stop mucking about with it.

Information on making pies is easy. The knowledge of how to make a good pie is difficult to give to someone. That’s why pastry chefs can charge $10.00 for one slice of really great pie – it’s hard to make a good piece of pie. And it’s extremely difficult to make a great one.

To solve this problem, we don’t need more data. We need a better system of moving someone from low knowledge to high knowledge. In short, we need to figure out how to be better teachers.

Thank you for sharing!

In 2006, bees started disappearing at an unprecedented scale. Entire hives would suddenly be abandoned by all of the worker bees.

The phenomena was so dramatic, and so startling, it was dubbed “colony collapse disorder.”

Since 2006, scientists have studied colony collapse disorder to determine why hives that were thriving suddenly started failing. The condition spread to hives in Europe, and possibly in Asia.

If you run marketing programs, you may see the similarities between bees and your own work. For long stretches, marketing programs can run in a pretty predictable way. Inputs of campaigns, media buys, research and targeting produce predictable results in terms of leads, sales, or brand awareness. Inputs lead to outputs. Just like bees use pollen to create honey.

But sometimes, suddenly, and for no obvious reason, marketing programs fail. This is “marketing collapse disorder.” And it’s happening now at an alarming rate.From 2002-2010, marketing programs were fairly predictable. Just slowly shift dollars toward digital for direct response, while maintaining  strong TV and print buys to reinforce brand messaging. Newspapers slowly lost market share, but that was due to local dollars moving online more than any other segment. TV took a slight hit in 2008, but came back in 2009 with the first green shoots of possible growth.

Digital dollars moved into increased paid search and funnel optimization activities. This provided strong incremental positive results, and therefore was easy to justify, easy to sell through, and most organizations made progress on a YOY basis.

But, now we are starting to see the effectiveness of the traditional means suddenly and dramatically fall off. Now, an increase in budget toward the “same old” planning and thinking might not improve response at all. The reasons for this are becoming better understood, just as with our bees.

Malnutrition: With our bees, research indicates that increasing homogenization of  crops has caused hives to rely too much on just one source of food. This leads to malnutrition that builds over time, and suddenly weakens the entire colony.

Marketing programs are also finding that a stagnant diet of 30-second TV spots and more dollars into PPC may be just as bad as a junk food diet. Overeating in these areas will not produce better results. A balanced marketing program must include dedicated resources to social media efforts that can prove themselves out and scale. While consumers move into these new media rapidly, marketers have been feeling the space out and experimenting.

Over the past two years, this has caused a larger and larger disconnect between marketing messages, and their target audiences. Consumer expectations are in a rapid state of change right now. Targeted, filtered information is becoming the norm in their personal life, but marketing has lagged behind. So, suddenly, consumer expectations have left traditional advertising vehicles lacking.

Immunosuppression: Bees may be suffering from suppressed immune systems, making the entire colony vulnerable to new disease. New disease can be passed quickly from one bee to the next.

Marketing programs found that they were not immune to a large scale, long global recession. The current economic crisis foretells a fundamental shift in economic priority for both businesses and consumers. Information and sentiment can pass virally from one consumer to the next. This means that marketing messages must quickly develop new tools and new immunities. As consumers evolve, marketing programs suddenly find that a stronger viral message – more personal, more relevant, and more shareable – is necessary.

Pesticides: There is some evidence that bees have absorbed new pesticides that were harmful to them, and spread those pesticides through their hives.

Marketing programs also have to deal with new and more sophisticated ways to get rid of the “pests” – that is, old “spray and pray” messaging. Blanket messaging has suddenly been seen as “not relevant to me,” which is the kiss of death for any campaign. Time spent on social networking sites continues to soar – now more than six hours a month, and growth is accelerating. Advertisers have not kept pace with this shift, which means that consumers are effectively running away from marketing messages, and toward peer-created media, more and more.

Fortunately, there are some recommended solutions for both the bees and for our beleaguered marketing programs:

Do not combine strong colonies with collapsing colonies: This will ensure the demise of both bee colonies.

Similarly, allow successful programs the ability to thrive, without the burden of being lashed to underperforming programs. If your TV campaign is not driving the web traffic you expected, let the web team create some different, engaging solutions that target a narrower, but higher consideration consumer. Don’t make both programs fail.

Make sure bees get a balanced diet: Use a synthetic sugar formula to ensure that bees get the right nutrients.

Unfortunately, marketing programs don’t have sugar formulas. But they do have the ability to flexibly respond to information from your customers. Research into customer or prospect behavior early and often. Social media monitoring gives you early warning signs about shifting sentiment and information resources for your target market. A balanced diet of understanding and strategic experimentation sets you up to move from one success to the next. A steady influx of social media programs is a crucial part of that diet.

2010 marks a dramatic shift in the ecosystem for marketers. Consumers are more fragmented, and they are not going to re-consolidate. Without some dramatic interventions into your marketing program, you run the risk of colony collapse disorder. Don’t wait until it’s too late.

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E-commerce is hitting a wall. The growth in e-commerce is slowing, and it’s slowing fast (yes, that is a pun). From 2008 to 2013, the rate of e-commerce growth is projected to slow from 13% to 8%. Now, please don’t think me a Chicken Little. I’m not sounding a death knell. Obviously, growth is still growth.

But, if you work in the e-commerce sector, you are in for a bumpy ride. Until recently, the sector has seen 20%+ growth rates for years, which has made most e-tailer’s jobs pretty easy. The criteria has been pretty simple: have compelling product; have a trustworthy website;  offer good deals and service. Pretty simple formula for 20%+ growth.

But, Americans’ buying habits have largely shifted, and the incremental shifts that are still to come reflect the fact that the halcyon days are behind us. From now on, e-commerce teams will have to eke out gains just like everyone else.

There are also a number of headwinds facing e-commerce retailers:

• Paid search competition continues to grow: As marketing budgets move out of traditional media into online, there are more competitors bidding on your keywords. That increases your cost for visitors. Even if you maintain conversion rates, that’s still an increase in the cost per sale.
• More and more competition is coming from other e-tailers: With the cost of starting cloud-based services, it’s easier than ever to get a store up and running. And more firms are looking for markets to disintermediate. More chances to try someone else means more chances for you to lose the sale.
• Additional competition is coming directly from your suppliers: Brands are taking their messaging directly to customers. But, increasingly, they can also complete fulfillment and retailing as well as any other partner. Apple has a strong history of this, and other technology outfits, like Dell and Microsoft, are following suit. With just a little bit of lean fulfillment in place, they can keep the retail margin for themselves. Don’t think they won’t try.
• Social is throwing everything up in the air – again: Just when you thought you could relax, social media jumps into the fray, mashing up and mucking about your customer data. The challenge in this is that just as buying preferences were starting to settle in for consumers, they will have the ability to revisit every decision about where and what to buy, based on tons of unsolicited feedback from their friends

Fortunately, there are some emerging ways to continue to differentiate yourself as an e-commerce provider. More and more, the focus will be on creating personal, relevant experiences. That means using the social graph to influence shopping. It also means narrowing your niche and speaking just to your core audience. If others happen to stop by, that’s fine. But, the core experience must stay targeted.

At the recent Video Commerce Summit, organized by Liveclicker, a number of practitioners discussed how they are solving these challenges using video.

Historically, there are lots of challenges with video online, including technical hurdles for encoding and decoding, bandwidth and compression quality issues, value-add considerations. But, necessity is the mother of invention, and e-tailers need a way to keep raking up big gains. It’s clear that the hurdles are getting more manageable all the time (thanks, HTML5, and video handlers like Liveclicker themselves).

It’s also clear that e-tailers are increasingly looking to video to solve a number of the challenges outlined above.

• Video personalizes the shopping experience: Hosts show off new products. Users “like me” give a personal touch. And video solidifies brand identity in a way that a static site just can’t. Emery Skolfield from HSN had some great case studies of this.
• Video socializes shopping: Mall hauling (individual users showing off purchases on YouTube) is an extremely social experience. Jordan Blum from BeautyChoice.com is working with vloggers to create makeup how-to videos from rising talent that makes every experience social in order to build their personal brands.  And overlaying social “like me” data with video reviews is also an effective way to target relevant information to specific users.
• Video builds new habits: BJ Fogg talked about using different types of video to target first time visitors, and direct them to return regularly, and eventually to make a site visit part of their daily routine. One of his experiments showed that a personal video increased response rate from 0% to 47% – the immediate nature and personal message of video transcended the inertia of the user to click away to the next experience. He has some great resources at BehaviorGrid.org.
• For now, video is a differentiator: E-tailers are pushing forward with video content, and learning a lot. Deborah Lewis from Overstock.com shared their process of creating over 10,000 videos in just two months. Jimmy Healey from Onlineshoes.com is creating 40 videos per day. Video helps give a quasi-tactile experience to websites that improves the experience for some customers. And e-commerce is moving rapidly.

In fact, Alex Vieux from SundaySky sees video as the inevitable next step in e-tailing: “Video will be completely commoditized in e-commerce, and users will not be comfortable buying online without a product video. Think about it: would you trust a website now that didn’t have a picture of the product? It will be the same with video in the next several years.”

As competitors look to differentiate in the space, video will be an important component for some time. And by starting now, organizations will be able to build important experience and learnings into their business moving forward. So, what are you waiting for?

(And, in the spirit of using video, here are a couple of clips related to this post)

Mall hauling example:

ReelSEO summit coverage with BJ Fogg:

Thank you for sharing!

What do you expect for a dollar?

If you think your standards are low, think again. What’s the ratio of free apps on your iPhone, to 99 cent apps? How many albums have you streamed, vs. digital downloads you have bought?

Consumers expect more than ever – regardless of price point. Two factors contribute to this continual bar-raising in the consumer’s mind:

• Increasing quality and service across all consumer categories, and
• Access to better information.

The past 50 years has seen an incredible expansion of choice and quality across all consumer categories. Manual processes, with variable consistency, were replaced by automated, machine processes. Then, services were automated using computers to create endless replicas that were exact duplicates.

Business processes were normalized and shared across verticals, thanks to the rise in consulting and outsourcing firms. This promoted a high level of similarity across industries.

And all of this was to the consumer’s benefit – quality improved, defects decreased, and customers got more for their money. In Buying In, Rob Walker discusses how Consumer Reports recently rated more than 80 washing machines. There were no “Poor” or “Fair” ratings at all.

In fact, 57 of those washing machines were “Very Good.” Manufacturing has gotten to the point where most everything we buy is pretty darn good right out of the gate. So, the consumer’s default assumption is that everything will be of a uniformly high quality, at a minimum. Sure, some products will really stand out. But, consumers really can’t go wrong at this point. Quality is a minimum expectation.

At the same time, there are more references and resources than ever before. Consumer Reports has a print circulation of 4M, and separately, 4M unique visitors per month. But that’s just one place to get first person feedback about a business or product. Amazon, Yelp, various App Stores, and nearly every e-commerce website offers customer reviews, feedback, and some form of rating system. Not to mention Facebook and Twitter.

That means that customers now do increasing amounts of research on even the most fleeting of transactions.

To pry a lousy buck out of a consumer’s pocket, you have to be the best in class.

I found myself on the consumer side of this equation just today. A Samsung bluetooth headset went on clearance for $2.00 after rebate (only $1.00 each if you bought three!). Initially, I got excited. Then, I checked out their Amazon reviews (which said the volume didn’t go up very high), did a Google search (mediocre battery life), and then searched on Twitter (just talking about the deal; no mention of quality).

My heels cooled. The race for the deal was off – I didn’t order them. It just wasn’t worth the hassle for a product that wasn’t excellent.

If you think you can cut a corner, or fix it next week, or figure it out later, think again.

Thank you for sharing!

NPR is running a series on influential summer jobs. This is the essay I submitted:

For two summers, I worked in Hell on earth – the dirtiest, hottest, most dangerous place I have ever visited.

I worked in a foundry. We made disc brakes for cars and kitchen sinks out of molten steel.

As a summer employee, I did the grunt work. On my first day, I worked a line making sinks. I was in charge of breaking apart the molds after the metal was poured. Hot metal would flow down the spigot, and fill the mold. Within a few seconds, the sink cooled enough to hold its shape. I was stationed down the line with a metal rod held over my head. As each new sink was poured, I jammed the rod into the mold, and wrenched apart the dirt.

Each sink emerged from its mold like a glowing alien, breaking out of a shell. I lifted, thrust, cracked over and over. Then, the line stopped for a break. I set the rod down, and jumped from my platform. I was so hot and dirty that rivulets of sweat cut clean paths through my grimy skin.

Immediately, the rod rolled down and cracked my skull open.

On my first day, after forty five minutes on the floor, I left to get 6 stitches in my head.

No one thought I would make it past the first week. During the school year, I waited tables at Shoney’s. I was in college, studying International Relations. With a minor in Dance.

But I came back, determined to prove myself.

Most days, I was responsible for mixing in additives to the raw steel. The chemistry in making metal parts is very precise. So, after the fresh dip of steel came down the line, I measured out 1 cup of zinc, and 2 cups of magnesium. Then I scrambled up the ladder, and stood on the edge of the pool of liquid steel. I dumped in the buckshot metals, then stirred them in with an iron rod that melted in my hands.

After that, I hoisted a jack hammer to the edge of the pool, where metal had started to cool and adhere to the sides, and I hammered off the hardened steel. Pieces of molten metal flicked up and hit me in the face, chest and legs. Every day, I had a pattern of tiny new burns, instantly cauterized by the heat.

It was grueling work. But, at the end of the shift I had a sense of accomplishment because I had made something new in the world. Every day I left, sweaty, gritty and exhausted, with the satisfaction that the world was a different place because of my work.

Now, I build websites and create marketing campaigns. I don’t get paid to do anything tangible or concrete. I work with my hands only to type. I sweat only when I’m at the gym.

But, every time I am challenged with something that seems impossible, I remember the foundry. I remember my sweat sizzling as it dripped onto hot metal. I remember being wrung out and dehydrated, with metal shavings flying into my eyes, and hours to go before the shift ended.

And the new challenge that I face now simply doesn’t seem that bad.

Because at the foundry, somehow I always kept going. I never slowed the line down. And I never caused it to stop.

Thank you for sharing!

Awareness Inc is one of the vendors that I reported on in my report on ten social media management platforms (download here).

In a sign of how fast the industry is moving, even before the final report was released, Awareness had made a major move to shift their platform and allow for a much broader range of marketing and engagement activities on their platform. This brings a lot of relevance to a strong platform for corporate marketers.

Two-Way Communication and Aggregation

The overarching change that Awareness has released is integrating engagement into the platform. Previously, Awareness focused on a traditional campaign approach to marketing. Since social media content refuses to follow the traditional marketing campaign format, it made it tough for early adopters to look at their platform. Awareness was good at broadcasting, but didn’t give you a chance to listen or have a conversation with your audience.

Now, Awareness allows two-way communication, in a traditional “inbox” style aggregated format. That means all your network updates from multiple channels come together to be managed in one place. That makes it much easier to account for a comprehensive understanding of pending conversations.

Why It’s Important:

As more SMMPs move toward an inbox-style aggregation interface, it will become increasingly important to bubble the most important or pressing conversations up to the top. Time-based aggregation does little to help marketers cope with the volume.

Look for more SMMP vendors to take on the role of curator, filter, and prioritizer. As semantic understanding gets better, and influence is tracked more accurately, SMMPs will begin to sort and prioritize messages, meaning that each time you log in to the system,  you will see the most important new posts – not the newest.

Cadmus is already doing this for Twitter. Look for SMMPs to integrate this type of functionality either through partnership or acquisition. In fact, Awareness takes the first step (as others already have) by automatically tagging sentiment for new social posts.

Foursquare and WordPress Integrations

The new release of Awareness also integrates two important social platforms. The WordPress platform allows marketers to give read/write access to corporate blogs without requiring content creators to log in to yet another system. It also pulls in WordPress comments, allowing you to review blog comments easily, just as you do Tweets and Facebook Status Updates. That’s a smart UI decision.

The Foursquare integration is also significant. Despite marketers not having a clear sense of what to do with geolocation services, there is still a need to participate and experiment. Short of having a mid-5- or 6-figure budget to create a content partnership with Foursquare, Awareness has found a great integration.

Through using Foursquare’s API, Awareness allows marketers to leave “tips” at thousands of locations simultaneously – so all of your retail locations can get the same Foursquare tip, and give everyone on Foursquare a coupon or special offer.

Strategically, this is a big step forward for Foursquare. Limiting special and offers to only the Mayor does not effectively leverage the platform, but assigning employees at each location to update Foursquare individually is a recipe for disaster. It also allows marketers to swap out tips and offers as needed, to stay in line with overall campaign goals.

The Long Tail of Social Networks

One concern for all SMMPs is how many networks to support. Each integration takes real engineering resources, not just in the short term, but over the entire product lifespan. APIs change. Functionality breaks. New features become important (see Facebook’s Like button for a recent example).

Product managers at SMMPs have to thread a difficult needle right now as they make decisions about how fast to integrate the next upcoming channel. Awareness has placed a big bet that Foursquare will continue to be relevant. And, over the next 12-24 months, this seems a safe bet. Foursquare is actively finding a monetization model, and still iterating on its core product. That means it looks well-placed to stay relevant to geolocation services.

Additionally, these tacit endorsements by third-part integrators confirm that Foursquare is a service worth supporting. So, this development from Awareness actually helps Awareness shape the perception of the partners that it endorses.

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After working with the social media management space for a number of months, and watching a new industry being born, I thought it was about time for a comprehensive review of the products and tools that are out there. You can jump right over to download the report now.

If you are overwhelmed by managing multiple social media accounts, this report can help. It goes through all of the considerations for how to select the right tool for your team, including team needs like “campaigns vs. conversations,” scheduling, URL shortening, and analytics capabilities.

The report contains in-depth write ups on ten products, including:

Argyle Social

Awareness Social Marketing Software

CoTweet®

HootSuite

ObjectiveMarketer

Postling

SocialOomph

Spredfast Social Media Management System

Sprinklr Social Media Marketing Solutions

Vitrue

It also includes a comprehensive evaluation checklist to determine how soon you should implement one of these tools.

Go download the full report, and please let me know what you think of it in the comments.

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At this year’s SXSW, I attended a session on the future of online video, with Mark Cuban, who is part owner of HDNet, and Avner Ronen, CEO of Boxee. Ronen was bullish, declaring that the web would be the future of video. Cuban countered that video online would never have the heft and marketplace presence of traditional network and cable television (or, at least, not in the next 5-10 years).

The flaw in the debate is that both of them spoke about video as entertainment content only. That’s not surprising, given that both HDNet and Boxee are entertainment companies. But, this belies an important truth: historically, entertainment has been supported by advertising. But when products can create their own engaging content, then there is no need for retailers to support expensive entertainment creation.

This is the real future for online video. Companies become content creators, which supports their value proposition and sales pipeline. The practical uses of video content are much bigger than just entertainment. That’s where Liveclicker has built a unique offering.

Liveclicker has built a video delivery engine that is dedicated to dynamically and seamlessly transcoding and delivering videos. Their principal focus is seamless implementation and delivery. That allows creatives – whether in-house, or an agency – to focus on making quality content.

Liveclicker takes the technical challenges, project management, and headaches out of using video online. They are one of the first video vendors to support full HTML5 for native video playback. That means you don’t have to worry about incompatibility, plugins, codecs, browser compatibility, or bandwidth restraints. And they downgrade delivery mechanisms to ensure high delivery and compatibility for the end user.

This goes way beyond worrying about Flash on the iPad…suddenly, you can start thinking about what kind of videos would work well in email marketing. And, Liveclicker’s analytics system allows the marketer the ability to do full A/B testing, conversion optimization, and even SEO all from the platform, without needing to touch product detail pages, or the IT department’s CMS.

Perhaps their most underrated feature is video syndication and distribution. Liveclicker has built up a robust set of integrations with popular and niche video sites, which allows you to push your content out to hundreds of external social video sites (starting with YouTube, but going very deep, very quickly) directly from the interface.

This is a crucial component to any Distributed Content Marketing strategy – you must broadcast content out to a wide variety of channels to improve social sharing. Those external sites drive highly qualified traffic back to your site, making them much more likely to convert. Pair that with on-page video, and they are seeing double- and triple-digit boost to conversions on a regular basis.

Having just completed a broad landscape review of social media management platforms, I can confirm that no SMMP is covering the video space adequately, yet this is the area of highest growth and greatest potential for marketers to speak directly to their target audience.

Liveclicker’s email integration is also impressive. This has long been a challenge for marketers, as email clients vary widely in rendering, and mobile devices are being used more for email. Liveclicker puts all the compatibility issues to rest, and dynamically serves correctly transcoded video on the fly. That means marketers have the ability to use the most powerful messaging platform, in the most intimate way – by making video highly personal.

Liveclicker is even demonstrating significant cost savings by replacing traditional 360 degree product rotation images with dynamic video, which is much cheaper to create and render in post-production. These are real, hard costs that online retailers incur on every single product page. Even a modest savings can radically improve your ability to do more heavy lifting with fewer marketing dollars.

After talking with Liveclicker’s sales manager, Ben Kopetti, I was impressed with their platform, and their strong technical and business teams. The team has created successful companies before, which bodes well for their ability to deliver a robust platform that will continue to grow.

If you are an online retailer, or other marketer with a strong product focus, I would recommend reviewing Liveclicker for your own needs.

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