“It seems like just a short time ago that these location services were only used by a few hardcore web tech geeks. Now they’re so mainstream that they’re taking up a chunk of the New York skyline.”

Um. No.

Foursquare has just over three million users and you need a smartphone to use it. It is far, far from “mainstream”. And the article in Mashable feels like something I’ve been seeing a lot of lately – mistaking a brand using a niche and emerging web service (the “shiny object” in the title of this post) as a way of positioning themselves as cool and hep, for some sort of validation of something as “mainstream”.

From where I sit, Foursquare and other location-based applications will be mainstream when they have 500 million users globally. Even Twitter, with 87% of American consumers aware of it but only 7% using it, is not mainstream (see: Facebook, Google).

TIAW, an international umbrella organization of women’s networks representing more than 50,000 women worldwide, created the very special World of Difference 100 Award to honor up to 100 women from around the world who have contributed to the economic empowerment of women.

We’re incredibly proud of Leona for this wonderful accomplishment and wish her many, many congrats!

“Coca-Cola, with its 10.7 million Facebook fans, has three to four times… [the number of] Foursquare registered users. (There are at least 11 brands whose Facebook fan pages have quietly grown bigger than the biggest geo-location providers.) That certainly trumps U.S. unique visitors to Coke’s brand website, which fell by more than 40% to 242,000 in July compared to a year ago, per Compete.”

Of course the only problem is those eyeballs are not portable. They effectively belong to Facebook, no matter that Coke and others have spent millions in media dollars on the platform to drive membership (as they do to drive traffic to their branded sites) and the fact that those people have opted into membership on their brand page.

This of course leads to a very interesting concentration both in terms of audience (Facebook owns it) and media dollars (Facebook gets an increasing share since they deliver it to the right people – and measure the results). Pretty much a win-win for Facebook… but something that brands, accustomed to simply signing cheques, rather than helping shape the advertising platforms they’re using, need to start thinking about very seriously.

The article goes on to point out that Facebook is essentially morphing into a CRM solution – a “big list broker like Experian” – except that they are free. Of course the irony is that brands are subsidizing this new facet of the site, and if Facebook decides to change their revenue model, they could also end up paying for what they helped build.

• F U 2.0 presentation with Scott Stratten
• Big Chief: Leading Your Tribe by Alex Brown
• Our Game Could Be Your Life panel with Michael Dolan, David Fono, Kate Raynes-Goldie, Gabe Smedresman, and Adrian Hon.
• Naked Dating: Finding love in 140 Characters or Less with Jeremy Wright and Melissa Smich
• Your Resume Was So 2005: Show Me Passion by Duane Brown
• Bend Over? Surprise! Agencies Are Screwing You with Lucia Mancuso from The Blog Studio and Megan Warby
• Too Many Options: Choosing a Digital Media Platform by Randy Matheson from Delvinia Interactive and Duane Brown
• Branded Entertainment: Do Brands Hurt Good Storytelling? by Matt Di Paola of Proximity Canada
• I’m a Flash Developer. Now what? by Jeff Vermeersch from Proximity Canada
• What does Google TV mean for advertising industry? with Andrew Bailey of Proximity Canada
• The Universal Declaration of Avatar Rights with Collin Douma of Proximity Canada
• 3 Partners Vs 2 Partners Vs 1 Partner by YouPhonics founder Aidan Nulman
• Trust and Control -The Future of Privacy Online with Colin McKay from the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada
• Startup Marketing: It’s More Then a Twitter Account with Saul Colt from Saul.is (I’m on this one – hint, hint)
• Agile Ain’t Just for Developers: Agile People Manifesto with Andre Gaulin and Jay Goldman
• Killer iPhone Photography: Tips from the New School by photographer Kris Krüg
• Conquering Creativity: A Creative Method For Every Mind with Jason Theodor from Blast Radius
• Federating the Social Web by Evan Prodromou of StatusNet
• Value of a Facebook Fan: Does it Matter? with Michael Scissons from Syncapse
• Shopping as a Revolutionary Act? with Tara Hunt
• The Rebirth of Radio Thanks to Social Media by Elliott Hurst from Supernova Interactive
• Your Content Stinks! Drive results with Content Marketing with April Dunford
• Understanding Customer Culture; Caution: May Require Cojones by Ujwal Arkalgud and Grant McCracken
• Abolish The Hourly: How Value Pricing Wins Clients with Lee Dale from Say Yeah!
• Real User, Real Connections with Russel Sinclair
• Avoiding Extinction in the Digital Dark Age with Adele McAlear

Kevin Richard also has a great post on the same topic here. Voting closes on August 27th. Vote well and vote often – we’ll see you in Austin in March!

We’ve been talking about how effective marketing is increasingly shifting from “interrupt and repeat” to a value exchange, i.e. the marketer gives you something you want in return for your attention. It’s a fairly simple (though still somewhat revolutionary) concept, and we have seen some incredible results using this approach in our emerging area of expertise, scaling social media.

This week I came across this article, written by friend and colleague Aaron Fulkerson, CEO of Mindtouch (one of the leading open source collaborative platforms), and published on Forbes.com. In it, Aaron talks about how Mindtouch and their customers are using MT technology to expose their documentation on the web, and how this, in turn, is driving sales,

“Documentation, once siloed in the realm of how-to guides, is actually feeding top-of-the-funnel activity. In fact, some companies… are reporting that their documentation is bringing in over 50% of their qualified leads. I can report that [Mindtouch] receives 70% plus of our site traffic from organic sources, and our documentation generates more than half of our overall site traffic. Furthermore, over half of our lead generation is driven by our documentation.”

This is essentially marketing with user manuals, which sounds absurd. Except that the audience in this case wants it, and it is helping to generate sales. So the questions I leave you with are: since you are now a publisher, what other materials might you have inside your org that online audiences are eager to consume? How can you work to expose and make them sharable on the social web in order to impact your bottom line?

[Photo courtesy of Peter Merholz]

Catching up on some reading this weekend, I consumed this article from AdWeek with interest. It was essentially a litany of agency bitching that location-based service Foursquare didn’t have the tools, manpower or know-how to cater to their needs.

“They’re not responsive and extremely hard to work with,” said a digital agency exec who asked not to be named. “It’s hard to bring campaigns to life. Nobody knows how to create a badge or ask [Foursquare how] to enable behavior. It’s black magic.” In general, he said, “it’s pretty much unworkable.”

Guess what, folks? Foursquare is a startup, not CNN, and they are figuring out their ad model in this emerging space in realtime. That’s called “innovation”, and in a nutshell? It’s not them – it’s YOU.

Agencies are accustomed to working a certain way (especially when it comes to media buying), and when you deviate from that, it does not compute. Emerging platforms like Twitter and Foursquare are opening their doors to advertisers, but one of the biggest issues is that many client agencies simply are not flexible enough nor do they have the expertise to do it right. They revert to their comfort zone, which results in below-average performance and all kinds of friction around actually getting the work underway. Just ask Digg and Twitter; we’ve seen it there firsthand.

So what’s the answer? It’s all in the right approach and attitude. Imagine this – as a participant in closed betas and other first-of-their-kind opportunities in the paid social space, advertisers often have the chance to co-create by providing meaningful feedback. The rewards of participating well can be significant (we’ve seen results of between ten and 40x that of “traditional” display advertising with our clients, never mind the value of the business intelligence gathered). In other words, you don’t just write cheques, you get to help influence direction in order to generate maximum value. I’m not sure where else an advertiser would have the chance to partner, learn and get a significant competitive advantage in quite the same way.

However, the catch is that if your agency isn’t adaptable or able to help you keep pace with innovation (and likes to prove it by bitching in print) you might have a problem.

[photo courtesy of Kathleen Leavitt]

Following in the footsteps of Facebook, last week Twitter launched a new suggestion feature that helps users find new people to follow. The tool looks at who you follow, and who the people you follow follow, and then suggests new people for you to follow. This new feature is gradually being rolled out to users and probably explains the huge influx of random follower requests I’ve been receiving all week.

This new feature in combination with Twitter’s enhanced name search results should be the start of expanding Twitter’s social graph.

Google’s back at it

Google’s been hard at work the past few months making all kinds of improvements to Gmail. Continuing on their drag and drop feature streak, this week Google added the ability to drag and drop attachments to your desktop. This small improvement should yield lots of happy users for those who receive multiple attachments.

Blackberry Torch to compete with the iPhone

This week, BlackBerry maker Research in Motion (RIM) announced the upcoming release of the BlackBerry Torch (also known as the BlackBerry 9800 slider). Lots of people are excited about the new device, comparing it’s functionality to the iPhone 4.

BlackBerry fans in some parts of the world may have to stick with the iPhone though, as countries like Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates have started to shut down BlackBerry messaging services due to security concerns and RIM’s failure to meet regulatory requirements.

A testament to the power of social media

Yesterday 10-year Tanner Bawn was en route to New York on an Air Canada flight to witness a charity run called “Tutus for Tanner,” a muscular dystrophy fund raising event organized by Tanner’s blogger aunt, Catherine Connors. Although Tanner arrived in New York a-OK, his wheel chair was damaged on the journey.

Tanner’s aunt and a network of bloggers and Twitter users, who for the past week had been helping to raise money for Tanner’s family to renovate their home, instantly starting tweeting about the issue. Air Canada, although slow to respond at first, quickly jumped on the issue as it exploded online and repaired Tanner’s wheelchair and offered him and his cousins a free trip to Disney World – one of Tanner’s last wishes.

According to Tanner’s aunt, ““If I hadn’t been with Chrissie (Bawn, Tanner’s mother) and Tanner, if it were any other kid without a vast social media network behind them, it wouldn’t have turned out this way.”

Gotta love social media. Happy weekend, everyone!

Usually, managers equate innovation with creativity. But innovation is not creativity. Creativity is about coming up with the big idea. Innovation is about executing the idea — converting the idea into a successful business.

Govindarajan and Timble focused their research on execution and offered an elegant equation to help illustrate the importance of execution.

Here’s why we worked on execution, as opposed to creativity: We surveyed thousands of executives in Fortune 500 companies to rate their companies’ innovation skills on a scale of one to 10, one being poor and 10 world class. Survey participants overwhelmingly believe that their companies are better at generating ideas (average score of six) than they are at commercializing them (average score of one).

So which is more effective — moving your (already good) creativity score from six to eight or lifting your (very poor) execution score from one to three? Here’s the math using our shorthand, creativity times execution:

Capacity to innovate = 6 x 1 = 6

Capacity to innovate, increasing creativity score = 8 x 1 = 8

Capacity to innovate, increasing execution score = 6 x 3 = 18

It’s no contest. Companies tend to focus far more attention on improving the front end of the innovation process, the creativity. But the real leverage is in the back end.

I really enjoy being on the back end of innovation. We’ve all got lots of big shiny ideas and creative world-changing solutions that never make it past the white board. Real innovation comes when leaders give their people the mandate and the space to execute and deliver. Steve Jobs, who has quite the track-record on innovation, famously said: “Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.” Are you leading or following?

This week YouTube announced that it has changed it’s video upload limit from 10 minutes to 15 minutes. This is good news for users who enjoy posting their lengthy video feedback responses to the newest episode of Jersey Shore.

YouTube says that since it now has a tight handle on dealing with copyrighted content, users who upload large chunks of TV shows and movies are less of a concern and therefore longer videos can be permitted.

Groupon introduces personalization

We’ve all heard of the Daily Me phenomenon, but what about the Daily Deal phenomenon? I remember that exciting time of week when all the retail sales flyers would arrive in the mailbox and the whole family would scour over the week’s door crashers. Now, daily deals are arriving in inboxes instead of mailboxes, courtesy of websites like Groupon and RedFlagDeals.

This week Groupon introduced it’s Personalization feature which will send users one deal a day based on their preferences, purchase history and overall profile putting an end to scrolling through dozens of tire and mattress sales and cutting straight through to the good stuff.

Celebrities are also jumping on the band wagon to promote these daily deals websites. Lindsay Lohan is reportedly being paid by shopping club website Beyond The Rack to tweet about designer sales.

Speaking of celebs and Twitter…

The man who once said ““Everything that Twitter offers, I need less of” has now joined the ranks of Twitter. Kanye West, not one to do things quietly, ended his boycott against Twitter this week and celebrated his new account with a live appearance at the Twitter head office in San Francisco. Kanye makes up part of the 0.4% of celebrity Twitter users and has already attracted 306,105 followers – that’s 1,000 times as many as the average Joe.

Check out Kanye’s Twitter performance below.

So what did I take away this year? A number of things, but one thought in particular I have been chewing on for some time, especially because it aligns with our Enterprise Services practice, which is all about change management. I shared it Andy McAfee just before the social media panel I participated in on the second day (and which was very sparsely attended – social media being the red-headed stepchild of E20), and it goes a little something like this:

1. There is a dramatic proliferation of touchpoints between the enterprise and the market. Two-way conversations used to happen via your 1-800 number, your reception desk and your sales and PR teams. Now hundreds, even thousands of employees across the company can be communicating with the entire market via dozens of social channels in real time (no surprise here).

2. Consumers perceive brands/companies/institutions as speaking with one big voice. They don’t care if it’s CRM, sales or marcom. These artificial divisions may mean a lot inside the org, but outside, no one cares. You’re Company X. End of story.

3. Internal integration across these silos is critical to avoid missed opportunity and potentially generate solid ROI – the communications person will be encountering CRM issues, the CRM person bumping up against sales opportunities, etc.

4. It’s within that last point that I find a most compelling question. How does the sales function integrate with a company’s social media activities? How does it become nimble and horizontally integrated in order to take full advantage of the opportunities presented at all of these different touchpoints? How and when does it engage effectively?

5. What if your sales org could become something that lives in “the cloud” (please see below for a great video that answers the question, “What is Cloud Computing?”), meaning it is accessible from any point within the organization and any time in the sales cycle, rather than being a linear process that starts with a suspect at the top of the funnel and ends in a sale at the bottom? (Colin Douma, a brilliant guy who is now the VP of social at an agency in Toronto, had some interesting thoughts about what the sales funnel actually looks like in the age of social media, and Joe Jaffe recently wrote a booked called Flip the Funnel, so I’m not alone in thinking about this).

The end state? If sales is now horizontally integrated across the org, living in a kind of “process cloud”, when someone in customer service or communications or research identifies a prospect with an itch their product can scratch, they can feed that lead right into the appropriate node in the sales pipeline. Opportunity seized.

This is of course both a technology and a workflow challenge, but one I suspect will increasingly become an issue as engagement matures and a return on all of our socializing must be demonstrated. A spurned prospect is also more that just a lost opportunity – it’s someone who’s likely pissed off, since no one enjoys being ignored.

[full disclosure: I attended E20 2010 on a complimentary press pass]