• Get Personal: Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh handles the company’s Twitter account, putting a friendly face behind a  big company. Hseih also follows people back for that extra special personal touch.
• Let Customers Know What’s Happening: One of the main foundations of social networks is the real time updates and information sharing. Let customers know about store openings, in-store events, promotions, etc.
• Ask Questions: Apparel retailer Mandee posts questions on Facebook through the status feature, which provides rich, real-time customer intelligence on preferred styles and colors to assist in merchandising decisions, as well as understand customers on a more personal level.
• Be Engaged and Participate: Retailers need to monitor feedback by listening to what consumers are saying about the brand and respond accordingly.
• Be Relevant: Post information not only relevant to your brand, but to people who shop in your stores. Whole Foods posts recipes for organic dishes on their Twitter site. People want useful information that can help them make informed decisions."

I don't think anything could be further from the truth.  I think that if you're truly impassioned about what you're working on, you can't help to enjoy what you're doing.

To that end, there seems to be a nascent movement toward creating tools for business that are able to achieve real results while not being so buttoned-down that they drain the humanity from the room.

The first inkling that I had of this was back in March at SXSW, where I ran into Amy Jo Kim, CEO of ShuffleBrain, on the flight from the West Coast out to Austin.  AJ and her team are doing some groundbreaking work in figuring out how brain games and social networks intersect.

The very next day, while still in Austin, I had the chance to attend a session called Playing On! Interface Lessons from Games, a panel anchored by Nicole Lazzaro, CEO of XEODesign.  And summarily had my mind tweaked in ways that were highly unexpected.

The net-net: Many of the key concepts that have helped propel games to be a $21 billion industry in 2008 are applicable in business, too.  The concept of "collecting" things, like experience points (XP) in role-playing games?  We see that behavior in business apps, as well...what's in the upper-right hand corner of your Twitter screen?  It's the number of "friends" you have -- a collecting behavior.  The idea of going on a "quest" in that same role-playing game (what Nicole calls "Hard Fun" in gaming-speak)?  You see that concept every time you log into LinkedIn, and are told that "Your profile is 85% complete."

Not only are the patterns from game design starting to make their way into business, but "games" themselves are being turned into serious facilitation techniques as well.

Last week at the Innovation, Design and Serious Games Exchange, I had the chance to see first-hand how a thorny, serious product management question ("What features do our customers really want in the next generation of our product?") could be deftly teased out of a diverse group by way of a game-based technique.  Check out these two videos with Luke Hohmann, CEO of Enthiosys, where he facilitates a session that turns the traditional "focus group" into a collaborative design session:

"Buy A Feature, Part 1"

"Buy A Feature, Part 2"

(More on "Buy A Feature" here.)

I'm convinced there's something going on.  There's a fundamental improvement in the way business people interact in this kind of scenario.  It's not the rote, mind-numbing, death-by-Powerpoint.  Instead, it feels like a shift toward bringing the "whole person" into the workplace using much more engaging techniques than have traditionally been used in many industries and environments.

So, what do you think?  Is this just some wacky, West-coast frittering away of time?  Or are we seeing the early stages of a fundamental change in business?

On the surface, there are stark differences between business-to-business marketing and business-to-consumer marketing: audience size, volume of sales and magnitude of purchases. But as mobile becomes ubiquitous for connecting with customers, are we starting to see a convergence between the two?

I would contend that the answer is, yes – if we have the courage to think creatively and move beyond the already-tired clichés of mobile marketing such as text campaigns and mobile couponing. 

In fact, with a bit of creative thought, the opportunity for connecting with new customers in both audiences is quite remarkable if we concentrate on the experiences that can be provided with today’s mobile devices.

So what are the ways that we can get creative? 

Let’s look at the root of that word, “creative” for a second. It stems from create.

Every one of our prospective customers – both B2B and B2C – has not just a tiny screen onto which we can foist our message, but now has the ability to create things as well – photos, videos, conversations and relationships.

Let’s look at the taken-for-granted camera phone capabilities.

Again, why not think about how we can bring prospects into the process by enabling and encouraging them to be a creative part of the sale, instead of a passive recipient?

In the B2C case, we can, for example, encourage contests and participation where customers take their photos with the most interesting/scenic/extraordinary usage of our products and submit them to a community site.

Similarly, we can encourage B2B customers to send their sales reps photos of their unique environment/circumstance/prickly problem so that the reps can better understand the situation and propose an insightful solution.

In the B2C case, we could encourage video testimonials to be pulled into a powerful montage.

In the B2B case, we can gather videos of customer best-practice tips to illustrate how our products perform in the real-world and how they are being used to solve real problems in an efficient manner.

But, more important than the technical tools, why not enable prospects to easily connect with the people and information they need to make a decision to buy?

It is all about the connections and the relationships. 

In the B2C case, a great example of this would be making it easy for customers to locate and, after the initial sale, create reviews of their experiences with a product from other customers. 

Similarly, in the B2B realm, this entails providing tools to connect the prospect with other similar past customer references, testimonials, case studies or a knowledgeable sales associate.

The upshot is that for both B2B and B2C we have a real opportunity with mobile: the opportunity to differentiate based on how we encourage, empower and enable active, social customers instead of passive targets.

The organizations that crack the code on this are going to be the winners in using this medium.

So let us use mobile to bring both B2B and B2C customers into the process, instead of simply throwing marketing messages at them. 

Let’s challenge ourselves to start conversations, and enable prospective customers to engage with us and with each other, regardless of what bucket  – B2B or B2C – in which they have historically been classified.

How Cisco looks at social media from a governance perspective, as presented by Jeanette Gibson (Director of New Media, Cisco Corporate Communications).  The slide reads: Be Respectful, Be Mindful, You Are Reponsible, Abide By The Rules, Add Value, Be Honest, Be Yourself

"The smartphone category grew its share of the overall mobile phone market six percent annually, having jumped from 17 percent in the first quarter of 2008 to nearly one quarter (23 percent) of the entire mobile phone market. According to Rubin, this serves as clear indication of the rising popularity of the smartphone category that, by many analysts’ estimates, is already reshuffling the entire market."

Read it.

Next, kudos to Lisa Boccadutre on fitting a whole raft of information into a very small space. The information density on this piece is astounding, in that in two pages there are points about time frames of market uptake of social media, capability changes over a five-year horizon, strategic evolution, treatment of customers and evolving social capabilities.

I do have one primary concern: This graphic seems to imply that the customer will still be on the outside looking in, even five years from now. Not sure I entirely agree with that.

My key question: What does this look like if the customer moves to the center of the picture, instead of merely being a target of an organization’s actions?

So, here we go...

Link to video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1p-CoclHwE

Here's the setup:

"Blogs are changing the way companies are listening and reaching out to their customers. This televised panel of media experts is aimed to give insight in how to use blogging as a successful marketing communications strategy.  Sample discussion topics include: What are the elements of a successful blog? How can legal pitfalls be avoided? How can ROI be measured? How can we confront our fear of blogging? What will the future of blogging look like?"

The panel was followed by a Q&A session.

Here's a link to the video.

Bonus factoid: What I learned...it's a bit disconcerting when a person whom you don't know hands you a lavalier mic and calmly instructs you to partially disrobe (in front of a roomful of people) in order to run the microphone cord up the inside of your shirt so it doesn't show up on camera.

...and the money 'grafs:

"Create the ability for community members to communicate as they want to. Brand managers and most companies want to control the conversation. If your users are truly part of the community, they will do nothing to hurt and/or destroy the community in which they live.

Trust them to make your product better. Trust them to make your community better."

Which brands that you know have the courage to actually trust their community members?  And which ones are afraid?

photo: wvs

"Is it time to declare email bankruptcy, delete those 1,000 unread messages, issue a public mea culpa, and start over? With an ever-increasing chorus of “overload,” this social media stuff must be irretrievably broken, right?"

Link to article.
PDF of article.