What’s lost is more than just time and money. An organization that attempts a launch or two or three and achieves continued poor results also loses its confidence. A culture of failure sets in. “We don’t do launches well.” This culture begets fear of attempting anything new. (more)

R&D is cut back. Profits must be wrung out of existing products and services and endless hacking at overhead. Eventually the organization will strangle itself to death. (cough—H.P.—cough.)

On the other hand, what happens when an organization is confident it can get the most out of every launch? Growth. Innovation. Grace. Apple.

So how can your organization become “launch confident”? You’ve really got two options: you can invest mightily to internally improve your launch skills and capacities, or you can outsource to the experts.

That’s where The Agency for Social Media comes in. We are your one-stop branding, marketing, and communications team. We are masters at the art of the launch, from researching what the needs are of your potential customers, to understanding your competition, to creating brands that are the genuine expression of your identity, to finding the best uses of all the media to build communities for you and your products — so that your success is not in just this one attempt, but builds an ever-growing eager and trusting audience in the future.

To become a thriving organization, yours needs to recognize the reality that you are constantly launching something: new services, new campaigns, new internal practices, new products and brand extensions. Your organization needs to understand the process of the diffusion of innovation, from the development of the new product to follow-on service that continues throughout the entire product lifecycle.

If we like what your vision is and we believe we can help, then we will guide you to becoming consistent launch masters.

How to start? It’s not difficult. Give us a call, and let’s set your trajectory.

Bring a fresh U.S. perspective for a fast-growing Australian winery that was quickly developing many varietals and brands and help them grow in a down-draft U.S. wine market. As in many industries, wine people tend to talk to the buyer in language that is meaningful mostly to the industry. ASM’s task was to craft new communication that would consistenly speak meaningfully to the consumer and to build a community of enthusiasts for the brand using all media including social media.

The Process:

ASM began by reviewing all communication from the winery to date — every sell sheet, brochure, shelf-talker, and news bulletin. ASM interviewed the key U.S. and Australian leaders (some of these archived on video for social media purposes) when they visited the U.S.

ASM visited and interviewed wine buyers for the wholesale market, wholesale salespeople, wine industry experts, consumers, chefs and sommeliers.

ASM made a comparison of language used by the client to describe their vision and compared it to the language used by other leading wineries throughout the world. We observed that there was a tendency to genericize the language around the wines and the winery.

We also observed that the website and social media efforts for the winery did not reflect an underlying strategy or plan.

A new understanding of the winery’s true identity was presented by ASM and as consensus grew around that understanding, all communication from the winery could begin to reflect the fundamental drive for quality that characterized everything the winery undertook. Finding a wide panaroma of language that could be used in advertising, back of bottle communication, brochures, sell sheets, shelf-talkers and language for the sales people began to create a national clarity for the perception of the winery in the consumer’s eyes.

ASM created new and consistent materials of all kinds for the winery — newsflashes, a newspaper coming from the winery’s home in Australia, all POS materials, coupons for charity events, a flight concept that is used in advertising and on a custom basis in the restaurant market, custom clothing to raise the winery profile at major tasting events, and a redesign of the website that turns it into a new and community hub for the winery globally.

The Result:

Growth in U.S. sales year over year was 238% during a time that Australian wines in the U.S.market shrunk by 10% overall.

The Future:

ASM continues to provide all communication services in the U.S. for the winery, with many scheduled regular services as well as instant-response services on a 24-hour turnaround basis.

The principals, entrepreneurs and experts in the field of web security, were stuck. Three years prior, they’d developed, provisionally patented and tested a powerful system that they knew could transform security on the Internet. But didn’t know how to move forward. They couldn’t clearly explain the invention to non-techies, were concerned about having their innovation stolen, and didn’t know where to begin.

The Process:

ASM conducted a half-day ASM Alignment session with the Client, in addition to several phone and email conversations.

ASM was able to create new language and graphics that for the first time communicated the innovation in language that investors could grasp. ASM also worked with the Client to produce their ASM Context, which helped the Client clearly demonstrate their competitive advantages.

In addition to logo and branding creation, ASM built and deployed a website for investors that included a customized version of our an NDA that acted as a gateway for the core passsword-protected pages explained the breakthrough.

The Result:

ASM was able to harness its own network to introduce the Client to their first potential investors, and are setting up the first conversations with some of the targetted first adopters, which includes several of the world’s leading financial organizations.

The Future:

ASM will continue to provide high-level strategy for the Client, and continue to work to secure their initial funding.

ASM will continue to function as the Client’s off-site turnkey branding, strategy, communications and marketing solution to and beyond the expected IPO.

First Discovery — All media is social media. The concepts of social media have given everyone a new lens to rethink who they are and what business they’re in. Social media levels the playing field for a lot of competitors. Not only can the little guy appear big, but get big fast: Our winery client grew 238% year over year, while their category shrank 10%.

Second Discovery — Our clients get more than they expect. Everyone we’ve worked with now considers us part of the company.

Third Discovery — We’re different. Our competitors don’t see the world the way we see it. They come out of advertising agency and PR agency cultures, which by nature and by business model are campaign-based. They’re used to client engagements that start with a product launch and end in a few months. Their approach is inherently, “Get in and get out.”

We come from entrepreneurial leadership and strategy. We start by going to the root of the client’s long-term vision. We try to figure out who our clients really are, and from those insights come powerful differentiation that will guide the client’s communication for a lifetime, and inexorably leads to deeply authentic communications and branding.

That’s why our clients always want us to be no more than a phone call or email away. We’re the keepers of their corporate flame, the crack team ready at a moment’s notice to express their truth through any and all media.

The Challenge:

A world-leading communication technology project management firm needed to raise their public profile to attract major partners for multi-billion dollar contracts.

The Process:

ASM reviewed current and past engagements to discover the connecting threads that ran through all the projects. ASM extracted and polished quotes that would give instant credibility, explain the engagement process, and give a quick sense of the huge scope of the engagements. ASM then created graphic elements to pair with each project, designing and implementing a new website that is both discrete, Fortune 50 stylish, and conveys the highest level of engineering prowess.

The Result:

An immediate invitation from the world’s largest engineering consulting firm to partner with our client on a $24 billion project.

The Future:

ASM is available on a 24-hour turnaround basis to create new content for the client’s website tailored to bids in progress, and to refine any and all print communications for the client so that the client can consistently present a Fortune 50 face.

Within a few paintings, we had it down. “There’s a beauty. Great carving and it really jumps off the wall.”

“You think? Seems a little over the top to me. Maybe more of a transition from the warm outside to the cold reality.”

Now whenever we happen to end up in a museum together, we just naturally fall into our discussion of the framing. The art has taken a secondary position.

In the marketplace of ideas, somewhat like the marketplace for art, framing has an important role to play. I suspect that poor framing or no framing could significantly lower the initial esteem in which a painting would be held.

Poor framing of ideas is much more harmful. Even brilliant and valuable ideas that are poorly framed are highly likely to be lost. Brilliant framing can be so effective in launching ideas that often the framing and the idea become intertwined forever. Ronald Regan’s Cadillac-driving welfare queens, although completely fabricated, changed the perception of welfare for decades. Welfare had not changed at all. The framing had.

What is the purpose of a frame? A frame separates one thing from another. The known world ends at the frame, and what is contained within the frame can stand alone and be contemplated. Have you ever seen a huge frame for a tiny picture? All that matted space creates a kind of visual silence that beckons, “Step closer and see the tiny treasure I protect.” Just imagine how a postage stamp might look in a twelve foot wide by ten foot high massive frame. Who would be able to resist walking up to that postage stamp and trying figure out what could be so important about it that it deserves this much visual space?

Wouldn’t you like your ideas to receive the same attention? What was Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg indicating, as quoted in the NY Times recently, that when she speaks what she says is ignored until someone else also says the same thing? Is it harder for a woman to achieve the space that great framing might provide? Maybe she needs to clear her throat before she speaks, or speak much louder, or be much funnier. Or maybe she needs to whisper, forcing everyone to draw closer and to hang on her every word. Clearly, her current framing strategy needs some work.

For those people, businesses and organizations that want to be seen the way they want to be seen, masterful framing is essential. And in a crowded and noisy marketplace, sometimes you will need to create some quiet around yourself to be able to be heard. Simple is powerful. A single idea may be all that someone can get about you, at first.

If we work together, that’s one of the first things we’ll be discussing. First, who you are and what you stand for. And then we’ll be looking for all the ways to put what’s valuable and unique about you in a context that will frame you — separate you from a noisy world so you are perceived the way you want to be.

The consultant leans closer to me to tell me a little secret. “I already know what I want my book to be like. I want to write like this.” They reach into their briefcase or portfolio and start to pull out a book. I already know what’s coming. It’s going to be a book by Jeffrey Fox.

Because it seems everybody wants to write like Jeffrey Fox.

The problem is, as I often explain to a prospective author, only Jeffrey Fox can write like Jeffrey Fox. It’s not a gimmick, or a style you can pick up, or a secret that once I tell you how it’s done, you can do it, too.

The real secret about Jeffrey Fox is that no one thinks like Jeffrey Fox.

I know this because I worked with him on his first book, How to Become CEO that was a bestseller for Hyperion. When Jeff sent me the complete manuscript it is was way less than a hundred pages. CEO was made up of short pieces, all right to the point about what it takes to succeed in business.

I could have told him we needed to flesh it out, or tell more stories. Maybe he should prove why everything he said was really so. But I refrained. I told him my gut was we should leave it alone — it would either be a huge bestseller or not get published at all. In my proposal I framed Jeff as the new Machiavelli, explaining to the princes of the 21st century how the business world really worked.

Jeffrey Fox’s twelfth book comes out this week — How To Be A Fierce Competitor, What Winning Companies and Great Managers Do In Tough Times. The title is kind of funny, since for Fox, we’re always in tough times. You can never let up, never sit back on your haunches, never get comfortable with success. A smarter, better more aggressive competitor always lurks around the corner. It was true in How to Become CEO, true in How To Become a Rainmaker, and true in these Tough Times.

The new book is comprised of 60 Chapters. You could read it in a sitting, or more likely, a flight from New York to Chicago. And as with every Jeff Fox book and every Jeff Fox page, you might wish it was printed on only one side of each page, so you could take the entire book apart and paste the pages all over your office and even your bathroom. This is stuff you want to remember and use and share with your colleagues every day, because there is no way you can follow Fox’s advice and not succeed in business and in life.

Now for those who aspire to write like Jeffrey Fox, I lied about there are no secrets. In fact, I’m going to share a few Jeffrey Fox How To Write secrets direct from the horse’s mouth: Keep it simple. If you can find an extra word, kill it. Tell the truth. If you don’t know what the truth is, don’t write. Accept nothing from common wisdom without giving it the piñata test. Repeat 60 times. Publish.

Wow. Volkswagen wants us. Well VW, you’ve got our attention. Our phone lines are open, and come tomorrow morning one of us (either Volkswagen or Agency for Social Media) will be picking up the phone and sorting out the time differences between Tiburon and Wolfsburg.

We’re ready right now. VW, we’ve got a strategy for your social media and a way to integrate the new media with your existing plans. We’ve got ways to build VW communities around the globe, build viral interest for new products, manage your tweets at major events, keep your Facebook pages magnets, and bring new and old customers back to your dealers when it’s time to swap wheels. And thanks to our relationship with another client, accolo, we can staff faster and better in any language and any place than anybody else on the planet.

We’ll be ready for our meeting even if you want to meet us at 9:00 AM in person tomorrow morning in San Francisco. We’ll pack the ASM top team into Max’s GTI and show up in a real driver’s car.

So much so that we cancelled XM.

And then came BBC Radio 3 on the web. BBC Radio 3 is what I would also want in Paradise if I could somehow get my record fudged. The BBC has unlimited funds with which to do great things (raised through a tax on TVs and the lottery) so unlike our public radio and TV there is no sponsorship, no pledge weeks, no endless non-commercials from Exxon and the local law firm. And very, very little self-promotion about what you just heard what you’re going to hear later and how all this was brought to you by people just like you who, if they knew better, would probably be listening to the BBC.

Strangely, as I write this on Saturday morning, the BBC is playing the live feed from the Met in New York. We could listen to the Met directly over our local college station that also feeds it, but the station puts out a poor quality signal. So the Met sounds better coming from New York via London to San Francisco via the web. Amazing.

It was too good to last, this classical music paradise. You know how it is with little perfections, that bakery shop around the corner with their dreamy cream puffs and one day the door doesn’t open and the counters are gone. And you notice the ‘Retired’ sign in the window. Two weeks ago, the BBC signal suddenly turned into a parody of itself — a digital hash with echoes and a rapid chopping effect. You could tell what they were broadcasting, but it was unlistenable. No classical radio when I was shaving. No classical radio Sunday morning. No classical radio during dinner. Every few hours I would try the feed again, hoping against hope that it was some technical error that someone had overlooked. But that seemed absurd. How could the mighty, perfectionist BBC, the greatest institution in the history of broadcasting not know that something was wrong with the single greatest source of culture available in the entire universe? Impossible.

So I searched the BBC’s technical websites to see why they were scrambling our signal. Maybe they had changed policy and weren’t going to let the rest of the world freeload on the British taxpayers. Seemed reasonable, but sad if true. But I could find no statement, no press release, no mention of an intent to scramble their feed to outsiders.

I found a BBC technical website that seemed preoccupied with the event surrounding the fact that some department was moving across the street. I wrote that my signal had been screwed up for days and wondered if that were intentional. I explained I had tried on several different computers. I also mentioned that rebroadcasts of BBC Radio 3 programs were streaming just fine.

Imagine my surprise when I got a Google alert this morning from the BBC website. Someone read me, checked out my concern, and discovered that the BBC signal to the entire world had indeed been unlistenable for weeks. And they fixed it.

I am pleased to announce that as of this morning, BBC Radio 3 is back on the web.

Shows you something about the leverage of the social media. A single radio listener can save paradise for the whole world. With just a few keystrokes.

“Transparency” is a big buzzword right now, and there’s a good reason: It’s less of a trend than it is an inevitable part of doing business. Companies like Google are getting ever faster and more sophisticated at cataloguing and organizing the massive amounts of raw data that exists on and offline, giving your customers, clients and competitors near-instant access to huge amounts of information about you, your products, and your actions. What you say in a press conference tomorrow will be still be somewhere on YouTube ten years from now. That flippant response to a rude customer on your blog will may as well have been embossed on your letterhead.

While all this should terrify any sane person, in the long run it’s better for consumers and companies alike. For example, Apple is one of the few companies who can still get away with pretending problems don’t exist. They’ll refuse to acknowledge that defects or problems exist for months, or even years, before suddenly offering a fix as if nothing ever happened. They can get away with it for now because they’re big (and popular) enough, but they’re not immune: Steve Jobs occasionally has to come down from up on high with an email to a jilted customer or the media when Apple’s message control gets out of hand.

Pundits will pontificate about the value or worthlessness of social media and its uses, but undeniably the best part is that now you have a powerful platform without any filters between you to the people you’re trying to reach. As a company, you have unprecedented power to control your narrative and connect with the people that matter most – your customers.

So what’s the first rule of social media? Be honest. Be open with your customers. Remember that the coverup is worse than the crime. If you mess up, fess up. Your customers will respect you for it, and be more willing to give you the chance to make it right.