While keeping up with the what’s what in social media, a few of us here at the ASM factory indulge our vanity on the Google from time to time and see how we rank. Imagine our surprise when a search yesterday let us know that “Volkswagen Seeks Agency for Social Media.”

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. (more…)

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.

I like to be able to turn on the radio and have classical music be there. With the disappearance of classical radio in general around the U.S. I was listening to radio less and less. Then came XM satellite and for awhile we really enjoyed classical in the car, although the main announcer, Martin Goldsmith, had a way of saying his own name in a weird way — Golllld-smith — about 500 times a day and after awhile you were wondering if it was worth it just to hear a little Mendelssohn, whose quartets Martin Golllld-smith played a lot.

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.

Be honest. Who didn’t get a bit of a chuckle out of last weekend’s digi-brawl between Kevin Smith and Southwest Airlines (Southwest stockholders excepted, of course)? We all got to see a famous movie director getting thrown off a plane, making funny faces on Twitter, all the while unleashing rant after (hilarious) rant to his legions of fans (and critics), and all Southwest seemed to be able to do was offer a milquetoast denial/apology on their blog. In the parlance of our times, this would be known as a whole hot steaming pile of FAIL. Haha, everybody laughs and we move on to the next meme. But if you’re a company planning to participate in the social media world (and you’d better be), you should be paying close attention.

“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.

We’ve been moving ourselves and our clients to a new kind of website — magazine style sites that allow an organization to put a lot of information right up front and that make it easy for the reader to quickly find what it is they’re looking for.

For organizations that have regular blogs, it’s always been difficult to keep old blogs, even great pieces, front and center. New blogs push old blogs farther and farther down. That’s the way it was.

With magazine style web pages, everything changes. Lots of articles can share the front-page, organized by category, so dozens of stories can get attention.

Most important of all — magazine style blogs have one unique feature that lift them above 99% of all the blogs on earth: a dateline. The dateline, streaming right across the top, announces that your website is much more than brochureware. A date-lined website says:

“We’re committed to bringing you whatever is new and important the moment we learn about it.”

The dateline give a reason to your community to return to your site frequently since they can depend on you to bring them what they need to know when they need to know it.

Yes, running a magazine site commits you to a lot of thinking and a lot of communicating. The great part is that you’ll be building a knowledgeable and appreciative community of supporters, allies, referrers, and customers.

A Guest Blog from Larry Ackerman, Founder, The Identity Circle, Author of Identity is Destiny and The Identity Code

As we slide into 2010, working to trade recession for recovery, there seems to be more and more talk about how to rekindle top-line growth, how to build competitive advantage, and how to find and hold onto really great talent.

If, however, there is one thing that signals cautious optimism among beaten down companies and stressed out executives, it is talk about innovation. Why? Because innovation is the art of the possible. It demands optimism, conjuring up such close-cousins as transformation, creativity, potential, and renewal. In short, innovation is the embodiment of corporate hope.

Where does innovation come from?

A recent article in The New York Times, Now at Starbucks: A Rebound, describes how the company, under CEO Howard Schultz, is in the midst of shuffling off the cookie-cutter methods of assembly-line cappuccinos, in favor of the kind of eclectic, “start-up” attitude that spawned the business, beginning in the late 80s.

The article unfolded for me like a play, with Schultz offering hope and analysts offering concern that Starbucks is refusing to accept its “new identity” –

Schultz: “We lost our way…I told employees to break the rules and do things for yourself.”

Analyst: “The kind of resonance the company once had is going to be hard to recapture.”

If innovation is the art of the possible, then Starbucks is definitely innovating. But where does that innovation come from? Does it flow simply from creating ever-new-and-improved customer experiences, or is this kind of innovation translating what was into might be?

Want to innovate? Go back to the future.

A great movie — an even better mantra when it comes to sparking innovation. Schultz’s call for change isn’t about reinventing Starbucks — it’s about rediscovering Starbucks: reclaiming those essential and unique characteristics that accounted for its formative appeal. Will Starbucks succeed in its odyssey? I believe it will

Another fine example of back to the future innovation is Apple, everyone’s perennial innovation poster child. What is so compelling about Apple’s innovation two-step is that it is no more, nor less than the continual reinterpretation of the company’s original mission: to humanize the computer. And day after day, year after year, that’s exactly what Apple does, with charm and brilliance.

The success of back to the future innovation isn’t limited to high-flying lifestyle and consumer technology concerns. It is alive and well among a wide variety of companies. Take IBM, for instance. About to enjoy its 100th birthday, IBM generates enormous energy, impact and profits by continually reinterpreting its founding intent: to apply technology solutions to solve business problems.

IBM is a problem-solving juggernaut, whose current focus on helping us become a “Smarter Planet” allows it to do what it does best: Improve our societal infrastructure, economically and socially, creating, among other things, more efficient cities and more patient-centric health care.

Technology to one side, think also about Walmart who, 24/7, finds ways to give ordinary folk the chance to buy the same things as rich people. Look as well to Ford, whose new global offering, the Fiesta, continues to democratize the automobile, something the company started doing in 1900.

Coffee. Technology. Societal infrastructure. Retail. Cars. Innovation doesn’t depend on what business you’re in — it depends on honoring who you are as a business, by constantly translating your company’s roots into new forms of value that drive progress and, in turn, keep your organization fresh, relevant — and alive.

Is ‘new and improved’ killing innovation?

Consciously or not, Howard Schultz understands the power of back to the future innovation. Untethered to the roots of the company, innovation can take on a life of its own, producing profits but losing its strategic value. New mission or purpose statements, often the result of new management teams, can draw companies away from their core identities, leading to new products and services that, unintentionally, pull the organization further and further away from its essential center of gravity.

The real power of taking a back to the future approach to innovation isn’t just its impact on productivity and profits; back to the future innovation also leads to a more coherent organization, where the pieces and parts of the company fit together well, adding up to a more strategically efficient enterprise.

What to do?

As the seeds of economic recovery begin to sprout and your organization starts to think seriously about innovation and the investment it calls for, here are three questions for you to address:

Does everyone in the innovation loop know who we are, where we come from, and why it matters? Make a point of communicating the value-creating roots of the enterprise, how they’ve contributed to growth over time and their importance as the institution’s center of gravity.

Are we capable of changing from a changeless foundation? Manage the identity paradox. Help your innovators to see the power and wisdom of staying in sync with the original vision or principles of the company, while aggressively reinterpreting them to meet changing market needs.

Can we make Shakespeare stick? When it comes to innovation, channeling the Bard is a good idea. Shakespeare was an innovator in his own right. He wrote plays that altered how audiences perceived life. He changed people’s views of human relationships. But that’s not why innovators should keep him in mind. Shakespeare — like Howard Schultz — understood the power of identity as a force to be reckoned with when he said, “This above all: To thine own self be true.”

Comment from Gerald Sindell:

Really terrific. I think, or hope, that’s there’s one more piece here, and that would be the link between the innovation that absolutely was the core of every successful new company’s success and the understanding that the original innovative impulse (and success) must be nurtured as the driver of innovation forever. When the 2nd generation of management becomes a caretaker instead of innovation driver, the org will certainly whither. That would be Ford after Ford, Apple in the years Jobs was gone, and so on.

Identity, which is based so profoundly on the initial innovation (and innovators), is the eternal key to authentic innovation.

Near San Francisco in the town of Vallejo, there’s an old street that was part of the Naval shipyard established in the 1800s called Magazine. In New Orleans, there’s a six-mile thoroughfare called Magazine Street. These are the ancient streets where magazines of supplies were kept, storehouses for emergencies. On warships, the magazine is the storage area for ammunition. A magazine is where you can find every essential you might need.

If you blog reglarly as a way of bringing fresh ideas to your constituency, whether they be clients, potential customers, community, or just readers who like your voice, then you are probably familiar with the feeling that blogging is fundamentally Sisyphusian. You say something worthwhile on any given day, it goes up on your blog (which is hopefully on the front page of your website) and it stays there for all to admire forever and ever.

Actually, not really forever. It stays up there until you obliterate it with your next post. And then whatever you’ve previously written, no matter how brilliant, gets pushed down farther and farther until it rests in a cold damp cellar reserved for ancient blog posts. As in anything written more than two weeks ago.

Fortunately, there’s a revolution happening for artful bloggers: the magazine. Magazine-style templates for your blog have the potential to transform your website from flat and old to active, complex, rich, dazzling and involving.

We’ve been playing with a couple of magazines on two of our websites over the last few weeks, and the implications are percolating through. You can take a look at endleofon.com and agencyforsocialmedia.com (this site) and see what the current result is.

Here are a few observations: magazines are organized by the category you assign your blog posts. In our current versions we can have up to six categories. Since the first category goes on top, we have named that category News, and every post we write will first carry that single category as its identification. Later, when News is full of posts and a post gets pushed out of News, we’ll rename it to one of our other five categories.

Maybe the most important driver of the spirit of a magazine template is that it has a dateline, right across the front. That shows your commitment to visitors to keep your site always updated — so that every time someone shows up you’ve got something new for them. The great thing is that all your old posts that had something important to say can now be found in one of the categories on your front page, and listed there as prominently as you want it to be. If you’ve been in the habit of creating little keynote graphics for each post, Bravo! You’re ahead of the game because your website will automatically be lively with lots of great graphics. If not, then you really ought to spend a little time finding and creating graphics to go with every post that you want to keep alive.

Don’t hesitate to go back and freshen old posts. No one cares if what you said was slightly off six months ago. If it needs to be corrected, updated, revised or even thought through some more, go ahead and refine it.

Magazines are powerful, and not for everyone. If you are comfortable keeping your website up as a brochure, you don’t need to be a magazine. But if you’ve been creating blog content for awhile, a magazine might be the best possible way to leverage your investment.

And if you’re really committed to building an active community for the issues you care about, whether it be your business or simply your passion, you might find the potential big gun of a magazine to be just what you’ve always wanted if you only knew it existed.

Next post we’ll talk about the opportunities magazines create for you to invite contributors to your site. Guest bloggers used to come and go, disappearing just like your own blog posts. But with a magazine, you can keep vastly more content, your own and that of your guests, right up front.

Jet Blue is twittering at jetbluecheeps. Customers are signing up for last minute seat deals and receiving notice of a block of 25 last minute seats at pretty good prices. What counts if the current number following: 45,000.

The danger with offering these last-minute deals on twitter is that the prices can appear to be a false discount for some travelers. One reader complained that an outbound fare from Boston to Chicago for $9 was dishonest, since the return flight was $160.

A quick check today shows all the trips offered are round-trip, locking in twitter travelers to a two or three-day stay.

ASM likes twitter for last-minute vacancies of all kinds: doctor’s or dentist’s appointments, your restaurant gets a last-minute cancellation, your spa suddenly has an opening. If you have your social media in place, you can fill those last minute spaces.

I wrote this piece the morning General Motors entered into bankruptcy. When I hear a CEO say something that’s almost self-delusional, I wonder if he’s trying to rally the troops or really believes it.

Surprisingly, GM responded with an open letter to me. I took them up on their offer to survey their models and dealers, and I wrote a long private message back to their head of design. When I was unable to get any response, I followed this piece with something, although tongue-in-cheek, would have been a radical way to express their new committment.

GM has still not begun to touch the potential of the social media to begin to forge genuine relationships with their customers.

Good morning Mr. Henderson —

Big day for you, no question. My best wishes go out to you on Day One running the new General Motors. Clean slate, pretty much, except for those legacy issues that might hold you back. A culture of poor vision, poor design, poor assembly, poor service. That’s a lot to change all at once, but you’ll need to do it. At your press conference you said the new GM would be bringing to the market, among other things, great design. That really struck me. I wondered what your process would be for inspiring, creating and recognizing great design. And how could a passion for great design be inculcated into the culture on a permanent basis?

Your passenger vehicle sales are now one-fifth of what they were at their peak. You’ve lost sales to all those well-designed and well built Japanese, European and even American cars. I can’t imagine that without great design you will be able to get people like me out of their Audis and Hondas.

And that’s what worries me. I really wonder if General Motors can suddenly start to make stuff that’s well-designed, from both the engineering side, as well as the interior and exterior. Can an organization that has made so much truly ugly stuff suddenly start making great design?

I went to your new website gmreinvention.com and perused the portraits of the top team, just to get some clues about the design sense there. I see mostly corporate-type guys, in ties and suits, and the one thing that doesn’t leap out is, “Wow — great design sense.” What leaps out is, “Older white guys wearing suits to the office in Detroit, except for one woman and one black guy.” And while we’re all looking at this new website together for clues about the new GM, does it worry any of you that the portfolio of the woman, Susan E. Doherty, is described as: “North America VP, Buick-Pontiac-GMC.” Didn’t anyone tell the web designer that Pontiac was buried several weeks ago?

The first clue that I will be looking for that will indicate whether you might be getting it will be how you go about changing the old GM logo and branding. Will you step up to the world class level of your competition, or will we have more lipstick-on-a-pig level efforts? The truth is, if your new logo and design efforts are synthesized for you by an outside agency working with your marketing people, chances are the new look of GM will be as disconnected from your aspirations as the current worn-out GM blue and white letters over a thick bar.

What should your process be to discover your new image? A significant number of top team people from a broad spectrum of leadership is going to need to get together and decide what the new GM really stands for. If you don’t get this critical first step done right, the chances that anything else you do will be able to accurately express your aspirations for the new GM will be zero. If you don’t know who you are and can’t articulate it, a whole bunch of people throughout the organization are going to be making up their version of what the new GM is, and it’s going to be way, way too much like the old GM.

Once you have those retreats to figure out who you are, then you’ll be able to talk to designers about that new logo. You will be able to tell them what you want to convey, instead of the other way around. And when they get it right, you’ll be the ones who know.

In the meantime, the whole world is watching. And we’ll know, too, when we see that new “GM” for the first time, what your future is.

The plight of the typical independent bookstore, such as City Lights in San Francisco, highlights the challenges for the little guy trying to compete against the online giants. In this piece we take a look at what a retailer really has to offer, and how to turn that into a successful business. The small retailer has some real competitive advantages over the giant online store. The challenge is to let go of the old business model and make the most of the new reality.

This piece was written for Huffington Post, so there’s a lot more that could have been said about the opportunities for the small retailer to capture and build a thriving community. It starts with taking advantage of the fact that you’ve got real people in your store. Capture their contact info, give them a discount for staying in touch. Build a loyalty program (the more you shop with us, the better your discount.) If you give it a little effort, you can create a relationship built on value and trust that no one can complete with.

Here’s the original post:

She seemed like what you might call ‘a nice person.’ He seemed decent enough, too. His voice a tad too loud, but not meaning to be obnoxious. They were just enjoying the days between Christmas and New Years, chatting, flirting, browsing the new non-fiction cases at City Lights. Multitasking ran deep in their veins. They were joking, scanning book jackets and discussing several topics at once.

I would have turned back to my browsing, when suddenly it caught my eye. She wasn’t even looking at her phone, but in a well-practiced gesture that you might not have seen if you weren’t paying close attention, she hovered her phone over the book and snapped a picture of the cover. It took less than a second but there was no mistaking the intent. City Lights had lost another sale. That $35 book would soon be coming her way from Amazon at $24.95.

The store was bustling with customers. We try to visit regularly because the browsing is always so superb — it’s impossible to glance at a shelf without discovering a terrific book that you haven’t heard of before. A year ago I had been scanning a category of books near the cashier called “Books With CDs” and Arnold Steinhardt’s exquisitely crafted Violin Dreams fell into my hands. (And I bought it there.) I’d never heard of it before and never seen a mention of it in print since. If not for City Lights I would never have discovered one of my favorite books of all time.

Browsing is like middle children — something you take for granted but when it’s gone society loses something important. Middle children are the buffers in a family, the ones who learn to negotiate between the typically aggressive eldest child and the clingy youngest siblings. Middle children are like saints, actually. (Full disclosure, yes, the author of this piece is a middle child, but you probably already knew that.) It was predicted a generation ago, and clearly now come to fruition, that with the shrinking American family and the decline of the numbers of middle children, we would become a more contentious people. Clearly this explains what’s going on in the Senate.

Browsing has a big role to play in society, too. Browsing is the enabler of serendipity. Without browsing, the chances for the out-of-frame discovery are terribly diminished. I am still waiting for someone to say, “I discovered this really great book on Amazon.” What would our world be like without serendipity? That would be gray, dear reader.

Busy as the store way, the City Lights cashiers had nothing to do but chat with each other and answer the occasional reference question. They just weren’t ringing up sales. City Lights had become a free browsing service for Amazon.

We took a break from browsing and headed out for some non-touristy North Beach food. We stopped in front of a restaurant and were immediately assaulted by a hawker who swept down, apparently attempting to entice us with a breath that sang of fresh garlic. She announced the specials in an accent so obscure that even as we read the menu along with her, not a word could be understood. The dim sum parlors provided a different sort of browsing: plates of wax food that was meant to speak directly to one’s salivary glands.

And then I got it. Both the restaurants and City Lights were providing a browsing experience. The difference was that the customers browsing the restaurants came in and actually bought stuff. But people browsing the books at City Lights were buying their books from Amazon, even while they were still right there in the store!

What to do?

If I ran City Lights and wanted to stay in business, I’d put big signs in the windows and behind the cash register: “We’ll meet Amazon’s Price!” Apparently City Lights management believes that they can’t make enough money trying to match Amazon, but I have news — making $7 on a book is better than making nothing on it. The day I was there thousands of dollars in sales were being lost. And as long as you have the traffic, do what the carwashes do. Sell other stuff to your customers at full price: accessories like reading lamps and bookmarks, gift cards, even Smithfield hams, dammit! But don’t turn your bookstore into a browsing facility for Amazon. You can’t go on like this.

I left the store a little depressed, fearing for a great institution. As we walked by The Stinking Rose, another North Beach fixture, I noted a woman in her thirties deep into her book as she sat by herself in the window. There was no question where she had bought her copy: she was reading a nice fresh volume of Kerouac.

So City Lights had managed to make at least one sale. I hope it wasn’t the last.