The morning had gone well. I’d recorded a personal best for the 10K. I was enjoying the run, powering through the first two hill sections on pace, on plan. Then at mile 12, trouble. I noticed my hands first. My fingers mutated to regulation-sized frankfurters. I couldn’t make a fist. Then my feet—I felt like I was running in wet Uggs. My pace slowed, then stopped. I willed myself to keep moving and pulled it together just long enough to get across the line. The video of my finish is hilarious, one arm flapping wildly and the other clutching my phone so I could stop my Nike+.

There are many online training plans available for first-time racers. I trained to one from a reputable site. I did about 140 miles in preparation. Then I made a rookie mistake. In the final days, I read an article on the same site, “How to Have a Great First Half Marathon.” “Drink at every aid station,” they advised. I know better. On my training runs, I drink very conservatively. But on race day, I rationalized, I’d be going harder than before—the experts were probably right. Nope.

The medics had a simple explanation: I was mildly overhydrated. My water intake was inhibiting replenishment of salt in my body. I had created an electrolyte deficit. To compensate, my cells were swollen with H2O. Basically, I’d made a tactical error: I drank too much during the race.

Marketers have an obligation not only to put out good information but also to contextualize it for athletes. In a rush to get info out inexpensively and in a timely manner, it is easy to forget that there are real people out there who are counting on it’s being well organized and correct. The organization that creates plans that are easy to understand, well contextualized, and experience appropriate can create a very loyal following.

In the end, what I discovered through training for and completing my first half marathon was that most free advice on running is like water: It’s best when taken with a grain of salt, so the electrolytes can keep the swelling down.

For years we had heard how communities were going to be the new way forward for marketers. And indeed, as sites began to allow ratings and comments, great strides toward engaging consumers were made. Looking back even two years, it’s almost comical how many well-intentioned people made commitments to technologies they thought would create consumer “engagement.”

Those days are long behind us. The platforms of choice have reached a level of, dare I say, maturity: Facebook, Google, Twitter, Yelp, WordPress, and so on. Somewhere in the mix, people are finding a combination of commerce, sharing, and socializing that is right for them. That’s the engagement.

In the past, firms invested in features and functionality to try to help consumers have a richer experience with their brands. It turns out that what consumers want is not whatever flavor of community a company is pedaling. If the enterprise has a good Facebook presence, that’s fine. But consumers want products to work as expected. They want companies to be true to their word. Without that, no amount of community building matters.

Marshall McLuhan said, “If it works, it’s obsolete.” When it comes to engagement, technologies will come and go. When it comes to loyalty, delivering on your product’s promise is the only way to ensure a happy customer. Aw, shucks, go ahead and use my personal information to sell ads—that puppy is so darned cute.

Me: “Los Angeles—Cole’s restaurant and bar.”

Her: “Certainly. I will now download directions to your nav screen.”

Me: “Dang!”

That was a great experience. No fiddling with the nav touch screen—just a quick conversation and I’m on my way to a French dip and refreshing beverage. There’s a lot that isn’t technologically great in my car. There are at least four different female voices involved in setting the car’s preferences (five, including my wife’s). The voice commands are painfully inaccurate. Setting up a Bluetooth device without any screen input is a fail. But asking for directions and getting them sent to the nav screen is fantastic.

The OnStar experience works because it doesn’t rely too heavily on the car’s computer’s having to be great. It is a service. It can be upgraded without touching the car’s technology. GM can tweak OnStar’s back end as much as it wants and then deliver the service when it’s tested and ready. A car’s computer, on the other hand, is essentially obsolete the minute it boots up. There are no upgrades, no cracking it open to add more RAM. Seven years down the line, the dashboard touch screen’s icon for the iPod will still have a click wheel on it.

External services such as OnStar have a much longer shelf life and are more satisfying for consumers. As connectivity to networks becomes more ubiquitous, automakers increasingly are going to shift services into the cloud. And we’re not talking only about new flavors of OnStar.

Google has an autonomous car that has been driving around California for weeks now. The car has been using a series of cloud-based data sets, radar sensors, and video cameras to direct itself down Lombard Street in San Francisco and along the Pacific Coast Highway. Google believes that the self-driving car will be available to consumers in eight years. Core pieces of car functionality are not only being taken off the dashboard, they’re being taken out of our hands entirely. That’s going to require a huge shift for the auto industry—and a fundamental change in the way we live. I, for one, can’t wait for OnStar to take the wheel.

The event was called, “How to Imagine a More Integrated L.A.— Why transforming the Los Angeles River would revitalize the city and bridge east and west.” At the center of the discussion was a plan commissioned by FOLAR (Friends of the L.A. River) to revitalize a 125 acre site in downtown Los Angeles known as the Piggyback Yards. Imagine downtown having its own Millennium Park, connecting Lincoln Heights, Boyle Heights, Union Station, and places, like the USC Medical Center and the Brewery Arts district. At the center of the project would be a revitalized Los Angeles river—complete with Steelhead trout.

The projects architects and designers did a lot of ground work engaging in a bit of guerrilla planning by going to each agency with a stake in the project. The Army Corps of Engineers was on board. Union Pacific, the current owner of the property had been consulted. L.A. Metro was in on it. Leaders from the surrounding communities had been consulted. In the end the planners came up with a design that was not only remarkable, but also viable.

Great idea, right? Who wouldn’t want this? Turns out—everyone. In my post event straw poll no one believed that they would see this project in their lifetime. Because A. they we’re cynical about government bureaucracy, and B. they didn’t believe the community would provide support required to pull it off. Bummer.

I often think that for every one good reason to do something, there are one thousand reasons why not to do it.  In civic terms a massive park in this part of L.A. would be amazing for the city, but if no one believes the government can do it and no one believes it can be done with popular support—all the imagination in the world won’t make it happen. If all of us Angelenos put our heads together I’m sure we can come up with 10 million reasons to kill Piggyback Yards. But that doesn’t mean we should.

The act of attempting such an ambitions plan is an act of courage on the part of the project planners. The crowd in attendance was prepared to imagine living in a city where such a massive project could happen. So its some comfort to know that in L.A. good ideas will continue to integrate the city in ways that infrastructure never will. Kudos to Zócalo for providing a forum for this kind of thinking. As long as there are places where people can challenge assumptions there’s a one in 10 million chance that something truly great could happen.

Economy-class seats are 17 inches wide. Seat pitch (the distance between seat backs) is typically 30 to 32 inches. Add 10 inches of legroom and we essentially travel cross-country in a mini fridge. It sucks, but it’s what we expect.

Low expectations are an opportunity. It’s one thing for an airline to announce an additional 2 inches of legroom in coach; it’s another to invest real R&D money into blowing away customer expectations. That’s exactly what Air New Zealand did when it introduced the “Skycouch” coach seats that fold out into beds:
http://bit.ly/8Mvq1t

Not only did they innovate on seating, but they also came up with an inventive pricing model to ensure that those new skycouches would be full of passengers. What I like about the Air New Zealand approach is how radically they addressed the customer need. The three-year project not only looked at ergonomics for a single passenger but also for how families and couples utilize space together. Competitors may be able to shift seats forward and backward to create more room, but most will be at least two years behind on radical innovation.

Making big improvements in customer experience during an economic downturn takes guts. It will be interesting to follow Air New Zealand’s business curve over the next two years. Given my most recent travel experience, I’m thinking: Auckland is looking like a pretty sweet destination.

The first reason is simple: it’s about potential. “Slates” don’t have a bunch of clunky buttons or a fat keyboard hanging off the front. They can be any device that their software wants them to be. Think about the iPhone, with more than three million apps available: the iPhone is potentially three million different devices. Cracking the code on a “slate” would be a goldmine for whoever gets it right — one device to rule them all.

This brings us to the second reason for so much excitement surrounding the “slate.” In December, Vitrue released its annual “Vitrue 100: Top Social Brands.” The iPhone was in the top spot. It isn’t because it’s a great phone — it’s because of how many other ways we connect socially through the device. Facebook’s mobile usage grew by 300% after the launch of the Facebook iPhone app. Twitter’s mobile users account for half of all tweets. Mobile computing devices get social currency when they help us connect. A “slate” with a social component is going to get tremendous buzz. That buzz will translate into social currency. With Frost & Sullivan estimating that more than half the world’s population will have mobile subscriptions in 2013, social currency translates into real currency for manufacturers of the next big thing.

If Apple rolls out a winner on the 26th, the tablets of CES will be a distant memory. But if it misses, it’s anyone’s game.

Here are four principles to help marketers co-create value with their customers.

Be Collaborative
Customers, partners, and employees — we’re all in this together. As I have said before on this blog, the stakeholders in your brand conversation extend beyond end users. Enabling dialogue between your customers, employees, and partners can create value for everyone. Twitter can help you engage in conversation in real time. But with Vivox voice chat coming to Facebook, customer service calls are about to explode socially. Companies that are good at co-creating value will harness voice-to-voice interactions with customers to create positive word of mouth in social arenas. Given the potential for volume-driven social customer service, it will have to be a collaborative effort.

Be Considerate
Being considerate of people’s time and effort is critical. Failing to remember frequent users’ passwords while constantly bombarding them with CRM campaigns makes your company appear soulless. One of the basic tenets of social engagement is, “Be human.” It might come down to a few simple things: remembering user preferences; not spamming long-time friends; rewarding loyalists; providing extras for über advocates. Ask your company what is preventing you from being human with your customers; then work on those areas immediately.

Be Targeted
We’ve become used to a certain amount of ad randomness in our online experience. But within social media, we are beginning to expect messages to reach us targeted to our specific area of interest. Start by identifying the social ecosystem model that works best for your company. Include customer insights. Ask where they are expecting to see you and build from there. Content that is tailor made for your target social ecosystem is more important than any banner ad you run. Nobody passes along a Flash intro — I guarantee it.

Be Adaptive
Linking into and out of key customer arenas such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc., allows the conversation to grow organically and creates word-of-mouth opportunities. If you are determined to collaborate with your customers, you have to be willing to broaden the technology discussion within your organization. Tools like Facebook Connect need to be integrated in collaboration with your IT department. Not sure where to start? Take a look at the Altimeter Group — they can help you understand the best technology strategy for your enterprise. It’s hard to collaborate if you don’t integrate.

Co-creation of value has its rewards

Buying friends vs. influencing people

There is a company that will sell you 5,000 friends on Facebook. It will cost you roughly $700. An Australian marketing firm can deliver the same number of Twitter followers for even less.

Body count is only one measure of social media success. It’s the easiest to grab onto because it’s the one that everyone can see. Here are 5 additional goals for brands that are looking to go beyond body count.

1. Shareable content.
Delivering a product message that will be used on Facebook, Twitter, or Meetup is different than writing package copy. Make it a goal to be associated with content that gets traction on Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, or Twitter. It may be a PR effort or a story pitched to a prominent blogger. Do it well and you’ll be gathering mind share — not just bodies.

2. Real-time conversations. Start offering more than a “contact us” link.
In social media, a customer can share a bad experience instantly with all of their 5,000 friends. There are some Twitter apps, such as Twittdom, that can be bought as a package, but they require staff to provide answers to tweeted customer problems. We like the Southwest Airlines approach: heading off the consumer at the pass. By capturing a cell phone number when passengers buy tickets, Southwest is able to call them before they . . .  pack the car, round up the kids, drop the dog at the sitter, turn off the gas, arm the alarm, and drive 40 minutes to the airport. We can only imagine how many complaints this system has warded off.

3. Being physically relevant.
It’s old school, but there is a reason why campaigning politicians physically touch as many people as they can. Tweetups got a lot of press a couple of years ago for bringing groups together in the physical world. We like Foursquare. It allows users to automatically associate themselves with physical locations at specific times. It has the potential for creative event activation. It could be as simple as creating a Foursquare account and having employees check in to their favorite brand-related locations — Foursquare can be set to deliver those check-ins as tweets — or as elaborate as creating an entire event around a specific popular Foursquare location.

4. Internal participation.
You can’t be part of the conversation if you don’t join it. Encourage employees to be active on the social networks. Your team members have the biggest stake in your success as a company. Ignoring that they have a POV on your business that they already share with their friends is willful ignorance. Embracing the platforms that your team members participate on, and giving them an opportunity to identify themselves as part of the organization, sends a positive message to the whole team.

5. Shifting the conversation.
Sentiment is key to understanding your social efforts. Make it a big goal within your organization to understand and change the conversation around your company. Get a baseline measurement from Social Mention or one of the other sentiment readers out there, then set a big goal to move the needle. Encourage everyone — employees and customers — to enroll in this task, and get everyone pulling in the same direction. Remeasure the sentiment after a month and celebrate the shift.

Pack and go profile

Yesterday’s news that Facebook had hired David Recordon from Six Apart got me thinking: How far are we from true profile portability? Recordon’s book on OpenID is available for pre-order on Amazon. According to his blog, the book will “take all of the OpenID knowledge and best practices that are currently spread out and unorganized around the Web and organize it so that it becomes easier to implement OpenID on your site.”

OpenID offers users a simplified site sign-in process. Remember Clear, the airport fast lane for business travelers? They read your thumbprint and, bam, you get right through security. With OpenID, you get a fast lane for site sign-in. No remembering passwords or filling out registration forms. One sign-in — that’s it.

If Facebook is hiring people who advocate this kind of technology, true profile portability can’t be far behind. Let’s call it OpenProfile, an aggregation of all our Facebook activity that goes with us as we travel the Web. An OpenProfile would get us recommendations that match our interests wherever we go online. And as long as the profile information we choose to share is a benefit to us, we will share it freely.

People might get freaked out and decide that sharing their Facebook profile with every site they visit is just too scary. So adoption could be slow. The risk is that it might be adopted too slowly, not gain enough followers, and never really take off — just like Clear. But if Facebook integrates it in a nonthreatening way, it could also be the revolution in experience design and marketing engagement that many have been hoping for.

Update Aug 27: Nice quick exchange with Dave Recordan. It looks like we’re closer to an OpenProfile than not. Dave pointed me to Federated Login for Google Account Users a combination of OpenID Attribute Exchange 1.0, Open User Interface 1.0 and OpenID+OAuth Hybrid protocol and FaceBook Connect and your profile is part of your interactions—you just may not realize it.

Reality catches a break

The display of graphic information over real-time video is commonly referred to as Augmented Reality (AR). One’s initial experience with it was probably watching a football game on TV. It was a small miracle when the computer-generated  first-down line magically stayed put while the camera panned. Players appeared to run over it, not under it. Camera angles changed, and the line remained. For a brief instant, it was cool. Now that has disappeared; it has become part of the game. In fact, it is part of nearly every TV sporting event. TV instances of AR technology are Pop Warner league compared to what is about to happen.

Tag the World
Layar is an app available for the android phone. It allows developers to lay photos, video, and text over live video on the phone. And it’s location based. So as you pan your phone’s camera over the food court, you can get information on which vendors are less likely to poison you (Are you listening, health inspectors?). Any content that is tagged shows up as information over what appears on your camera’s screen.

Be Recognized
What about people? TAT Augmented ID is an app that uses facial recognition technology from Flickr to identify a person and pull up available profile information about them. Think your online persona can’t follow you into the real world? Think again. Feel a Sandra Bullock movie here, anyone?

Need Directions?
Download Nearest Tube. It overlays subway station information onto live video on your iPhone. Point the camera down the street and get the distance to the nearest subway. The transportation, the restaurant, although…

Minority Report vs. Fight Club
There are two cinematic visions of AR that have manifested themselves in real life. Audiences swooned as Tom Cruise groped the gestural interface in Minority Report. His deftness at sifting through information felt almost inevitable. In reality, we got the iPhone and iPod touch. Small miracles, but not as grand an experience as we’d hoped for. Next, Ed Norton’s walking through his immaculately detailed apartment in Fight Club, with everything he owned displaying its name, price, and description. It was an IKEA catalog brought to life. And it was supposed to scare us. Instead, it influenced a whole generation of programmers and designers who are making it possible to overlay the real world with all kinds of digital information.

What we might find scary, though, is just how fast this kind of technology becomes commonplace. Will it be socially acceptable to scan strangers? Sure. Will there be virtual graffiti artists tagging the wonders of the world? Absolutely. Will we eventually forget how cool it is to use this stuff? Certainly.

UPDATE: Sean Kingston Augmented Reality Karaoke Yahoo Tech reports rapper Sean Kingston CD ships with an augmented reality component that lets visitors to Kingston’s site be part of a music video.