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.

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.

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

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.

hello, goodbye

You feel like a terrible person. You just ignored a friend request from your mom. What alternative did you have? A limited profile? It would take mom two minutes to figure out you were hiding something. Facebook has 250 million active users worldwide. The 55+ demographic on Facebook is growing at a rate of 194.3%. That’s a lot of moms.

Ignoring a family member is a symptom of a bigger problem for the social network players. An unwanted request from a relative was item #1 in the 15 Reasons to Quit Facebook article on switched.com. As networks reach a saturation point, users might choose to interact less or self-censor more rigorously. When people stop sharing, networks lose their vibrancy.

Enter the niche network. There are networks based on music, sports, film, colleges — you name it, there’s a network for it. Mom will join Facebook, but unless she is into big air or vert ramps, she probably won’t be interested in joining you on loopd.com. Loop’d Network is an action sports community. Users can add friends, create status updates, and do a lot of the things Facebook enables you to do — only sicker.

There are alternative sites like bebo.com that feel like MySpace meets Facebook. Bebo organizes around video music and groups and is a place you might migrate your close friends to if Facebook becomes too saturated. Ning cracked the code when they created the platform to end all platforms. On Ning you can create a community around any interest you may have no matter how obscure. Go to ning.com, search your obscure interest, and you will probably find 300 or 400 people who’ve banded together around, say, a love for habanero-based salsas.

Facebook no doubt is working on more solutions for dealing with the saturation issue. Until then, you could introduce your mom to http://twittermoms.ning.com/. Maybe setting her up on Twitter would keep her off Facebook — there’s a strategy.

We help our clients delight their customers. We expand what’s possible for people to accomplish on the technologies they use every day. We love community, embrace advocates, and put experience first. Ultimately we want to help people achieve something big — our clients and their customers alike.

Our mission points toward a future where what people want to do is more important than how they do it. For now, the world is defined in terms of social media, online media, offline media, advertising, games, etc. But as those distinctions fade, what remains is the experience. One of our goals as an agency is making sure that with the diversity of work we do, we keep in mind that the customer has a goal. There is something they are trying to accomplish, and it’s not our job to get in the way. It’s our job to surprise them with how well they were able to achieve that goal.

The moment a customer has a great experience and feels empowered in the process, that’s an OIC moment.

A shared idea takes on a life of its own.

Zócalo Public Square brings big thinkers and their equally big ideas into direct contact with the general public — for free. Zócalo is centered in Los Angeles, but events have been held in San Francisco, Berlin, and Shanghai. Later this year they will be in Guadalajara.

To see the likes of Paul Krugman and Wangari Maathai, or meet Reihan Salam in person, you’d normally have to score tickets to The Daily Show. Or you could attend one of Zócalo’s free lectures. The moderated events cover a broad range of topics. After the lecture, the speakers attend the reception. Want a drink with the Mexican ambassador? You could’ve had one if you’d attended the event at Disney Hall.

Face-to-face interactions are important. Several years ago I was at a lunch with Neil Postman, author of Amusing Ourselves to Death and Technopoly. I don’t recall the conversation — it’s the physicality I remember. He ate a sandwich. He sat kind of hunched over. He was at points comfortable with the questions and annoyed by the people doing the asking. I could probably watch every video of Neil Postman ever recorded and never see him eat a roast beef sandwich. Seeing him in person humanized his ideas.

I joined the Zócalo board last year because I believe they represent a new model for civic engagement — one that doesn’t just promise access to concepts but also access to the thinkers themselves. There are too few places to connect to big conversations. It takes $10K and a personal invitation to get a seat at TED. Zócalo lets you watch events online for free, but there is nothing quite like seeing the look on Paul Krugman’s face when he gets asked about current U.S. economic policy vis-a-vis the G-20 by goth girl. You just have to be there. Attend a Zócalo event and see for yourself.

"Thumbs up" in smoke

The Atlantic’s excellent article on ratings this month raised an issue we’ve been thinking about at the agency: What will it be like when we all have ratings? Nearly every business I encounter in Los Angeles has been rated by somebody on Yelp.com. Most get a 4-out-of-5-star rating. We usually scan the ratings looking for 1-star reviews. Interested in the single person who really hated Zankou Chicken? Was it the garlic sauce? Maybe they’re a vampire.

Today, ratings exist in closed systems. Yelp, Epinions, Google, Yahoo, iTunes, Amazon, etc. The Atlantic’s article highlights two specialty rating sites: Glassdoor.com, for rating your workplace; and RateMyProfessors.com. There are the sentiment raters like Metacritic.com or Socialmention.com that aggregate comments from the Web and assign value to the totals. Most systems are based on the deliberate input of users clicking a few stars or writing a full-blown review. With the rise of applications like Visible Vote mobile and Socialmedian.com, we seem to be on the verge of a ratings pandemic. An explosion of real-time yays or nays. Input generated while the emotions are still fresh.

Picture a Frank Luntz-style feel-o-meter application that traces how people are responding to events as they unfold. Nielsen ratings for everything in life. My guess is that you can already predict where the high and low marks are going to appear. Waiting — for anything — bad. Free stuff — good. The movement between the extreme ends of the spectrum — how quickly we go from satisfied to unsatisfied during a given experience — will be most interesting to marketers. “I love this frozen yogurt: 5 stars. What! There’s no actual yogurt in it? 4 stars.” And it won’t just be experiences. Are you a Good Samaritan or a bad neighbor. Prepare to be rated.

I once unknowingly cut off my friends on the freeway. Top down, 90 miles an hour, music blaring. I slammed past their Previa — mom, dad, baby, seat, and all. Fortunately, I found out the old-fashioned way: they told my wife. In a couple of years, I suspect, I would  just receive an unfavorable review — 1 star — for all the world to see.

Follow-up: July 3

Excellent article today in the NYT about ratings management.

Non stop tweeting gets its own API. Cotweet, the web-based collaboration platform that helps companies engage customers in real-time on Twitter has gone into beta. Cotweet allows users to sign in and assign tasks to others. Users can track an individual twitterer, get stats on them and add comments to their account. Starbucks, Whole Foods and Ford use Twitter for CRM and sales with CoTweet. Cotweet allows the rest of us access to the same kind of management tools.

The feed never ends.

http://cotweet.com/