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.

"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/

Online, everybody shops alone. Retail sites and checkout user flows have evolved around a single user, with a single mouse and a single credit card. For the most part, our friends are missing from our online retail experience. Friends are part of our shopping ritual. What happened to dragging a sobbing, just-dumped pal out of bed at noon and taking them to buy — I don’t know — a Porsche GT3? Online retail is a lonely place. At the same time that individual stores began enabling product ratings as a way to “engage consumers,” the landscape of our online experience changed. Here it comes: Social networks now account for a significant portion of our time online.

This is a strange time. The people we know live on one site. The stuff we want lives on about a million others, two or three of which are good retail experiences. If you have motorcycles as one of your interests on your Facebook profile, and have friends with similar interests, you’ll get an ad for motorcycle insurance in the ad space on your Facebook feed page. But the clickthrough rates for those ads are 0.032%. The ad recognized you, but you don’t care.

Likewise, if you go to the motorcycle insurance site to shop for a quote, you’ll find that the site treats you like an anonymous drone. Guess what: As far as the insurance site knows, you are an anonymous drone. So there is no cross-selling, no friend recommendation, no integration of your life into the process of buying insurance. This is a big miss for retailers and shoppers alike.

Attempts have been made. You can become a fan of a product on Facebook — if you have no life. You can rate songs on music sites — if you love music and have no life. You can have a virtual friend make a recommendation for you on iTunes and feel virtually not lonely. But the chasm between the people in your life and the stuff you all love is still huge.

To bridge the gap, profiles must become portable. Not autofill portable, but truly integrable into our various online experiences. This brings up a number of issues — you can hear Jim Gaffigan’s high-pitched voice as the chorus chiming in here: “Who owns the platform?” “What about privacy?” “What if somebody sees me shopping for Basha CDs?” But the big question is, “Who owns my profile?” And the answer in the context of social retail is, “We all do.”