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

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.

Relationship Status: Linked

Facebook pays $42 million and gets a user base of early adopters and a team of ex-Google developers who are leading the way in real-time search. Should Google be worried?

FriendFeed offers a set of active search filters that would be very useful for Facebook, but not in their current state. In my opinion, the FriendFeed tools become really valuable if they can be integrated as passive search on Facebook, allowing users to filter and find content from friends without initiating any search at all.

The Facebook news feed, where friends share status, links, and photos, is quickly overrun if users have no filtering set. It only takes two or three prolific friends to push content off the feed page in a hurry. The act of hiding a friend on Facebook is the simplest form of filtering. A friend who generates a lot of content, but very little value, can simply be turned off. Friends who provide valuable information stay on the feed page longer.

So why did Google release a public beta of their search engine (code name: Caffeine) on the same day Facebook announced the FriendFeed acquisition. Are they nervous? Currently, Facebook searches are limited to items posted in the last 30 days. Not very threatening. But Facebook poses a threat to Google because the way users find information is less important than the trust they put in the information they find.

Think about searching vacation destinations. I trust the choices of my friends more than the options offered by a thousand faceless search results. What Facebook has over Google is the potential to deliver destinations I might like — based on where my friends went — potentially, a much higher-quality recommendation than a paid search result.

Quality matters to us. According to Forrester, the #1 most powerful form of advertising is the personal recommendation of a friend — Facebook’s raison d’etre. Search engine optimization isn’t far behind — but in Google’s eyes, neither is Facebook.

What do you wake up to?

What’s the first thing you do when you wake up? You have a few choices: Attend to your biology, get something to eat, shower, stretch. Many of us are reaching for our laptops or cell phones before we even get out of bed.

The New York Times article yesterday notes that network usage is spiking much earlier than even a few years ago: “Arbor Networks, a Boston company that analyzes Internet use, says that Web traffic in the United States gradually declines from midnight to around 6 a.m. on the East Coast and then gets a huge morning caffeine jolt. ‘It’s a rocket ship that takes off at 7 a.m.,’ said Craig Labovitz, Arbor’s chief scientist.”

Last year, I would listen to NPR for a few minutes. Today, the clock radio is unplugged in favor of a cell phone charger. On more than one occasion, I have been awakened by the buzz of the first AP story alert of the day, or the first email from an early-rising colleague.

The first experiences of our day are critical to how productive we are during the day. Julie Morgenstern, the author of Never Check Your Email in the Morning, says no email for the first hour. In her opinion, email puts you into reactive mode to start the day, and you never catch up (video here).

Our morning routines will continue to evolve as technology integrates information into our lives. Is the fact that many of us reach for information before we reach for the cereal good news, bad news, or no news?

No technology is an island

Once in a while a term comes along that resonates with some truth we all feel about technology. Kludgey was one — a perfect description for an interface or experience that was designed with blatant disregard for the user. Then there was ecosystem — the notion of a decentralized technical landscape where services are deployed in the cloud. Ecosystem emerged as a metaphor just when technology companies were trying to make substances like beryllium sound eco-friendly.

Now we have a phrase that combines the frustration a a poor user experience with urgency of an environmental disaster: Galapagos syndrome.

The Japanese develop amazing cell phones. They constantly lead the world in cell technology. Kids in Tokyo were using phones as digital wallets, and to read manga, while we were still enamored with the slide-away antenna on our StarTAC. Japanese phones are expertly adapted to life on the island, but they look like alien creatures to the rest of the world. The Japanese call it Galapagos syndrome — the creation of technology that develops independently of world markets. It makes a Japanese cell phone with e-wallet features we can’t use as appealing as a Gila monster in our pocket.

I imagine that this term used to describe all manner of closed technical systems. Social networks, and proprietary e-commerce solutions, will be vulnerable, as will any system or product that can’t be deployed in a global market on an open platform. The term creates a sense of urgency that implies that prevention or an antidote for the syndrome might be possible. So it’s perfect for your next IT meeting.

"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.

Majillions were spent by consortium and industry leaders organizing complex revenue sharing models for the the distribution and display of content. How terribly important and earnest the meeting must have been. Agents, moguls, talent, producers all with a huge stake in a tiny screen. What was the result? Mobile TV. An experience so singular I still recall every detail of where I was and what I was doing when watched it. Like an assassination.

Many of us would wonder why anyone would even try to own the channel for pulling TV onto the cell phone. We have apps that will allow us to access video, personal or pro, broadcast or amateur, in varieties and quantities we couldn’t have imagined even 2 years ago. With one app I can get every NPR station in the country. No local tuner, no radio, no need to sit through a pledge drive—sorry KPCC.

MobileTV seemed like an evolution. But the model had too many constraints to succeed.

What happened to mobileTV is also happening in our livingrooms. Quietly, the big OEMs are burying wireless cards into our flatscreens. Yahoo keeps its TV app development toolkit humming along. Microsoft is making 1 against 100 a gameshow/videogame playable on the xbox 360.  A little confusing, but it feels right. Its just a screen, why doesn’t it bahave like one? We have three expectations around content: Content is constant, content is platform agnostic, and content is free—or very cheap. Any attempts to limit the access to content by media outlets will simply be worked around by applications or forgotten all together.

At the moment our flatscreens and our cellphones have more in common than not. MobileTV and Broadcast TV stand on the same precipice. They share the same constraints and complications around the delivery of content. They seem promising, but very often the experience is a let down. On both applications are available to compete with content. There is no reason we shouldn’t be able to access our email, family photos and watch first run movies for free on the big screen in our living room. And therefore no reason someday we might be saying “I remember watching TV on my TV.”

July 13, 2009 Follow-up

Time Warner announced TVEverywhere. Well, almost. No mobile, but online is a start. Mashable reports that HBO and Cinemax have signed on.

http://tinyurl.com/lceqdr