The Personal Touch: Barney’s New York
No, we don’t spend a lot of money or time there (thank God!), but my wife is a big fan of their incredible perfume collection. When she visits, the salespeople remember her name. When she buys something, she will often get a nice handwritten note in the mail. These things, in addition to the nice smelling perfumes, keep her coming back.

It’s All About Who You Know: Cafe Madrid, Chelmsford
A dear friend of ours hosted a birthday get-together for my wife on Friday. I don’t often find myself in Chelmsford, MA, but I was impressed by what I found. In addition to the great service and great food (we ordered the tapas sampler and the paella, and they threw in the Spanish equivalent of antipasto while we waited), the husband of the owner of this small Spanish-American restaurant came by our table, offered to take our picture (above), and emailed it to me. That’s service! If you’re in Chelmsford, stop by for good food (and ask Larry, who’s also a dentist and a damn fine maker of sangria, if he’s figured out that photo printer yet).

Did You Find What You Were Looking For?: Home Depot
It was in-between snow storms, and with no immediate snow in the forecast. I thought for sure I’d be able to find three things quickly: rock salt, a snow shovel, and a snow pusher for my car. The only rock salt I found was in a 25 lb. bag: quite a bit more than i was looking for. The snow shovels were hiding in the garden center, nowhere near an entrance. Finally, the snow pusher was nowhere to be found. I walked out empty-handed (the shovels sucked). I tweeted my frustration, and got a reply from Home Depot. A simple and scripted one that asked “Did you find what you were looking for?,” but it was enough (for now) to know that they at least saw my tweet (now do something about it). What can I say; I’m easy!

Know When To Say Yes: Verizon
On a whim, I wandered into my local Verizon store to complain about my mobile phone, the LG Voyager, which has gotten scratched to hell and was prone to shutting off for no good reason. No questions asked, they gave me a new phone, and found the right cover to prevent more scratching. I was prepared to give them Hell, talk them down contract price-wise, but I was so disarmed I didn’t even bother asking about getting cheaper service (that WILL come soon though, trust me, especially with $40 all you can eat data+voice plans out there).

Right Here, Right Now: Bank of America
I may sound like a total shill here, as these are brands that can evoke very strong negative reactions in people, but I have nothing but good things to say about my Bank of America customer service experience. I left my card in an ATM and got a replacement card within 15 minutes of noticing it. Bank of America succeeds by having processes in place to deal with a LOT of contingencies, and by being available to me almost all the time. The training they must give doesn’t always sink in right away, but my experience has been much more positive than negative.

Okay, so what are some examples of not giving me the personal touch that I need?

Ignorance Ain’t Bliss: ANHosting/MidPhase
This company, the soon to be former hosting provider for this blog, has BIG problems. First of all, they have a brand problem, as I can’t even really tell you what the company’s real name is. Second, they have serious downtime issues. Finally, their customer service doesn’t handle escalations appropriately, or at all. I can’t get beyond a level 2ish technician to a business-level person who can really explain all the downtime that my site has gotten. Finally, they just don’t give a rat’s ass about ANYTHING online–they won’t engage, period. Ironic (if not entirely unusual, unfortunately) for an ONLINE HOSTING provider, no?

We Are Always Right, Except When We’re Right: Apple
I know, I already went off on Apple (and the next two companies) on the SocialSphere blog, but it bears restating here. Apple does a LOT of things right, and whoever on NPR who recently said they’d rather have an Apple employee dress them than a Microsoft one is absolutely right, but Apple and Steve Jobs are NOT infallible, and they run an incredibly old school marketing program for such a hip company. I would appreciate Apple much more if I felt like it listened to me, even if it’s to say that they wouldn’t let me chose their clothes, let alone their software improvements.

Ignore The Man Behind The Curtain: Google
When customer support for any other company takes more than 72 work hours to address a complete failure of their product, you’d move on. When the company is Google and the product is AdWords, you don’t have many other viable options, so you take it. But you don’t forget.

Crowdsourcing? What’s That?: Facebook
So you now have the largest online social network in the U.S. . Do you think to leverage that incredible customer base to help make better informed decisions? No, you plow ahead, ignorant of the will of the masses, and make dumbass decisions like Facebook Beacon, the New Facebook and the completely ridiculous new ToS (apparently they’ve rolled back the ToS).

You have to have all three of these in place in order to truly succeed with social media. I think it’s also very interesting to see how these three spheres align, and where they don’t. This is simplistic and a first stab at something we’ll be discussing more early next month as we plan out 2009 as we all try to visualize what a “social sphere” really looks like (and how many there are). Without giving away much more, I will say that good things are definitely coming from SocialSphere in the coming year!

I’d love your thoughts. I’ve also been playing with “spheres of influence” and other ideas…

• Setting up a research calendar for 2009 reports, which will focus on particular segments of social web technologies
• Launching our weekly Social Media Business Tool review, which will focus on how to get started with individual services, sites and tools
• Kickstarting one podcast series–in which SocialSpherites will interview book authors–and adding a few more interviews to the B-2-B social media successes series I started for Tech PR Gems and PRobecast
• Reviewing existing, and ultimately proposing SocialSphere’s own, frameworks for evaluating social media tools and services for businesses
• Formalizing the processes around our daily Social Media War Room, including a headline news feed and other notification and subscription services

In the meantime, please check the SocialSphere Blog for updates from the other crew.

Mitch then went on to quote SocialSphere advisor Joe Trippi, which is of course when my ears perked up. Mitch wrote that

Obama used a combination of television, the Internet, and social media to recruit volunteers and supporters, and cement relationships with them. He asked supporters to supply their cell phone numbers, and sent out regular text-message blasts, even announcing his selection for vice president over text message. Using a custom social-networking site, created with the help of a Facebook co-founder, Obama supporters were able to log in and find lists of people they could call, or whose doors they could knock on, to try to persuade others to vote for their candidate.

And it’s only the beginning, said Trippi. That kind of networking will likely transform the White House. Trippi anticipates Obama will create a similar social networking for his legislative initiatives, and recruit supporters to lobby Congress to get his policies enacted into law.

The result will be further increase of presidential power, and erosion of Congressional authority. “Congress will be put between a rock and a hard place, if millions of citizens sign up to help the President pass his agenda,” Trippi said. “If the President says, ‘Here are the members of Congress who stand in the way of us passing healthcare reform,’ I would not want to be one of those people. You’ll have 10 or 15 million networked Americans barging in on the members of Congress telling them to get in line with the program and pass the healthcare reform bill. That will be a power that no American president has had before. Congress’s power will be taken over by the American people.”

Mitch and Joe paint a picture that is at once scary and inspiring. Setting the political implications of a weaker congress aside (this isn’t a political blog, after all), this will—we hope—be a new kind of presidency. But don’t get fooled—BusinessWeek reminds us that Barack wasn’t the first presidential candidate to be good at tech.

The real test will be in how well Barack is able to transform his social media marketing machine into a true engine for change. Don’t get me wrong, we’ve taken the first step toward change by electing him, but his mastery of social media will not be solidified until his social media adoption becomes more than marketing. As Mashable’s Adam Ostrow writes, “How Will President Obama Use His Massive Social Media Influence?” Or as FreshNetworks asks,

How would [the Obama/Biden administration] use social media and online communities to continue to engage with people when they are in power[?] Social media can really help engage people when it provides away for them to have a real exchange about things that matter to them, where they can find out information on things they are interested in, share ideas and thoughts with peers and with politicians, report things to them and feel that they continue to be part of a campaign.

Newsweek cautions us that his road will not be an easy one, and the American public may have to be patient. Keeping us feeling connected is one way to do that, and social media is the way to do it. I hope I’m still getting emails from him two years from now (and maybe tweets too!).

We got to talking about the history of Boston’s tech community—Adam has survived more than one downturn over the years—and then the conversation turned to how we are positioning ourselves for the downturn. After sharing how my company positions itself, he questioned, given the current economic slump and growing concerns over the viability of the many startups which have banked on low-revenue “if you build it they will come” business models, whether “web 2.0” is a term anybody will want to associate themselves with a year from now.

Then, on Tuesday, I presented to a class of Emerson students about social media and PR, and got asked to predict what would be hot in the next couple of years. Of course I said “Web 3.0,” which Wikipedia concisely describes as “the evolutionary stage of the Web that follows Web 2.0″—um, yeah, thanks! I like the way the conference organizers described it:

The Web 1.0 concept was simple: web pages linking to web pages. Then came Web 2.0 – a powerful movement from web pages to web applications. Web 2.0 applications have evolved into often slick viewports into proprietary or personal collections of information. This means they still primarily house data in silos inaccessible to and disconnected from the larger world, and most importantly, from each other.

But as we approach 2009, the clear outlines of the new web are forming. Some call this next generation the Semantic Web, but we think that term is confining, and so, instead, we refer to it as simply Web 3.0.

The new web is moving beyond connecting pages to interconnecting data objects, concepts, and things. Ultimately Web 3.0 is really about creating technology that more accurately mirrors how we see and think about the world around us.

So these are the key areas I think will see a lot of development over the next couple of years:

• Trust. Trust is one of two remaining economic scarcities in the Internet Economy—there’s just not much of it out there. Chris Brogan put it nicely: “Though a company like Microsoft spent millions and millions of advertising and marketing dollars trying to improve our perception of the brand, none of us gave a sh!t until Robert Scoble came along and put a human shape around their online and event presence for us.” The trust barrier will be solved by understanding how human “trust agents” (as Chris puts it) work, and by allowing us to layer “trustworthiness” over all of our online interactions (not just in search, but social networking, bookmarking, blogging, etc.)
• Attention. Attention is the other economic scarcity remaining. There are only 24 hours in the day, and we have to sleep for a good chunk of them. The competition for the rest of them is fierce. Applications that are smartest at competing for our attention—or at helping us understand what we should be paying attention to—will have a distinct advantage in the web 3.0 world.
• Agents. Chris Brogan talks of human trust agents, but digital agents will finally come back into the public’s view as well. I’m not talking about the old school “tickler” agent (“Hey, don’t forget you’ve got to pick the girls up from soccer practice tonight”), nor am I talking about Google Alerts (“You asked me to keep an eye out for blog posts mentioning ‘Web 3.0′, so here you go…”). It’s closer to the kind of capability you see in good contextual advertising (my favorite example of which is all the “Bacon Salt” ads I get on Facebook after I signed up as a fan of the bacon page), but it’s both cross-platform and cross functional. As just one small example, you tell it that you want to be kept abreast of upcoming social media events, and it checks Upcoming.org, Facebook, Evite, Meetup, etc. and shares with you the events it finds, allowing you to sign up for them through its own interface.
• RSS. I can’t tell you how wrong-headed so many interpretations of Forrester’s recent report are (Paul gets it right in this link). RSS is not dead. It’s simply buried so deep that most people don’t even know it’s there. But that doesn’t mean they’re not using it. Content syndication will be at the heart of web 3.0. It empowers almost everything I’ve been talking about in this post to some extent. Don’t sell it short. Look for ways to use it and build applications around it.
• Semantic Web. I’m sorry. I hate to use this term. It has such negativity surrounding it. But let’s put all that bias aside for a second, and ask ourselves a question: What if there was a way, for instance, that my blogging software could understand that what I was writing about—in plain English—was an event I was trying to promote, and could translate that information so that it could automatically be shared with Upcoming, Evite, Eventbrite, Facebook, etc.? Tell me that wouldn’t be cool. The AI behind something like that isn’t too far away—hell, the Turing Test is pretty close to being passed.

Am I missing anything?

[ADDED 30 OCT 2008 1:30PM]

YES! I’m missing something:

• OpenID! A conversation between myself, @RodBegbie, @al3x and @sbtodd on Twitter made me realize how important something like this will be to Web 3.0. If you assume that trust and interoperability will be at the heart of Web 3.0—go ahead, try to argue otherwise—then an idea like OpenID becomes critical. It provides a common identity platform for interoperability. YES, to quote Alex Payne, “It’s confusing for users and developers, it doesn’t bake security in, and it doesn’t solve a problem that non-geek users care about.” But it’s just confusing because nobody’s been able to explain it well. Security can presumably be fixed. And Like I said on Twitter, it might not solve a problem most non-geeks care about*, but down the road they might!

* THIS geek certainly cares about it. I am LIVID every time some sites password security mechanism forces me to create YET ANOTHER password that I will ultimately forget. And what about interoperability? To make that happen, you’ve got to give away some security. For instance, for a lot of the cool (not to mention necessary) Twitter apps, I need to share with them my Twitter username and password. Having a security layer on top that ultimately ensured that Twhirl doesn’t have to know my password, or that I didn’t forget the super-strict password that I had to create especially for one service, could ultimately make my life easier.

Was I wrong? By the very design of my new blog–which for the record is completely independent and wholly owned by me–have I indelibly tied myself to my new employers? Is this bad? Have I violated a rule of personal branding in tying this new blog too closely to my new employer? My good friend Jim Spencer (@fairminder on Twitter) called me on it today:

Thanks Jim! You’re right. I feel so old skool! I thought this personal branding thing wasn’t totally foreign to me, being so social media savvy, but I am busted! I’ll have to think of a clever logo/swirl with MM, M&M, MtM, or my initials or something…

Personal branding ain’t as easy as I thought it’d be! But it’s good to have friends to help you along.

It was a whirlwind day of meetings on the Marine Corps, thoroughbred racing, auto clubs and sick kids–all the while texting back and forth with Liz Koch, who headed up today’s Social Media Club Boston event at Gillette Stadium while I was busy getting briefed and decompressing.

First of all, this is a hell of a smart team! Smart, but also creative and collaborative. Our clients, at least the ones they’ve let me speak with already on day one, are also sharp and willing to learn.

The best thing about the culture here is the emphasis on learning, thoroughness and collaboration–as just one example we had one of our interns standing up in the conference room showing off sites many of us had never seen before.

So far, no regrets! I do miss the antics at Topaz, but there’s so much to learn and do here. I’m looking forward to tomorrow!

I’m convinced that Topaz would have had more in store for me should I have decided to stay, and I was sorely tempted to do so.* But my gut was to take advantage of the opportunity that I wasn’t looking for but secretly wanted. It’s an opportunity to explore how social media can help organizations with more than just their PR and marketing needs. It’s not that PR and marketing aren’t important–they’re very critical applications of the web 2.0 technology we have at our hands. But they’re not all that social media can help with.

To be truly successful, social media needs to–if not be delivered in a top-down manner–at least be advocated and understood at the highest levels within an organization. Having a web 2.0-savvy champion inside an organization’s PR department will simply just not cut it. CEOs that don’t understand social media will soon be finding it harder and harder to find jobs–especially in this economy.

With that lecture in mind (I promise there will be many more of them here!), I’d like to introduce SocialSphere Strategies, the company I’m heading to on Wednesday. You may know them through their sponsorship of past Social Media Club Boston events, or through the many very smart people working there, including John Della Volpe, Mark Wilson, Jonathan Chavez, Nicco Mele, Abby Giles, Linda Della Volpe, some very smart advisors and of course some very smart millennials, who of course keep everybody else honest.

I have accepted a position as senior analyst and director of client services, meaning I will split my time between researching (and reporting on) web 2.0 technologies and applying this research to SocialSphere’s clients, which include or have included the Massachusetts State Lottery, Harvard’s Institute of Politics, Reader’s Digest, Kyle’s Treehouse (which by the way is looking for a social media-savvy employee–drop me a note if you’re interested), the National Thoroughbred Racing Association and the United States Marine Corp.

So here’s the problem: I’ve violated two important principles that I’ve lectured many people about:

1. Always try to take two weeks off between jobs to refresh yourself. (I’m taking exactly zero days off.)
2. Promote your personal brand as well as the corporate brand. (Sure, some people know who I am thanks to the Social Media Club and, in general, the social media scene here in Boston. But I haven’t had my own blog.)

I can’t fix the first problem, except by perhaps replying on John’s good nature and all-around niceness to give me a few extra days off after I show how hard a worker I am. But I CAN fix the second problem. And YOU can help! You can subscribe to the RSS feed for this blog. I promise I’ll say smart things here!

I’ll outline in a separate post what I intend to write about here, but be assured it will focus on an analysis of social media and web 2.0 from a holistic business perspective–and with a healthy dose of skepticism that only occasionally creeps into a lot of the navel gazing we all do.

Because my day job will include responsibility for analyzing technology (and because I’ll be working with some brilliant measurement and analytics folks), you’ll get a much more analytical, organized and even quantitative perspective from this blog. From the get go I intend to have nice crisp clean categories–buckets! We all love buckets! All the lovely social media diagrams I see are great to look at–and don’t get me wrong, they provide a good high level view of the world–but they’re not very practical for classifying and thinking in an organized fashion.

So you’ll get buckets, folks! None of that folksonomy crap–we’re talking real taxonomic buckets that will help you understand where things fit into the big picture. So that’s my promise!

Next up is a post on my editorial policies, a rant or two, then I’ll roll my sleeves up and post an editorial calendar to get things started for real!

* For the record, I am not completely severing my ties with Topaz Partners. I have agreed to serve as a member of their board of advisors, and will continue to contribute to their great blog and podcast.