What does Google know about you?

Have a look at this page:
http://google.com/ads/preferences

Click to Enlarge

This is what great customer service ‘feels like’. Do you think that the message (in the above posted image) was crafted by a company executive? or Edited and reviewed by a corporate communications council? Did it require layers of approval?

Leaders in days of social business should take a fresh look at their communication processes and re-design them accordingly. The market needs and expectations have evolved.  The above posted interaction is a prime example of a great company culture.

It is no longer feasible to have a ‘crafted’ message for every single customer interaction as that is non-scaled, slow, fake, fluffy and unauthentic. Instead focus on having a consistent story and an empowered customer oriented company culture.  It becomes even more important for social media strategists who are crafting their digital comms processes and really impacts how they build their content calendars. Traditional PR processes aren’t viable any more.

As of right now, the above image has had over 120K shares and has gone viral. People within my network have indicated that they will shop at Sainbury’s whenever they are in England. Congrats Sainsbury’s!

Total cost: An empowered employee and ₤3 pounds.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales tweeted on the 16th, “Student warning! Do your homework early. Wikipedia protesting bad law on Wednesday!”

Imagine a World Without Free Knowledge. This line from Wikipedia became viral on the social media last night.

As most of you observed on January 18th, many leading web organizations registered their opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (known as PIPA). Some vocalized it by ‘blacking out’ (Wikipedia). Some decided to post messaging and hosted petitions (for example, Google). In fact, Google gathered 4.5 million signatures in one day against SOPA and PIPA. By going dark for the day, and by suspending their services, they demonstrated the effect of these bills, if passsed.

The support from the Silicon Valley has had a positive impact on the Obama Administration as the White House has released a statement that SOPA will be shelved for the time being and openly criticized the bill.

On the other hand, the legislation is widely supported by Hollywood and the rest of the entertainment industry. In fact, News Corp’s chairman Rupert Murdoch, who has recently joined twitter, used social media to support the bill.  Some of Murdoch’s tweets included,

“So Obama has thrown in his lot with Silicon Valley paymasters who threaten all software creators with piracy, plain thievery;” “Piracy leader is Google who streams movies free, sells advts around them. No wonder pouring millions into lobbying;”

Google responded by calling Murdoch’s tweets nonsense and biased.

What does it mean for Canadians?

SOPA’s enforcement would certainly include Canada as the law does not care for physicality of the website server, instead it defines a “domestic domain name” as any registered by the registrar in USA. Since every .com, .org, .net is managed by domain registrar in US, the law effectively asserts jurisdiction over millions of domains (and sites) all over the world.

It also means that we Canadians or any don’t have a choice to view site’s content if it is deemed to be offensive of SOPA and/or PIPA. Think about that for a second. It basically comes down to this: within the bill’s almost 80 pages is a blueprint for ruining the Internet. In that sense, SOPA is a remarkable achievement. Rarely does a proposed law manage to be so bad in so many different ways.

Even though it is primarily a piece of anti-piracy legislation, SOPA is broad. The proposed bill gives the U.S. government  the power to pursue court orders against any site believed to be engaging in copyright infringement. (There’s nothing adversarial about the court proceedings that lead to those orders: the defendant doesn’t even have to be present). It follows the “Shoort First, Think Later” philosophy.

If passed, it will be the reason for social media’s death. If you share a picture from another site on this site in the comments, this blog can be shut down immediately. From Search Engines to Wikis. Imagine the social movements which can be shut down on the notion of piracy. The Arab Spring wouldn’t have been possible if a law like SOPA was in place. Occupy Movement, not a chance.

Not to mention that Canadian government typically follows US’s lead and can lead to a Canadian only law which would mimic SOPA and PIPA.

It hinders our future. It hinders the web’s future.

If you would like to understand the SOPA act better, be sure to check out the following video by Khan Academy which explains the act and it’s potential far-reaching implications.

Life can be hard, that’s the truth. The world isn’t always sunshine and rainbows. It can be a mean and nasty place and regardless of how tough you are it can beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. Nobody is going to hit as hard as life. But it isn’t about how hard you hit, it’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward; how much you can take and keep moving forward.

Genius Advertising by LG. Not going to say more, you have to click on the video link.

Happy New Year! After taking some much needed time off, I am back and I want to start our 2012 by show casing Seth Godin’s discussion on not being another average nobody. In the above video, Seth talks about the ‘forever recession’, derived from the industrial factory era, which led to creation of the top-down-fear based economic models and how one can join the race to the top, instead of settling for the bottom.

2012 is the year of disruption and innovation and forming real relationships.

I am also looking forward to announcing a new project shortly that I’ve been working on for quite a while now. More details to follow.

The Shiny Object Syndrome. It appeals to all of us. Think about it. Who hasn’t been impressed by the shiny new Macbook Air, the latestgadget or the latest social media meme? In the world of slick marketing, real-time instant gratification and ever changing digital trends, it becomes hard not to be distracted.

From Google + to Xing to Facebook Timelines to Android Icecream Sandwiches to Klout Scores to Jive to IBM Connections to SocialCast to our grandmother tweeting. It’s noisy. It’s shiny. It’s distracting. It’s all over the place.

However, we must ask ourselves and truly think about the why behind the slick object we are drooling over. The Goal. The Vision.

Last night, I was in a client meeting discussing the role of social media and the digital space in the upcoming Canadian political campaigns. During our discussion, I was asked if my client should sign up to create a mobile app which some company has been pitching for over a year?

I paused.

Where does an app fit? Apparently, someone was selling the idea that an app is social media and it can make everything happen in the next campaign for upcoming leadership candidate. I pondered the notion of the app and asked what will that achieve? Is it part of something bigger? Is it extending our story in the digital space? Will it drive awareness? Interactions? Encourage voting? How, when and where will it be promoted?

There was no answer.

They hadn’t thought that through. Instead, they were pitched that everyone uses apps on their iphones and smartphones. But it’s not their fault, as the app was not being pitched to solve a problem, a need or even a want. It’s an issue I often see in the industry.

In any business discussion, we need to step back and look at every tactic in a strategic manner. We must pose questions such as, is it driving our objective? Is it truly part of our strategy? Is it pragmatic? Does it add value in anyway? Or is it just busy work.

This becomes very important in the marketing space with shrinking budgets, where marketers are often distracted by the shiny object syndrome believing that the mishmash of different ‘shiny’ activities/tactics will just work because everyone else is doing it. Unfortunately, more than often, the activities aren’t inter-connected, not well thought out and only negate the brand experience and even worse — confuse our customers.

We create white papers, micro-sites, demos, facebook pages, email lists, twitter accounts, 10 page forms without ever thinking about the end goal and most importantly — the customer need and the experience. Case in point, think about the value of QR codes and how have they been used in the industry to date so far. Or companies dying to do social but not seeing any positive traction.

It is often observed in the world of social media gurus, agencies, and web 2.0 consultants where there is more focus on the tool and/or tactic vs. the business goal.

At the end of the day, are we mapping our activities to reach an end goal? Not only do we have to start thinking from an overall business perspective, but we also need to start thinking strategically from our customers perspectives.

We need to ask the why every time.

By the way, if I do get to launch a shiny slick mobile app for the next Canadian elections , I’ll definitely tell you about it. :-)

– Jeremy Pepper, public relations consultant

‎Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

“Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter … Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful…that matters. ” Steve Jobs

Here’s the Stanford Speech for your review. www.bilal.ca/the-best-14-minutes-of-your-life/

Writer Nicholas Thurkettle said that “People who speak of Steve Jobs’s legacy in tech terms are missing the story. Tech was the medium. Jobs was a philosopher.” If you would like to check out the other blog posts that have been inspired by Steve Jobs over the years on this blog, please click here.

I literally teared when my wife informed me about Steve Job’s death. As Om Malik said, “Steve taught me to care about the little things, because in the end, little things matter.”

Rest in Peace Steve. Sincere condolences to the Jobs family who have lost a father and husband to cancer at 56. We lost much. They lost more.

Why not drive them over to your site. In my past life, as their Global Marketing Leader at IBM’s DeveloperWorks, we realized the value of social media and created experiences that bridged external and on-domain experience. We learned that on our own domain can be as capitivating and social as any external social network. But it needed us to shift our marketing mindset to embrase social holistically. From advocacy programs to how we communicated our message. Frankly, brand needed to become less about the brand and more about the community it served. It wasn’t easy. But we did win the Forrester award for being the best in Social B2B space in supporting our community — on our own domain.

This allows us to serve community no matter if Twitter, Google+ or Facebook go away or morph into another network.

Copyblogger’s Sonia Simone has called it out.

Digital sharecropping is a term coined by Nicholas Carr to describe a peculiar phenomenon of Web 2.0.

One of the fundamental economic characteristics of Web 2.0 is the distribution of production into the hands of the many and the concentration of the economic rewards into the hands of the few.

In other words, anyone can create content on sites like Facebook, but that content effectively belongs to Facebook. The more content we create for free, the more valuable Facebook becomes. We do the work, they reap the profit. Same story with Twitter, Xing and other networks.

The term sharecropping refers to the farming practices common after the U.S. Civil War, but it’s essentially the same thing as feudalism. A big landholder allows individual farmers to work their land, and takes most of the profits generated from the crops.

The landlord has all the control. If he decides to get rid of you, you lose your livelihood. If he decides to raise his fees, you go a little hungrier. You do all the work and the landlord gets most of the profit, leaving you a pittance to eke out a living on.

Let’s think about that for a second.

“If you want to hire great people and have them stay working for you, you have to let them make a lot of decisions, and you have to be run by ideas, not hierarchy,” “The best ideas have to win, otherwise good people don’t stay.” ~ Steve Jobs.

Empower and hire the best creative talent. And trust them.

Every single relationship, business and educational outcome improves when the brain is positive first. If you cultivate happiness while in the midst of your struggles, work, at school, while unemployed or single, you increase your chances of attaining all the goals you are pursuing…including happiness.

Our society’s formula for success and happiness is broken. As Shawn Achor points out:

Happiness is not a mystery. You have to train your brain to be positive just like you work out your body. We not only need to work happy, we need to work at being happy. Try an experiment right now called the 21 Day Challenge. Pick one of the five researched habits and try it out for 21 days in a row to create a positive habit.

1. Write down three new things you are grateful for each day into a blank word document or into the free app I Journal. Research shows this will significantly improve your optimism even 6 months later, and raises your success rates significantly.

2. Write for 2 minutes a day describing one positive experience you had over the past 24 hours. This is a strategy to help transform you from a task-based thinker, to a meaning based thinker who scans the world for meaning instead of endless to-dos. This dramatically increases work happiness.

3. Exercise for 10 minutes a day. This trains your brain to believe your behavior matters, which causes a cascade of success throughout the rest of the day.

4. Meditate for 2 minutes, focusing on your breath going in and out. This will help you undo the negative effects of multitasking. Research shows you get multiple tasks done faster if you do them one at a time. It also decreases stress and raises happiness.

5. Write one, quick email first thing in the morning thanking or praising a member on your team. This significantly increases your feeling of social support, which in my study at Harvard was the largest predictor of happiness for the students.

If you are having trouble getting started, at the end of my TED talk I describe how to make those habits even easier to start by managing activation energy.

If you reverse the formula, you can turn happiness into a success advantage, raising every business and educational outcome. Start by doing one of these habits.  And once and for all, stop yourself and others from saying, “I’ll be happy when…”  That formula is broken. But there is a better one: happiness leads to greater success.

Apple at the core, its core value, is that we believe that people with passion can change the world for the better.

~ Steve Jobs

People with passion define their communities, their work and their lives. It is only their passion that drives the relationships, its culture, art and the science behind it all.

Social Business thrives on people with passion that continue to push their boundaries and never settle. Without passion, it would not be possible to not only build but be a successful social business.This believe and passion in something deep sets apart the do’ers from the shak’ers.

Passion and caring fosters the culture of real human dynamics that are the core of any social business — our relationships (with colleagues and customers) are forged on trust, a shared sense of purpose and a willingness to share and build on each other’s ideas.

In this sense I think you could say that a social business strives to be a much more human (and humane) kind of entity and that is only possible when people with passion and drive are behind it.