Hi Mr. Jones.  I caught your MSNBC interview this morning with Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski re: your new book, Who Cares Wins: Why Good Business is Better Business.  You made some excellent points re: how transparency, authenticity and speed will win the day for corporations; about how companies who expect to do well must increasingly expect to do good, as it is becomes ever easier for consumers to suss out egregious behavior and punish bad actors (from un-friending to public humiliation).

This is all well-worn territory for Social Media geeks, of course, but it’s always good when execs who can regularly bend the ears of the Davos set preach the Cluetrain gospel. Good on ya.

Towards the end of the interview, Ms. Brzezinski asked, “Do you like iPhones?”  I saw this as a big set-up question.  I thought she’d ask you how Apple could possibly be so popular, given the damn near nefarious practices of its manufacturing partners in China. Turns out she was just pissed that she’d broken her new phone. What a wasted opportunity.  So, I’ll ask you, Mr. Jones:

If – as you posit – we live in a dawning era in which lame and/or evil business practices will be readily discovered by consumers who are increasingly empowered to publicly discuss and punish such practices, how do you explain the outsized popularity of Apple?

Based on numerous articles in well-read and esteemed publications such as The New York Times and Wired, among others, it’s been made crystal clear that Apple is no friend to U.S. manufacturers (nor to American workers), nor does it seem to take more than a cursory interest in the working conditions of Chinese workers.

Where is the outrage?

For the record, I don’t have the answer – and despite my harangue above, I freakin’ love my iDevices.  For the record, I sincerely believe in what your book evangelizes.  I haven’t read it yet; maybe you talk about “The Apple Exception?”  Is it an exception?  Is a company that produces superb product (and pays lip-service to the proper causes) exempted from the new paradigm?

I write this Open Letter because a) I could not believe the plum-sweet opportunity that Ms. Brzezinski criminally let slide(!!), and, b) because I genuinely wonder about the answer.  You seem a smart, decent, and well-connected fellow – heck, you probably have Apple CEO Tim Cook’s cell phone number! – and I hope you can help me figure this out.

Depending on who you ask, the Facebook IPO will result in boundless glory or is destined to be remembered as the final pinprick in an impending burst of the current tech bubble.

For my part, whereas in the past I likened Facebook to previous Walled Garden successes like AOL (the AOL of the early 90′s, not the AOL of today – which is a SHIFT client!), in the past 18 months or so I’ve only been impressed by Facebook’s ability to embed itself across the larger, open expanses of the Web. It “rides alongside” us as we surf, versus dictating how and where we experience the Web, as Ye Olde AOL used to.

This fact, plus the service’s global adoption rate, plus what appears to be an increasingly sensitive perspective re: user privacy (borne of past errors), makes me pretty sanguine about Facebook’s future. Invest!

The Facebook IPO is also good news for Silicon Valley in general, as the Merc aptly discussedlast week. While the Merc article talked more about the remora-style companies who will benefit from Facebook’s shark-like dominance, the economic boon will also be felt by the myriad service providers (including marketing agencies) who cater to the Silicon Valley set.

New millionaires means new startups: the brilliant engineers who started out with Zuckerberg will soon have the means to strike out on their own.  I look forward to having scores of meetings in the year ahead, in which I am proudly told, “The CEO of <hot start-up> was one of the original engineers at Facebook.”

God bless the entrepreneurs.

Wow. It’s been nearly two weeks since my last blog post. Sorry about that. I was out sick. And wow, what a crazy time to sit on the sidelines…

Facebook IPO. Hello!  More on that in a future post.

Susan G. Komen vs. Planned Parenthood.  Sheesh! Let’s talk about that!

(Caveat:  I am a Blue State progressive; whose mother died of breast cancer; who marched on Washington as a college student in support of women’s rights; and whose dear-departed grandmother spoke with horror of the days prior to Roe v. Wade. Got all that?  You’ve been warned.)

Just as I started writing this post, the news broke that the Susan G. Komen Foundation – which had spurred a massive protest movement by severing grants to Planned Parenthood for breast cancer screenings (for what turned out to be a spurious rationale) – was reversing its decision. Oy!

Shall we count the ways in which this situation got screwed up (from a Public Relations perspective)?

They apparently made this decision back in December, and it led a top exec or two to quit in protest. And when they made the announcement, the Komen Board members were caught short by Planned Parenthood’s immediate (and compelling) response.  Yet the two organizations had been in talks for weeks beforehand!  In other words, there were plenty of red flags raised along the way to know things could get touchy.  Lesson: have a crisis plan ready; this could get ugly.

The decision to de-fund Planned Parenthood would result in thousands of underserved women in minority communities losing access to breast cancer screenings.  Imagine how much grief the Komen folks could have spared themselves if they’d tethered their PP announcement to news of their plans to ensure those communities still got care?  Instead it looked (and smelled, badly) like a cynical politicization of women’s healthcare, that left poor women in the cold…

… And this all occurred during the same week that the GOP’s presumptive nominee was caught up in his “I don’t care about the poor” slip-up… which led to “revelations” of the Komen Foundation founder’s deep ties to the GOP.  Can you say, “down the rabbit hole?”  Lesson: don’t lose sight of your mission.

To make matters worse, not only was the Komen Foundation slow to respond to the hubbub, but they even (allegedly) started deleting negative comments on their Facebook page.  For the record, that’s a no-no.  I brought this up on Twitter and got the following responses in quick succession:

Confirmed: @Komenforthecure is deleting critical FB posts from their Wall. Way to make a bad PR problem worse. #skg

— Todd Defren (@TDefren) February 2, 2012

@socialologist @TDefren We have not, do not and will not delete posts on our Facebook wall. If you click “everyone” they will all appear.

— Susan G. Komen (@komenforthecure) February 3, 2012

@komenforthecure @socialologist @TDefren I was deleted.

— lwiseblau (@lwiseblau) February 3, 2012

Whether they deleted posts or not … the perception was that they were doing so. A more active response policy on their Facebook page would have gone a long way.  Even those who disagreed with them might have given ‘em props for responsiveness in the firestorm.  Lesson: community management principles of messaging, transparency and speed are paramount in a crisis situation.

Could it get any worse?  It did.

The good news is that both Planned Parenthood and the Susan G. Komen Foundation got a spurt of donations, from the left and right sides of the spectrum, respectively.  But, this only made crystal clear what was fairly obvious all along: this had been a political decision, and the ramifications for under-served women were thus made all the more stark.  In other words, the mission had been violated.  Which led to the reversal today.  Which led to sniffs of “too little, too late” from the Left and justifiable rage from the the thousands of newly-minted pro-life Komen donors on the Right. A classic no-win situation!  Lesson: “caving” is not always the right solution; Komen could have found alternate ways to serve poor women’s needs, i.e., through different advocacy organizations, and gotten enough credit to walk away bloody but unbowed.

All of this put the Komen Foundation’s many corporate sponsors in a bind.  Many of the sponsors’ own Facebook pages lit up with boycott calls and “for-shame’s.”  Facebook’s thumb’s-up became a wagging forefinger (or a proudly thrust middle one)!

The single best response from a sponsor came from the team at Yoplait Yogurt.  They created a separate tab on the Yoplait Facebook Page, dedicated to letting their fans vent about the situation (and in the bargain, wisely taking the political screeds off their main Wall):

Lesson: an oldie but goodie – “embrace and extend.”  Yoplait knew they couldn’t easily dodge the issue (their Pink Lids campaign was pretty huge), so they embraced that fact and extended it to a dedicated forum.  And, importantly, the Yoplait team didn’t just throw up this tab and ignore it. They continue to engage (rather non-commitally, but that is to be expected from a large corporation … at least they are present and listening).

By the way, there’s a great write-up on all this (if you’re game for even more on this issue) at Kivi’s Nonprofit Communications Blog.

Do you have any further thoughts on the Komen v. PP imbroglio?  I’m still kind of under the weather, but that likely means I’m more likely than usual to get it on with ya in the comments!  Have at it!

Those of you who follow me on other social nets like Twitter or Facebook know that I am pretty opinionated when it comes to politics.  Suffice to say that I am a card-carrying member of the “Liberal Coastal Elites.”  (I try not to over-indulge or bore folks with it; and I certainly can play nice with my right-leaning friends.)

I bring it all up only as a segue to the fact that I am a big fan of Andrew Sullivan’s Dish blog.  Sullivan’s one of the big dogs in blogging; he’s been freshly-empowered by his move to the Daily Beast to experiment with new technologies; thus I increasingly look to The Dish not just for political musings but as a pioneer exploring the future of the medium.

In recent weeks, for example, Sullivan hosted a live-chat with over 8,000 readers, to debate his ballyhooed NEWSWEEK cover story.  He implemented an “Ask Andrew Anything” video series featuring his rotoscoped image waxing on issues large and small.  He’s also live-blogged most of the GOP debates and caucuses — all with the help of only a handful of staffers. It’s a lean yet media-savvy organization that manages to post a mix of original and curated content upwards of 10x a day.

In a post last week, really almost a throwaway, Sullivan notified his readers that he and his team would be live-blogging the South Carolina contest:

“Yes, we’ll be live-blogging the results from South Carolina tonight starting at 7 pm. When I say ‘we’ I don’t mean it royally. We all scour the web and the in-tray for data, ideas, views, reactions, images, as they come in, and I organize it all into a single post and write it in real time.

“The kind of journalism that no one was ever expecting to do until a few years’ ago.”

That may overstate things: while few expected bloggers to become so sophisticated, what’s actually happening is that premier blogs are becoming more like broadcast outlets than websites.  This is not so much a journalism issue as a speed+consistency issue.  As Sullivan has noted:

“Matt Drudge told me when I sought advice from the master in 2001, (that) the key to understanding a blog is to realize that it’s a broadcast, not a publication. If it stops moving, it dies. If it stops paddling, it sinks.”  

Two of the top blogs in the world?  Drudge‘s and Sullivan’s.  Speed kills.

It’s the end of the Web as we know it: the more online we are, the more we expect the web to mirror the real time tv networks.  It’s the beginning of the end of the static web.  We’ll cease to think of it as a text/narrative-based medium soon enough.

With this in mind, if you are a brand considering a more aggressive Content Marketing strategy in 2012 … Will you be able to keep pace?

Let’s take a ramble.

One of those automated spambots on Twitter informed me that today was my 5–year anniversary of microblogging.  Wow.  Five years.  Really?

What was I up to five years ago?

I was living in Boston, in-between my family’s quinquennial moves to San Francisco.  My brain was on fire, as I’d hit upon a worthy successor to the Social Media News Release concept and was just a couple of weeks away from debuting the Social Media Newsroom template.

As I look back, 2007 was a prolific time for the entire Social Media industry.  It was not only the year Twitter started its remarkable run, but was also a time when Facebook was becoming truly important to the wider world; when bloggers were getting their due; when SXSW was worth attending; when the Echo Chamber was fully formed.  Some of my best thinking was produced in that timeframe, as I do a quick review of my “Jedi Academy” posts.  This was the era before Social Media Experts and dashboards and marketing automation and near-daily must-attend seminars.

Now, of course, everything is so … sophisticated.  The money is flowing.  Much of the ideas come from companies latching on to a sustainable trend vs. individuals sharing a passion.  I don’t bemoan the loss of that more innocent age.  The profit motivations don’t bother me a bit.  I only worry that the best ideas don’t always get a fair shake.

When I learned it was my 5–year anniversary, my next thought was, “Can I envision a 10–year anniversary on Twitter?”  I’ll admit, my gut reaction was, “NFW.”  Then again: why not?  Twitter, Google and Facebook have each done a far more credible job of embedding themselves in our daily lives than old stars like AOL, MySpace, Friendster, etc.  … And they are minting money, with no end in sight.  … And they are cultural touchstones in a way that those bygone services were not.  These three companies – Facebook, Apple, Twitter and Google – are the titans of this new age; they could well outlast us all.  … Which is why I worry that the best ideas don’t always get a fair shake, unless they can show how they complement (vs. threaten) one or more of those companies.

So I guess that’s what I miss, 5 years later: the sense that anything was possible; the sense that anyone could make a difference; the idea that anyone could win this thing.

It’s called growing up.