I recently came across a CNN article that urges, “Be polite and put your smart phone down.” The article was sobering because it reminded me of the many ways I have allowed my smart phone (a 3G iPhone) to worm its way into my personal life like a virus — even altering my behavior in subtle but important ways. Consider this:

• Recently when I woke up for work, I swear my first conscious thought was, “Did I remember to charge my iPhone last night?” Not, “I’m hungry” or “Time to hop into the shower.”

• My walk to and from the commuter train takes a little longer. Why? Because I’m mentally distracted as I read my email on my iPhone while I’m walking. (At least I remember to watch where I’m going before I cross the street — so far.)

• I’m getting sloppy. The “pardon the typos while I respond to your message on my iPhone” mentality is taking hold. I’ve become more tolerant of writing gaffes than I should be.

• Although I have never texted or checked email while driving, I’ve done so at lengthy stop lights or while waiting for a train to cross the tracks in front of me. Some might say that at least I’m using down time productively. But too often I’m jolted back to reality by a car honking behind me when the light turns green or the train passes, and I’m still goofing around with my phone. Not good — just begging for an accident. And on top of that, whatever happened to using down time to meditate, pray, or enjoy the time-honored tradition of counting box cars? Does anyone do that anymore or are we all heads-down now?

• More than once my daughter has asked me to turn off my iPhone when we are together. We have a rule now: phones off when we are together unless I get “permission” and explain why I need the phone on (say, an absolutely unavoidable issue has arisen at work, and it’s better if I use my phone quickly to dispatch with the problem so that we can get on with our lives.)

I am most bothered by the way I have allowed my phone to intrude on my family time. I don’t want my daughter remember her dad as someone she shared with a device while she was growing up. I certainly don’t want my wife to feel that way about her husband, either.

Recently it was suggested to me that I simply must accept reality: we live in a world where we must multi-task mentally all the time especially when our attention is divided among so many conversational channels (Facebook, Twitter, email, phone, etc.). It’s just reality. But I don’t know about that. Surely we have not reached a point where our personal devices constantly need our attention and time like another family member?

This Labor Day I’m going to do something that I hope you will, too: I’m turning my phone off unless I need to use it to call a family member or friend — the way we used to use phones. Maybe I should use my quiet time this weekend re-reading Cell, the Stephen King novel about a signal emitted through mobile devices that turns people into lunatics. It’s a fascinating read, by the way — published in 2006, the book feels more relevant with each passing year.

Whatever I do with my phone turned off, I suspect the world will be just fine without me while I’m gone.

When was the last time you embraced the unknown at work? Maybe when you plunged into social media even though you felt like you didn’t know what you were doing?

If you are willing to experiment with something new, you know how uncomfortable it feels, sometimes even like you are in over your head. But as the great rock musician Robert Plant demonstrates, you can flourish if you’re willing to accept the unknown. In the September issue of Mojo, he discusses his astonishing career as Led Zeppelin front man and solo artist — a journey that has seen him constantly explore an improbable but successful mix of musical idioms including folk, rock, blues, Indian, and Arabic poly-rhythms, from Kashmir to Nashville.

At age 62, he is now a member of rock royalty. And yet in his words, “Musically I’m almost flying blind. And that’s fantastic. Because the way it is now, I’m so aware of the passing of time, and I know that as far as my musical world goes I just like learning and being amazed, and being a little bit out of my depth.”

What an astonishing statement for a man who has won multiple Grammy awards, been named one of the top 20 rock singers of all time by Rolling Stone, and sold millions of albums both solo and with Led Zeppelin. (He’s set to release the eagerly anticipated Band of Joy September 14.) As it turns out, exploring the unknown and being willing to fly blind is what has fueled his creative peaks both alone and with Led Zeppelin. “There was no place we wouldn’t try and joyfully go” he says of Led Zeppelin — and not just musically, either. The song “Kashmir,” widely regarded as the band’s creative zenith, resulted from his and Jimmy Page’s explorations of Morocco into desert territory As he tells Mojo, “You can’t use an American Express card in a souk in the desert . . . we actually managed to make adventure feed the soul.”

Plant says Led Zeppelin fell into a creative rut in the latter half of its career. “Maturity kicked in, the songs were structured . . . We’d been around together too long by then” — complacency bred by maturity.

I hope I’m still willing to get in over my head when I’m 62. I don’t want to mistake growth with perfecting what I know already as vice president of marketing for Razorfish. Many people in my profession are like that: they carve a niche for themselves by becoming known as an expert at one or two things. They don’t really explore anything new but rather burnish their reputations for, say, being experts at social media or writing presentations for other people. And I don’t find fault with that approach.

But to grow, you need to be willing to try new things — and that means getting used to feeling like you know less than anyone else in the room. Because to learn means suppressing your ego and being willing to learn from people who know more than you do. And in today’s economy, a willingness to learn can be good for your job. Those who don’t expand their skills are more vulnerable when jobs are on the line.

I fight the urge to become comfortable on the job all the time. I mean, who wants to wake up every day and go to work feeling uncomfortable? But I’ve learned I just need to get comfortable being uncomfortable. Blogging regularly made me feel uncomfortable at first. So did Twitter — but now, not so much. What makes me uncomfortable now is figuring out the explosion of emerging technologies and becoming a more creative thinker.

So now I know where I need to go next if I’m going to grow. With a golden god rocker to inspire me.

Recently Carnival Cruise Lines and my employer Razorfish announced the launch of a new Facebook application that makes it possible for people to collaborate with their social network to plan vacation cruises. Cruise enthusiasts can explore different types of vacation options and involve their Facebook friends in the planning and booking of a cruise. Interestingly, the announcement occurs days after Delta Air Lines said it would start selling flights on Facebook.

The Carnival and Delta announcements show how companies are linking social media to commercial transactions — and also how brands can mine customer data gathered on cloud computing platforms like Facebook. It’s one thing for companies to build brand awareness and consumer goodwill by making use of the conversational power of social. But Carnival is looking for a way to tap into its 251,000 Facebook fans (and counting) for transactional value, not just brand appeal, as is Delta with its 39,000 fans.

Moreover, there is a subtle but crucial difference in the approaches taken by Delta and Carnival. Delta aims to keep its customers on its Facebook app for the duration of the booking process. But Carnival directs consumers from its Facebook page to Carnival.com to complete a booking. Both approaches have their advantages. While Delta’s approach is more self-contained, Carnival can expose consumers to branded content on Carnival’s own turf. Consequently Carnival seeks to take more ownership of its social experience.

Forrester Research data suggest that both Carnival and Delta are making the right moves by building upon their Facebook pages. According to a July 28 report written by Henry Harteveldt, 26 million leisure travelers in the U.S. began using social media over the past two years. Seventy two percent of U.S. online travelers (nearly 100 million people) participate in social media at least once a month. In the report, “How Travel eBusiness Can Engage Conversationalists, the New Social Media Group,” Henry urges travel companies to add a booking engine to their social network pages.

Razorfish helped conceptualize, create, and design the Carnival Facebook app (a first of its kind in the cruise line industry).

This blog post comes to you live from the PSFK Chicago Salon, “Fueling Imagination.” During a morning session, Mig Reyes, Brock Rumer, and Colleen Wilson discuss the employee culture inside Threadless, the successful T-shirt designer and merchandiser that famously crowdsources designs.

The Threadless team expresses bemusement at all the news media attention devoted to Threadless. To them, there is no secret to the success of Threadless: be human and rely on friends. That’s all there is to it: seek ideas for T shirt designs, quickly act on the good ones, and be cool to people as you do it. Spread good karma and get good karma.

According to Team Threadless, successful T-shirt design ideas can come from anywhere including inside Threadless — customer service, the CEO, anywhere. And it’s not just a matter of crowdsourcing designs — Threadless also crowdsources ideas for improving the way the company operates. Mig says that encouraging employees to generate ideas was inspired by Facebook and Google, two companies that make it a point to set aside time for employees to think creatively.

According to Brock, Threadless discourages prima donna behavior and encourages employees to embrace their inner whackiness, including the manner in which employees tweet. According to Colleen and Mig, Threadless also encourages people to be human.  The culture is open with a come-as-you-are vibe in the office. (”We want to work with people who are not afraid to embarrass themselves,” says Mig.) And that authenticity extends to the way Threadless markets itself. Threadless does not typically use models to show off its T shirts but real employees who look like you and me. If the company makes a mistake, a real person owns up to the problem and deals with it. You don’t get a bland “Sorry for your inconvenience” message from a phone tree if a T-shirt order is botched, but a “Man, we messed up” from a real employee — a personal approach partly inspired by Zappos, Mig says.

Have fun. Be human. Be respectful. And do it all with friends. Those are the principles of the Threadless culture. And that culture shines through in its marketing and service approach.

PS: great to be at a PSFK Salon and meeting Piers Fawkes, and I enjoyed reconnecting with Brock, a former Razorfish Chicago colleague.

An Intel Core Processor isn’t the sort of product a consumer can test drive before buying — or is it?

As described in Brandweek, my employer Razorfish recently launched for Intel a new website that makes it possible for consumers to learn more about Intel Core processors — not through a “how to” description but via an interactive experience that includes a product test drive.

According to Malia Supe, Razorfish client partner on the Intel account, the Razorfish design team was guided by a single goal: convince consumers that the right processor is key to their purchasing decision, and do so in three steps: Explore, Test Drive, and Shop. That’s because computing power ranks high on the list of considerations for buying a new device, but it’s not apparent to consumers that choosing a more powerful computer starts with choosing the right processor.

“With the new Intel Core Experience, we want to focus on the needs of mainstream computer users who might not understand or care about the role a processor plays in their purchase decision,” Malia told me. “These consumers trust Intel as a brand, but they need help understanding why the processor is important to their overall computing experience.”

So here’s how the site works: you are asked to identify the most common way you use a computer (via two simple questions). Based on your input, the site recommends the best processor for your needs. For instance, let’s say you identify music as one of your computing needs. From there, the site will ask if you need computing for listening or creating music. If you’re a listener but do not need the computing power to create content, the site might recommend, say, the the Intel Core i3. Then with a click of a “start shopping” button, you can shop for a computer or laptop with that processor.

In all the site identifies five activities to guide your Test Drive: music, photography, home computing, entertainment, and gaming.

According to Malia, “Our approach to the site experience is something new for both consumers and the industry: put the processor ahead of the computer as a starting point for making a purchase decision. We are guiding consumers from the inside-out of the computer, which really turns on its head the conventional thinking about how we shop. Designing the experience around consumers’ passions, such as music and photography, is the key to our approach. No matter their passion, consumers can see how their behaviors drive processor recommendations, and they can identify the ideal processors for their needs.”

The team designed a simple, no-nonsense site: no fancy graphics, just a focus on quickly guiding the consumer to the right computer matched with the most suitable processor. Accordingly, the navigation moves the visitor along a linear “Explore, Test Drive, and Shop” journey.

The clean design reflects a deliberate strategy on the part of Intel and Razorfish, Malia said. “We wanted to create an experience a consumer would not expect from a high-tech company, free of detailed specs and technology jargon,” she said. “We also wanted to demystify the processor.”

The site also employs an interesting approach familiar to web designers, the liquid layout. The size of the site retracts and expands automatically to fit the size of your computer screen, using a Flash application that Razorfish designed for Intel.

The Intel Core Processor Experience site is a natural extension of the Intel/Razorfish relationship. “Intel repeatedly asks Razorfish how we can apply innovation to redefine Intel’s role with consumers, and our team thrives in an innovation-focused environment,” Malia added.

I think the Intel Core Processor Experience site is a good example of building a brand through an experience as opposed to a message. And yet the experience need not be chock full of bells and whistles. So far early data show lots of repeat visits and dwell time especially on important areas of the site, like the shopping functionality.

If you have any questions about the work, let me know. Your comments are welcomed.

Being able to enjoy a glass of clean, safe water is probably something you take for granted, like the sun rising every day.  And yet a billion people in the world lack access to safe water. My employer Razorfish just helped nonprofit charity: water launch a campaign to address this problem. I hope you will take a moment to help.

Here’s the pitch: charity: water is dedicated to bringing safe water to developing nations. All donations to charity: water go directly to projects like the creation of deep wells and biosand filters. And charity: water proves every project built by using photos, content, and GPS coordinates via Google Maps. So far charity: water has launched nearly 3,000 such projects saving nearly 1.3 million people. The newest charity: water undertaking, September, seeks to raise funds to build wells in the Central African Republic, where more than one third of the nation’s 4.3 million people lack access to clean water, causing a host of life-threatening problems ranging from dehydration to disease resulting from unsanitary conditions. So how can you help? For starters:

• Donate
  

• Spread the word on Twitter. Follow @charitywater. Tweet about it.

• Show your support on Facebook. Get behind the charity: water Facebook page. Share the preview video on Facebook.

Of course I invite you to explore the charity: water website – truly a cutting edge use of digital to raise awareness for a charity, including a stunning high-definition video that features a snapshot of the Bayaka people in the Central African Republic to show you the human impact of your effort.

Razorfish pro bono support for the September campaign includes helping to conceive the social media strategy, driving the search marketing strategy, and working with publishers to raise ad impressions.

I hope you will help.

Here’s a surprise: a customer fulfillment notice that’s actually fun to read. After ordering a from CD Baby a copy of Ronee Blakley Live at the Mint, I expected to receive a perfunctory confirmation of my purchase shipment. Instead here’s what I found in my email in-box:

“Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow. A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure it was in the best possible condition before mailing. Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy. We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved ‘Bon Voyage!’ to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day. We hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. In commemoration, we have placed your picture on our wall as ‘Customer of the Year.’ We’re all exhausted but can’t wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

Even the “From” field of the email caught my eye: “CD Baby Loves You,” which automatically made me want to open the email. And once I did, the note had me at hello. I read every word, finding myself caught up in a small moment of entertainment amid a busy day.

Every customer touch point is an opportunity to surprise and delight. When has a company surprised and delighted you lately? I’d love to hear about your CD Baby moment.

A new Altimeter Group report identifies eight success criteria for Facebook page marketing — and points out that brands have a long way to go applying those criteria successfully. I encourage marketers to read it. The report is free, and Altimeter is a leading authority. (Note: my employer Razorfish was among the 34 contributors.) Now that I’ve read the report, I have a few observations of my own:

• The very existence of the report is significant. It wasn’t too long ago when social media pundits questioned whether brands even have a rightful place in the social world. It wasn’t cool to suggest that a big corporation can and should use social to build its brand. “People want to talk with other people, not brands,” was the conventional wisdom. But conventional wisdom was wrong. Consumers are happy to interact with brands — in-store, online, and yes, in the social world. But as the report points out, companies need a lot of help figuring out the rules of the game for social branding. By identifying eight critical success factors for Facebook page marketing, Altimeter seeks to help define those rules. For instance, brands need to participate in a dialog. SAP regularly responds to posts on its Facebook wall with meaningful comments from a real person. Sounds like common sense, right? And yet only half companies assessed by Altimeter were deemed to have achieved “maturity” for participating in dialogue. But I wonder if the social media pundits share some of the responsibility for the lack of maturity for putting so much emphasis on empowering consumers and not enough on helping companies also become empowered?

• I noticed the report did not identify transparency as a success factor. The omission of transparency again shows how social is maturing. There was a time when transparency was all the rage — as if being confessional was a requirement for effective branding in the social world. But being transparent does not equate to being a good marketer. Look at Apple — a great brand because it retains a mystique by not giving away too much. Unfortunately, tansparency has become a catch-all for marketers too lazy to exercise good judgment and discretion. Marketers need not reveal how the sausage is made or invite consumers to explore every nook and cranny of their products and services in order to be effective. Instead, I like how Altimeter advocates authenticity – for example revealing the names of people from your company who are interacting with consumers on your Facebook page. Or making sure the people who manage your Facebook page write their own replies to customers using a conversational tone rather than outsourcing the conversation to someone else and claiming it as your own. But, more so than having an authentic style? Being authentic to your brand. And therein lies a crucial difference between authenticity and transparency. A company that wishes to maintain a mystique about its brand should exercise greater discretion about what and how much it says. (By the way, Augie Ray of Forrester Research discusses the difference between authenticity and transparency here.)

The complete success factors:

For more analysis, check out this blog post by author Jeremiah Owyang.

Times Square Billboard by Space150 from Cliff Kuang on Vimeo.

There is no such thing as intrusive advertising so long as advertisers provide great content to consumers — and in the case of a new Forever 21 billboard ad, consumers are the content.

Here’s how the ad works: pedestrians strolling through Times Square in New York notice a mirror reflection of themselves projected on a giant interactive billboard above the recently opened Forever 21 clothing retail store. We can wave at ourselves onscreen and do all the other impulsively silly things that pedestrians like to do when we stop and gawk. And then the fun really begins: a model appears on the billboard and appears to pluck one of pedestrians off the street. The model kisses the digital image of the pedestrian, tosses the person back into the crowd, or places him or her in a shopping bag. Other times, the model takes a Polaroid snapshot of pedestrians and waves it to everyone watching from the street — a snapshot of us.

I “saw” (or rather experienced) the ad myself by happenstance June 30 as I was walking on Broadway. What I noticed first were the smiling people jamming the sidewalk, with their fingers pointing upward. Even though I was in a rush, I just had to stop what I was doing and find out what had captured everyone’s interest. I quickly found myself being entertained like everyone else. I did not feel like I was staring at an ad even though I was. And yes, I looked for my own tiny image projected amid the “digital crowd” high above Times Square. I even shamelessly waved and wondered if I might be one of the lucky people who would be slipped into a shopping bag.

The ad works because it is, quite simply, fun. The ad also reminds me of how a good movie comedy creates a communal experience among strangers gathered temporarily in one place. Somehow I don’t think the ad would be as fun if I were all by myself on a deserted road. In the context of Times Square, though, the ad feeds off the energy of the crowd and, in turn, energizes us. Really part of the fun is watching others beside you on a crowded sidewalk experience the same realization you just had: the initial puzzlement and curiosity etched on the face of a jaded business person or tourist, the upward gaze, the expression of surprise as we realize the image we are watching is us, and then the laughter when the model onscreen starts to engage with us. You can read more about it in Fast Company.

How many ads have you seen that literally stop traffic and make people wave happily at the sky? Kudos to agency space150 and to designer Chris O’Shea, whose his own Hand from Above project in London inspired the work.

This blog post comes to you live from the second annual Forrester Research Customer Experience Forum 2010 at the Grand Hyatt in New York. The theme of the event is creating breakthrough customer experiences. Through an energetic keynote, Patty VanLammeren, chief customer experience officer of Allstate Insurance, discusses the Allstate customer experience journey. (She emphasizes “journey” because she knows the process of pleasing a customer is one of never-ending improvement.)

Allstate began its customer experience journey about six years ago with the creation of a customer loyalty index and a dedicated team to look after customer experience. In 2008, Allstate made a critical decision: improving customer loyalty would be one of only three corporate priorities. In Patty’s words, “That’s when the game began to change,” and when she was appointed to the role of chief customer experience officer.

Her first task: get facts in front of her. She studied Allstate’s previous efforts to satisfy customers. She reviewed details like the average amount of time Allstate takes to resolve a customer conflict. But, she decided that the metrics had limited value “because customers do not experience averages.” She realized that Allstate needed to do something that data was not measuring: “shift our culture to focus on the customer.” So how to do that?

One of her first steps: create a customer experience forum, which is a monthly meeting where Allstate execs (including the CEO) have a spirited discussion on how to improve customer service. She also enacted monthly “customer staff meetings” with managers at a more tactical level to come up with ways to improve service. At one of her first meetings, she required managers to role play as if they were Allstate customers — from angry to happy.

She also dedicated customer satisfaction specialists to specific business units (like embedded journalists) in order to focus on day-to-day management of customer satisfaction.

But the process did not stop there. In the ensuing months, she:

1.  Made customer satisfaction everyone’s business by linking employees’ 401(K) profit sharing matching contributions to improvements in Allstate’s customer loyalty index.

2. Improved customer service standards and held agents accountable to them.

3. Acted as chief customer experience evangelist throughout the company. She made 54 presentations to 9,000 employees in 2009.

4. Clearly communicated throughout Allstate customer wants and needs in the voice of the customer. She asked every business unit owner to develop and refine actionable and measurable “declarations” for improving customer service.

5. Changed Allstate’s public reporting. On earnings announcement day, Allstate began reporting its customer loyalty index scores along with earnings results to send a message: customer satisfaction is intertwined with business results.

6. Improved the customer complaint management process to be faster and more responsive. “We decided we needed to view customer complaints as a gift” — a way for Allstate to learn and improve its operations.

7. Began to attack the company’s operating processes. She discovered that Allstate has too many processes for servicing customers inside business units — but not across business units. Allstate is now examining all its processes and figuring out how to make them span the entire company — not an easy thing to do because “at Allstate we have a process for everything except eating and going to the bathroom.”

8. Improved metrics mostly by examining other companies’ best practices. She realized that Allstate needed to do a better job tying customer satisfaction measures to company leading performance indicators. As she says, “We are just scratching the surface on measurement.” Also, Allstate now compares its satisfaction results with other companies inside and outside its industry (something Allstate previously never did).

Some lessons learned:

1. Allstate needs to move faster to keep pace with customers’ rapidly changing needs.

2. Allstate needs to let its customers lead them instead of trying to lead its customers.

2. Allstate must empower people. As Patty says, “Customers do not want a relationship with technology. They want a relationship with people.” Empowering employees means “hiring people who like people” — sounds obvious, but Allstate realized it was hiring too many technicians who really understand the content of insurance but lack adequate customer service skills. She also enacted a self-selecting employee ambassador program. Ambassadors receive special attention from Allstate. (For instance, ambassadors received a preview of the company’s social media guidelines before the guidelines were launched throughout the company.) To date, more than 3,000 employees have volunteered to be ambassadors. (She likes making the program voluntary because employees who sign up are more likely to be motivated.)

Results so far: the best-ever one-year improvement in the company’s customer loyalty index.

“But we are not even close to where we want to be,” she concludes. “We have made the customer experience a part of everyone’s jobs.”