Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Philip Crosby wrote a seminal book (Quality is Free) in which he argued that it’s cheaper to build things right the first time than it is to fix them later. Obvious now, but heresy in Detroit 1980. Quality quickly became not just a better way to manufacture, it became a marketing benefit as well. Not only was quality cheaper to make, it was cheaper to sell.

I’m struck that we need a new book, call it Efficiency is Free.

It’s cheaper to build carpets that don’t create poison gas than it is to do the easy thing and let people suffer later. It’s cheaper to build an 8 passenger car that gets 30 miles per gallon than it is to suffer the consequences of the 12 mile per gallon Suburban. It’s cheaper to design smaller, lighter and recyclable shipping containers once than it is to buy and hassle with billions of foam peanuts in the long run.

So why doesn’t everyone do this? For the same reason the quality revolution took a full generation to take hold–it costs more right now. It takes planning right now. It requires change right now.

Right now will always be difficult. But efficiency is still free.

Over the years, I’ve had the pleasure to attend and share thoughts at several social media events. In more recent times, I’ve come to appreciate the regional events, as the crowd there is often quite different than our national experiences. It’s come to me just recently why that is.

The Kitchen Table

A kitchen table is often the heart of the home. No matter where you want that heart to be, where things really happen is often at that table. You do your homework there. You and your kids do homework. You and your spouse argue over money. You talk about what comes next, good or bad. The kitchen table is a place where we experiment with new things before we move to the next thing.

To me, social media events are a kitchen table of sorts. It’s where we go to feel supported, to feel nourished, to feel validated for what we’re going to do next. Going to BlogWorld or SXSW or any of a dozen other great shows lets you speak with the people who “get it” and spend time with the people who know what you’re talking about with such excitement and zeal.

But we can’t conduct all our life at the kitchen table. At some point, we have to take those experiments and that nurturing out into the world. We have to move on.

What Moving On Means

First off, we have to return to the kitchen table from time to time for nurturing and sustenance, so don’t let it seem like it’s forever. It’s a cycle. The kitchen tables of our lives have a reason for being there. They are the anchor of a lot of what feels right. So going to the various social media events to learn more, to affirm what you already know, to meet people who see things the way you do, is a big positive. Accept and appreciate that.

But then, what really has to happen is that you have to take what you’ve learned and bring it out of the bubble. You have to go back and embed in the places that need your help. You have to grow the idea from being “inside baseball” to “useful to the people that matter to you.”

Come Back, Go Out, Come Back, Move On

I guess, in the end, I’m just saying that it’s all a cycle. We all grow. We all try new things. We all develop.

I have so much stuff to talk about in the coming days. Sorry I was quiet. I had some things to take care of.

This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Name: Fast Society

Quick Pitch: Fast Society is a free iPhone app that groups contacts into an instant, short-term team, combining group text messaging and one-touch conference calling.

Genius Idea: Ever attended a crowded show with a group of friends, only to notice that John-Boy has wandered away to the merch table, Esther (who is shorter than the rest) has been lost in a sea of concert-attending ogres and Marcel has passed out somewhere in the corner? Well, Fast Society is the perfect solution for those crazed, crowded situations.

Fast Society takes the group texting experience to the next level with conference calling as well as geolocation. The other week, we covered GroupMe, a mobile app that lets you create an SMS chatroom on any phone. The app is awesome in its simplicity, but its use-cases are still up for debate. Yes, group texting is fun and useful for a brief period of time, but after a while it either becomes, 1. Annoying, 2. Forgotten and replaced with another diversion.

Well, Fast Society Co-founders Matthew Rosenberg, Michael Constantiner and Andy Thompson set out to fix that issue after attending a Bloc Party concert during which their friends kept getting separated. While group texting would have been helpful in this situation, Rosenberg and Co. wished that they could create a specific group (i.e. the Bloc Party concert-goers) that would be able to converse for a specific time (i.e. the duration of the show). Enter Fast Society.

Fast Society’s more advanced interface makes it a much more useful app than GroupMe. After downloading the app, start by choosing a time frame for your team to be in communication (three hours to three days), and then add friends by searching through your phone book or adding a number. You can add anyone to your team, even if he or she’s on another carrier. People receive text messages alerting them to the creation of the team, and they can choose whether or not to join (you can also leave at any time by texting “leave”). Upon joining, they enter a kind of text chat room.

During the allotted time period, you can text your team (a process that works much the same as apps like GroupMe), call it via an instant conference call service and easily find and share your location via geolocation. Note: Those using the app can see others as a pinpoint on a map, but geolocation is a lot more barebones when you’re on another device. Still, you can text your location to your Android-using friends as well.

Once time runs out, so does the group, leaving you with a blank slate. That way, you won’t have any annoying text chain forever active on your phone.

Again, it’s a shame that this service is currently limited to iPhone users — at least in the fullest sense of the experience — but Co-founder Matthew Rosenberg told us they’re currently developing apps for Android, BlackBerry and Windows Mobile. Once this opens up to other handsets, we can see this service coming in handy for much more than attending shows. From work events to group vacations, Fast Society has the potential to be a real boon to mobile users.

Right now, the current iteration is free, which begs the question: How do Rosenberg and Co. plan to make money?

“The next version of the app is going to have what we are calling ‘powerups’ in app purchases to enhance your experience,” Rosenberg says. “Longer groups, more people, and some other fun stuff I am not quite ready to share.”

Fast Society itself is rather an ambitious effort, as it is currently entirely self-funded. Still, the app managed to snag the role of the official mobile partner of New York’s CMJ Music Festival, which is quite the achievement and gained the team direct access to their target audience: Young, concert-obsessed music fans.

Will you test out Fast Society during your next event, trip or speed metal show?

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Bliz

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Sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark

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BizSpark is a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

This year’s Los Angeles Auto Show Design Challenge tackles a heavy question: How do you build a lightweight car that doesn’t compromise safety, styling or performance?

Mercedes-Benz’s answer to that question involves a high-end rickshaw, a Smart knit by lovable robot grandmothers and a sedan grown from seeds. We swear these are concepts from Mercedes, not Citroën.

For the first time in its 7-year history, the Design Challenge expanded its reach beyond Southern California and invited Mercedes-Benz design studios from Japan and Germany to participate in the annual competition. As thanks for the invite, Mercedes brought concepts that stick out amidst relatively staid designs from General Motors, Honda and Nissan like Hammer Pants at the Highland Games.

This year’s rules stipulate that entries must weigh less than 1,000 pounds (1,500 with passengers). They’ll be judged by “artistic beauty, comfort, uniqueness of design, roadworthiness, sustainability, performance and user-friendliness of the vehicle.” We’re sure our commenters will weigh in on whether some of these avant-garde designs meet these criteria.

From Mercedes-Benz Research and Development Japan’s Advanced Design Center comes the Maybach DRS “Den-Riki-Sha” electric rickshaw. It’s more like a Rick-Segway, however, with a self-balancing electric drivetrain, albeit one that’s connected to a yet-to-be-developed intelligent transit infrastructure.

The Volk at Mercedes-Benz Advanced Advanced Design Germany might have been inspired by the theme of some trendy Berlin club for their Smart 454 design. The car is made of carbon fiber literally knit by “incredibly high-tech robots that look as friendly and cuddly as our grandmothers.” We imagine that cold, industrial robots only seem lifelike if your grandmother is Lucille Bluth.

Even Mercedes’ American designers offered a bizarre creation. The Biome concept is grown from two seeds that are genetically engineered to customer specifications. Cars are nurtured at Mercedes-Benz Nurseries until the two seeds grow into a seamlessly integrated interior and exterior. Even among the far-out ideas from Mercedes, this one is especially fanciful.

Though they’re highly advanced designs, the compressed-air cars from Honda and Volvo, the polyhedral 3-D lattice mono-formed frame of the Cadillac Aera, the ultralight Mazda MX-0 or the combination organic-synthetic exteriors that encapsulate concepts from Nissan and Calty Design Research seem tame compared with the oddball lightweights from Mercedes.

Judging ends Nov. 18. We’ll keep you posted.

Photos: L.A. Auto Show Design Challenge

Facebook is, at the moment, the most important social network in the world. Over 500 million people connect to one another in the “Social Network.” And, with the introduction of the Open Graph, we are interacting with our Facebook connections on our favorite websites where our social graph and the corresponding activity of Likes, interaction, and commentary become the centerpiece for social curation and more importantly, our focused attention. We are putting our social network to work and we are learning how to share, discover, and collaborate in public.

Brands, regardless of size and focus, are converging on Facebook where the idea of connecting with customers and prospects represents a potential boon for both earning relevance in a new domain as well as expanding overall reach. Facebook is a sparkplug for word of mouth and when engaged, contributes to the end of business as usual and the beginning of social commerce. If fact, the top 10 brands on Facebook today host over 100 million “Likes” on Facebook.

The Top 10 Brands by Population (Rounded Out)

1. Starbucks – 16 million
2. Coca-Cola – 15 million
3. Oreo – 12 million
4. Skittles – 11.5 million
5. Red Bull – 10.2 million
6. Victoria’s Secret – 8.4 million
7. Disney – 8.3 million
8. Converse All Star – 7.3 million
9. iTunes – 7 million
10. Windows Live Messenger – 6.8 million

With that said…

By This Time Next Year

By this time next year, you as a brand or as a brand representative, will spend more time and resources on Facebook than you will on Twitter.

Allow me to clarify this statement as it’s easy to misread. My sentiment is merely a reflection of the maturation of the social web and the commitment and attention required to cultivate communities, inspire advocacy, and foster engagement. Facebook and Twitter are unique in their design and their culture and each offer distinguishing opportunities for businesses. As such, they demand a dedicated focus, strategy, and approach.

Twitter is important and essential to learning, engaging, and cultivating customer communities. I believe that Twitter is your window to relevance, both understanding how to identify and earn it.

Facebook, as both a network and a platform, is unlocking new and important connections between people, brands, content, and data. The technical and creative aspects of what Facebook is capable of facilitating on behalf of your business and the people who define your markets, requires indoctrination. And, once we explore the culture and technical advantages of Facebook Connect, Likes, and the scope and possibilities of the open graph, we get an idea of the deepening emphasis required to transform Facebook from a “Fan Page” to a bona fide brand page, creating nothing less than a social epicenter for business.

If Twitter is your window to relevance, Facebook is your focal point for the social web.

Nothing goes without saying here. It is also important for you to invest in learning about where, when, and how your social consumer engages with peers as they most likely connect in other networks beyond Facebook and Twitter. It was after all, the inspiration for the Conversation Prism. Facebook is just one, albeit pivotal, pillar in your socialized business strategy.

The State of The Facebook

With over 500 million active users, Facebook is by far one of the most important networks in the world. 5o% of those active users log on to Facebook in any given day. And in total, people spend over 700 billion minutes per month posting, sharing, Liking, commenting, poking, playing games, and interacting with one another as well as the content and applications that define the pervasive social ecosystem.

The average user is connected to 80 community pages, groups and events and creates 90 pieces of content (social objects) each month. If you follow Zuckerberg’s Law, then we will double the amount of content we share every year. When combined, the numbers are staggering. More than 30 billion social objects (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) are shared each month. Facebook is a vortex for content.

Everyday individuals on Facebook maintain a social graph of 130 people, which is in line with Robin Dunbar’s theory (Dunbar’s number) of the maximum number of relationships we can effectively manage.  However, with suggested friends, I believe that number will push us to expand our networks from relationships (strong ties) to relations (focused, weak, and temporary ties). I call this Social Graph Theory. And much like Zuckerberg’s Law, Social Graph Theory suggests that the size of our network will grow, but more importantly, become much more complex, yet focused. We will maintain relationships, but also expand into a thinner form of relations that include interest graphs, nicheworks (contextual networks) and temporary connections. What’s important for businesses to realize, is that individuals now maintain peer networks that resemble engaged audiences where interests are the axis of conversational rotation.

Brands are increasingly globalizing and Facebook scales with the reach that they need. Currently over 70 translations are available and more than 70% of all Facebook denizens reside outside of the United States. And more than one million developers and entrepreneurs from more than 180 countries support Facebook as a “platform” with greater than one million websites integrating Facebook sharing, liking and visualized social graph features into content discovery and consumption. So, what does that mean? Integrate Facebook functionality into your online properties (in addition to other relevant social presences of course). Two-thirds of comScore’s U.S. Top 100 websites and half of comScore’s Global Top 100 websites have integrated with Facebook.

And what of mobile?

Smart phones are the new sub-tablet so to speak. There are as many active users accessing Facebook on their mobile device as there are active users of Twitter. And that’s a powerful statement. Today 150 million people access Facebook actively and they’re twice as active on Facebook than non-mobile users.

May I Have Your Intention Please?

Many brands underestimate Facebook and what’s truly required to attract and captivate the social consumer. In my research, I find that a significant number of brands focus their efforts primarily on Twitter, treating Facebook as an afterthought. Rather than engage in each community with purpose and dedication, examples are abundant where companies are simply syndicating tweets to Facebook rather than updating each network individually. When people reply on Facebook, representatives are usually unaware as they’re mostly monitoring Twitter responses rather than Facebook. In these cases, Facebook becomes a graveyard for tweets instead of a community where likes are earned and conversations are fostered. After all, how do we expect to trigger the social effect without investing time and attention in the people who define the very social graphs we’re hoping to engage and activate?

Facebook success is defined by our investment of time, resources, energy and creativity.  In other words, we get out of it what we put into it. In Facebook, it’s not just about who we’re connected to, it’s about those we’re not. What started as “Fans” has evolved to “Likes” and in that simple shift in phraseology comes something quite profound. “Fans” implies a hierarchical relationships where brands publish at will to a community that feels a bit more like a traditional audience. “Likes” begets a linear form of relationships where we earn the endorsement of a social consumer, but in order to foster a community, we have to continue to do so. This introduces a peer-to-peer (P2P) dynamic where rather than program our Facebook activity from a top-down perspective, we now have to consider an active participatory role in earning Likes, attention, and hopefully advocacy much more frequently than we may have anticipated initially.

Likes become a form of social currency and contribute to the overall social capital earned by a brand within Facebook.

In February 2010, market research firm Chadwick Martin Bailey along with iModerate Research Technologies, surveyed over 1,500 individuals online as well as conducted one-on-one discussions to contextualize social media behavior. Their research shows us that social commerce and quite specifically, F-commerce (Facebook Commerce) is bursting at the seams.

Since actions speak louder than words, the study sought to answer the question of whether or not engagement actually leads to purchases. The answer is yes. An impressive 51% of Facebook fans and 67% of Twitter followers indicated that they are more likely to buy since connecting online.

Success begins with a plan, which serves as a roadmap to reach customers and those who influence them. On the road to success, it is wise to refer to the map routinely to ensure that we stay on course. Doing so, reminds us why we’re here in the first place.

The roles of the social consumer are distinct and the reasons for connecting with a brand are equally diversified. It’s our job to cater to each segment to earn their Likes and attention now and over time.

On Facebook, existing customers topped the list with 49%. Following with 42%, consumers felt compelled to show support for the brand. In third with 40%, individuals admitted that they hoped to receive discounts and promotions.

Other stats worth mentioning, 27% and 26% of respondents stated that they would like to be among the first to know information about the brand and also to gain access to exclusive content respectively. And, 17% claimed that they were referred to the page by someone that they knew, which already demonstrates word of mouth at work.

Facebook is changing the way we think about business, customers and community and as such, there’s much to learn. Everything begins at the beginning and together, we will earn relevance and expand business opportunities in a new social marketplace one Like at a time.