Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Aside from poking, Mark Zuckerberg isn’t known for much physical activity, but that hasn’t stopped a company from creating an action figure of the Facebook co-founder.

MIC, which introduced a Steve Jobs action figure in November, is now selling a Zuckerberg doll for $69.90. Why? The company says this is the “next greatest action figure for tech nerds” and that the company (whose name stands for “Made in China”) “really admired the man who is responsible for connecting over 500 million people across the world, helping Egypt’s protesters to spark an uprising and becoming the youngest billionaire and Time ‘Person of the Year.’”

Modeled closely on the real-life Facebook CEO, the 7-inch doll sports a casual brown hoodie sweatshirt, worn-in jeans and open-toed Adidas sandals. The doll is said to be heavier than an iPhone, but lighter than an iPad. It also comes with a stand with a Facebook logo, a “like” and “poke” card for Zuck to hold and speech bubbles where the user can write their own witty messages. (The blog suggests “I’m CEO, bitch!”)

MIC isn’t the first to see heroic potential in Zuck. Last month, a Canadian publisher, Bluewater Productions, introduced a comic book based on Zuckerberg, who of course, was the unwilling subject of one of 2010’s most-lauded films, The Social Network.

For his part, Zuckerberg seems to be making an effort lately to humanize his image, with an appearance on Saturday Night Live, an interview with 60 Minutes and, just this week, a Facebook Page devoted to his new puppy, Beast.

Tuesday, Google announced a few changes to Chrome, its engineered-for-speed web browser.

The super-fast beta version that was announced a few weeks ago has already been updated to a stable version. For the Googlers working on Chrome, speed entails not only faster code (the latest version of Chrome boasts a 66% improvement in JavaScript performance) but also easier-to-navigate interfaces.

With that in mind, the company is rolling out a new Settings interface for all Chrome users. One major change is that Settings are now presented in a Chrome tab rather than a dialog box — a change that will seem familiar to those using Google’s Cr-48 notebooks, which run Chrome OS and present absolutely everything in a browser tab.

Settings are also searchable, which many users will likely find extremely helpful.

Here’s a brief demo video showing Chrome’s new Settings pages in action:

Google has also extended its sandboxing features to Chrome’s Flash player.

Interested parties can download the latest version of Chrome now; be sure to check back with us in the comments section to let us know what you think of the new browser.

You’re looking at one of the finest examples of automotive Art Deco: the 1938 Hispano-Suiza Dubonnet Xenia. Go ahead, stare. Now wipe that drool off your keyboard.

Currently on display at the Mullin Automotive Museum in Oxnard, CA, the Xenia was based on an existing Hispano-Suiza H6 that was heavily modified to feature a unique independent suspension designed by driver, pilot and aperitif heir Andre Dubonnet. Each wheel was mounted on a single arm that extended forward from kingpins at the end of the axle, while sealed, oil-lubricated coil springs and shock absorbers ensured a smooth ride.

The “Dubonnet suspension” was later licensed to Alfa Romeo and Simca, and also sold to GM who marketed it as a “Knee-Action” suspension. The sealed coil springs were leak-prone and wildly expensive to repair, however, and the technology never made it into post-war cars.

Suspension aside, the Xenia’s hand-built coachwork by Jacques Saoutchik makes a Talbot Lago look like a Renault Fuego by comparison. It fits in the Mullin’s “French Curves” collection of pre-war French vehicles (Hispano-Suiza, though Spanish in heritage, built many of their cars in France through a French subsidiary), but park the Xenia next to any other car of the era, and it looks like the Clampetts are in town.

Photos: Mullin Automotive Museum

We use social media tools for different purposes. We might use it for distribution of media, for marketing, for customer service, for promotion, for communication, and most likely, for all of the above. How you use it depends on your end goals, obviously. But most times, people are being thrust into using social media without really knowing what the goals are, and without knowing what kind of workflow should accompany the use of the tool. Instead, they swing by Facebook to see if anyone commented on the wall update, and they visit Twitter to reply to a few things, retweet a few other things, and they end up feeling like they’re not sure why they’re doing this, let alone how it’s going to serve the cause.

For the sake of this post, we’ll talk about the marketing aspects mostly. Oh, and this is just PART 1: AWARENESS AND CAPTURE. Depending on how it’s received, I’ll add more.

Here are some thoughts on developing social media workflows (including the first building blocks).

Goals First

Where most people get tripped up with social media is that they don’t have solid and clear goals in mind. Goals for using social media for your business can be varied. A few sample goals:

• Increase subscribers to our newsletter by __%.
• Increase sales.
• Promote community engagement (measured by comments and other touches).
• Improve awareness (measured by site visits or video views or similar, and better still, next actions taken).
• Gather customer feedback for product and service enhancement/improvement.

You’ll note that the goals listed above also have tangible measurements attached to them. Showing up in social media to dip your toes in the pool isn’t all that useful. It’s fun and it might prove that you’re using all the cool kid toys, but if you’re not building on something tangible, then there’s nothing worth doing. Caveat to that: it’s okay to not understand how you’re going to achieve these goals right out of the gate. Part of the process is to actually understand the medium and figure out how to best use it.

Thinking in Blocks

If you and I were drawing this together on a white board, or using post-its and an easel, we’d be drawing blocks. The blocks would be like recipe elements, or like bits of code, or like building blocks for kids. I’m a visual thinker, and I think it helps the process. Because I’m too lazy, it’s up to you to get out some sticky notes and make some blocks. Everything below this should be a block to consider.

Awareness

Unless your goal is to support and satisfy an existing organization (for instance, if you’re an association or if this is an internal project), the next thing you’ll want to work on is understanding how to raise awareness of your project. Creating amazing and compelling content is excellent, unless no one sees it. Awareness is tricky these days. YouTube is the #2 search engine in the world, and it serves billions of video views every year. That sounds promising until you realize that means you’re competing with billions of other videos, so just putting up a video there won’t help. This will be the problem with most every project you work on.

To gain awareness, you’ll have to find the people you need to target. To do that, you’ll need to understand the landscape.

Landscape

If I were building something to accomplish these goals, I’d first need to understand the landscape and which tools I’d want to use. For instance, if you’re doing something heavily B2B, there might not be a lot of value in hanging out on Facebook and Twitter, and maybe not even LinkedIn. Acquisition of new people would be the first and foremost thing to consider in that case, actually. If your product faces consumers, then you know that you might want to approach them on a series of mediums. Finding people could be as using a service like Rapleaf or Flowtown. You’ll note something (and we’ll talk about this more): these services all run on email as the hinge. You’ll note that email addresses are the true coin of the realm of understanding and using social media, at least from a marketing perspective.

Figuring out the landscape and the awareness are probably the first two blocks in any workflow, in my mind, or else you’re kind of wasting your effort.

Database

Once you know how you’re going to tackle awareness, and once you have a sense of the landscape where you intend to find people to appreciate and admire your projects, you’ll want a way to capture information about them and do something of value with it. You need some kind of database. If you’re a larger company, then you’re going to want to integrate these people into your existing CRM. Products like Salesforce already have spots to put people’s social media identities. ACT might, as well. I know that Batchbook has that built right in. What you’re looking to create in your database is a kind of Rosetta Stone of people’s social map. So, once you’ve done your work, you might have my Twitter account, my Facebook account, my LinkedIn account, my YouTube account and whatever matters to you.

You’ll obviously also want to store some information that you glean from those channels. Perhaps on YouTube, you’ll note that my daughter does product reviews with me, and maybe you sell a kid’s product. You’ll note that on Twitter, I talk about hip hop, and maybe that will be of value to you. Who knows? But salespeople understand the value of such information. The point is, that without a database, you’re just making stuff and setting it free on the world.

Capture

If you’re looking to build awareness and you’re looking to do something with it, you’ll need to think in terms of capturing these new potential leads so that you can understand which of them can be turned into prospects. Remember that not everyone who interacts with you is a lead. Not everyone who watches your video is a lead. Remember that you have to do some good community work to convert any of these people into buyers and that their response to your efforts to engage doesn’t mean that they want to buy. (Please repeat this over and over to eager salespeople and hungry marketers.)

Just the same, we have to do some things to seek out and find people to add to our database.

Listening is a great capture. If you learn how to grow bigger ears, the results of such efforts will help you find people via the listening channel. As people start voicing their needs, they aren’t exactly saying your name every time, so you might have to work on finding what phrases and words people will use that identify what you sell. Note: it’s rarely what you put on your marketing materials (though maybe it should be?).

Creating good media is a great way to seek capture. For instance, if you write a really useful newsletter, people will sign up. If you create free webinars, people will sign up. These aren’t immediately prospects, but they are at least leads that you can run down. With a social media perspective to capture, perhaps what you do after gathering up these new email addresses is you run them through RapLeaf of Flowtown and find out where these people spend time online. From that, you might learn a bit more about what these people are into and how that might apply to determining if they’re a useful prospect, and also possibly helping you better understand how to market to them and eventually sell them your product or service.

Capture is one of the steps that I feel most people miss with social media workflows. They create interesting stuff and then don’t do much to try and build a follow-on step, OR they go for “sale” as the next step. In most workflows offline, sale is the fourth or fifth action. I never understood why people thought it would be truncated online.

Here Endeth Part One

The awareness and capture elements of a social media workflow are something that will take some time to ingest and work through. I think we’ll stop here and see what comes of this. If you find it interesting, please comment. If you disagree or want to rebut, by all means, please do. These are just some serving suggestions. If you want to write your own version of the article with some more steps, by all means, please do, and consider linking back to this post.

That’s the beauty of this stuff. We can all collaborate and contribute. What say you?

Monday night, Adobe released a new, experimental Flash-to-HTML5 conversion tool codenamed Wallaby.

Wallaby is an AIR app that lets devs and designers quickly and simply convert Flash Professional files to HTML5 — and when we say “simply and easily,” we mean it’s a matter of dragging and dropping. The company is specifically hoping this tool will make it easier for designers and developers to get their content onto iOS devices like the iPhone and iPad.

We saw a demo of Wallaby last fall; while some of the company’s CS5 software offered HTML5 plugins already, we said Wallaby was different because it supported elements and resources within animations, not just the animations themselves.

Wallaby is being released on Adobe Labs; Adobe is asking devs and designers to take it for a test drive, see how the HTML5 code looks, and give feedback accordingly.

Adobe has had an interesting time trying to articulate its position on Flash and HTML5 over the past year or so. To put it briefly, the company feels there’s still room in the current technological and creative spaces for Flash, but it doesn’t think that either Flash or HTML5 has to exist to the exclusion of the other. Therefore, as a company that, to a large extent, exists to serve the creative and development communities, it wants to create great tools for both the HTML5 and the Flash camps.

In a release, a company rep stated, “With more than 3 million Flash developers in the creative community, Adobe continues to look for new ways to help them build on their existing skills and to make their content available to the widest possible audiences. User response to the Wallaby technology preview will enable Adobe to better understand what types of innovations are needed in our long-term investments in both Flash and HTML5 technology.”

Check out last fall’s demo of the app, and in the comments section, let us know what you think of Wallaby so far. And if you do decide to download Wallaby yourself, let us know how it worked out for you.

EVs are here, but a widespread public charging infrastructure is still years away. In the meantime, an iPhone app released today shows EV owners where they can plug in — provided they’re willing to depend on the kindness of strangers.

The founders of Palo Alto startup Xatori envision a world where iPhone-equipped good Samaritans make up for what is, for now, a small charging infrastructure by opening their homes and businesses to those needing juice. The new PlugShare app can create profiles showing where these Good Samaritans are located and what kind of outlet they have available — a regular 120-volt socket or a quicker 240.

The free app makes it remarkably easy to keep you going if you’re running low on juice.

Among other things, PlugShare lets you browse a list of public charging stations, search for places to charge and call or text PlugShare members who might be willing to let you plug in. Anyone can browse the list of charger locations, but to get specific addresses you’ve got to create an account.

EV early adopters are a friendly bunch and many are only too happy to let you plug in. There also are many opportunities to plug in at home, at work and at a small but growing number of public charging stations. But the app makes “plug-surfing” a snap and could help alleviate “range anxiety” among newcomers to the technology, said longtime EV advocate Chelsea Sexton.

“This app formalizes something that’s been occurring in the EV community for years,” she said. “EVs are a community-oriented technology, and while charging opportunities are ubiquitous enough that plug-surfing is rarely needed, new drivers will like the reassurance and all drivers like the opportunity to connect with each other.”

To make the app more useful, it would be nice to have an open “comments” field where those with plugs to share can list when they’re available. As it stands, user profiles feature phone numbers and addresses. It also would be nice to have a rating system where electric vehicle owners can praise a user’s homemade cookies and convenient freeway access — or warn of poison ivy and big dogs.

Coverage is, as you’d expect, sparse. Hours after the app’s debut the plugs were few and far between beyond the San Francisco Bay Area and largely limited to the East and West coasts. They’re pretty much nonexistent through most of the Midwest.

Company brass say PlugShare could foster a sense of community among EV owners.

“Many people won’t have EV’s right away, but everyone has an electrical outlet,” co-founder Forrest North said. “Sharing electricity from a standard outlet only costs about 15 cents an hour, a small price to lessen our dependence on oil.”

We’re pretty sure the app, or another like it, could incentivize individuals and businesses to build an ad hoc charging infrastructure. Businesses could use the offer of charging up as a way to draw customers into the store, much like coffee shops and cafes use free Wi-Fi to attract customers and keep them around awhile.

Photo: Chevrolet Volt charging up. (General Motors)

An analysis of online responses to automakers’ advertising campaigns has found that Chrysler’s “Born Of Fire” commercial featuring rapper Eminem continues to strike a chord online.

Alterian, a company that tracks and analyzes social media, found that the online buzz surrounding Chrysler peaked during the Super Bowl but continued to show positive feelings towards the brand throughout February. Nearly 74 percent of online mentions of the Chrysler 200 reflected positive opinions.

“Historically, Chrysler did not fare as well before the Super Bowl, compared to the other manufacturers,” said Alterian’s Jim Reynolds. “The Super Bowl commercial started a monster trend for them, which has continued to snowball.”

Even counting a drought in online buzz before the Super Bowl, Chrysler gained 54,783 unique mentions in search results between December 2010 and February 2011. This made Chrysler tops among the nine similar brands that Alterian studied. By comparison, Infiniti only got 7,915 unique search results during the same time period.

Within the brand, the Chrysler 200 got most of the attention. It came in first with 12,092 search mentions, ahead of the Cadillac CTS, which was only mentioned in 7,368 search results. This is good news for Chrysler, whose reputation has been less than stellar after years of selling a tired product lineup.

“Chrysler represents a great example of the ideal buzz a brand should strive for. Like most, we were shocked and impressed by Chrysler,” Reynolds said. “Initially we questioned whether the Chrysler 200 could hold its own against more traditional luxury car manufacturers, but they proved us wrong.”

Unfortunately, Chrysler’s online buzz leaned heavily towards dealer and sale websites, without as much community involvement. In Alterian’s study, the car most mentioned on forums and in online communities is the BMW 3-series, with more than half of the top ten sources of online buzz made up of chatter on BMW fan sites.

In order to build relationships with customers the way BMW has, Reynolds said, Chrysler must harness their social media buzz and engage those who are talking about the brand. “Hopefully, they can transition this momentum into community growth like BMW or Cadillac,” Reynolds said.

Photo and Video: Chrysler

… a cautionary tale. It’s always easier to make a promise than it is to keep one, and if you’re not careful, it compounds.

I got my new Macbook Pro the other day. It comes with Migration Assistant, a flawed piece of software that promises to easily transfer years of old data from one machine to another.

The software failed. (Promise broken). Having paid $99 for the One to One service (which promises individual hour long sessions), I make an appointment and head over to the store. Nate, the promised guide, doesn’t know how to fix it, because, despite the promise, he’s not trained to do so. He hands me over to a genius, Michael, who hears my story and promises to personally handle it (it takes ten hours to do the transfer, he’ll watch over it and make sure it goes well.) He actually looks me in the eye and says, “I promise to personally handle this.”

The next day, the phone rings. It’s Aideen, who has the case, doesn’t know who Michael is and doesn’t know what to do. She leaves a message. I call back, talk to someone at the store who insists that Aideen isn’t available but that someone will call me back within thirty minutes. He says, “I promise that someone will call you within thirty minutes.” An hour later, no one has called back.

It goes on and on. Every employee means well. Every employee is overwhelmed by incoming traffic, most from people who have already had their promises broken. Every employee has discovered that it’s easier to make a promise and pass it along than it is to either tell the truth or keep the promise.

The cascade starts with the product. When your brand makes promises it can’t keep, your overworked staff bears the brunt.

Remember those 21 malware-infested applications Google removed from its Android Market last week? Google now says there were actually 58 malicious apps downloaded to 260,000 Android smartphones, and late Saturday night, Google remotely turned on its kill switch, which is able to remove those errant applications from the phones.

The kill switch is actually software that’s downloaded onto an Android smartphone and installed automatically, removing the apps in question with no user action required. In its Google Mobile Blog, the company announced:

“We are pushing an Android Market security update to all affected devices that undoes the exploits to prevent the attacker(s) from accessing any more information from affected devices. If your device has been affected, you will receive an email from android-market-support@google.com over the next 72 hours. You will also receive a notification on your device that “Android Market Security Tool March 2011” has been installed. You may also receive notification(s) on your device that an application has been removed. You are not required to take any action from there; the update will automatically undo the exploit. Within 24 hours of the exploit being undone, you will receive a second email.”

Google’s had this kill switch in place since 2008, and it used the remote application removal capability for the first time in June, 2010.

Google downplayed the harm caused by these malware apps, assuring users that none of their personal data has been compromised:

“For affected devices, we believe that the only information the attacker(s) were able to gather was device-specific (IMEI/IMSI, unique codes which are used to identify mobile devices, and the version of Android running on your device). But given the nature of the exploits, the attacker(s) could access other data.”

The kill switch is not going to completely fix this problem. TechCrunch points out that Android devices are still vulnerable because of existing security holes at the system level, which must be fixed by cellular carriers and hardware manufacturers. The problem is made worse by cellular providers sticking with older versions of Android, unfortunate because the security exploit only affects Android versions 2.2.1 and older. The good news is, if an Android phone is running the latest software, that security hole has already been patched.

So commenters, is your confidence in Android shaken by this incident?

That’s what most of us do. We present facts and proof and expect a rational consumer/voter/follower/peer to make an intelligent decision on what’s better.

That’s how science works. Thesis, test, evidence, conclusion. All testable and rational.

Here’s the conversation that needs to happen before we invest a lot of time in evidence-based marketing in the face of skepticism: “What evidence would you need to see in order to change your mind?”

If the honest answer is, “well, actually, there’s nothing you could show me that would change my mind,” you’ve just saved everyone a lot of time. Please don’t bother having endless fact-based discussions.

Apple tried to use evidence to persuade IT execs and big companies to adopt the Macs during the 80s. Ads and studies that proved the Mac was easier and cheaper to support. They failed. It was only the gentle persistence of storytelling and the elevation of evangelists that turned the tide.

What would you have to show someone who believes men never walked on the moon? What evidence would you have to proffer in order to change the mind of someone who is certain the Earth is only 5,000 years old? If they’re being truthful with you, there’s nothing they haven’t been exposed to that would do the trick. I was talking to someone who has a body of artistic work I respect a great deal. He explained to me his notion that the polio vaccine was a net negative, that it didn’t really work and that more people have been hurt by it than helped.

I tried evidence. I showed him detailed reports from the Gates Foundation and from the WHO and from other sources. No, he said, that’s all faked, promoted by the pharma business. There was no evidence that would change his mind.

Of course, evidence isn’t the only marketing tactic that is effective. In fact, it’s often not the best tactic. What would change his mind, what would change the mind of many people resistant to evidence is a series of eager testimonials from other tribe members who have changed their minds. When people who are respected in a social or professional circle clearly and loudly proclaim that they’ve changed their minds, a ripple effect starts. First, peer pressure tries to repress these flip-flopping outliers. But if they persist in their new mindset, over time others may come along. Soon, the majority flips. It’s not easy or fast, but it happens.

That’s why it’s hard to find people who believe the earth is flat. That’s why political parties change their stripes now and then. It wasn’t that the majority reviewed the facts and made a shift. It’s because people they respected sold them on a new faith, a new opinion.