Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Seven hours after Argentine soccer player Leo Messi started a Facebook Page, he has almost 7 million Likes.

To put that number into perspective, it’s nearly 40% as many Likes as President Obama has on his Facebook Page, and about 30% as many as Justin Bieber fans have contributed to his Facebook Page — but Messi’s Likes were gathered in hours, not years.

Messi, who plays for FC Barcelona and is considered by many to be the best soccer player in the world, wrote in a translated welcome message on the page, “Hola! Welcome to everyone. Thank you very much for the great number of messages that I have received. I am so excited! From now on we will be more closely connected… through Facebook.”

Lady Gaga beat President Obama to 10 million Likes last summer, but we can’t remember another celebrity nearing the milestone so quickly. We’ve reached out to Facebook about whether Messi has set a Facebook record.

How many people should be answering the phone at Zappos on a Saturday? What’s Southwest Airlines policy regarding hotel stays and cancelled flights? Should the knobs on the shower at the hotel go side by side or one above the other? Can I turn it on without getting sprayed with cold water? How many steps from the front of the hotel to the registration desk?

Too often, we blame bad service on the people who actually deliver the service. Sometimes (often) it’s not their fault. Sadly, the complaints rarely make it as far as the overpaid (or possibly overworked) executive who made the bad design decision in the first place. It’s the architecture of service that makes the phone ring and that makes customers leave.

Three quick tips for anyone who cares about this:
1. Require service designers to sign their work. Who decided to make it the way it is?
2. Run a customer service audit. Walk through the building or the software or the phone tree with all the designers in the room and call out what’s not right.
3. Make it easy for complaints (and compliments) about each decision to reach the designer (and her boss).

In my experience, most of the problems are caused by ignorance and isolation, not incompetence or a lack of concern.

Mozilla has published a list of 10 Firefox add-ons which hinder the browser’s performance the most.

The list, available here, shows how much each add-on slows down Firefox at startup.

Ironically, an add-on called “FastestFox – Browse Faster” is on the list, together with several very popular ones, for example the developer-oriented Firebug and bookmark synchronizer Xmarks.

The slowest add-ons on the list, FoxLingo – Translator / Dictionary and Firebug, slow down Firefox’s startup by a whopping 74%.

The list is a result of a recent initiative by Mozilla to put a stop on performance-slowing add-ons. Mozilla announced it will perform automated performance tests of the top 100 add-ons hosted in its add-on gallery every week, and display warnings for add-ons that slow Firefox startup time by 25% or more.

When I see how companies use social media, one of the biggest things I see them doing is pushing offers and contests. Sure, that’s part of marketing. But that’s like saying that the only show on television is The Price is Right. There are plenty of other ways to engage your audience, and to me, the real meat is in seeing beyond offers and into other ways to engage.

Encourage Enthusiasm

Take a look at BMW USA’s Facebook page, especially the Wall. They’re empowering enthusiasm. Some of these people probably don’t even own a BMW – yet. But they’ve found a place to bask in the cult of BMW for a while, and I bet they’re thrilled.

Empower Community

Want to know an example of a great Twitter community? Mack Collier runs a weekly chat at 9PM ET on Sunday nights called #blogchat. If you ever have the opportunity to watch it live, it’s a blur of useful information and camaraderie. If I were a community manager at a company, I’d look to emulate something like what Mack has done. It would be a very beneficial experience compared to just making offers.

Tell Stories and Entertain

If you’re Hubspot, you just keep making more and more content to keep your audience entertained. Every production has a bit of humor, a bit of useful advice, and a bit of message reinforcement. You tell stories over and over that get your primary points across. You make sure people understand the context of the tools you’re pitching, so that they understand why they should care in the first place. There’s no one better at keeping their customers immersed in context-reinforcing content than Hubspot. You could study them and emulate them and the improvements would be obvious and fairly quick, provided you got the intent correct.

Serving Suggestions

Mick Galuski runs Toy Soldier Games downstairs from my office. It sells comics and all kinds of game products and accessories. Many of these games can cost the average customer around $200 (my estimate because I’m too lazy to walk downstairs and ask Mick of that’s right). The way the games work is that you have to buy products and accessories to tell specific stories. Mick does a great job of helping parents and their kids get into the storylines. He helps people find budget methods to get into certain games. He also works hard to show people age-specific entry points to gaming, knowing that a gamer becomes a customer for life if they’re cultivated nicely.

By offering serving suggestions, Mick goes well beyond offers in his marketing efforts.

Look Beyond Offers

Your buyers want much more than discounts. They want to express themselves, they want relationships, they want context, and they serving suggestions, just to name a few. What are you doing to bring them beyond offers? How do you see the various platforms of social business helping or hindering those efforts?

Angry Birds fans can’t get enough of the bird-hurling application and game franchise from mobile developer Rovio.

Angry Birds Rio, the latest iOS and Android edition of the game, features a theme based on the upcoming FOX animated motion picture Rio. The app saw ten million downloads in its first ten days after release.

The milestone metric spans all free and paid versions available in the App Store iTunes link, Android Marketplace and Amazon Appstore. The stat was first announced on Rovio’s Twitter account.

The news is flashy tidbit of information that demonstrates Rovio’s stronghold in the mobile gaming genre. Everything the company releases in the Angry Birds franchise is an instant hit, plush toys included. The impressive figure also demonstrates why investors were keen on forking over $42 million and could help lay the groundwork for a profitable IPO.