Open up your mind and say, ahh...

A friend asked me the other day, “…given the sorry state of so much in the world, what’s possible to look forward to?”

The state isn’t sorry. It’s wide open.

Interest rates are super low, violence is close to an all time low, industries are being remade and there’s more leverage for the insurgent outsider than ever before in history.

The status quo is taking a beating, there’s no question about it. That’s what makes it a revolution.

I said this nine years ago and I stand by it. In the years since I wrote this essay, people have started social movements, built billion dollar companies, toppled dictators, found new jobs, learned new skills and generally made a ruckus.

Go!

Hindsight is 20/20. People are already looking back on the 1990s and wishing that they had had more courage. When you look back on the 2000s, what will you have to say for yourself? The following is reprinted from 9 years ago.

Here’s a question that you should clip out and tape to your bathroom mirror. It might save you some angst 15 years from now. The question is, What did you do back when interest rates were at their lowest in 50 years, crime was close to zero, great employees were looking for good jobs, computers made product development and marketing easier than ever, and there was almost no competition for good news about great ideas?

Many people will have to answer that question by saying, “I spent my time waiting, whining, worrying, and wishing.” Because that’s what seems to be going around these days. Fortunately, though, not everyone will have to confess to having made such a bad choice.

While your company has been waiting for the economy to rebound, Reebok has launched Travel Trainers, a very cool-looking lightweight sneaker for travelers. They are selling out in Japan — from vending machines in airports!

While Detroit’s car companies have been whining about gas prices and bad publicity for SUVs (SUVs are among their most profitable products), Honda has been busy building cars that look like SUVs but get twice the gas mileage. The Honda Pilot was so popular, it had a waiting list.

While Africa’s economic plight gets a fair amount of worry, a little startup called ApproTEC is actually doing something about it. The new income that its products generate accounts for 0.5% of the entire GDP of Kenya. How? It manufactures a $75 device that looks a lot like a StairMaster. But it’s not for exercise. Instead, ApproTEC sells the machine to subsistence farmers, who use its stair-stepping feature to irrigate their land. People who buy it can move from subsistence farming to selling the additional produce that their land yields — and triple their annual income in the first year of using the product.

While you’ve been wishing for the inspiration to start something great, thousands of entrepreneurs have used the prevailing sense of uncertainty to start truly remarkable companies. Lucrative Web businesses, successful tool catalogs, fast-growing PR firms — all have started on a shoestring, and all have been profitable ahead of schedule. The Web is dead, right? Well, try telling that to Meetup.com, a new Web site that helps organize meetings anywhere and on any topic. It has 200,000 registered users — and counting.

Maybe you already have a clipping on your mirror that asks you what you did during the 1990s. What’s your biggest regret about that decade? Do you wish that you had started, joined, invested in, or built something? Are you left wishing that you’d at least had the courage to try? In hindsight, the 1990s were the good old days. Yet so many people missed out. Why? Because it’s always possible to find a reason to stay put, to skip an opportunity, or to decline an offer. And yet, in retrospect, it’s hard to remember why we said no and easy to wish that we had said yes.

The thing is, we still live in a world that’s filled with opportunity. In fact, we have more than an opportunity — we have an obligation. An obligation to spend our time doing great things. To find ideas that matter and to share them. To push ourselves and the people around us to demonstrate gratitude, insight, and inspiration. To take risks and to make the world better by being amazing.

Are these crazy times? You bet they are. But so were the days when we were doing duck-and-cover air-raid drills in school, or going through the scares of Three Mile Island and Love Canal. There will always be crazy times.

So stop thinking about how crazy the times are, and start thinking about what the crazy times demand. There has never been a worse time for business as usual. Business as usual is sure to fail, sure to disappoint, sure to numb our dreams. That’s why there has never been a better time for the new. Your competitors are too afraid to spend money on new productivity tools. Your bankers have no idea where they can safely invest. Your potential employees are desperately looking for something exciting, something they feel passionate about, something they can genuinely engage in and engage with.

You get to make a choice. You can remake that choice every day, in fact. It’s never too late to choose optimism, to choose action, to choose excellence. The best thing is that it only takes a moment — just one second — to decide.

Before you finish this paragraph, you have the power to change everything that’s to come. And you can do that by asking yourself (and your colleagues) the one question that every organization and every individual needs to ask today: Why not be great?

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Name:V.I.K.T.O.R.

Quick Pitch: V.I.K.T.O.R. is an automatic video-editing app.

Genius Idea: The free iPhone app makes movie making and sharing mobile clips quick and easy.

Built-in cameras on smartphone and tablet devices make it easy to record videos of experiences anywhere we go. But how often do we go back to watch these videos or share them?

V.I.K.T.O.R., an automatic video-editing app, provides a simple and convenient way to cut and edit video clips and turn them into short movies. The app allows users to make short movies — either 20 seconds, one minute or two minutes long — that actually look professionally edited. For now, it’s free to create a movie, but in the future, the company plans to charge $0.99 for 1-minute movies and $1.99 for two-minute movies.

“We all have special moments that we want to remember,” Evgenia Bogdanovich, co-founder of V.I.K.T.O.R., told Mashable. “This video editing app offers a way to recollect your memories and turn them into a video presentation that feels emotional and looks professional.”

Developed in June, the idea of V.I.K.T.O.R. was inspired while two of the four co-founders of the app were traveling in Hong Kong. Sergey Nurmamed and Alexander Didenko saw tourists taking pictures and recording videos with their phones, and wondered how often people actually go back and look at these memories. When Nurmamed and Didenko returned to Russia, the V.I.K.T.O.R. team decided to create an automatic-editing app to make it easier for people to create movies from their experiences and share them with friends and family.

To start making mini-movies, download the app onto an iPhone and choose one of the following video-editing options:

• Automatic: The app randomly chooses video footage from your phone.
• Semiautomatic: Users manually select videos.
• Controlled: Gives users more control by allowing them to sort their videos by different sections and shotsAfter you select an option, users can also add in their own themes and soundtracks. Browse the list of categories (travels, sports, family, events, lifestyle or moods) and select a theme that suits your movie. Then create a movie title and select the mobile clips that you want to include.

   

  Select an unlimited number of video clips to include in your movie.

   

The past year was a wild one in the sports world, full of salacious scandals, poignant moments, new records, the passing of old legends and the forging of new ones.

But digital and social media also shaped — and were shaped by — some of the year’s biggest moments in the NBA, NFL, international soccer, college football and nearly every other sport humans play. Sometimes the stories were inspiring. Sometimes they were sad, or repugnant. Sometimes they were funny. But they were almost always interesting.

Here, we look back at 15 of our most memorable sports moments from the year that was. Scroll through the slideshow below, and let us know what you think in the comments.

What are your favorite stories from this list? What would you have added? What do you predict for 2012?

While pro athletes are used to criticism from fans via social media, digital hate doesn’t usually come from fellow players. But that’s what happened when Chicago Bears quarterback Jay Cutler missed more than half of a crucial NFL playoff game with an injured knee in January.

As the Bears lost with Culter watching from the sideline, current and former NFL players including Maurice Jones-Drew (left) sounded off on Twitter, eviscerating Cutler for a perceived lack of heart.

February’s Super Bowl XLV between the Green Bay Packers and Pittsburgh Steelers was the only sports-related topic among Facebook’s top-10 conversation subjects worldwide, ranking ahead of globally noted events including Hurricane Irene, Prince William’s royal wedding and the deaths of Steve Jobs and Amy Winehouse.

Check out the Facebook infographic at left to see how the Super Bowl measured up against the online world’s other hot topics.

Following the earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan this March, WNBA player Cappie Pondexter tweeted, “What if God was tired of the way they treated their own people in there own country! Idk guys he makes no mistakes.” She later followed that tweet with this gem: “u just never knw! They did pearl harbor so you can’t expect anything less.”

Pondexter’s tweets sparked a vociferous backlash and she soon returned to Twitter to issue an apology (left).

NFL star Rashard Mendenhall poked a hornet’s nest in May when he wrote this tweet (left) following the killing of Osama bin Laden by American forces: “What kind of person celebrates death? It’s amazing how people can HATE a man they have never even heard speak. We’ve only heard one side…”

Mendenhall’s team, the Pittsburgh Steelers, quickly distanced themselves from his words and athletic apparel company Champion dropped him as a sponsor.

The Ultimate Fighting Championship is known as one of the most brutal sports around. But in May, the organization decided to pit its fighters against one another digitally as well. The league announced $5,000 bonuses for writing creative tweets, having the most total Twitter followers and gaining followers at the quickest rate.

When sporting legends such as Shaquille O’Neal retire, they usually do so with a lavish press conference amid much pomp and circumstance. But Shaq, an early social media adopter, bucked that tradition in June.

He announced his retirement from the NBA via a a short recording using the social video startup Tout. “I want to thank you very much,” he said to fans. “That’s why I’m telling you first: I’m about to retire.”

On July 17, the Brazilian men’s national team was eliminated from the Copa America. The Twitterverse users worldwide posted about the game at a rate of 7,166 tweets per second. That would have set a new world record for Twitter — were it not for another international soccer match held the same day.

When Japan beat the United States to win the Women’s World Cup, tweeters around the globe posted at a rate of 7,196 messages each second immediately following the shootout finale. The two matches then stood at first and second on Twitter’s leader board of all-time service usage.

The first tangible casualties of the NBA lockout came in September, when the league canceled a week of preseason games. But, before and after that marker, the lockout played out online in realtime.

Players like Anthony Morrow, left, used Twitter to post defiant public messages to the league’s franchise owners and sway fan support. The NBA established an official @NBA_Labor account to help guide the narrative as well. Meanwhile, viral videos of out-of-work NBA players dominating amateur leagues popped up all over YouTube.

For supporters of the NHL’s Tampa Bay Lighting, hockey season began with a techie twist this October. The team introduced free replica team jerseys (left) for season ticket holders. But the classic staple of fan apparel came with a radio frequency chip embedded in the sleeve.

Each chip gives discounts on in-stadium purchases but also has a unique ID that allows the team to track who buys what, which executives say will allow the organization to analyze the most effective future deals and promotions.

Following a big win by his hometown Denver Broncos in October, NFL fan Jared Kleinstein photographed himself striking a prayerful pose to honor the signature gesture of the Broncos’ unorthodox lightning rod quarterback Tim Tebow.

Kleinstein christened the move “Tebowing” and started a Tebowing.com website to post photos of himself and a few friends dropping to one knee in unexpected places. The joke immediately became a viral meme. Two days later, Kleinstein’s website had more than 350,000 unique visitors and he has now received more than 15,000 photo submissions
from people Tebowing (see example at left) in more than 75 countries.

During the NBA lockout, Oklahoma City Thunder star Kevin Durant tweeted on Oct. 31 looking for a local flag football game to join (see left). An Oklahoma State University student responded, inviting Durant to join a fraternity match nearby.

Durant, the NBA’s scoring champion, acquitted himself well on the gridiron (see YouTube video) by scoring four touchdowns.

Mississippi State University painted a giantTwitter hashtag (see left), in one of its stadium endzones before the annual college football rivalry game against the University of Mississippi.

Business and marketing types lauded the move as a brilliant conversation-sparking innovation, and it’s believed to the first time a social media tag or handle has been incorporated into the actual field of play in any sport.

After stomping on an opponent during a game this season, NFL bad boy Ndamukong Suh of the Detroit Lions posted an apologetic message (left) to his Facebook page on Nov. 25. Suh was nonetheless suspended by the league for two games, and his post rekindled a familiar debate about whether celebrities’ public social media apologies are gracious public gestures or convenient cop-outs.

Philadelphia 76ers fan Jerry Rizzo lived every social media enthusiast’s dream in December when he and a friend took it upon themselves to create fictitious Twitter accounts for potential new team mascots in a fan voting contest.

Rizzo later received a call from team CEO Adam Aron and after coming in for an interview was offered an official position as the 76ers’ new social media coordinator. Rizzo told Mashable that his new position is “kind of like a dream job for me.”

As the headline implies, even though Social CRM exists as an official category, what it is and what it is not is blurry and hotly debated. Think about the vast array of vendors selling social media solutions for a moment. Many of them are positioned as Social CRM or sCRM tools, but when you examine true capabilities versus stated positioning , you will find that many vendors are in fact stronger players in social media management (SMMS), social CMS, listening, collaboration, intelligence, and conversation management.

If you think about this from a business perspective, it’s almost impossible to identify which vendor is truly qualified to deliver against the goals of a new social CRM system.  Decision makers have to spend an inordinate amount of time attempting to sort through what is true and what is simply good marketing. Often, they must recruit experts to help survey the landscape and qualify vendors.

Earlier in the year, I met with Houston Neal to discuss the state of Social CRM, where it’s headed and where it needs to go. As you can see, I believe that 2012 is the year when we finally start to accurately segment the market while better defining what Social CRM really is and how businesses need to think and rethink their approach to customer relationship management. It’s part technology and part philosophy. Because, in the end, it’s about relationships.

Here’s the transcribed conversation…

Houston Neal: To begin, do you think a true social CRM suite exists in the market?

Brian Solis: That’s a good question. Let’s first take a step back. The thing that’s a little bit more interesting about Social CRM – and definitely one of the things that’s under appreciated – is the idea that it forces us to rethink the definition of CRM. By that I mean, CRM was originally about putting together an infrastructure, processes, and methodologies to support customer and sales processes. What we see now is mainstream social media. So, the whole discussion around socializing CRM is about the introduction of new touch points within the business ecosystem that we didn’t design around originally.

When you ask if there are any solutions out there, the answer is yes and no. What was CRM and what will be CRM are two very different things. And, quite honestly, you’re actually going to see a complete transformation in business in general. It goes by names like “social business,” “adaptive business,” and “holistic business.” What we’re learning now with the democratization of information is that individuals are in control of the brand and brand experience as much as the business. This is paramount. This is at the heart of what’s fueling the socialization of CRM. If I could put it into one nutshell statement it would be that brands used to be defined by the marketing department. That was because they controlled the media. Now that people are starting to take control of the media, brand equity becomes this collective of brand experiences. Those brand experiences are shared through blogs, Facebook, Twitter, forums, you name it.

When you try to design software around capturing this activity, you have to begin by questioning your business strategy. What is it that you are trying to accomplish? Are you trying to steer experiences at the beginning, during, or after? Or, all of the above? Tools are starting to emerge that allow you to identify decision making processes at every step. They are all, in one way or another, adapting to certain parts or many parts of this social CRM idea. But if indeed social CRM is much bigger, as we’re discussing here, then it’s just getting started.

Finally, just to make things a little bit kookier, what we are talking about is removing the “C” from CRM. It’s not just about customer relationship management. It’s now about this idea of what I call SRM. Drop the “C” and call it social relationship management. Or just drop the “S” and call it relationship management. The thing I like about RM is that we’re not just talking about relationship management. This could mean reputation management and a whole bunch of things. This is really what we’re talking about, right? Because you can influence the decision of someone before they’re even a customer. You can manage the whole information work flow process, channel it within the organization so that you’re not just learning and responding, but so that you are adapting as a business to be better structured to handle the customer of the future.

Moving on to a more specific question, what type of applications do you think would make up a social CRM suite?

I recently wrote an article about Dell and Gatorade building these rooms called social media command centers. They look like NASA with screens all over the wall showing things like conversations, relationships, keyword clouds, and whether certain words are becoming more or less dense. They’re monitoring sentiment in real time. It’s pretty crazy and it’s cool at the same time. But if you imagine like this futuristic world of CRM, it would start there, right? It would look a lot like that because essentially what they’re doing is they’re monitoring all of the activity that’s taking place. Who’s saying what and where, who’s asking what, who needs a reaction, who needs a response?

This is one way that the social CRM system would really start to begin. From there, it’s a matter of technologies and work flow that allow you to hear, see, process, respond, and adapt all within the infrastructure in the way the business is designed.

Take Nimble for example. It will allow you to track all of these different individuals, then at a point of engagement it, let’s say its Twitter, channel one individual to someone in customer service or product management.

So, let’s say I send a Tweet. Customer service then takes this tweet, and using a tool like Nimble, it could bring in more information than what you would normally find in that tweet. For example, the person’s name, what other accounts they have across other networks, etc. It would then build a database around it. Customer service can then push out a response and track the response. The database could also send a signal to the listening agent to say, “we’ve got this one handled, you can check it off your list.” If the listening manager finds a sales opportunity, they could funnel it over to sales. That tweet can then also populate the sales database and sales can use this to respond and track the status of the opportunity. This is just one, very light way that this can be done today. Over time, it will get more sophisticated.

If you look at my blueprint for the social business you’ll see this thing called the conversation cloud on the left side of the blueprint. You’ll notice Get Satisfaction. What they represent is this conversation cloud that channels conversations into one place. So, let’s just say somebody asks a question on Twitter, or somebody asks a question on Facebook, or somebody goes to the website to ask a question. The magic with Get Satisfaction is that they can put together common responses and common answers from a knowledge-base, directly to the individual. So it can just constantly serve up the right answer without even having to have a human being present, which is huge. It saves them a massive amount of time. This is yet another dimension to CRM that we really haven’t seen before.

So, when you look at Get Satisfaction, combine them with Nimble, then combine with a command center, we’re starting to see pieces of this complete social CRM suite emerge. Then there is going to be some type of glue that brings it all together. That glue is probably going to be somebody like Salesforce who buys all of these pieces to offer one complete solution, or parts of the solution.

What trends are you seeing in the market, both in terms of product development, and general market activity?

I’ve seen a lot of innovation in tools that are called social CRM, even though they’re really one facet of a bigger discussion around social CRM. I’m also seeing a lot of enterprises either innovating or acquiring social CRM type solutions. Though, I’m not sure that I see anything that’s comprehensive. Nor do I see a lot of strategic messaging and real expertise around that messaging. In general, I think we’re going to have more confusion before we have clarity. I think everybody is just learning here as we go.

One trend I hope to see – and I don’t know that I’m going to see this immediately – is the definition of the need. People need to have a better understanding about what it is. Before executives spend any real money or resources around designing infrastructure on the activity, they need to understand what it means. This trend is going to take a little bit of time. Right now social CRM either lives in a silo in marketing, public relations, or customer service. The most important trend we’ll see in 2011 – and going into 2012 – is the understanding of social media’s impact on the entire business.

So basically coming up with use cases?

Ahh, use cases. Lets see. I’ll give you one. But, let me preface it. Dell is often used as a social media success story. Some people believe that it’s overused. But let me tell you why it’s an excellent example of social CRM.

Dell has innovated around a problem. And that problem was that people hated Dell. If you remember it was called Dell Hell. Dell Hell was really the collection of negative experiences through blogs and Tweets. What ended up happening was Michael Dell – and the rest of the company – took it so seriously that they innovated with social CRM systems around it. And it’s still evolving today. When there’s a problem on Twitter, blogs, Facebook, or anywhere else, they watch to see which issues gain momentum. As this happens, they unearth what the problem is, get a team to fix it, then push the fix. This completely extinguishes those discussions. So that means that it went from a listening component to a development component to a distribution component of a CRM system. Phenomenal, right? They’ve got the same infrastructure for sales, human resources, finance and legal. This is what I’m talking about. Dell is able to understand the nuances of its brand and brand experiences at any step of the decision. They’re building an infrastructure, and more importantly, a methodology of philosophies around engaging with those experiences, dealing with those experiences, or managing those experiences. So while they’re far from being the complete example of an entire solution, Dell is by default, building a social CRM system for the entire organization.

I also wanted to send a special note of thanks to Lauren Carlson, Houston Neal,  and the Software Advice team for including me in the 2011 Authority Awards. Other winners include good friend Mr. Paul Greenberg and Denis Pombriant, who is someone I look forward to getting to know better in 2012.