Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Guest post by John M. Bernard, author of the new book, Business at the Speed of Now, and Chairman and Founder of Mass Ingenuity.

Imagine going to work in one of Henry Ford’s factories a century ago, proud that management referred to you a “hand” or a “hammer” or maybe even a “wrench.” The labels reflected Ford’s emphasis on automation and management’s view of laborers as mere cogs in the machine.

Screw this nut onto that bolt; weld this strap to that frame; do it over and over and over again until your brain froze with boredom. Of course, management needed workers to get the numbing, repetitive work done, so they turned to the ideas of Frederick Taylor, a time-and-motion guru and father of so-called “scientific management.”

Scientific management took the “person“ out of “personnel” by exerting rigid managerial control over everything people did on the job. It tolerated no variation, brooked no questioning, and invited no suggestions for improvement. Yet it transformed Ford Motor Company into a huge and hugely profitable enterprise.

Ford’s success with the new Mass Production logic inspired other companies to follow suit. Soon, vast quantities of decent quality and affordable products were rolling off the assembly lines. As workers’ wages increased, they bought ranch-style homes in the suburbs, installed color television sets in their living rooms and parked shiny new Fords in their garages. Welcome to the great new American middle class.

That was THEN. This is NOW.

Times have changed. Nowadays, fewer than 10 percent of U.S. workers work on assembly lines. The other 90 percent work in environments where the old management logic clearly does not make sense (not to say it makes sense any longer in manufacturing). Yet Mass Production thinking still dominates our modern enterprises and even our schools and government.

People no longer accept the “cog in the machine” definition of work. They are independent, curious, quirky, passionate and emotional folks who demand that management put “human” back into “human resources.” They question authority (think Occupy Wall Street) and they want to improve everything in sight

Welcome to the new era of Mass Customization (a term Stan Davis popularized in 1987). It aptly describes today’s economy, where every customer wants what she wants, and she wants it NOW.

The shift from Mass Production to Mass Customization demands a fundamental shift in the way we manage our organizations. Centralized innovation and decision-making, the mainstays of the Mass Production era, simply cannot get results in a world where unlimited choice demands real-time response.

Of course, new technologies and the Internet play a huge role in enabling customization, but real-time value creation also demands human intervention. More than ever, the customer experience depends on flesh-and-blood people interacting with other flesh-and-blood people.

Profits also hinge on people. A Mass Customization economy benefits from a fully engaged workforce. Research by Gallup and other investigators proves that an employee who moves from disengagement to engagement not only thrills customers but bolters the bottom line to the tune of $13,000 a year.

Most companies have not capitalized on that new fact of corporate life. According to Gallup, only about 30 percent of the workforce takes action without instruction from the boss (engaged). Of the remaining 70 percent, roughly 50 percent merely show up and follow orders (disengaged), while close to 20 percent dissipate their creativity by actually disrupting the business (actively disengaged).

Management enjoys so many useful tools these days: Lean. Six Sigma. Employee Empowerment. Service Quality. Quality Circles. Team Building. Self-Directed Work Teams. Leadership Training. Management Development. Customer Satisfaction Programs. Employee Engagement Surveys. Suggestion Systems. Profit Sharing. Stock Options. The list could fill a dozen pages. So why, despite all the new-fangled, state-of-the art techniques at their disposal, do managers remain so stuck in the mud, with engagement declining, not improving?

The answer is perfectly simple. To paraphrase George H. W. Bush, “It’s the system, stupid.” The underlying management system determines culture; culture determines the degree of employee engagement.

The new era of Mass Customization demands the right sort of get-it-done culture. And that sort of culture requires nothing short of a fundamental rethinking of the basic management system we use to get things done.

With the shift from Mass Production to Mass Customization, forward-thinking businesspeople must take on the most crucial reengineering project of all, reshaping management’s role in a way that will close the employee engagement chasm.

It will take as much imagination and blood, sweat and tears as it did for Henry Ford to create the preceding era. Alan Mulally who’s running Ford these days, is doing exactly that.

A business that operates in the NOW must build a management system that provides clear direction and a line-of-sight to results for every employee. Such a system must generate true accountability, forge a common business language everyone understands, drive complete transparency, and ensure that everyone enjoys the appropriate resources, tools and skills to do their work spectacularly well. In this NOW world, management must complete its work before that all-important value-creating moment arrives for its inspired employees to thrill the customer and crush the competition.

The Senate is currently debating a key piece of cybersecurity legislation which could change the way American tech firms operate. It is impossible to understate the need for the proposed Cybersecurity Act of 2012–the United States, in the midst of a historic surge in online crime and espionage, has decided to act to reduce the problem. However, critics argue that the Cybersecurity Act is wasteful and threatens privacy. As currently written, the Cybersecurity Act could lead to massively increased costs for American tech and Internet firms.

The Cybersecurity Act dramatically increases the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) role in combating cybercrime. Responsibility for commercial and civilian online security would be explicitly placed under DHS’s supervision; responsibility currently lies with a host of federal, state, and local law enforcement and intelligence agencies. A new National Center for Cybersecurity and Communications (NCCC) would be established within DHS, and would be headed up by a Senate-confirmed presidential appointee. Information sharing between government agencies would be streamlined. And the DHS will be responsible for establishing federally mandated “cybersecurity performance requirements” for critical Internet infrastructure.

The latest aspect of this bill has especially rankled critics. The DHS, once it decides what constitutes “critical internet infrastructure”–as the bill does not give an explicit definition–will lay down security requirements for the owners and operators of relevant services. Owners and operators will be required, at their own expense, to alter their Internet security choices in accordance with government requirements. This will be an extremely pricy proposition for hardware providers, Internet infrastructure providers, and web giants like Google, Facebook, and Amazon.

As currently written, the bill merely defines “critical Internet infrastructure” as anything “whose disruption from a cyber attack would cause mass death, evacuation, or major damage to the economy, national security, or daily life.” This is a broad definition that gives Homeland Security a huge mandate for overseeing Internet security standards by American tech firms.

A bipartisan group of Senators, led by John McCain (R-AZ), has argued that the Cybersecurity Act will lead to federally mandated Internet security requirements for private firms. Meeting federal benchmarks for online security will lead, ironically, to reduced security for critical Internet infrastructure providers. Rather than being able to introduce innovative responses to new threats, critical infrastructure providers will be tied to federal benchmarks from 2012 for at least the next five years.

Government cybercrime and cyberespionage protection is currently covered by the Federal Information Security Management Act of 2002. This 10-year-old bill does not cover aspects of modern security culture such as smartphones and spearphishing.

On the one hand, a new cybersecurity bill is a much needed thing. However, the current version of the bill clocks in at over 200 pages. Rather than being restricted to protecting the government from cyberattacks (a worthy goal), the bill was intentionally written in ambiguous and confusing language that could hypothetically lead to many American firms falling under its mandate. The Department of Homeland Security has not been known for cutting costs down, for providing clear regulatory definitions, or for working effectively with the private sector. Fast Company just reported on the awful mess of Homeland Security’s social media surveillance program.

While McCain is upset about the potential for increased government regulation and increased expenses for tech firms, he’s mostly angry that the bill doesn’t increase the NSA’s spying powers. In a statement submitted to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, McCain stated his wish for U.S. Cyber Command and the NSA to oversee cybersecurity, rather than DHS. McCain’s statement explicitly stated that part of his vision was for the NSA to engage in real-time monitoring of Internet traffic in order to prevent cyberattacks.

It is important to note that the Cybersecurity Bill is still in its infancy and that the bill’s contents will change markedly before passing. An earlier version of the bill inadvertently fueled fears of a government Internet kill switch thanks to sloppy writing. Meanwhile, the House of Representatives is pushing through a similar cybersecurity bill.

However, whatever form the government’s final cybercrime legislation takes, we know two things. Tech and Internet firms will see increased security costs thanks to stricter regulation, and the government’s power to spy on the Internet will likely increase.

Image: Flickr user Harald Groven

For more stories like this, follow @fastcompany on Twitter. Email Neal Ungerleider, the author of this article, here or find him on Twitter and Google+.

Photo: Solar Impulse/Jean Revillard

Andre Borschberg sounds remarkably bright and alert after spending more than 60 hours straight at the controls of the Solar Impulse flight simulator. Granted, he’s been able to get some sleep, sometimes napping for a whole 20 minutes at a time.

Borschberg is approaching the end of a 72-hour stint in the sim, running through a series of tests and challenges to prepare for what lies ahead when he attempts to fly around the world in a solar airplane in 2014. It’s been grueling, but not so bad.

“I feel quite well, better than what I expected,” Borschberg said from the cockpit mockup in Switzerland.

The point of the prolonged testing is to determine how best to manage the pilot’s needs while circumnavigating the globe in a solar plane. It also will allow the team to evaluate and refine the cockpit design. Some of the tests are simple reaction-time experiments; others are emergency drills designed to prepare Borschberg for things like losing power during a landing. Borschberg says his piloting skills haven’t degraded too badly with the loss of sleep.

“The quality stays very good,” he says, “but certainly it’s a bit lower than somebody who has slept eight hours.”

Andre Borschberg sleeping in the Solar Impulse simulator. Apparently there was no king-size option. Photo: Solar Impulse/Jean Revillard

A larger cockpit has been a big help. Compared to the first Solar Impulse that first flew in 2009, the second aircraft offers a bit more room.

“This cockpit is slightly larger than the first one,” Borschberg says. “We can do some exercise gymnastics, it helps to stimulate the muscles and the blood circulation. And I do some meditation to smooth how I use my energy.”

Borschberg has been allowed to take several “micro-naps” of about 20 minutes. It’s all part of the test. When the alarm goes off, there’s no hitting the snooze button. The former Swiss Air Force pilot must immediately take control of the airplane and establish straight and level flight.

“We measure the reaction time, as soon as I’m awake I go and take control of the airplane,” he says. “I have to grab it and provide an action. First control the airplane, then figure out anything else. Reaction time from alarm to when I grab the controls is 2 to 4 seconds. It is very quick.”

The biggest challenges of sleep deprivation have been critical decision making and of course landing the airplane. Borschberg says he finds he needs more decision making help from the crew as the simulation progresses. This was expected though, and he says it is not a problem.

The next-generation Solar Impulse, known as HB-SIB, will have a wingspan of more than 236 feet. It will not have a true autopilot. The airplane lacks sufficient power to maintain any type of predetermined flight altitude in the event of a strong downdraft, according to Borschberg, and it is so delicate that an autopilot could cause problems in unusual circumstances. Instead, Borschberg says, the airplane will have an electronic co-pilot of sorts capable of maintaining a directional heading and alerting the pilot to any problems with the performance of the airplane.

Borschberg and Solar Impulse co-founder Bertrand Piccard hope to attempt their around-the-world solar powered flight in 2014.

Richard Moross wants you to know that
business cards are alive and well. As the CEO of MOO, the company
that pioneered those clever mini cards with do-it-yourself design
options, Moross says the business of printing may be 500+ years old,
but it’s doing quite nicely, thank you very much.

Since its founding in 2004, the company
has a seen its compound annual growth rate exceed 100%. MOO.com
now has hundreds of thousands of customers in nearly 200 countries
and printed 50 million business cards last year alone. Moross is
expecting that number to double in 2012.

Which is why Moross brushes away talk
that exchanging cards is going to go the way of the horse and cart.
Not only does he order and give out thousands of his own cards every
year, Moross maintains, “The more connected to the web we are, the
more precious the real world is, so it is important to make a
connection.”

That connection comes in the form of a
handshake, a look in the eye, and the passing of the card. “It is
hard to generate trust virtually and convey your personality through
a Skype call,” Moross explains. Though he says, “we sell the
most boring products in the world,” Moross notes that business
cards are resilient for a number of reasons, not the least of which
is simplicity. “You don’t need to upgrade the OS. Everyone
understands what it is, and it just works.”

For all their genteel simplicity, MOO’s cards captured the attention of some
pretty tech-heavy businesses. Recent partners include Airbnb, whose hosts are encouraged to use MOO cards to showcase their digs to
prospective guests, and Facebook. Moo’s Facebook Cards are
personalized featuring any of your Facebook Timeline Cover Photos on
the front and a custom quote (or favorite status update) on the back.

These collaborations drive home
Moross’s fascination with the way design on the diminutive bits of
paper can break the ice, build relationships, and strengthen a brand.
He sat down with Fast Company recently to discuss how he gets maximum
impact from a mini card.

Be Yourself

“I give out thousands of cards but I
take a lot, too. I’m an avid collector. I mainly take pictures of
places I’ve been and meals I’ve eaten and use those on my personal
cards. There’s a story behind each image. For instance, I had
octopus raw and shredded in Bangkok once. It looked disgusting but it
was marvelous. Those are the things that people find memorable when
they rifle through the cards they got that week and they remember
you.”

Ice Breaker, Not Deal Breaker

“Typically I give my cards out at the
beginning of a meeting; that way the recipient can put it in front of
them, and, if there are multiple people in the room, no one forgets
anyone’s name. I like to lay all my cards out on the table and have
people pick their favorite. Each one is different and it makes for a
really fun introduction.”

Make a Useful and Productive Tool

“We mostly print flat rectangles, so it’s pretty straightforward at
a fundamental level. But there is a very specific reason for the
size. When I first designed the mini card I did in the shape of a
regular business card, but stripping away all the wasted white space
made it more personal. Because it is a strange aspect ratio there is
some cropping you get to do when using your own photos. The fact
that you are going through the editing process is quite liberating.
You get to really show who you are.”

Photos for Everyone!

“There is a camera in every device now and the proliferation of
photography stored on the web–Facebook is the largest depository on
the planet. To get people to use their own photography in business
and personal cards is a powerful application. It is almost like a
subversion of the cheesy real estate photo, you can suck the photos
into MOO’s website and do pretty low intensity design work, and it’s
very memorable and impactful.”

What Not to Print

“Other than something illegal, pretty much anything goes. We have
had some customers order trials of…offensive graphics, and
we block those users. Most of customers are creatively inclined and
we are often delighted by the types of cards people make because we
hand check everything.”

Lasting Impression

“I think business cards will prove more resilient than books. We
are in the identity business and the next stepping stone will include
the ttransfer of information from the cards into devices. There is
still something important about real-world tokens, though. MOO’s
mission is not just to transfer information, but to keep it.”

Image: Flickr user Richard Moross

Damn those Germans for designing attractive electric vehicles that promise a measure of style and luxury, only to taunt us by never actually selling them.

Audi is especially guilty of this, tempting us first with the gorgeous R8-based e-tron and e-tron Spyder and now with the A3 e-tron shown today at TED2012. The A3 e-tron joins the BMW Active E on the list of lustworthy practical electric cars we’ve seen from the Germans.

The car is, as the name suggests, an A3 with a 100-kilowatt electric motor and a hefty 26-kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery. Range is pegged at 90 miles. When the car first broke cover in April, Audi said it would hit 60 mph in under 11 seconds.

The A3 is part of a pilot program designed to “define a progressive e-mobility driver experience” and “identify challenges and opportunities with plug-in vehicles.” In other words, it’s an R&D program to refine the vehicle and the drivetrain. That explains why the car is being rolled out under a pilot program in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington D.C. and Denver.

Audi engineers and “technical experts” will spend the next year driving the cars, using the data to develop the cars we might one day see in showrooms.

Photos, video: Audi

The Pico Projector Play

Samsung is guilty of trying to imply innovation in its smartphone lineup by delivering dozens of ever-so-slightly different phones, but its latest move in the Galaxy range is perhaps the boldest: The Galaxy Beam. It’s recipe is simple: Take a chunky but reliable Android 2.3 handset with otherwise fairly typical specs, then add a 15 lumens picoprojector. That wins you headlines like this: “Samsung Galaxy Beam: Play smartphone games on a 50-inch screen” and it sure stands out from many of the other Galaxy phones, and most other big-name Android handsets.

But is it innovative? Not really, as phones with pico projectors have been around for a while now. Admittedly because it comes via Android’s ecosystem and has Samsung’s weight thrown behind it with special apps and the suggestion of thousands of game titles from Samsung’s own app stable it’s likely to do better than these earlier devices. But many smartphone games are all about the unique motion-control input you can manage with a handheld sensor-stuffed phone, and that’s just not gonna work with a pico-projected image on the nearest darkened wall. Neither are many apps likely to be written especially for this platform, as there’s no margin in it.

And yup, you’ll need a darkened wall as, though Samsung says it works in daylight, 15 lumens is pretty dim. This thing’s real strength is projecting a bigger image onto the seatback in front of you on a flight on an overnight flight. But that bumpy plastic’s not the best screen surface–and may really bug your fellow travelers.

Clever move by Samsung? In a way, yes–but really this smacks of depserately trying to pad out a smartphone range with no real innovation.

The Chips, Chips, And More Chips Play

According to Bit-Tech.net, MWC has gone “ga-ga for chips” with a lot of the attention focussed on the different platforms that phones use as their silicon chip engines, and endless claims of bigger, better, faster, more. There’re CPUs based on ARM’s Cortex A9 architecture, now coming to budget phones, its high-end multicored A15 architecture, compared to Nvidia’s Tegra 3 Kal-el CPU, and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon S4.

If you’ve gone acronym blind already, then steel yourself: It gets worse. Intel’s Atom “medfield” Z2460 got a showing. Huawei’s own-effort system-on-a-chip the quad-core K3V2 is also a standout, as it means Huawei is trying a soup-to-nuts ownership of smartphone technologies, including a custom power management chip that draws less than its rivals and 16 separate graphics cores.

These chips of course power phones: HTC’s attention-grabbing One X phone is perhaps the most-talked about this far, and it’s mainly based on its 1.5GHz Tegra 3 CPU, which lets it run blisteringly fast.

And that’s about the size of it. Is it innovative to soup up the current meme, strap it into a warmed-over core phone design and take it in the same direction every other phone maker is taking their product? Not necessarily. Plus you risk confusing, irritating or completely blind-siding the phone-buying public with all these names and specs.

The Better Camera Play

Meet Nokia’s 808 PureView phone. It’s got a 4-inch display, a 1.3 Ghz single-core CPU that’s not going to win too many speed prizes, aging but reliable Symbian OS and a 41 megapixel camera behind a premium Carl Zeiss lens. Yup, that’s 41 megapixels, foiks (sure, there’s some jiggery-pokery involved in averaging pixels down to the final stored image, but it’s clear that this phone’s sold on this main strength).

Remember our concern that the pointless megapixel war was coming to the smartphone? This is that nonsense in action. Because it’s not all about the megapixels: Photography’s all about the optics that lets your camera capture light. Even serious pro-level Canon DSLRs only sport 16 megapixels, but have gloriously large sensor pixel sizes so their low-light performance is amazing, and they can slot some serious glass lenses in the front to take amazing photos using all the tricks of the trade like variable depth-of-field and proper tilt-shift. None of that’s going to happen within the few square millimeters of Nokia’s sensor nor inside its roughly one centimeter front-to-back depth.

It may be better than many smartphone cameras, but that’s not necessarily a universal statement nor is it necessarily something that’ll attract consumers. And it’s definitely not an innovation.

The Not-A-Phone Play

Asus is trying an unusual trick with its Padphone device–using much of the hardware in a smartphone to power a bigger-screen tablet package that the phone piggybacks onto via a special dock.

Clever, and means you don’t have to take “two bottles into the shower,” needing both a tablet and smartphone when going on a long commute, say. But you do still have to carry the two bits of hardware, so the real saving may only be on price. And like those famous hair-cleaning products, it’s possible that a one-for-all system like this isn’t as ideal as letting you choose the device that suits you from both worlds.

Innovative? A little–though the tech is just an evolution of the laptop-becomes-desktop PC meme. One that’ll rock the mobile computing world? Nope.

The Actually Clever Play

Meanwhile over at Kickstarter there’s a fascinating little product that you could do worse than pay attention to. It’s called Node, and it’s a modular smartphone-connecting sensor suite that comes with its own Arduino cores, apps, and plug-in hardware modules.

Why’s it interesting? For starters its perfect for hobbyists to tinker with novel interfaces for their mobile computers, which could lead to some clever innovations in, say, mobile gaming controls that the big makers may pay attention to. But also because its modular nature may ultimately let you plug in a chemical sensor, a radiation sensor, an infrared thermometer or any one of a million other extras. This turns your smartphone into a truly amazing tool–the equivalent of Doctor Who’s famous sonic screwdriver perhaps, able to be pointed at almost anything in order to do almost anything.

It’s clever, lateral, truly innovative and much more interesting than nearly all the “my phone is faster than yours” shenanigans going on at MWC. In the near future, this is where the real innovation in the smartphone world is likely to lie.

Chat about this news with Kit Eaton on Twitter and Fast Company too.

Photo: Scaled Composites

The burgeoning private space industry continues to grow and based on hiring needs, there is more growth on the horizon.  Three of the leaders representing both commercial orbital and sub-orbital missions have busy human resource departments trying fill dozens of openings.

Scaled Composites, the company designing, building and testing Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo even produced a recruiting video trying to lure engineers to the Mojave Desert. Another southern California company, SpaceX has pages of hiring needs as the company prepares to begin a busy launch schedule over the next several years. And industry veteran Orbital continues to add plenty of engineers to its ranks every month.

SpaceX recently announced more deals to launch satellites using its Falcon 9 rocket. The Hawthorne, California based company had to reschedule its first planned flight to the International Space Station which was suppose to happen earlier this month, but has more than 40 launches on its schedule for the next several years. All of the activity is reflected on the company’s hiring page where dozens of positions are listed ranging from a few sales, HR and fiance positions, to dozens of engineer openings.

Founded by Elon Musk, SpaceX may soon follow some of the entrepreneur’s other companies with an IPO. Musk started SpaceX in 2002 after selling PayPal to Ebay. He told Bloomberg there is a good chance SpaceX could go public next year.

North of SpaceX headquarters in the Los Angeles basin, Mojave based Scaled Composites and its partner The Spaceship Company are also working hard to both build spaceships and hire the engineers needed to design and build the hardware.

Scaled Composites is expected to begin powered test flights of SpaceShipTwo later this year. The sub-orbital spacecraft will be built for Virgin Galactic just a few blocks away from Scaled at the Mojave Air & Space Port by The Spaceship Company. Scaled Composites released a video this month (below) highlighting the company’s long history of creative designs (aircraft, not videos).

In an effort to try and fill some of the vacancies, Virgin Galactic and The Spaceship Company are heading to the aerospace hotspot of Wichita, Kansas next month trying to attract talented engineers from some of the traditional aviation companies interested in a change of scenery.

Both SpaceX and Scaled Composites will be teaming up together on Paul Allen’s Stratolaunch project that will combine a SpaceX Dragon rocket with what will be the world’s largest airplane as the launch platform. We assume this means even more engineers needed in Mojave.

Video: Scaled Composites

Depending on who you ask, people would say that I’m an “Internet guy.” I’ll own that. I make my living on the Internet. I work primarily in the world of explaining to people how the digital world will change their lives. I’ll accept that to be true. But I must be really clear with you: understanding how the Internet makes Local work better is probably the most important part of what I’m studying and learning, and what I hope to help companies understand better.

This morning, I have a strange conundrum. I lost my car key at an airport a week ago. The thing is, I bought my car over the Internet, which was a great experience. Only, I have zero local support. I have no local relationship with any dealership or garage. It turns out that I need this, desperately, to solve this particular problem.

So, today, I called Anthony at a dealership local to the car. Anthony, not General Motors. I called one guy who is skillful, friendly, and able to help me solve my problem. On one side, I have the ease of use of buying my car off the net without the typical hassle. On the other side, I have a local guy who is going to fix my issue.

Rebecca Lieb, my colleague at Altimeter Group released a new report, “Content: The New Marketing Equation Why Organizations Must Rebalance.” The report helps organizations find balance in the creation of effective content strategies while delivering value to stakeholders and consumers and also the bottom line.

It’s safe to assume that the attention of the audience as we knew it is waning. And when we look at the online and mobile behavior of connected customers, a sense of responsibility emerges as everyday people become media beacons in their own right. As such, they rigorously share and curate for their audience with an editorial-style approach as what was once a static audience is now an audience with an audience of audiences. People are learning that there are rewards for contributing to signal instead of the noise. Those who do not, learn the hard way…that people will disconnect in order to preserve the integrity of their stream.

Such is true for organizations. For those organizations that do not contribute value to social streams will find that content and desired voices will fall upon the severed ties of once captive communities. Rebecca’s report will help companies identify a path for increasing relevance. And, it starts with adopting an always-on approach that extends campaigns through a continuum model. As she observes…

Marketers can serve customers and prospects with content through every phase of awareness, branding, intent, conversion, and customer service. Yet, unlike advertising, content initiatives are continual rather than episodic, placing new demands not just on marketing organizations but also across the enterprise as a whole.

When you study the intentions and architecture of many branded social media campaigns and strategies overall, it’s difficult to not wonder whether social media isn’t an oxymoron in its current incarnation. I’ve written about this on several occasions over the past year, calling for an end to an era of Social Media 1.0. It’s a call for businesses to move from antisocial social media strategies and raise the bar for more compelling and mutually beneficial forms of engagement.

Good friend Tom Foremski recently observed that, “Corporations are being pressured by legions of ‘experts’ to exploit social media as a lucrative sales and marketing channel. This will destroy social media…” His point was that brands used social media channels to push traditional corporate media, exhibiting a collective broadcast mentality disguised as social engagement. He then started EC=MC (Every Company is a Media Company), a movement to help businesses realize the opportunity presented by social for not only marketing, but true storytelling, experiential journeys, and engagement. Also referred to as brand journalism or brand publishing, the idea is that brands can earn greater attention, reach, and results by investing in a journalistic approach. It’s a move away from promotional content to the delivery of useful, entertaining, or meaningful engagement and experiences through new media.

Attention is finite and the competition for it is only escalating. But to entice and capture attention will take more than a new content strategy and a supporting editorial calendar. It will take a new mission, purpose, and culture to unlock experiences and pave engaging journeys through content.

As Rebecca notes…

Content marketing requires a shift in company culture, resources, budgets, partners, and strategy. Rebalancing is critical to achieve these goals. The choice is whether to rebalance now, or later when the battle for attention may become even more difficult than it currently is.

To adapt to a new landscape for effective attention marketing, Rebecca introduces a five-stage maturity model. It details how organizations evolve in the quest to market efficiently with content. Not every company will reach every stage. But as she observes, evolution, direction, and purpose must start at the top…

Yet to effectively market with content, organizational change and transformation must be driven from the top level of the organization. Left to the marketing department alone, success is limited. New skills must be developed and training offered, both in digital technologies as well as in job functions more aligned with the responsibilities found at a newspaper, magazine, or broadcaster, than in classic marketing functions. Content requires more speed and agility than does marketing, yet at the same time it must be aligned with metrics that conform to the business’ strategic marketing goals.

1. Stand: This organization may have dabbled in social media or created a blog, but activity is infrequent and not generally viewed as important within the organization. The marketing department relies almost wholly on “push” communications such as email marketing, direct mail, and advertising.

2. Stretch, Taking the First Steps While Scanning the Horizon: An organization at the Stretch stage realizes the value of content marketing and begins to build the strategy and support necessary to create and publish content.Understanding develops that, while many of the tools and media are free, content requires an investment of resources. An executive sponsor is necessary to lead the program and communicate its value and reach to the organization. This executive sponsor is also tasked with identifying team members to engage with early channels, building basic forms of content, and evaluating potential agency relationships.

3. Walk, Ambition and Forward Momentum: In this stage, content creation and production get a solid strategic foundation organizationally. From channel specific (e.g. “we blog”), content begins to become channel agnostic and is distributed across a variety of channels and platforms. Processes are formalized. This is the stage at which a team begins to take shape, strategy is more fully refined and tweaked, and the team begins to establish governance to scale and shape content processes.

4. Jog, Sustainable, Meaningful and Scalable Content Initiatives: The organization’s strategy is clear, as well as communicated throughout the enterprise at this stage. Focus shifts toward expanding the team and its ability to create experiential, engaging content rather than simply create and publish simpler stories and informational pieces. The processes for producing content are also more fully developed and strategic. Content is created with a view toward being reusable or repurposed across multiple media platforms.

5. Run, Inspired and Inspirational: In this phase, a successful, real-time integration of content marketing and curation is part of the fabric of nearly all aspects of branding. The organization has become a bona fide media company, actually able to monetize innovative and highly polished content that is either branded and/or related to the brand proposition. Content is sold and licensed based on its standalone merit, with content divisions having separate P&L responsibility.

In the report, Lieb also introduces four fundamental steps toward content marketing maturity. These steps serve as important reminders that no matter how sophisticated your program is today, its success is always determined by how audiences with audiences engage and contribute to the dissemination of your story, value, and mission. And in turn, success is measured by how they feel and/or the actions that they take as a result of the engagement.

1. Understanding That Content Marketing is Not Free

2. Implementing Broad Cultural Integration Around Content Marketing

3. Integrating Content Marketing with Advertising

4. Avoiding Bright, Shiny Objects

To get there of course is not an easy task. As noted earlier, it comes down to culture…it comes down to leadership. Additionally, effective content marketing strategies and ultimately the experiences and outcomes that they can deliver require a supporting infrastructure that is strengthened by pillars of new expertise. It takes a different vision for what’s possible, higher standards and supporting metrics, and most important, a new perspective.

- Organizational Structure. The infrastructure that allows content creation and distribution to be fostered and encouraged both within the marketing department and beyond it.

- Internal Resources. Staff roles, teams, and leadership that support and create content marketing.

- External Resources. The extent to which the organization works with outside vendors and service providers including agencies, creative resources, and technology vendors.

- Measurement. Creating meaningful metrics around content marketing, including tying them to overall marketing and sales goals.

- New Skills and Capabilities. Fostering understanding of content marketing, executive buy-in, and ensuring staff can manage, create, and publish content.

- New Mindsets and Approaches. Content marketing is almost never a 9-to-5 undertaking. Creating, managing, and monitoring content outside of normal business hours, often in real time, is essential.

Rebecca’s report includes a self-audit that’s designed to assess where your organization is on the Altimeter Content Marketing Maturity Model. The goal is to help you better understand what you need to advance along the framework and also improve the effectiveness in how content increases engagement, experiences, and outcomes as a result. The case studies provided in the report are eye-opening. I also believe that they will inspire creativity in defining your content marketing goals.

In the end, content is a representation of the sentiment you wish to evoke, the story you wish to tell, the experiences you wish to deliver and the journeys you wish to create. Content though, is a also reflection of your vision, supporting culture, and the intentions that define the social objects you introduce. It’s time to rebalance.

BARCELONA — Opera has launched new versions of its Mini and Mobile web browsers at the MWC today: Opera Mini Next and Opera Mobile 12.

Opera Mini Next is actually a preview of what’s coming in the next version of Opera Mini, the company’s browser that works on Java-supporting feature phones and smartphones.

It brings Facebook and Twitter integration through something called Smart Page, a starting screen that gives you easy access to social networking functions, news and other goodies.

The Smart Page won’t appear in the smartphone version of Opera Mini Next, though. There, users will get hardware acceleration and a revamped speed dial, which now features an unlimited number of Speed Dial shortcuts.

The company’s native smartphone browser, Opera Mobile, has reached version 12 for Android and Symbian devices. It brings WebGL support, which should make it easier for developers to create and distribute cross-platform games. It also supports Opera’s HTML5 parser Ragnarök, more Speed Dial customization options as well as support for camera use in the browser.

You can get the Android version of Opera Mobile 12 in the Android Market. Opera Mini Next is available at http://m.opera.com/next.