Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Imagine a company catalyzing a new approach to student learning and achievement in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). And what if the company’s purpose were to prepare students around the world, from all corners and walks of life, to collaborate in solving social and environmental problems, beginning right now?

Imagine the power of the relationships these children will have when they are in their 20s and 30s as they continue to work with each other.

Sound ridiculous to you? Do you wonder: How is this possible, given that one billion children live in poverty, many in remote rural villages, others in densely populated urban slums? When so many children in developed countries aren’t even getting decent educations, much less children in the developing world?

What if I told you that middle school and high school students from some of the world’s most deprived communities are already working together on solutions for sustainable energy sources and to purify water? That 250,000 students are already collaborating on STEM projects through 60 schools, universities, and NGOs around the world? And that plans are well under way to scale such educational opportunities to reach millions?

What I just described is pilot program for Hewlett Packard’s Catalyst Initiative. Catalyst is part of HP’s Social Innovation program, which encompasses education, entrepreneurship, health, and community. Particularly distinctive about Catalyst is that “all the learning creates far-reaching results in problems facing humanity,” says Ajith Basu, chief program executive for the Agastya International Foundation, and head of the New Learner consortium of Catalyst.

While HP’s Social Innovation program can be considered a particularly evolved case of corporate social responsibility, I think it is much bigger. Corporate Global Vision (CGV), a concept that I have articulated, is a better descriptor: Envisioning and achieving the greater potential for both the company and the world by affirming the interdependence of corporate success with the health and prosperity of the planet and its people.

“We wanted to figure out how to create immersion learning experiences,” said Gabi Zedlmayer, vice president of HP’s Office of Global Social Innovation, when we got together at the Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting last fall. “We know that technology alone is not the solution. So we decided to build a network of schools and people across boundaries and frontiers to find a different way of learning.”

HP’s goal with Catalyst is to reimagine STEM education and the classroom, Jim Vanides, senior program manager for HP, said in an interview. He described how HP established “an international network of innovation sandboxes” to answer the question: “What does a powerful learning experience look like, and how does technology enable it?” Further, he explained, HP’s goal is “STEM plus”–not simply STEM, but also creativity, collaboration, and problem solving–“all that students will need to be valuable citizens of the world.”

According to Vanides, by raising STEM+ literacy and increasing the quality of the STEM pipeline, the next generation will be prepared to solve the large and seemingly intractable social global challenges.

“Breaking down all barriers is fundamental to success,” said Vanides. ”Barriers between countries, secondary and college education, universities and NGOs. At work, we solve problems through collaboration with people throughout the world. If young people learn to engage in learning and problem-solving without any silos, they will be prepared to have an enormous impact.”

HP had a vision of the true potential of children of all backgrounds throughout the world.

“This experience has transformed me,” said Basu. “My greatest learning has been that children have no problems anywhere. The problem is the system and the lack of resources.” Even in the poorest, most remote neighborhoods of India, Basu says, “the children are much smarter than we were. Much faster. We must create systems around that. We can create powerful learning communities.”

Re-imagining education is not a fantasy. It’s becoming a reality.

Consider a student in a classroom of 35 students that never had funds for lab equipment. Starting last year, via Catalyst, she can conduct experiments remotely by using laboratories at MIT and the University of Queensland in Australia. She can, for example, measure radiation emissions as a function of how far she holds her cell phone from her ear. She can design the experiments herself, and watch the Geiger counter in Australia via live media. She can run the experiments as many times as she likes at her own pace, produce a lab report, and then compare results and experiences in the classroom with her teacher and fellow students. The results are already in: Students who use the virtual instruments show significant increases in test scores.

I actually ran the experiment myself online while Skyping with Dr. Kemi Jona, Ph.D., director of the Office of STEM Education Projects at Northwestern University. Science was never so fun, and it stimulated my curiosity. “Here’s the vision: Remote labs can be transformative at a district, state, or national level because you can create a server function or cloud solution that can provide a centralized shared facility of science experiments,” says Jona. “A district no longer needs to buy lab equipment for each school as we do now in the current funding model…a model that is financially prohibitive for most communities.”

Next, imagine students in the remotest villages in India helping to find solutions to waste management by participating in science projects via mobile science labs, science fairs, and young instructor leader programs. This is already happening through the Agastya International Foundation.

Through 62 mobile science vans that take science education to the village doorstep, 28 rural science centers, and a 170-acre Creativity Lab campus, Agastya has reached over 4 million children and 150,000 teachers in several Indian states and is supported by scientists and educators from the Indian Institute of Science, Defense Research and Development Organization, and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research.

And finally: Imagine a magnet middle school in Stamford, Conn., where 50% of the students are from educationally disadvantaged families, helping to solve local well water contamination problems through a partnership with middle school students in Shandong University Middle School in China. Throughout the process, the students from Stamford are learning Mandarin and the students from China are learning English. (Students are pictured, top, collecting water samples from Long Island Sound.)

“This began with our seeing water contamination in our local water wells as a teachable moment,” said Bryan Olkowski, assistant principal at Scofield Magnet Middle School. “Then, by engaging in Catalyst, the world has opened up to us.” Since 2010, Scofield students have worked in partnership with students at their sister school in China, remotely and through exchange visits. They are collaborating using geospatial information studies (GIS), technology, and systems with university faculty and resources provided by HP.

Scofield teachers traveled to New Dehli last spring to present at the international Catalyst Summit, attended by all of the consortium partners; a new group of Scofield teachers will participate in the follow-up Summit this spring in Beijing. And HP has introduced new funders to Scofield, including the International Society for Technlogy in Education.

According to Olkowski, one thousand students in Connecticut have already benefited from Catalyst, as well as 640 in China. He believes that the project is a contributing factor to increasing math and reading scores on state tests for kids in his school.

“This is what’s possible for public school education,” said Olkowski. And that key message from this project is spreading: U.S. Congressman Jim Himes visited Scofield, and Olkowski was asked to brief the U.S. Congress on the project.

Scaling the solution through further investment, collaboration, and advocacy.

Beyond the sharing among the Catalyst consortium partners, further collaboration occurs between HP and corporate, foundation, and government leaders.Jeannette Weisschuh, HP’s director of education initiatives, spoke with me last week from London, where she attended the Education World Forum, the largest global gathering of education ministers. “The focus here is on innovative concepts to jointly increase student performance, especially in STEM education and entrepreneurship and using technology to increase student outcomes and enhance learning experiences and achievement in all disciplines, for the purpose of building a better world.”

With the pilot phase just completed, HP is embarking on Phase II. This year, HP will determine which of its innovation sandboxes is yielding the best results, invest further resources accordingly, and engage additional funding partners in order to scale the best solutions.

A particularly important HP partner has been the World Economic Forum’s Global Education Initiative. Additionally, OECD is working with HP to study the best uses of technology to advance STEM education through innovative learning environments; together they will issue a report at the end of this year.

Corporate Global Vision: Envisioning and achieving the greater potential.

The field of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been maturing for over two decades. Since the 1990s, many of us have been helping companies transition from philanthropy and service to CSR–an integrated strategy that advances social and environmental purposes while also enhancing corporate financial value.

Corporate Global Vision (CGV) takes the C-suite and boardroom view. With Catalyst, HP demonstrates the problem-solving capabilities of HP technology; expands markets by increasing education rates and wealth worldwide; and builds relationships and goodwill with customers, including businesses, governments, NGOs, and individuals.

David Packard understood this when he said that “the real reason HP exists is to make a contribution, to improve the welfare of humanity.”

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It’s the best of times, it’s the worst of times–to be a startup, that is. On the plus side, recent research from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation indicates that startup companies–particularly high-growth startups–are the most fruitful source of new U.S. jobs and offer the economy’s best hope for recovery. On the other hand, newly minted ideas are fighting a sea of competitors for market share and funding, not to mention navigating Sarbanes-Oxley regulations and the still-cautious consumer spending landscape.

The best bet for aspiring entrepreneurs may just be a hookup. One that has staying power. Accelerators, those forums for getting hands-on help from experienced mentors, sourcing seed capital, and sometimes even providing a co-working location, can provide the resources to take a startup from concept to market a lot quicker than trying to blaze a trail independently.

Joshua Hernandez, a founder of Tap.Me, an in-game advertising platform, writes, “Although I had built three other startups and failed another two, I knew we would need to connect locally if we wanted to survive our business concept. The Chicagoland Entrepreneurial Center (CEC) became an immediate forum for us to present our startup, which at the time was quite complex.”

Hernandez just happened to live and work in Chicago. However, there’s still hope for aspiring moguls who aren’t anywhere near startup hotbeds like Silicon Valley. Fast Company talked with Rebeca Hwang, cofounder and CEO of YouNoodle, Inc. and a technology partner to the Startup Malaysia conference, Kevin Willer, the CEO of CEC, and Murat Aktihanoglu, managing director of the Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator in New York City. Here’s what they told us about standing out, hooking up, and getting a brand-new business off the ground.

FC: What’s the best way to make your application stand out?

Rebeca Hwang: The best way to stand out is to have a compelling story and to articulate it efficiently. It’s not just about a product pitch. The team, especially when coming from outside of the Valley, needs to be able to capture the story of the team and the idea in less than five minutes. The story should include information that increases the credibility of the team in the sector, an endorsement by highly reputable people in the startup community, and a compelling articulation of how the product solves a relevant (and potentially profitable) problem in the market. It should convey the passion and personal emotional investment of the team in this project. Finally, adding some color always helps. For example, many investors love to learn about aspects of the founders’ personality or past accomplishments that might be indicative of tenacity, integrity, and brilliance, e.g.: I was an international champion in chess tournaments.

FC: How can you showcase your team most effectively?

Murat Aktihanoglu: By having a video. If you have all the cofounders talking about the product and excited about it, it’s much more effective than sitting down and filling out an application. An idea can change, but team is the most important part of the business.

Kevin Willer: There needs to be a lot of pre-work such as socializing: coffees, meetings, meetups, and business plan pitches. The founder needs to constantly be in the community raising awareness, energy, and traction for the business. Specifically with accelerators, it is important to find out who the partners and the people involved are and go and try and meet them through your network or find someone to put in a good word for you.

FC: How important is it to accept critical feedback from mentors/potential investors/other entrepreneurs?

Murat Aktihanoglu: It is very important to listen to all the feedback, but in the end it is their company they have to run it. No company should just take it all and change. They should synthesize and analyze and make their own decision.

FC: If the entrepreneur is not located in a startup hub such as Silicon Valley, what’s the best way to connect with an accelerator? Is it worth moving for awhile to participate in such a program?

Rebeca Hwang: My recommendation is that the entrepreneur takes advantage of any opportunity to meet people who are located in one of these startup hubs. Competitions and conferences are great opportunities to meet international speakers and mentors. If at all possible, traveling to a hub is probably the most efficient way to get connected to accelerators.

There are programs that offer scholarships to global entrepreneurs to get a taste of Silicon Valley. For example, the Stanford BASES e-Bootcamp program invites 100 global entrepreneurs annually to an intensive immersion program in the heart of the Valley.

Murat Aktihanoglu: I’m personally against comparisons between Silicon Valley and New York and other cities. If you are a great startup, you will succeed, and there are many hubs that have emerged. It’s a great time to be a global entrepreneur because of advanced web tools for distributed teams. Investors are more than ever looking into global opportunities seeing how level the playing field is. Potential country risks are no longer blocking great startups from being funded by top VCs. However, if you are not near an accelerator, it might be worth just going over and joining a program for a few months.

FC: Should you get on board just to meet investors? What other benefits should you aim for when joining an accelerator program?

Kevin Willer: The end goal of participating in an accelerator is to go to Demo Day and raise money for your business. However, the real key and value to accelerators is bringing a good team that has a good strategy and idea and accelerating their growth to the next level through mentorship with advisors. Accelerators have an important and valuable aspect of community and help build awareness about your business to that community.

Murat Aktihanoglu: We thought mentoring and sponsors and driving focus was the most important thing a business could get from ER Accelerator, but something we did not expect was the synergy between the companies. They network and help with tech issues such as fixing bugs in programs. One company met an investor who ultimately passed on working with them. But that company introduced the investor to another business that he did want to fund. After our summer session, seven companies moved together into a new space to continue the collaboration.

For more leadership coverage, follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Related stories: 

• Building A Startup That Can Punch Above Its Weight–And Win
• How To Shift From Fundraising To Raising Capital
• 9 Nagging Questions To Tune Out When Launching A Startup

Image: Flickr user Ton Ton Copt

Every year since around 2006, I’ve been challenging people to forego the idea of a resolution, and instead, to come up with 3 words that will help you define your goals and experiences for the coming year. Resolutions are often too vague, or too directed towards one goal. It might be “quit smoking” or “lose 20 pounds” or “get hired.” These are all fine aspirations, but I challenge you to dig deeper, to find three words that could be used as lighthouses to guide you through stormy seas, that can be used as flags on the battlefield of your challenges, words that will bolster you and give you a direction that goes beyond the goals you might attach as a result of these words.

This year, I’ve got a little something more, thanks to Jacqueline’s post. Now, not only will I stick to my three words, but I will use Jacq’s idea of #12in12 to execute on the meaning of those three words every month. I invite you to do the same. It really seems like the best way to stay very mindful of your 3 words and their place in your life.

I first met Eric Vishria in 1999 when he interviewed at Loudcloud (later Opsware), the company I co-founded with Marc Andreessen & Ben Horowitz. We were looking for a smart, fired up young dude to be CEO Ben Horowitz’s “mini me.” Eric, then 20 years old, fit the bill and showed from the start that he had a ton of potential. He quickly rose through the ranks in various product and marketing roles, ending up running most of the company’s marketing for us. We got to know each other well since as co-founder and CTO, my job was to be the technical guy explaining to the marketing guy what we were doing and why it mattered, so marketing could explain it to the world.

When Opsware was sold to HP in September 2007, we spent a year there with Eric running a half-billion dollar BU for HP software while I was CTO. Both great jobs, but within a year we found ourselves missing the startup life. We began percolating new ideas independently, and the natural thing was to bounce ideas off each other.

In summer 2008, we were pitching each other our individual ideas and realized we should really work together. We hadn’t nailed down what we wanted to do, but whatever it was, we knew it needed to be together. It had been Eric’s dream since the age of eight to be CEO of his own great company. Being CEO was something I thought I might like to try this time around. One of my better decisions was making a bet on eight-year-old Eric’s ambition rather than my own mid-life curiosity, paving the way for our collaboration.

Throughout the fall of 2008 we were combing the Internet, making observations, and generating ideas. We would meet at each other’s houses or Buck’s in Woodside for breakfast, armed with onepagers to talk through. Most of the ideas were terrible, a fact that usually became obvious before the OJ arrived, but a few made it to the next round.

One idea we were both attracted to was reinventing the desktop in the cloud. It was clear virtually all applications were moving from the desktop into the cloud, leaving the desktop a bit of an empty shell. We quickly realized the browser was the new desktop — why don’t we reinvent that? We took the idea seriously enough to move our meetings from the dining table to a whiteboard, and soon hammered out the vision for what RockMelt would become — a browser reinvented for the way people use the web today, with friends, sharing, and favorite sites built in.

Having worked together for nearly 10 years before founding RockMelt, we felt confident there wouldn’t be any surprises; we knew each other’s strengths and weaknesses. This worked to our advantage when we began seeking investment since it took away one of the big risks startups face – founders who don’t end up getting along or who begin to develop conflicting company visions.

Our first pitch was to Marc Andreessen, our longtime friend and industry visionary, and Ben Horowitz, one of the greatest company builders either of us had ever known. They immediately loved the idea, but in typical Marc and Ben style, put us through the wringer on the details. Several weeks, our first two engineers, a working prototype, and many pitch revisions later, Marc and Ben were on board along with our coach and mentor Bill Campbell, legendary angel investor Ron Conway, and a few other investors — RockMelt was off to the races!

- Tim Howes

Whatever people may say about Lady Gaga, she has been a positive influence in the philanthropic world. And now she has partnered with the Robin Hood Foundation to launch two Facebook contests to support the New York-based charity, which benefits the poor and homeless.

One contest is designed to increase Robin Hood‘s Likes on Facebook while the other asks Facebook fans to help decide how Gaga should divide a $1 million donation to the charity.

Both contests stem from Robin Hood’s annual May 9 fundraising gala where Gaga will be performing. The Robin Hood sweepstakes is giving away two tickets every weekday to attend the concert. Fans are entered into the lottery by liking the page and inviting friends to join.

It’s a huge chance for Robin Hood to boost its social media presence thanks to Gaga’s millions of fans, says Mark Bezos, Robin Hood’s senior VP of development and communications.

“The exposure that comes from someone who has 32 million Facebook fans is a great opportunity for us, but at the end of the day this promotion, this contest, is about helping people who need it and doing it in a way that is not superficial,” he says

The second contest, hosted on Gaga’s Facebook page, will feature five different charities tackling local issues around poverty and homelessness. Fans can vote for which charity most deserves Gaga’s money. The results will be tiered, with the winner receiving $500,000, the person at second place receiving $250,000 and so on. Gaga will donate $1 million in total to the five charities. Basically, it’s a crowdsourced way for Gaga’s fans to tell her where she should donate.

Crowdsourced giving campaigns are definitely new ground for Robin Hood. Even though the foundation hands out approximately $130 million in grants annually, it has kept a relatively low profile. Bezos hopes the pairing with Gaga will bring greater awareness to the foundation’s mission. “At Robin Hood, we don’t give grants by popular vote, it’s by results,” Bezos said. “We don’t want to go down this path just because it seems like it would a really fun way to engage a lot of people. What we promise our donors is that every dollar is going to work as hard as it can to improve the lives of poor people in New York.”

To that end, each of the five charities in the contest have been vetted and approved by the foundation. The tiered system ensures that none of the non-profits will walk away empty-handed.

Lady Gaga has proven herself to be quite the activist. She donated proceeds of a New York concert to rebuilding efforts in Haiti, she has been selling bracelets to support Japan and she is also an active supporter of LGBT rights. Bezos says the idea to collaborate with Robin Hood actually came from Gaga’s camp. “We don’t trade in celebrity a whole lot, it’s not something that we seek out so when the opportunity comes to us, we just make sure, first and foremost from our point of view, that it’s going to do the most good to the people who need it,” he says.

Robin Hood has found a way to include Gaga without sacrificing its core message or best practices. It’s not an easy feat, but it puts the cause first. Other partners in the campaign include Network For Good, Partnerships 4 Purpose, Causes and Buddy Media.

What do you think of celebrities supporting non-profits? Is the collaboration a good match? What could they have done better? Sound off in the comments.

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The Ruby community and the language itself are a fast-growing phenomenon that plays an ever-increasing role in the ecosystem of web apps we all know and use.

If you’re a beginning Ruby dev, this post is for you. We have polled six experts in the Ruby community — developers who have come highly recommended and respected by their peers.

This is the advice they give specifically to new Ruby developers. We hope you find it useful, encouraging and enjoyable.

If you’re a seasoned pro or an intermediate Rubyist, stay tuned. We’ve got lots more where this came from, and our six experts have got tips, tricks and code snippets for you, too.

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Jacques Crocker: Learn As You Build

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Jacques Crocker is a Rails Jedi based out of Seattle who loves working on early-stage startup ideas and launching new products. He’s helped launch almost a dozen Rails apps this year including HeroScale.com (automatically scale your Heroku workers and dynos) and WordSquared.com (a massively multiplayer online word game). Next year, he’s planning on using Rails to launch 24 new web apps.

In an e-mail exchange, he told us new Ruby devs should “start building something and get it released to GitHub as soon as possible.

“You don’t have to have a new or exciting idea to implement. When you are learning, just build stuff that has been done before. Build a scaled down version of Twitter. Or reimplement a blog.”

Crocker says he once ported a PHP-built job board to Rails — a thoroughly educational experience.

He continued, “I’d recommend finding a project that looks interesting on OpenSourceRails.com and getting up and running locally (and the tests functional). Then try adding a few new features to it. And get it upgraded to the latest Rails version while fixing the dependencies.

“Jumping straight into development work without experience will definitely be difficult and frustrating. However the amount of learning you’ll receive will be enormous… Making yourself suffer through the pain of a new environment will help you learn faster than you ever thought possible.”

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Yehuda Katz: Dive Into the Ruby Community

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Yehuda Katz is a member of the Ruby on Rails core team, and lead developer of the Merb project. He is a member of the jQuery Core Team and a core contributor to DataMapper. He contributes to many open source projects, like Rubinius and Johnson, and works on some he created himself, like Thor.

He advises newer Ruby developers, “Don’t be intimidated. Take advantage of the very many robust community resources that exist, and make connections with community members through open source. The Ruby ecosystem is hungry for new developers, and if you make your mark, you won’t go jobless for very long.”

In fact, Katz says the community itself is one of the strongest points of the Ruby language. “Even though most of the web development community is focused around the Rails framework, there are standalone libraries for just about everything, like virtually every new NoSQL database and connectivity with services like Twitter and Facebook.

“There’s a spirit of experimentation in the Ruby community that makes it extremely strong.”

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Obie Fernandez: Start With a Clean Slate

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Obie Fernandez is the founder and CEO of Hashrocket, a Florida-based web consultancy and product shop. He’s a well-regarded blogger and speaker, and he’s also a series editor and book author for higher-education publishers Addison-Wesley.

He said, “Don’t try to bring over your old idioms and patterns, because they’ll just weigh you down.

“When I came over to Ruby from Java, my first instinct was to try recreating a bunch of concepts and architectural patterns that I already knew, such as dependency injection, instead of learning new ones more appropriate to Ruby. If you’re coming from a statically typed language like I did, you might have some trouble letting go of the perceived security of type constraints.

“There’s like this whole Zen aspect of working with Ruby where you have to let go of trying to exercise control over every possible interface for your objects.”

He also echoes Katz’s statements about the Ruby community. “We’ve got this amazing, creative and hard-working global community of people working to make Ruby the most enjoyable environment. There is no big commercial vendor getting all capitalistic on us and causing problems like you see with Oracle and Microsoft and their developer communities. Almost everything that gets done in our space, 99% is done for open-source love and passion and because it is useful to the person doing it.”

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Ryan Bates: Ask — and Answer — Questions

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Ryan Bates is the producer and host of Railscasts, a site full of free Ruby on Rails screencasts.

For beginning Ruby devs, Bates recommended, “You can learn a lot by asking questions, and you can learn even more by contributing, yourself.

“With every problem you run into, there are many others who will likely run into the same thing. When you find a solution, write about it to help others and to get feedback on better solutions. We’re all learning.”

Bates takes his own advice, as well, by contributing to sites like Rails Forum.

Disclosure: Mashable‘s features editor, Josh Catone, is the co-founder of Rails Forum.

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Desi McAdam: Learn From the Masters

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Desi McAdam is a Ruby developer at Hashrocket. She also co-founded and regularly contributes to the technical blogging group DevChix.

She said the thing that helped her most in her study and use of the Ruby programming language was “pairing with other masters of the language.” Since not everyone who wants to learn Ruby has one-on-one access to the masters, however, she has a few suggestions for beginning devs.

“I would also suggest reading books like The Ruby Way by Hal Fulton and Programming Ruby, a.k.a. The Pickaxe Book, by Dave Thomas, Chad Fowler and Andy Hunt.

“If Ruby happens to be the first language you are ever learning I would suggest Learn To Program by Chris Pine. My sister is a nurse who has never done any programming whatsoever and she was able to use this book to learn the fundamentals of programming and she did so at a remarkably fast pace.”

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Raquel Hernández: Three Steps With Four Tools

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Raquel Hernández is an experienced hacker/mathematician with a background that includes many programming languages and many work environments, from freelance and contract work to startups and larger companies. However, she’s made a particular focus of Ruby and Rails.

She came to us with a list of specific steps and tools for new developers.

“I would suggest reading Programming Ruby 1.9: The Pragmatic Programmer’s Guide (The Pickaxe Book) in order to get familiar with Ruby.

“For Rails-specific stuff, I’d highly recommend Railscasts as starting point. Pick a fun project; complete the Getting Started with Rails tutorial; and deploy it to Heroku.

“After completing these three steps, you’re going to be having so much fun and getting lots of things done that there won’t be coming back.”

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Specific Questions or Tips?

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If you’re new to Ruby and you have a question, feel free to drop it in the comments! Our panelists are likely to stop by with more feedback.

Likewise, if you’re a more experienced Ruby dev and you feel like answering questions or passing on some great advice of your own, please leave a comment and school us all.

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Series supported by Rackspace

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The Web Development Series is supported by Rackspace, the better way to do hosting. No more worrying about web hosting uptime. No more spending your time, energy and resources trying to stay on top of things like patching, updating, monitoring, backing up data and the like. Learn why.

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Maria Ogneva is the director of social media at Nimble, a social relationship management solution that transforms your entire community into business opportunity by leveraging the best of customer relationship management, social media and communication tools. You can follow her on Twitter at @themaria or @nimble, or find her musings on the company blog and her personal blog.

It’s no secret that customer experience is one of the cornerstones of an effective business strategy. In all honesty, it should have been all along, but many companies chose to hide behind corporate walls and only talk to customers when it was convenient for them instead of when the customer needed them. There’s no need to belabor the point that social media has put customers in the driver’s seat. However, companies don’t need to live in fear of the next Kevin Smith or Nestle Fanpage episode. They just need to fix their customer experience to ensure that products and services actually do what they’re supposed to do and the company’s support and service are actually helpful.

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Social CRM Connects Social Customer to Social Business

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Today’s business must address more aspects of the customer experience than ever before. In addition to a stellar product or service, you now have many more channels to listen to and participate in, while keeping the experience consistently excellent. Where it gets complicated is wading through the noise, turning data into insights that the whole company can use, and sharing these insights. Because there is so much data being hurled at you, solutions that help unify and share information in a usable format have become necessary. Analyst firm Gartner estimates that more than 80% of growth in enterprise use of social networking tools will be driven by customer engagement projects and estimates social customer relationship management to be a $1 billion submarket of CRM in 2011.Recall that in my previous post about social CRM, we addressed some key tenets:

• Listen and engage;
• Have a 360-degree view of the customer;
• Adopt transparency and customer service as cultural foundations for your business;
• Share and align with your team; develop necessary workflow;
• Social engagement must be enterprise-wide.

In an effort to see these theories applied to real-life situations, let’s examine some examples of how my personal customer experience was affected by businesses correctly capturing, sharing and acting on relevant information.

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Honeymoon and Teamwork

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For my honeymoon, I stayed at a world-class resort called Tabacon in Costa Rica. Each day was full of thoughtful and personalized details that were carefully orchestrated among various employees of the hotel, as well as external parties. The best part of the experience was a private dinner in a cabana in the rainforest. Let’s dissect the collaboration and communication that had to occur for this experience to happen:

• Our travel planner contacted the hotel to make arrangements and communicate our honeymoon status.
• A reservation specialist received the reservation, captured client (mine) information in the internal record system, analyzed honeymoon suite inventory and booked it.
• The hotel referenced client preferences via my profile for that hotel group (“Leading Hotels of the World”) and discovered my preference for champagne.
• The hotel communicated this preference to housekeeping; housekeeping prepared the room for arrival with a champagne bottle and a personalized note of congratulations.
• The concierge greeted me at the door and offered the private dinner and established a channel in which I could book it.
• The hotel collected menu preferences and desired time; communicated time to chef and waiter.
• The waiter came to pick us up in the room and the chef prepared food to client specification.

At least five people and two systems (internal and external) were involved in making this an unforgettable experience. So why did I use this as an example, even though there was no social media involved? Because social or not, the underlying business principles haven’t and shouldn’t have changed. A finely tuned communication and collaboration system is key if you want to provide an excellent experience, whether it’s via the social web or in-person.

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How Does Social Media Enhance Experience?

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Only when you are confident in your ability to support the collaborative process should you invest in a full-scale social media effort. I recommend following these simple steps:

1. Listen and respond. You should be listening for signals from social media for needs of existing and potential clients. You want to engage proactively: listening at the point of need; as well as reactively: listening for indicators that someone may need help. To provide another personal example, Virgin America effectively and quickly responded to a need I had via social media. Unlike its competitor, Virgin got back to me very quickly, taking care to resolve the issue in the backchannel instead of sending me to an 800 number.

2. Cross-reference social and internal customer data. Is there anything that could have made the Virgin example even better? Certainly! It would have been even better if the company automatically knew my frequent flyer number without me having to message it. To successfully serve someone or give them an unforgettable experience, you need to know what your relationship is with the person who tweeted, your history of communication, as well as purchase history, if it’s a customer. For example, at my company, we help you cross-reference people from the social media stream (either your own or as a result of tracking keywords) to the internal record for a full 360-degree view.

3. Understand context of relationship. Quick caveat: this new level of customer intelligence should be used in context of the relationship. While the customer may want you to get the full scoop on him or her in a customer service scenario, a company should never appear like it is using the personal information of someone who has no relationship with the company.

I once had a sub-par experience with a major financial institution where I couldn’t get in touch with customer service. Exasperated and in a panic, I complained on TwitterTwitter, after which the Twitter rep got back to me promptly. Before I could even write back with details about my situation, she proactively e-mailed me via the e-mail address on record. In this case, it wasn’t creepy and actually provided value, because we had a relationship, and I knew the company had my e-mail address.

Of course, if an existing customer is having a bad experience, your first priority should be fixing the experience, communicating it back to the user and asking this person to keep voicing feedback and opinions. This will increase brand affinity and create an experience worth sharing with others. Whether your customer is having a good experience or bad, it’s key to create a participatory channel in which ideas can be voiced and captured, and progress communicated back to the customer.

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Share and Collaborate, Rinse and Repeat

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As you do all of the above, make sure that your team, as well as key external parties, are on the same page with you. Cross-reference social data with internal data, retain and reference current and prior conversation threads and ensuing actions items. Just like how the Tabacon personnel immaculately shared information about me, delegated tasks to each other, and stayed on the same page, so should any business that wants to provide a superb customer experience.

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Image courtesy of iStockphotoiStockphoto, AndyL

Every now and then, I draw comparisons between the things that inspire me offline in order to help spark creativity and evolution in the all that I do online. Inception served as a catalyst for rethinking social media and how we use it to socialize not just our marketing efforts, but our business overall. Weeks later, ideas germinated and here I am today, sharing my thoughts and observations with you. Indeed, Inception is the genesis for creativity and innovation.

If you have yet to see the movie, don’t worry, I won’t include any spoilers here. I will say that it is worth your time. For those who have experienced Chris Nolan’s masterpiece, perhaps you will share this vision and time with me to explore ways in which we can bend the realities we know to construct new paradigms for social business.

In the film, Leonardo DiCaprio’s character Dom Cobb, sets the stage for the movie and subsequent analysis through poignant monologue that continues to resonate with me…

What is the most resilient parasite? Bacteria? A virus? An intestinal worm?

An idea. Resilient… highly contagious. Once an idea has taken hold of the brain it’s almost impossible to eradicate.

The premise of the movie begins with extraction, but the moral of the story is underscored by inception.

If you’ve read Seth Godin’s best-selling book IdeaVirus, the power of ideas may already sound familiar.

Godin shows, the now-familiar idea of viral marketing is one very specific form of ideavirus marketing. Most businesses will not be able to engage in true viral marketing, but all can use the ideavirus approach

While my mind was already spinning with ideas and questions regarding the applications of extraction and inception in social media, it wasn’t until I read a review of the movie by Devin Faraci of chud.com that crystallized my thoughts into ideas. Faraci concludes that in addition to many things, the movie is Nolan’s homage to the catharsis of art and bringing ideas to life. As Farci observed…

The film is a metaphor for the way that Nolan as a director works, and what he’s ultimately saying is that the catharsis found in a dream is as real as the catharsis found in a movie is as real as the catharsis found in life. Inception is about making movies, and cinema is the shared dream that truly interests the director.

Faraci draws parallels between the cast of Inception, Cobb’s team, and how each role represents key players in the movie making process.

Cobb is the director. Arthur, who does the research, is the producer. Ariadne, the architect, is the screenwriter. Eames is the actor. Yusuf is the technical expert. Saito is the studio chief. Fischer is the audience.

Such is the framework necessary to lead the socialization of business. While today social media is led by a champion or team of evangelists that “get it,” its path remains a bottom-up process of forcing transformation through evangelism and experimentation. Eventually social media will lose momentum before its promise can be fully realized however. A team consisting of a visionary leader supported by capable specialists across the fabric of the organization is imperative to fully realize the opportunities and responsibilities that unfold with social immersion.

The Production of Social Media Requires a Dedicated Cast

Penrose Stairs illustrate the impossible objects that can be created in lucid dream worlds

Like the motion picture industry, we can also adapt the Inception team to the world of social engagement. As such, a successful social media team could (should) consist of the following cast members:

Cobb, The Extractor: Executive or management team responsible for the brand in large. This person or team is also required to not only extract ideas to adapt products, processes and services, but also introduce the new ideas that empower consumers to excel.

Director: The digital brand or marketing manager leading teams or individuals into each social dive

Ariadne, the Architect: Designers build and define the online experience as well as the bridges (and Penrose stairs) that connect the dots.

Arthur, the Point Man: Data and research analysts who gather information and intelligence and present it to the various teams for incorporation into strategies and supporting tactics.

Yusuf, the Chemist: Social technicians and alchemists who bring architecture to life through apps, landing pages, interactive media platforms, custom tabs and the like.

Eames, the Forger: Brand representatives who serve as the personalities and voices on the front lines in communities

Mr. Saito, the Tourist: Symbolic of the influencers who serve online communities as overseers and moderators.

Miles, Cobb’s mentor: The ethics that serve as the inspiration for meaningful social media programs and engagement

Fischer, the Mark: The audiences and people with whom brands hope to connect and convince.

In the movie, all of the other cast members in each dream are essentially projections of our own subconscious. Their actions and words are extensions of our interpretations and perceptions and are only as relevant as our pre-existing opinions, thoughts, and notions. It’s a metaphor for operating within a comfort zone, hearing and seeing only what we choose rather than opening our minds to the collaboration.

Inception and Extraction

While the movie is entitled inception, it begins with the idea of extraction – the ability to enter the dreams of others in order to “steal” secrets hidden away deep within our subconscious. But the film’s premise and its significance is rooted in something much more meaningful, the ability to seed ideas that come to life when we awake – inception versus extraction.

As discussed in Engage and also Charlene Li’s new book Open Leadership, it is this listening, really listening, that opens leadership to change and ultimately true collaboration and co-creation. It is through this unique understanding of the cultures, landscapes and the themes that fuel connections and communication. This incredible insight inspires relevant engagement and supporting constructs that galvanizes and empowers customers and peers to become stakeholders in all you do.

The extraction is the research and listening. It’s not enough to monitor conversations through keyword searches. It’s not enough to measure “automated” and mostly inaccurate sentiment. It’s not enough to track activity in terms of mentions, followers, likes, and comments. Extraction is the guiding light to relevance, resonance, and significance (RRS), social media’s critical path. And, it’s through extraction where we uncover opportunities for inception.

Important ideas are transformative, stimulating, and motivating. They change our outlook and perspectives and send us on new paths. It’s our responsibility to not only react with relevant engagement, participation, and programming based on extractions, but also lead communities through influence and the inception of impassioned, inspirational, and constructive ideas.

As Godin preaches, “Ideas that spread, win.”

Or as Cobb observes, “The seeds we plant…may change everything.”

By Brian Solis: www.briansolis.com