Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Greg Biffle, Dale Earnahdrt Jr, Landon Cassill and Joey Logano (from left) wait for Brad Keselowski as they walk down the track toward the fire that brought the NASCAR Daytona 500 to a halt. Photo: Bill Friel/Associated Press

By Matt Hardigree, Jalopnik

America’s wonkiest social media platform, Twitter, and its (supposedly) most backward sport, NASCAR, exploded in a massive fireball fueled by jet fuel, secret phones and good timing last night during the Daytona 500. It’s the story of how one driver picked up 100,000 followers in two hours and how the sport of good ol’ boys may be forever changed.

To the uninformed, NASCAR may seem like the last place a technology like Twitter — created by and for and the kind of hip techies who know which breakfast taco places have free wifi during SXSW — might thrive. To these people, NASCAR is just a bunch of guys driving in a circle.

But NASCAR, like baseball, grows more interesting with context. It’s an epic soap opera, and fans thrive on information. Who’s pitting? How’s their car doing? What’s the track condition? Such things are the currency of NASCAR fans on race day. Although they may not be among the most tech-savvy fans, they may be the most voracious consumers of info outside the Fantasy Baseball crowd. Just look at their apps.

When journalism was local, the math of reporting was pretty simple: you found a trend, an event or an issue that was important and you wrote about it. After all, you were the voice to your readers. Being in sync with a hundred or a thousand print journalists around the world was important, otherwise your readers woul’d be left out of a story everyone else knew about. And being in sync let a reporter know she was working on the right stories.

It wasn’t lazy. It was smart. Your job was to report to the people in your town first, and to report what would be important tomorrow, which was the same thing everyone in every other town was doing.

But it led to events like this one:

Of course, now there is pretty much no such thing as local when it comes to news. Anyone in the world can read about anything in the world. As a result, this habit of being in sync completely undermines what we need from professional journalists.

How many times have I read the story about Louis CK in the last week? Did I need a newspaper to write precisely the same story days after I read it for the first time? How much do we care about the race for ‘first’ when first is now measured in seconds or perhaps minutes?

We don’t need paid professionals to do retweeting for us. They’re slicing up the attention pie thinner and thinner, giving us retreaded rehashes of warmed over news, all hoping for a bit of attention because the issue is trending. We can leave that to the unpaid, I think.

The hard part of professional journalism going forward is writing about what hasn’t been written about, directing attention where it hasn’t been, and saying something new.

There are actually two recessions:

The first is the cyclical one, the one that inevitably comes and then inevitably goes. There’s plenty of evidence that intervention can shorten it, and also indications that overdoing a response to it is a waste or even harmful.

The other recession, though, the one with the loss of “good factory jobs” and systemic unemployment–I fear that this recession is here forever.

Why do we believe that jobs where we are paid really good money to do work that can be systemized, written in a manual and/or exported are going to come back ever? The internet has squeezed inefficiencies out of many systems, and the ability to move work around, coordinate activity and digitize data all combine to eliminate a wide swath of the jobs the industrial age created.

There’s a race to the bottom, one where communities fight to suspend labor and environmental rules in order to become the world’s cheapest supplier. The problem with the race to the bottom is that you might win…

Factories were at the center of the industrial age. Buildings where workers came together to efficiently craft cars, pottery, insurance policies and organ transplants–these are job-centric activities, places where local inefficiences are trumped by the gains from mass production and interchangeable parts. If local labor costs the industrialist more, he has to pay it, because what choice does he have?

No longer. If it can be systemized, it will be. If the pressured middleman can find a cheaper source, she will. If the unaffiliated consumer can save a nickel by clicking over here or over there, then that’s what’s going to happen.

It was the inefficiency caused by geography that permitted local workers to earn a better wage, and it was the inefficiency of imperfect communication that allowed companies to charge higher prices.

The industrial age, the one that started with the industrial revolution, is fading away. It is no longer the growth engine of the economy and it seems absurd to imagine that great pay for replaceable work is on the horizon.

This represents a significant discontinuity, a life-changing disappointment for hard-working people who are hoping for stability but are unlikely to get it. It’s a recession, the recession of a hundred years of the growth of the industrial complex.

I’m not a pessimist, though, because the new revolution, the revolution of connection, creates all sorts of new productivity and new opportunities. Not for repetitive factory work, though, not for the sort of thing ADP measures. Most of the wealth created by this revolution doesn’t look like a job, not a full time one anyway.

When everyone has a laptop and connection to the world, then everyone owns a factory. Instead of coming together physically, we have the ability to come together virtually, to earn attention, to connect labor and resources, to deliver value.

Stressful? Of course it is. No one is trained in how to do this, in how to initiate, to visualize, to solve interesting problems and then deliver. Some see the new work as a hodgepodge of little projects, a pale imitation of a ‘real’ job. Others realize that this is a platform for a kind of art, a far more level playing field in which owning a factory isn’t a birthright for a tiny minority but something that hundreds of millions of people have the chance to do.

Gears are going to be shifted regardless. In one direction is lowered expectations and plenty of burger flipping. In the other is a race to the top, in which individuals who are awaiting instructions begin to give them instead.

The future feels a lot more like marketing–it’s impromptu, it’s based on innovation and inspiration, and it involves connections between and among people–and a lot less like factory work, in which you do what you did yesterday, but faster and cheaper.

This means we may need to change our expecations, change our training and change how we engage with the future. Still, it’s better than fighting for a status quo that is no longer. The good news is clear: every forever recession is followed by a lifetime of growth from the next thing…

Job creation is a false idol. The future is about gigs and assets and art and an ever-shifting series of partnerships and projects. It will change the fabric of our society along the way. No one is demanding that we like the change, but the sooner we see it and set out to become an irreplaceable linchpin, the faster the pain will fade, as we get down to the work that needs to be (and now can be) done.

This revolution is at least as big as the last one, and the last one changed everything.

American Airlines announced a record-setting order for new aircraft today, and it shows where the airline industry is headed.

The Dallas-based company will buy 460 planes from Airbus and Boeing, with options for another 465. The massive order comes as airlines rush to reduce operating costs by replacing their aging fleets with new, more fuel-efficient aircraft. The order brought with it an announcement from Boeing on the fate of the 737, which will be updated and not replaced.

With the current state of the economy and many airlines still counting pennies, the giant order has raised questions in some quarters. But airline analyst Richard Aboulafia says it’s all about the race toward efficiency.

“It’s fundamentally a defensive move,” he says. “Everybody is looking for a hedge against expensive fuel.”

In the world of single aisle, narrow body airliners, that hedge comes from new, fuel-efficient engines.

New engine designs and technology are driving the efficiency push we’re seeing from Boeing and Airbus. We’re also seeing improvements in the airframes, including weight reduction and aerodynamic improvements. Both companies claim efficiency improvements of around 15 percent for the newest narrow body models expected to fly within the next several years.

The technology is available to dramatically cut fuel costs with re-engined airplanes compared to the airplanes in many fleets that have been flying 20 years or more. This gives the industry the motivation to purchase new airplanes, says Aboulafia. The key is there is money available to buy the jets — about $13 billion in the case of the American deal.

“You’ve got access to jet finance coupled with high fuel prices,” ” Aboulafia says, “and that shifted the cost burden away from capital costs and towards operating costs.”

Airbus appears to be the winner in the American Airlines order with 260 airplanes. It begins with current A320 series airplanes in 2013 and 130 orders for the new A320neo (new engine option) beginning in 2017. The A320neo was the big hit of the Paris Air Show last month. American placed options to purchase another 365 airplanes from the European company.

On the Boeing side, the order includes 200 airplanes. Half will be from the existing lineup of 737s known as the 737NG (Next Generation). But the big news was Boeing’s announcement that it will not replace the 737 with a new model, but instead re-engine the current 737 and make improvements to the airframe. This is similar to what Airbus did with the A320neo. There’s no word on the new name for the improved 737. May we suggest Next Next Generation, or NGSquared?

Boeing CEO Jim Albaugh says the decision was driven largely by the need to have airplanes available sooner rather than later.

“Our customers wanted more efficiency now and certainty of delivery,” he said.

American placed options to buy an additional 100 airplanes from Boeing’s 737 family in the announcement today.

Image: Airbus

It’s easy to act as though the news media is something that is done to us. Some alien force, projected onto all of us, pushed out by them.

Of course, that’s not true. It’s something we buy, something we pay for.

We’re paying for superficial analyses, talking points, shouting heads, *****gate of the moment, herd journalism and silly local urgencies instead of important international trends. We’re paying for fast instead of good. We believe we’re paying for hard questions being asked, but we’re not getting what we’re paying for.

We might pay with a dollar at the newsstand, but we’re probably paying with our attention, with attention that is turned into ad sales.

Too often, we fail to stop and say, “Wait, I paid for that?”

Almost everything else we buy is of far higher quality than it was twenty years ago. The worst car you could buy then was a Yugo… clearly we’ve raised the bar at the bottom. Is the same thing true of your news?

As the number of outlets and channels has exploded, media companies have faced a choice. Some have chosen to race to the bottom, to pander to the largest available common denominator and turn a trust into a profit center. A few have chosen to race to the top and to create a product actually worth paying for.

I fear that the race to the bottom will continue, but it’s hard to see how anyone could be happy winning it.

Their civic obligations aside, it’s up to us to decide what to buy.

While I’m in the throes of writing the next chapter, I wanted to share a recent interview I did with BroadVision‘s Andrew Gori. Following this discussion, the interview was reenacted live at BroadVision’s headquarters in Redwood City, CA as part of its Clearvale SecondFloor speaker series hosted by CEO, Dr. Pehong Chen.

The conversation tackles subjects facing businesses of all shapes and sizes ranging from social media adoption and planning to collaboration and brand management online to organizational transformation and change management.

How can companies with no social media experience identify a good or bad social media plan?

Even companies with social media experience can have trouble identifying a good social media plan.

With social media, it’s like the starter’s pistol went off and everyone started running, and not a lot of us stayed behind to question: “Why am I in this race to begin with? Who is going to run it and why?” The important aspect of social media is the ability to define your desired outcomes before you even design a program.

Distinguishing a good and bad social media plan is all about design, purpose and outcome. Businesses tend not to consider these three things when developing social media programs. Much of social media is free or inexpensive, but there is also time and resources that need to be considered. A company can create a Facebook page for free, but what happens when someone asks a question on that page’s wall?

In a recent blog post, you discussed Dell’s baptism by fire and how Dell Hell forced them to “listen, engage and adapt”, and ultimately create a very successful social media plan. Do you think it is necessary for a company to have to go through some sort of baptism by fire before it can adopt an effective social media plan?

Baptism by fire certainly is a way that some companies learn. I call it the “ah ha” versus the “uh oh”. There are companies that get it. Starbucks gets it; they’ve been very proactive from the beginning. Dell gets it, but they had to go through the “uh oh” first. People say that Dell is a tired example, but I’ll tell you why I love Dell as a social media case study: they learned the hard way and CEO Michael Dell cares. When you have those two things together, you’re essentially working the ends to the middle. Dell ended up realizing that Dell Hell can’t happen again, so they put in protocols to deal with flare ups before they burn too hot or too bright. What you see today is their social media command center, which feeds every aspect of Dell, from technical support to development to customer service to sales, and even human resources and finance. Each one of those departments has adopted a social extension, which is huge. Dell realized they needed to collaborate internally before it could collaborate externally, and it must be both proactive and reactive.

So if a company is having difficulty being social internally, if departments within a company are not being transparent with one another, should that company hold off on adopting a social media plan?

I don’t think they should hold off, but they do need to think about what they want to accomplish first. They should have the infrastructure in place and be ready to deal with a crisis. Every big company has some sort of crisis communications or crisis contingency plan in place, and this isn’t unlike that. So companies need to have a contingency plan in place in case they do need to collaborate with one another. What would that look like? Who are the point people? These are things that should be defined up front.

Everything a business does should have a plan around it, but many don’t when it comes to social media. Social media came to the organization from the outside in, and from the bottom up. It came from you and me, and everyone who uses Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. There’s no IT department to set everything up, so amateurs are trying to get their arms around it and put some processes in place. There’s a lot of chaos and social anarchy going on, so we need to think through scenarios, even if it’s just for marketing, just in case.

What kind of climate are you encountering when working with executives who are interested in learning about social media? Do they embrace it or are they nervous?

It’s all over the board. I work with a lot of executives and try to help them design their organization around social media. I also work on the management side, and one thing I’ve learned is it’s different every time.

I don’t know of any businesses that are saying, “Social media is our future,” and I don’t know that any business should. Social media should be a focus, not the focal point. It’s not about making the business social; it’s about making it more adaptive.

The lessons that social media teaches us has benefits for the entire organization. Good service oriented businesses have existed forever. Nordstrom came before Zappos, and before Nordstrom there was probably the local shoe store. There are always some elements that remain consistent; culture, communication, compassion, service. Social media amplified these things.

The thing that consultants and internal champions need to realize is the executive might not be as into social media as they are, and that’s ok. Your job is not to talk about the need for Facebook or Twitter. Your job is to figure out the need for your business to be on Facebook or Twitter, and the impact it will have on the bottom line. Connecting those dots changes the game, and that happens when you stop reading Mashable and start looking at click paths and running analytic reports, and other things that are unique to your business and don’t exist in blog posts or books.

Does an established brand, like Nordstrom, run the risk of diluting their own brand if they adopt social media plans?

To some extent; even though Apple doesn’t have a social media presence, they are paying close attention. At a minimum, intelligence is critical. If a company wants to move beyond intelligence and actually be engaging on a social network, it has to do two things. The first is to define what value it can put into and get out of the network. The second is it has to develop a plan that that brings the brand to life in a way that embellishes rather than dilutes is.

One thing that needs to be discussed, and I’m surprised that this doesn’t come up more: what is the persona of the company? If you’re going to have a presence on the web, your persona is something that needs to be defined. Companies often use a style guide; what the logo looks like, how it should be presented and under what circumstances. If it’s so important to have that guide for a brand’s logo, why not have it for a company’s social media presence? If Judy and Bob start Tweeting and interacting on behalf of a company, they’re diluting that company’s brand with the personal identity of Judy and Bob. When you do that, you lose the luster and mystique of the brand. The brand style guide has to include social media elements.

On a more personal level, what do you enjoy about helping companies become more social?

I really enjoy helping companies develop a new sense of purpose. By the time I’m done working with a company, it’s less about social media and more about helping them reinvent an aspect of their business and helping them become relevant again. That’s my personal mission as well. I don’t see myself as much as a social media strategist as I do a business strategist. A lot of what I focus on is change-management and organizational transformation, which for me is personally fulfilling and exciting.

Some things to think about while the doorbell rings…

There are communities that have moved Halloween from today, because they don’t want it to be on a school night.

There are communities that abhor Halloween, arguing that it is a day for Satanists and other ideas that are anethema.

And there are communities where the goal is to obtain as many chocolate bars as possible. (The hobo costume will always remain the official teenager get up, because you can make one in three minutes).

How did fruit end up as treat non grata?  How did the few giant candy companies end up stamping out variety, selling giant bags of cheap chocolate instead? (Hint: there’s huge pressure to do ‘the regular kind’ as many consumers/homeowners are afraid to stand out in this regard). A great example of peer pressure meeting the race to the bottom.

And in the last few years, how did a trivial kids’ holiday turn into a multi-billion dollar bacchanal for adults, complete with ornate houses and bespoke costumes? Is it because of some well-orchestrated Halloween Marketers of America initiative? It just seemed to happen, didn’t it?

My take: Marketing home runs usually happen because the market/tribe/community is itching for a void to be filled, not because a marketer committed some brilliant act of promotion or pricing. The art, then, is to pick your niche, not to freak out about how to yell about it. You can’t make a perfect storm, but you can find one.

I recently re-read this great article about how many marketers are moving into partnerships with product makers so that they own more equity in the product and so that they own more of the design and development stages as well. This is interesting, because it’s the opposite of showing up for work as a marketer for a company. Instead of pushing Coke or Fritos or whatever, you’re making a deal with John’s Original Lime Rickey and building it into something you can sell better. It’s what my friend, Tim Hayden and I called during a recent discussion “having some of my own ponies in the race.”

Not everyone will go that route. It’s tricky. It requires one to be an investor. It requires a sense that the marketplace will support your product and it requires a lot of thought into the ways it differs to work for a company versus be part of the ownership of a product (or service).

If you do think that way, I think the way to go is with local and/or small businesses on the one hand, and with huge outsourcing and manufacturing teams on the other. For instance, if I know someone who makes an amazing premium cupcake, I just have to figure out a way to dropship it safely, and I could really add to that person’s bottom line. If I could partner with a Chinese manufacturing company, I could create some kind of product that appeals to the kinds of people I’ve built my community around. Either way, I wouldn’t be just selling someone else’s product. I’d be partnered, and that would include shouldering more of the burden, but also reaping more of the rewards.

There’s more on this in this thread at Third Tribe Marketing (membership required). We go on to talk about the evolution and some ideas and some pitfalls.

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Shipping is fraught with risk and danger.

Every time you raise your hand, send an email, launch a product or make a suggestion, you’re exposing yourself to criticism. Not just criticism, but the negative consequences that come with wasting money, annoying someone in power or making a fool of yourself.

It’s no wonder we’re afraid to ship.

It’s not clear you have much choice, though. A life spent curled in a ball, hiding in the corner might seem less risky, but in fact it’s certain to lead to ennui and eventually failure.

Since you’re going to ship anyway, then, the question is: why bother indulging your fear?

In a long distance race, everyone gets tired. The winner is the runner who figures out where to put the tired, figures out how to store it away until after the race is over. Sure, he’s tired. Everyone is. That’s not the point. The point is to run.

Same thing is true for shipping, I think. Everyone is afraid. Where do you put the fear?