Open up your mind and say, ahh...

In her sophomore year at Chicago’s ACE Technical Charter High School, Kewauna Lerma had a 2.25 GPA. Yet when Jeff Nelson met Kewauna, he knew she was capable of getting into and graduating from a four-year college. Nelson is the cofounder and Executive Director of Urban Students Empowered (US Empowered), a not-for-profit organization dedicated to college preparedness and college persistence (keeping students in college once they have enrolled) for low-income high school students.

“If you spent 10 minutes talking with one of our students, you would be absolutely convinced that they have everything it takes to get to and through college,” Nelson says. But, “If you look at the data, you’ll see that the reality of the trajectory for them to get there is incredibly unfair.”

There has been fierce debate about the causes of the problems as well as what the best solutions might be to address our arrested public school education system, which is almost universally recognized as being in crisis. Hundreds of organizations collectively spend more than $4 billion dollars working on education reform. In 2010, the documentary film Waiting for Superman helped achieve more widespread public awareness about the challenges in the education reform process itself. There has never been so much attention from politicians, celebrities, social entrepreneurs, and not-for-profits around education. Even in bitterly divided Washington, some politicians from both parties have been able to agree in principle on certain elements of reform plans.

Yet even with so much focus on education reform and so much support for taking urgent action to respond to the crisis, it often seems that very little is actually getting done. This is especially true at the level of the high school to college transition, since most of the focus on educational reform is on how to get students to graduate from primary and middle schools and to keep them in high school without dropping out. Comparatively little attention has been given to preparing students, especially the less privileged and less affluent, for the day that some of them actually begin their freshman year of college. For those students, the challenges remain daunting. Once this demographic enters college, the risk of dropping out is high. In the Chicago Public Schools, only 18% of students enroll in four-year universities and just 7% graduate from college by age 25.

Enter Jeff Nelson, a 30-year-old Chicago native who first saw the need for a focus on college persistence as a Teach for America Corps member, teaching sixth grade at O’Keeffe Elementary School on Chicago’s South Side. It was there where he opened the newspaper and saw that alarming graduation statistic (at the time it was 6%). Nelson recalls thinking, “I had 32 students. I did the math and figured that about two of them would graduate with a four-year college degree. It was atrocious.”

So he got to work. “To be a true education reformer, you need a unique combination of incredible tenacious persistence and humble patience. You’re trying to solve a vast problem, and you have to do it in a way that maintains quality,” Nelson says. He started with excellent teachers. US Empowered recruits the right teachers to serve as mentors, coaches, and instructors to get high school kids prepared to think about college, understand their options for going to college, and what kind of academic work they have to accomplish to get there. These teachers are some of the best full-time teachers in their schools, and by leading US Empowered as an in-school, credit-bearing course, the college prep work is not an extra burden on teachers already over burdened with their day-to-day responsibilities. To find the teachers who will lead their program in a given school, US Empowered gets recommendations from their “human capital partners,” including Teach for America, Chicago Foundation for Education, Academy for Urban School Leadership, Chicago Teaching Fellows, and the Golden Apple Foundation.

The experienced teachers who implement the US Empowered program lead the effort to build college readiness into the academic curriculum, meeting with students 40 minutes every day. The course starts during the students’ junior year in high school and is focused on getting students to reach the academic standards necessary to have a high probability of getting into a college. The program is operating in high school environments that typically lack resources, including college-oriented advisors and guidance counselors, and have low rates of success in having their students go on to college. US Empowered also helps students understand how to make college a reality, how to get prepared, how to obtain financial aid, and other critical questions. But the program does not stop there: During their first year of college, the students in the program are required to continue participating in online support courses. US Empowered finds ways to continue to connect the college student to his or her US Empowered support network, so that they can get additional help if they need it. This attribute of the program is particularly important to keeping students in college once they have gone through the challenging obstacle course of getting to college in the first place.

Nelson believes college persistence is more important than ever. The economy has shifted aggressively towards higher value services and knowledge worker jobs. Ten years ago, increased high school graduation was viewed as a primary goal of the education reform movement. Today, while that goal remains, the shift in the economy means that a high school diploma alone is not much of a determinant for a bright future. “All of us in education want the same thing, we want the kids we teach or the kids we serve to have the choice to live a happy, healthy, productive life,” Nelson says. “It’s that simple.”

Part of what inspired Nelson to go into this particular aspect of education reform was a sense that the college persistence issue was solvable and measurable. Nelson says that US Empowered has tried to operate as entrepreneurially as possible starting from the organization’s inception: “We’ve been focused on outcomes from day one. We started with very clear measurable outcomes we wanted to achieve, then we built strategies to execute on those goals. I think that backwards planning really increases our effectiveness.” Although US Empowered only operates in 11 Chicago-area high schools, it can boast that 98% of its students have been admitted to four-year colleges, and 85% of their students are currently persisting in college. One of those who US Empowered helped to succeed was Kewauna Lerma. As a result of her work in the US Empowered program, her GPA improved by 41%. She was accepted at Western Illinois University, where she is currently studying pre-medicine.

US Empowered has been operating in Chicago since 2007, and has garnered high praise from the educators that they work with. Tony Pajakowski the Co-Principal at Perspectives-Calumet High School of Technology, describes the US Empowered program as a “huge win,” adding that “our kids are thriving with the individual attention the program provides, giving them a new perspective on what we mean by ‘college for certain.’”

With successes under US Empowered’s belt in Chicago, and after developing an extensive five-year strategic plan, this month US Empowered expanded outside of Chicago for the first time, launching a new program in Houston. Following Houston, US Empowered plans to continue expanding, with a goal of having programs in four to five cities in the country by 2017. This fall will be particularly busy for Nelson, as he will also become a father for the first time in August. Nelson says that this development made his work even more personal. “When I became an expectant father, I noticed how similar the goals we have for US Empowered students are to the goals I have for my child. It’s fundamental to who we are as people,” he says. He remains laser focused on meaningful and measurable education reform, especially now that he is contemplating the educational system his own children will find when they reach school age.

David D. Burstein is a young entrepreneur, having completed his first documentary 18 in ’08. He is also the founder & executive director of the youth voter engagement not for profit Generation18. His book about the millennial generation will be published by Beacon Press in early 2013.

Fox’s Glee is slumping in its third season–but does that mean people are losing interest in TV musicals? NBC’s new Broadway-focused drama, Smash, which premieres February 6, is about to find out. Three industry pros share tips on how Smash can avoid Glee‘s missteps and become, well, a smash.

Photo: Flickr user gudlyf (Glee)

A version of this article appears in the February 2012 issue of Fast Company.

At age 27, Danny Meyer abandoned plans to go to law school and decided to open Union Square Cafe in New York City–a decision about which New York City’s food lovers are eternally grateful.

In the 25 years since, Meyer has opened 28 restaurants and–incredibly, given the cutthroat nature of the New York restaurant scene, where restaurants open and close more frequently than subway doors–has had only shut one down. Meyer’s Union Square Cafe, Eleven Madison Park, and Gramercy Tavern consistently appear on most major New York top restaurant lists. Eleven Madison is one of only five Michelin 3-star restaurants in the city (Michelin’s highest rating); the New York Times gives Eleven Madison its highest rating of four stars. Only six restaurants in a city with 26,000 places to eat merit such a badge of honor.

As the CEO of Union Square Hospitality Group, Meyer oversees a large team that manages all of the restaurants and additional businesses, including the Shake Shack burger stands, which have in a few short years become a national and international brand, with locations in Miami, Washington D.C., Connecticut, Kuwait, and Dubai, among others. Demand for Shack burgers in New York is so frenzied that someone made a Shake Shack app that lets you watch live video feed of the line so you can plan your burger binge based on its (usually very long) length.

This week, he opened a Blue Smoke BBQ stand and another fine-dining restaurant, North End Grill, in New York’s Battery Park City. North End is his second collaboration with Chef Floyd Cardoz, recently the winner of Top Chef Masters.

We sat down with Meyer at North End Grill to talk about the lessons he’s learned in a famously risky industry, and the secret ingredient of his success that has stayed the same all these years.

Fast Company: You’ve been in the restaurant business for 25 years. You’ve seen a lot. What have been the biggest changes in this industry in that time?

Danny Meyer: Restaurants and chefs have become followed by such a broad swath of the public, in a way that used to be reserved for sports stars, movie stars, and theater actors. Restaurants are in the firmament of today’s common culture. It would have been unheard of when I got into the business to talk about where a particular chef was cooking and for people to know who that chef was. So now there’s a public that’s hungry for food information. There are now artisans and farmers, winemakers, bread bakers, cheese makers, people who raise pigs, and people who roast coffee who take what they do very seriously. 25 years ago you would have been ashamed to say you were going into the restaurant business or to become a pig farmer, today you are proud. We also have a media that covers food and restaurants extensively. 25 years ago we didn’t have the Internet, blogs, or the food network. We had a group of students visit us from St. Louis who are studying marketing. 25 years ago they never would have put a restaurant on their list of places to visit.

One of the other big movements in the restaurant business has been the local and organic movement. You were early to that, why has that been important to you?

I’m a big believer that you can try to change the world based on philosophy, doctrine, and belief. But I think the thing that really drives the world is hedonism, the pleasure factor. As far as I’m concerned, the best way to convert people to eating fresh local grown produce is to show them that local fresh grown produce tastes better. Our industry is hyper-competitive; there are 26,000 restaurants in New York, so each one has to give you a reason to try it as well as a reason to come back. We are constantly looking for better ingredients to cook with. So that when you come here you say “The grilled salmon I had at North End Grill was the best I’ve ever had.” We’re constantly looking for better servers so people will say “My server made me feel better.” In our industry, we can’t leave a single stone unturned; we’re always looking for what’s better. I think where our industry–or any industry–can get in trouble is when they try to invent things for invention’s sake. Sometimes early in their careers, chefs make the mistake of adding one too many things to a plate to get attention. If a chef is just coming up with wiz-bang gimmicks on their plate, that has nothing to do with bringing real pleasure to people.

Several of your places have become part of the classic New York restaurant establishment. How do you keep the “classic” elements amidst constantly needing to innovate in order to stay fresh?

You want to preserve a sense of how someone’s made to feel, even while you’re evolving your product. Your product can evolve all the time and it has to. In 1985, no one had ever seen something we called “Filet Mignon of Tuna.” It was our most popular dish at Union Square Cafe for years and years. Then after a while, it started to read like 1985. So the goal was to keep making people feel the way they want to feel when they come here, but also to figure out a way to change the tuna. What we really try to do in all of our restaurants is to find this magical harmony between allowing the guest to feel like they went out to eat and like they came home to eat. The architecture of somewhere like Union Square Cafe is very homey, but we want to give the guest enough, whether it’s the cocktails, the desserts, or the dinner, to make them say, “That’s not something I would have made at home. I’m really glad I went out.” But at a restaurant like The Modern you feel like you’re going out. What we really need to work on at The Modern is dialing up the kinds of things that make you feel like you came home. Every restaurant needs to have a point of view. But it’s like a sailing race. There’s no such thing as a straight line; you’re constantly making corrections. But the thing I’m proudest of is that our older restaurants are the more popular ones. That’s because we stay focused on where we’re going, but we also listen to our guests and our staff. We’re proud of the point of view that we start with, but we also realize that’s only a starting point.

So how do you actually go about trying to make The Modern feel more like “you’re going home?”

We identify that with a team of our leaders. You don’t do it for them, you ask them for their ideas, so that they understand the concept and they are invested in the solution. For instance, at The Modern we put in shorter tablecloths. When we opened it in 2005, we were thinking more about “going out,” so we had these long formal tablecloths, you’d never have those at home. You wouldn’t believe how a little detail like that makes a place feel more relaxed. Then one person on our team said mentioned how much they loved getting candy afterschool as a kid. So the pastry chef developed the idea of a rolling candy dessert cart with 15 kinds of chocolate on it.

As you make these changes, how do you know if they are having the intended effect?

We’re in the business of creating delight for people. My partner Michael Romano, who was the chef at Union Square Cafe for 20 years, has an old comment card on the bulletin board in his office. It’s a cartoon with three panes. In the first pane, there’s a person opening the door to Union Square Cafe with a frown on their face because they had a bad day, in the second pane they’re eating a burger at the bar, being served by one of our bartenders and their face has a straight line, in the third pane they’re walking out with a smile on their face. Whatever happened to you before you came in we can’t control. Whatever happens in pane two is our responsibility. How we do that all starts with how we hire. The people we hire have to be really good at what they do, but they also have to have a high “HQ”–which means they are people who are at their happiest when they’re making other people feel good. There are plenty of good cooks out there, but there aren’t plenty of really good cooks who are primarily cooking for your pleasure. If you look at the people who work in our restaurants, I think you’d see two things: The first is that our staff is focused on their work, the second is that they are having fun with each other. So the staff exudes that spirit which is in turn quite attractive to the patrons.

It’s interesting to hear you talk about the importance of company culture in the restaurant business.

It was intuitive from the beginning but it took me 10 years to name it. I had to name it when I opened my second restaurant Gramercy Tavern. As soon as there were two, it meant that wherever I was, I wasn’t at the other one. I started to see that it was even more important how our staff treated each other than how they treated our guests. Lots of restaurants could never have an open kitchen because of all the yelling that goes on. Waiters get their head’s chopped off in the kitchen, and then they are expected to go into the dining room and be lovely. I couldn’t figure out why Gramercy Tavern didn’t feel right when we first opened, then I realized that that culture was missing.

The only restaurant you’ve closed was Tabla in 2010. You’ve called the decision to close it “excruciatingly hard.” What did you take away from that experience?

As long as there is integrity involved, there is no such thing as failure. Tabla had a 12+ year run, which is pretty extraordinary for an Indian restaurant. We probably closed it two years later than we should have. I was so proud of never having closed a restaurant in a quarter century, and I wanted it to go on for another quarter century. So there was a little bit of foolish pride there, but there was also genuine concern I had for our staff members there. I didn’t want them to lose their jobs. The recession was pretty brutal to Tabla. It was our largest restaurant–one of the many things that I learned from Tabla was scale your restaurant to the concept–Indian cooking, especially in Tabla chef and now North End Grill chef Floyd Cardoz’s hands is exquisite, but all it takes is one spouse in a group of three couples to say they don’t care for Indian food, and you’ve lost that whole group. I also realized that the cruelest thing I could have done was to keep that restaurant open. We had an incredibly loyal staff, they were so loyal that they wouldn’t leave, so that mean that for 3 or 4 years they were not getting raises. So we closed it–we closed it the right way. We had a job fair for all of our staff. We invited all of our chefs and GMs, and we also invited every chef and GM of other restaurants who had been alums of Tabla to come in and hire our team. Now all of those people are further in their careers, and a lot of them have come back work with us.

North End Grill is your 28th opening. What’s unique about opening here?

It’s a new neighborhood. One of the things we love to do is come to a neighborhood before the rest of the world does. We did that with Union Square. We did that with Gramercy Tavern in the Flatiron district. We come down here to Battery Park City, there’s a real dearth of restaurants down here. I don’t get it, because there’s a real high concentration of businesses whose employees entertain at lunch and there’s a concentration of residential buildings with residents who go out for dinner. The challenge when you go to a new neighborhood is “are you crazy or not.” And only time tells. One of the reasons we decided to open three restaurants at once in this area–Shake Shack opened here six months ago, Blue Smoke opened here five days ago, and North End Grill opened five days ago–was to try and hasten the process of creating a “there there.”

In addition to your fine dining restaurants, the Shake Shack franchise has really grown in the past few years.

The first Shake Shack was really an attempt to answer a need in Madison Square Park. Then the line kept getting longer and longer…and you can’t get more space in a park. So we opened a second one, to initially try to mitigate the line from the first one. We opened on the Upper West Side but the Madison Square Park line just got longer. Then we opened a Shake Shack at CitiField. Now we have three Shake Shacks, and it was getting to be so big that we dedicated a whole team within the business just to Shake Shack. Then we started getting invitations to open them from all over, the most surprising of which came from the Middle East.

As you expand all over the country and now globally, how do you ensure the Shake Shacks all have this same sense of hospitality?

One of the beautiful things about Shake Shack is that it becomes a mirror of the community it is in. We do the same thing everywhere we go–except for a few drinks we name after the neighborhood we’re in. But they all look different based on who goes there. The Middle East feels different because we don’t have people pulling their burka aside while they’re eating a cheeseburger while taking a picture and blogging about the burger. You wouldn’t believe the Twitter follows we got and the blogging that goes on around the Middle East Shake Shack. We have a company called Hospitality Quotient, which teaches companies who are already the best in the world at what they do to become the best in the world at how they make people feel. So we use Hospitality Quotient to train the staff in with Shake Shacks abroad. The staff in Kuwait consists mostly of Filipino kids. They’ve never been treated this way in any job, and the training we do with them is actually empowering. I think what we’re trying to say is that the spirit is just as important.

In 2011 a number of restaurants started to use iPads as menus and ordering systems. Would you ever see a day where you would use an iPad for people to order or put a live twitter feed on the wall?

I never say never, but I don’t see a role for that in a restaurant like this. We thought a few years ago about having a wine bar that was connected to the Internet. The idea was to have a dynamic list of ten wines by the glass. From anywhere in the world the guests could go online to pick the wines from our list of over 300 wines. Whatever they wanted to taste, we would open it, it would become one of our wines by the glass, and then everyone could see the top wines at that moment. We thought about something like that, it could be a ways off. We always have 3×5 cards at all of our restaurants that describe the wines and the menu, I could absolutely see having an iPad there instead so that a server could go to that information and then come back to your table. But then again, I said I wouldn’t have online reservations because I didn’t want to give up friendly encounters on the phone. Then I realized if that’s how people want to make a reservation, that’s how they want to make a reservation!

Note: This interview has been edited for content, clarity, and length.

Images: Danny Meyer portrait and The Modern photos by Ellen Silverman; Union Square Cafe, courtesy of Union Square Cafe; Shake Shack, photo by Beyond My Ken

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David D. Burstein is a young entrepreneur, having completed his first documentary 18 in ’08. He is also the founder & executive director of the youth voter engagement not for profit, Generation18. His book about the millennial generation will be published by Beacon Press in 2012.

Part 5 in a series introducing my new book, The End of Business as Usual…

What do people want? If you don’t know, why not ask them?

Seems like a common sense question to ask. However, when it comes to customer engagement and relations, common sense appears to be an uncommon virtue. The good news is that asking customers what they need is now easier than ever before. Learning about what they prefer or what they’re missing based on their actions and words is prevalent within social media. Asking them directly is also a powerful form of engagement. At the very least the act expresses intent to learn and perhaps adapt.

Too many research projects or studies these days focus on what brands are doing in social media rather than what they should be doing. And at the same time, most are conducted from the perspective of the business and not from the perspective of the people affected by the actions or missteps of brands.

In February 2011 ExactTarget and CoTweet released a revealing study “The Social Breakup,” that provided a glimpse into the oft missed customer point of view. While many reports highlight why people Like and follow brands, this study divulged why consumers “break up” with brands in social networks.

Like any interpersonal relationship, the consumer-brand relationship has a distinct and fascinating life cycle. The relationship begins with the initial “spark”—the decision by the consumer to become a SUBSCRIBER, FAN, or FOLLOWER—followed by a blissful honeymoon period in which the consumer gets to know the company better through communications and social interactions. As the relationship progresses, the frequency and quality of interactions shapes the consumer’s desire to take the relationship to the next level.

If the company fails any of these relationship tests, a “social break-up”—i.e., an “unsubscribe,” “unfan,” “unlike,” or “unfollow”—is all but inevitable. When the consumer is no longer happy in the relationship, they will actively break off contact with the company…or just ignore their communications in the hopes the company will get the message that it’s over.

According to the study, 55% of Facebook users have liked a brand and then later decided they no longer wish to see the company’s posts. 51% of fans say that they really aren’t fans as they don’t visit the page or web site after the “Like.” 71% of consumers say that they’re now becoming more selective.

When asked why the honeymoon is over, the top reasons for unliking a brand in Facebook are:

1. The company posts too frequently
2. My wall was becoming too crowded with marketing posts
3. The content was too repetitive or boring

The reasons, regardless of percentage are equally revealing…

I only “Liked” the company to take advantage of an offer.

They didn’t offer enough deals. (note: if you combine these two details, “deals” would become the one of the top reasons people connected and disconnected from brands)

Their posts were too promotional

The content wasn’t relevant.

The company’s posts were too chitty-chatty without adding value

Twitter is a much different network than Facebook. However, that doesn’t stop brands from attempting to connect with customers. And, it doesn’t stop customers from experimenting with brand engagement. However, 41% of Twitter users followed a brand only to unfollow them shortly thereafter.

Again, when you ask the customer why they decided to unfollow their favorite brands, the answers are as difficult to hear as they are enlightening.

1. The content was too repetitive or boring
2. My stream was too crowded with marketing posts
3. The company posted too frequently

The remainder of responses are identical to the reasons shared earlier in reference to Facebook.

Not enough deals.

Too conversational.

Irrelevant.

Mind the (Customer) Gap

It comes down to something that’s repeated so often throughout our lives that we may have become immune to the importance of its message, “Mind the gap.” This cautionary expression is designed to protect us from our own potential missteps. But in business, we must mind many important gaps, one of which represents a dangerous pitfall in the evolving landscape of business.

The customer gap represents the distance between what we think customers want and what they actually want. The definition of this gap is different for every business and it is something that we must overcome.

Today we see so many brands flocking to Twitter and attempting to befriend new customers without realizing that they’re willfully stepping directly into an abyss of irrelevance.

It starts with answering some very basic, but vital questions.

What do customers value?

What do customers value in social networks with regard to the culture of each?

Why are customers seeking or reacting to brands in these networks?

What turns them off?

Why do they unlike or unfollow brands?

How can we introduce value to induce a sense of appreciation and ultimately loyalty or advocacy?

The answers to these questions exist. It just starts with asking the questions. More importantly, it requires that you do something with the answers…that’s the hard part.

When Perception isn’t Reality

IBM recently set out to measure the gap between customers and the corresponding awareness of businesses and their ability to meet the needs of consumers in social networks. Authored by Carolyn Heller Baird, Global CRM Research Leader with the IBM Institute for Business Value, IBM Global Services and Gautam Parasnis, Partner and Vice President for IBM Global Business Services, the study, “From Social Media to Social CRM,” teaches us about the emerging social consumer. Coincidentally, we learn more about their preferences than many social media best practices reveal to date.

The report begins with a level-setting that is refreshing and also challenging…

Understanding what customers value, especially when they are in the unique environment of a social platform, is a critical first step toward building a Social CRM strategy. What triggers a customer to seek out a company or brand via social media? What would make a customer reluctant to interact? And does social engagement influence customers’ feelings of loyalty toward a company as businesses hope it does?

The answer lies in one of the reports greatest insights and also one of its most obvious, “Obtaining tangible value is the top reason most consumers seek out businesses via social sites.”

While it’s easy to blame it on the youth, the reality is that the DNA of social customers is indiscriminant of age or any other demographic for that matter. This is more about psychographics, the linkage of people through common interests (note: interest graph) than it is demographics or the social graph.

As discussed earlier in this series, consumers are investing time in social networks to connect with friends and family. According to the IBM study, the total number of users in social networks doing so accounts for 70% of all social consumers. The subsequent reasons individuals interact in social networks is to access news and entertainment at 49%and 46% respectively. 42% desire to share their opinions and another 30% seek to access reviews. But what of those seeking to engage in conversations or relationships with brands? They number at a mere 23%.

IBM mapped the chasm between brands and consumers highlighting the separation that divides intention and actuality. 65% of businesses view social media as a new source for revenue. At the same time however, consumers claim that it is they who expect to realize value from businesses in social media. Nevertheless, the discrepancy between what customers want and what businesses think they want reside at opposite ends of the stream.

The perception gap is reminiscent of couples therapy where each individual sees the world so entirely differently that they require mediation to meet one another in the middle.

If you ask consumers why they interact with companies in social networks, they’ll tell you it’s to receive a discount (61%) or to make a purchase (55%). If you ask a business why they think consumers follow them in social networks their response is likely to mirror IBM’s results. 73% believe that consumers wish to learn about new products and an additional 71% connect to receive general information.

Perhaps most telling is the severity of misperceptions between consumers and brands. While consumers expressed the desire to receive discounts or make purchases as the top reasons for engagement in social media, businesses view these actions as the lowest two motives for connecting in the social web.

To “bridge’” these gaps requires a social CRM strategy and infrastructure to foster collaborative experiences through engagement that customers value. Social CRM tends to focus on technology and systems to provide stakeholders with access to information and processes to support informed engagement. sCRM can also greatly benefit by adapting to the 5th P in order to inspire updated methodologies for engagement that today’s customer can appreciate. It is as much a function of infrastructure as it is a matter of adapting to human nature.

Next Steps

Brands must face the tough reality that social media is in direct conflict with the mode of business as usual. Businesses must first with understanding the wants and corresponding behaviors of the social consumer to effectively adapt.

Introduce mutually beneficial engagement strategies and programs that are unique to the expectations of each community. Technology is an enabler, but customer service works best when it’s designed to serve.

Think like a customer. Or better said, take the insights that are gleaned from gathering intelligence to become the customer you’re trying to reach.

Social consumers are not looking for information, recreations of your Website or links to existing, probably outdated web pages. Recognize that the social consumer is quite content operating without your interference. If you’re unsure what they want, ask them. Then build experiences that deliver value and also build experiences that are shareable. K.I.S.S Keep it Simple and Shareable or Keep It Significant and Shareable.

Elvis once famously sang, we need “A little less conversation and a little more action…”

If you want to know where the future is headed, sometimes telling clues reside in how the youth of the world interact and share with one another.

With the rise of the Golden Triangle of technology, mobile, social, and real-time, technology is not just for the geeks, technology is part of our lifestyle…it is part of who we are. However, as we are all coming to learn, it’s not in what we have, it’s in how we use it that says everything about us.  The way we use technology, whether it’s hardware or social networks for example, the differences are are striking.

But something disruptive, this way comes. And the truth is, it’s been a long time coming. How we consume information is moving away from the paper we hold in our hands and also the inner sanctum of family, the living rooms where we huddle around televisions. In fact, Forrester Research recently published a report that documented, for the first time, we spend as much time online as we do in front of a television. Indeed the battle for your attention will materialize across the four screens, TV, PC, mobile, and tablets.

Sometimes however, generations collide and such is the case with social networks. While the boomers were storming Facebook to stay connected to loved ones, young adults were expanding their digital horizons. Even though text messaging dominates the attention and thumbs of younger adults, the Internet is also competing for the remainder of their time. In fact, its dominance is brooding.

eMarketer recently published a report estimating that in 2011, 20.2 million children under 11 will go online at least once per month from any location. Representing 39.9% of this age group, this number is up from 15.6 million in 2008. In four short years though, online savvy children under 11 will rise to 24.9 million, which represents almost half of this young population at 47.8%.

With virtual worlds and social networks attracting younger and younger audiences, this number may very well only represent a conservative estimate at best.

Growing Up in a Digital Utopia

Certainly every new generation experiences a revolution that alters behavior from the previous way of life. This usually begets stories at some point in life that sound a bit like this, “You kids…you have it so easy. In my day, we used to…”

Perhaps one of the reasons I believe that the estimates are low for online permeation across younger demographics comes down to rapid evolution of technology and its impact on culture and society. As we’re influenced by technology, peers, and society at large, the Golden Triangle is where each of the three influences will source its effect. Let’s take a look at what’s hot, right now…

1. Social Networks

2. Mobile phones and geo location

3. Tablets

Perhaps what’s most interesting is the fusion of all of the above. See, we become the centerpiece in a production that unfolds around us. And at the same time, society evolves through the coalescence of collective consciousness and movement. We move in parallel and yet, we march to the beat of our own drummer.

The future lies in the hands of our youth as steered by those who earn the prestigious and privileged regard as mentor. As a father, I’m very well aware of Facebook’s minimum age requirement of 13. However, my children, at ages 14 and 11, not only possess a Facebook profile and have for quite some time, they are also very well connected to friends and family and digitally established in their own right. The peer pressure to live online hit a tipping point where, as parents, we made a thoughtful decision to enable the inevitable. As we see with businesses investing in systems for training and establishing guidelines and governance, we too are helping our children better understand the brave new world that, in some cases, they know better than us.

Again, our youth will take to the internet in droves, far greater than we imagine and the device used to engage isn’t always going to be a PC. As evidenced by other data I examined, perhaps we can’t just “blame it on the youth.” Perchance the blame falls upon zealous parents who thrust their children into living a life online before they can say otherwise. While innocent in nature, the reality is that as kids grow up, they will have presences to manage earlier, for different reasons, than any of us have faced.

A recent study by security company AVG and Research Now surveyed  2,200 mothers in North America (USA and Canada), the EU5 (UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain), Australia/New Zealand and Japan, and found that 81 percent of children under the age of two currently have some kind of digital profile or footprint, with images of them posted online. 92 percent of U.S. children have an online presence created for them by the time they are 2 years old. In many cases, a digital presence is born before the child, with sonograms (23%) actively published and shared on social networks and blogs.

A 600-plus million strong network yes, but Facebook is but only one of the hundreds of digital islands where we maintain part-time residences. YouTube, gaming networks, specialized nicheworks, and chatrooms are also primary attention traps for our youth and adults alike.

The skyline for the attention of our youth and all of humanity is under construction and is under constant transformation. The difference now, is that we’re marching towards a new direction. While the destination is elusive, the panoramas we experience in our journey teach us skills that help us steer experiences.

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