Taxes, unemployment, class warfare: The haves and have-nots have consumed much of the rhetoric in this year’s election cycle. Today’s political discourse would have many believe that most of the country is wildly divided, occupying opposite ends of a political spectrum with little to no overlap; however, the truth is very different. Most Americans are moderate, and though political ideologies may differ, we generally seek similar goals.

Throughout what has seemed like an endless procession of debates, a comment made by one candidate was particularly jarring as it highlighted a troubling trend: a growing gap between politicians and the people they represent.

Newt Gingrich recently said of the poor, “You have a very poor neighborhood. You have students that are required to go to school. They have no money, no habit of work… They have no habit of showing up on Monday and staying all day or the concept of  ’I do this and you give me cash,’ unless it’s illegal…What if you paid them in the afternoon to work…What if they became assistant janitors, and their job was to mop the floor and clean the bathroom?”

Forget for a moment the disregard for child labor laws, even the displaced workers (replaced by a cheaper child work force). His solution centers on the premise that there is an inherent flaw in the poor that is best fixed through imposed manual labor.

How is it that in a society more open and connected than ever before the gap between politicians and voting Americans has never felt larger? If politicians (not their staff members) actually used the Web, specifically social media sites, they’d begin to understand their constituents more intimately. It’s something that can easily be done everyday, not just during election cycles. President Obama’s recent Google+ Hangout – albeit during a campaign season – is a perfect example of a politician using social media to connect with his constituency.

Obama was recently challenged by the wife of an unemployed American semiconductor engineer on his visa program that allows highly skilled foreign workers to gain employment within the US. Obama, perplexed, insisted she send her husband’s resume so he could look into this matter further.

We watch politicians debate bills like SOPA and PIPA and believe these moments expose how far removed and out of touch they are with technology, the Web and social media. But the truth is, false statements, outrageous stereotypes and inane proposals expose their disconnect.

As a politician, it is your civic duty to be in touch. Rejecting the vessels that connect you to your constituency is a failure of responsibility as a candidate and elected official.

The comments made by Gingrich offend me not because they are representative of Republican values, because they aren’t. Rather, they offend me because it is yet another glaring example of a politician pontificating while ostensibly removed and out of touch with the real issues and the people he claims to represent.

Over Christmas most of my friends were out of town  and while the streets may have been quiet and empty, the overall feeling was anything but. Thanks to my other friend…the Internets!

It’s times like this that being connected is nice. It allows you to have a greater appreciation for what social media can do for grandparents or friends whose lives have taken them to places remote and far away.  In NYC its easy to become spoiled and take for granted how close everything and everyone is.

Once Christmas had ended and everyone had landed back in New York, the second half of my annual ‘week off’ was to begin. I planned a ski trip to Vermont with a fairly large group of my closest friends. After having spent the last few New Years in NYC, I was ready to avoid the crowds and do something slightly more low-key.

With the expectation that I’d have to do some work over break, I brought my computer and all my gadgets. Even without the expectation of work, parting with these things can bring about a great deal of anxiety. I know… pathetic.

Upon arriving at our cabin, I realized that – much to my chagrin- we had no Wifi. Panic set in.  I calmed myself with the knowledge that I was with friends (and humans) and my reliance on my devices would be pushed aside by quality time with people I cared about. As I went about my week, in the beautiful mountains of Vermont – skiing, building fires, cooking food, playing board games etc. I found what I had originally viewed as a ‘disconnection’ became contrarily, refreshing. By week’s end, I hadn’t so much as glanced at my laptop.

It wasn’t until I got home and saw my Facebook wall, Tumblr blog, Instagram posts and tweets that I realized… I hadn’t disconnected at all. We talk about social media as though it’s a special thing that takes place in a vacuum. The truth is that social media doesn’t exist. ‘Social Media’ is a behavior, an attribute that we apply to forms of media, which have existed for a very long time.

The ubiquity of distribution and sharing by individuals has contributed to the erosion of this notion of ‘connected’ and ‘not connected’. In turn, the distinction between ‘media’ and ‘social media’ should erode as well.

If you are still relegating your social media team to some far away understaffed corner of your office in 2012, you’re doing something wrong. Your social teams of 2012 should be integrated and with the rest of your marketing department and have an equal voice at the table.

Social media is dead because it never actually existed. The truth is that your marketing departments needed to label something they didn’t understand. They stopped evolving and the new kids at the table needed a title. Assimilate your teams and let knowledge sharing trickle up and down. 2012 is going to be a fascinating year – start it off right.

My father has served as a director of finance for various non-profits both large and small for several decades. One of the difficult issues he is forced to confront is where and how to allocate funds. The organization’s cause? Salaries? Marketing? Fundraisers? The challenge: how to maximize each dollar and every resource so that the organization can A) stay afloat and B) carry out its mission.

He taught me that one of the best ways to save money is to create an environment where a salary is not the single defining assessment of an individual’s value to an organization. The truth is, money has and always will be an important factor for employees. However, deep down we know that money is only one of many factors, and its significance diminishes greatly after a certain point. Princeton University conducted a study and determined one’s happiness as it relates to the amount of money he or she makes starts to level off at around $75,000. It’s at this point that other factors play a surprisingly more significant role.

Whether or not you subscribe to the theory that a happy employee is a productive employee, the science backs it up.  Results of a study conducted by the University of Warwick‘s Economic Research Institute overwhelmingly support this idea.

“We find that human happiness has large and positive causal effects on productivity,” the team said. “Positive emotions appear to invigorate human beings, while negative emotions have the opposite effect.”

The study goes on to conclude:

“If happiness in the workplace brings increased returns to productivity, then human resource departments, business managers and the architects of promotion policies will want to consider the implications.”

So the question then becomes, absent of money, how do we make employees happy? Sure, compliments, greetings and everyday friendly gestures can make a difference, but it’s a small (albeit important) piece of a much larger pie. The seemingly obvious solution would be the public recognition of an employee’s contribution or success. Yet even as this basic act can often go unrealized, the larger challenge for managers can be how we deal with errors, missteps and failures. Harvard University and the Stockholm School of Economics investigated the benefits of a reward-based strategy as opposed to one that focused on punishment. The study found:

“When both options are available, reward leads to increased contributions and payoff for the group, while punishment has no effect on contributions and leads to lower payoff for the group.”

Often when we think of rewards in the work place we think money. It just simply isn’t the case. What we do know is that there are several factors that motivate us, and each seemingly contributes to our overall happiness. Congruently, the factors that demotivate contribute to our unhappiness and ultimately detract from the group as a whole. If revenue is down, try working to get employee spirits up, and just maybe the revenue will follow.

For more information on what motivates us see Daniel Pink’s (author of Drive) video “The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.”

Rdio launched in the US a full year before Spotify, so naturally when Spotify with all it’s marketing dollars and buzz plopped in from overseas I was a bit skeptical. Sure enough, the service wasn’t bad, in fact it was pretty good… but not nearly as good as Rdio. You see, Rdio wasn’t just a music streaming application, it was like my personal music concierge service. It curated music for me based on what my friends and trusted sources were listening to, and delivered it in an easy to use interface. I was swooning from day one. I’d watch in my newsfeed as friends would appear, listening to their music using the popular Spotify service and like a Mac user watching someone on a PC, I’d think… “Why are you using Spotify? Rdio does the same thing…. just so much better.”

Then… last week happened. Spotify Apps.

Spotify Apps came in and shattered my world. Akin to when my parents told me I was Jewish and Santa was never coming again, everything I thought I knew was out the window. You see, Spotify Apps with its wildly open API, allows all the trusted music sources you’ve relied on for the past 5-10 years to curate customized music experiences; essentially building their own little music apps on the back of Spotify’s library and music deliver system.

Spotify is to the music-blogosphere, as steroids are to Barry Bonds career (umm… allegedly), making something good into something great.  Spotify has essentially empowered your favorite sources for music discovery (blogs, magazines etc.) to become a true access point for music consumption.

Reading Pitchfork? Like that song, album? Add it to your favorites. Now you have it on your computer and phone. Spotify Apps have made themselves a blog’s best wingman. You’re going home with that record tonight, because quite frankly… it’s just so easy.

Dear Rdio,

I love you and I know we haven’t been spending that much time together… but there’s someone else….  I’m sorry.

In a January (2010) blog post I attributed platform loyalty to more than just user interface and network availability. Additionally, I stated that a consumer’s investment in applications – many of which do not operate cross platform – would play an important factor:

“Every app purchased on a mobile device represents a small investment by a mobile user in their respective mobile ecosystem.”

Today, Apple far outpaces Google in terms of dollars generated through app purchases. As we’ve learned from Microsoft, there is big money in software. In a staggering figure, Apple accounts for roughly 85-90% of all dollars spent on mobile applications.

These numbers are alarming when one considers that Apple accounts for only 5% of global market share for mobile devices. This is a massive problem for Google, and the longer it goes unchallenged the bigger the problem will become.

The study released by GfK regarding platform loyalty further illustrates the dangers posed by Apple to its competitors. Apple’s 80% retention rate can easily be tied to several factors beyond investments made into the App Store. The study underscores that unseating current Apple users is an uphill, if not futile effort. Imagine how this will translate to tablet market where the iPad enjoys a 75% market share.

Fortunately, the smartphone market is anything but mature with a global penetration rate of 27%. There is still plenty of room for platform growth in the tablet market. The mobile market, whether it be a smartphone or a tablet, represents the future of computing. In two years we’ve seen companies who’ve pioneered and ruled the marketplace diminish in influence, and dance with death (RIM, HTC, Nokia, Motorola etc.).

Microsoft dominated in the 80’s and 90’s and what we are seeing now is a battle for the new king of computing. With no apparent heir, what’s becoming apparent is that a cohesive, cross-device platform will rule the land. With a king yet to be crowned, iPhone loyalty, iPad market dominance, App Store dollar spend and the introduction of iCloud, seem to be positioning Apple as the frontrunner for succession.

For many – if I may continue this analogy- what they see are the grand rapids… chaos, confusion and an overall sense of feeling overwhelmed. It is easy to get lost in all the noise.

For many companies (large and small), Facebook has been approached as a promotional platform; a marketplace for the exchanging of ideas and thought and less as a marketplace for an exchanging of goods.

If the Social Graph has taught us anything, it is that our connections matter. Our friends affect our actions, and we really value their opinions as they contribute to the shaping of our own.

When riding the grand rapids, those in the raft are looking at more than what’s directly in front of them, they’re looking down river in anticipation of what’s to come: calm water, rocks, waterfalls…

In the grand scheme of retail, e-commerce is still fairly new and continues to evolve. US e-commerce sales totaled $165.4 billion in 2010, up 14.8% from 2009. That is substantial growth in what has been a fairly stagnant economy. The introduction of online sales was extremely disruptive for the brick and mortar businesses who were disengaged from the web. For this reason, looking downstream is crucial (no matter your business).

The social experience will be equally disruptive for those who choose not to engage in the social web. The signs are pointing to a future in social shopping. Building your social footprint as a business is an investment in your future digital storefront. A recent study by Webtrends & Adgregate Markets found websites that are not engaging in e-commerce are losing traffic to their Facebook pages at startling rates. This is likely because they are not deriving value from their experience with these retailers online. For the retailer this is simply lost opportunity. The study also discovered commerce conversations on Facebook ranged from 2% to 4% matching traditional commerce websites. Consumers are beginning to show signs that the Facebook + retail intersection isn’t that far-fetched of an idea.

Be proactive ,anticipate your customers’ future expectations. Begin investing in your own social properties today, so you can turn your relationships into actions (sales) tomorrow. There are several retail platforms and services available today. Payvment (which has an Etsy plugin) currently sits atop them all. Other services include Storefront Social, BigCommerce SocialShop, Ecwid and more.

If the first phase of the social web was establishing connections, we are now moving into the next phase where we continue to converse and share, but behavior is extended further into movements like purchasing and selling.

Today’s Amazon.com might be tomorrow’s Facebook storefronts. The web will continue to evolve and change. As a business owner or boss, your choice is to change with it, attempt to anticipate the changes and learn…or atrophy and die (your business… not you).

After graduating high school I attended Syracuse University to study the music business. Over the next four years as I maneuvered between internships, booking shows and managing bands, I would watch the very industry I once glorified not merely implode, but leap off a bridge with a rock tied around its foot.

My freshman year of college would usher in massive changes to an industry largely stable for the prior 30 years. The proliferation of high-speed internet would bring about an era of media consumption in extreme volumes. The use of Peer2Peer networks would explode on campuses and record labels would see sales dive for the first time in a decade. The iPod was penetrating the market at unforeseen rates, redefining the music experience, and record labels were settling $75 million price fixing lawsuits while simultaneously vilifying their customers for downloading MP3’s they’d refuse to make legally available. By the end of the academic year, the iTunes Music Store had launched lending false hope that the worst was behind us.

Over the course of the next four years The Facebook appeared, record sales would fall off a cliff, labels would consolidate, and as the industry grew smaller it seemed that the only area of growth was in the sheer volume of music being shared and consumed.

After graduation day, sitting around with my friends peering off into the rubble that was the music business, a major label – the original end goal – was in fact the very last place I wanted to be. The internet had eaten the music business up and spit it out. I quickly realized the future of all media, not just music would be dictated by consumers and their interactions with technology. It’s for this reason I find myself at Glow, where I am able to leverage my understanding of the market place with the designers and developers who are constructing its walls.

Today, the music industry still has yet to recover. Record sales continue to decline, labels continue their layoffs and revenues are lower than ever. Bands have responded by incessant touring, saturating an already crowded market and the digital licensing world is in complete disarray. SoundExchange can’t seem to give away an estimated $9 million dollars in back royalties to musicians (and managers) who probably don’t even know it’s waiting for them. The industry is a hot mess. But the future of the business looks bright and here’s why.

New services, technology and digital platforms are constructing what will be the next iteration of the music business. As the pillars of this new music industry are put to soil, what will rise from the ashes is a robust business rich with content and revenue.

Today we consume all forms of content (video, articles, music and books) in higher volume. Our expectations are such that if we pay for it, we want it accessible whenever and where ever we may be. We want the ability to share it with our friends and experience it in groups. Until recently no legal model existed to support this behavior and arguably the technology wasn’t available. But consumer demand is what drives change.

iTunes addressed the demand for digital content but it did little to address the volume at which we were consuming.

How could I possibly afford to legally pay for the plethora of content I was exposed to online without going broke? Why would I spend that money if I couldn’t have it everywhere? My home, office, car, phone, in the park, on the subway…

Rdio, Spotify and MOG represent what has been the missing link in the digital revolution that devoured the music business. Since the introduction of the iPod nothing has transformed and redefined my music experience in such a pivotal way as Rdio.

I pay a monthly fee in exchange for access to nearly all the music I want, whenever and where ever I want it. It’s easy, organized, clean, headache free and most important… available EVERYWHERE.

In time, adoption of these services will increase, the pennies currently produced for participating artists will turn into dollars, and the $88 million distributed (in Q3) by SoundExchange for digital streams will grow to hundreds of millions.

In the not too distant future consumers will make purchases on Facebook as regularly as they do on Amazon. Managers and artists will begin taking control of their social properties, seeing them not merely as promotional platforms but as new revenue drivers and Donald Passman won’t issue a new edition of his famous book “All You Need to Know About the Music Business”, he’ll need to rewrite it from scratch.

RIM was successful because it introduced a product that did precisely what its intended audience needed, corporate email and did it well. What happened along the way were a few innovative gems (Blackberry Messenger) an expanded market place (both in customers and competition) and several learnings that other companies would extract to later bleed RIM out.

RIM, seemingly missed these learnings, ignored them or lost focus. When a company continues to turn a profit (in spite of itself), resting on past laurels can blind leaders to changing tides and the subsequent wave(s) that will inevitably wash away those successes.

On Apple’s Q4 earnings call back in October (’10), Steve Jobs said of RIM:

“They must move beyond their area of strength and comfort, into the unfamiliar territory of trying to become a software platform company.”

Ignoring what was incredibly valuable advice, RIM continued to produce Blackberry devices that remained relatively unchanged from one device to next. When faced with innovative devices from competitors they’d focus on their market share rather than their product. Now that their market share has eroded they’ve focused on their positive balance sheets, dismissing what seems to be obvious to everyone else.

Though there are obvious lessons to be learned in what has become RIM’s slow demise, I think there is a slightly less obvious lesson. Your secondary services can offer great opportunity. But companies must create environments that encourage this type of exploration and broad based thinking.

The Blackberry Messenger Application had a value seemingly unmatched in loyalty. The application was able to anchor so many to an outdated device for so long. This only emphasized its value to users.

Herein lies the missed opportunity to innovate and expand. BBM could have become an ancillary business opportunity yet it went unexplored. Rather than innovate, Blackberry chose to hold customers dissatisfied with the majority of the devices’ function for the small part they loved. If BBM was this powerful its presence on multiple devices could have laid the ground for a new business opportunity on foreign land.

Missed opportunities like this are the result of a work environment that doesn’t encourage exploration, innovation and new ideas. Could BBM have become the next Twitter? Groupon? FourSquare? It’s possible but that ship sailed when iMessenger was announced.

Soon after writing this post an open letter by a senior level executive (who probably should be tapped to be RIM’s CEO) highlighted additional areas of anti-innovation and disorder that have contributed to the organization’s downturn.

The most detrimental of these appears to be fear. Fear has its place, but an organization threaded with fear will produce very little in the way of new ideas. Failure is always an option; companies should fail several times over. Just keep these failures behind closed doors and out of the hands of your customers.

No longer was our window into the great cloud of information pursued through the guise of a browser, but rather through our mobile devices and applications. We’d begun to experience the web, link to link, rather than browsing site to site.

This post does not seek to explore the nuances that define our web browsing experience. Rather we’re here to discuss games and the death of the console, as we know it.

Gaming, a term whose connotations once conjured the mental images of a scrawny 13 year old nerdy boy, socially sequestered to his room, surrounded by Star Wars figurines, is now a multi-billion dollar industry, whose participants average-in at 45 years of age.

Gaming has grown from an 8-bit experience on low-powered consoles to graphically rich computer experiences, only to return to low quality (near 8-bit) experiences, by way of casual gaming online.

Gaming, as it were called, has found refuge in not just our home entertainment systems and computers, but our advertisements, websites and social networks. Gaming and “game mechanics” have permeated and serve as a driving force in our (ad agencies + media dev companies) most successful efforts, whether they be advertisements, location based check-ins (Super Swam Badge you’re mine) or simple mobile applications.

Gaming has shed the stereotypes of its past and now welcomes women of all ages and people of all socioeconomic backgrounds. The advent of new devices such as iPads, iPhones and Androids have opened gaming to new generations, while reacquainting individuals pulled away by the forces of life.

To say the gaming industry has grown substantially in the past 30 years would be a bit of an understatement. It’s expected that the gaming industry will pull in revenues somewhere around $35 – $45 billion in the next few years. That’s more than twice the size of the music business at the height of CD sales.

When we consider that causal/social games are expected to account for nearly $11 billion of this growth by 2014, it’s important to take pause and consider what affect this has on the current gaming establishment.

The numbers paint a bleak story for traditional console gaming. Big publishing houses are spending movie size budgets ($50, $100 and even $150 million dollars) only to find the margins shrink and sales decline on these blockbuster games. Juxtapose that with a game like Angry Birds, where development costs were $140,000 and revenues have surpassed $70,000,000.

Nintendo, for the first time in 7 years posted a first half-year loss. Last year in the US, video game software, hardware and accessory sales were down 8%. Meanwhile, social gaming champions Zynga earned a valuation around $5.5 billion (just under Electronic Arts).

So what’s going on here? Well, it’s the medium and the message.

As technology improves the console gaming experience is being replicated on our mobile devices. Look no further than games like Dead Space and Infinity Blade; 38% of mobile gamers are established console gamers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXriafAKH3M&hd=1

Yet, as the medium shifts, so has the message. Games like Farmville, CityVille and ZyngaPoker collectively have approached 300 million active monthly users.  Gaming is no longer isolated to the guys. Women account for nearly 60% of causal and social gaming, all of which are finding homes on our computers and mobile devices.

To suggest the gaming industry isn’t aware of this shift would be an extremely naïve position. EA has spent nearly $400 million acquiring independent game publishers who are masters in this field.

However, what this signifies for brands, companies and anyone with a message, is that becoming a contributing member of the game development community is not something completely out of reach. Social, mobile and casual games are inexpensive yet effective means of distributing branded content and messaging.

Equally, individuals with a great idea and the will to execute will find soft and fertile ground to grow. When industries go through cataclysmic shifts such as this, the barrier to entry drops and the market becomes rife with opportunity. The question for brand managers and agencies is: Are you taking advantage of this growing opportunity and, perhaps more importantly, exposing it to your clients?

It’s not that I’m adverse to change, I love it and embrace it. But as of late I feel like Google is throwing a ton of shit at the wall hoping something sticks. Is this a take two on Google Wave?

I get it. Google is trying its damnedest to get into the social space in some meaningful way. But it didn’t work. Twitter? Maybe they should have just bought them. Google Buzz? You’re late to the party, I feel like I’ve seen you before, and I’m not keen on you crashing my inbox.

I have gone to great lengths to ensure that what I see in my Gmail inbox are things I want to see. My calendar is clean, my contacts organized, and I have filters setup so that the emails in my inbox are relevant. But now, the conversations that I’d have on facebook or twitter are bleeding into my sanctuary of order. I fear I may soon have no place to hide.

I expect that I will soon develop a filter and adapt to this new noise, but I am not a fan of having this distraction in my Gmail inbox. As much as I’d love to pretend I can follow twitter/facebook/reader/buzz intently while working, I know that even sometimes I too have to turn off the social media valve and focus on the task in front of me. Google buzz, just knocked down the door that separated my social media conversations and productivity.

I’m curious how I feel about this tomorrow. Update to follow.