In planning my work for 2010, I asked myself similar questions. For New Marketing Labs, we’ve built the business to help larger companies use social media and other online marketing methods to build awareness, improve channels, and deliver more connected business relationships. In my other company (not yet launched), we’re going to empower passionate business, one human at a time through adult education. In thinking about what I’m going to do for [chrisbrogan.com], the soul of this site is where I have to reconsider what I’ve been offering and push forward for what I can do to be helpful in 2010.

Does Your Business Have a Soul?

Does your business seek to be helpful? Do you wake up thinking, “How can I do something that will improve the experience of others?” Will people say they’re better off with your business around than not?

Business doesn’t have to have a soul. It truly doesn’t. But should you want to be passionate about what you do, either as an employee or as the owner, you might consider this question more closely. The purpose of any business, at some level, is revenue. If not, then it’s not really a business. It’s a pursuit, a hobby, a passion, a charity, or something other than a business. But seeking revenue doesn’t preclude having a soul, so let’s banish that thought.

But if you are seeking to work passionately, and you’re seeking to build a business that will sustain you (and/or others), a soul helps. And by soul, because maybe I’ve not been clear, let’s say that a soul is “the moral and intentional guidance and ‘life’ of your company.”

(I bet I just lost a few of you left-brainers.)

What Does Your Business Soul Need to Consider?

In Trust Agents, Julien and I worked to explain that there’s a new way to conduct one’s self on the web. At the end of the book, we revealed that it didn’t really apply only to the web. Our point was simple: we think that the way people do business could stand to evolve into something more human and relationship-based. We feel that this has been lost a bit over the years, and that part of what’s contributed to the economic problems of the western world at least is that companies started seeing people as numbers only.

Putting your intentions and morals and good people skills back into the way you do business, we feel, might be part of a cure. That’s why we talked about the importance of being a human artist, someone who understands the so-called “soft skills.” Treating people like you want to empower them to succeed instead of wanting them simply to buy is a path towards sustained business. Working out how your business fits into an ecosystem and understanding what else your customers are dealing with helps with this as well.

Putting Your Soul To Work

If nothing else, your business soul is a set of questions. Ask yourself whether you would want your mother or spouse to be marketed to the way you are marketing. Ask whether the products you sell are something you’d give to your family. Ask whether there are better/easier/more helpful ways of doing what you’re doing. Ask whether you’re approaching your business relationships in a balanced way, or if you’re just sitting there champing at the bit to sell (people can tell the difference). Ask what kind of price your products and services are worth? Determine whether you’re giving real value or if you’re just selling.

The answers to these questions should help guide you. They can form the core of your vision of your business’s soul. Again, I’m not thinking that every business seeks to have a soul. I’m thinking that you, should you want to be passionate about your work, might think about the soul of your business.

The core of my success over these last years has come from this: be helpful. I got to that by thinking of how a sustainable business can be run with a human warmth. My personal rewards for this kind of thinking are great, and not just in monetary ways. Remember, the reason behind writing Trust Agents was because Julien and I discovered that there are more currencies out there than money and time, and the biggest one we found untapped was trust.

So, does your business have or want a soul? Where do you go with this? And what are your answers to the questions posed above?

It’s the perfect time to have that in mind, and it will drive success, if executed with passion.

Photo credit dbking

I was thinking about an old article that quoted Joshua Schachter, founder of Delicious, where he talked about how he organized his site to have obvious syntax. He said, that once you get the hang of it, it became very easy to use the site, even from a browser window. Example: If I want to read any pages saved with the tag “chrisbrogan”, I can search http://delicious.com/tag/chrisbrogan . Now, replace my name with whatever else you want to search up on the address bar of your browser, and you pretty much know how to surf through Delicious without any effort.

For the record, Craigslist.org is like this. I can navigate it simply and from the address bar, and I understand what I’m searching out.

The entire concept of the URL, the uniform resource LOCATOR, was that we’d have a way to find resources (or web pages, or files, or whatever information) by way of coordinates that wouldn’t change.

Twitter introduced the need for URL shortening services. They were around before, but Twitter made them necessary. Now, they’re practically a business unto themselves.

And I’m thinking about projects like Glue and now Sidewiki (Google’s little “stick a wiki against any website but only if you’re using this application to see it” project). They’ve obfuscated the clarity of web pages. Okay, I get the notion of annotating the web. I understand the premise behind having ways to see things in our own way out in the wild web, but I think it messes up the point.

People had some real mixed emotions about Seth Godin’s Brands in Public project, but I couldn’t see the fuss. Seth just organized a bunch of information that was out there, and gave brands the opportunity to buy into his effort. The brands could’ve done all the work themselves. Seth saved them a step. The project, however, doesn’t create two webs. It just revisits this information in another format.

The splintering of commentary and conversations problem (how services like FriendFeed and Twitter and Facebook scatter our conversations all over the web instead of consolidating them) is real, and yet, it’s a matter of views. We’re interacting with data where we consume it, which is sensible enough. The missing tech, actually, is just the ability to get those comments all corralled and easy to respond to in some way (and many companies are trying to make that easier).

So where does this take us?

First, I think abstraction is here to stay. I don’t think we’ll have simple URLs to remember for all things (wish it were, but it’s not). I think the trend of shorteners that supposedly add value is here for a while, too. I think the fractured conversation is here to stay.

Now, will this impact business? Not exactly. Instead, it will require us to pick our battles, to determine just how splintered and muddy we want to get to catch up every drop of conversational/business goodness, and it will require us to keep futurists and sages on speed dial (how quaint a term is that?).

Funny thing is: many will never even know this war is even being waged.

Photo credit Jared

I think Groupon is clever in its simplicity and elegant in its design. Basically, a company puts up an offer that only triggers if enough people take the deal.

In the screen grab I took, the deal is for people to attend a spa, and 25 people had to buy at the offered rate of $65 USD. 67 people (at the time of this writing) took the deal, which, if you think about it means that the spa books over $4300 in business for this one promotion. Not bad, eh?

I think there’s some there there, as the kids say.

What say you?

I’m often asked which software and which websites I use to do my job and live my digital life. A list like this is maybe just a way for you to check yourself, but also you occasionally will find something that catches your eye. I’m sure I’ll miss a few things.

Software I Like

• WordPress – my blogging software.
• Seesmic Desktop – my Twitter client desktop-wide.
• Tweetie – my Twitter client for iPhone.
• YouTube – for videos under 10 minutes.
• Blip.TV – my preferred “full service” video provider.
• Gmail – my email service.
• Adium – my IM client (I rarely use IM).
• BatchBook – my contact database.
• FreshBooks – my personal invoicing software.
• Pipeline Deals – my sales CRM.
• Picnik – my photo editing software. LOVE it.
• Flickr – my photo hosting solution.
• Delicious – my social bookmarking tool.
• Google Reader – my RSS reader (for reading blogs).
• Google Calendar – for calendering.
• Socialcast – (client) for Workstreaming (like Twitter inside work).
• Radian6 – listening software (a client).
• Evernote – my multi-tool of note taking/keeping.
• Blue Sky Factory – my email marketing software.

That’s what I’ve got for now. If you think of something I missed, or have a question on one, feel free. Let’s use this as a discussion starter. Fair?

I’ve been trying out Posterous after reading about it on Steve Rubel’s blog. I’m using it to capture my vacation.

Today, I tried switching to HTML on the website to embed a YouTube video. (Okay, I just lost a few of you, but basically, I was adding a video the “by hand” way). No go. It wouldn’t be recognized.

Solutions: 1.) use the bookmarklet and push the button while on the YouTube site, or 2.) email the URL to Posterous and let THEM do it.

Okay, fine with a YouTube video. The web has TONS of widgets and applets and things that are just simple copy/paste efforts. Posterous is great and handling the simple stuff and I enjoy it as a very simple, lightweight blogging platform, but I’m a little ticked that I can’t muscle down just a hair and add an embed code.

Just thoughts on a service. Am I wrong?

A Social Customer Request Sheet

1. Why do I have to learn your phone tree? Once I get into your system, let me punch in some ID (give me 3 ways to do this), and let me customize. The truth is, you KNOW why I’m calling. Don’t make me go through your messy tree. Let it be keyed to me.
2. Make your website all about me. Hell, Amazon.com goes about halfway there now. Why can’t you? If I’m a customer, then you have a sense of where I am and where I want to be. Can you help me get further along?
3. If you’re going to make communities, please align them to me and my usage. Meaning, if I’m looking to talk to other parents about how I use my dSLR and my video camera to capture my kids’ lives, make the community site about that and not your new amazing dSLR. I’ll be a parent much longer than that SKU will be relevant to your company.
4. Please give ME stats and don’t keep them all to yourselves. Why shouldn’t I know that I’ve called in 14 times and that I’ve had more than 24 agents working on my problems? I think stats would help alleviate certain customer service tensions, and they would give me more information to share, should the problem persist.

In short, if you’re going to think about social customer relationship management, then make it the other way around from the beginning. Make the customers the prime focus and not your company.

Could anyone do it? Not sure. What’s your take?

Leave it to Dave Winer to get me thinking. His premise is simple: how come there’s no simple news feed for a city? Why can’t we not see immediately (or even with an hour delay) all the various goings on within our city? It’s not like the information isn’t captured. More likely, there’s just no mechanism in place to push it out.

But think about it: cops pushing their efforts into RSS. Ditto the fire and ambulance. Schools realtime streaming their goings on. Why couldn’t every traffic sensor in the city work for me? Why can’t I touch every data point and then shape it the way I want it?

Tie hot location data to this. Imagine the bus tells me it’s coming. The subway lets me know I’m only a few minutes from my next possible opportunity. Imagine the opt-in of individuals who want to meet other types for business meetings, who want to connect with other members of their self-proclaimed groups.

Before we even get to marketing, we have dozens of gorgeous interactive possibilities. What would this city do for you? Do you see the Minority Report, or potential?

The Internet of Place is here: we just haven’t hooked it up yet.

I love this kind of thinking. Robert has given some thought to what’s going on today and what should make this evolution of the web at 2010 happen. I believe that he’s got a lot of great insights here. Want to see the list?

Here’s what Robert says will be indicative of the 2010 web:

1. Real Time. Google caught the Wave of that trend today BIG TIME.
2. Mobile. Google, again, caught that wave big time Wednesday when it handed Android phones to everyone at its IO conference.
3. Decentralized. Does Microsoft or Twitter demonstrate that trend? Not really well.
4. Pre-made blocks. I call this “copy-and-paste” programming. Google nailed it with its Web Elements (I’ll add a few of those next week).
5. Social. Oh, have you noticed how much more social the web is? The next two days I’m hanging out on an aircraft carrier with a few people who do social media for the Navy.
6. Smart. Wolfram Alpha opened a lot of people’s eyes to what is possible in new smart displays of information.
7. Hybrid infrastructure. At the Twitter Conference this week lots of people were talking about how they were using both traditional servers along with cloud-based approaches from Amazon and Rackspace to store, study, and process the sizeable datasets that are coming through Twitter, Facebook, and friendfeed.

What do you think? I think this is Scoble’s next book. You?

The web gave us the perfect “nowhere.” A Star Trek fan in Houlton, Maine can talk with another fan from Reykjavík, Iceland, without thinking a thing about it. We can be anywhere, and if you follow through, anywhen, and thus, we don’t need proximity to build relationships (or customers, or much of anything). The first web, the brochure web, gave way to the second web, the two-way web. What if the third web is about the relationship of things and places between the physical world and the placeless, timeless world? I’m calling this vplaces (more in a bit).

Our web has already shifted. Bridges tell us when they are up and down. Laundry rooms report their status. The web of things now connects the physical world with the web world. Here’s where my thinking started getting into something else.

vplaces, pplaces, and tplaces

The web of nowhere relates to vplaces. You might be thinking Second Life. I’m not. Well, okay. Second Life can be part of it. But the web of nowhere is the web we have today. I can write this blog post anywhere in the world (Seattle, Boston, Fresno). You can read it anywhere (Mumbai, Glasgow, Detroit). It’s the web of “it doesn’t matter where things are.”

The web of nowhere is not necessarily real time, either. Blogs and plenty of websites Thus, the web of nowhen is also the non-realtime. As we’re starting to become more and more interested in realtime, with tools like FriendFeed and other lifestreaming devices and applications, there’s also more and more pull for the time-shifted web, or tplaces.

What do I mean? Phone calls are synchronous. The real-time web is synchronous. Events and real space activities are synchronous. But there’s value in time-displaced events, too. For instance, if I mix a combo of physical world places (pplaces) and timeshifted information (tplaces), I get services like BrightKite, where I can leave notes in the air in a place for someone to come along and find them.

What other combos are there? If you mix vplaces and pplaces, there are many opportunities. Think about all the various Apple iPhone apps that use GPS as one component, like NIN Access. Think about Microsoft Tag. Think about situations where the web doesn’t have to be a static page any more. Think about a web that comes together are things, around objects talking to each other and us, around places that are a mix of physical and otherwise.

What Am I Ranting About?

I admit this doesn’t have immediate and obvious application, and yet it does. To me, it does. I see this as clearly as anything. To me, if you design for the web of today, you’ll get what everyone else has. If you start planning for these new webs, of places, of timeshifting, of mapping the physical into the web and back again, you’ll start to find the new vectors, the new possibilities.

What does this say to you? Anything? Did your eyes light up?

This blog (and most blogs) runs with MySQL as the database underneath it all. Most of the services you know and use on the web use MySQL, a free (or at worst inexpensive) version of database software that Oracle has spent a long time competing against.

Once Oracle owns it, what will happen? Om points out that there will certainly be some departures from the MySQL team (mostly due to overlap). What else will become of it, now that it’s tied into the fiercely competitive Oracle product line?

This isn’t a “the sky is falling” post, but rather, we can’t just hear this news and not consider it. Will it impact most of us in a significant way? My guess is “not directly.” I think things might change in subtle ways down in the depths of things, and/or maybe this will point to a more seamless scaling future for certain high intensity apps.

Consider yourself notified, and be sure to thank Om Malik for continued great reporting at GigaOm.