After California Pizza Kitchen and Peet’s Coffee & Tea put a policy in place preventing people from packing heat on their hip when in stores, a gathering of gun-toting citizens were forced to find a new place to frequent—so they sauntered to Starbucks.

Legally, they’re allowed to lug their heavy metal in any of the 43 states which protect the principle; of course businesses bear the right to prohibit people from entering their establishment when wearing weapons—which represents the firepower behind the fracas.

Starbucks is staying centered, ignoring both the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence’s pleas to ban artillery at the bistro and OpenCarry.org’s overture calling for its 28,000 members to caffeinate there in a show of support.

Standing behind a belief that gun-control debate belongs in the legislatures and courts, Starbucks suggests adopting a policy of prohibition in states where it’s legal to roam with a revolver would place its employees in the untenable position of pushing law abiding customers out of stores—an unfair and potentially unsafe position.   

As we stand atop our virtual soapbox during these blog sessions, our solution usually starts with a simple adage: ask your customer. But is that a decaffeinated cup of caution in this case? Both sides sport ammunition in the form of numbers, so who does Starbucks select as a sounding board?

Ordering an opinion from Regular Joe is still justified. It’s the average customer (the many, many more who mind the middle of the argument) who matter most; uncovering their passion, or perhaps utter lack thereof, may provide a made-to-order PR solution. After all, finding an answer doesn’t have to be as difficult as dictating an order for a half double decaffeinated half-caf, with a shot of caramel. 

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As you pull the trigger on the weekend make sure to get your fill of fun, but don’t forget to set those clocks accordingly on Sunday!

Getting married, having kids, quitting a job, taking a new one. Think of any of the biggest developments in your life or the broader world around you and I’d bet none of those happen without a fair amount of risk.

However, from an early age we are taught to avoid risk. We understand that with risk comes mistakes. And mistakes can be painful. But making mistakes is also how we learn.

We aren’t born knowing that the square peg doesn’t fit into the round hole. We need to try it for ourselves. We experiment. We learn not only what doesn’t fit, we also learn what does. And in that process of learning we begin to see relationships—those between shapes and spaces, challenges and solutions, effort and satisfaction. More is learned from the time spent trying than if we got it all right on the first attempt.

But in business, mistakes mean more cost, more time, and lost opportunities. With the drive towards higher levels of productivity, higher margins, and more efficiency we don’t have room for mistakes.

Without that room, the ability of business to learn and grow is limited. Sure, companies can capitalize on incremental opportunities but they will miss the bigger breakthroughs because they didn’t see as many relationships, have as many experiences, or try as hard. They won’t learn as much from their mistakes, because they won’t make as many of them.

Companies need to create room for mistakes. To explore and try out stuff with their customers. To learn. And to do so faster, to get to the right solution sooner. When companies can make mistakes (ideally outside of the public eye) they can learn invaluable lessons from doing so and bring their customers better solutions because of it.

Risk isn’t that tricky of a concept if you think about it differently—not as the negative value of an event, but as a process capable of yielding positive, even breakthrough results. Make a practice of making mistakes. Create a private space in which to do so. Build a “learning agenda” for your company. And embrace risk. Because what’s true in life is true in business—most great things don’t happen without a fair amount of risk.

Allow me to explain:

It was a Saturday afternoon and my daughter and I were out running through my ever-growing list of errands when I realized that it was getting to be lunch time. I was too far from home to head there to satiate the persnickety cravings of a three-year-old, so I thought we should grab a quick bite on the road and the first thing that caught my eye was the “golden arches.”

Here’s the thing: I have never actually taken my daughter to McDonald’s before. There, I said it. I’m a vegetarian for crying out loud and I generally just don’t eat this kind of fast food. Hell, if I’m really honest, I didn’t really think I was a fast food kind of mom. I mean we buy organic and love Whole Foods, could I really take my daughter to McDonald’s? These thoughts rattled through my exhausted brain as I found my blinker turning on and my car cruising—as if being controlled by someone else—into the McDonald’s parking lot. With one click of the car seat buckle, I grabbed my daughter’s happy little hand and off we went.

Once inside, without a thought, I ordered my little lady a hamburger Happy Meal. The exact meal my mom had ordered for me close to 1 bazillion times before when I was a child. I got myself a milkshake (because, why wouldn’t I?) and we proceeded to a little corner table by the window. As my daughter tore into her bag with excitement and discovered not only French fries and a hamburger, but a toy surprise, she was absolutely GIDDY! She looked at me with such earnest three-year-old eyes and said, “I like this place momma, a LOT.”

That did it. Here come the waterworks. The feeling of nostalgia hit me like a tidal wave and I started to tear up like this was some sort of milestone moment in my daughter’s young life. I remember thinking, “What the hell is wrong with you lady, get it together!” But I couldn’t help but remember all the “special” meals I had at McDonald’s as a kid. All the affection I had for the brand that lay latent for 20 some odd years was back … with a vengeance.

Once I got myself together and my daughter happily gnawed on her tiny bag of fries, I started thinking about it. Why did I react this way? I guess it was a mixture of nostalgia, and a deep brand connection that caught me completely off guard. As a recovering member of the ad agency game, I couldn’t help but think if agencies could figure out how to harness this kind of connection with consumers it would be like uncovering the Holy freaking Grail. But it’s a tough nut to crack and it seems like there are really only a few iconic brands that will ever have permission to live on this kind of hallowed ground.

So what do you think, what brands do you find yourself most strongly connected to? But WAIT, before you answer, I would challenge you to skip the first few answers that come to mind and REALLY think about it. The answers might surprise you as much as McDonald’s surprised me.

There are a number of rewards that I’ve experienced as an employee at Communispace, all of which help to feed our culture continuously. Working with more than 100 of the best and most innovative brands on the planet is one. So is being associated with a revolutionary concept in the market research landscape—one that was co-innovated by our CEO and first client over 10 years ago. Of course working alongside some of the most talented, hard working, and fun people I have ever met is a constant source of job satisfaction.

I get a real jolt of pride and job satisfaction out of telling people where I work. These days, Communispace carries name recognition as a great place to work, and I’m routinely asked by my peers how they can get their foot in the door.

The question I am asked most often is something like, “What’s it really like to work there?” or “Is it really as cool as it seems?” My answer is simple and true: What you see on the outside is exactly what you get on the inside. No hidden agendas, no debilitating politics—just hard working individuals passionate about being the best at what they do.

Yesterday’s article in The New York Times highlights one of the really innovative aspects of our culture here. The message of the story just makes it even easier to respond to those questions with deeper conviction. 

As you will see in the article, our growth is not inhibiting our culture at all. In fact, it continues to evolve daily.

I now fit the profile of a minivan driver—I’m in my thirties and I’ve reproduced—and therefore I’ve been told by friends and family that I absolutely cannot drive a minivan.

It’s not fair!

I have musician friends who drive minivans. So, it’s okay to open that deliciously-easy sliding door if you’re taking a bass guitar out of it, but it’s lame if my son is the precious cargo?

Enter Toyota’s new “Meet the Parents” ads for the Sienna Minivan.

These ads are pure genius, playing on an oft-forgotten truism of cool: There’s nothing less cool than trying to be cool.

Will the ads convince naysayers to enter through the sliding door? I live with one data point who might be coming around. As for me, I consider myself an early adopter. (How cool is that?)

Stephen Covey?

You might remember him as the guru who told us about “The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People.” Remember Habit 5? “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.” Brilliant stuff—something we all should have been taught at home though I confess I don’t recall that memo. My bad. I caught up eventually.

A recent article in The Economist brought a lot home to me. The article quotes work by Mikolaj Jan Piskorski, a Harvard Business School professor and one of his MBA students Bill Heil. According to The Economist, the researchers surveyed more than 300,000 Twitter users in May 2009 and reported results that include:

• More than half said they tweeted less than once every 74 days
• The most active 10% of Twitter users published 90% of all tweets

That last bullet should give anyone who believes in the wisdom of crowds reason to pause. What kind of crowd? Ought to be the first question we ask, followed by, who is in it? This goes right back to Covey—understand the audience before beginning your sermon. The first bullet proves another kind of wisdom; the kind that understands that membership is not participation.

Of course there are times when the proverbial (or Monty Pythonesque) blind horse could tell you all you need to know, as in when you start getting complaints that a product or process is broken. But that’s called feedback and often we confuse it with discovery.

When you really want to discover what your customers think—their attitudes, behaviors, biases, and unmet needs—it really helps to know that the data you are collecting is coming from a reasonable cross section, not the noisy ten percent. Just as there are names for processes like “feedback” and “discovery” there’s a term that describes that noisy ten percent. They’re often called outliers.

CRM’s work with social media so far seems focused in various ways on the outliers, and predictably vendors are still trying to figure out social media’s true potential. If you understand the value of communities, it should be obvious.

Wow! Communispace is so excited that you have given us a CRM Service Rising Star Award, thank you! We are really proud of what we provide for our wonderful clients. The Communispace “two-step” of our services is no easy feat.

We are thrilled to be CDW’s “dance partner” and also a partner to our many other clients who are striving to deeply understand their customers. It’s true that our emphasis on a continuous discovery process, going beyond simple feedback, helps our clients grow their business. It leads to better marketing, improved product development processes, and a company that’s truly customer-centric.

CRM guru Denis Pombriant’s comments make us want to twist and shout—we’ve worked hard to create a solution that gives our clients new insights while not leaving “community-building to chance.”

You think our two-step is impressive? Just wait til you see us cha-cha…

We really appreciate the recognition, thank you!

Over the past decade, we’ve been witnessing the rise of social media. While we are fundamentally social beings, technology advances and cultural preferences have driven proliferation of these behaviors online. The series of tubes that carry data are wider and reach further than ever. Moore’s law still holds true, as does Metcalf’s—to which 400 million Facebook users across a variety of platforms can attest. We have become conditioned to share opinions on anything and everything in our new digital forums, salons, and echo chambers.

At the same time, many of us seem to have realized that pursuing work/life balance ends up as corporate Samsara. Instead, we’ve intertwined work and life to the extent that we do what we love and love what we do. (Or perhaps have gotten much better at fooling ourselves about it.) Along the way, we started bringing our toys to work and realized that our personal technology was better than the company’s.

Good businesses follow the action and most brands finally realize that these trends can be harnessed for commercial benefit. But using social media for business is easier said than done—so far, many brands have been tacking on social real estate to campaigns the same way they’ve been doing with digital microsites and banner ads. To make social media work, businesses must participate in this space differently than consumers; in other words, they’ve got to take a social business approach.

I think Communispace provides a great example in helping companies participate in social business. Using a framework developed by Dachis Group, here’s how I see the company creating social business value:

• The Ecosystem. Providing connections with prospects and customers to help extend organizational functions beyond those on the payroll, e.g. marketing research.
• The Hivemind. Allowing brands to become more culturally calibrated with their customers. Understanding motivations paves the way for social calibration.
• The Dynamic Signal. Bringing out insight from previously unheard voices. The silos in existing listening processes prevent weak signals from being heard.
• The Metafilter. Moderating discussion and drawing out signals from noise. Listening requires a balance of automated filtering and manual curation.

It’s time to shift from social media and get down to social business. Finding the right partners to help you get there matters.

Despite a limited love for the sport, admittedly accredited to an inability to see past the pageantry nor distinguish between a salchow and axel jump , through this past weekend I had set a personal record in viewership—that is until Ice Dancing dominated Monday’s lineup and I was finally forced to put the games on ice. 

My personal preference aside, the chorus of complaints from viewers has continued (and climbed) through the weeks. The USA-plus  plan for coverage, using downtime in skating to show snippets of other events (often on delay from earlier in the day) leaves something to be desired—like seeing other countries compete in any of the events. Those on the West Coast  are riddled with ridiculous three-hour lag times, despite having clocks tuned to the same time-zone as Vancouver and real-time access to results. Ignoring mass-interest in another episode on ice, US versus Canada in hockey, NBC excommunicated the event to cable’s MSNBC, a news network; 8.22 million fans followed (again, a near record in ratings), but we’re left to guess what the game would have drawn if offered en masse on basic cable.

Not long ago much was made of NBC’s creative use of ratings to endorse Leno’s return to the late night lineup, a policy they’re playfully pulling back out of their PR pocket . While its true viewership has vaulted past Turin—my attention isn’t for entertainment, it’s for endurance.

NBC is surviving on the success of America’s record run of medals and increased interest in more extreme events, while falsely assigning credit to their own “premier programming.” If the path to seeing Shaun White grab gold leads through tassels and toe loop jumps, then so be it—but my attention and affinity for the network is on thin ice.

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Here’s to uncovering a universally understood maxim heavy hitters, the pleasure of a few work-free days!

Ursula Burns, who was appointed CEO this past July, describes an environment at Xerox where the employees are simply too nice to one another. She wants them to “become more fearless and be more frank and impatient with one another” to help the company grow.

Ms. Burns’ call for brutal honesty within her organization got me thinking—can Xerox’s 130,000 employees leverage anything we know at Communispace about building the kind of community that will cure Xerox’s internal positive bias? Here’s what I came up with:

1. Build intimacy.
Give Xerox employees a platform to be heard in a way that doesn’t make them feel like they are one of 130,000. Intimacy is what drives participation. For us, that means that a community of 500 members has better participation than, say, in a community of 2,000. With larger size comes increased anonymity, which means less engagement.

2. Talk to the same group of people over time.
Knowing what to ask is important, but knowing when to ask can be even more important. Our members become increasingly loyal about the companies who sponsor a community, and this makes them more honest over time. They become more committed to your success and stop being polite and when they feel you are committed to listening—and that you aren’t going away.

3. Close the loop.
Take listening one step further and close the loop. Tell them what you are doing with the information you heard, and how it is making a difference. This will make everyone feel that giving feedback—both good and bad—is a good use of their time.

4. Let your customers help.
Gather the customer stories—both the ones who’ve been loyal for years and the new ones you’ve acquired through Affiliated Computer Services—that will help open up the conversation. They are uniquely poised to keep everyone honest if you have the kind of relationship with them where they feel that you are truly listening.

And who knows—maybe in a few months the NYT headline will read something like “New Culture Redefines Xerox.”