There's no room left in 2012 for average, or even good, products.

Just three or four years ago, making a good product was good enough. In fact, a lot of the business thinking at the time focused on knowing when to stop investing in a product and get it out the door.

"Perfection is the enemy of progress," I would tell folks. The MVP (minimum viable product) and lean startup movements are great for learning -- but there is nothing MVP about an iPad or Ridley Scott film.

 

When I speak to businesses about marketing and business development, one of the first things I say is "Be Awesome." Whether you are just starting out, or taking a quantum leap - being the best you can be truly matters.

Entrepreneur and venture capitalist Jason Calacanis has written a much more in-depth and compelling manifesto about excellence that should be required reading for all owners, and entrepreneurs.

Read the whole thing. And save it.

This post is about what happens when a leading nonprofit jumps into a highly controversial area of public debate without a communications strategy, stays silent, and therefore lets others take over the public dialogue, perhaps permanently redefining the organization and its brand. Watch and learn, so you don’t make the same mistake on whatever hot button issues your organization might be wading into.

Kivi Leroux Miller has posted the definitive analysis of how to thoroughly botch a major public announcement. "Komen For The Cure" made a highly-charged, political decision to end a breast cancer screening partnership with Planned Parenthood.

Apparently, they made the decision with little or no forethought about the communication and branding impacts the decision would have.

Any business or nonprofit can fall into this trap. But Miller provides one of the best surveys of EXACTLY HOW failing to have a strategy resonates across the web and media landscape.

Read her post. Learn. And don't repeat.

In an era when nearly everything we do is recorded, we have less control over what we choose to remember, and perhaps more crucially, what to forget.

Most of us do not remember what we read online or wrote on March 9, 2011, or what clothes we wore that day. We don’t remember the phone calls we made or how long we talked, or whether we went to the grocery store, and if so, what we purchased there. But all of that information is archived, and if a pressing enough need were to arise, our activities on that day could be reconstructed in nearly complete detail.

Of course, the perils of an online world that remembers everything are well recognized. As Jeffrey Rosen wrote in a 2010 New York Times magazine article, "the worst thing you’ve done is often the first thing everyone knows about you." 

But there is another, more subtle aspect to the inexorable growth of digital archives that store not only the worst things we have done, but everything we have done. To the extent that the past helps define us, it does so not only in terms of our greatest public triumphs and failures, but also through the mundane actions and daily experiences that in the aggregate can be far more important. 

In earlier times, those actions and experiences comprised a personal history accessible only to a small circle of people, and of which we were the main custodians. We were largely free to choose what to remember, and perhaps more crucially, what to forget.

Today, however, our personal history lies scattered throughout cyberspace. And, as illustrated by Facebook’s late-January decision to require all users to switch to Timeline, which will make it much easier to view the entire history of posts made on the site, we often have less control over that information than we might like to believe. 

The prospect that companies to which we have entrusted our data can unilaterally choose to elevate the visibility of actions we took years in the past undermines an option to forget that has long been viewed by philosophers, psychiatrists, psychologists, and writers as critical to the human experience. Nietzsche, for example, described forgetting as a form of active repression undertaken to preserve "psychic order, repose, and etiquette." In the 1942 story “Funes, the Memorious,” Jorge Luis Borges writes of a man who is cursed with the burden of remembering everything that happens to him. “To think,” writes the narrator in Funes, “is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions. In the teeming world of Funes, there were only details, almost immediate in their presence.”

What does it mean that we "lose the option to forget." This is the bargain we as individuals AND businesses make with corporate archivists like Facebook, Twitter, and the like. Mindfulness (and sound policy) are important in this framework of [lack of] control.

President Obama has a clear choice on how to approach the 2012 election: He can spend all his energy defining Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich or whoever ends up as the Republican nominee in as ugly a way as possible, or he can spend all his energy defining the future in as credible a way as possible. If he spends his energy defining his Republican opponent, there is a chance the president will win with 50.00001 percent of the vote and no mandate to do what needs doing. If he spends his time defining the future in a credible way and offering a hard, tough, realistic pathway to get there, he will not only win, but he will have a mandate to take the country where we need to go.

Thomas Friedman makes a compelling case for having a big vision, communicating it clearly, and passionately pursuing it.

I'd like to suggest that this is a pretty solid recipe for success for any business or organization.

Or life, for that matter.

If your business or nonprofit has a Fan page, you might wonder if Shares, Likes, and Comments to and of your posts have an equivalent effect. Edgerank Checker posted today the results of an interesting study of more than 5500 Pages.

The answer is that comments and shares are MUCH more impactful to your business than likes. As much as 4-5 times more impactful.

The takeaway? Any interaction is good. But if you are going to invest the time and energy to engage - go deep. Have a real, authentic dialog with your Fans. Post excellent, useful content. Don't just go for the pithy Like link.

If you find your content isn't generating the deeper engagement of Sharing and Commenting, then use that as an opportunity to listen to your Fans, and focus, refine, and test your content strategy until you see some deeper engagement.