But what’s more interesting from a psychological perspective is how each new iPhone release ups the fanatic interest of more and more people.  Last week the online reservation system for the phones crashed within hours of going up because 600,000 orders hit it so fast.  Then huge crowds turned out worldwide to buy them today, the day of the launch.

More than a need to have the new cool toy, people are clamoring for easier ways to communicate and connect.  With each new iPhone release consumers are compelled to have a better device with upgraded apps and features that help them to be social in better and faster ways.

Beyond this, the sense of community between iPhone users to share tips, geek out on technology and have fun is a reflection of types of people attracted to the Apple tribe. Apple understands the experience economy and Apple lovers love the products because they always deliver better experiences.

Last night in Boulder people began lining up outside the Apple Store at 4pm.  By 5:30 Matt Emmi, an Apple customer, had set up a huge Samsung screen that campers would use to play video games and their kids would use to watch movies like Wall-E.  Others were already sharing iPads, playing board games and going on food runs for strangers next to them in line. This set the context of a community sharing an event.

Here a ‘shot in the dark video’ of the scene with about 100 people at 11pm last night:

Click here to view the embedded video.

By 6am the crowd grew to over 500 people:

Click here to view the embedded video.

And then at 7am over 1,000 faithful Apple addicts were rewarded as the ‘Black Curtain Hiding Awesomeness” (as some labeled it) fell and the doors were opened. This video of how Apple launched iPhone 4 today, including the ceremonial reception of Michael Sitarzewski and Dave Taylor, the first customers in line, reflects how Apple understands the experience economy.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

You may have noticed that Facebook Fan Pages switched over to becoming “Like” pages instead this week.  That was only the beginning.  With a Facebook “Like” button that every website can install for free, you will now be able to show your interest in articles, bands, movies and every other type of content on the Internet.  Once you click “Like” on a piece of content it will automatically show up on your Facebook wall with a link back to the page that you like.

Because this is so easy, and will soon be ubiquitous wherever you go on the web, you will be bringing your friends with you to every site you visit.  When you click on a CNN article you will see which of your friends have “Liked” it before you. CNN is one of the first websites implementing the Facebook “Like” technology.

Facebook is now the fourth most-visited Web site in the world with over 500 million visitors a month. According to Nielsen Co., Facebook visitors spend more than five and a half hours each month on the site.

In essence, the biggest shift from this is that many people who do not participate very much on the social web outside of Facebook will now.  Imagine a year from now how much participation will be going on when you see a “Like” button on every web page.  People who have never bookmarked a website through Digg, Delicious or Stumble Upon will find it second nature to click the “Like” button on Fandango while purchasing movie tickets.

Everyone is an influencer and now we will be influencing each other at warp speed.  The top down model of companies with the most money and power controlling a monologue of information is dead.  As brands interact more with consumers through all social media channels their outreach will deliver greater benefits.  We have moved from monologue marketing to dialogue marketing.  Now we are entering a new phase where community marketing is gaining traction because technology is laying the highway for it to happen naturally.

To better understand the changes coming with Facebook’s Open Graph, read Jeremiah Owyang’s excellent post with a matrix breaking down all the implications. To delve deeper into How to Delete Facebook Applications (and Why You Should) check out Read, Write, Web. To discover how Facebook’s Open Web will affect your privacy read this Mashable article. This is only the beginning of what you will be reading about regarding Facebook’s Open Graph. It’s changing how we use the Internet.

Instead, I’ll wait 6 months and they’ll probably release one with a camera, video capabilities or more features.  For now I’ll enjoy learning about what’s fun and great about the first version by playing with my friend’s iPads.  So far it  just seems like a larger screen to enjoy apps on, but I’m sure that theory will be proved wrong.

Follow my friend Matt Emmi’s blog as he documents his experience of using the iPad to replace his crashed laptop.  He’s moved all of his data to the cloud through Mobile Me and others apps and feels confident he can pull this off.

For now, we can all enjoy a moment of zen from our friends at Blendtec who have blended everything from glow sticks to Chuck Norris.  Now, it’s the iPad’s turn…

Click here to view the embedded video.

The latest 2010 breakthrough prediction is that next year is the year that social media ROI will finally be measurable.  This will be a great leap forward for advertisers if it comes true.  It will also solidify the shift from traditional media domination of ad buys over to a large increase in those funds moving to work with individual online influencers.

My company predicts that, based on our extensive research, 2011 will be the Year of The Influencer.  Therefore, it’s not a surprise that I agree that 2010 will be the year that social media ROI can finally be measured.  One reason why I expect that to happen is that we’re one of the companies working hard to build the structures to make it happen.

Aside from that, the biggest question about social media in 2009, especially from people new to the field, was “what’s the ROI on a social media marketing campaign?”  The analytical tools like Klout, Radian6, Twitter Grader and Filtrbox are getting sharper by the day in measuring online influence in ways that actually matter to answer that question.

Brands are just starting to seek out channel partnerships and influencers who can be brand advocates.  In the last six months this space has become white hot and is currently in it’s infancy.

Remember that ‘Twitter’ was declared the most used word in 2009 and ‘influencer’ may be on it’s heels for that title in 2010 or 2011.  When those two words create the return on investment everyone’s looking for, then the evolution of media power from traditional media to social media will begin it’s second phase fueled by multiple models of profitability.

But after seeing this video in a great post by Jeremiah Owyang, I had to pass it on.  Besides, the video was shot on the Pearl Street Mall in Boulder, highlighting part of what I love about living here.

Other videos I’ve seen show pointing an iPhone at a neighborhood, seeing which houses are for sale, the sale prices and then watching video tours of the houses you like.  Brightkite has a new Layar app for phones using Android and for iPhone 3GS phones.

Eventually you’ll probably be able to scan any environment and as people walk by you’ll see their bios, social networks and other information identifying them. It’s a little spooky, but I’m guessing that there will be ways to choose whether or if you’re information will be accessible.  The future is now.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I don’t want to hate my AT&T cell phone service and the iPhone monopoly, but I do.  To be fair, I know people on the East Coast who love AT&T and can’t stand Verizon.  But in Colorado, Verizon service is awesome and AT&T is way below par.  I’m talking about constant dropped calls, conversations that cut in and out and lack of internet access.

Apparently this is true in Austin and other areas too.

Even though I mostly use my phone for data and hardly use the voice option I have to pay a premium price for it.  The lowest voice plan is 450 minutes so I can’t even lower that to 150 which is still more than I use.

But that’s not the biggest issue.  The worst thing is that I work from home and can’t even access the Apple App store much less talk to someone on the phone from that location.

The AT&T customer service representative I spoke with today pulled up my location and said, “Yes, in your area we have low to no service, but if you walk 10 feet away it could be better. I see that there’s a note to add a transmitter near you, but there is no date scheduled for when it will be built” (Awesome!  And I have a note to give you a million dollar check, but I don’t know when it will be written.)

Me – “Actually, I’ve tried using the phone while I walk my dog in the neighborhood and while driving and it’s bad for at least a 2 mile radius.”

AT&T – “Well, your options are to either cancel your service or pay the full monthly amount.”

Me – “Can I get a discounted monthly rate since I’m not able to use your service or my phone most of the time from my location?”

AT&T – “No sir.”

Me – “But AT&T has a monopoly on the iPhone service contract.  If I cancel my AT&T service then I can’t use my iPhone at all.  I’m not able to use Verizon or another carrier that DOES have great service in my area.  The iPhone is what I want, it’s your insufficient service that I don’t want. So what you’re saying is that I have to pay the full price for monthly service even though AT&T can read the fact that I can’t get decent service from you where I live. ”

AT&T – “Yes, we have the iPhone contract until at least late 2010.  Please understand that the iPhone device is very complicated and is very challenging to service.”

Me – “Then why did AT&T sign an exclusive service contract for service that you admit you’re not able to provide? That’s like signing a contract to provide ice cream in the desert when you have refrigerated trucks that can’t keep the temperature cold enough to keep the ice cream from melting.”

….and on it went and I received a lovely $27 discount for one month though I’ve lived with crap service for 13 months so far.

So I’m just another blogger sharing yet another story about incompetent customer service from a corporation that quite frankly doesn’t give a damn and doesn’t take responsibility for not delivering on what you have to pay for.

Conclusion: iPhone – awesome.  AT&T in Colorado – crap to non-existent service in most areas. AT&T wins short term profit and long term horrible word of mouth & faces a mass exodus in late 2010, customers lose, bloggers write about it and it doesn’t change.  Excuse me now while I leave this in the past and move on to focus on issues I have some control over with hopes that I can go back to Verizon in late 2010.

One of the most significant shifts that social media is driving is the spirit of collaboration rather than competition in some business spaces and in intellectual property systems.  These are both driving scalable innovations that will benefit everyone.  What you don’t know won’t hurt you, but it will leave you in the dust as life moves forward with amazing changes.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Stats from Video (sources listed below by corresponding #)

1. By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers….96% of them have joined a social network
2. Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web
3. 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media
4. Years to Reach 50 millions Users:  Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months…iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
5. If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 4th largest between the United States and Indonesia
6. Yet, some sources say China’s QZone is larger with over 300 million using their services (Facebook’s ban in China plays into this)
7. comScore indicates that Russia has the most engage social media audience with visitors spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month – Vkontakte.ru is the #1 social network
8. 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction
9. 1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum
10. % of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees….80%
11. The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
12. Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres have more Twitter followers than the entire populations of Ireland, Norway and Panama
13. 80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
14. Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé…In 2009 Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen
15. What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…
16. The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
17. Wikipedia has over 13 million articles…some studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English
18. There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
19. 54% = Number of bloggers who post content or tweet daily
20. Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth
21. If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $156.23 per hour
22. Facebook USERS translated the site from English to Spanish via a Wiki in less than 4 weeks and cost Facebook $0
23. 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
24. 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
25. People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services  than how Google ranks them
26. 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations
27. Only 14% trust advertisements
28. Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
29. 90% of people that can TiVo ads do
30. Hulu has grown from 63 million total streams in April 2008 to 373 million in April 2009
31. 25% of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video…on their phone
32. According to Jeff Bezos 35% of book sales on Amazon are for the Kindle when available
33. 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation because we no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
34. In the near future we will no longer search for  products and services they will find us via social media
35. More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook…daily.
36. Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like David Ogilvy Listening first, selling second
37. Successful companies in social media act more like party planners, aggregators, and content providers than traditional advertiser

If you still don’t understand what social media is this will help:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Most airlines only seem to be getting worse.  Unfortunately for them it’s happening in a sea of social media where consumers voice their experiences. Andrew Hyde and Frontier have been sparring for months now through his Frontier Fail website.  Brad Feld’s post today was on Taking a Month Off of Air Travel. And then there’s the infamous United Breaks Guitars video that made their stock plummet:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Unfortunately for us there’s not much choice since most of them are tanking when it comes to customer service.  Virgin and Jet Blue may be the exceptions to the rule.

I received an email a few days ago for Frontier Airlines with the headline “We turned Colorado Day into Colorado Week” offering fares listed between $34-$139 each way.  Sounds like a great deal right?

Well, then I read the fine print, and by fine print I mean the real details that for some reason need to be written in 4 point font that you need  a microscope to read.  Both convenient and awesome!  Here’s what it said:

Fares do not include passenger facility fees of up to $9 each-way, the September 11th Security Fee of up to $5 each-way or fees of $3.60 per segment. A segment is defined as one takeoff and one landing. Fares to/from Alaska do not include arrival/departure tax of $8 each way. Seats are limited and certain flights and/or days of travel may be unavailable at these prices, especially during busy travel periods. Tickets are non-refundable and non-transferable, but may be reissued for up to a $150 change fee (depending on the fare type purchased) plus any applicable difference in fare so long as your flight segment(s) is canceled prior to scheduled departure time, otherwise the ticket(s) and all monies will be forfeited. Previously purchased tickets may not be exchanged for these special fare tickets. If you choose to purchase an Economy ticket through our Reservations Center or at a Frontier airport location, there will be a $25 ticketing service fee. Fares and schedules are subject to change without notice and other restrictions may apply. Based on August 2009 schedule some flights are operated by Lynx Aviation. Be sure to read and understand the rules for checked baggage.

*US: Fares shown are each way for off peak travel. Off Peak is Monday-Thursday and Saturday through 1/15/10. Fares are slightly higher other days of the week. Blackout dates of 9/3- 4 and 9/7/2009, 11/24-25, and 11/28-30/2009, 12/18-19, 12/22-24, 12/27-29, and 12/31/2009, and 1/2-3/2010 apply. Purchasing an Economy fare may result in additional baggage fees: a first bag may be checked for a fee of $15 per person and a second bag may be checked for a fee of $25 per person. Service to/from El Paso, TX and Grand Junction, CO ends 9/13/09. Seasonal service to/from Anchorage, AK ends 9/21/09. Seasonal service to/from Jackson Hole, WY ends 9/13/09.

So, if you’re going to Alaska with two bags not on a black out date and purchase tickets at an airline counter you can add $69 to your ticket price.  This includes things like a ‘facility fee’ and a ‘security fee.’  I think Ticketmaster started this 20 years ago with their ‘convenience fee’ of $5-$10 added to every concert ticket.

Airlines – if you’re going to charge these fees, just be upfront and honest about it.  Yes, they’re lame and that’s why  you guys shamefully hide them in 4 point font and doublespeak language.  We get it, we don’t like it and we can’t do anything about it.

As a marketer I learned the magic of using the words ‘starting at’ before a price a long time ago.  Those $34 tickets are probably only from Denver to Colorado Springs.  Almost no one is going to get a $34 one way airline ticket and who expects an airline to make any profit on a ticket that low anyhow.

It turned out that their rate for the flight I wanted to New York was $299 (before all the hidden extra charges) and I found the same flight on Us Air for $213.

We understand that businesses have costs and are fine paying a fair price for a service, but please stop raping us with quasi-hidden fess.  My final request for all airlines is for your next steps to not include charging extra for having to deliver lost bagage or making the oxygen masks deploy only after a credit card is inserted in the seatback scanner.

Last night I was talking with a product marketer in his 60′s who is just starting to look at getting on Facebook and Twitter because his kids are encouraging him to do it.  He was asking me about how Twitter is helpful to businesses and I remembered a big generational lap I’ve seen in how we frame the value of social media.

After I explained the revolutionary aspect of easily and exponentially building relationships with customers and targeted people his response was, “but what company has the time to do that?”  To which my response was, “What company doesn’t have time to do better customer service and build loyalty and lifetime value with their customers?”

This is a key hurdle for many companies to jump.  When you see how Zappos, Comcast, Dell, small design firms and others are exploding their businesses with social media you see a few examples of how dozens of companies are creating loyalty.  It’s not hundreds or thousands yet because most companies still don’t ‘get’ it.

We’re moving out of a broadcast (telling) marketing environment into a relationship (listening and then sharing) marketing environment.  This is very hard for bigger, older, traditional companies and industries to understand.  So when they see these new tools they’re still thinking in old ways and trying to use them in old ways that are ineffective and counterproductive.

In the 80′s we began complaining that the promise of technology giving us more leisure time was a myth.  What people aren’t seeing today is that social networking is solving that problem, or at least getting much more benefit from our time, by creating more frequent connections to people around the world.

Twitter facilitates more in real life connections with people in your tribe than monthly networking events ever hoped for.  Facebook allows people to share personal updates with hundreds of friends in a split second.  YouTube allows us to learn from TED videos without attending the conference. Personal blogs allow people get deeper understanding of your personal and professional talents.  And there are many other benefits to these and the dozens of other social networking sites.

I’m teaching unemployed people how to find job leads and communicate with HR directors and C level executives through Twitter.  This was not possible 3 years ago.  Social media will evolve into tools that help companies design product offerings based on direct consumer requests instead of unscientific market research in the future.

The flow has shifted.  It’s time to learn how to befriend customers and treat them like citizens rather than broadcast messages about your product’s greatness to them like sheepish consumers. Companies will soon learn to engage with their audience on a peer level or they will be out of business.

Would you like to have the formula he gets paid $12,500 to put into use for Fortune 500 Companies?  Are you curious as to how this formula is used to influence your buying decisions?

Well then, today’s your lucky day, isn’t it? You’ll notice this formula whenever you read a sales letter or an ad. Remember that the key to writing a sales letter is that the job of every paragraph is to make the reader want to read the next paragraph.  Now that you know this you may catch yourself thinking of this when you hypnotically continue to watch an infomercial or read an enticing offer.

This is the secret skeleton used to write the most successful ads that grab your attention and motivate you to give out those credit card digits.

1. ATTENTION – Write a headline that GRABS your reader. Fear or curiosity are good places to start. For example: “Ex-Truck Driver Makes $21,815 a Month Doing What You’re Not”

2. INTEREST – List the benefits of your product or service. Acknowledge their problem while showing you have the solution. Show that you’ve been where they are and you can help them.

3. CREDIBILITY – Mention referrals and references of how others have benefited from your product or service.

4. PROVE – Show testimonials with full names and cities or countries. Offer a risk-free guarantee.

5. BELIEVABLE – Give your full contact information. Make it easy for them to buy with no hassles. Let them know why they should trust you.

6. SCARCITY – Have limited offers, special time sensitive sales, discounts on a few products in limited quantity.

7. ACTION – Ask for the sale. Make it simple.

8. WARN – Let them know the pain they’ll experience if they don’t use your product. i.e. If you’re selling a wrinkle cream let them know how dry their face will be and how much deeper their wrinkles will get without your product – if that’s true. Don’t lie.

9. NOW – Tell them why they should buy right now.

That’s it. Now you’ve got the skeleton that the best copywriters in the world use.  If you’re a marketer this won’t be gold, it will be platinum.

If you’re a consumer, this is a platinum shield to help you take a deep breath and question if you REALLY need that product or service before parting with your hard earned cash.  Read the formula a few times and you’ll start to notice it in the structure of commercials, the language of print advertising and the content of major marketing pitches that effectively get you to buy whatever they’re sellin’.