There are great articles all over the web about the amazing new features of the iPhone 4.  There are also almost as many articles about the problems the iPhone 4  has.

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.

A conversation simply about Twitter and Facebook is the wrong one to have when discussing social media, even though it’s the one most people are having.

Social media has revolutionized how people connect and communicate. It is now a normal, everyday activity to connect with virtual strangers in real time via the social web – much in the same way you may connect with personal friends and family via the phone or by email. Social media can effectively reach thousands of people through a single action – such as a blog post, activity update on Facebook or Twitter “tweet.”

If you connect online with a group of people who share your interests, such as gardening, motorcycles, football, reading, music or underwater basket weaving, then you are participating in a Trust Community – wherepeople having a common interest interact with one another specifically to discuss and share information on the shared topic.

Usually, in a Trust Community, an Influencer – sort of like the community mayor, may serve one or more roles, such as recruiting new members, holding members to an ethical and courtesy standard, or disseminating the largest volume of information to other members. There may also be more than one Influencer in a Trust Community where roles are shared.

With the latest advances in social networking technologies, people are naturally searching out and finding others within their interest tribes.  In absence of the geographical and time constraints that we experienced before the Internet, it is now possible to instantly connect with people on other continents, build reciprocal personal and business relationships and share information and ideas with thousands of people having the same passions and interests.

Read the full article here.

I recently had a meeting with the other two founders of Oxstein Design Labs to get our messaging together before we launch a lot of what we’re doing to the world. We already have great partners and interested clients that are helping us to create our initial offerings which is nice place to start.

A big piece of this will be creating an open source framework to help people build, manage, measure and understand Trust Communities.  Beyond that, we’ll be playing in the spaces of tech, social media, education and entertainment. I put up our initial blog today.  It’ll be moved to our website when it launches very soon, but it’s time we started to share our vision and begin to connect to our tribe.

After being either a consultant or an employee for a couple of decades, it’s very exciting to be building a company that’s fully aligned with my interests and skill set with top level players.  Working with people who are smarter than me in their fields of expertise and who also value fun and integrity as much as money is a true joy.

When we met for the first time in person after months of Skyping, phone calls and emails to officially kick this company and project off the ground it was amazing to note how each of our respective talents came together and mesh so well to create and build our collaborative vision.  I’ll roll more of that out in the coming weeks and months.

It’s a change to be traveling a lot more and working the hours of a start up entrepreneur as we build the parent company and the companies under it’s umbrella.  I’ll be meeting interesting people as well as speaking and presenting much more.  (Blog posts and Flikr photos will undoubtedly be flowing like a waterfall.)  But most importantly, I’ll be doing work that fills my soul as it helps others to see and enjoy the bigger picture of what the social media revolution and niche Trust Communities are doing to transform our lives.

I’m very lucky.  Communication, relationships, technology and collaboration have been my loves all my life.  We are now at a point where these interests are overtaking the culture of control and competition that we were born into.  It’s a great time to be alive for someone like me.

As I blog about this and other adventures it will be great to connect with you on deeper levels than I have in previous blog posts.  My heart will have more to say as it’s song develops on this journey.  I’m getting for the first time how fun business can be.  It’s fun because when you play with the right people to do the right things that contribute in the right ways it’s a blast.

Photo source: Bilal Al-badry’s blog

The main conversations around social media are misguided by debating the usefulness of the tools based on people with limited knowledge misusing them.  Like all human communication, some of what people use the tools for will be nonsense and some will be valuable.

How people individually use social networking tools is the issue, but the focus is usually on whether the tools are worthwhile.  Don’t blame revolutionary tools for how dumb people misuse them.

The quality of the questions you ask and the quality of the conversations you participate in will dramatically affect the quality of your life. That said, the main questions around social media are the wrong ones.  Here are some examples:

“Why should I care about someone posting that they went to the bathroom on Twitter?”

“How can anything meaningful be written in 140 characters?”

“Who has time for that social media stuff?  I”m too busy for that.”

Our old filters of perception and lack of understanding about the bigger picture of what’s happening is misleading a lot of people.  Beyond that, I’ve found that if you aren’t educated on how social media tools and niche communities help your life, you probably won’t ‘get it’ when you experiment with it.

After not ‘getting’ Twitter for almost a year, I asked a friend who was building her business with it to show me the value because I knew I was missing something.  Just having someone tell me about Tweetdeck, hashtags, retweets, direct messages and explain how she used the tool made me ‘get it’ when I started to use it.

Most people over 25 don’t realize how personal branding, social web technology, smart phone technology and niche communities are evolving personal & business communications – which is how you build, manage and operate your personal and business lives.  We are fundamentally changing how we connect, communicate and collaborate.

The impact of this change is like the original impact of radio and TV when they were invented.  The level of usefulness of Twitter & Facebook is the wrong conversation.  That’s the micro conversation and it confuses people who aren’t educated on how these platforms can add value to them personally.

This is like trying to explain the value of personal computing to people in 1980 when they said, “but my typewriter has always worked fine.” (Can those people imagine life without a personal computer or the internet today?) Or explaining what a car could do to people in 1910 who said, “but I have a horse.”  It isn’t easy to understand for non-users until well after the technology moves from early adopters to the mainstream.

A lot of your friends probably don’t use Twitter today. They also probably didn’t use email in 1994, but they do every day now.  …and they might not in 5 or 10 years as it becomes antiquated technology. Twitter, Facebook and other social networking technology will be fused into an entire socialized internet along with many other technologies people do and don’t use yet.

The bigger conversation is the one to be having.  The one that acknowledges that tribes, niche trust communities, technologies like Google Wave and Google Sidewiki, old business systems failing, how Generation Y (which will be the dominant U.S. population as of 2010) operates & much more are the leading indicators that tell us what’s coming next.

What you now do on Facebook you’ll be doing on every website & it will all connect in ways you can’t fathom.  If no one has explained this & you don’t use the power of Twitter & Twitter search in your current relationships you can’t understand this.  In five to ten years everyone will get it because, like people under 25 today, it will be the water we all swim in.

One of the best marketing books ever written is Seth Godin’s latest: Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us.

In reading this book I was reminded of the tribes I’ve gravitated to and been a part of throughout my life.  They ranged from a church youth group, cliques in school, friends who liked the same music, peers working in the same industry to people who shared similar interests, ideas or beliefs.  Think of the tribes you’ve ran with as you grew up, moved to different cities, started a family (or not) and changed jobs or careers.

The idea of tribes is nothing new, but with social media like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, tribes are larger and more powerful than ever.  And because they are self-chosen groups based on relationships, the likability, and trust factors that lead to persuasion coalesce much faster than traditional marketing campaigns searching for eyeballs.

In the last week someone created a Facebook group for a teen night club I went to in the 80′s.  This idea had someone else start a photo page for the Las Vegas 80′s music scene I was a part of which in turn caused me to start a Facebook Group for KUNV, the radio station the scene was based around where I was the Program Director.  I’ve reconnected with over 50 people in 3 days from a long lost tribe that’s over 20 years old because of the connective power of Facebook to rekindle and build relationships.

In the 2008 election the Obama campaign had the highest number of followers on Twitter, over 100,000.  This was a large part of making their campaign successful.  They got their messages out instantly to their target market (who all opted in voluntarily) multiple times each day.  This was one major factor in making the Obama tribe feel that they were a part of the action.  And they were, even the ones who don’t know Twitter exists.

There’s a lot more that will be said about the power of tribes and how we’re now in a time of leaders (anyone in the tribe can lead others) and followers rather than a time of managers and employees or people with big titles giving orders to others.

Just read Seth’s book.   It’s a fast engaging read with information broken down into simple ideas and story chunks.

Read the review from Publisher’s Weekly here: Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us and read Seth’s awesome blog

“Tribes is a must read for all of us. It’s up to each one of us to lead in today’s new kind of world.”
—Former U.S. senator Bill Bradley

Click here to view the embedded video.