Another episode of As The E-Book Turns wrapped this week, with Amazon locked in a page-turning battle with the publishing industry. The plot twists are many, but here's a quick outline: Amazon wants to continue charging $10 for e-book versions of most new titles and bestsellers, but the industry's leading publishers think that price is too low. Macmillan, for instance, wants $13 to $15 for most of its e-book titles, a demand that Amazon conceded to last week. Hachette, another major publisher, also plans to drop Amazon's $9.99 price model, and would rather see many e-books in the $15 range. HarperCollins has made a similar move. Meanwhile, the industry just gained an ally in Apple, which has agreed to let publishers set the price of e-books designed for its new iPad tablet. It's no surprise that publishers would want higher e-book prices, particularly for hot new bestsellers. But their strong-arm efforts to eradicate Amazon's consumer-friendly pricing aren't a good way to grow a nascent e-book market (and e-reader) market.

The challenge for the existing publishing industry today is the same faced by many businesses and industries. So many rules have changed, yet leadership fails to see a way to avoid the pain dealing with the change would require. Hence the chest beating among publishers which amounts to digging their heels in for a fight they cannot win. Its all about economics. In a business where barriers to entry used to be up front costs in promotion, development, distribution and production, new business models have emerged to render the past value of publishers increasingly mute.

Look at Blurb for instance. Watch their CEO Eileen Gittins who founded the online book publishing service after she had an "awful, brutal" experience trying to get her own book of photography published. That generated a "personal passion" in her for the idea that anyone should be able to publish a book with high-quality photographs or other art work. Less than three years later, Blurb has become a phenomenon -- publishing more than 80,000 titles in 2007 and creating a community of book lovers that numbers 250,000. As I mention, the debate between publishers and kindle amounts to the wrong debate about the industries future.

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; and
3. 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media.

There can be no doubt that social media is becoming a significant method of communicaiton and connection for people across the globe. But what does that mean for organizations ? What are some of the implications ?

Dion Hinchcliffe's recent post Social CRM, Ground Zero for Enterprise 2.0 in 2010 does a good job of sharing some forward looking thinking about how organizations must reassess their methods of interacting with customers, partners and employees based on social media trends. For more details on these trends watch the video below.

Social CRM: Enterprise 2.0

At its core businesses must redesign their method of delivering support and interaction based on these new mainstream communication and collaboration tools. As Hinchcliffe notes, Enterprise 2.0 is a new and popular term that describes using lightly structured social environments to collaborate and capture knowledge in a discoverable, reusable way. Typically, these tools are highly social and freeform, so that they can adapt to the problem at hand. Enterprise 2.0 is generally applied in a business setting between at least one to three types of participants: workers, trading partners, and customers. Social CRM fits the bill for all of these criteria.

What Does This Mean ?

Michael Krigsman came away with the following perspective in his recent interview with CRM guru Paul Greenberg:

Successful customer relationships are based on interacting, cooperating, and collaborating with customers to provide mutual value. Technology is an important enabler but is secondary to relationship.

There’s been some question wether Social CRM is part of the broader Enterprise 2.0 story. Reviewing GetSatisfaction for examples from major, well-known firms might help in evaluating that question. Regardless, with saleforce.com's new chatter platform among other CRM's that are enabling social media integration, the practice is coming to the mainstream and deserving of consideration. Fundamentally, one must reconsider the paradigms of roles, functions and methodologies that are represented in the graphic below in order to successfully deploy these new tools. More than the technology, leadership's thinking about interactions is critical to evolving to this new higher plane.

Love it or hate it, the IPad is just one example of many more highly functional internet connected devices with more features delivered at lower and lower prices to come. These devices are highly mobile and will get smaller, becoming more imbeded into our daily lives.

The impact of products like iPad, combined with an increasingly available high speed Internet grid will eventually revolutionize each and every business model and organization existing today - and sooner than one might think.

When one reads analysis of the device, like Rueter's article " Publishers embrace iPad, but revolution unlikely", it shows how many continue to measure the success of an evolutionary product in terms of old paradigms. The device will not rescue a failing publishing industry, such is hope for the dying. It and its off spring to come, however, will lead the way to completely change how people produce, distribute and digest content; leaving the extant industry vanquished in its wake. Just look at the explosion of devices reflected in the graphic below.

The same is true for vast segments of the entertainment industry. When one reads that the iPad device underwhelmed Hollywood, people should laugh aloud. These devices were not designed to save the dinosaurs of that industry. However, they will be a part of redefining the entire method in which entertainment content is created, distributed and deployed as the demonstration below reflects.

Let's see the iPad for what it is. Not a savior but as part of a progression of innovations that will ultimately change everything.

My talk on technology and social media adoption and its potential impact on the health of military personnel and their families led to a series of conversations with the rank and file of the Army's MWR community. No matter the venue, there exists a great opportunity to educate leadership on how solutions like cloud computing, social media, and wellness technologies can be adopted to positively impact the missions of organizations at much lower cost than extant methods. While the rapid pace of change happenning today makes adoption a challenge, we've got to do a better job of unleashing the potential solutions offer to solve important problems. That is why the symposium was such a great event.  Watch this video. As John Chambers of Cisco points out, organizations can change how they fundamentally work to become more productive.

The ALA also sponsored Dr. James Sallis, who spoke on environmental considerations relating to wellness. His talk was very interesting and pointed out important facts regarding how simple changes in the manner which communities are designed can have a meaingful and lasting impact on wellness. Great work and worth a review.

My thanks to the men and women of our armed services and the leadership of the ALA and MWR. I particulary thank my father, who recently passed away , for being the stellar military officer and distinguished pilot and academy graduate he was. He would have enjoyed attending the symposium and meeting the fine and dedicated professionals I had the privledge to address.

B2B or B2C marketers, eager to know how social media fits into the marketing mix, can use Social Technographic Profiles of decision-makers to design marketing programs that not only capitalize on emerging social behaviors but also fundamentally change the nature of the marketing relationship between buyers and sellers.

A recent webinar “Understanding Your Customers’ Social Behaviors“ contained some great content and practical tips on how to approach social media spaces. The slides and a video recording are available herefrom Slideshare.net (for slides) - see below - and drop.io (for the recording).

There is this cool tool from Forrestor research (below) that enables you to evaluate the social profile of B2B customers.

Also, there is on-going and vibrant conversation taking place on sites like Twitter, using the hashtag #socialgraphics. Check it out.

By 2037 nearly one in three households in the U.S. will be headed by someone over the age of 65.  Household size will decline across the board with a large share of the population living in one or two person households.  Middle and upper middle classes will shrink the share the most and these consumers fuel the majority of demands for consumer products including fitness and wellness services.

2. Businesses Focus Will Need to Be on Market Share

The share of households that have children will continue to decline as a result of an aging population. By the middle 2020s, the share of U.S. households with children under 18 will fall below 30%.  This is a key demographic for fitness, wellness and other consumer and product industries. As a result players will increasingly have to focus on retaining their customers and taking customers away from others in a stable to shrinking marketplace.

3. Messaging to a Multi-Cultural Marketplace Will be Essential

Multi-cultural marketing will be critical when promoting a business. The majority of population growth in the U.S. will come from new immigrants and the children they have in this country. Since most immigrants are young, families with children will become more ethnic, more quickly, than the total population. By 2025, the majority of families with children in the U.S. will be multi-cultural. Less than half of families with children will be native born non-Hispanic White.  The industry will need to appeal to this emerging demographic.

4. New Needs Will Emerge From A Maturing Market

Boomers will rewrite what it means to be old as they have rewritten what it means to be children and adults.  According to Daniel Pink, author of DRIVE, "The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us", 100 Boomers turn 60 every 15 minutes and they are seeking "Purpose" for the rest of their lives.  This is a demographic that research suggests is connected online 98% of the time ! Hence my item 6 below.

5. Spending on Consumer Goods & Services Will Decline

As population slows in the U.S. Household size will decline across the board and so will consumer spending. The impact of these two trends means that after 2020, per household spending will start to fall.

6. To Be Competitive Social Media Will be an Important Tool

Social Media is a missing trend.  Those competitors that have an experimental sense of social media's possibilities will benefit.  There is no clear blueprint for how to proceed. Social media strategies are a new frontier. The efforts are flexible, motivational and engaging when done well. And, if you make a mistake, they are pretty easy to correct. Reach your customers more effectively and less expensively.