Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg was once famously quoted as saying that "A more open and connected world will help create...more authentic businesses and better products and services." That vision is already being realized, and its name is collaborative marketing.

Innovating in a service business works best if the innovations are: 1) Aligned with your core purpose, 2) Meet a future consumer need and 3) Can be executed by your organization.

The salesperson said, "We will only discuss price in person." Their unwillingness to share any pricing information raised a red flag. Was their pricing so offensive that they could not share it? Did they not have consistent pricing? Did they not price their meats by the pound?

It can be argued that a corporate sustainability program will only go as far as its meager budget allows. How can we be asked to change how consumers behave and investors invest?

Have you ever gotten nowhere over the phone with a manager, consumer relations person, or an automated help-line and just given up? Next time, be nice but determined on your quest for quality on the road to consumer power.

We like to put people into buckets so we can think about more of them at the same time, and one of the biggest buckets we use is "consumer." Ironically enough, people are "better consumers" when they're treated like anything but.

Here's a message to just about every private equity shop out there. There's a really simple way for you to make the billions in all your funds work smarter, harder and faster.

As much as we can plan and apply technologies and processes to each experience, we must be highly conscious of the fact that it's the customers' perceptions of these experiences that actually matter when the goal is to generate sales and build loyalty. So what matters to social customers?