Mitch Joel, in my view, is a good guy. He's smart and his written and intelligent and popular book. We seem to agree on many issues. But one place where we are not joined at the hip is on our current views of Apple Computer.

Mitch thinks that all this negative noise--the Gizmodo incident, Ellen DeJeneris, FCC antitrust investigation, John Stewart and the most recent "antennagate" has done nothing to hurt the company.

Mitch sends evidence almost daily. He reports record lines in front of the San Francisco Apple Store, record sales for the year, and so on and so forth. Mitch offered to bet me $1,000 that a year from now, Apple will emerge unscathed from the current avalanche of unfavorable coverage. The loser would give the money to a favorite charity.

I am in no position to be gambling $1,000. Besides, unlike Mitch, I am not so very sure how all this will come out.

Someone else tweeted me, "Apple may be doing bad PR, but people don't care. I consider that an oxymoronic statement. PR, as I learned and practiced it, is about relationships with publics, not about hits from a press release or any such tactical nonsense.

Lately, Apple has been consistently doing a style of PR, that has surprised, angered and disappointed some people. I am one of them. At times I've considered them arrogant. At times they have played the part of the bully.

So long as they are the only ones making brilliant products, they can get away with such behavior. But the market is changing. Others have come out with very good phones and history suggests that those competitors will keep making better and better phones and with all that competition prices and margins are likely to slip.

This is where the PR gaffes come in.  PR shapes how people feel about a company. They involve trust. On rare occasions PR, has a dramatic, sudden impact on a company's market position. Usually the process is slower than that.

For a very large company the erosion can take a very long time. It took General Motors, for example, more than 20 years, to hit the rocks and they coupled bad PR  with building shoddy products.

Apple still builds fine products. But now there is a wart on the nose of the Apple hero image. Now, people who have not yet purchased an iPhone for the first time, may look at other options. Now, people who have contracts with AT&T expiring may shop around.

There is already a trickle of erosion. I know that because a small handful of folks on Twitter have told me they've switched or will.  I do not think the number will swell dramatically immediately.

But I think that if Apple does not change how it converses with its publics soon,  there is an excellent chance that it will begin feeling a loss of repeat customers and see new customer stray. I think that it's vendor-friendly service pricing [They get a share of AT&T's outrageous take] will go down and that impacts the bottom line.

In my view Apple needs to vastly upgrade the way it conducts conversations with customers.  Currently, its demonstration of responsiveness is Steve Jobs reading cherry-picked emails sort of the way the late Perry Como used to read song requests on his TV show in the late 1950s.

What Jobs is doing is performance-oriented, not conversation-oriented. It wows a few people for a short period of time, but most folk understand that it's hokey.

There are thousand, perhaps millions of people who now have fear, uncertainty and doubt about Apple. The best way to offset that is to join the popular social networks and to start using blogs and podcasts in a meaningful way.

We need to start seeing people who work at Apple, who are passionate about their work, who care about user concerns and who are not Steve Jobs.

I reduced my bet with Mitch Joel from $1,000 down to one drink, based on results of Apple sales/profit numbers one year from now. I am not extremely certain of winning. A large company is like a supertanker, running on an open throttle. It takes a lot of time and distance to change its direction. It takes a lot of time and distance also to change user perception.

What I am absolutely certain about is that Apple was in a much stronger market position six months ago than it is today. And if it does not alter course, the supertanker that is Apple Computer will eventually discover it is headed directly toward rocky shoals.

By then, it may be too late to alter course.

"Hello Ladies," says the oh-so-manly Old Spice guy. "Does your man look like me? No. Can he smell like me. Yes."

What a great combo. The Old Spice guy is both a spoof and at the same time an extremely cool and compelling reason to splash your face with an after shave lotion that chances are your grand daddy used to woo your grandma.

The Old Spice guy is Isaiah Mustafa,  a retired  football star. He clearly hopes the spots will leverage him into a new acting career. I think he has a shot.  I also think Proctor & Gamble has a great shot of resurrecting a 72-year-old aftershave.

This is all well and good, but from my editorial perspective, the importance of the Old Spice guy is that he is the most successful fusion of traditional advertising with social media to date.

The 30-second spot ran for the first time July 7 on national TV. I don't know how many people saw it there, but the spot has been viewed 5.5 million times on YouTube. Mustafa has made a whole batch of Your Tube spots that have been view an addition 6 million times. Many of the spots are in response to comments left to him on his Facebook account or Twitter where he has about 45,000 followers.

He's fast and funny on Twitter. He flirts without ever going over the line. He feels like a guy's guy. It seems to be just Mustafa, without admen or marketer mucking up what is his fabulous bantering ability.

This is brilliant integrated marketing. It pulls elements of the traditional Old Spice ads. But where the guy used to ride off on a white horse, now it's a motorcycle. The spot ends with the familiar whistle that Spice ads have had for years.

It has been a very long time since I have viewed any ads that are truly creative, and that brings me to what I fear the most about the Old Spice guy.

Shortly after P&G announces that Old Spice sales have boomed, little creative teams are going to be summoned into rooms and shown this ad.

"I want something like this for our client, and I want it by Tuesday," these teams will be told.  And thus this true original I fear is going to be followed by an endless parade of imitators.

What I would prefer seeing is the Old Spice guy serve as a new high bar for integrated advertising integration. Let's see someone outdo what has been done with this most memorable campaign.

By now you know, that there are some serious questions about the new iPhone 4 and its external wraparound antenna.

Perhaps the most damning of all was the credible and neutral Consumer Reports flunking it on reception tests that were reconfirmed by Engadget,

I have been following this issue rather closely. As far as the product itself goes, I am still among the many who tend to believe that this new iPhone 4 is the best iPhone ever offered. To me the revelation is that the crappy reception we have all so often blamed on AT&T was probably being caused by the iPhone and lying reception bars covered it up.

It seems that each damning report on the technology is offset by someone else.

This morning Marco Tabini tweeted me:

" Have you wondered how CR measured a *reception* problem w/o attaching wires to the phone? I have: http://⇥.ws/kf."

I read through his post saw a credible attack on the magazine's testing methods. It increased  my doubts of the problem's magnitude.

What we have is a legitimate controversy over a significant new product in the hottest of technology market segments. We have it at a time of mounting competition equaled by growing demand.

Any way you position it, Apple has tons depending upon it's success. And as the conversation ignites and amplifies, what is Apple doing? It is stonewalling and suppressing the words of its customers.

If they are actually listening to the volume and tone of conversation, then they are doing a better job of keeping it a secret than they did of keeping the iPhone 4 itself a secret.

Reports are up and have been reconfirmed that Apple forums--or "discussionsare" as the company calls them--is deleting all conversations about the Consumer Reports piece.

Now, Apple is not the most social of companies as you probably already know. But these discussions are the closest they come. I've used them and found them to be usually helpful. I have hoped that their success would open the door further into social media forays for Apple.

Instead this unilateral censorship is extending command and control policies into terrain where you don't usually see it. Oh es, companies review forums for appropriate behavior. You'll probably get your post deleted if you assert the CEO is having sex with a lower species, for example.

But users discussing issues and concerns with other users and perhaps a company representative is what forums have been about for better than 20 years.

I have been critical of Apple in recent months, because of tactics that seem extremely selfish and heavy-handed. And yet this type of stomping on legitimate customer voices sound more to me like the Chinese government than a company that built itself as an underdog champion who made cool stuff for independent people.

There are those who have been calling this the end of Apple Computer. That is silliness. Apple customers for the most part remain loyal and happy with the products. The company still has a long, long way to fall before the end can even be seen.

But they seem to be falling with accelerated velocity lately and I hope they veer off course before they do smash upon the pavements of Cupertino.

Lost sales may remain quite small. But Apple Computer would be wise to follow the Tipping Point subtitle advice: Little things can make a big difference and they can do it very, very quickly.

For some reason, I woke up this morning thinking about some of my least successful speaking engagements.

Once I followed Craig Newmark at a conference of librarians. He told them he thought librarians were sexy and that he grew up spending his happiest hours in the libraries of Northern New Jersey.

This was a tough act to follow right there. But I got up with a PowerPoint presentation, telling a group of people who mostly took notes on yellow legal pads, how Google had forever disrupted their businesses. Not only did they hate what I had to say, but  was the last speaker on a long agenda and stood saying things they did not like while they envisioned Sunday traffic a busy airport.

That was a memorably bad experience, but the two worst I have done were standing before Silicon Valley venture capitalists in the last few months of 2009.

I was promoting my Twitterville book. Most of my presentation comprised of stories about small companies such as Stocktwits, CrowdSPRING and VergeNewMedia who had each used Twitter to get started. My takeaway message was that Twitter was one of a whole arsenal of social tools that could help a new company get on the playing field at greater speed and at lower price than was previously possible.

I had assumed the poker faces I saw in the audiences were because these guys traded in silicon-powered horses for a living. I was wrong. They were stern-faced because they had come looking for new opportunities in social media tool-making companies.

They wanted to invest in the next Facebook or Twitter.

Yet, my sense were these guys would have passed on the opportunity to invest in the first Facebook or twitter, because no one had yet drawn a social media box in their investment categories chart.

Years ago, I spent lots of time around VCs, much more than I do now. They were scary-level smart, just like the entrepreneurs. They invested in people and dreams and took great risks on technologies being built by teams who were still clueless on business plans.

These days, the VCs I meet are often more like bankers. They want a predictable return and they don't want much risk.

Such strategy is safe, but they will never, NEVER be in early on te next Facebook, Twitter or much else. The big money is to be made on starting categories that do not exist at the moment.

The place for  social media may still be a new company, particularly one who would like to stick it into the eye of an elephant like Facebook. But chances are far more likely, the next great startups will not be in social media as a category. They will be using social media to to build great, lucrative companies in other categories.

I

There's lots of speculation going around that Google Me will threaten Facebook. I have my doubts, because Google continues to be among the least social companies and that makes it hard to be a leader in a marketplace where you do not really participate.

The truth is that I am rooting for Google. In fact, I root for anyone who goes up against Facebook. Why? Because Facebook continues to break the agreements it makes with users when they sign on and because Facebook's uppermost management demonstrates continuing disdain for user privacy in service to the direct marketers it considers to be its real customers.

When I write about Facebook, as I so often do, many people agree with me and other suggest I get a clue. Facebook has 500 million users, I am reminded. People don't seem to care about these issues, I am told. Get a clue, I am advised.

It's funny. In my lifetime, I have witnessed so many companies displaced from absolutely dominant market positions into something considerably less than that. IBM actually owned the brand "PC," and conventional wisdom declared you just didn't get fired for selecting IBM Computers. In the 90s, Microsoft took over, and resistance to it, everyone heard, was futile. Now they are struggling to remain important. In automobiles, General Motors was so strong that it's CEO could declare that what's good for GM is good for the country. Now we the country wants GM to succeed because we own a significant piece of it.

The thing about dominant positions is that sooner or later they recede. Perhaps they could be sustained indefinitely, accept for the fact that invariably the dominant players get smug, and that complacence turns muscle into girth. That smugness makes them think they can decide what their customers want, rather than their customers should decide what the companies should make.

That brings us back to Facebook, a company that made it to world-dominator in record time. It is young and strong and so very, very confident in itself and its future. It is still growing.

It has already forgotten the power of its users. And because its users do not pay, Facebook never seems to regard them as customers.

And in this fact, there is a huge market opportunity. It's one that Google may focus onto, or one that a couple of kids in a garage or spare bedroom may glom onto.

To beat Facebook, just offer everything Facebook offers, just like Salesforce.com does with Chatter, which pretty much looks like Facebook, as do a great many enterprise community sites.

Just change one rule: make absolutely clear that your loyalty is to the customer, not the marketer. That you will honor any user agreements ever signed. You will always, ALWAYS put the user first.

You will not displace Facebook overnight. It will take a few years. You will have very humble beginnings, but the barriers to entry are quite low and the promises very high. And as sure as the day follows the night, you will overtake Facebook.

I have always liked telling stories.

In second grade, I told a story and the teacher made me stay after school for it. After that, I switched to nonfiction. Story telling stayed with me. I majored in it in college and then I became a journalist.

I remember my days as a newspaper reporter and editor with great joy colored by nostalgia. What slowly strangled the love, was that being a reporter required a vow of poverty. I have never found great virtue in poverty and I did not like it.

So I became a PR guy. This provided me with some level of affluence, at times, but it really threatened by dedication to nonfiction story telling. It also put me into a culture that loved bullet points far more than stories.

Then social media came along. More than half a lifetime had passed, but finally I found a venue that is made for story telling. Stories work so much better in most social media venues than do "three key points," or "six steps to a more perfect complexion."

The thing that you need to realize is the power of storytelling is in the simplicity of the tale.

In business, we very often have a tendency to try to sound as smart as we can. We try to show how much complexity goes into whatever it is we are selling. People want to know how easy it is to drive that car far more than they wish to understand the principals of torque.

Complexity is not memorable and it is rarely fun.Audiences often doze more and retain less.

But a story, ah, a story. I bet you can tell me a story you learned from your childhood and I bet you smiled when you recollected it. You can probably tell me who told or read it to you and where you were.

Can you do that with a recent business diagram, or PowerPoint bullets?

I didn't think so.

Dear Steve,

First off, thank you for all the brilliant, innovative products you created over the years. Thanks for demonstrating that hardware can be more than a commodity. Thanks for showing that software can be simultaneously simple, elegant and powerful.

And above all, thanks for being the star of the greatest comeback story of Silicon Valley history.

As a customer I have been consistently satisfied and often surprised by what was in the products I bought from you. I have forgiven you a certain arrogance in tone. For example, I was prepared to hate a support staff that required I make an appointment and stood under a sign calling them geniuses.

Except that they consistently have solved my problems, usually in prompt and painless fashion.

You are the underdog that got over the others; the Fortune 50 company with street creds; the rebel whose cause was to provide better stuff for the creative elements in the masses.

But Steve, just now, now as you become the biggest and most valuable of all personal computing companies, now you seem to be sprouting warts on your previously flawless face and I fear your image is turning uglier faster than you realize.

From March until today, there have been a series of missteps--not in product and business strategy--but in the sort of stuff that make people respect, trust and like you.

One night a geek left an iPhone prototype on a bar stool triggering a series of events that would have caused Apple Computer some minor embarrassment.

Steve, you should have shrugged, but instead, many of us feel like  you behaved like a schoolyard bully. The image of police storming a Gizmodo editor's door will be remembered as Apple police storming that door. When Ellen DeGeneres, did a cute and forgettable skit of her difficulties texting on an iPhone, Apple demanded an apology, it made it memorable. Many of us wondered when Jon Stewart if you were becoming "the man, if there were not more truth than humor in the question.

That bring us to your bungled handling of the iPhone launch, which ironically is the most successful phone launch in history in terms of numbers. But several issues, particular fear, uncertainty and doubt about the antenna have blemished the launch.

As evidence trickles out over this slow-news holiday weekend, it appears that you were right. The antenna is probably a non-issue as you said it was. But Steve, customers were concerned and you dismissed their concerns in a manner that seemed pretty glib to me.

Your style reminded me of Marie Antoinette.

You may recall, she was a regal lady in the pre-digital era. When she asked why people were angry, she was told they had no bread. She shrugged it off as a non-issue. "Then let them eat cake," she shrugged.

Perhaps, she was simply ignorant to the depth and breadth of people's feelings. In any case history sees her as incredibly insensitive to the needs of people whose lives she influenced. Seven years later, she was shown the bleeding edge of the Guillotine.

Steve, I am not suggesting that you are in danger of decapitation. But I need to stress in the strongest of terms that your current position as reigning hero can end and it can end abruptly and violently if you loss touch. Tech history is filled with cases of once dominant companies who overestimated the power of size versus customer championship.

You are facing new levels of competition. You are facing customers that used to adore you, suddenly scratching their heads and sitting back. I am among those.

Steve, I became convinced that the iPhone 4 was a great phone in about 15 minutes. I went to Twitter and I asked people who had bought it, about reception. Fifteen people said it was great. The 16th is in the UK with a different service provider and he was having problems.

But I think I'll wait. I just don't feel as good about you as I used to. It makes me curious about the Droids. The number of Droids coming out and the parade promised from other handset makers convince me, there will soon be an entire bakery of alternative cakes to choose from.

Steve, every second of every day there are conversations going on about you and Apple and it's products and attitude in social networks. Your customers influence each other and they influence your prospects.

Apple has managed to be among the least social of all tech companies until this time. It has done so by providing great products and services so that the conversation streams have gushed with Apple love.

A few years ago I coauthored a book called "Naked Conversations." My co-author and I observed that most companies that embraced social media had problems they needed to fix. "If you have great products and your customers love you, you may not need social media."

Steve, that was five years ago. A great deal has happened. People are talking about you all the time and it is not all filled with Kumbaya love notes. Much of what is being said is not true, such as is the case with the antenna.

But you need to join the conversation, now Steve. People need to know that Apple people are concerned and responding to customer concerns. Steve, very seriously, it is strategically time for Apple to join the conversation.

Those of you who know or read me, know that I am not much of a measurement kind of guy. I have been stating for several years that the tools of social media measurement are still primitive. Besides, we have not quite figured out just what it is that we want to measure.

In previous times, we wanted to measure  demographics, click-thrus, lead generation from a marketing effort and so on. This stuff is relevant I concede, but it just isn't the essence of social media programs.

Social media is more fluid than that.  It is harder to boil down onto spreadsheet numbers. It involves engagement, conversation, education, word of mouth, corporate and personal branding and so much more.

These things are layered with nuance and subjective judgment calls.

I have been called anti-measurement, but that is not the case. My argument is that there is great danger in measuring the wrong things. And what you measure shapes how you use social media moving forward.

All business practices need to be measured, evaluated, challenged and refined. Ultimately they are about money, but measuring against ROI is often the wrong number. Most marketing is measured on acquire new business, not shaving the cost of goods sold down to achieve profitability.

My argument that measurement tools are too primitive has eroded away. Over the past couple of years, the tools have gotten a lot better and the people who use them seem to have become a lot wiser on figuring out just what to measure when they evaluate a social media practice.

The other day, my friend Jeremiah Owyang, a partner in Altimeter Group, posted a blog that forecast something called Social Analytics was an important and emerging trend.

I had not previously heard the term, so I'm guessing many of you haven't either. In a tweeted conversation Jeremiah defined the term as, "the practice of being able to understand customers & predict them using data from the social web."

That's an "aha" moment for me. He's working on a report, but just the thought of social analytics captures to me the challenge and the goal of what should be measurable in social media.

I am not yet convinced that these tools exist today. Perhaps, Jeremiah's report will show that a significant start has been made in that direction. I don't know. I hope so.

If you can understand how I feel about your company, based on my conversation with you. If you determine that there are others like me, than you as a marketer, product developer, customer support professional can adjust course. You can make your products and services more to my liking--if I am relevant to you.

You will be able to do it faster, cheaper and with greater precision, if social analytics fulfills the promise that Jeremiah makes for the emerging category.

My last post argued that social media is now at the end of a period of great disruption and is now entering a longer, quieter period of normalization. I need to emphasize that we are talking about the world's organizations, and there is a long, long tail.

While some companies such as Dell Computer, SAP and Intuit are at the very beginning of transitioning into normalization, there are some companies who have just started to dabble in social media. For some, it may be too late and they may not make the transition from a successful Broadcast Era company into an even more successful Conversational Era company.

In some parts of the world, and in many large niches, social media has just begun and it is far from normal just yet. Sometimes something happens in the marketplace that accelerates social media. Dell, SAP and Intuit had strategic challenges and social media has helped them accelerate solutions. Although these challenges have not yet been resolved, social media has unarguably played very favorable roles in resolving them.

It seems that to get a large organization fully immersed in social media, they very often need to face problems, problems that are best resolved by interacting to customers, by listening and responding to their problems.

Three companies that have not been overly immersed in social media historically probably felt they did not need it. Apple Computer has long been the world's favorite tech company. It's scrappy. It has been an underdog and it's products have been way cooler than competitive offerings.

But lately, the company has made moves that feel more like schoolyard bully than scrappy underdog. And having its charismatic CEO read and answer cherry-picked emails just may not be enough, as competitive products get closer to even with Apple offerings.

Apple may soon find a need to use social media for more conversations with its constituents.

The same with Toyota, a company that until recently did not need social media in the ways that General Motors and Ford Motors have need it--and successfully used it to rebuild user trust.

Toyota is already active in social media. But it has elected to use advertising, not Twitter, for its main response to user safety concerns.

I think five years from today, both Apple and Toyota will use social media more and traditional marketing less to address customer and market concerns. Either that that or they will find themselves eclipsed by companies they comfortably outpace today.

But what about BP? Could social media help them? Well, there are certain things social cannot do and the apparent combination of callousness and carelessness cannot be fixed by sounding warm and fuzzy on a blog.

But if BP were active in social media, they would at least be able to demonstrate that they are listening to a world united against them in horror and anger. And perhaps they would at least be sensitive enough to get their CEO to skip week end yacht races.

I do believe that we are at a flex point that makes it easier for the likes of Apple, Toyota and BP. Instead of breaking the new that Dell, SAP, Intuit and so many other companies broke, they can simply follow the trail blazed by others and get there faster.

That's what I meant yesterday when I said good ideas are being replaced by redundant best practices. That's what happens in normalization periods. These things take time.

It seems to me that social media is at the very end of it's beginning phase. This period goes back at least a decade, but when it comes to business, the action really started in late 2005.

It has been a messy, noisy, distracting and divisive period. Nearly every institution has been changed by social media as it sped across the first four phases of the Kuber-Ross Model and has now pretty much entered into acceptance.

It's no longer a question of should social media be used for business, but HOW it will be used.

This is as it should be and it has followed a path that other technologies have taken as they moved from leading edge to mainstream. For some of us, we greet this flex point with ambivalence and even sorrow. We are ending and action-packed, dramatic phase and entering a longer, steadier phase of normalization.

Businesses are getting more comfortable with social media. Original ideas are evolving into best practices. Social media has become scalable and it is most certainly sustainable. We are learning how to measure myriad goals that social media can fulfill.

People are starting to talk less about the tools themselves and more about the business at hand. In short, social media is becoming a mere tool set and in the coming years conferences and conversations--and books--that gush euphorically about social media virtues will be about as popular as a conference on the benefits of faxing.

This phase will be longer and change will be slower.  Using social media in your work will be just an everyday activity that you do to get your job done. Today's popular tools will continue to be refined or replaced. People like me will end up searching for a new next best thing.

The age of disruption and excitement is coming to an end. The age of normality and significant, producing, prolonged business value has begun. That's what was supposed to happen all along or so it seems to me.