Craters of the Moon, Idaho. Photo by Shel

[NOTE:  This is the 4th in a series of off-topic posts. My wife Paula and I  just completed a 10-day, 2,700-mile road trip through the US northwest. The previous installment left off at Shasta Lake and this one picks up a few miles later. ]

From Lake Shasta we drove north past snow-crowned Mount Shasta. At Weed, Calif. we turned off I-5 and onto Route 97. With extremely few exceptions, we would not put wheels onto a highway for another 1200 miles and eight days. This was a wise choice.

On the Interstates you focus is on getting there, there's a sense of urgency. On back roads you focus is on being there's a sense of exploration. We stopped often to read historical markers, soak in magnificent views and enjoy assorted oddities along our way.

Route 97 extends north from Weed all the way to Canada. At an average height of 5000 is a scenic pageant of rivers, mountains, lava beds and forests.

Our biggest stop was at  Crater Lake, the bluest inland water body I've ever viewed. Filling 30 square miles of a collapsed volcano, it's surface is 7000 feet above the ocean and it's deepest point is 1900 feet, making it the deepest in the US.

From their, we continued north another 60 miles to the very pleasant little  city of Klamath Falls. Home of Oregon Tech and with a population of about 20,000, we had nice late-night Taco salads at Hidalgos Mexican Restaurant, then stayed in a safe, clean and affordable Great Western.

We continued north on 97 all the way to Bend where we caught up with Paula's daughter, her husband and two of our grand children for a weekend at Sunriver Resort. The first person to scout around this area was Kit Carson, but that was before it had its own airport, golf course, swimming pools and tennis courts. We got a great deal on a fabulous house that slept five adults and two kids for two nights for less than $1K. We biked, jogged, swam, ate at a great restaurant and on our own deck, enjoyed free in-home wifi and just sat on the rear porch looking at pine trees. I'm not big on resorts usually, but this one gets a top rating in my view for having a great balance between recreation and serenity.

After Sunriver, our goal was to get to the big tomato of our trip, Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks. We drove a few miles north on 97 to US 20 east, which crosses into Idaho. We had no big plans for Idaho, a state that I know potatoes and HP printers. But we were surprised by its open space unrelenting beauty.

We made an over-night stop in downtown Boise at a Hampton Inn. The rooms were pleasant but the breakfast memorably awful.

In the morning, Highway 20 followed the Interstate for a while, then cut  into sparsely populated land you picture riding on a horse. It's a gently curvy road, part river meadow, rolling hills and some badland with mesa and cathedral rock formations erupting from time-to-time. There were also some large stands of white birch.

This was not an area for cute shops and restaurants. Paula and I had some steak sandwiches and we pulled over at Riley, Idaho. The sign said population 17, but I suspect they were exaggerating. We dined on rickety picnic benches, with a spectacular view blocked slightly by a port-a-johnny that was thankfully downwind.

We drove through the Sawtooth National Forest, the turnoff for the posh Sun Valley resort, abandoned gold mines and the out-of-use Rattlesnake Station, stage coach stop.

Then we went to the moon. Route 20's absolute high point is Craters of the Moon National Monument. I took the photo at the top of this page from one stop on a seven-mile loop. My photos did not capture the eerie sense of this area of eight volcanic disturbances, the most recent being a mere 1500 years ago. The lava fields we saw 800 miles west in Southern Oregon are part of this massive, unfinished area.

It really does feel like you are walking on the moon. Paula and I have seen the lava fields of the Big Island of Hawaii, but for some reason, these felt even more moonlike as we strolled upon the paths.

We stayed less than an hour and continued East. At all most every stop we felt the pang of wanting to stay longer. We had seen so much and had so much more to see.

Our next stop would be the tourist mecca of Jackson Hole, WY, where I had last visited33 years earlier. I learned that my memory could move mountains.

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.

[NOTE:  This is the 3rd in a series of off-topic posts. I've just returned from a 10-day, 2,700-mile road trip through the US northwest. It was part-family oriented, part a visit to some of my best visual memories and in part a review of the new Ford Escape Hybrid, which Ford Motors loaned me for evaluation purposes.]

We began grumpy and came home exhausted. In between, Paula and I had one if the best experiences of our lives. We were gone 10 days, slept in nine different places and got to experience the bigness, the beauty and diversity of the American northwest.

The highlights of the trip were a two-day visit to Sunriver, Ore., a resort in Bend Ore., and visits to Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks. But the connecting points--the towns and back roads, the little spontaneous explorations were almost equal in interest and discovery.

For some reason our vacations are almost always preceded by about a week of tumult. This one was a record setter. Paula got sick. Her mother, Jean Berman, 91, had an infected leg, which doctors attached to a clumsy medical vacuum machine until a few days prior to our departure. Our younger daughter and her two small children visited us until the day before our departure. For the first time since my heart surgery, I was feeling some chest pains and worrying.

When the tires of the Escape rolled onto our street from our driveway, I was still waiting for Paula to shout out, "wait, I can't do this. I need a rest," but she didn't. We picked up Jean in Fremont and were on the road at 9 a.m. as scheduled.

It was 85 in Fremont at 9 am when we hit the road. By the time we stopped for lunch at the Vacaville In-N-Out Burger, it was 102. We did not yet know that our departure date would be the hottest day of the year in Northern California.

After lunch,  we connected north onto the tedious stretch of I-5 to Redding.  We bickered about unimportant things as we sat in traffic, looking at flat agribiz-owned farmland. The temperature kept rising. This was the most boring stretch we would experience. It was made more difficult by a few serious construction delays.

Redding turned out to be the geographic wormhole. Before it was redundant flatland. After were evergreen forests, pristine lakes and a surprising number of snow capped mountains--always a surprise in 100 degree weather.

The biggest and most breath-taking was Lassen  stands tall and powerful over everything else. We regretted not having time to visit Lassen National Park.

We turned off for the next point of interest. Lake Shasta was our first scheduled stop. We drove through the aging City of Lake Shasta onto Shasta Dam Road. As we drove through the small city, Paula and Jean wondered why there were no people on the streets in mid-afternoon.

Our dashboard said the outside temperature was 105 degrees.

We stopped for a moment to watch a few people swimming and boating and fishing and enjoying a cooler time than we felt in the parking lot. I caught site of a speckled eagle, the first I've ever seen. The fleet-flying, fierce-looking was far too fast for me to catch a photo.

At the dam, we spent a little time at the highly informative visitor center, where we caught our breath and felt our collective moods elevate. We were looking at incredible beauty.

We were on vacation.

[Note. Mount Lassen & the speckled eagles are file photos gleaned from Google images. I took the Shasta Lake & Dam shots.]

"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.

My Ford Escape Hybrid evaluation unit was delivered a little while ago by Page One Automotive, the service that Ford Motors uses with professional auto reviewers. You may have noticed that I am not an auto reviewer. In fact, many former passengers will attest that I am not the best driver in the world.

This whole story goes back to Cordell Koland, who was the No. 2 guy at SIPR during most of the time that I owned the agency. He would eventually buy it from me. But when Cord first started working for me, I paid him enough salary to put him behind the wheel of a ten-year-old Honda.

So when I saw him drive out of our parking lot on his first day, I found it curious to see him in a new high-end BMW. Two weeks later, I saw the same guy leaving in an $80 K Mercedes. A little ;ater, after I saw his new red Jaguar, I pulled him into the office and asked him what was going on with the cars. I suspected drug dealing had had no desire for SIPR to serve as the front.

He explained that he reviewed cars from the San Jose Business Journal, where he worked until I hired him away. By reviewing cars, he was in a new high end vehicle every few weeks and he didn't have to own one.

I envied this. From Cord's starting point until today is more than 20 years.  But I always remembered Cord as having the coolest of scams with the car reviews.

A few years ago I met Scott Monty, who went on to become head of social media at Ford Motors. When I started planning this road trip I remembered both Scott and Cordell and connected some dots. I pitched him for an evaluation unit for this road trip I announced yesterday.

Too my amazement, Scott put me into the reviewer's evaluation system. I was contacted by Ford's Gwen Peake who asked me for details on how I would use the vehicle. I had originally requested a Ford Fusion Hybrid. I had rented a Fusion a few times on other trips and had been impressed. I had even tried to convince Paula to buy one when she needed a new car. Now that there was a hybrid, I was even more interested.

Gwen steered me to the Escape Hybrid instead. It is larger and more powerful than the Fusion and as an SUV the sight line will be much better when driving through the scenic wonders of Crater Lake, Sunriver, Or, Jackson,Yellowstone, Rushmore, the Dakota Badlands and other wonders of the US northwest.

So far, I have not yet even driven around the block. I have examined it closely and am currently trying to determine how to plug my iPod into the Microsoft-powered dashboard. [Hints will be gratefully accepted.]

I have to admit that I love this vehicle at curbside. It is compactly built yet roomy. Like other hybrids, it is silent. The engine cuts off when you idle too long, but lets the air conditioning keep running.

My deal with Ford is not to be a company mouthpiece, but to tell you readers what I think of Escape Hybrid. I am a reviewer--not a shill. But I have to tell you, this car has made a most favorable first impression.

[Yellowstone Falls, Wyoming]

I was a student in the 60 and did many of the things that students did back then. Among my favorite diversions was the road trip. Inspired by Jack Kerouac's On the Road, I had a love for jumping into a car with a few close friends, remarkably little money, and a three-buck road map to guide us along thousands of miles. Our objective was nothing more than to look out the car window and see the many looks of the US as you passed from urban to rural to mountains and to an ocean where strangely,  the sun set, rather than rose.

The road trips started small, then grew. After finals at Northeastern University, in Boston, Mass., my first road trip took me to Washington, DC.  Next came Montreal,  then the old Route One local road to Florida and Miami Beach.

But the vertical road trips were relatively small compared with the horizontals that would follow.

From 1967 and 1975, I crossed the continent three times in each direction. First was five guys in a 1961 Ford Galaxy with four classmates, and three fenders. Then with two political lefties in a beat up International Harvester. Finally I went off solo in an old Ford that broke down in Tennessee. I continued on  by thumb.

On these trips, I visited every state in the Union except Alaska and South Dakota. I meandered into Canada and Mexico. I had many adventures and encounters. They shaped who I would become as did Kerouac's spontaneous writing style.

But what stayed with me for so many years, was the land I got to see and sometimes touch. North America is a diverse, wondrous and mostly beautiful place. For me, it has inspired poetry and sometimes patriotism.

Patriotism was not a popular word among my friends in the  60s. We were angry about many government's policies. I had an earring, wore bell and hair that hid my shirt collar.  We were angry about a war and a draft that forced us into it personally. We were astonished to discover racism was an institution and indignant, that while we studied so many other people suffered.

Many of my friends, for a lengthy stint, started to hate the government and in so doing the country itself. What stopped me from becoming one of them, I am convinced, were these road trips.

I went out and actually saw the country. I met people  in parts of the country that looked and felt so very different from folks in my New England.  In our conversations with each other, we almost always found we had more commonalities than differences.

These conversations changed my perceptions of so many things. They still do now that I spend so much time online having conversations all over the world and discovering how very similar we are too each other.

I've been think a lot about this ever since last fall while watching Ken Burns National Parks series on NPR. More than anything I saw, traversing the United States, the National Parks were etched the most clearly in my mind. National Parks made me appreciate my land and respect a government that sets such places aside for people to see and appreciate rather than exploit and develop.

It is now 43 years since I first went cross country in the United States. So much has changed. I have live a life. I have grandchildren sleeping down the hall as I write this.

My wife Paula was not a college kid in the 60s. She was in her first marriage and raising two daughters and she had no time to protest and experiment as I did. She has only been to one national park.

While watching the Ken Burns series, I remembered one trip, when I and my traveling companions got stuck behind an over-sized camper that was moving a lot slower than we wished to go. We wanted a clear view of the beauty around us, but instead we were staring at this camper's back bumper. On that bumper there was a sticker.

"Too old to work. Too young to die. Just traveling" it said.

I'm now, I would guess, about the same age as the folks who were in that camper back then.

Paula and I decided last fall that we would take a road trip this summer, she for the first time and me to revisit roads previously travelled with a different set of eyes.

Originally it was going to be at least a month on the road, but I've had an odd year. There have been health and business issues. We shaved it down to just 10 days, but we are cramming much into our journey.

We leave Wednesday for Sunriver, Ore., to see more grandchildren and family. On the way up, we'll circle Shasta and Crater Lakes. Then we cross southern Idaho, stopping at the Craters of the Moon National Monument, then on to Jackson, Wyoming and Grand Teton National Park.

Yellowstone National Park will be next. We expect it  to be the highlight and I'll be there for two nights and 3 days. Then,into southwest South Dakota to see Mt. Rushmore, the Black Hills and Badlands, before turning back toward home in a route that takes us through Park City Utah, and our favorite week end destination of North Lake Tahoe.

And this time. there will be no hitchhiking. Ford Motors has agreed to loan me a Ford Escape Hybrid for evaluation on the road trip. I'm sure it is in far better shape than that old International Harvester. I'll tell you how it performs along the way.

For the next couple of weeks, this blog will be mostly about this road trip. It will serve as an online diary, which is what blogs were originally about. I will share with you some of what we see and experience.

I hope you enjoy vicarious travel

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.