Advertisers may not be sold on social media as a medium, but innovators are already using it as a platform to launch new ideas, reports Tim Mullaney in USA Today (5/17/12). For example, Red Robin Gourmet Burgers, a “460-restaurant chain, used an internal social network that resembles Facebook” to prepare employees for the launch of “its new Tavern Double burger line last month … Instead of mailing out spiral-bound books, getting feedback during executives’ sporadic store visits and taking six months to act on advice from the trenches, the network’s free-wheeling discussion and video produced results in days.”

Indeed, it appears that “social networking’s real economic impact might be ahead as companies learn how to harness ‘social business’ tools … companies are using social networks to build teams that solve problems faster, share information better among their employees and partners, bring customer ideas for new product designs to market earlier, and redesign all kinds of corporate software in Facebook’s easy-to-learn style.” As Marc Benioff of salesforce.com explains, “At a very basic level, Facebook is the most popular application ever, with a billion people who know how to use it … The ability to access information is much better because it’s easier to get to.”

Salesforce.com offers Chatter, a social-networking tool now “used by 150,000 companies.” Red Robin is using internal social-networking software called Yammer. Its president, David Sacks, says the concept is a natural. “We asked ourselves where would social networking go once everyone had a Facebook account? … Big ideas always move from the consumer market into the enterprise market,” he says. So far, Facebook hasn’t jumped on the trend, allowing Chatter, Yammer, Jive and others “mimic its look and feel, because making Facebook-like features an industry standard helped cement Facebook’s leadership in consumer social networks.” The social web has yet to produce US productivity growth, but Erik Brynjolfsson of MIT says its full impact among companies deploying it will be evident in about five years.

“Facebook’s big payday should be cause for celebration” but has instead provoked “two kinds of anxiety” that “imply America’s best days are over,” writes Rich Karlgaard in the Wall Street Journal (5/17/12). The first kind of anxiety, says Rich, “is that America’s innovation engine, Silicon Valley, is overheating.” His evidence is the $1 billion Facebook acquisition of Instagram, “a two-year-old startup with 11 employees and no revenue” and the eye-popping $37 per share commanded by Splunk, a $121 million cloud computing and big data company. Rich is also concerned by what he calls the “Algorithmic Army of slightly surreal folks,” led by Mark Zuckerberg.

“They seem to be pale men with oddly flat voices and faraway gazes who prefer to hide out in the bathroom during the IPO roadshow,” he writes. “When finally coaxed onto the stage to face investors, the great Zuckerberg appeared in a hoodie.” Rich can’t believe that this represents America’s future. (I mean, from neckties to mock turtlenecks to hoodies … what’s next — culottes?). This is a sign, says Rich, that America is following “Spain, France and Great Britain down history’s sinkhole of lost status and influence.” The way out, he suggests, is to “go mainstream and transform the big things: transportation, energy, electricity, food production, water delivery, health care and education.”

The challenge, he argues, is “to solve problems much larger than whom to friend on Facebook … The time to make big returns in Facebook and social media has passed,” he says, pointing out that by “2050 the planet will have nine billion inhabitants and three billion cars. This will create huge demand for fuel and road access.” He sees a big future in Google’s “robot-driven car,” for instance. He also sees bright days ahead with 3-D printing, which he says “will turn our artists into artisanal manufacturers and reward American-style creativity.” He believes “high-tech horizontal drilling” will unleash a US boom in “natural gas and shale oil,” and concludes by asking: “If America could have only one of the following — Facebook, Twitter or horizontal drilling — which would be the smarter choice?”

Psychologist Larry D. Rosen suggests “the very real possibility that all these new personal gadgets may be making some of us mentally ill,” reports Bryan Burrough in the New York Times (5/13/12). Fortunately, in his new book, iDisorder, Larry “surveys the existing research, throws in a bit of his own and suggests ways that users of new technologies can avoid behavioral pitfalls.” But that doesn’t happen until after he notes that “psychologists divide Twitter users into ‘informers,’ those who pass along interesting facts, and ‘meformers,’ those who pass along interesting facts only about themselves.”

Larry further reveals that 70 percent of us suffer from “phantom vibration disorder.” That’s “when your pocket buzzes and there’s no phone in your pocket.” Other mental health challenges posed by “heavy technology use” include narcissism from too much social-media activity and obsessive-compulsive disorder resulting from “constantly checking our wireless mobile devices (he calls them WMD’s, a great acronym).’” Heavy use of Facebook, meanwhile, “has been linked to mood swings among some teenagers.”

Larry has one chapter on “how technology addiction can lead to attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder” and another about “how all that medical data available online has created a class of people known as ‘cyberchondriacs.’” Other cited studies suggest that Google can erode our ability to remember facts, because they’re always just a keystroke away. Larry’s antidote is simply to take a break from the technology (“just standing in your driveway and staring at the bushes, research shows, has a way of resetting our brains”). He also suggests making sure your kids are getting enough sleep and enforcing a no-tech zone at the dinnertable, “reintroducing children to normal interaction after hours spent in cyberconversation.”

A newly launched social-network intends to bring neighborhoods closer together, reports Randall Stross in the New York Times (5/13/12). “As you get older, the community that is most valuable to you is the one in which you live,” says Nirav Tolia, chief executive of Nextdoor.com. “The neighborhood is where you buy a home, where your kids go to school, where you spend the majority of your physical life.” Nextdoor “provides a house-by-house map of neighbors who are members … as well as a forum for posting items of general interest; classified listings … and a database for neighbor recommended services.”

So far, Nextdoor, “says it has set up more than 2,000 such neighborhoods in the United States, each containing 500 to 750 households.” Members are “visible only to fellow members, so marketers can’t vacuum up names and addresses. Nor does the information appear on search-engine results.” Members are required “to prove they live at their claimed residences” either by completing a one-penny credit-card transaction” or other means. The service is free of charge and of advertising, although the plan is “to enlist local businesses to give members special offers that are unavailable elsewhere.”

Robert J. Sampson, a Harvard sociology professor, is warm to the idea: “There’s a common misreading that technology inevitably leads to the decline of the local community. I don’t believe that. Technology can be harnessed to facilitate local interactions.” Robert also “argues that worries about the supposed loss of community in cities is nothing new” and that cities have always been “ordered by distinctive neigborhoods.” In any case, Facebook got its start as the virtual equivalent of the Harvard campus, and perhaps now Nextdoor has created “something that Facebook no longer is: an online network defined by real-life proximity.”

Microsoft is using its retail stores to improve the digital experience, reports Walter S. Mossberg in the Wall Street Journal (5/16/12). The problems with the Microsoft Windows experience are evident to most users — and to Microsoft executives, as well. The issue is not so much the Windows operating system itself as it is that PC makers “clutter desktops with icons that are often little more than ads for third-party products; include confusing utilities that duplicate functions already in Windows; require lengthy setup; and configure PCs in ways that slow them down.”

Microsoft’s solution is to use “its small chain of retail stores and its online computer store to sell customized versions of popular PC models that have been streamlined for a cleaner look and better performance. It calls these machines ‘Signature’ PCs. They retain the maker’s brand, but sport a special Signature desktop and configuration. And they cost about the same as the identical stock version of the machine sold elsewhere. Microsoft also offers a program that, for $99, will turn users’ Windows 7 PCs into Signature models, if the owner brings the computer into one of its 16 stores, due to grow to 21 outlets in coming months.”

Microsoft tailors the “software and utilities” based on whether it “is deemed essential for a computer’s particular hardware.” It also “loads Signature machines with its own add-on software, such as its free email, photo and video programs … and a stripped-down ‘starter’ version of Microsoft Office.” Customers can further customize their machines at the stores, removing any unwanted programs and even adding “competing software, such as Google’s Chrome browser, or Apple’s iTunes for Windows.” A Microsoft executive describes Signature as “Microsoft’s perspective on Windows” as opposed to the hardware maker’s.

Microsoft is streamlining its Bing search engine while also making it more social and “task-oriented,” reports Katherine Boehret in the Wall Street Journal (5/16/12). The streamlining involves ridding Bing of “the distracting, multicolored search results” and “the lists of recently searched terms that you never looked at anyway.” Search results mixed with Facebook “likes” are gone, too. In their place is more “white space, which creates a calmer environment for reading and digesting information,” and two new features — Sidebar and Snapshot.

Sidebar is “designed to automatically surface names of relevant Facebook friends and others around the web who could best help you with a specific query.” The effect is to “turn the solitude of Web searching into a group activity.” So, for example, if you’re looking for a restaurant in Napa Valley, your results might include “the name of a friend who recently posted a photo album from Napa, a colleague who lists Napa Valley as his hometown as well as a well-known blogger who reviews restaurants in the area.” Sources also include Twitter, and plans are to add LinkedIn, Foursquare and Quora connections to the mix.

Snapshot, meanwhile, “displays task-oriented content to help people do things like making restaurant reservations, getting directions or seeing movie times.” A search for a restaurant, for example, might return “a map of its location … ratings from websites like TripAdvisor, hours of operation and a link to OpenTable for making a reservation.” The question, of course, is whether many people will take to this different, more social, style of search, given that “we usually search alone” and perhaps are generally satisfied with the results. The new Bing will make its debut on May 22 to about 20 percent of its users, with full rollout by June 1. In the meantime, you can check it out at bing.com/new.

Macy’s is turning some of its backrooms into warehouses to compete more effectively against Amazon and other online retailers, reports Dana Mattioli in the Wall Street Journal (5/15/12). “We’ve spent the last 153 years building warehouses,” says Peter Sachse, Macy’s chief stores officer. “We just called them stores.” Macy’s plan is to “convert 292 of its 800-plus stores for the task, with expanded storerooms and new technology that dynamically updates the status of every item in every store.” The idea is that excess inventory in stores can readily be sold online, and vice versa. It will also save “time and money on shipping” because items ordered online can be shipped from the store closest to the shopper.

The challenge is that, unlike Amazon, which uses barcode-reading robots to pick and pack orders, Macy’s is relying on human beings foraging through stores to find items and then packing and shipping them to online customers. Finding an item can be especially difficult when its color has a trendy but vague name like “magical” or “journey.” Macy’s actually is far from the first retailer to integrate its online and instore distribution and fulfillment operations. Retailers have been working at this “since the late 1990s,” although the technology required for success is now “finally in place.”

Nordstrom has been filling “online orders with goods shipped from its stores” since 2009 “and now ships from all 117 of its full-line stores.” But “omnichannel” distribution, as it is known, can be complicated and expensive, in that it can require shipping “from, say, seven separate stores” versus “one online warehouse.” Whether the store or the website gets credit for the sale is another tricky issue. However, Jamie Nordstrom, who heads up Nordstrom’s online operations, says the approach “has cut the level of markdowns and improved margins.” Macy’s profits, meanwhile, have “jumped 38 percent,” and its online sales 34 percent, in its most recent quarter.

Cosmetics companies are turning to e-commerce as a channel to sell certain discontinued items, reports Tatiana Boncompagni in the New York Times (5/3/12). The insight is that the first thing some shoppers do when a favorite perfume, shampoo or shade of lipstick is discontinued is to try to find it online. The beauty companies, meanwhile, can get a good idea which of their de-listed products are in demand by monitoring social-media sites as well as comments on their own websites. Charles Denton of Erno Laszlo actually found himself personally responding to some 200 emails a day from customers complaining about discontinued items, prompting him to reinstate a couple of them.

Bobbi Brown recently launched “Facebook campaigns … asking fans in various countries to vote on their favorite shades of discontinued products.” The winning choices will be available only via a Facebook link or on the Bobbi Brown website. Guillaume Jesel, svp global marketing for MAC, compares contests in which consumers vote on their favorite discontinued items to Dancing With the Stars. “It’s the same revolution you see in other industries,” he says. “You let the consumer take the steering wheel for a while.”

Hilary Jones of Lush, a UK beauty products company, says bringing back old items is mostly about fostering good will. “It’s not a hugely commercial thing for us,” she says. Others find the online line extensions to be welcome relief from the traditional “one in, one out policy” employed by brands and retailers alike. “At the shelf, you have to think about turnover,” says David Lonczak, a vp of ecommerce and digital marketing for Drugstore.com, Beauty.com and Walgreens.com. “That doesn’t make it possible to carry these tertiary products, but there is still a reasonable amount of business there,” he says.