Sometimes it’s hard to make the case for a big investment in social media marketing. It can be difficult to scale, time-consuming, and there’s always the risk of—gasp!—negative feedback.

Socialnomics makes an excellent argument for making social media marketing not just important, but central to the mission and products your company creates. Erik Qualman’s second edition of this book came out a couple weeks ago. Rather than focusing on the nuts and bolts of implementation, it's a wonderful conceptual framework for the importance of social media. It also takes a stab at what's just around the corner, which is very exciting.

My favorite quote so far: "Fail fast, fail forward, fail better." Quick iterative innovation is the watchword, and an engaged conversation with customers is necessary to make that happen. The new climate for product development involves intense competition, margins squeezed by the wide availability of similar products, and a need for speed. He argues that it’s better to move quickly than study something to death and have others beat you to market. But once you move quickly out the door, and some parts of your product fail, you need to respond just as fast.

This requires an ongoing, engaged conversation with your customers. You only fail forward, you only fail better, when you listen to your customers. Qualman argues that social media is the best way, perhaps the only way, to listen to your customers quickly and deeply enough to drive rapid development cycles. It’s not about releasing a half-baked product. It’s about speeding up the product’s improvement cycle, which is something we can all benefit from.

Release, listen, improve, release. Rinse and repeat. At Exsilio, our Social Media Marketing team focuses on embedding inside your organization’s message, and can help you sort through the noise to listen better.

It’s hard for many organizations to be so nimble in their product/service development, though. What challenges are you experiencing?

In the past about a month, I have been working on a windows 7 phone application. And I found a couple of unexpected cool little done for you features built in to the windows 7 phone that made my life so much easier. First of all, I was trying to put in an animated splash screen at the application load, and I was really pleased to find that it is already automated, you just need to replace the SplashScreenImage.jpg in the project root folder, and wala the splashscreen is done. To change the default application icon, and the tile when you have the application pinned on the front page, all what you need to do is to replace the ApplicationIcon.png and the Background.png in the project folder. Of course, then you will have to create some cool images to get people’s attention… since I am a developer, not much of a designer, Thank God for my creative team with great and awesome talents to make my app look beautiful.

For most apps, you would need to use the ApplicationBar with ApplicationBarIconButton for settings, navigation and such. Coming from a .net, css background, I was expecting to animate it in Silverlight so it would have the press state and hover state. And surprisingly, I found out, you just need to create an image that is 48x48 with transparent background with white/color on the icon, and reference it in the ApplicationBarIconButton as iconUri. At runtime, the program would replace the white with black and also transparent with white when you press on the button, and also it has a nice round circle with it, so you don’t need to create an icon that has a round circle with two or three states. But in order for the image to show up in the emulator and on the phone, you need to go to the property for each image and then change the Build Action to Content and Copy to Output Directory to Copy Always. If not, it will always fall back to the default application icon. There are also some default icons that came with the SDK, so you don’t need to have them custom created, and you can find them at:

• C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows Phone\v7.0\Icons\dark
• C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows Phone\v7.0\Icons\dark

Once you find out what the file name of the icon that you want to use. They are mostly formated as appbar.xxx.rest.png, then in the IconUri, you can just simply reference them as IconUri="/Images/appbar.xxx.rest.png". then you don't even need to add them into your application's images folder for the icons to work.