Authentic success.

Today's blog by Rich Sloan, founder of StartupNation, emphasizes the growing importance of authenticity in the marketplace. "People are tired of being “marketed to.”" Sloan states. "Instead, they want to connect with real people and real companies that care about the world and care about people."

He goes on to list several companies who've devoted segments of their marketing, IT or customer relations workforce to having online discussions with customers. That's all they do. They respond to Tweets, Facebook messages, blog posts and more, helping any customer with any concern they have.

This is the face of marketing in the years to come. In a world where Tivo lets you skip television commercials and iPods and Pandora let you listen to virtually ad-free music, organizations are now faced with the inevitable — have conversations with customers. The sinking effectiveness of traditional advertising has forced ... a conversation (of all things).

Like a teenager at a sock hop, organizations are nervously approaching their customers. They're weathering the potential rejection. They're accepting the complaints. They're accepting that their product or service may have flaws. But they want to talk. They have to.

Thanks to Sloan for pointing out the trend and hats off to companies like Dell, who has stopped ignoring or placating complainers and started building products around customer feedback. Finally, we might start getting products and services we want instead of what's being sold to us.

Read Rich Sloan's full post "Authenticity: A Key Trend In Marketing".

Email drift.

You've heard of mission drift, right? It's where organizations get distracted by other opportunities that aren't part of their original mission. Usually it results in reorganization of some sort.

Today, I got email drift — and I'm afraid it's one of the hazards of storing messages within your email software (like Outlook).

I wanted to reference a previous client document. Remembering it was saved in my "clients" folder, I opened my mail software with the intention of digging into the archive. But that didn't happen.

Instead, I noticed the eight new messages that came in and started replying to each one. Several minutes later, I finish replying, closed the email software and asked myself, "So what was I just doing?"

How many times has "email drift" stolen minutes (maybe more) from our day? The cure is relatively simple: Develop a system of storing attachments and messages on your hard drive. Most software will let you drag and drop messages (sometimes with the attachments) to a folder you can dig up later.

Why is it better? Because storing messages in your email software makes as much sense as storing important letters in your mailbox. It's just messy. Plus, you'll feel compelled to go through the new mail each time you're looking for the notes you've saved.