The Third Moment of Truth becomes the new advertising when the impact of the messages from social media (including Tweets, YouTube, blogs, Facebook,...posts or other user generated content) dominate the impact from paid advertising. One example from 2010 is BP and the oil spill. Images from the region and testimonies from residents had a greater impact than the television commercials the company produced in an attempt to influence public opinion. Perhaps the metric is trust. I give more weight to the product reviews from friends, relatives, a colleagues than an advertisement. Because of services such as Twitter or Facebook, there is a great likelihood that my opinion of a product will be influenced by the story from a source that I trust than a source that I view as biased.

When comparing a musical performance to producing software, I have found the following contrasts to be helpful: 1. The feedback is typically better in a musical performance. Other musicians know when you are doing a great job. The feedback is realtime. In Scrum you may need to wait a week for the end of a sprint for feedback. 2. The collaboration is typically better in a musical setting. One can trade between efforts that are more like solos or more like duets. The ebb and flow can be monitored by the entire ensemble. XP tries to mimic part of this with pair programming. 3. In software, the day-to-day workflow is more a pipeline (the output of one groups (such a requirements document) is the input for another group (such as designers) that pass something to another group (such as codes) that pass to another group (such as testers). 4. Even when the audience is composed of many folks that are not performance musicians, they know enough to appreciate a quality performance. In many software settings, the quality is poor but accepted. In music, finding the reference standards for a given type of music is relatively easy. In a corporate setting, one often has to use what has been adopted and train to work around the bugs.

Besides the autocatalysis model, the phrase "implicit coordination" can be used to describe this. Implicit coordination is a process that takes place when “team members anticipate the actions and needs of their colleagues and task demands and dynamically adjust their own behavior accordingly, without having to communicate directly with each other or plan the activity” Ramon Rico, Miriam Sanchez-Manzanares, Francisco Gil, and Cristina Gibson. “Team implicit coordination processes: A team knowledge based approach.” Academy of Management Review, Vol. 33, No. 1, pp. 163-184, 2008. The same phenomenon can occur within a group of highly skilled, musicians in an especially collaborative session. Most folks have difficulty assigning a name to this phenomenon but anyone that has experienced it prefers these sessions over the more common bureaucracy-as-usual sessions that pervade most work environments.

The post implies that "the most basic product marketing" should craft messages around the template of "We built this product to address this specific problem, for this specific audience, in this specific way." For many product managers, plugging content into such a template may be considered a best practice. However in certain contexts, it is an inchoate template. Two years ago, I didn't use Twitter like I use it today. The same is true for my iPhone. In the Twitter case, hashtags were not included in the original product roadmap. In the case of the iPhone, the App Store didn't exist when I purchased the product. Five years ago, a product manager couldn't have documented how I would be using these products today. When a product manager asserts that they can accurately specify parameters (the audience, the problem a RADICALLY NEW product will solve for this audience, the required features, ...) such product managers may be characterized as dogmatic. For radically new products, new uses for products may emerge as customers find solutions to problems that they may have been unable to articulate. A dogmatic product manager, may continue to insist that the specifics in their template are valid even as the context continues to change. An adaptive product manager quickly mobilizes an appropriate product development team to capitalize on the emergent conditions. When it is recognized that a changes are needed, folks such as @ericries refer to this as a pivot.