I attended the Next Generation Customer Experience conference in Las Vegas last month. Below are some of my top-line thoughts. Paul Hagen, an analyst at Forrester, feels experience is even more critical for brands as products become service-based platforms—envision how a car has become a device for transportation, a multi-media center, a connected device—and social media has given customers tremendous power over brands.

At the recent EMACS Conference in Orlando, which is dedicated to fostering the best practices in customer experience for utility companies, I was struck by the marked difference between the customer experience believers to what I would coin as the “lip service” crowd.

In the past, there were three pillars of Facebook gaming success. The first, virality, would require launching a game, engaging a core group of players, and making it easy to pass the game to friends, who in turn passed it to their friends.The next step was cross-promotion. “Hey, x-ville gamer, try this on for size and we’ll give you some free credits!” The third stage was monetizing the game through revenue derived from Facebook advertising.