It turns out Marshawn Lynch loves Skittles. It’s his favorite snack and ever since he was little his mom has been giving him Skittles before his football games. Now he celebrates his touchdowns by grabbing  a handfull of Skittles on the sidelines after he scores. The story got legs after week 13 of the season when the Seahawks destroyed the Philadelphia Eagles and Lynch had a monster game. The cameras clearly caught him eating Skittles after his first quarter touchdown. Soon after the game, Skittles jumped on the opportunity and offered Lynch a two years supply of the candy and a custom dispenser for his locker. I can’t wait for the offseason Skittles ads featuring Lynch.

This is one of those great marketing moments. It’s nothing you could ever plan for or expect, but good on Skittles for being on the ball enough to quickly capture the opportunity. “Feed the Beast” is the Skittles marketing slogan and now it’s also the nickname for the Seahawks big time running back. In business, sometimes you have to be good and sometimes you just get really lucky.

The company says it’s customers are already watching more content streamed on the Internet than its traditional DVD by mail option. It’s true DVD by mail is getting old and the technology easily exists for Netflix to do most of its business online. But when CEO Reed Hastings says “We are now primarily a streaming video company” I have to call time out.

Netflix has done a great job of getting their streaming service on just about every piece of electronic hardware there is from DVD players to XBox, Wii and even the iPad. But the available streaming library is woefully lacking. There is nothing I would like more than to only use Netflix online and stop all DVD mailings, but if you look at my current movie queue, that’s just not possible. Of the 38 movies I have in que, 19 of them are available for streaming but 19 are only available on DVD by mail. There is no way I will give up DVD by mail until that percentage gets up to 90% of my que available streaming. The only saving grace is that Netflix says it will spend more on licensing for streaming this year than for physical DVD’s. If they really want to be primarily a streaming movie company, they are going to have to get a much larger percentage of their library on the streaming service. So far, that transition has been much too slow, especially if you compare what is available online from Apple and Amazon. Enjoy your DVD’s while you can, because in 5-10 years, they will be extinct as the dinosaur.

When I saw the headline, “Barnes and Noble offers 30 free e-books to switch to Nook” I thought, oh yeah, now we’re talking. When you are competing with the industry leader who has a stronghold on the market, you need to do something pretty dramatic if you’re going to get a leg up. Giving 30 free e-books to switchers would have been just the kind of bold, ballsy move that could have changed the tide, at least a little. Alas, it turns out Barnes and Noble isn’t that gutsy after all and this promotion isn’t going to do a damn thing. The 30 free books, you see, are chosen by Barnes and Noble and span a wide variety of titles from cooking to history to fiction. Great, you gave me 30 books, of which if I am lucky I might be  interested in one or two. They claim it’s a $300 value. Some value.

You see, the real problem is if I already have an Amazon Kindle, I have all my books already stored there. I don’t have access to them on the Nook and this creates a nice lock in for Amazon. Now if you allow me to take 30 of my favorite titles over, and make it even better, the rest of my titles for a nice discount price, you will be able to generate switchers. What would this cost Barnes and Noble? Plenty to be sure but what’s the value of a new lifelong customer? This game is hardball and either you step up and play or you’re going to be out of the game soon.

The same thing can be seen in the tablet wars. Apple is the dominant player with the iPad. Competition is coming now from various Android tablets and most recently HP. But the HP tablet starts at $500 and many of the Android tablets are close to the same price point. That’s the same price as the iPad and like it or not, those tablets are just not as good as the iPad yet. Price being equal, people are going to choose the iPad. If these alternative tablets are going to make any headway, someone is going to have to through down a price like $300. This is not about profit or loss at his point, when you are trailing a dominant player like Apple, you’ve got to grab market share anyway you can.

Listen to The Show!

Social media is all about content. Creating and publishing great content is the primary factor in social media success. Fortunately that content already lives right inside of your company. The trick is getting it out. Great content might not even be where you think it is and I’m sorry to say it’s most likely not going to come out of your marketing department. Your best content is more likely found down the org chart with the girls and guys grinding it out everyday on front lines. These people have stories to tell and valuable insights about how the product really works and what customers think. Your road warriors, the sales team also can give you great case studies and interesting new ways your customers are getting value from your product.

It’s also important not to stifle content. Legal departments will wring their hands about the risks of uncontrolled content creation and corporate marketing will gripe about not being able to control the message. There may be a good deal of pressure, especially in larger companies, to retain the status quo. This will make everyone feel more comfortable but will get you nowhere in your social media marketing efforts. It’s not to say there are not valid concerns from the legal department and content creation does need guidelines. Most larger companies have adopted a social media or blogging policy which, when written well, balances security and legal concerns with enough openness and trust in employees as to not completely neuter the message.

By leveraging your internal knowledge, you will put yourself a big step ahead of your competition. One of the best differentiating factors between you and your competition is your employees and their knowledge. Don’t be afraid to show what you know and let certain key people step out and be a star. People inherently don’t trust companies but they do trust other people. Building trust in social media is key and it can only be done with real, authentic individuals. You have lots of these authentic people in your company and they have an important part to play in your social media business strategy.

Topics include:

New Android tablets debut at CES

The new Apple Macbook Air and what it means for the future of mobile computing

The coming flood of Internet connected devices or cloud based computing

App stores in the connected world. Apple vs Google

What do businesses need to do to capitalize on all that’s been discussed on todays show

Listen To The Show!

Netflix has very smartly pushed their software onto just about every streaming media device available today from Xbox to Google TV, Apple TV, Roku and many Internet connected DVD players. It makes sense for them to offer a streaming only plan to go along with these devices. The only problem is that while Netflix has increased it’s streaming movie and tv offerings, it’s still nowhere near what is available for their DVD by mail customers. For this to really work, Netflix is going to have to push even harder and make many more  movies available for streaming. Eventually, in all reality, there should be no DVD by mail all and everything should be streaming only. You would think movie studios would love this as profits are higher and copying movies is make more difficult. But as with many things lately, the DVD business model is so firmly intrenched change is hard.

It’s becoming more clear that this is where we are going in the future. Content will be largely cloud based and will be available on demand as a stream. It’s best for all parties really even though some will be slow recognize it.

The latest and perhaps most shocking example is the story of Giorgio Galante, an AT&T customer who wrote emails to AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson in part to complain about several aspects of his AT&T experience. After the second email in as many weeks, Giorgio received a phone call from AT&T’s “Executive Response Team” thanking him for his feedback and at the same time warning Giorgio if he continued to email the CEO he would be served with a cease and disist letter. Threatening your customer with legal action because he tries to communicate with an officer of the company is so shockingly dumb I am at a loss for words. Is that what they teach you at B School?

It’s not the first time, however, AT&T has acted in such a way. As they were being barraged by complaints about the poor network service AT&T said it was the customers who were using too much data and they would have to look into doing something about that. Yes, our service stinks and it’s your fault mr. customer, so I will have to find a way to penalize you for that. And in fact, AT&T has now found that way, this week announcing dramatic changes to their data plans for smart phones like the iPhone. Unlimited access is gone and customers now much choose between two data plans, both with data limits and charges for going over the limits.

How does AT&T get away with this nonsense? Because they have the iPhone, the most popular cell phone in the world and you cannot buy it from anyone else. Apple may have signed a pact with the devil on this one and like it or not, there is some blowback that Apple suffers from all this as well.

I believe something needs to change drastically in the mobile world. We can no longer allow companies to sign us up for long term (2 year) contracts and then treat us so poorly. Since all the mobile companies seem to be in league with each other on most of these egregious practices, it’s going to take some kind of government action to step in and fight for the American consumer.

In the end, I don’t know what AT&T is thinking on this one. Is Giorgio Galante a pest? Unnecessarily filling up an important CEO’s email with trivial complaints? I don’t care if he is a nusense . He’s a customer, he has a right to be a nusense. He deserves to be treated with respect. He deserves an answer to his questions, not a threat of legal action.

RedBox has been a massive hit without large stores because they put their vending machines where people already are, like the supermarket. No extra trip or hassle required. And at $1 a movie, Blockbuster doesn’t stand a chance. It’s interesting that Blockbuster has watched all this go on in the past few years but has not been able to do much of anything about it. They’ve experimented with a few things, but halfheartedly and they have been failures. Someone at corporate didn’t want to hurt the mainline retail business, which was really bad strategy because that business is dead now anyway and they have nothing to show for it.

Blockbuster has misread and misunderstood most every new business reality of the digital age. There CEO talks a good game but somehow I doubt they will have the boldness and smarts to actually do what it takes to catch up. The only thing they have going for themselves is a still strong brand name. If they can just find the guts to capitalize on it.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy