How much do you as a consumer value a positive experience with a brand or its customer service department? How willing are you to share that with your friends? How inclined are you to let that person know that you're interaction with them was positive?

Business practices and how we treat the planet are also in desperate need of re-humanization.

Effectively, change is almost impossible without industry-wide collaboration, cooperation and consensus.

What today's business reality makes clear is that brands cannot survive in a society that is failing economically, socially, ethically, and morally.

Brands must have a point of view on that purposeful engagement, whether it's directed towards the environment, poverty, water as a resource or causes such as breast cancer or education. Merely declaring your commitment to a category or cause will not be enough the distinguish your brand sufficiently to see a return on these well-intended efforts.

With the never-ending stream of new social technologies, apps and platforms rolling out every day, its easy to get lost in the minutiae of social media. Yet for there to be effective change, especially within large, top-down, hierarchical institutions, a company must have an over-arching understanding of the new role it has to play.

CEOs must embrace the role of serving as the public face of the company to their customer community and the marketplace at large.