Global Neighbourhoods

Google Translate and Social Media's Holy Grail

Google has announced that its translate service now helps people converse online back-and-forth in 51 languages. I have been following and using translate for a couple of years, with progressively increased frequency.

That's in part because I find myself talking with people in more and more countries, particularly in Twitterville. It's also because Google Translate has steadily, progressively improved and continues to do so.

Universal translation is a Holy Grail for social media's greatest promise: that all people can talk to all people in social media spaces and they can do so without the intermediation of government, media or other imposing institutions.

Ultimately, here's what would happen. Let's suppose my native language is French and yours is Farsi and let's suppose we met in Twitterville. I would type a message to you in French but you would read it in Farsi. You would respond in Farsi and I would see your answer in French.

We are some distance from the day when that would happen. Google Translate requires a few extra steps that slow down the interaction.  It sometimes makes truly goofy translations. A few months ago, my friend David Feng, who is incidentally a professional translator, tweeted in Chinese that he was tweeting from his iPhone in a subway under Beijing.

But Google translate from Chinese to English said that David was "under Beijing's belly holding my device" Funny? Yes, but not conducive to natural language flow.

The point is that Google Translate has been moving steadily toward greater accuracy and it seems to now be getting better faster. Translate also needs to figure out how to be actually integrated into the Twitter application as well as in blogs, Facebook and so on.

It is only recently that I began to believe this might actually occur in my lifetime and when it does, the results, it seems to me, will be monumental.

Does Multitasking impair real learning?

For someone who spends so much time in social media, I'm not much of a multitasker.

I tend to do one thing at a time. When I read, I read slowly and without even background music. When I write, I filter out almost every detail that is not relevant to the piece I'm working on. When I run, I don't listen to music, but pay attention to my body and the environment.

So this week's social media bash should actually make me feel pretty good.  A Stanford University study declared multitaskers can't filter relevant information as well as us single taskers. This study would confirm that I am maximizing my ability to learn by focusing while you... [HEY!!! Pay attention while you are reading this] are drifting off between chat, video, music, people in the room and whatever.

Just listen to Prof. Clifford Nass, who was among those conducting the survey. He says you multitaskers are “suckers for irrelevancy. Everything distracts them.”

But wait a minute. The reason I don't multitask is that I am easily distracted. My dog visiting for a harmless head pat distracts me. And on my single task, I still have to follow down irrelevancies. When I was writing Twitterville, I followed down 50 stories that did not appear in the book. I stayed glued to the Internet during the Mumbai terror incident for over a week and ended up writing less than two pages on the subject.

The thing is that we don't know what activities, are a waste of time until we waste some time pursuing them. Then there's the converse when an apparent distraction turns out to be valuable. I thought Twitter was a simple distraction from more serious efforts when I first started. It turned out those more serious efforts were in fact the distraction.

Brian Solis, writing in PR 2.0 speculates that the study examined the wrong activity.He thinks more than searching for useful task-oriented content, the social media multitaskers are searching more for connection.

To me it's an exercise in irrelevance. For better or worse, social media is moving relentlessly forward. It's seems fashionable to write reports and opinions as to why social media, causes loneliness in the workplace or that more companies are attempting to ban it or that multitasking people pay less attention to each task. Each of these report contain some truth. None of these reports contain anything close to an overwhelming truth, from my perspective.

If you try to warn the world that social media has some negative aspects, you'll get some attention, but most of us will get distracted and move on to points that are more relevant to the tasks we give top priority.

Media may have become more distracting and fragmented. But people have always used it as background to tasks. Music, television, games, etc. Somehow people who multitask, may flunk Stanford quizzes, but my guess is that over time people adapt and get their work done in styles and environments that just suit them.

I know lots of multitaskers. My wife is astounded at how few tasks I can do at once compared to her.  She seems to do hers with great skill. So do so many of the people I know in social media.

Now what was I saying?

Altimeter becomes a group. I'm betting it becomes more than that

I have lots of friends who consult businesses, write books or both. I try to avoid recommending any of them because favoring one will get me in trouble with the others. The last time I made exception to the rule was when author-consultant Charlene Li 's first book, Groundswell came out. I said she had co-authored a watershed book, in Groundswell and in that particular case, I seem to have called it right.

In expanding her year-old new technology consultancy Altimeter Group to include three accomplished and talented colleagues: online customer and social media strategist Jeremiah Owyang, marketing and innovation pioneer Deborah Schultz and enterprise application expert Ray Wang, she has transformed her home office practice into something that also may be watershed.

An "altimeter," by definition, measure how high something can fly, and the group will help global enterprise organizations do precisely that in areas of new technologies, particularly social media. There is an open source feel to their approach in that they will serve sort of as a "core four." When and as needed they will bring in other experts for projects.

The geo center of this  global operation will be in spaces they have rented in San Mateo they have dubbed, "The Hangar," which extends the Altimeter metaphor. The hanger is where you design and construct objects that take off.

With the exception of Deb Schultz, three members have their roots as Forrester Group analysts and I found it very interesting that Altimeter's press announcement there was an apparent avoidance of the word "analyst." I asked Owyang about it. "We don't provide syndicated research," which has historically been the gravy section of traditional analyst firms.

I imagine that gravy has been thinning in recent years. I interviewed James Governor in Twitterville, who is co-founder of Redmonk, another next-generation, four-person firm, that also eschews analyst reports.

It seems the value of these reports has continued to erode. Fifteen years ago, a typical report cost $10,000 and upwards. Now you can get them for $500. The problem is that most of the data contained in them is available for free online.

I think Altimeter and Redmonk are examples of a next-generation consultancy model. Instead of making money by selling proprietary data, these firms are sharing their data and selling their ability to assemble dynamic expertise to companies who are going to need it if they are to successfully navigate the road to recovery.

TBASH. It was about Twitterville...

... and Twitterville is about Tbashers

[TBashers--a diverse, but highly connected crowd. Photo by Ken Yeung]

It was a big week end for me. Yeah, I observed a milestone birthday, but that was almost beside the point. The big tomato of my week end was TBASH, my Twitterville book launch party.

My first purpose for Tbash was of course to sell books. It is my view that my Twitter community will have greater influence on Twitterville's marketplace fate than anyone else. This is a book about them, more than for them, but what they say about my book  is more likely to determine its fate than any other factor, or so it seems to me.

I invited quite a few of the people who I profiled in Twitterville, as well those acknowledged in the book for giving me stories and ideas which I used. More than 50 of them received Twitter-blue buttons to wear when they arrived. I asked everyone else to go up to the badge-people and ask them their stories and to share their own.

So a good portion of the conversation became people telling their Twitter stories, which quickly led to new Twitter stories. For example, I met Perrine Crampton, who it turned out was the daughter of someone I worked for more than 40 years ago. But what I loved the most was seeing folk like Scott Townsend of United Linen in Bartlesville, Okla., who is in the book talking with Aneta Hall of Pitney Bowes and the two discovering through #tbash how much common ground they shared in Twitterville.

This was my night, perhaps, but more than that this was a night for people who knew each other only on Twitter to discover when they met they were already old friends. There were lots of hugs, handshakes and smiles wherever I looked.

A lot of that happened and it was extremely cool to see.

Tweeter came from Washington State, Oregon, Southern California, Oklahoma, Texas, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia, DC, Connecticut, Rhode Island and New Hampshire and probably a few states I had not heard about. They were diverse by age (9 to 89), profession (enterprise, home office; technology to a regional laundry service) and in all sorts of other ways.

But they stood on a common ground called Twitterville.

Now they go home and read the 225 books they purchased.

Those who browsed at the party, who will be the earliest influencers of Twitterville conversations sometimes read small excerpts during the party. Their facial expressions sometimes seemed to reveal a certain ambivalence.

Should I be worried?

Overall, however there seemed to be a lot of photos depicting people who had a T-blast at T-bash.

Yesterday morning I invited the folk from out of town and a few of my closer Bay Area Twitterville friends to a brunch in my backyard where smaller number of people could have longer and more personal conversations until they caught airplanes or work they couldn't avoid.

It always is nce when old friends get to meet each other in the real world.

Thank ou everyone. For me it was about the best party weekend I ever had.

Singapore Documentary filmmaker Tan Siok Siok needs help making a 'Twittamentary'

Back before the Beijing Olympics, when the world's media was filled with news of anti-China protests, a Singapore-born documentary producer, named Tan Siok Siok who lives part of her life in that huge and complex city, produced a documentary film called Boomtown Beijing [link just to trailer].

Boomtown told a different story then the one on stage center. It depicted everyday people of Beijing, people who had nothing to do with the issues fomenting protest.

Tan captured the excitement, spirit and aspirations of people who lived there and were just proud that for the first time ever, the whole world was coming for a visit. The controversies, were not part of the stories of these people.

I met Tan when I was in China, she is understated, passionate, perceptive and generous. And now she has turned her considerable talents to a new story, one that interests me even more than China. Her Her new film, Twittamentary looks at how lives connect and intersect within the Twitter community.

And for those of you who spend time in Twitterville, well, this is your chance to be a movie star. Tan wants you to contribute video clips to Twittamentary. Get in front of a video camera and tell your best story about Twitter and you. Tell a story or talk about what Twitter means to you or why you think Twitter matters then upload it here.

To me, what really is interesting is that from the comfort of your own home, or while sitting in front of a webcam or smartphone, wherever you are in the world you can be part of a digital film being produced from China.

This, seems to me, expands the definition of Global Neighborhoods.

Yikes! I'm 65.

Thanks to my friend Jeremiah Owyang and Facebook's tradition of ratting out it's users, the beans have been pretty much spilled. It's true. I don't feel a day over 64, which is exactly how old I am.

My first inclination is to demand a recount, but getting one can be challenging as my Iranian Twitter friends have learned.

It's also true, that I timed #tbash to coincide with my birthday.  I figured I could celebrate with over 300 people and have this little secret that I was also observing my birthday, but I got caught with my birth certificate showing.

I guess the worst part is knowing that it's well past halftime in the game of life and I'm still not sure how it will come out or when the game ends..

There are also a few perks. I get to save money at the movies and on planes and at some hotels. Also, I've picked up a few pearls of wisdom over the years--or at least I think I have.

Should I share them with you? Probably not. Life is about finding your own pearls of wisdom and yours and mine very well could be different.

I'll just give you one tip: Stay curious. If you ever succumb do a "been there, done that attitude, life gets boring and so do you.

I'll give you another one at this time next year. I should live so long.

Giving Twittervilles to Beth Kanter so she can give to good causes.

I spotlighted Beth Kanter in Twitterville for her remarkable work in goodwill fundraising. Portfolio, my publisher gave Beth three books, which she announced she will auction off, after I sign them, then give the money to the cause of the high bidder's choice.

Now, Microsoft's classy Betsy Aoki who was interviewed in Naked Conversations has stepped up promising that she will buy three more Twitterville copies at #tbash, my imminent book launch party, and donate them to Beth after I sign them, hopefully to double the amount of money raised for a worthy cause to be named.

I have to help this cause. I am going to sign and donate three more books from my small stash of copies for Beth to give away as well. Now there are nine up for auction.

Anyone else?

HP becomes an angel sponsor for #tbash. Registration reopens.

HP has just made a last-minute sponsorship contribution to #tbash. I asked HP social media honcho Tony "Frosty" Welch on Monday and they came through in time. How's that for corporate response.

As a result, we can reopen registration one more time, at least a little bit. I've opened 20 more slots. We will now accommodate 325 people, which is probably just about as far as we can stretch our envelope.

If you still wish to attend, please register with your Twitter handle at twitvite.com.

Thanks HP. Also thanks to Dow Jones, Network Solutions  , Radian6, Intuit Inc. , MyWay Interactive and Uptake.com for making this event possible.

See 325 of you on Sunday. We're gonna have a ball.

Caught in the spamstream.

It was early and I was on my first cup of coffee wading through my email. There was what appeared to be a request by an editor in Virginia for a review copy about my book. I immediately, responded with a polite note, copying my publishers, PR person asking the book be sent.

Except that the conversation was not directed at me. It was responding to a direct mail pitch from a PR agency that I had not heard of who was pitching another book with which I was not associated. The agency was using a list server that contained the email names of a great many editors and bloggers who touch upon the social media space.

I had been one the bloggers on the list an that's why the conversation landed in my inbox, as well as scores of other editors and analysts.

Strangely, a lot of email started being generated in this stream. At first I paid no attention to it, but when the quantity started piling up, I opened a few to discover editors and bloggers shrieking to stop this endless stream of spam. Many thought it was me and I had to drop what I was behind it.

It spilled quickly into Twitter. An analyst for a very prominent firm, posted that my PR agency was spamming the world promoting my new book. The head of a PR agency who is prominent in social media, noted that this bad PR seemed to be doing me good because there were a few requests to send the book amid a host of them suggesting I go to the window open and take a flying leap.

Anyone who follows me should know that I am far from a fan of spammers and of PR practitioners sending blanket unsolicited emails. At first, I thought there was malicious intent behind what had occurred. I was relieved to realize it was just an odd coincidence.

I hope the PR person in question learns a lesson and is smart enough to apologize--not by email but in a blog. I wish the analyst who posted false accusations of me would retract his statement, but analysts admitting when they are wrong is an unfortunate rarity.

For me, it has taken a few hours with a firehose to set the record straight. I'm sure there are some people in that email stream who will continue to think I had something to do with book-promoting spam, but overall, social media has allowed me to set the record straight with most people.

This post is another step in that effort.

Is there a lesson to be learned? First, I need to be very careful what email I answer on my first cup of coffee. Second is that I should consider going back to caffeinated.

tbash expands guest list to 305

#tbash, the Twitterville book launch party filled up yesterday and today 12 people requested they be added to the wait list. We did a few recalculations and have decided we can comfortably accommodate another 30 people. Everyone on the waiting list has been added to the guest list.

There are now 18 more spaces for to attend #tbash. To register, please sign up here. And I know I keep saying this, but a new sponsor would allow us to make this a bigger party. The Hiller Museum can hold lots of people.

We really want to accommodate everyone, but if you want to go, I advise you to sign up soon. The sign up pace seems to have picked up now that the event is less than a week away.

See you Sunday.

My Tbash Overfloweth

Yesterday, the sign up site for #tbash, the Twitterville launch party hit 275, our maximum capacity--unless either a new sponsor steps forward. This is unlikely with one week to go before the event starts at 4 pm in Hiller Aviation Museum, San Carlos, CA.

However, Tatyana Kanzaveli, my event producer and I are looking at a few options and we expect we'll be able to squeeze a few more people in and hope to have an announcement later today.

We have already started a waiting list, but twtvite.com, the application we are using, doesn't not let us track sign ups by time and date. It lists names alphabetically by Twitter handle only.

So if you'd still like to go to the party, please email me: shelisrael1@gmail.com . In the subject line, please write "tbash" & your twitter handle. I'll ping you back and tell you your number on the list and your current chances for getting in.

I will add you to the wait list and I will tell you what your number on the list is. I'm sure we will be able to squeeze a few more folk into the museum.

What the Friendfeed-Facebook Deal means to Social Media

I was asked a couple of times last week what I thought about Facebook's recent announcement of an impending Friendfeed acquisition. It was a busy week and I really hadn't had much time to think of anything but the various elements of my impending book launch.

But last night, I had a few friends over including Shirley and Jeremiah Owyang and I asked Jeremiah hs views. he made a couple of really good points. First, he said it was a talent acquisition. Almost anyone who understands and appreciates Web 2.0 technology speaks with great respect for the elegance, simplicity and power of Friendfeed. It's the reason why the platform has become the conversational tool of choice among so many members of the technology community.

Second, Jeremiah sees a smart defensive move. He observed that Facebook didn't want another out-of-nowhere success story such as Twitter to deal with, and once again I completely agree with him.

I don't know any of the strategists over at Facebook, so I speak with no inside knowledge, but I think there may be another, bigger picture strategy going on and it has to do with where conversational technology is going over the next five or maybe 10 years.

This is a disruptive space, one driven by different fundamentals than we have seen in modern times. To date it has been driven, not by what the investor wants, not by what the entrepreneur wants but by what the users want.

For better or worse, social media is a customer-driven marketplace. This causes all sorts of headaches. Free for one thing, is a migraine in a free marketplace, but free has become the standard, perhaps since Google determined to make scores of millions of people happy, dependent customers before it made it's first penny.

Something else customers want--if not demand is to be able to post content in one place and have it distributed across the social web. In short, I want the tweet I post once to appears on Facebook, Friendfeed and so on. Right now, when I post on Friendfeed, I've checked a box that means what I post automatically goes up Twitter. When I post a tweet, it gets posted on Facebook. If I opted to use Tweetdeck, I can simultaneously post on Facebook and Twitter. Google is obviously interested in the space as well and I assume so are some people somewhere at Microsoft, and maybe Apple Computer.

The purchase of Friendfeed puts Facebook into a leadership position in the emerging race of "one post gets you everywhere. The acquisition of the Friendfeed talent pool makes it likely that lead will expand.

Then finally, there is another longterm factor, one that any MBA can explain to you. We seem to becoming to the end of a very exciting innovation era. Innovation and disruption is usually spurred by startups such as Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook.

Such phase are then followed by longer, slower moving, less-dramatic phases of refinement; of putting systems in place, of establishing best practices. These periods are invariably a time of great business consolidation. Agile little startups become pieces of much larger companies. There's less excitement and more profit.

I think the acquisition of Friendfeed is smart, strategic. It is also the logical next step on the continuum of what I call the normalization of social media.

Twitterville Newbies: Beware the Public Stream

In Twitterville, I quote co-founder Ev Williams as observing, "people are pretty much clueless when they first get to Twitter." He said that back in December 2008, and since then the company has introduced all sorts of features and functionality so Twitterville newbies will be able to find their friends and popular accounts when they first join.

I was absolutely clueless to the value when I first got there. After a few days, I had posted only once, had no picture showing and 45 folks following me. Why were the following me; I wasn't going anywhere? A couple of months later I was in Boston and posted that fact. My friend, and California neighbor,  Jeremiah Owyang turned out to be in Boston as well and ping me. We had dinner and fun that night, and that was the first time I discovered that Twitter can make things happen that otherwise would not have occurred.

That was only a couple of years ago. I could write a book about what I've seen on Twitter since then. In fact I just did.

Last week, I went to Kansas City, where I met with the sales team at Five Star Speakers, my new speaking agency. I was there really, so that they could better understand the product that I wanted them to sell--me. I found it more than a little difficult to figure out what it was I should say to them.

But the night before Steve Gardner had taken me out for legendary Kansas City ribs  at Jack's Stack. Steve and I found each other through Twitter, and I knew that he saw the value to his organization, yet it was also clear that many on his team were new and, as Ev Williams had put it, "clueless" to how Twitter really worked. At dinner, Five Star, bizdev executive had complained at how fast the stream moved when she got there. The next day, when I presented to the sales team,  heard the same observation and saw other heads nod.

It seems that as Twitter newbies my Five Star friends had been dipping into the public stream where the post of millions of people from all over the world go up in rapid succession. Until this morning I had not looked at the public stream since my first days in Twitterville. It isn't at all like dipping your toe into a stream. It's more like immersing your head into Niagara Falls.

The public stream is neither useful nor interesting to most people using Twitter and they usually learn this after a short while. It is your personal stream that matter. This stream contains the content of the people you choose to follow. I like Andrew Lih's observation that who you follow is more important than who follows you. If you follow lots of people then your personal stream will have lots of content. You regulate both the quality and quantity of what goes past you, by choosing wisely who you follow.

Your personal stream is really what will determine the quality of your Twitterville experience. Mixing metaphors, your personal stream becomes you customized, conversational newspaper. What flows there is the value you will take into real life and the conversation that start there are likely to be the most valuable to you in using Twitter.

Besides, it's a lot easier and safer to dip your toes into a little stream than a thundering waterfall.

 

My New Canadian Tour & a Global Neighborhoods Lesson

                            [Joe Thornley. Photo by Hyku]

My friend Joe Thornley just announced my five-city Twitterville book tour, which he has assembled on my behalf and for which I am extremely grateful. You can see the details here. It will also be the the third birthday for Third Tuesday, a monthly social media meet-up that has burgeoned since September 2006.

Canada is special for me as a speaker. When Joe brought me to Canada to tout Naked Conversations, it was the first time I ever spoke outside of the US. I had been to Canada a few times, and culturally it isn't that different from the US. Not only that but when we are not on the hockey rinks, Canadians and Americans tend to get along pretty well.

But still, I would be speaking in a foreign country. There are differences in nuance and culture. For example, those Canadians actually LIKE cold weather, which I hate. As Joe recently observed, I tend to be a worrier when it comes to writing and speaking. I sweat details in advance, so I can have fun when I'm up on stage.

Joe had arranged a couple of warm=up engagements where I had not be poorly received, but I had not hit it past the goalie by any measures.

So my confidence wasn't overflowing as I got ready for the main reason I had come to Canada, to help Joe launch the first-ever Third Tuesday in Toronto.

My knees were almost shaking when I got on the dais to be interviewed. I muttered my first two paragraphs. Then I started noticing people in the audience seemed happy to see me. Heads were nodding. Folks were smiling. Okay, Canadians tend to be very polite, when hockey is not involved but it helped to feel warmly received.

I felt Third Tuesday went well. I made some friends that night whom remain friends. I look forward to seeing them face-to-face again. "Hell," I thought, "they're just a bunch of social media geeks, just like in the States."

And in that thought was a bigger lesson.

It's not that all Canadians will enjoy or have the slightest interest about what I have to say. In fact, at that time, relatively few Canadians much cared about social media, or  Robert Scoble, never mind the unknown other guy who wrote Naked Conversations. 

There were, however, a few people who cared. It seemed we shared a common topical interest, a shared passion on something new and different that might change the way people communicate all over the world. I, and the American and Canadian social media enthusiasts shared a common interest and it transcended geographic barriers.

These are global neighborhoods. People of the world are using social media to create new spaces built on common interests.

Canada made me comfortable speaking in a foreign country. I've been most fortunate to speak in several more countries in Europe and Asia over the past few years, not to mention diverse corners of my own country.

Wherever I go, I'm comfortable. I know that most of the people out there care about the things I care about; read some of the same people I read; talk and follow and hear some of the same words and faces and voices that I follow.

My social media neighborhood has gone global and it is really a kick to be part of it and to see how it has grown in so many ways and so little time.

Twitter says attacks are "Geopolitical in motivation"

In a new Twitter.com blog post, co-founder Biz Stone says, "The ongoing, massively coordinated attacks on Twitter this week appear to have been geopolitical in motivation."

While Biz names no geopolitical forces I immediately assumed the culprits were supporters of the Iran Election thieves, but FT.com points the finger at a veteran cyberbully--Russia, who apparently has gone after Twitter, Live Journal and Facebook in order to silence an Georgian citizen who charges Russia with all sorts of nastiness in his country.

Russia, was the first country alleged to launch a cyber attack. Back in September 2007, it went after Estonia when the former satellite country relocated a statue salutary to former occupying Soviet soldiers.

In this case a country has maliciously attacked a few Western social media companies who allow people to speak up. Russia seems to think it's justifiable to silence anything that allows voices it doesn't like to be heard.

This is really scary.

An Era of Mass Micro Marketing

I've been thinking a lot about long-term changes since I wrote about LocalPeople and hyperlocal journalism a few days ago. I do see the future of journalism in its ability to drill deeply into topical and geographic niches. But as I step back, I think the same is true for most large organizations, particularly in business.

This is a reversal of direction, for decades, actually hundreds of years, communicators, branders, merchants, advertisers, elected officials, fund raisers have all moved toward bigger. Technology kept assisting organizations to reach more and more people at lower cost per person.

The golden era of physical newspapers and broadcast flourished for a very long time and it's long, steady decline started in the 70s did not pose much of a threat until the 90s and has only become clearly unstoppable for the last three or four years.

What really happened was that first technology let merchandising scale until it became massive, and simultaneously annoying and ineffective. It allowed, almost required, merchants to keep getting bigger.

Now the reverse is coming to pass. Global companies are discovering that technology is allowing them to get more personal, more interactive and more efficient by sing social media to talk with people one at a time.

This is absolutely baffling to many traditional mass merchants. They would prefer to do what they have always done in a new channel. They keep trying and it very rarely seems to work.

People just don't like being marketed to. They would prefer talking. They trust recommendations from peers more than ads. This has probably been always true for the most part. But now we have tools that let us get recommendations on what to buy,listen to, watch from each other and we trust real humans rather than faces on pages or screens.

After decades of learning to think really, really big, survival now requires brand people, advertisers, marketers, politicians, fund raisers to think really small. The entire world is becoming a micro market. We are self-organizing into topical niches. We decide about purchases in conversations that feel more like we are chatting over a backyard fence than listening to voices that sound like they emulate from stadium public address systems.

We have entered into an era of micro marketing, of virtual one-on-ones. Platforms like Twitter allow each of us to have lots of such conversations when we wish to. If we are part of a huge company than many of us can talk to many more.

Social networks let single voices carry fast and far. We have entered into something new and different. Marketers need to understand the dynamic of hyperlocal micro markets and they have the tools to address them massively.

This is mass micro marketing and it turns market strategist minds upside down and inside out, or so it seems to me.

Social Media Takes Some Hits

So far it's been a tough week for social media enthusiasts. First, referring to a recent suicide by a teenager who was taunted by peers on Bebo, the Archbishop of Westminister, head of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales, warned that sites like Facebook and Twitter can isolate teenagers who come to see friendship as a commodity with disastrous results. Reading his interview in the London Telegraph, he essentially put a smoking gun into the collective hands of social media site, which he apparently does not use.

Second, the US Marines announced a one-year ban on Twitter, Facebook and other social media site as security risks. "The mechanisms for social networking were never designed for security and filtering. They make it way too easy for people with bad intentions to push malicious code to unsuspecting users," a Stratcom source told Wired.com.

Both of these are serious matters and they are not based just on nonsense. The Bebo suicide is not the first such incident. In September 2007, 13-year-old Megan Meier committed suicide after being taunted by a neighbor girl's mother in a vicious hoax. A little more than a year later, a Florida teenager swallowed sleeping pills, then died in front of a Justin.TV web cam as viewer online watched and apparently taunted him because thy thought it was a staged event.

I would not be surprised to learn there have been other such incidents.

The Marines are absolutely right. They are more than a few bad bugs in social networks. The announcement comes less than a month after a hacker broke into Twitter.com, stole company secret, delivered them to Techcrunch who then published abundant chunks of what was nt meant for public scrutiny. As I write this post, Twitter has been shut down to defend itself from a malicious Denial of Service attack.

This is bad when it is done to a business. It would obviously be a lot worse if it endangered troops. The Marines may recommend that the entire us. Dept. of Defense band Web 2.0 until such time it's security can better managed.

As far as I know there have been no security breeches caused by social media to the US, or any other military to date. Could it happen? Of course it could.

But let's put a few things in perspective. Suicide is the number eleven cause of death in the world, according to the UN World Health Organization, who reported in 2006 that one in every 40 deaths is self-inflicted. In 2000 alone there were one million suicides worldwide, more than the number of soldiers killed in any
war since 1945. 

It's worse for teenagers. According to FamilyFirstAid.org, suicide is the third lead cause of deaths among American teenagers, in the US and presumably close to that for the rest of the world as well. It has been on the increase for at east a decade.

And of all the teens using social media in the world, three of them have committed suicide in incidents related to social media. Would these same three young people committed suicide even if there was no social media? We will never know. Should we blame social media for possibly provoking suicides among young people? With all due respect to the Archbishop of Westminister, that would take a leap of faithlessness.

Isolation? The Archbishop claims that social media increases it. I'll wager, he hasn't spent much time using the stuff. He hasn't seen the number of people who in the real world may be taunted and ignored who have found friends online, who have found they are not alone in feeling passions for topics that the mainstream of their peers disdain. Among my most compelling reasons for embracing social media is that it lets us find other people like ourselves and I wonder if that phenomenon has not prevented a few suicides. But then suicide prevention rarely makes the news.

The Marines are a different story. Only our worst enemies would want to punch holes into American security perimeters. Social media can pose a greater threat than say breaches into phones or even email for that matter. Take one single laptop beachhead and you may be able to corrupt an entire network.

I think the Marines have acted prudently. Social Media's explosion has attracted bad guys in the same way that it is attracting politicians. Its where the people are going. It's where you can find voters. It's where you can find innocent people to prey upon. It's where you can flaws in security that lets you inject malice.

Where good people go for honest reasons, you can be certain that bad guys will follow. Yesterday gamblers, swindlers and bordellos followed the Gold Rush prospectors. Today Phishers, spammers, scammers and malicious hackers are slithering into cyberspace.

I think the Marines will return to social media once they figure out how to make it a little more secure. Besides they have little choice. It's where they will find young people to recruit. It's how people in service are sharing videos with loved ones. 

The genie is long out of the bottle.Trying to prevent the military from using social media is less likely to succeed than keeping dinosaur fences from breaking in Jurassic Park.  Social media has a way.

The UK's LocalPeople: Hyperlocal that works

[Roland Bryan, Director of Strategy, Associated Northcliffe Digital.Photo by Shel]

Richard Titus, a serial entrepreneur, was a co-founder of Razorfish, the legendary ad agency that introduced, for better or worse, interactive advertising to the internet. It got sold to Microsoft and Richard walked away quite comfortably.

A couple of years back he and I served on the board of directors for YourTrumanShow, a video blogging startup that didn't survive the current recession. Richard, a Californian living in London has been an executive at BBC for the past few years, until he recently got recruited away to become CEO of Associated Northcliffe Digital (AND), the online component of A&N Media, the UK's second largest media company in the UK.

A&N is best known as publisher of the Mail and Metro, but in all it has about 120 British tabloids, a significant number of radio stations and other holdings. 

Richard has been in the US with Roland Bryan, AND's director of strategy and John Harmsworth [Lord Rothermere], who heads A&N.  They were in the States so that Titus could introduce them to people they knew in the technology community, particularly where it could be useful to building online community platforms.

At dinner, I found myself sitting next to John who shared with me that he understands the dubious future of newspapers moving forward. He really needs not look much further than down the hall of his own home where neither of his two sons looks at newspapers. Instead, they spend their time on Facebook and MySpace. He said he doubted that these two possible heirs to this media empire would ever turn away from online spaces and onto newspaper pages.

Most of my conversation was with Roland who started LocalPeople a couple of months ago. It sounded to me to be a most promising implementation of hyperlocal journalism when we talked last night.

I just spent an hour with it and it seems to me even more promising now. When you look at it, you'll recognize the functionality from platforms you've probably seen such as Twitter, Yelp,Flickr and maybe a shade of Facebook. Video is coming soon and will have similarities, of course, with YouTube.

The key difference between LocalPeople and most hyperlocal efforts I've come across such as the New York Times special section covering the innards of two Brooklyn neighborhoods, is that the AND effort looks and sounds like local people talking to each other in a cafe or over a backyard fence. The Times looks and feels like, well, the Times.

LocalPeople reads and feels more like Twitter than it does a newspaper, but unlike Twitter it is organized into geographic, rather than global neighborhoods. Roland emphasized there is no news in LocalPeople. If real news broke in one of these communities, the media company would dispatch a tabloid reporter. But now, the color and nuance of the local story can be greatly enhanced by LocalPeople.

This of course gets me jumping up and down gleefully. This is a form a braided journalism, one of my personal passion spots. Braided Journalism is about traditional and citizen journalism coming together, intertwining and emerging into something new, superior and enduring from what we have today.

The "enduring" part has been elusive as I have looked around at various new media news activities. Roland understands that if you want to attract local merchants the language and complexities of CPMs and Clickthroughs needs to be abandoned.

Local ad deals are quite simple. AND asks merchants what measurable results they want to achieve over the next year, and then calculates what LocalPeople would have to do to achieve it. Then they charge it and the merchant can very simply measure results.

"All we really have to do is be more valuable than the Yellow Pages," he said.

I see enormous promise in LocalPeople. The platform allows a great deal of self management and self organization. I think local merchants will immediately "get" the desirability of moving into venues where their customers have already migrated.

I'm going to keep my eye on this one.

Tbash registration opens at 9 am PDT. Only 142 slots still open

TBASH, the Twitterville book launch party, scheduled from 4-8 pm, Sunday Aug. 23 at the Hiller Aviation Museum will open for public registration at 9 am today.

 It will be on a first-come basis. Just go to the twtvite page and enter your twitter handle. If you plan to bring a guest who does not have a Twitter handle, re-enter yours and add the word guest.

There are just 142 open spaces left. The first 133 spots have been taken by people who are in th book, people who helped me find stories for the book and a small handful of close personal friends.

The number of people who can attend is regulated almost entirely by sponsorship revenue. We are grateful to UpTake.com a new travel search engine that searches reviews, ratings and information from 5000 of the top travel Websites that helps people decide where to go, where to stay, and what to do when you get there stepped up as a sponsor and we could add another 25 spaces.

We are hoping for more sponsorship. When we get it, we will open registration to more people. If you know of a company that can help, please contact TBASH producer, Tatyana Kanzaveli.

I will be monitoring and authenticating registrations today. If you run into a problem, please tweet or email me.

Announcing 'tBASH,' the Twitterville Book Launch Party

It is has been a long and sometimes difficult pregnancy, but I think the result is a beautiful baby. Please join me in celebrating the birth of my new book, Twitterville, how businesses can thrive in the new Global Neighborhoods.

tBASH, the Twitterville book launch party will be held from 4-8 pm, Sunday, Aug. 23 at the Hiller Aviation Museum, San Carlos CA. The first 300 copies of Twitterville will be on sale, ten days before it becomes available at most places that sell books.

tBASH will be attended by at least 25 of the people whose stories are told in the book.They are coming from all over the country. Among those who planning to attend are Richard Binhammer, Chris Brogan, Shel Holtz, Beth Kanter, Erica, O'Grady, Sam Lawrence , Lionel Menchaca, Jeremiah Owyang, KD Paine, Robert Scoble, Brian Solis as well as other prominent Twitterville folk.

But for me the cherry-on-the-cake is in the people who you may never have met or heard of, people who gave me great stories for the book, many of them traveling some distance to be part of tBASH.

They include:

They include: Sodexo's Arie Ball, who tweets to recruit executive talent;  Aneta Hall who is a social media change agent for Pitney Bowes the postage meter company; Bill Ferris who played a driving role in the first live tweeted surgery; Janis Krums, who was on a ferry to New Jersey, when a plane landed near him on the Hudson River; Stacey Monk who used Tweetsgiving to raise funds for a Tanzanian school and continues to make Epic Change; Howard Lindzon and Soren Macbeth, co-founders of Stocktwits the Twitterville fast-growing investment community; Matthew Arevalo, a Mac-loving geek who helped raise funds from Hollywood stars for charity:water and a few others who are still trying to deal with budget and logistics to get out here for the party.

There are a lot of people in Twitterville, not just those whose stories I tell, but people who reached out to me via Twitter, pointing me to the stories that are at the heart of the book. Over the last few weeks I have been reaching out and inviting each of them to reserve an advanced space at TBASH before I open it to the public. But time has run out and I haven't contacted everyone. If you are mentioned in Twitterville, in the book itself or in the acknowledgments, please tweet or email me before 9 am tomorrow, Aug. 4 and I will reserve a space for you.

At about 9 am Pacific tomorrow morning I will open [currently closed] signups to anyone via twtvite. Space is limited to 250 people for now, and at this moment there are 160 open spaces.

I will announce when signups go public on Twitter and then it will be first-come, first registered. You need to enroll with a Twitter handle. If you are bringing a guest who doesn't have one, use your own a second time and add the word "guest."

We have enough sponsorship to throw a great party for 250 people. We would like to make it a greater party for more people and to do that, we are looking for more sponsorship.

If you you can help in that area, please contact the phenomenal Tatyana Kanzaveli, an event impresario and sales & marketing consultant who has stepped up to produce tBASH and has done a remarkable job in a short period of time.

If you help support us, you'll be in good company. So far we've lined up:

Premier Sponsors

• Dow Jones, a News Corporation company is a leading provider of global business news and information services and the publisher of  The Wall Street Journal.” They will hold a drawing for an iPod Touch at the event.
  
• Network Solutions  a leading provider of products, services and resources to help small businesses start, grow and manage online.
• Radian6  focused on building the complete monitoring and analysis solution for PR and advertising professionals so they can be the experts in social media.”

General Sponsors

• Intuit Inc. is a leading provider of business and financial management solutions.
• MyWay Interactive hosts a free social contact manager that provides the capability to organize, sort, search and add notes to your Twitter friends.

Media Sponsors

• Mashable, the social media guide
• Churchill Club, Silicon Valley's business and technology business forum

Association Sponsor

• SNCR, the Society for New Communications Research

Social Cause Sponsor

• Global Learning Foundation[GLF]  Any profits from the event will going to GLF to help orphans in developing countries.

Food & Beverage sponsors

• Cameron Hughes Wines You'll be paying $3 a pop for wine and beer, but you'll be enjoying a higher quality because of the deal Cameron Hughes has provided us. [Soft drinks will be free.
• Sabra foods, makers of healthy foods for caring people
• Pretzel Crisps, Gourmet pretzel crackers from the people who used to own New York-style Bagels Co.

Needless to say, this is an important event for me, and I hope you will be able to join in celebrating the imminent arrival of my new baby.