Global Neighbourhoods

Cameras, cops, free speech & lame British laws

I was in Seville, in a major city square where I saw the two, uniformed, armed policemen on little mopeds. I smiled at them & they smiled back until  took out my little pocket camera. Then there's hands went up and they moved toward me gesturing to put the camera away. I complied.

I had a similar experience at the Rome Airport when I tried to photograph a heavily armed soldier smoking a cigarette outside security.

I would later find out that both countries had passed laws against taking pictures of law of officers and the military after very serious acts of terrorism had occurred. The thought of censorship in democracies had crossed my mind, but terrorism has certainly caused my own country to pass disturbing laws in the name of democracy that restricted some people's freedom.

Perhaps the laws are necessary. I have personal doubts. But those who know more about the tools that lead to machine gun fire in Italian Airports and bombs in Spanish planes and jets smashing into high-rise buildings are supposed to know more abut what is required than I do.

But then, the cases of over response in the name of freedom are long and well document. And the use of the camera is an instrument in revealing those abuses are even longer, as we have seen during Mumbai and the Iran election; in the record excessive use of force in a BART station on New Years Day this year and in the clubbing of Rodney King in LA back in 1991.

The camera has shown the truth when authorities entrusted to protect the public were in fact deceiving the public.

I write all this because the British have passed and are attempting to defend one of the most abusive and discriminatory laws I have heard of since maybe the Stamp Act in the time of the American Revolution.

It seems that in the name of freedom countries sometimes do the lamest things, as the US has so recently done in the case of Guantanamo. The British law is being explained by authorities as not being applicable to innocent tourists but will applied to people who appear as though they might be terrorist.

I assume that means white people in Western clothing can take pictures. Darker people in Eastern--or mid-Eastern-garb may be subject to arrest, interrogation or the mere confiscation of their cameras.

I really shouldn't have to tell you what's wrong with that. British citizen of all hues and clothing tastes shouldn't have to fight against such appalling, subjective discrimination. 

And in the name of fighting for freedom, freedom itself should not be so easily tromped upon by any government claiming to be a democracy.

[NOTE: I am running late to make a plane and I have not added quite a few pictures and links that may be useful when I get a chance. I assume it is still legal for me to post the pictures.]

Citizen Journalism & Tear Gas at the G20

I first heard about the the incidents two days after they started. William Herring,  tweeted me a link to the first of four videos I would see. Each gave the impression that police were using overwhelming force against an apparently small and nonviolent group of protesters in a park  near the University of Pittsburgh.

After I retweeted that, I would discover the protests were against the G20 assembly of top level leaders the world's 20 largest industrial and developing nations, a gathering that I overwhelmingly support, in the US city that has made the best comeback over the past half century.

Video such as this one disturbed me. It was sandwiched between slabs of street-protest rhetoric and was clearly edited. Yet it displayed pretty good evidence that police had been more than a little zealous in their disbursement tactics. It was also the first indication that police had been "federalized." Why had that not been reported in traditional media. When had they been federalized and what was the reason?

As a tweeter-blogger, I didn't know; nor did I feel free to call the US attorney general's office and say I was a blogging citizen journalist whose readers wanted answers.

So I stayed with the videos and I found them ugly. When I tweeted that there had not been anything like this in the US since the 1960, I was almost immediately corrected. The G20 meeting in Seattle in 1999 had caused havoc on the streets where avowed anarchists clashed with police, causing personal injury, property damage, and disruption to that city for almost a full week. Not much got accomplished inside the World Trade Organization summit of financial ministers.

At about that point, Perry Caldwell, a new Tweeter sent me a clip from KDKA, Pittsburgh's Channel 2 news site reporting many windows being broken and other minor damage. He condemned violence on both sides, but seemed to me to think police had acted properly.

I felt the KDKA story was  one-sided and did not explain the massive police action involving  tear gas, smoke grenade and new ultrasonic "sound cannons" that evoke a head-splitting noise that seemed suited for an Orwellian novel.

I have my own one-sided view as well. I was a protester against war and for civil rights in the 60s. I tasted tear gas and came very close to feel a policeman's club on my head. My attitudes have changed, but I'm generally skeptical of unlawful assembly charges because they fly in the face of American rights to assembly.

Then Ed Shah jumped in. Ed and I frequently talk in Twitterville. He impresses me as passionate as I am about human rights and police states. Ed pointed out that the US had an obligation to protect world leaders when the are assembled on American soil. He also speculated that the street noise could be a distraction for a more dangerous act of terrorism against the G20 and of course he is right.

1. I quieted down and stepped back. There were lots of issues intertwining here. I really didn't know much about what was going on. Nor did I know much about the events building up to the confrontation on the streets.

I realized that I am not a news organization. The people with whom I connect to "report" on an issue are not a news network. We were stepping in to fill a void created by a media industry in atrophy but we really still lack the organization, leadership, legs and budget that the old dynasties had provided.

Had I been an editor, with budget and staff and Pittsburgh or the G20 had been part of our beat, here are a few things I would have done:

• I would have assigned and coordinated a handful of reporters, correspondents and stringers. I would have assigned one to interview the police chief, mayor, Pitt officials to get their side of the story. I would have a political correspondent speak with officials at Justice, State and maybe FBI. I would have that reporter write about the government thinking and decisions as well as what they knew that helped them reach the decisions.

• I would have assigned anther reporter to attach her or himself to the protesters, writing human interest pieces about them, where they were from, how they got to Pittsburgh and why as well as what they hoped to accomplish. I would have insisted the leaders be interviewed and their backgrounds checked out. I would have investigated where their money had come from.
• I would have had someone research both the protest movement against globalization as well as a brief history of US street protests and what they did or did not achieve.
• I would have had my art department draw maps showing the proximity or distance between protesters and the G20 Summit. I would have investigated the possible vulnerabilities caused by the protests.
• I would have spoken to local citizens and non participating eyewitnesses who could shed light on what they had seen.

And so on. But I am in no position to do any of those things. Unfortunately, it appears that neither is the press whose coverage of this protest has been thin at best and apparently written without having been there or seen anything firsthand.

This why I have become a proponent of what I call braided journalism, the coming together of tweeters like me with professional organizations like the New York Times. We have seen samples of this in the last 18 months; the Szechuan Earthquake, Mumbai, Gaza, Iran Elections, Station Fire and many other incidents.

When citizen and traditional journalism braid together the pubic is better served. We come closer to getting the whole story. The information provided tends to be more balanced. Our right to know allows us to form opinions on sufficient information.

G20 is now over. All parties will go home and share their thoughts with friends. Maybe some reflective commentary will appear online. But overall most people won't know what happened there because of a failure of braiding the information together and reporting on it.

Ok, it's 'Lethal Generosity,' but I'm going to need your help

               

               [Rubbermaid's Jim Deitzel, a lethally generous guy]

A few days ago, I asked for feedback on my next book. Should it be about Braided Journalism or Lethal Generosity, two concepts that I discuss in Twitterville? The response was not huge, but it was overwhelmingly in favor of Lethal Generosity.

Far be it for me to go against the wisdom of my own crowd. While I do not need to make any decision in this area for several months, I am going to start thinking through this subject and most important, I need to find examples--lots and lots of examples, from viewers like you of Lethal Generosity.

Let me explain; Lethal Generosity is the business strategy of doing as much good for your customer as possible, thereby screwing your competitor who has to either follow your lead or ignore programs that serve them.

I mentioned three such examples in Twitterville:

• When Jeremiah Owyang was at Hitachi Data Systems, he started the Data Storage wiki for all members of the data storage community. The purpose was to openly share ideas, information and recommendations that would be helpful to customers. Jeremiah invited competitors to join in because that best served customer interests. If a competitor joined, then they were following the HDS lead. If they stayed out of wiki participation then they were turning their backs on a conversation dominated by and serving existing and potential customers. Universally, the wiki became known as the Hitachi wiki and Hitachi became the perceived thought leader.
• Rubbermaid, Jim Deitzel just joined Twitter at first to point to other social media content they were producing, but soon discovered that there were numerous professional organizers hanging out on Twitter as well. These were the rare folk who had passion about Rubbermaid's bins, racks, dividers and dish strainers. So he began using Twitter as a way to help these people form a Global Neighborhood on Twitter. He played a key role in organizing it into a community where it shared information. Further, he arranged for Rubbermaid to give these organizers product discounts for which they had not previously been eligible. Now if a competitor wants to join in they will have to join a community that is being de facto led by Rubbermaid. Or they can continue to keep out of the conversation.
• When Molson Canada, learned that the Toronto Transit Authority was short $85,000 it needed to have public transit run all night on New Year's Eve 2009, Fergus Devins kicked in $20,000 and called upon the Toronto business community to kick in to save the program and support "responsible drinking." He specifically called upon arch-rival Labatts to follow the Molson's lead. If Labatts failed to follow would it be supporting "irresponsible drinking?" Labatts joined the Molson lead. Toronto citizens obviously benefited. But so did Molson.

That's it. That's my entire repertoire of Lethal Generosity case studies, and I I used all three in  my last book. So n I need about 100 new ones. The three elements I'm looking for:

    1. A company must demonstrate an action that directly and indisputably benefits         the community;
    2. The action preempts a competitor in a way that goes to reputation;
    3. Social media is involved [preferred but not required].

Do you have a story for me? I am going to do the next book pretty much the way I did Twitterville. I will ask the social media community for ideas, case studies. I will post notes of many of them on this blog and I will acknowledge anyone who contributes in the next book.

I also would appreciate any and all thoughts about Lethal Generosity. Share with me here or in Twitterville.

Getting past cluelessness: some tips on getting started on Twitter

I've done a lot of public speaking on Twitterville lately. One of the most valuable parts for me are the questions. It tells me what's on the minds of people attending Twitter-related events.

Invariably there are some people who have just started poking around on Twitter. They often convey that they are confused by all the enthusiasm they are hearing from the veteran users in the room.

Each time I am reminded of a quote in the book from Ev Williams, CEO & co-founder, who observed, "people are clueless at first, when they first get to Twitter." I know I was.

When I first got there, I posted what I thought was a brilliant tweet: "Well here I am. What happens next." I did not realize that's pretty close to most first posts. For me nothing much happen for about 30 days, until I discovered my friend Jeremiah Owyang was visiting Boston at the same time I was and we eneded up having a good meal and fun time together; not a wrld-changer, but it was an event that could not have possibly happened without Twitter.

The Twitter team has had all sorts of functionality to make it less disorienting and  easier to get started since Ev made his clueless comment in December 08; yet 30 days of cluelessness seems to be the norm.

I have a few thoughts on getting started that may be helpful:

1. Stick around. It's very much like moving into a new neighborhood. You may be lost at first. You may patronize all the wrong restaurants for your tastes, hire the worst handymen and take the longest routes to your destination, but after time you will become wiser through your experience.

2. Begin by listening. A mistake many newbies make--particularly business and professional people--is they come in talking, not listening to the conversations that were going on before you got there. It's like walking into a social networking room and starting by booming about who you are and what you sell. People will ignore you. If you persist they will turn their backs on you. Just listen to what is being said, until you think you have something that is useful or interesting to add to the conversation. Then join in softly, waiting fr others to ask you to say more.

3. Use Twitter Search to find relevance. I tend to avoid listing my favorites on almost all topics. But my favorite tool for getting starting on Twitter is Twitter Search.Think of all the topics relevant to you and chance are good you'll discover people talking about the subject. Pick the ones you like the most, then check out the people they are talking with. Also check the followers/following lists for more people talking about what interests you.

4. Focus on who you follow. Over time most people discover that who they follow is far more important than who follows them. They are your daily newspaper. By choosing your "reporters" you can maintain a high quality of interesting and useful information. You can adjust your reports on a very regular basis as your interests--and theirs--change.

5. Give it time. I think there is some comfort in knowing that most everyone was clueless at first. But that about 50 million of us stuck it out long enough to find great value in Twitterville.

Finally, have fun. Fun is vastly underrated in business. Those of us who realize how much fun you can have in Twitter soon discover great business value despite the fact that Twitter is quite enjoyable.

Learning from young people

A few years back, Rick Segal, then a Canadian venture capitalist and I visited several European countries to talk with as many people as we could regard Web 2.0 and social media. We often got asked to predict what trends we saw.

Rick had a great answer. If you want to understand what's going to happen in the next five, ten or 20 years, don't read any analyst report, he counseled. Instead go down the hall and speak to you kids. Watch what they do with their time. Chances are pretty good that when they grow up and become employee and enter the marketplace, their habits today will be their habits in the future.

I thought it was pretty good advice and I have often reused it, sometimes forgetting to provide proper attribution.  Since then, I started avoiding forecasting as often as I could. I've also started to avoid "bests" and "favorites" lists because what I like today may not be what I like tomorrow and more than that they may not be the ones you should select as a most or best.

But the big part of Rick's lesson to me is to pay attention to young people. What they are concerned with or excited about gives you a sense of what mainstream thinking will be like in the near term future.

This all shot back to me because in a half hour, I will be guest tweeting/skyping to a graduate school class at Purdue led by my SNCR friend Mihaela Vorvoreanu. You can follow the conversation at the hashtag #tech621. I love talking with college students because I learn so very much from these experiences. I'm grateful that technology has made it so brain-dead simple to let me make virtual visits such as this one.

Is Social Media Strategy Overrated? No, but be flexible.

Consultants and marketers have historically been fond of the strategic perspective and for good reason: if you don't know where you are going, then any road will take you there.

In fact I agree that businesses should  not embrace social media unless they have a good reason for it.

But there seems to be a catch. Once you start down the social media road, situations change and you may find that in pursuit of one goal a more valuable one emerges. You may also find that in the fast interaction of day-to-day business the real power of each social media tool you use may be in tactical implementation.

The strategy of a telephone may be to ensure customer communications. But one day your kid may call you to say she or he just got admitted into college. That is off-strategy, but my guess is that you won't tell your kid to get off the phone because this is an inappropriate use of the tool.

When I wrote Twitterville, more often than not, business people told me they started using the tool for one reason and a better one just popped up. Lionel Menchaca at Dell wanted to drive traffic to his blog. It worked, but he found greater value in the content relevant to his company he found there and the speed of conversations.

IBM started using Twitter ad hoc and discovered it was the best place to demonstrate the expertise of employees and a faster, better way for its ecosystem to communicate than its own Lotus Notes. Mayo Clinic started a Twitter account to stop the sort of brand ID theft it had experienced on MySpace and discovered it was a great venue for discussing health issues.

Social media's greatest benefit over other options is that it is both interactive and public. You may start a conversation and someone talks back. You may join a conversation and find something valuable to add to it. You may talk about lunch or weather and end up doing business.

When you start, you just don't know where it will take you.

When Laura Fitton started, she was a stay-at-home mom who hungered for interesting conversation with grown ups. I doubt she had any sense that it would help her become an author, speaker and entrepreneur.

Sometimes the path has many switchbacks.

United Linen, a restaurant uniform and laundry service started tweeting Bartlesville Oklahoma high school baseball scores to be a hometown booster. They eventually posted a series of YouTube videos on different ways to fold linen dinner napkins making them a thought leader in a vertical niche. Eventually they would use Twitter to update customers during an ice storm. The latter incident would indicate an emergency preparedness strategy, but my impression is that it was a much more tactical implementation. Something happened and Twitter was a tool at hand. The phones were down and Twitter was working, plus it was faster and easier.

 My point is to go into social media with a sense of who you want to reach and why. But be prepared for surprises and pack flexibility into your approach. Surprises happen and social media allows you to adapt and adjust with greater ease, less time and lower cost than other available options.

Lethal Generosity or Braided Journalism? Help me out.

             [Molson's Ferg Devins demonstrating Lethal Generosity.]

At any given time, I am researching one or more books to write. Most of them never reach fruition. A short while ago, I was working on a project that could have become Conversational Healthcare. As it developed, I became convinced that here was indeed a book in the abundant information I found, except that I came to realize it was not the book for me. It did not incur enough of my passion, which is an essential ingredient in the books I write.

I wrote a chapter in Twitterville called Braided Journalism. It looked at points where citizen and traditional journalism are intertwining together in social media spaces. I used examples such as Janis Krums ferrying to New Jersey when US Air 1549 landed nearby. He took a photo and 27 minutes later that photo was broadcast on MSNBC. I talk about Mumbai and Gaza and about Casper Oppenhuis de Jong who was about to Skype his parents in Holland from China when the Szechuan Earthquake took place. The Iran Election took place on the day I finished Twitterville and that is where this new book will probably start--if I write it.

I've been telling audiences about this idea and they smile and nod as I bop around talking about Twitterville. But I cannot help but notice that no one is running up to me and pumpng my hand and telling me how much they want to read Braided Journalism and offering an idea or two for the book.

Meanwhile there is another topic from Twitterville, which I call "lethal generosity." I talk about it in my book presentations as well. It's the concept that social media is built on a culture of generosity. Those who use social media to give information, ideas and sometimes money to the community become the most influential. I talk abou how Jeremiah Owyang started a data storage wiki back when he was at Hitachi Data systems and invited cometitors to join in. I also talk about how Molson Canada donated $20,000 to keep Toronto trains running on New Year's Eve as part of their branded campaign of community responsibility. Then they invited Labatts, their leading competitor to join them in the effort. If Labatts declined, would they be supporting irresponsible drinking? If Labatts said yes, would they be following Molson's thought leadership?

Lethal generosity is using social media to screw your competition to the benefit of your mutual customer.

During my recent Canadian whistle-stop book tour, several people told me how much they loved the concept. My host, Joe Thornley said he thought that would make a better book than braided journalism. Since then, in a Twitter conversation with Eden Spodek she said she thought lethal generosity was a better idea, and then several other tweeter chimed in agreement.

Sometime in 200, I plan to start writing my next book. I have actually drilled down and gathered several anecdotes for Braided Journalism, have started to outline chapters and have placed a few more brushstrokes to what could become a book. I have passion for it. But I am not sure I have audience.

I also have more than a little passion for Lethal Generosity and it feels like more people are interested in this latter possibility.

Right now, I am just thinking out loud. More of my focus will remain on helping Twitterville get noticed. But I have a great deal of faith and respect for my social media crowd. So I'd like to hear your thoughts on this subject.

Tuesdays in Canada.

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                               [Joe Thornley by Julien Smith]

Three years ago, I spoke at the first-ever Third Tuesday in Canada. The name of the event was selected because it just happened to have been the Third Tuesday of September. Third Tuesday had been the brainchild of Joe Thornley, a partner in Thornley Fallis a PR firm based in Ottawa and Toronto.

He and I shared a passion for social media. We had met at one of my earlier speaking engagements I was pleased because he had read Naked Conversations. He was pleased because I had read his blog.

So, when Joe got the idea to plant the seeds among professional communicators for a Canadian-based community of social media enthusiasts I thought he was the right guy with the right vision at the right time.

When he invited me to be Third Tuesday's first speaker, I thought the combination of his PR skills and my recognition as co-author of Naked Conversations would make give Third Tuesday a good kick off.

In terms of head count, it did not start all that auspiciously. We did not need to rent out Maple Leaf Gardens. That much was certain.

In the greater Toronto area there are about 5.5 million people. We managed to draw 42 people of them. We met in a comfortable tavern, where Mark Evans, then a newspaper reporter interviewed me.

What made that night memorable was not presentation, but conversation. I stayed quite late just chatting and listening and joking and drinking with some really nice people.

I had a few things in common with everyone I met. Sometimes it was travel, sometimes sports, but I had one thing in common with each of them. We shared a love and hope that social media was going to change the way businesses and people communicated.

Seeds were planted that night. Apparently, they  were genetically altered to endure harsh winters. My return to Third Tuesday after a three-year hiatus revealed to me a national, thriving social media community.

Last week, the second week of the month, I spoke at five consecutive Third Tuesday events in Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver. Not only do seeds germinate in winter but the social media community up there has the apparent power to change the calendar.

I'm not sure of the attendance numbers, but each room was filled. Toronto alone had grown by more than fourfold in three years. What impressed me more than quantity was the quality of the attendees I faced. They were among the most engaged and interactive audiences I have found in my three years on the speaking circuit.

Canada is happening in terms of social media. The audiences I faced were as engaged and knowledgeable as any I have found. They are also great hosts. I was wined and dined beyond my ability to imbibe. I came home with a few great stories for my social media global report.

If you have something to say to people who care about social media, I encourage you to contact Joe Thornley. If you happen to be in any of these five unique and beautiful cities, I encourage you to join these meet ups. You'll meet some really cool people.

SM Global Report: Shel Holtz [Part 2]

NOTE: This is the second of a two-part interview with corporate communications guru Shel Holtz. You can read Part 1 here.

Can you give me some insight into your views on how social media is changing the role of the professional communicator?

One of the myths of social media is that the role of the communicator is completely changed. I would argue that some dimensions of the communicator’s role have changed, and they are significant.

Other dimensions, though, continue just as they were. Social media is an addition to the business communication environment. It has NOT completely replaced the environment.

For example, media relations continues to be important. Despite assertions that the media are irrelevant, research continues to demonstrate a considerable amount of trust placed in local news media, both print and electronic. The behind-the-scenes work of communicators that is never visible to the general public – like negotiation with activist groups, in-depth audience research, relationship- and alliance-building with strategic constituents –  will continue as before.

Now that we have the “in-addition-to-not-instead-of” argument out of the way, let’s talk about how the role of the communicator is changing thanks to social media. Or, perhaps I should say “should change,” since in many organizations, these new requirements for communications haven’t yet taken root.

The most significant change is the notion that communication is the crafting of one-way top-down messages. While there is still a role for some of that, communicators must equally be prepared to facilitate conversation. Some of the skills required include community identification, building, and moderation; one-to-one engagement and message monitoring.

Coordinating the organization’s social media efforts is another vital role for communicators, ensuring, for example, that employees all have accurate, timely information they can tap into when engaged in their own conversations with friends, families and online communities.

Such coordination also ensures a rogue business unit doesn’t do something inappropriate in the social media space that colors the reputation of the entire organization. Communicators also need to know what new channels are emerging and be ready to monitor them and communicating through them should the evidence suggest they have become important.

And communicators must be able to demonstrate the effectiveness of their efforts. While there are many points of view about the ability to measure social media, there is always a way to note how an effort has paid off, particularly if you knew what your goals were for that effort at the outset.   Another communications industry issue is the continuing consolidation of traditional media.

How does this impact the professional communicator? I don’t see this as a new issue. Media have always gone through consolidation and change. Television was a new medium. The changes in the magazine industry of 25 years ago – from general publications like Life and Look, to specialized, niche publications, like Ferret World – also required communicators to rethink their approaches. Email – nearly 20 years in the business world – introduced new marketing opportunities (both good and awful).

But, how often do you see Burma Shave-like roadside promotions these days? Communications has always been about adaptation. Smart communicators have always watched the landscape to detect the shifts and tap into the channels to which audiences are paying attention. Anybody who keeps all their eggs in one basket (e.g., television) isn’t very good at his or her job. One reason marketers are embracing channels like YouTube and Twitter is that they recognize the declining influence of some traditional channels like newspaper and television advertising and the migration of attention from those media to newer ones. Concurrent with this, of course, is the need for communicators to embrace the practices that work in these new media.

Simply transferring the same messages to the new media – like running press releases through corporate blogs or trying to deliver marketing messages through Facebook – won’t work.

Solid professionals in the communication business know this intrinsically. Less professional communicators are surprised.  

Simultaneous to all this, is the relentless emergence of social media people. Where do these new “reporters” fit into the world of corporate communications? As with everything else, citizen journalists represent challenges and opportunities. The challenges include not necessarily getting a heads-up that someone is reporting on you, and not necessarily getting called for fact-checking or comment on a story about you.

In short, citizen reporters don’t abide by a code of conduct that you could generally take for granted with "professional journalists," trained, to report through an hierarchy that includes seasoned editors, and getting paid for their work.

With major events, the number of reporting outlets will exceed any organization’s ability to manage its interactions as they have in the past. While all reporters have some degree of bias, citizen journalists often don’t even strive for objectivity.

Companies also need to watch for attacks on their brands. The recent viral blog displaying images of WalMart shoppers is a great example. 

Consequently, companies must broaden their monitoring and find ways to communicate that potentially reach these individuals as well as their audiences.

However, if organizations see only the threat and not the benefits of citizen journalists, they’re missing huge opportunities to tell their stories. Blogger outreach is just the tip of the iceberg for engaging people and providing them with things to report that interest them and their readers/listeners/viewers.

You and Neville Hobson have completed nearly 500 For Immediate Release podcasts. How has your content and audience emerged since you started back in January 2005?  

In addition to the 480 episodes we’ve produced of Hobson & Holtz, we’ve also released many interviews, book reviews, and speeches. Since Hobson & Holtz is a show that focuses on what’s happening now, the evolution tracks the changes to social and other new media. For example, we talked quite a bit about Second Life a few years ago; today, virtual worlds get mentioned far less frequently. Now, we spend a fair amount of time talking about Twitter, though.

Another change: We spend less time making the case for businesses to engage in social media and more on the various ways they can do so. Fewer and fewer companies need to convince management that some kind of engagement is required. (Statistics bear this out, by the way, with most research indicating the majority of companies plan to increase their social media spending) .

The audience is pretty much the same, though. They're mostly early-adopter communications leaders with a healthy proportion of non-communicators who are just interested in the topic. For example, one of our frequent commenters, Clarence Jones, works in retail. We also have a few CEOs among our listeners.  

You’ve authored or co-authored six business communications books. How has the trade book publishing business changed over the years? What impact do you think social media is having on the future of books?

 To be honest, I haven’t noted any change at all to the trade book publishing business from the author perspective. The process is pretty much unchanged. Sales numbers also look about the same. I also don’t see social media having any kind of impact on book sales. On the other hand, the move toward digital (which goes way beyond just social media) will see some copies moving to ebook devices like the Kindle.

I don’t see this affecting business titles in the short term, however, since most people who buy business books like to display them on their office bookshelves (this according to more than one publisher is an important motivator for business title purchases).

I also don’t see a complete end to hard-copy books. Let’s be realistic: Would you take your $300 Kindle on to the beach and risk dropping it in the sand when you doze off? There’s something to be said for the $8 paperback that (a) won’t break when you drop it and (b) you can share with someone else when you finish reading it. 

If you were to advise someone just now entering into the field of PR or corporate communications, what would you tell him or her?

I’d say that this is one of the most exciting times in history for getting into this business and that the opportunities are greater than ever.

Then I’d note that the universities are not necessarily teaching communication students what they need to know to thrive in a communications job; that they should pay attention to skills like community moderation, search engine optimization, social media monitoring and measurement, and the like.

I’d also advise them to get involved before they start sending resumes, completing applications and going out on interviews. If they can demonstrate their passion and skill with a blog, a podcast, a Facebook profile, a Twitter account, or some other combination of channels, the jobs just may find them.

Additional comments?

One of the most interesting aspects of being a realist is that I find myself sometimes attacked by both extremes. The social media purists don’t think I understand that social media changes everything. (It doesn’t; nothing changes everything.) You should hear the purists when I say there’s still a role for the traditional press release!

Yet research by the Society for New Communication Research [SNCR] proves there is.

On the other hand, traditional communicators and business leaders think I’ve gone over the deep end and assign too much weight to social media. (I don’t; it’s critically important.) For example, I don’t think the organizational structures of old-guard companies will dramatically change because of social media.

The design group will still design the products, the manufacturing group will still handle production, and the marketing group will still drive sales. However, I believe the adoption of social media inside companies will allow for more seamless interaction and collaboration within those structures, altering the way work gets done. This viewpoint doesn’t seem to satisfy either of the extremes (either everything changes or nothing changes).

But I’ve been watching the impact of online communication on organizations since 1985, and I think I have a pretty good handle on it. Based on that, I’d advise people that social media is not the end of the evolution; it’s merely the spot on the continuum where we now reside. More evolution is on the way. Like the Boy Scouts say, be prepared.

I won't talk about Twitterville tomorrow. It's 9/11

Tomorrow is 9/11, the anniversary of the ugliest day of my life.

I really have nothing new to add to the conversation; to the reflections and memories that you have or I have or have been recorded. I won't watch the videos of horror that I know will be shown again and again and again tomorrow. I don't need to. They are etched in my mind.

But I've been reflecting a bit about what I can do to show my respect for the day, and the only thing I came up with is quite small.

I won't talk about Twitterville tomorrow. I won't self-promote. I won't exude the power and wonderfulness of social media, or tell you where I'm talking. I'm going to use the time I usually spend promoting my new book to reflect about life and what is important.

I have no advice whatsoever for you on what you should do. I'll just say this. There are somethings in your life that are very big, and very enduring and will etch your time on the planet.

I'm willing to be it's not the launch of a product, service or even a book.

SM Global Report: Shel Holtz [Part 1]

[Author, Communications Pro Shel Holtz. Photo by Shel Israel]

NOTE--This is the first of a two-part interview with Shel Holtz. He simply had too many useful perceptions to share for me to be able to cut it down into one blog post. If you are a communications professional you really should read this one through.

When controversies rage in social media, as they so often do, Shel Holtz is frequently a voice of calm moderation.  He doesn't avoid them, but he is usually late to the conversation and when he joins it he adds value by showing a balanced perspective.

A career communications professional who has sat in agency and corporate seats, a former journalist and a podcast pioneer, Holtz has spent his entire adult life in the communications business. He sees issues with a balanced perspective.

Author of six books and a frequent public speaker, that balance shows that he's picked up a fair amount of wisdom. Shel has been at this social media stuff longer than most people. My view and his do not always coincide. Sometimes we outright disagree.

But his thoughtful, example-filled way of expressing his view always gets my respect and the respect of just about everyone I know.

This is among the longest of my SM Global Reports. I have chosen do do very little trimming because so much of what Shel has to say is worth hearing. If you are a communications professional, it should be required reading.

Last time I interviewed you was in 2005 for Naked Conversations. At that time, you admonished me not to "overrate" blogging.You said it was just "another milestone on the corporate communications continuum." Looking back at it now, do you think blogging was just what you said it was, or is it something bigger?

It’s important not to confuse the tool and the effect it has had. The blog tool itself – a lightweight content management system that produces items in reverse-chronological order and allows readers to comment – simplified and improved  what earlier online tools did. In that respect, blogs were a logical evolution of earlier online tools.

On the other hand, if I didn’t think the uses to which organizations can put them weren’t important, I never would have co-authored Blogging for Business!

Still, I must say that business has not embraced blogging to the degree it should. The dearth of blogs by Fortune 500 companies, and the overall percentage of blogs among businesses, indicate that blogging is still in early-adopter mode.

Further, most companies that have blogs aren’t using them well. Forrester’s research notes that corporate blogs are very, very low on the scale of communications trusted by customers.

This has nothing to do with the tool and everything to do with the ways they are being used. Many corporate blogs continue to serve as channels for traditional communication rather than authentic conversation. These are the blogs that breed distrust. Between organizations that use blogs in this manner, and those that don’t use them at all, I’d suggest that if blogs are going to have a significant impact on business at large, it’ll happen sometime in the future. It hasn’t happened yet, despite the fact that blogs have had a significant impact on some companies (GM and Dell leap to mind).

There are exceptions, of course, and the exceptions get the attention – as well they should. They demonstrate that organizations can use blogs to improve transparency, to interact directly with customers, to portray the company’s culture, to solicit feedback and input, and to collaborate with audiences to solve problems.

It is my belief that every company should have a blog, since it is the best tool to use when a rapid response is needed.

Finally, the blogs written by customers provide insights companies would be downright irresponsible to ignore. These same insights were available before blogs – through surveys, focus groups and other channels – but blogs have dramatically simplified the process of keeping a finger on the customer’s pulse.

So, yes, I continue to believe that blogs were an evolutionary development from a software standpoint, but that their use is vital to business.

How would you describe Twitter’s role on that continuum? Does it much change the role of the corporate communicator?

Twitter introduced an entirely new model that has begun to have a profound impact on communications.

Some would argue that the real-time monitoring capability is significant. While I believe it’s important, companies and communicators should always be monitoring any source of information that will help them make better decisions, react quickly to challenges and better serve their constituents, from customers to shareholders.

Others argue that business’s leap into Twitter as a marketing channel demonstrates its importance. But business will tap into any new channel where their customers and influencers are. Again, I think some of the innovative uses to which Twitter is being put are exciting, but finding innovative ways to capture attention in new channels is marketing’s job, isn’t it?

Still others will discuss the connection that’s possible between companies and customers. That connection was available on blogs, and even on message boards before that. Twitter takes this to a new level (as Zappos demonstrates) that is exciting and full of potential. But it’s still a logical advance along the continuum.

The biggest change to communications wrought by Twitter is the introduction of what I’ve been calling “the 140-character news cycle.” The speed with which news and rumors can spread has accelerated beyond anybody’s expectations thanks largely to Twitter. We’re beginning to develop a catalog of case studies: Motrin Moms, Amazon Fail, Domino’s Pizza.

Twitter has single-handedly redefined the meaning of “news.” The communities on Twitter have an insatiable appetite for updates when an event captures attention and builds momentum.

Organizations that do not fill the 140-character news cycle with their own information will be subject to secondary and tertiary sources of information occupying the void, often with speculative information, messages based on the public’s risk-averse nature or general distrust of institutions, or deliberate misinformation spread by adversaries. Scott Monty’s ongoing infusion of information via Twitter during the Ford Ranger Station situation is a perfect example of an organization ensuring accurate and timely updates are available for people to talk about, preventing the spread of incorrect and potentially harmful information.

I’ve been wondering lately about the potential usefulness of a lifestream utility like Posterous to an organization. Updates such as those Scott provided to Twitter could be added with a bit more substance, while maintaining a chronological record on Posterous where comments can be aggregated.

In any case, organizations once had a luxury of time before responding to events or updating ongoing activities during a crisis. Messages could be crafted, reviewed, analyzed and revised. Today, communicators need to respond far more quickly, which puts an entirely different spin on crisis preparation.

Your website bio puts some emphasis on your abilities to help companies use online resources in a crisis. How important has social media become in crisis management. Can you share an anecdote of something you’ve done for a client in this area?

As I said, the nature of crisis communication has undergone a change that is among the most significant companies must address resulting from social media.

Interestingly, the fundamentals of crises have not changed at all. These include:

• The public is risk-averse
• The public attaches little credibility to business advocates
• The media’s role is based on conflict
• Advocacy groups will exploit your crisis to their own ends
• Emotion, not logic, is at issue. If you engage in debate, you’ll be seen as defensive

• Crises are characterized by symbols: dead birds in the Exxon Valdez crisis, stunned employees carrying boxes of their possessions out of Enron headquarters, overturned Ford Explorers in the Explorer/Firestone Tire crisis.

• Organizational goals are also unchanged: to present and maintain a positive image, preserve constituent support, address mis-perceptions and misinformation and, ultimately, survive the crisis.

Finally, core crisis strategies remain unchanged from pre-social media days:

• Respond quickly, accurately, professionally, and with care
• Be transparent and accessible
• Treat perceptions as fact
• Acknowledge mistakes and address how you will avoid a repeat of the situation in the future
• Tailor messages to address the aggrieved party
• Acknowledge and respect the other side’s concerns
• Make no public confrontations
• Emphasize existing relationships

Given that these fundamentals remain unchanged, it is critical for organizations to acknowledge what has changed. Crises erupt with unprecedented speed. Anyone can break news. And the boboundaries between mainstream media – once (by necessity) the channel for getting your information to the public – and social media have become very porous.

With employees engaged in social media – whether companies like it or not – they also become voices during a crisis. So organizations need to recognize that achieving their goals and executing their strategies require new approaches and a thorough understanding of the new environment.

Again, speed and frequency of response are critical. Keeping employees updated is also vital. Knowing in advance where your audiences are online is important. Knowing who will interact with those audiences and ensuring that individual (or individuals) is empowered to act without endless rounds of approval is equally important – which means training and preparation before a crisis hits is also a requirement. Far too few companies have crisis plans. Those that do have them rarely update them to account for these changes, and even fewer companies drill their crisis plans.

As for my own experience, I recall one client who was under attack by a competitor using misinformation to draw business away. I got then to monitor discussions of the issue among customers so they could correct misinformation, which a customer might inadvertently be spreading. I also had them create a quick-and-dirty WordPress site that listed the allegations of the competitor and offered the truth. It was easy to update and easy to point people – media, influencers, and customers – to the site during online, phone, or face-to-face conversations.

Will China Innovation Work?

I have been watching with a great deal of interest the departure of Kai-Fu Lee from Google to form Innovation Works, which has aggregated a $115 million fund that will be invested in tech start ups.

While $115 million is not enormous anymore by Silicon Valley private equity standards, that amount will go many times further in China and should be viewed as most significant. Some of China's most successful tech pioneers have contributed to Innovation works and according to Mr. Lee, the first order of business will be to "recruit talent."

I visited China for a little over a week last November and participated in presentations by more than 50 Web 2.0 startup executives. I found them hard-working, well-informed and bright. I thought their workspaces and employees felt very much like Silicon Valley during earlier--more entrepreneurial periods.

I came home impressed by what I saw. I got some sense of how vast and promising the China market was for Chinese Web 2.0 markets and only once heard an entrepreneur express a vision that went beyond China itself. I left with some sense of China's tech sector being a new Silicon Valley, one designed to hit places and people that the California-based tech innovation epicenter had never reached and probably never will.

I saw an infrastructure forming in China that was robust and growing, filled with the sort of relentless optimism that I had experience in Silicon Valley more than 20 years earlier.

It took some reflection to realize one key ingredient of Silicon Valley's secret sauce was missing for the most part. There were a few exceptions, but in all the company hoods that my group was invited to look under, I saw very little true innovation. I saw many companies that had emulated Western companies for chat and video and other popular functionalities. Then they recalibrated and localized for Chinese and Asian markets.

But I saw extremely few example of technologies that truly innovated: creating something that had not previously existed; providing technologies that changed the way people worked, played, communicated and so on.

I've come to wonder if this is a cultural thing: if a top-down government that regulates so much of people's lives, will allow a bottom up explosion such as we have experienced here.

I find the most interesting aspect of Mr. Lee's very interesting move is the name itself. Can Innovation Works make innovation actually work in China?

The answer to that question remains to be seen.

Braided Journalism's Monetization Strand

Twitterville had a chapter called "Braided Journalism." It talks about the convergence of citizen and traditional journalism in a social media space.

A good example is the story of Janis Krums, who tweeted the photo of US Air Flight #1549 landing on the Hudson River. The guy just wanted to get to New Jersey, but by coincidence he became perhaps the most famous citizen journalist in modern times.

A sidebar is that Janis's jaw-dropping photo was used with abandon and without permission by traditional news outlets. The process slowed and got complicated when he started asking for royalty payments.

It seems to me that he braid of journalism I discussed in Twitterville was missing an important element--the monetization strand. We who provide content on blogs and at Flickr; we who have become passionate or have stumbled upon the power and potential of organizing citizen journalistic efforts need to eat.

Like traditional journalists through history, the passion put into reporting far exceeds the tangible rewards most of us have realized.

We have now entered into a massively transformational era, one in which most institutions are either being restructured or replaced. Evidence is pretty compelling that the era of mass marketing is being redirected into highly niched and/or localized marketing efforts, something I like to call mass micro marketing.

Nike, for example, has started a series of ads targeted at specific niches that range from Native Americans to swimmers to young adults in a specific urban neighborhood.  Niche marketing is far from new, but what is new is a refocus on its value as a core strategy for global merchants.

which also are nothing new. This of course coincides with the acceleration of hyperlocal journalistic efforts. As my friend Ryan Kuder, who has played in hyperlocal, recently tweeted, "hyperlocal has been just around the corner for the past 15 years."

But now there's compelling evidence that the corner is being turned. Big media is getting smaller and grassroots new media organizations are starting to fill the huge voids caused by the old guard's contractions. Veteran journalists who have lost their jobs are finding new homes in it. J-school students who may find the jobs they are being trained for do not exist, are gravitating to it. Not only that, but people like Janis Krums, just happen to be on the scene when news pops up unexpectedly.

There is a natural opportunity for big branders to start looking more closely at hyperlocal organizations. There is also a huge opportunity for a large, fragmented and usually overlooked advertiser in the local merchant.

You local restaurant, dry cleaner or retailer has been filtered out of most marketing systems for years, drowned out by louder voices with bigger budgets who often enjoy lower ad rates by buying volume.

Your local dry cleaner, or plumber has limited options in social media, even from the perspective of a social media zealot like me. She or he used to put ads in local Yellow Pages, but they have gone; hometown radio stations lost in consolidations; bus panel advertising until much of society stopped using public transit. They used to have the hometown weekly newspapers but they too have dried up.

But now there's hyperlocal and the opportunity for the local merchant to sponsor coverage of a local street fair or soccer game, or clean up campaign or sponsoring a safe streets campaign.

In the past few months I have become less frightened by the large writing on cyberwalls that declares traditional media is dead and more heartened by the fact that something new, monetizable is emerging that will fulfill many aspects of the public's need to know what is happening in their neighborhoods and on their planet.

I see many pieces floating around, occasionally bumping against each other and sometimes converging. It will take time. For the past 60 years or so, nearly all marketing, branding, communications and advertising professionals have been trained to think big, to send one message or image that impacts masses of people.

Now there is a need to reverse the strategy, to think small, to get personal, to relate to either a physical or global neighborhood. This will take time, some successful practitioners in both media and marketing will not make the change successfully.

But in the end, I see a braid of journalism and marketing that will thrive. It will look very differently than the products that prevailed in the Broadcast Era. There will be much greater audience participation. News services will be more fragmented and decentralized than they have been in perhaps a hundred years.

But the braiding of new marketing with new journalism will occur there is a need on the parts of all parties concerned, particularly the public. The people who provide the content will begin o see the rewards. The merchants who have been shut out will be allowed back in. And the smartest mass marketers will discover the value of thinking local.

SM Global Report, Adventure Girl Stefanie Michaels

                 [Adventure Girl Stefanie Michaels]

I don't pay much attention to celebrities in social media. I don't condemn them, but overall they just don't much interest me. Usually they lack many characteristics--authenticity, conversational approach, transparency that have made me such a champion of social media, particularly Twitter.

 

Stefanie Michaels, who you may recognize as Adventure Girl in Twitterville is among the very few notable exceptions. She clearly is tweeting herself and is remarkable up close and personal with many of her followers. She participates in community events and causes and is obviously informed on conversational issues in Twitter. This may explain why she has more than 1 million followers.

 

Her book, Adventure Girl’s Guide to Adventure Travel…without Breaking a Nail, was released earlier this year and she seems to be trending toward more adventeros excursions. Earlier this year, she braved sub-zero  weather to participate in the Alaskan Iditarod dog sled race. One month later, Michaels defied gravity  when she, along with astronaut Buzz Aldrin, participated in the inaugural flight of Las Vegas’ Zero G, an airplane ride that lets passengers experience zero gravity.

Here are her answers to my questions:

Obviously you were bitten by a travel bug early in life.  Did you start young?

YES! My first plane trip was at 6 months old and everyone said I squealed with joy and giggled the whole flight to Chicago. My parents said they knew I’d have a career on a plane… little did they know, I’d practically live on them.

 

What experiences got you addicted to travel?

Meeting new people, seeing new places, touching unique things- nurturing my senses. Addiction is only part of it!   If I am home too long, I get antsy and grouching. I always say that the jet fuel I smell when I get to airport gives me butterflies. I am off to have an adventure filled with diverse people, places and experiences.

It’s an addiction because it’s my “book” in life- it’s how I learn about the world. If I am not traveling, I’m stagnant in life in a way, I’m not learning or growing. It’s my passion to ever change, grow and evolve.

       [Seeing the pyramids the old fashioned way.]

When, how & why did you decide to make travel an essential component to your career?

 

Really, they say if you do what you love, it will come to you. I didn’t go out seeking travel as a career, it found me.

I did however know the moment I wanted to be a journalist, the night in 1989, when the Berlin Wall was torn down. I was a kid, glued to the TV and I wanted to be there telling people’s stories. I also dreamed of being a war correspondent. I guess I’ve always wanted to be where news happened and where the action was. Travel encompasses all that.

You came to social media from the celebrity business model. You were a model, then a TV personality before stepping into Twitterville, blogging and video.

My parents were in the entertainment business. My uncle was an actor. He took me in when I was a toddler to his agent and they signed me on the spot. I was so hyper, and bouncing around and dancing, that the agent thought I’d be great for commercials. Within a month I had booked my first car commercial. From there I moved into modeling and television. The modeling I hated, but used it as a launching pad, thus using my name to create my own promotional company.

When I was modeling, I developed an idea I called, "Travel Partners," which used email to take my fans with me on locations, where I was doing all this great cool stuff as a spokesperson.

I'm told I launched one of the first 1500 commercial websites on line- , and began bringing people along with me to cool locations around the globe with my film crew. We aired the snippets online. I was “blogging” daily from location at the time, but then the term was not “coined”- we called it daily updates from location. That’s also where my fans called me "Adventure Girl" for the first time. It stuck, so Travel Partners eventually became AdventureGirl.com.

I guess I’ve always done it, shared my experiences, so falling into social media was the next step in my techno-geek-ism. (My secret dream is to write code) After trying MySpace, then Facebook, I found Twitter most gratifying. It’s just brilliant all around, and especially if you “get it”.

[ 

[Getting sized up by Burmese refugee women in Chiang Mai village, Thailand.]

Why did you decide to try social media?

I’m a journalist at heart, so I am always reading and looking for ways to communicate. I have been writing online for several years, but fell in love with Twitter because of it’s simplicity and “now” real time media advantages. It took me about six months to get @AdventureGirl out of a squatters hands, so when I got it, I was all about communicating and learning about it at warp speed.

Twitter has revolutionized the way we send and receive media. It’s the “new internet” and I saw this straight away. I wanted to be a part of it.

 

How has Twitter worked out for you so far?

I was hooked in the first minute. I have never felt more at home online than I do when I am on Twitter. I have made so many new like-minded friends, forged relationships I never would have, had it not been for Twitter. I don’t think you find this with Facebook or MySpace- they are more insular.

With over one million followers, you are one of the 100 most popular tweeters. Who are these followers?

They are everyday you-and-mes. I even have followers who are animals- lizards, dogs, cats, which I love because they make me laugh. Diversity in life, diversity in my friends on Twitter. I love it!

Everyone thinks of me as this celebrity, but in reality, I’m just a girl working, like everyone following me. There is nothing glamorous about me in my pajamas with zit creme and tweeting!

 

How do those 'everyday you-and-me' folk help you make a living?

Twitter for me is not about “making money.” It’s about passing around knowledge, information and connecting. However, it does open me up to meeting companies and entities that see Adventure Girl-the brand as adding potential value to what they are doing. Indirectly, it is a great source for connections, thus business opportunities may come to me because I am on Twitter.

How has social media changed your image and you?

Social media has given me a platform to share information that was/is important to me. I don’t need to “hide” behind publicists or agents, and I can be silly and show I am this real person.

It also inspires me. People like @drew who I learn from everyday or @invisiblepeople – a former homeless man who is putting a face to homelessness with a video camera and stories. I think that’s what is most important to me and I hope it’s made me a better person just knowing them and passing on their messages.

What is the most important thing you've learned from social media?

To engage, communicate, and NOT sell your agenda. To be pure, show concern, to be a real person who cares. I have also learned that so many people don’t get that. That’s why I love “block.” I don’t want to see your spam. Also, listening. Your followers will let you know what they like, what they don’t and they do it in real time.

You are much more conversational on Twitter than most other so-called celebrity tweeters. Why have you chosen to spend the time and energy. How has that helped you professionally?

What’s the point of “being social” and partaking in social media, if: A. You’re not going to be social; and B. You hire people to do it for you. Celebrities that do this are missing out. It’s  “old media,” and that way of thinking is obsolete.

 You can see the forward thinking celebs like MC Hammer, who have embraced the power of having their own voice. We as celebs have fought for this for so long, now there is a platform set up where we can have a voice. Why give that power away?

I take the time and spend the energy because like any relationship, it enriches me both spiritually and emotionally, give and take. There was a trending topic recently called #twittercrush. People were naming actors, athletes, musicians… I named “Twitter”.

Professionally speaking, by just engaging, communicating, it indirectly helps me professionally because what you see if what you get, and a lot of companies seem to be attracted to this.

 
For the benefit of my studio audience, can you share an adventure you've experienced where social media played a role?

Sure, Operation Smile, the organization that helps children with facial deformities receive life-changing surgeries, came to me one day through Twitter. They asked if I wanted to go on a mission with their doctors to help kids who were going for their surgeries. I stepped back, cried A LOT, and then got back to them with a “yes.”

What they did not know is that my brother had a cleft lip and had died (unrelated cause) before he got his surgery. It was a tragic loss for my parents- they grieved quietly, burned his photos and never spoke of him again. I found out via an aunt when I was 11 about him.

Together with Renee Hamilton, their social media guru, we came up with the 140smiles.org campaign- and I became their Twitter Smile Ambassador, raising money for 140 kids in 140 characters- one smile at a time. It gives me the chance to honor my brother and shed a light on this important charity.

Now, TwestivalSF< will honor 140Smiles in the global Twestival event and I’ll be able to help even more children through this social media fundraiser. I am humbled and honored.

What advice do you have for someone who wants to enhance a personal business position by using social media?

DON’T Talk about business. That will come as people get to know you and you them, trust is formed and there is interest. I want to know who you are Mr. CEO of company X- not what you are selling. Are you even a real person who cares? That’s the best piece of advice I can share. Be real. Don’t sell: share.

 

 

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.

Enterprise Social Media Normalizes

Way, way back in the good old days of 2005, before we had FaceBook and Twitter; YouTube, Digg or Yelp, it was big news when a big company blogged. During the time, Robert Scoble and I were researching Naked Conversations, the world was astounded when individuals at General Motors, Microsoft and Sun Micro became the among the first pioneers to slip social media inside corporate gates.

In 2005, the barriers to enterprise social media activity of any kind were formidable. There was legal and the fear of negative comments; we were clueless on what to measure or how to measure. There were bosses with arms folded and heads moving side-to-side at the thought of employees, on company time, writing about the work they did and posting it without filters or reviews by superior; without running it past the twin command and control towers of PR and legal.

What a quaint social media universe it was way back then all of five years ago when there were less than 8 million people in the world using the primitive tools of social media.

I was reminded about these very recent good old days last night as I watched  a panel discussion at IT Executive Forum, produced by Tatyana Kanzaveli, as part of her excellent continuing series. The panelists: Lasandra Brill of Cisco; Tony "Frosty" Welch of HP, Mike Brito of Intel; and Sumaya Kazi of Sun Micro are among the top social professionals in their respective organizations.

None of them were the first to bring social media into their organizations They are not the sometimes forgotten risk-takers who so recently risked termination by being the first to inject this new, transparent, conversational communications into cultures and systems that were not designed for openness.

Each of them is highly professional and knowledgeable. They do what they do with at least as much job security as anyone else in a corporation has these days. They answered questions with ease, expertise and occasional humor on the usual gambit of questions regarding measurement and management, training and process. To some degree, each of these four players in these four prominent tech enterprises takes a different approach, but for the most part it has become a matter of nuance.

They still have to fight for budget--and there is still no box to accommodate the functionality of their social media teams in their respective org charts.

But what was most important to me is that there is no longer a question as to whether or not social media will continue in the enterprise. Social media is now generally recognized as necessary for a modern entity. The corporation has become conversational and the pioneer phase of this happening seems to sometime in recent months silently drawn to a close.

Systems are now in placed. Social media training, encouragement and coaching seems to now be part of the workplace environment. And using the tools of social media to just do one' job is not only now acceptable, it has become expected.

Social media is normalizing. The fact that a company now has a blog or tweets or has a Facebook account is about as newsworthy as the fact that it allows employees to use email or telephones without someone screening what they say.

Social media will still astound from time to time as it did when Janis Krums shot a photo of that plane on the Hudson or when the Iran election was ostensibly hijacked.

But in the day-to-day workplace environment using social media tools is becoming routine and about as newsworthy as receiving email. Social media is normalizing and as it does so it is becoming less controversial and more valuable.

And as far as I am concerned this is a very good thing.

Time for Twitter to Ditch Trending Topics

Last week Jeff Jarvis tweeted the other day that it is time for Twitter to discontinue 'Trending Topics,' that list of what people in Twitter are most following. I could not agree more.

The feature takes up a lot of space, which is Twitter's greatest constraint and could be used for better things.

There was a time when Trending Topics was helpful. "People are pretty much clueless when they first get onto Twitter," Ev Williams has said and he was right of course. The feature was first offered last year in an effort to help people find interesting topics of conversation and it worked well in accomplishing that for a short while.

But now people are less clueless. Nw, when they join the friends they have help guide them along and assist them in finding new colleagues. They can easily discover topics that interest them and join neighborhoods based on those topics.

But Trending Topics, has become all-too-often a list cluttered and dominated by banalities, contests and silliness that is of no interest or use to a great many people, particularly those of us who use Twitter for business, or to learn about events in the world; nor is not useful for actually meeting new people with whom you share common interests.

Trending topics is easy to game. Just create a quiz, invite people to discuss pet peeves or a sex-related topic; be a movie star who dies under questionable circumstances and it will push subjects like the Iran Election right into oblivion.

Obviously, there are more people who like the topics that are making the list than those who do not--or the list would not have picked up the TV Guide quality that it has assumed. But it seems to me that it is bring broadcast media technique to a social media venue.

This may seem like a trivial topic, but it is not. There was a time when thinkers had great vision for television. NBC pioneer David Sarnoff envisioned bringing opera and symphony into America's living rooms. News pioneer Edward R. Murrow thought that the distribution of news on television  would level abuses by tyrants and corrupt public officials. Educators dreamed of using television to educate the masses.

And we ended up with American Idol.

Twitter is the fastest growing computer-based technology in history. There is no end to that growth trend in site. It has the potential of letting each of us find others who share our interests and passions without intermediation by bosses, government, advertisers or anyone.

Twitter can be perceived in more ways than the blind men saw the elephant.

"We become what we measure," my friend KD Paine, the social media measurement expert often says. My belief is that if Twitter focuses on measuring Trending Topics, it will become something far less than it could become.

Why I empathize with Prof. Gates

The last time I was hurt by an anti-Jewish comment, I was 13-years-old and attending Boy Scout Camp.  I've experienced occasional anti-Semitic comments since then, but they didn't much get into me. This one did. The epitaphs were hurled at me by my counselor, in front of about a dozen other Scouts.He was someone who was supposed to teach and inspire me, someone I was supposed to trust.

It happened 51 years ago, but I remember the scene as if it were yesterday. It no longer hurts and enrages as it it once did, but I still see the incident with indelible clarity. If there is one experience that enlightened me to how racism and prejudice works, it was that moment in 1958.

Being Jewish subjects me to a lot less than I would face if I had been born black.   I look, sound and dress like a great many American white Christians. The last 50 years of immigration by people who do not look so "acceptable," to the exclusions my parents--two European Jewish immigrants, experienced in an earlier America. Bashing has turned away from us and toward blacks, Hispanics, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs; ostensibly gay people, the ragged, the physically deformed and other people who look, well diffferent than some Americans think Americans should look like.

I'm not talking about the overt hatred of cults in white hoods. I'm talking about everyday slights invoked by everyday people, most of whom will insist they don't have a prejudicial bone in their body; eople who are above all that because they voted for Barack Obama.

It is important to consider that you do not have to be a racist to make a racial assumptions. You don't have to be mean spirited when you make a comment that hurts someone along racial or ethnic lines. You don't have to hate black people to be nervous when you see a couple of black people wearing gang colors on an isolated street.

Humans have a natural tendency to trust people who look and feel like ourselves and to mistrust any group of "others." The more "others" there are the more nervous we get. Some would have us build walls at our borders to keep "others" out.

Take a look at the guy wearing handcuffs in the above picture.  He's Prof. Henry Louis Gates, a Harvard scholar, personal friend of the President of the United States, a 58-year-old black man who needs a cane to assist his walking. How many moments of his life are filled with Boy Scout Camp memories. How many times in his life was he hurt or excluded for no other reason than his blackness?   Some of his Boy Scout camp memories are old, some more recent. One occurred last week. It occurred when he was tired and grateful to be in the comfort and privacy of his own home.

Professor Gates flew home from China, a long, long flight to Boston. He met a limo driver, who probably by coincidence was also black. They drove about 30 minutes to the scholar's home in Cambridge and after all this travel and time, after customs and bag checks and airports and Memorial Drive traffic, the damned front door was stuck. Gates went around, got in through the back and still could not unstick the door. He came back, shouldered the front door and got in.

A neighbor watched all this. She did not see her neighbor, the Harvard professor and a Town Car driver. She saw two black men breaking into a house in her neighborhood and she called the police.

By the time, Cambridge Police Sgt. James Crowley arrived on the scene, the driver was gone and Prof. Gates was finally at home. I would assume Gates would be irritated by any uninvited person rapping on his front door at that moment and at that time.A cop who thought he might be a burglar would be high on the list of possible irritations.

By all accounts, Gates showed ID that he lived in the house where he was found. It is generally perceived that at this point he behaved in a way that Sgt. Crowley found offensive. Gates was ordered outside his own home and got louder. Crowley hand-cuffed him and charged him--not with attempted burglary but with unruly conduct.

I have read multiple accounts of this incident. In every case, I get to this point and wonder: Why didn't Crowley just say, "sorry, I was just doing my job, shake Gates' hand and be on his way?"

For those who argue that Gates was the offending party; that he should have just done what he was told; that we don't have the right in the United States to talk back to a police officer who is giving us a tough time when we are not breaking any laws, I disagree.

America to me, is not a place where people are supposed to be ordered out of their homes, handcuffed and dragged to a police station where they get finger printed, mug shots taken and perhaps placed in holding cells.

Take race out of this. Let this be you. How would you have responded if you were in Gates position? Once the cop knew you belonged in the house, would you not expect him to just go away?

Now, add color to this incident. Try to imagine the number of Boy Scout Camp memories flooded into Prof. Gates mind when Officer Crowley ordered him to step outside even after the recognizing that Gates was no burglar.

Should Gates have been more obsequious? Well, of course he should have. It would have saved him and his friend Barack Obama a good deal of angst and embarrassment. Obama's "stupidity" quote was obviously the unwisest utterance of both his campaign and his tenure so far. It will be used against him in the coming months and for a long time to come.

But to me, it is an accurate--if inappropriate-- statement and one that popped out because he too has a life filled with great successes interspersed by Boy Scout camp moments. It seems to me that Obama's was a very human gaffe. As a supporter,  I regret the moment; as an admirer, it confirms to me that our buttoned-down,  president remains a very human guy, who can relate to how his friend felt.

I need to emphasize that a creditable case has been made that Sgt. Crowley is no racist. He has lead departmental Affirmative Action trainings.  Black police officers vouch for him. This is all may be true, but that does not stop the incident from having deeply racial overtones. As Prof. Gates has said "Race is part of my portfolio." You cannot review this incident with adding color to the nuance.

On Twitter several people have posted that they've examined the facts and conclude this was not a racial incident. I cannot help but notice that every one of these posts came from white men. I've suggested several times such posters go ask a black person if he or she considers the incident to be racist. If they do not know a black person, pick a Muslem or Hindu. If they do not have any minority members to ask, perhaps they should examine themselves and how qualified they are to judge this incident.

Blatant Ku Klux Klan type behavior may be a thing of the past. Most people seem to think that now that we have a black president, we Americans are past are centuries long history of racial discrimination. We are not. Even good people make racial, ethnic and appearance assumptions.Somewhere today, a black or Muslim or Sikh child will feel what I felt long ago in Boy Scout camp.

Even the best of us harbor some stereotyping moments. One of them happened last week on a quiet sde street in Cambridge, Massachuesetts.

Why I don't like the Amazon-Zappos Deal

[Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh. Photo by laughingsquid.com. ]

Amazon.com, world's largest retailer, announced yesterday that it will acquire Zappos.com, the Internet's largest merchant of shoes and accessories. At the time of the announcement, that stock was valued at $807 million. The market apparently liked the the announcement. By closing time, the value of the stock was up to about $900 million.

When I interviewed Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh for my Twitterville chapter on retailing, he told me how the company formed because the founder could not find the shoes he wanted while shopping in a San Francisco mall; how the company went from making "nearly nothing" in 1998 to passing $1 billion in gross merchandise sales in 2008.

That's a good story, and in that light Amazon.com and Zappos are fellow travelers.

In 1995, Amazon's first full year, it was discounted by a large brick and mortar bookstore executive who said his company lost more money to shoplifters than it did to Amazon. Now, Amazon is the world's largest retailer and is on track to gross $20 billion in sales in the current fiscal year.

But then there are certain places where the two companies are very different. The one that makes me cold to the deal is culture.

Tony Hsieh told me that an essential component to the Zappos strategy was to build a customer-service focused culture that just happens to sell shoes and accessories. He moved Zappos from San Francisco to Las Vegas to build a less technical and more service-oriented culture.

It's the focus on culture that brought Zappos into social media and particularly Twitter, where it has become the wrld's tweetingest retailer and perhaps the most loyal base of online customers. When I asked on Twitter if anyone had a negative customer experience with Zappos, I was told to "stop picking on those guys. They do a great job all the time."

Amazon too, has loyal customers. I'm one of them. But it is not a particularly Conversational Corporation like Zappos. It provides superior service, but it's culture seems to focus on efficiency, not customer service. You just don't see many Amazon employees chatting online about their favorite sports teams or recent rock concert experiences.

You can argue, and rightfully so, that these are tough times for retailers and efficiency is what is needed more that transparent conversations. You can argue that Amazon has created the world's best-oiled retail machine and I cannot argue with you.

But something there is that loves the friendliness, even the occasional gabbiness of the Zappos guys. Something there is that loves the accessibility of Tony Hsieh who tweets abundantly himself, while it probably never occurred to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to tweet r blog or do a YouTube clip on what Amazon looks like inside.

One of the most difficult aspects of mergers is the consolidation of cultures. Companies, quite simply do things differently. Acquiring companies look for ways to make things more efficient and I will be pleasantly surprised if Zappos is allowed to keep the culture and style and focus on service that made it a billion dollar entity after 10 years of independence.

 

Braiding Businssweek

About a week ago, traditional publishing giant McGraw Hill announced it wanted to sell or spin BusinessWeek, one of the most venerable of all American business publications. The news, I am told, stunned most of the editors and reporters still there.

So far, almost no one has pointed to a possible acquirer and almost everyone close to the matter believes BusinessWeek is going to have to change business models if it is to survive. So far, at least two well-known BusinessWeek writers have suggested possible solutions. Design writer Bruce Nussbaum suggested two new models; the first being sort of an ongoing forum on selected business topics and the second by Stephen Baker, who covers social media suggests converting a portion of the publication into a wiki.

In 2005, while I was writing Naked Conversations, Baker really irked me by implying that somehow journalistic standards for blogging were inferior to those required to write for BusinessWeek. For a while I nursed an idea of taking him on in my book, until on the third or fourth revision of the book, I realized that Baker had a valid point.

As a blogger, I often post content on one draft. As readers remind me, I often miss obvious and blatant typos. I have no editor questioning and filtering what I have to say. I have no colleagues sharing an anecdote or insight that will make my story better. When writing books, I undergo much more editorial scrutiny, but even there, it is not the hard-nosed, Devil's Advocate style of a quality news editor who has general authority over the content provider.

This is true, not just for me. It is true for most social media writers who provide original content. Few of us are parts of a team and only a tiny handful of online social publications have our copy scrutinized and challenged by editors.

Yet, in recent years, we are the ones who are finding--and telling--an increasing portion of the world's stories. A 19-year-old, Dutch kid named Casper Oppenhuis de Jong, tweeted the first news of the Szechuan Earthquake to the west, where traditional media picked it up; Janis Krums was just trying to get to New Jersey, when a plane landed on the Hudson River when he took a TwitPic of a plane landing. The increasing role of people with cameras and connected devices in Mumbai, Gaza and Tehran have driven the point home with drama and flair in the last year. Traditional media have turned to people on the streets of the world to get the information of the world and share it with subscribers.

And yet there is an ambivalence about it, I imagine at places like BusinessWeek. We on the streets are unknown factors. We do not always report with accuracy. Sometimes, as is the case currently in Iran, we won't even reveal who we are or what sources we have. Many, like Casper or Janis, had no plans to contribute to citizen journalism. Casper was in a bookstore so he could Skype home to his folks in Amsterdam. Janis parked in New Jersey because it was cheaper than driving into Manhattan. And yet they both changed the information the world needed--and wanted.

Stephen Baker, talks about the "last 5%," that extra effort many elite publications take with pride to get the precise words that make a story more accurate and polished. He's right. Very few social media writers have time, desire or talent to do that.

The world will not be a better place, however, if the salvation of BusinessWeek is in snipping off that last 5% of quality. And the world will not be a better place if the extremely talented team that is BusinessWeek succumbs to the extreme challenges that traditional media organizations face today.

It seems to me that most people see the value of both the disciplines of old media and the speed and breadth of new media. It seems to me that the news organization of the future will need to braid these two camps of traditional and citizen journalists into something that emerges into something new and different; something that does not yet exist but needs to; something that can cut the costs of printing inefficiencies while increasing the speed in which information is distributed.

This new, "braided" BusinessWeek, would of course move to online only. It would abandon the antiquated concept of news being released once weekly. It would do almost everything that the organization is already doing at BusinessWeek.com, but it would become a much more social platform, incorporating functionality from independent blogs, tweets, YouTube and podcasts.

In my [undetailed] vision for an braided BusinessWeek, the organization would use content submitted by social media people. It would not be instantly published. Editors would revise, challenge and polish. The news would be posted as quickly as possible.

There would also be some form of revenue sharing. Instead of just giving a blogger a stringer's pittance, the social media person and the publication would revenue share any advertising. BusinessWeek would cover local business news and offer advertising to local and regional advertisers.

I hope it's not too late for BusinessWeek. If it is, I hope some other publication will look at this concept of braiding traditional and citizen journalism in a social media venue as an enduring solution to an chronic problem.

SM Global Report: Richard Edelman

Edelman PR is the world's largest independent PR agency, but I'm not really one to be impressed by the largeness of an organization. PR Week has voted Edelman the best large PR agency in the world, three out of the last four years, but I hold trade rags commending industry luminaries suspiciously.

What impresses me the most about Edelman PR is that it seems to be an agency of innovation and big ideas, more than other large agencies I have known. It was the first PR firm to conduct media tours. It set up the first-ever online crisis management service. It was the first Western PR firm in China, and perhaps most impressive to me, is it established trust as the key measurement for PR strategy.

What also has impressed me is Richard Edelman and the thought leadership he has demonstrated in the complex and nuanced area of social media and its impact on the PR industry. He was early to the blogosphere, and he led his own staff to become among the most social media active of all agencies. He also has been an undoubted influence on the heads of large companies, NGOs and even small countries in understanding and embracing social media.

I asked Richard his thoughts on social media and particularly the impact it is having on PR agencies and their images.

1. You recently posted a blog that disagreed with a NY Times piece about Silicon Valley PR practices in the social media era, saying that it used old, false stereotypes. Please summarize your bones of contention.

The NY Times article had an important lesson for communicators, who must recognize that the winnowing of mainstream media will require a different approach to PR. But the idea that PR folks can circumvent both MSM reporters and key bloggers by whispering in the ears of influencers is patently false. So was the characterization of PR executives (especially females in PR) as reliant on relationships to achieve results for clients. Classic stereotypes of PR executives can be summarized as evil spin room denizens as in the movie “Wag the Dog” or superficial party people with megaphones. Both of these canards must be refuted and resisted.

2. It does bode a couple of interesting questions. Here’s PR, which can be defined in many ways, but usually image has something to do with it. Why do you think PR has so many problems with its own image?

The PR industry has image issues because it allows itself to be defined by its least common denominators, from celebrity publicists to Silicon Valley relationship masters. In fact, what we do is more important than ever before. The dispersion of authority, lack of trust in institutions, rise of stakeholder society, need to connect to broader group of influencers are tectonic plates moving. We are pushing the concept of Public Engagement, with action tied to communication, to our corporate clients.

3. How do you feel social media has changed the role of the PR practitioner?

Social media has allowed PR people to have more personal and more continuous connection to stakeholders. The mainstream media news hole has allowed only episodic coverage of companies and has been focused most often on the CEO. Now we can bring a more true-to-life picture of companies, with consumer-generated views of products, blog posts from corporate researchers, and discussions around important issues (ethically sourced product etc.)

4. Let’s go back a few years. You were, without dispute, the earliest prominent member of the PR community to whole-heartedly embrace social media. You started blogging in 2004 and you also started advocating that PR practitioners adapt to the changes that had started to occur. What did you see at that time that convinced you it would be wise to jump in?

I must give all of the credit to my cousin, Linda Stone, / formerly of Microsoft, whose pioneering work on “continuous partial attention” best describes my teen-aged kids. She listened over lunch after my middle child’s Bat Mitzvah, where I carried on about the new role of civil society, the rise of empowered employees and consumers.

She walked me over to the PC, sat me down, and pointed to early bloggers such as Dan Gillmor. In short, she pushed me to get into the game. It is my weekly appointment with the community; what will be new and interesting.

5. So you were early in incorporating social media into your personal brand. How did that impact the Edelman brand, and for that matter, the Edelman business practice? How often is social media a factor today in Edelman being selected, vs. 2004? 

My blog, and the 40 others that are featured at Edelman.com, have made us the most popular web site of any company in the communications sector (yes, ahead of Ogilvy, McCann and other giants).

My blog is the leveling element in conversations with potential employees or when I visit companies on new business calls. We don’t have to talk about baseball or golf; we can make a connection on topics in my blog. Social media is a key reason why Edelman is selected by prospective clients; we have also persuaded our clients to be much more open in their communications with the world as control and credibility are at opposite ends of the spectrum.

6. What are the constants for the PR practitioner? What professional skills have remained the same since you started in PR? What's changed?

A PR person must be more broadly knowledgeable and technically proficient. The opportunity to offer advice to the C-suite has never been greater, but we have to earn that position every day by being connected to new voices of employees, consumers, civil society and social influencers. There is a tendency to become narrow and deep, to know your industry top to bottom. That is not sufficient; it is not as if health care or technology exist in a vacuum. There will be pressures on privacy, IP, payment modality, fairness of compensation, green policy; we must offer insight on these and more.

7. Is there any sort of business--any size, any sector-- that can afford to ignore social media in its communications practices?

I thought that the financial services industry could ignore social media, as it was so heavily covered by mainstream media.
I was wrong, particularly as government has become enmeshed in the sector through the bailout last fall. Health care companies are overcoming their fear of regulatory intervention in order to participate in the conversation on diseases and drug treatment.

8. Would you advise young people to go into either PR or corporate communications in this day and age? Why or why not?

A career in public relations should hold great appeal to students graduating from college. The secular trend towards PR and away from advertising has enabled the industry to withstand the present recession in much better condition than in 2001-3. The basics of the job, from writing to media relations, remain the same. But the additional responsibilities, from connecting with new influencers to conversing with social media to creating programs that change policy for corporations, are truly exciting and important.

9. Here's an easy one for you: What's the future of media? Does traditional media continue to wane until it hits the vanishing point? Does social media continue to ascend in importance?  Do the two media categories eventually merge and become "just media?"

I had breakfast last week with Jim Warren, until a year ago the editor of the Chicago Tribune. He told me that the Hartford Courant had reduced its newsroom from 400 reporters to 150 reporters in the past six years; the Tribune is down by nearly 50%. Local papers are becoming hyper-local but even that is no protection against incursions by ESPN (note launch of their new Chicago and LA sports web product).

The local TV news outlets are under terrific pressure as key advertisers in auto, banking and retail evaporate. It is clear we will have five national newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, NY Times, Financial Times, perhaps the Washington Post. Network news will gradually ebb, as the average viewer today is 65 years old.

The consumption of media has not diminished; it is the mix that has changed. The average person sees or reads eight sources of media on a given day, according to the Pew Foundation. So there will be more demand for immediate, short form content, delivered on all three screens (TV, PC, mobile). Social media will fill a hole by offering  personal experience, deep knowledge of sector and opinion.

10. Additional comments?

I am happy to be part of an independent, family-owned business that gives me the ability to speak freely about issues in our industry.

Twitterville excerpt: Introduction

NOTE: With permission from my publisher, Portfolio, I am posting Twitterville's entire Introduction as it will appear when the book is published on Sept. 3. I certainly hope you like it.

INTRODUCTION

James Buck Gets Out of Jail and Inspires This Book

James Buck’s tweet was but a single word: “Arrested.”

That tweet would get him out of jail, and inspire me to write Twitterville. But neither of us knew that at 9:33 AM on April 10, 2008, when Buck was in the backseat of a police car and being taken to a holding cell in the Nile Delta city of Mahalla, Egypt. 

Buck was a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, majoring in photojournalism. He had come to Mahalla to photograph the food strikes in this manufacturing-agricultural city of four hundred thousand. 

Days earlier, the streets had turned violent. Fires were started, and people got hurt. Police clubbed and arrested several protesters. On April 10, Buck took a cautious approach. He stayed back from the crowds, using a telephoto lens to capture his story. 

He got busted anyway. 

I knew something about Egyptian police. In 2007 I had interviewed Wael Abbas
(@WaelAbbas), as part of my Social Media Global Reports blog post series. Abbas is an Egyptian citizen journalist who kept posting videos on YouTube of uncharged “suspects” being tortured in Egyptian police stations similar to the one where Buck was heading.*

It was when I saw the word “arrested” on Twitter that I realized how much bigger this new social media communications tool had become—more than I had previously thought possible. I didn’t know James Buck. I didn’t follow him on Twitter
until that one-word post. I didn’t even know that I connected
with him.

When a “tweeter,” as someone who posts on Twitter is called, reads something posted by another tweeter and thinks that it’s worth repeating, he or she adds the letters RT and posts it again. Someone else may then read it, and repeat the process. This is called retweeting and it is the essential process that makes word often travel so far and fast on Twitter. 

Retweeting is an important part of Twitter’s magic: you may follow—or be followed by—just a small handful of people. Yet even if only one person follows you, through just a few degrees of separation you are connected to the growing millions of people who tweet all over the world. 

James Buck was a new tweeter. He only had a few followers; as I already mentioned, I wasn’t one of them. But a friend of his retweeted the “arrested” post and added a brief explanation. A friend of mine saw that and retweeted it. I was four steps removed from Buck. I saw the post about thirty minutes after he had posted from the police car.

A few weeks earlier, while saying good-byes to friends in Berkeley, one had turned Buck on to Twitter. Th e friend thought it might be good to have on his Blackberry in case some emergency popped up.

While Buck sat in the cell, the one-word message he sent to Berkeley friends via Twitter kept moving. For some reason, the Egyptian police let him keep his Blackberry and he kept tweeting. His small personal network kept retweeting. Word spread on Twitter. Someone contacted the U.S. State Department, which swung
into uncharacteristically quick action. 

Within twenty-four hours, Buck’s government had intervened. He was released from jail and was about to be driven to the airport where he would receive a free trip home. Before he stepped into the car, he stopped to type in another
single-word message, or tweet as they are universally called.
The message said “Free.” 

This changed my personal view of Twitter. Until then it was something fun to use, occasionally useful for business purposes. Tweeting had landed me some paid speaking engagements. I had friends who lived in other countries and it was a faster, easier way to keep in touch. 

But the James Buck incident took my breath away. I realized that this Twitter phenomenon had bigger implications than I had understood. I started paying closer attention and taking notes. 

Dramatic Moments 

I began to notice that now and then Twitter has very dramatic moments. In the coming months, this would include a Dutch student in a bookstore in South China who would report the first deadly rumble of the Szechuan earthquake. A team of surgeons in Detroit tweeting real-time progress to medical professionals at a Las Vegas conference as a robotic device removed a tumor from a patient. A young entrepreneur on a ferry on the Hudson River, witnessing a passenger jet skid to a halt nearby, then start to sink. 

And it would be easy to have written a book just about those moments of life and death. There are enough of them that unfolded, and there will undoubtedly be many more.

But drama is not the entire story.

Much of the time, Twitter is just about everyday people discussing everyday things. Increasingly, it has become a highly effective tool of business communication. This book chiefly focuses on telling you how people use Twitter to get closer to customers and constituents.

Twitter is also about stumbling into old acquaintances. On the day that James Buck typed in "arrested," I was sitting comfortably at home, having crossed paths with an old friend on Twitter. We were sending little spoonfuls of conversation to each other, details of jobs and travel, pets and grandchildren, catching up on the past thirty years since we’d lost each other.

Equally, Twitter is about meeting new people who are relevant to you, in business or whatever else interests you. You can find them easily, start a simple conversation and watch how quickly and deeply it can develop. 

Ultimately, this is a book about what Twitter can do for you. I’m
going to tell you what others have done and are doing and my hope
is that it will give you a few interesting or useful ideas. 

Telephone Metaphor 

As Chris Brogan, one of Twitterville’s most respected pioneer-champions, likes to say, “It’s very much like a telephone.” He’s right, and the telephone is a good starting point, but it seems to me that Twitter is more than that. 

Brogan maintains that Twitter, like the phone, is a personal communications tool. And you can use it to conduct any conversation you choose to discuss. 

Those conversations, however, are usually private on the phone. You can talk privately in Twitter through a feature called direct message, or DM. Yet in most cases, Twitter works best when it is public and anyone can see what you are saying, so that anyone can respond to what you say or retweet it. 

Twitter is also superior to a telephone for meeting new people. When a stranger calls you on the telephone, it is usually to try to sell you something you don’t want. The practice got so out of hand on the telephone that laws have been created to constrain telephone peddlers. 

But on Twitter, meeting strangers can be both enjoyable and valuable. If you meet someone you’d prefer to avoid, there are filters and functions that work relatively well at keeping that person away from you. It is almost always an easier experience than receiving a cold call. 

People use Twitter for personal or business reasons. Many of us find we cannot help but mix the two together, just like many folks do on the phone or face-to-face.

I’ve been asked why any employer in her right mind would allow workers to tweet on company time. The answer is simple, and again it’s like using a telephone at work or, for that matter, e-mail or a fax: you use Twitter to communicate. The topic is up to you. 

The Blog Metaphor 

Twitter is as much like a blog as it is like a telephone, except that you need to picture a very small blog post. In fact, Twitter is the leading software in a category called microblogging. You publish what you have to say, and people respond if they wish. You publish to one person or to the whole world, and people respond in the same manner. 

Space is limited to just 140 characters; therefore, messages must cut to the chase. Shorthand necessarily becomes part of tweeted language; it’s more egalitarian than full-size blogs because people respond in equal length and equal placement on Twitter pages or “tweetstreams.” The constraints of size lead to speedy conversation. Twitter moves faster than any blog. 

There are several books that will tell you how to use Twitter and why you should. This book does a little of both, but neither is my central focus. I share with you the stories of people using Twitter in the home office and in the global enterprise. People tweet to raise money for causes; to make government more responsive; to find and distribute news; to build personal or business networks; or to just
kill a little time with people you enjoy. 

I believe that many of us learn best from other people’s stories. If I tell you about someone who has used Twitter to improve his personal brand or to get more customers into a coffee house or to shop in one market over another, my hope is you will read one of these stories and adapt Twitter to whatever it is you do.

Twitter is a pretty simple tool. Most people can pick up the mechanics just by fiddling with Twitter for a few minutes. Once you start talking with people, they tend to be pretty generous in helping newcomers fi nd their way around. Before you know it, you’ll be helping others who have followed you into Twitterville. 

A Tool for All Seasons 

I am beginning this book in the toughest economic climate since the 1930s. I hope that we will have entered better times before you start reading it. 

I could argue that Twitter is ideally suited for tough times. At a time when economic constraints are causing most businesses to make painful cuts, they still must interface with customers; Twitter is the most efficient and effective way to do it this side of a face-to- face meeting.
 
It’s not just customers, it’s your entire business ecosystem—your prospects, partners, employees, investors, analysts, and media. You’ll probably find many of them are already in Twitterville when you arrive, already having conversations relevant to your business. The sooner you join the conversations, the faster you may get out from under the business pressures you are facing.

But when you think about it, Twitter is not just a tool for tough times, but for all times. Th ere is no economic situation in which businesses do not need to interact with constituents. Th ere are very few instances when the most economic way of doing it is not the wisest course to take. 

Good-bye, Broadcast. Hello, Conversation

We live in an era when what used to be considered best practices are not so good as they used to be. Methods that have been in place for years, refined and optimized over time, just aren’t getting the results they used to. Among them are customer support, traditional marketing, and product research. 

My previous book, Naked Conversations, coauthored with Robert Scoble, assailed the excesses of marketing. In 2006 that seemed a revolutionary idea to some. Now it seems pretty obvious. Marketing programs are too expensive, and they produce diminishing results. 

Twitterville examines the inefficiency of traditional marketing. It argues the case for using social media instead of ads. It argues that from a business perspective, Twitter is the most effective tool yet delivered into the growing arsenal of social media tools. 

But Twitter alone is limited. It is too shallow in its constrained space. It is not visual. It is limited in its ability to conduct safe transactions or hear someone’s voice. A carpenter building a home would have to use a hammer—but not just a hammer. This book shares numerous stories of how Twitter works best with other social media tools, particularly blogs. 

When considering Twitter, this book advises you to consider an entire toolset, which in fact can lead to an entirely new way to conduct your business.

In Naked Conversations, Scoble and I predicted the death of a so-called Broadcast Era, and the birth of a new Conversational Era. Twitterville looks upon the three years between books as a transformational time. This transformation has accelerated during this recession because businesses now understand that they need to explore new avenues. Those avenues seem to converge on Twitterville’s Main Street. 

The Generosity of Crowds 

I have often written about social media being built on a “cult of generosity.” Tweeters have been more than a little generous with me in the process of writing this book. 

As I started each chapter, I posted on Twitter what I was covering, and requested people tell me good stories on the various topics explored in each chapter. My cup overflowed with results. I received several hundred suggestions. Tweeters generated about three-fourths of the stories reported in Twitterville. The process I
used is called crowd sourcing, which I find to be better for research than anything else, including Google.

In Google you enter a keyword, and a “spider” crawls all over the Internet’s data to give you results. That’s a pretty remarkable process. But by crowd sourcing in Twitterville, I got people I know and trust to give me information, insights, and specific examples, which this book shares with you. 

The way in which I wrote this book confirmed to me my very best thoughts about Twitter. Twitterville has its darker streets, as I will discuss, but it is dominated and culturally shaped by a cult of generosity. The people who are most generous in Twitterville are among its most influential members. 

Why Call It “Twitterville”? 

I am not sure whether or not I was the first to coin the term “Twitterville.” I came up with it after Laura Fitton  described her “Twitter Village” in a very thoughtful blog post in January 2008. I had not previously heard the term, and I’ve been using it ever since. 

Twitterville connotes a certain homey, small-town feel, a place where you meet people you know as you stroll down familiar streets. These are people with whom you share common friends, interests, and ethics. When you meet a stranger here, chances are you have mutual friends or interests. 

While Twitterville has millions of people in it, and is growing faster than the world’s largest megalopolises, it still feels cozy to most of its residents and visitors. It still feels safe for the most part. This is due, in my opinion, to Twitterville’s most important characteristic, something I have named Global Neighborhoods. The con-
cept came to me several years ago, while I was having coffee with Charlene Li, who wrote the foreword to this book.

She told me geography is becoming irrelevant because of social media. 

For Charlene it seemed to be a throwaway thought. But for me, it was a very large idea. It gave me the sense of global neighborhoods, which became the name of my blog and has been my central focus since ccompleting Naked Conversations. 

Through social media, society is being rearranged very fundamentally and at a faster rate than many people realize. Until the Conversational Era came along, people were constrained by geography. We really could not get to know people we did not encounter face-to-face.

When you think about that, you realize that each of us has been denied access to billions of people, many of whom share similar passions and interests, some of whom can help us, some of whom we can help. 

By no means have the barriers disappeared. Everybody simply cannot know everybody else on the planet. But the barriers between people have been lowered through social media. Doors have been opened. Restrictions are being reduced as people start discovering there are others like themselves all over the world. It has   potential to reverse the combination of suspicion and ignorance that peo-
ple of one culture feel about people of another. 

We no longer need airplanes to meet new people who are  physically far away from us. We can now go online and visit a virtual place to do this. That place may not be tangible or even real.  But the people you meet there are real, and so are the relationships you form there—and Twitterville will hopefully show you their
value. 

In her foreword, Charlene Li writes that Twitter is “a conversation,” a reference to The Cluetrain Manifesto, the fountainhead book of the social media revolution. She is right, of course. Markets are conversations, Cluetrain taught us. Twitterville is a marketplace, and the conversations are meaningful to a growing number of businesses. 

So I fully agree, but I see something even more promising. Twitter lets us behave online more closely to how we do in the tangible world than anything that has ever preceded it. And we find neighborhoods that suit us. If we love to talk about politics, we can find many neighborhoods where everyone cares about just that. The same with hummingbirds, cooking, sports, or needlepoint. You can find a neighborhood where you can hang out to learn and share and chat about the topic.
You can join as many or as few as you like. These are global neighborhoods, yet they are small and personal and cozy at the same time that they make your world far bigger.

I hope you enjoy reading Twitterville as much as I have enjoyed writing it. 

 —Shel Israel
 January 21, 2009

The emergence of 'Braided Journalism'

[ Flight 1549 lands on the Hudson, a fine Braided Journalism moment. Photo by Janis Krums]

As I've mentioned, my favorite Twitterville chapter is called "Braided Journalism." The chapter covers Twitter's role in Mumbai, Gaza, the Szechwan Earthquake, the landing of US Air Flight 1549 on the Hudson, the video recorded New Year's Day BART shooting and a good many other instances where citizen and traditional journalism have converged in social media spaces.

The book was locked up on June 12, the day of the Iran Elections, an incident which showed how fast new events eclipse the old in this category. The concluding point of the chapter is that traditional and citizen journalism are converging. "We have become the feet on the streets of the world when news breaks," I wrote.

Yet, most reasonable people realize the world will not be a better place, if the discipline, ethics and professionalism of traditional media disappears. I may no longer see a purpose for a daily newspaper delivered to my door by a fossil burning vehicle, but I most certainly see a value for the New York Times and its long-established standards for excellence. I look at the former Christian Science Monitor, whose slow death as a tangible newspaper was followed by the welcomed excellence of the CSMonitor.com which has risen like a phoenix from the newspaper's ashes.

This thing that I call braided journalism seems to be emerging everywhere in a variety of forms styles and focuses.

One of my favorites has little to do with events of the scope and importance of say Iran or Mumbai. Take for example, girl's basketball. A former NBA sports reporter grew passionate about his sport finding it less tainted than even boys sports. So he started a blog site called Hoopgurlz as a citizen journalism project. He got some sponsorship and then ESPN acquired it where it is now flourishing as is he, I assume.

Some laid off Baltimore Sun reporters regrouped and started BaltimoreBrew, a sponsored blog dedicated to "stirring up news and views," and has started getting sponsorship to allow them to do work the Baltimore Sun apparently can no longer afford to do. On a global level, ProPublica, established in part by ex-LA Times reporters is a volunteer network of investigative reporters who were concerned that the kind of digging that made journalism different and superior to the fluff that fills so many surviving news columns, was becoming a luxury during tough economic times. There news is often the stuff the Pulitzers should be made of such as their recent look at nurses whose criminal records go undetected.

The NY Times, has taken a different route and weaves the locals on the street with pro journalists with something called "The Local." It is breaking new ground with a braided journalism experiment covering two largely ignored Brooklyn neighborhoods, giving the type of hometown, dig-under-the-fingernails coverage he every community deserves.

I could not go very far in any direction related to braided journalism, without stumbling across the Miami-based Knight Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to the betterment of journalism, started in 1950 with some of the considerable profits gleaned by the formerly venerable Knight-Ridder newspaper empire.

Since 1950, the Knight Foundation, "dedicated to excellence in journalism," has helped in the education of over 100,000 journalists and has contributed north of $1 billion toward the betterment of information quality at the community level. 

In recent years more and more of Knight's efforts have gone toward projects that are based online. There's little doubt their efforts will change. They seem to be in a catbird position for the emergence of a new generation of Web-based media that will incorporate new media with time-established ethics and practices.

This is an area of emerging interest to me, and I think importance to how people will get their information in the coming decades. I will revisit some of the organizations mentioned here and I would love to hear from you if you can point to evidence of convergence between traditional and citizen journalism in social media venues.

I am always on the outlook for a next book possibility and Braided Journalism is among those that captures my personal passion. Bt whether it becomes a book or not, depends on what I find and to an almost equal degree, what people tell me here and on Twitter.

Is there a trend back to blogging? How will it impact Twitter?

                      [Robert Scoble returns to blogging. Photo by Shel]

Robert Scoble has declared that he is going to start blogging more these days, after having spent most of his posting time at Friendfeed and Twitter. I have often followed Robert's lead on social media and in collaborating with him a few times, I have learned just how transparent one can be, while remaining professional.

This time, I was about 10 days ahead of Scoble. I started blogging about 10 days ago and hope to post a few times weekly--if not more, and I am enjoying it a great deal. As much as I obviously like Twitterville and tweeting, for it' speed in generating conversations, it simply is too constrained for expressing a single thought in great depth.

When I tweeted Scoble's intentions, Liza at A Maui Blog said she too was planning to get more active on her blog and  San Francisco futurist Chris Saad announced he had registered BlogsareBack.com [although someone else seems to be using the URL right now].

So, is this a trend? Will there be a sudden resurgence of blogging?  Will Scoble and I and Liza be part of an long parade of recovering Tweeters who abandon tweeting and return to the long view of the blogosphere?

Well, I do think that blogging is about to enjoy a long steady resurgence. There is a need for the magazine writing style of blogging. But I do not believe it will be at the expense of Twitter and Friendfeed. In fact, social media tools work best when used with combinations of other social media tools including YouTube and podcasting.

When something new is introduced, it goes through a high-visibility fad period in its evolution. This has been true long before social media--with almost any innovation. When the fad dies, there is usually a sharp taper off for a while, which usually is followed, by a long, steady, less-hyped resurgence.

Blogging is well past its fad level and now the return to it--if there really is a return emerging--well be longer and steadier and less hyped. There will come a time when people will tire about speaking about Twitter, just like has happened with blogs, email, television, telephones, and trains for that matter.

But the products have endured and remain useful. I do not think the return to blogging will impact Twitter very much at all. I think that Twitter will continue o evolve rapidly and relentlessly for years to come.

But at some point people will just use it, like they use email. I think that's what starting to happen with blogs. I thinks that's eventually wat will happen with Twitter.

RackSpace downtime, competitive response & lethal generosity

Rackspace is a leading hosting service. It is sponsors Scobleizer's new video show Building 43, which I think has been a venue where Robert has done some of his best work so far.

Just after July 4 weekend, the hosting service experienced a brief downtime caused by a faulty "bus duct," whatever that is. The point is that a significant number of users were incapacitated by the crash.

Rackspace went into immediate action using what I would call the social media playbook, if there were actually such a thing. They used there blog, having Eric Johnson a senior web developer explain clearly what had happened, what the company was doing about it and apologizing for the inconvenience. Meanwhile via FriendFeed and Twitter Scoble was doing what he does best and he was doing it with equal transparency. Rackspace customers chimed in, nearly unanimously expressing loyalty and faith in their hosting company.

Of course major competitors noticed. When a hosting service goes down, there are obvious opportunities. There are unhappy and frightened customers. One competitor, Online Tech of Minneapolis took two days until it posted a blog intended to hijack Rackspace customers with an "easy transition plan" from Rackspace to them. The company boasted that unlike Rackspace, it had never experienced customer downtime. It brought the message into Twitterville and posted a couple of follow blogs.

That is a predictable approach. It comes from a traditional marketing approach based on military strategies. When you see your opponent has a weakness, attack it with extreme prejudice. Take more ground.

But the day before Online Tech posted its blog assault, another competitor ServInt posted this blog by Reed Caldwell, CEO , which takes an entirely different approach, one I find better-suited for the new conversational marketplace  rather than the commercial gladiator approach used Online Tech.

Caldwell, stated that his competitor had been "communicative, forthright and responsive to its customers. He said ServInt stands behind Rackspace and advised customers to do the same.

The conversations heated up in Twitterville, and Friendfeed where Scoble pointed to most of the blog posts and dozens of hosting service customers had joined in. The sentiment was nearly unanimous for Rackspace and particularly ServInt, whose CEO revealed himself to be a class act leading a classy culture.

There may have been a defection or two to Online Tech, but I could find no reports of it. But in the court of Twitterville opinion, the were the clear losers.

ServInt's approach falls into something that I call in Twitterville, lethal generosity. The companies that are most generous to their marketplaces--including competitors--become thought leaders. Those that take more combative approaches become thought followers. Which would you prefer as your vendor?

There are other twists. A tech company should never, NEVER, boast that it hasn't suffered downtime. When one does, it is as sure as the night follows the day, that company will stumble, because in the end all parts break. When it happens to Online Tech, it will have few friends. ServInt conversely will have friends and credibility going for it.

Times have changed. Companies who learn to put their markets before themselves, and happy users before themselves are likely to profit greatly from that generosity. It is one of those difficult to measure issues--but there is an ROI on generosity and Servint is likely to enjoy that return in coming months and perhaps years.

Blame Drew's Cancer for this Blog Post

Most of us have had an experience involving someone we love and cancer. Even when the beast is defeated there simply nothing funny about cancer. About 13% of all people who died in 2007 were taken by cancer.

In the US in 2008, some 11 million people were afflicted by cancer. Drew Olanoff, 29, a Philadelphia-raised developer became one of them, when a lump on his neck turned out to be lymphoma, one of the most treatable of all cancers when caught in early phases. Except Drew's cancer was detected in Stage 3, which is not an early phase. It had first appeared on his neck but had spread into his chest and abdomen.

It meant Drew would have to cancel plans to move to Los Angeles where he had just been hired as online communities director for mobile text pioneer GOGII. Instead, he moved in with his mom in Swedesboro, NJ where he immediately began chemo treatment and neulasta shots every 2 weeks.  He has completed 4, and has 5 to go. 

Drew is a self-admitted geek, known and popular in the Web 2.0 community and long active, particularly in social media and Twitter. Like many people with cancer and other chronic and threatening diseases, Drew turned to social media for support.

What is different for Drew is his injection of humor. He created a Twitter hashtag called #BlameDrewsCancer. Read through that list of thousands of tags, and I'm wagering you will have no choice but to smile if not bursting out laughing. Then you stop and think, "Wait, I'm laughing about some guy's cancer."

Your entertainment helps Drew. It supports and encourages him to fight the fight he has to face. He knows he is not alone. He knows people are on his side.

Drew started what has become a Twitter meme, by blaming his cancer on his missing keys or yet another loss by his beloved Phillies. Soon others joined in. Among them is cancer survivor Lance Armstrong who blamed Drew's cancer for a sore shoulder. This has led to Drew's increasing involvement in LIVESTRONG, Armstrong's online cancer-fighting community.

Drew has guest blogged at LIVESTRONG. When people blame Drew's cancer at LIVESTRONG they are requested to donate a dollar per complaint. Drew is searching for a corporate sponsor to match the funds.

Here are my questions for Drew and his answers.

Q1 When you first noticed you had a lump, what was your initial response? When you showed it to your mom, what was her response? How did the doctor break the news of cancer to you?

I first noticed I had a lump a week or two before I left San Francisco.  I took pictures of it and my mom's response was "it could be anything."  I already knew I was coming home to visit before I headed off to LA and GOGII, so it seemed reasonable.  When I got the diagnosis, the doctor called me into the office.  I knew it wasn't good.  He was direct, and scheduled my first chemo treatment right then and there.

Q2 What were your first thoughts when you discovered you had cancer?

"Dammit."  Probably because I knew deep down something was not right.  Because of the tests and the feedback from the doctor and surgeon, I knew it was a probability.  (Lymphoma of some type, Hodgkin's being the easier to treat of the two)  When I got "the call" I broke down.  Both of my parents were there at the time, luckily.

Q3 What made you decide to turn to social media?  Were you aware of other people in social media with cancer?

I always feel like I want to share.  Not because I want attention, but this is my chosen profession.  If I'm going to share something funny, great, or sad ... then I better keep things real.  And this was as real as it got. I have a lot of friends on Twitter and various other social networks ... even if I haven't met them in person.   I wasn't aware of that many people who were that public.  In retrospect I was wrong.

Q4 How did you get the idea for #BlameDrewsCancer?

I started blaming things on my cancer a week before I was diagnosed officially.   The doctor had said it looks like a lymphoma so I took that as my diagnosis. I blamed things on my cancer, and my mom's initial response was "You don't know that its cancer," to which I'd respond "Yes, I do."  I wanted to turn it into a site since I'm a geek.  Ran it by my longtime mentor Micki Krimmel and she said "Do it."  So I called Mike Demers whom I worked with for a long time in Seattle, and not only one of my best friends, but a Hodgkins survivor.  He said yes immediately and built what you see today.

Q5 What has #BlameDrewsCancer done for you? What about social media in general?

For me, it has allowed me to talk about cancer in a way that not many people can.  Cancer scares people, and rightfully so. But there are things that can be done, and are being done. You see it every day with LIVESTRONG and other foundations.   What it does for social media is prove the medium even more.

Q6 What are some of your favorite anecdotes from #BlameDrewsCancer?

Blaming my cancer for Nickelback still makes me laugh.  But when I woke up to Lance Armstrong blaming my cancer for his shoulder injury, I knew that I struck a chord.   An unintended chord as far as reach, but a chord none the less.  I've also woken up to people blaming my cancer for the death of loved ones.  Difficult, but real.  

Q7 Can you share with me some comments--pro or negative, the hashtag has caused.

Zero negative whatsoever.  Do I know that things can be misused either for spam or nastiness?  Yes.  It's a part of the territory.  But I'd say that 99% of the tweets come from the heart or the funny part of the heart and that's a wonderful thing.

Q8 What advice do you have for other people with serious or chronic diseases and using social media?

Reach out.  You're not alone.  If ONE person comes back to you with a sign of support, or an offer of friendship, you've won and the disease has lost.

Q9 How did you become affiliated with LIVESTRONG and Lance Armstrong? How much money have you raised? Just how does it work and how do people contribute?

The day that we launched the site, LIVESTRONG's CEO and community team reached out to me.  They asked me if I needed support, needed anything ... and asked me how I was feeling.  It meant a lot.   To date, we've raised $600 solely for LIVESTRONG, but have raised over $3,000 for the American Cancer Society and $500 for the Make-A-Wish Foundation. 

People can donate directly to LIVESTRONG via a link on http://www.BlameDrewsCancer.com or through our Facebook Cause Page.  http://bit.ly/bdcfb - The support has been amazing.  But I won't rest until I find sponsors to donate $1 for each unique blamer to LIVESTRONG.

Q10 additional comments?

Cancer picked the wrong people to mess with. 

Welcome BurrellesLuce, my new site sponsor

You may notice a new icon on my blog sidebar, to your right. It has the icon of my new sponsor, BurrellesLuce, a leading monitoring, measurement and contacts service for communications professionals. If you click through and register, you may win a new Kindle, a giveaway item that I wouldn't mind winning myself.

BurrellesLuce decided to give Global Neighbourhoods a try for a few months to raise awareness of its online services. It is a non-exclusive relationship and I have room for more icons in that sidebar.

Why I chose Five Star as my Speaker Bureau

Just about every author I’ve shared notes with see a cart horse relationship between writing books and speaking. Most of us do better on the fame side of the fame-fortune continuum but we need both speaking and books to make a decent living.

My author friends who do the best financially from speaking engagements, invariably use speaker agents. Until a few weeks ago I have not followed suit, although I was aware that I was not doing well on the paid-speaking circuit as several of my peers.

This is because the speaking agents and bureaus I’ve spoke with have not made me comfortable on three simple areas. I want to feel like anyone representing me understands who I am, what I talk about and can help find audiences that want to hear what I have to say in the style I deliver it.

The first agent I ever spoke to was right after Naked Conversations was published. I suspected we had a mismatch when he advised me that he would not use the title of the book in pitching on my behalf. “Naked,” he advised me, would turn off some of the corporate audiences that he would sell me too.

Other agencies have told me how great the agencies were.  Others could not fathom that I was not a technology speaker and so on. My conversations with other bureaus got less frequent and shorter, until I decided to go my own route.

I didn’t do badly, but with a new book, I thought I would give it another try. I actually found two that understood social media and even Twitter.  One was in Boston and represented several of the most respected social media speaker authors, people I look up to, but that agency failed to convince me that they understood where and when I was unique versus another name on the list.

About then I asked for recommendations on Twitter.  I have obvious faith in Twitterville and I have always trusted the opinions of people I know more than Google searches or what organizations say about themselves on a website.

So when Wallace Wilson recommended Steve Gardner, CEO of Five Star Speakers in Kansas City, I paid attention. When Wallace said he had actually used Five Star, I paid closer attention and when I discovered that Steve actually tweeted I started getting downright optimistic.

Steve has spent well over two hours talking with me on the phone. We have exchanged over 30 emails. We have discussed aspects of our personal life. During all that Steve convinced me that he knows who I am, what I have to say and why people might want to hear it.

I share all this because some of you may need to retain an agent or a consultant. Others of you may be consultants. I thought it might be useful or interesting to share the process and what factors got me to decide to go with Steve and Five Star.

One other note. My "turning pro" does not eliminate the selected free speaking engagements that I have done. I love speaking to the social media community itself. I have just completed a new book and I want to talk about it. Instead, it vastly expands the audiences that I hope to reach.

In fact, there are several ways it may be easier for me to participate in community events, by getting me to cities and venues, where sponsorship might not otherwise be available.

Iran, Twitter & Braided Journalism

I completed final proofing of Twitterville on June 12. Many authors, myself included, love to conclude a book with a demonstration of some form of Big Picture vision. Mine was a final chapter that explained how on Twitter, we can easily form global neighborhoods-virtual spaces where people all over the world can come together to share information, ideas and passion on any particular subject.

Twitterville concludes that these global neighborhoods lets people in different places and of different cultures talk directly with intermediation of governments, media or employers. When we do that we start to notice our similarities and can find them more compelling than our differences.

It was supposed to be a big thought, a vision of instances that would happen far into the future. But on June 12, in Iran, a country that I knew little about an election was held. By the next morning results of 30 million ballots had been allegedly hand-counted and the incumbent anti-West, pro-terrorist regime declared itself a winner by an overwhelming majority.

The speed and the count defied credibility. Details revealing some districts had counted more than 100 percent of the registered voters led to questions. Unopened ballot boxes photographed in libraries led to expressions of disbelief, spurred by protests from defeated candidates, respected clerics and reasonable people everywhere.

Those who had hoped to see change; who believed they lived in a country that provided them a choice at the ballot box felt they had been robbed of that choice and they took to the streets do demonstrate their disbelief, which soon erupted into outrage.

For the most part, traditional press was hamstrung. It was not that they were shirking responsibilities, but years of budget cuts had thinned the ranks of stringers, correspondents and reporters for mainstream media. Plus the Iran government plays games with journalist visas. Worse when government "requests" are ignored, the leaders of this republic responded by detentions, expulsions, and occasional arrests and perhaps charges of disruption or spying both of which can result in being slowly hanged to death [they raise you by the neck, so that you strangle, rather than just drop you through a trap door so your neck quickly breaks].

This onerous and successful suppression of traditional journalism has worked in many countries all over the world. When certain governments kick the press off a story, it almost always means ugly things are going to happen; unarmed people will suffer, voices for change will be silenced.

But this time there was some new force coming into play; something that had not occurred before. The voices of people on the streets could now be heard on Twitter, where people who supported them could amplify what they had to say by retweeting. Twitter became the voice of the street. It also worked in tandem with YouTube and Flickr to serve as the eyes.

These video not only showed us smoking guns of evidence, it showed us the victim of these smoking guns, such as the sniper killing of Neda Agha-Soltan a 26-year-old student. Twitter filled the void created by the traditional media's inability to report the news and it did it in a grassroots, ad hoc manner that made many news organizations wince.

First off was the issue of sourcing. It was dangerous to Iranian tweeters to identify them. On Twitter, we just agreed to not post names. Many of us also changed our own addresses o appear as if we were in Iran, and we encouraged authentic Iranian Tweeters to say they were from elsewhere--to confuse government investigators.

For the press, who is disciplined to at least attempt some level of objectivity this was a problem. While as a Tweeter I get to say what I think, a professional journalist is trained not to do that, but to attribute a quote to a  credible source.

But second, was the issue of factual credibility. As had been the case in events like Mumbai, the Schezuan Earthquake and Gaza-Israel, there was a huge amount of misinformation being circulated. It was hard to verify and during the days when the story was moving rapidly from streets, to rooftops; from embassies to hospitals and was a definite challenge to determine what was actually happening and to do so with reasonable speed.

For me the Internet posted photos and videos were the verifiers. For the press, posting such content without knowing who took these visual renderings was a challenge.

But the press had been locked out for the most part. They could go talk to some Iranian now sequestered in the safety of a Western university or they could trust the story emanating from the streets of Iran.

After a few days of confusion, much of the press turned to Twitter and social media to report the story. They added some professional vetting that discounted many of the early stories that were seemingly manufactured to overstate an otherwise credible case.

Twitter came first. It told a story that the word is likely to have otherwise overlooked. Tweeters were the feet on the street who wrote the story. They were the videographer and photographers and these citizen journalist did so at great personal risk--as have professional journalist been doing for centuries.

The longer, deeper, more balanced and accurate stories were written by the great traditional institutions such as The New York and Los Angeles Times.

But something new has been happening ever since the China Quake when much of the Western press first learned about a tremor that killed 50,000 people because a Dutch teenager named Casper Oppenhuis de Jong was an eyewitness with WiFi access. The press went with the unknown guy whose feet happened to be on the street and at that point, the strands between citizen and traditional journalism began to intertwine.

This evolved into a full-fledged braiding of traditional and social media by the time Janis Krums used an iPhone to photograph US Air 1549 landing near his passenger ferry on the Hudson River.

By the time Iran erupted, it was becoming clear that to get some stories there needs to be a convergence of of these two reporting systems. In Iran, traditional media started to bend some of its rigid and perhaps outdated rules, simply because they would not have participated in a story that held great interest to many people all over the world.

There are many things that can be said about Iran. There are also many disparaging comments any of us can make bout social and traditional media. But it is becoming clear that we are moving in a direction in which journalism braids, and in so doing people who care can find out more news about events in more places--large and small than has previously been the case.

For a very long time, media institutions have looked disdainfully, even contemptuously on social media coverage. There are more of those days behind us, it seems to me, than there are in front of us.

Events of the last years have varied greatly. But the strands of braided journalism are growing stronger and broader with each passing event.

Using YouTube to Crash UA's reputation

The frustrating part of writing a book like Twitterville is that great stories keep happening after the book gets locked up and before it gets to the bookshelf. I wrote an entire chapter about users taking control, talked about classics like Motrin Moms and Pepsi's offensive suicide ads, but perhaps my favorite was about David Alston, the Radian6 marketing executive who Tweeted that U-Haul had treated his wife rudely and discovered a global community of unhappy former U-Haul customers.

Today David sent me a link to the above YouTube clip, which had over 120,000 views in its first 36 hours. If you skipped it, it depicts Dave Carroll and the Sons of Maxwell, singing a clever ballad about how United Airlines freight handlers broke his guitar and took a year before refusing to make good.

In days of yore, Carroll and other customers who felt they were poorly treated had little or no recourse. But now, as HistoryBlitz, one of the 1200 commenters noted: "YouTube is the Consumer's Weapon."  He or she is absolutely right, but it is not just YouTube. People are using Twitter, blogs, Facebook, Flickr and podcasts to fight back. [BTW, I could not find a single defender of UA among those 1200 comments.]

Suddenly companies that do not apologize for poor customer treatment and play odds that most customers have neither the wherewithal nor the patience to litigate will just fade away.

They're wrong of course. Companies that do not understand that individuals can use social media to raise concern, ire and awareness. Companies that continue to ignore this, I predict, are the ones that will fade away and sooner than they may think.

Help me with my Social Media Global Report

Since 2005, I have used this blog to post interviews on people who are using social media to change their businesses and lives. So far, I've interviewed over 400 people in 38 countries. The diversity has been enormous--from CEOs of Global 100 companies to people fighting for human rights in countries' that abuse them. I've talked to students, government workers and people passionate about non profits.

At the core of my work has been the Social Media Global Report [SM Global Report]. When work there emerges into specific projects, like Twitterville, I move the conversation over to the new category.

Thanks to the completion of the book, and to BurrellesLuce coming on as a site sponsor, I am reinvigorating my SM Global Report. I am looking for new stories that are useful and interesting to people who are exploring social media. I am looking for stories with business or human angles. Yes, I like to write about prominent people, but equally so, I like to find the stories, that no one has previously told. For example, in Twitterville, one of my favorites is the story of United Linen, a restaurant laundry service in Bartlesville, Okla--a company born in the Great Depression, and using social media to get closer with customers in the current recession.

Please help me. Tell me your stories or stories that interest you. Leave a comment here, or send me email at shelisrael1@gmail.com. Let me share your best social media stories.