Miscellaneous

I have moved to WordPress as of Feb. 7, 2010. Please visit me at http://globalneighbourhoods.net. If you somehow bounce back to this site, just hit refresh and try again.

I will slowly migrate old posts over as well. But you if you are searching for old content, you may want to search here, first.

Sorry for any inconvenience. See you on the new site.

For the next couple days, Global Neighbourhoods is moving to WordPress. Please excuse the appearance of the site at times. Regular posts will resume shortly.

One of my exercises in starting a new book is to create two sentences. The first tells you what the book is about and the second tells you who it is for. The challenge is to constrain yourself to two sentences.

I'm not there yet. It would be nice, because once I get there, figuring out the Title/subtitle would not feel like such a daunting task.

As I've written before, I use this blog as a sandbox, for my books, a place to play and experiment. A place to see what does and does not work. Over half the books I planned to write have never gotten beyond this sandbox. Almost all writers go through similar exercises, the difference being that mine occupies a public space. And my hope is that you give me some feedback that will help guide me forward.

So, here are a few thoughts I have on what this book is about. I offer them randomly. It helps me just to put them down on virtual paper. It would help more if you chose to give me some feedback.

1. Almost every corporation today is dealing in some way with social media. Almost any department of any company can use social media tools and I've dealt with that issue previously. This new book looks only at online enterprise communities, built by a few, usually very large enterprises. I will spotlight at least five: IBM, SAP, Microsoft, Oracle and Intuit and use my blog and Twitter to actively search for additional enterprise community examples and anecdotes.
2. Enterprise communities are usually part of enterprise ecosystems, an historically vague term
   that predates social media. It refers to the
   global infrastructure of partners, customers and companies. Every large
   enterprise uses the term, but it is very often just a concept that
   looks like a lifeless org chart with lots of dotted lines. But when you
   insert online communities into the ecosystem it gives it a heart, one
   that pumps life into the ecosystem, making it more resemble the
   biological kind. This section will probably be called "The Tinman's Heart," in reference to the Wizard of Oz character.
3. Some online communities are huge. SAP has about two million active users as part of an ecosystem that Ray Wang at Altimeter Group says is a marketplace worth about $80 billion. Intuit's series of very loosely joined social networks may be the most viable small business marketplace anywhere. I believe that these marketplaces simply could not exist without these online communities. My research for this book will either prove or disprove that opinion.
4. Online communities almost invariably have small cores of passionate champions coming from all sectors of the online community. They play key roles in all the online communities I've looked at so far, but these roles and styles vary greatly from, say Microsoft MVPs to SAP Mentors or the contributors that Intuit assembles periodically a few times each year. Founding companies give these community leaders recognition, but what seems to drive them is a passion to share what they know with other community members. [This section may be called, It's not the stoopid tee-shirt]
5. A key issue to address is the role of the founding company in the social networks they create. This section, tentatively called I lost my command & control. Just what do I do now?"
6. Another thread will be a look at the blurred line between companies, customers and partners. Both Intuit and SAP have given me countless examples of how online communities and ecosystems have changed traditional perspectives of buyer v seller v vendor into something more fluid and interactive. These days, there is an interdependence between companies, customers and partners. They count on each other for better products. They thrive or fail together and this changes the entire dynamics of the relationship and how products, support, design and policies develop.
7. Social media serves as an accelerant for the sharing of ideas and information. Even during these tough and formative times for enterprise communities, participants are getting smarter faster than has been previously possible. As the economy turns around, this will put social media closer to the center of the company and help businesses come back faster and at lower cost.
8. This book will deal with the issue of business value for social networks. This does not mean that there needs to be an ROI for communities, but this book will look long-and-hard at how social networks are being braided into the fabric of traditional business, which they so recently disrupted.

These ideas are neither sequential, nor are they organized. They are the beginning of my understanding the two sentences of what this book is about and who will want to read it. I am missing a good deal and I am sure that some of what I've just written needs greater clarification.

It's a work in progress, so tell me what you think. Oh yeah, one more thing, got a good name for it?

An open letter to Mark Zuckerberg

Dear Mark,

First, congrats on building Facebook into the world's largest social network. You now have about as many users as the US has residents and China has people on the internet. That makes Facebook a very important platform and you a very influential decision-maker on how this new Conversational Age will unfold in the coming years.

I'm writing you now because of your recent remarks during a recent eight-minute interview where you said that you try to maintain "a beginner's view" of Facebook and make decisions as if you were starting your company today. In that light you decided to open all Facebook user information in the interest of transparency and because you believes your 350 million users were now comfortable with it.

 Mark, I have to say, I think you are wrong in so many ways.

We may be in transparent times. If we are I applaud a new age of transparency. But there is a big difference between transparency and privacy. Let me illustrate:

I may elect to blog about taking a work day off and using the time to take a romantic walk on the beach with my wife. I may post a picture of her and my dog on that beach. But their are elements that I keep private. Perhaps we share an intimate moment in the sand dunes. I elect not to tell you about that part.

So there are a few pieces to this. First, I disclosed personal stuff including some photos of loved ones and a confession that I was playing when I should have been working. I also elected to hold back certain parts of the day because they were private.

Transparency is important in business as well. Businesses, using venues such as Facebook are learning that it is safe and wise to be far more transparent today than they were at the beginning of the last decade. But that safety comes from the assurance that they can keep certain matters private and that they get to decide what information they should hold back.

Mark, I have no problem really with the data you just released to the world about me. I'm a pretty transparent person and all the stuff you released is pretty public already. But Mark, I have a huge problem with you deciding to release that stuff about me. I would greatly prefer to have been asked. I'm betting a good percentage of your other 349,999,999 users do as well.

You see, we agreed to other rules. We did not know that you would start every day as if Facebook were brand new and could then change the rules on us and many of us just don't like it.

To be honest Mark, you are building up a compelling case that there is a command-and-control aspect to your customer approach that a few generals might envy. A couple of years back, you decided to use advertising to monetize Facebook without asking customers.

Some people shrieked and you shrugged implying that they should get a clue. More recently, you unilaterally changed your Terms of Use with 350 million people, declaring that you suddenly owned user-generated content and you could reuse it as you saw fit.

In response, your users started an "I hate Facebook" campaign, using Facebook itself as the group's epicenter. I thought you were wise to have backed off. I had hoped that you would have learned a lesson. Apparently this was not the case.

Mark, as I stated Facebook is a force to be reckoned with. You can probably get away with this. But please think about the precedent you are setting. If you ca share my user name and email account, why can't the next guy unilaterally share my phone number,  and street address. How about pictures of my grandchildren along with the schools they attend and the routes they walk to get there?

Then there a great question about what banks, credit cards and governments might do down the line.

The term "slippery slope" is little bit overworked, but Mark, honestly, I feel you have just put 350 million of us at the top of a mountain on a toboggan that you remotely control and have gien us a swift push down a steep trajectory.

Please reconsider.

Tags: Zuckerberg, Facebook, Privacy. Terms of Use. "I hate Facebook"e

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I had a great meeting with Mark Yolton, yesterday, one of my two co-authors on The Living Enterprise, a book about SAP's ecosystem. We talked mostly about people in SAP communities who might have cool stories to share for the book.

But Mark also gave me a new example of lethal generosity, a term I've written about previously here and in Twitterville. The concept is based on the observation that the people and companies who are most generous in social media companies are also the most influential. And those who just promote their self-serving agenda very often fail. By being more generous to customers than your competitor, you essentially eclipse them in the eyes of people who would buy or recommend your products or services.

Yesterday, Mark mentioned the SAP Community Network (SCN) Job Board. At first this seemed pretty uninteresting, but as he explained, it got a lot better.  Mark, who heads up SAP communities said the company spends a lot of time just observing its community conversations.

Not that long ago, his team noticed a lot of people saying they needed jobs. Simultaneously, others were saying they needed to hire. In fact some of those companies couldn't buy more SAP software because they were short tech staff to install and deploy it. 

So SCN created a community job board where friction is reduced and employment holes are filled, thus letting customers buy and use more software. A sweet touch is that SAP doesn't post for jobs on its own job board. It refuses to compete for talent against its own customers and partners.

"If we make customers more prosperous," Mark told me, "we prosper."

But here's the part that makes it lethal generosity, in my view. As far as SAP knows none of its competitors have job boards. If an Oracle customer wants a fast, free way to find quality developers to hire, it would have to switch to SAP. If one of SAP's customer's competitors wanted to access talent, it would have to become an SAP customer for the access.

It was interesting to learn about other plans SAP has to gain competitive advantage by monitoring its own communities to spot early trends. For example, it might notice that there's suddenly a lot of conversation is taking place in and about Turkey or perhaps Brazil indicating that software sales in that country is heating up and it can inform its sales organization to adjust course accordingly.

I've heard very few cases of enterprises using communities to directly impact sales in such a way. It is part of the ecosystem approach that seems to me to integrate social media tools with the entire company's needs.

I like that.

Tags: SAP, TLE, The Living Enterprise, Lethal Generosity, Mark Yolton

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This is an afterthought to my previous post on my answers to Twitter FAQs.

Another way I sometimes respond to the question of how you can possibly accomplish anything in just 140 characters:

Picture Twitter as a big, piping hot, flavorful bowl of soup. That first spoonful gives you a good sense of what's in that soup. It could be unsatisfying thin soup, or perhaps is mass produced in some food-processing facility.

But sometimes it is a fine and unique porridge, made in a friend's kitchen. It warms you on a cold day and you remember it after it is gone.

You don't fully appreciate it until you engage in numerous spoonfuls and become nourished by the full conversational bowls.

Those first 140 characters are just a first spoonful. It's a taste that reveals a promise of what is likely to be there for you. But don't judge the whole bowl on just the first sip.

I keep watching with interest the crescendo of debate on global warming orchestrated to coincide with the Copenhagen Summit which is now underway. I am no scientist and a great number of you reading this post probably understand the data and implications better than I do.

It does seem to me that those who believe that humans are causing the planet to warm may be guilty of some dirty tricks regarding peer review inclusion of dissenting views. This is a shame because peer review and debate to me is a time-honored tradition and through the friction of opposing views, observers can come to informed conclusions.

I wish political arguments on say health care used peer review. Then most of us Americans might know a bit more about what we are talking about and logic might prevail over emotions.

Most people are emotional on the issue of climate change as well. And I think both sides in the scientific community have managed to dent their own credibility.

But that's not the key issue. The key issue is that the risks in not acting in a global way may end life as we know it on Earth. It is clear that the overwhelming number of those expert in this field see overwhelming evidence that we are on a path of destruction so imminent that it could impact or even terminate the lives of our grandchildren.

So when I hear the argument that the Earth has only warmed by a mere half degree in 30 years and therefore the movement to curb emissions is a massive and costly overreaction, I wonder.

Maybe they are right, but am I willing to risk the lives of my grandchildren on that speculation? My oldest granddaughter is 11.Perhaps, if she drove my car down a highway she would not hurt herself, or anyone else, but why would I take that risk?

Who in their right mind would take that risk?  What society in its right collective wisdom would take that risk?

We'll find out the answer to that question very shortly in Copenhagen.

[Wife Paula, dog Brewster & Unidentified bearded man in red suit. Photo by Shel]

Note: This
is the 5th time I've published this holiday post. The only real change is my having to update my age. The annual trigger seems to be the annual purchase of a holiday tree, which we just placed in our living room. Enjoy.

I grew up in the 1950s in New Bedford, Mass., an overwhelmingly Christian East
Coast city. Christmas was the biggest day of the year.  School was
closed. Parents had rare paid days off. There was usually snow on the
ground and the abundant churches would chime carols from bell towers
all day long.

Even if you were a Jewish kid and you knew this day was not designed
for you, you couldn’t help but share in the excitement. My parents, who
were born in Europe at a time when it was unfortunate to be both
European and Jewish, were unable to conceal their own ambivalence. Our
small family would drive to gentile neighborhoods admiring decorations.
We once ventured all the way to Boston--in those days a two-hour
drive-- where we saw live reindeer fenced in on Boston Commons beside a
large illuminated plastic nativity scene.

More than once, my mother cooked a turkey on Christmas day and
family would come for the day—but we never, ever admitted that the
celebration had any relationship to Christmas. There were no stockings
hung by our chimney with care, no bulbous piles of loot, no sweet smell
of pine trees in our living room.

Christmas was a source of huge confusion for me as a boy and teenager. Perhaps it still is.

As a Jewish kid, we had Hanukkah. But the Festival of Lights, as it
is called, seemed pale in the shadow of all that Christmas glitter of
tinsel and bright blinking bulbs. Christmas was everywhere in the
windows of homes and stores, on lawns in parks and even on rooftops.
Yes, it was in the schools and no one even thought of objecting at that
time.  I still wouldn't.

While he was still alive, my grandfather, a white-haired kindly old
man gave me Hanukkah “gelt,” in the form of a silver dollar. A dollar
was big-time money back then, but how could my grandfather ever compete
with the other white-haired guy, the one in the red suit with the
elves, the flying sleigh and all his well-disguised doubles in
department stores?

I liked getting a gift each of the eight days of Hanukkah, even if
over-half was only socks and clothing that I would have gotten anyway.
But while my Christian friends had only a single day, theirs seemed to
be the Perfecta jackpot, dwarfing our quantity of days with their
quality of day.

In January. when we went back to Betsy B. Winslow School, I’d hear
glee-filled reports of how these Christian kids had awakened Dec. 25 to
entire living rooms filled with Schwinn bikes, Lionel Trains, American
Flyer Wagons and Junior Builder Erector Sets. All they had done was to
leave out some faith-based milk and cookies the night before.

Christmas loot was bad enough, but then there were the miracles.
Theirs was the birth of God’s son on a night when animals talked. Ours
was that a temple light burned for a long time. Big deal. Our most
popular Hanukkah song was, “Dreydle, Dreydle, Dreydle,” which has the
same melodic merit as “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” Not quite on par with
“Silent Night,” “First Noel” or even, for that matter, “Rudolph, the
Red-Nosed Reindeer.” Our Holiday food featured potato latkas, still a
personal, cholesterol-soaked favorite, but we had no Mormon Tabernacle
Choir, no TV special with Perry Como crooning “Ave Maria.“ We never
dashed through the snow, laughing even part of the way.

But Hanukkah had one special part for a Jewish kid in that era--
latent machismo. The holiday story was about how Judah Maccabee had led
a successful guerrilla war against the previously undefeated Roman
Legions, making himself the central figure in the whole Hanukkah tale.
Maccabee had kicked some serious Roman butt back when the Romans were
the undefeated champs. It made me proud. He was our Rocky, our Joltin'
Joe DiMaggio, Jackie Robinson. He wasn't no wimp as Jewish kids were
often considered to be in the 50s.

I started remembering all this, while driving through the
sad city of East Palo Alto (EPA). A few years back, EPA had the highest
murder rate in the country--outdoing Detroit, New York City and
Oakland. They say it’s a lot better now that they’ve brought in a Home
Depot, Ikea and Sun Microsystems campus. But as I sat at a traffic
light watching a packaged goods deal between a dude in a long coat and
a kid on a bike, I saw a sign that reminded me about what I envied most
about Christmas. It hung in huge, slightly lopsided letters across
University Avenue.

It said: “Peace on Earth.” There wasn’t space I guess, for the tagline, which of course is, “Good will toward men.”

Tomorrow will be my 65th Christmas. It was a great many Christmases
ago when I first heard the words, and fewer Christmas ago when I came
to understand the bigness of the concept and the power of the thought.
Peace on Earth is much, much bigger than Maccabee kicking Roman butt.

Not too many years ago, I met Paula who is now my wife. She loved
Christmas like the kids in the old TV programs sponsored by Hallmark
cards. She loved the planning, and decorating; the gifting and wrapping
and opening and putting ribbons on her head; she loved the cooking and
filling the house with unlikely assortments of people who somehow
enjoyed each other. Her zeal put me at odds with my own deep and
ambiguous feelings about the holiday. I’ve never been able to explain
them to her in any way that makes sense and perhaps that’s what I’m
trying to do in this particular blog.

There are now two things special about Christmas for me. The first
is the big thought, dream or illusion of peace on earth and goodwill
between its many inhabitants--Christians Jews, Muslims, Hindus,
atheists and even Republicans. I don’t pray, but I do hope. If you do
pray for these issues, I hope they come through and I will be grateful
to you if your prayers delivered that dream.

The second is smaller and more personal. It’s about Paula and how
she catches the season’s joy as if it were something contagious.
Whatever the germ, I’ve caught it as I find myself looking forward to
the planning, and decorating; the gifting, wrapping and opening--albeit
without ribbons on my head. Monday our home will filled with unlikely
assortments of people and I already know it will work out just fine.

Happy holidays, whichever you choose to observe, and may the New Year bring all of us closer to peace on Earth."

[Originally published December 24, 2003

James Governor has posted a nice piece about his company's seven-year-saga to acquire exclusive online use of Redmonk, his company's name. In the post, he refers to his Twitterville interview where he talks about how important company brand names are.

He also politely overlooks that in a recent freelance piece I did for BusinessWeek.com, I in inadvertently further mutilated his brand by referring to Tom Raftery, who runs the Greenmonk sustainability arm of the company as tweeting as @Greenmonk. He does not. He tweets as @TomRaftery. This gets still further muddled by the fact that James has also been using the @Monkchips handle on Twitter because Steve Ivy, now of Six Apart owned @Redmonk until turning it over to James.

Whew. Was all that trouble worth it? You bet it was. Every time someone did a Redmonk search the results caused confusion. James found himself using more "monk" derivatives than many medieval monasteries.

I feel the pain from personal experience. This blog is called "Global Neighbourhoods" with the British spelling because when I first started using it, a Florida entity, which existed simply to aggregate and resell URLs had taken the American "Neighborhoods" and wanted $25,000 for its rights. When I offered $10, they came back with a $5,000 offer. I then offered $1 and there the negotiations froze.

Earlier this year, GoDaddy.com told me that Global Neighborhoods name had been released and I immediately licensed it for the next several years. If you click on it you get here, but it seems to me that so much time has passed, so many people have the "u" version that to switch yet again could cause more confusion.

Sometimes, as I have also experienced, people buy URLs not for hopes of profit but for malicious reasons. In Twitterville, I also write about Mayo Clinic who first obtained an account for defensive reasons. On MySpace, the Mayo Clinic name was purchased by a British woman, with apparently little love for the esteemed Minnesota-based clinic. The icon there shows someone being snuffed in an electric chair.

My point is this, while branding issues are currently undergoing a good deal of rethinking, brand names and images are not. There are many ways to corrupt a company brand. In the case of Redmonk, two legitimate entities came up with the same name by coincidence and caused seven years of headaches. Mayo learned that there are folks on the Internet who would like to put an egg in the face of their brand.

My advice is simple. Protect your name in as many places and in as many ways as you can. I learned this the hard way and now I invest nearly $1,000 a year on protecting brands I use. Still there are ways that are overlooked. If you are a company, think through every possibility and invest in protecting yourself.

I wonder, if I register "BlueMonk," how much James will pay for it at some point in the future when he branches out again?

['I propose a return to normalcy.' Warren G. Harding]

I've been out speaking a lot lately, mostly promoting Twitterville and always talking about social media and it's impact on business, government, nonprofits and other institutions. The most frequent question I get is regarding what I see coming next.

Predictions make me uncomfortable. If I were better at them I would spend more time picking stocks. The thing that I've learned to love about the future is that it will surprise us and we can have a good chuckle about how silly predictions can be.

Social media so far has been a series of surprises and these surprises on one hand have led to sustained change that almost all observers now see as changing how business and organizations will interface with customers. These surprises have been spurred by one innovation after another and it has been going on for  a decade now. What began in the tech sector has spilled over into business and government;; education and goodwill fundraising. These changes have disrupted and undermined how we get our news, who we talk with, what we buy, watch listen to and a good deal more.

When viewed through social media, it has been a period of relentless change and a pretty exhausting time for most business managers. Their jobs during this period have not changed all that much. They are still worried about operating margins and headcount; costs of goods sold and how to replace best practice which are not as good as they once were.

The fundamentals of business do not really change. They are all about exchange goods and services for profit in a marketplace. They should not change at this fundamental level and those who argue that they should seem to miss the key benefit of social media tools.

The overwhelming benefit of these tools is to make business and markets work better for both buyers and sellers; to make it all work more effectively and efficiently; to make access to markets easier and cheaper and larger to expedite and open communications.

Social media has accomplished enough of that to make enough business people understand the value and want to embrace them. What has slowed the process is that social media has also been very disruptive.

We have gone through a prolonged period of disruption in which social media tools have change a great many aspects of the way modern companies conduct business. I believe that this period is now coming to a close.

We are leaving the age of social media innovation and entering a longer, slower-moving period in which businesses and institutions will absorb and assimilate these tools into their everyday business practices. The novelty of these tools will fade away as the utility of them becomes clearer and more universally accepted.

There was a time when people wrote books and produced conferences to discuss the business benefits of email and fax machines. The telephone got introduced at a public fair and immediately business thinkers warned of the dangers that existed if such a device were permitted into the workplace.

A great many executives agreed about the phone, but eventually, business saw that the benefits far outweighed the liabilities. Businesses that continued to ignored  those benefits eventually disappeared. And as the benefits of the phone became clearer to more and more people, the once-heated conversation about the phone's place in business cooled down, became obvious, tedious and would eventually wither.

What I see happening in the near term future is far more valuable than it is controversial or interesting. We have entered into a long, slow, steady, non-disruptive period of refinement and adoption. The tools we have will get better and easier and faster, but they will not be soon replaced by some shiny new thing. The business that have painfully adopted the new tools will feel far less pain and far more results. New people coming into the workplace and marketplace will use social media tools with as little angst or consideration as they use email or phone.

We are entering the Social Media Age of Normalization. The guy in the photo above is Warren G. Harding, one of the darkest horses to ever get elected president. He did it by sitting on a nice porch in Ohio and declaring that after the horrors of the Great War, Americans wanted to "return to normalcy."

The word "normalization" is actually a more recent word. It was developed by database technicians who used it to describe how relational databases work, once all the flaws were scraped out.

That's what happening with Facebook, Twitter, blogs, podcasts, YouTube and the rest. It is no straight line, but the tools are getting steadily better and their usage, for the most part, is growing in the same way.

Welcome to the Social Media Age of Normalization. I predict an Era about as tumultuous as watching paint dry and as significant as the adoption of the automobile.  I wonder what I get to write about next.

The question was: " What do you think is more important for attaining power: followers or who you follow?" It was directed at me as I sat on a panel at the Social Media Summit, produced by London-headquartered Lewis PR.

It took me by surprise and one live tweeter accused me of skirting the issue and not understanding about power. I disagree with his assessment but that's besides the point.

It took me by surprise because most people who follow me know that I see social media as all about the conversation; not power. It involves personal and corporate branding issues, but not power. It even is about influence, which may touch upon power but it is not the same.

The way social media works just about the same way computer networks work. They both adhere to Metcalfe's Law, which loosely stated says the value of a network is determined by the sum of your users. It was true for telecommunications and it seems to me to apply very clearly to social networks as well.

But value for the individual simply does not translate into power. The power is in the sum of the users on the network. In social media, each of us is a node and the more nodes we connect with has something to do with power.

But each of us matters very little to the sum of the massive networks we connect with. If some one with five followers leaves a network it matters very little. If someone with over a million users departs, it may get noticed for a short while, but the power of that network stays close to the same. Why? Because those millions of other people are still there, are still connected; still contain nearly all the knowledge, data, wisdom, ideas and energy as they did prior to the departure of that one really big node.

Networks have great power in social media. People don't, not really. Each of us is too easily replaced.

We can, however, benefit greatly from the power of the networks we join. As to the specific question, almost everyone who has examined twitter believes that in most cases there is greater value in who we follow than in who follows us. Those people are out newspapers. They are our source of much inspiration. We care about people and those people give us all sorts of valuable stuff.

Social media is about so many things. But if you have come to it for power, I really think you'd be happier going to work for an Electal utility.

I get uncomfortable whenever I get introduced as a social media expert or guru. First off, whenever I hear someone else called that, I have a tendency to fold my arms and think, "Oh Yeah?" I find myself poised to pounce if that person makes anything close to a mistake.

When people call themselves either of those titles, my inclination gets amplified.

Judging by the surplus of Twitter and blogs shots being taken at those marketing themselves as coaches, gurus and experts, it appears that I am not alone in my inclinations. But that does not make us right.

I think this controversy has been accelerated because people have started making money teaching others about social media. And when they and their friends come up against competition they take a very old school approach. They badmouth people they do not know, and assume the right to point a derogatory finger simply because they were doing the stuff first.

Among my circle of personal social media friends, I have heard the argument that we were here first and anyone we don't know, anyone who does not go way back to the good old days of say 2006 must not be an expert.

This, of course, is a mountain of mole dung.

There are now hundreds of millions of people using social media. Many of them have them have spent thousands of hours using the tools; have drunk the same brands of KoolAid as others have, feel the same passion we have and are very, very capable of teaching others the strategies and tactics of using social media; who understand that social media is about conversations not about monologue.

The global neighborhoods of all the virtual social spaces are filled with people I have never met; who have attended events and meet ups I have not attended does not diminish their knowledge.

While I may not feel comfortable calling myself an expert, that does not require them to make the same choice. There are score, perhaps hundreds or even thousands of people who are capable of teaching others why and how to use social media and it seems to me, they can call themselves "guru" "coach," "expert" or whatever they damned well please. And those who feel that for some reason their timeline seniority allows them to challenge the claim should sit down and shut up.

Let the clients and customers, the students and friends; the attendees and workshop participants determine who is expert and who is not.

A great deal is being said these days about personal brand and as is usually the case, with a new term, there is debate on how new or important it is. There are those who feel personal brand is just a new term for good old-fashioned reputation and others who feel there is an opportunity for old advertisers to try a new spin on their creative attempts to insert position messages into human minds.

I see some truth in all of this, and the whole truth in none of it. To me personal brand is very closely connected to human reputation. There are two aspects that I think make it at least slightly different:

1. Social media is allowing a tremendous amplification of personal brand and in so doing personal brands can emerge into just another form of contrived marketing noise, and we need to be aware and concerned about that.
2. Personal brand is changing corporate and product brand in an increasing number of cases. This changes who shapes brand and why and how it is done. It changes how markets perceive brands and this is an area where little thought and conversation has emerged so far.

Corporate brands themselves are defined indifferent ways, but it generally has to do with how someone in your market feels about your company, its products and services. It's primary tools involve advertising and graphic design. Traditionally branding was used to create the illusion that an organization consisting of tens of thousand of employees spoke with a single voice, marched in unison and never, ever made a mistake--or at least one that the company would admit to.

Over time, this form of branding has lost effectiveness and the cost of maintaining this sort of brand strategy has simultaneously become more expensive. Those high costs in these down times have much to do with the current acceleration of large companies into social media.

While there are quite a few exceptions, generally speaking traditional type brand messaging has fallen flat in social media venues while personal brand has thrived.

How does this impact the marketplace? In several ways. But at the essence of them all is the current realization that companies are not branded monoliths but are comprised if many people, diverse people, whose views sometimes differ and even collide; talented people wh sometimes screw up, but are human enough to admit their mistakes and to promise to do better next time.

A fundamental problem with corporate branding is that its strategies are designed to be one directional--to send messages out. This collided with the most common complain people have against large organizations: "they don't listen to me. They don't want to hear my complaints. The support people want to get me off the phone."

But social media lets markets talk back at companies. We can shout, ask or suggest. And we often get answers. Instead of being disdained we are getting respect.

Personal branding has much to do with this. Personal brands are far more human than corporate brands. I think personal brands are reshaping corporate brands and it has far more to do with social media than traditional marketing. We hated Dell when they had the audacity to call us Dude in ads while giving us support people who did not speak our language. But now there are dozens of people there; people we have come to know in social media; people who sometimes don't have good answers, but at least they tried.

Many of us feel better about Dell than we used to and that translates into corporate brand equity.

Much has been said about personal brand and what it does for the individual. If we blog, tweet, podcast or engage in all these new tools it allows us to create a new for of web-based ever-changing resume and that seemed great in a world where we took jobs while simultaneously planning to move on to a new employer a couple of years hence. But the economy's great swan dive into the toilet may have changed that.

We and our personal brands are more likely, I think, to stay put for longer times. The thought of being a lifer just may start inching back into workforce thinking. And this too will apply personal brand to the reshaping of corporate brand.

Time was traditional branders designed our business cards. And when someone received it, that logo may have shaped their view of you. Now it's the opposite. What that person thinks of you is shaping their emotions of your corporate logo. Brand seems to me to work much better on both sides of that business card when there is a perception that real humans are part of those graphic representations.

Yesterday, over on Twitter, I asked for suggestions for my SM Global Report and was surprised by the confusion that caused. Some people thought I was offering some sort of proprietary report, perhaps a PDF.

This post is to help me explain and to give me a link I can point to in the future. [If you know all about the SM Global Report and how I use it, just skip this report and come back later.]

The Social Media [SM] Global Report is at the core of what I do. Since 2005, I have interviewed people about how they use social media in their work and lives. In all there have been over 400 interviews with people in 40 countries. These people have varied from CEOs of global enterprises to pioneers in NGOs, elected officials and regime change activists; a cancer victim using Twitter for ideas and support; a member of the Lebanese Parliament using Facebook to talk with constituents while hiding from Hezbollah.

And so on... It began essentially as a business report, but it seems that I am following social media wherever it goes. I am looking for new stories that either inspire others or give pragmatic ideas of new ways social media can be used.

Almost invariably the SM Global Report is at the core of the books and articles I write. People I interview often become subjects for my speaking engagements and when I get a new project, the SM Global Report gets renamed for a period of time. It became "Twitterville Notebook" for a while. when I was working on my recent book.

I am always looking for stories of people who have used social media successfully. It doesn't matter where, but it most certainly matters how. These are case studies. I write about things that have already happened partly in the hope that it will help others make adopt social media in new ways.

In that light, I rarely--if ever--write about new companies with new tools or APIs. Despite that fact, I get more than a few pitches for stories like that and I get very few pitches for the stories I am really after. When I tweeted yesterday that I wrote about people not companies, I immediately received a few company pitches. So if you are a PR practitioner, please keep that in mind. You can email me with story ideas whenever you like, but it would be best for me if you took the time to click on the SM Global Report category button in my sidebar and read a few of the Reports first.

If you have such a story or an idea on how I can find one please let me know.