My inveterate friend Tom Foremski picked City Lights Bookstore at 6 pm for getting together. It seemed fitting. Tom and I are both writers whose styles and perspectives were shaped in the 60s and City Lights, is the last bastion of the stormy renaissance that is usually called "The Beat Era."

I finished my business in San Francisco earlier than expected. I arrived at City lights at 4:30 with abundant time to kill.  I strolled the shelves of poet-bookseller Lawrence Ferlinghetti's fabled bookstore. I had read a great many of the books being offered and I had read them long ago.

But I'm not big on nostalgia and after a short while I felt like I had been there and done that as far as City Lights was concerned. I had killed less than half an hour.

I wandered outside and watched the amazing diversity of the neighborhood, clicking a few street scene photos. The neighborhood is like a Coney Island of the mind.  City Lights is sort of a cultural island surrounded by diverse sections of San Francisco. You are just a few footsteps from the Financial District, Chinatown and the restaurants of North Beach.

It also abuts the strip joints and porn shops of San Francisco's small, seamy adult entertainment district. There, just a couple of doors down from a sex toy supermarket I caught a new marquee: The Beat Museum, and I wandered over.

It cost four bucks to get in and what a weird, strange trip it will deliver. If you were on the magic bus of the 60s, its a visit to memory lane. If you were were not, then it educates you that the Beat Generation was a period of enlightenment, a time to explore the hope of peace and tolerance. Yes it was about sex and drugs, but it was so much more than that.

It was a period of art and music, of poetry and challenging conventional truths. It was a period of people bypassing powerful institutions, conventional wisdom and tolerance. It was a time where people exchanged ideas, often with great passion attached to them.

Very quickly, The Beat Museum brings all that back. It looks at the usual nexus of the era: Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassidy and the others, but mostly it spotlights Jack Kerouac, but mostly it talks about Jack Kerouac, author of several groundbreaking books, the best-remembered being On the Road.

Kerouac, was my favorite. His style was fast and contemporary. It sounded at times like the bebop jazz that he loved. You felt like you got to know the people he wrote about because his conversations were so, well, naked.

There are so many ties between the roots of social media and the beat era. Many of the thinkers and technologists who have provided us with the tools were shaped in that era.

It seems to me that we of the social media movement are braided and bonded to those of the Beat Generation. We have a love of innovation. We have hope for a future that provides people greater health and safety. We believe that conversation will reveal much and resolve a few differences. We have a distrust of the all-powerful and the institutional. We reserve the right to question anything.

Kerouac used a manual typewriter and wrote books. If he were alive today, I'm sure he's still write books, but he would use the tools of our time. He would be unquestionably among the most prominent of our bloggers.

The style he pioneered is the style that succeeds the best in the blogosphere, whether you are talking for an enterprise or telling about a traveling adventure.

Yes, Kerouac would have tweeted as well. He probably would also have been prolific with a handheld camera. Kerouac understood, even in writing books, that it's dialog that matters. He captured conversations in his books.

Just think of what he could do with the tools we have today. Just think of the influence he would have on the young minds of today as he had on the young minds of the 60s.

In 1953, Ralph Ellison wrote The Invisible Man a book I was required to read in college in the 1960s and one that has shaped my thinking. The invisible man in that book was a black man, one that you would pass by without seeing; you could say what you wanted within earshot of him and it did not matter, because well, it was as if he wasn't there.

Over the years, I have become aware of all sorts of invisible people in the world, those whom we are more comfortable ignoring than acknowledging; those whose problems do not concern us, because their poverty or affliction was not our doing.

Mark Horvath has been a commercial TV producer and a recording artist. He's also a great writer and story teller. Earlier in his diverse career, he was teen age pot dealer and would end up being one of those invisible people along Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles. If I had passed him by in 1995, I probably would not have seen him at all--except for the large lizard on his shoulder.

Mark is now producing TV again at invisiblepeople.TV. He is also tweeting at Hardly Normal. To say his new endeavor is being done on a shoestring might exaggerate his assets. But the next time you want a dose of reality TV, try watching some f Mark's incredibly interesting, moving and occasionally inspirational episodes.

His story is below, but first one other note: Mark could really use some editing equipment. If you have some to spare contact him through me or at Hardly Normal.

1. Let's start with your background. Where were you born and raised? What did you aspire to do when you grew up?

I grew up In Binghamton, NY.  At age 14 until I was 16 I sold an average of 20 pounds of marijuana per week.  It was my first business experience. As a kid, I could not come home with a new car so the group of kids that helped me --my “employees” would spend event cent on anything fun.

I also started to play drums professionally--meaning I made money--at age 14. By the time I was 16 music gave me the same power that selling drugs did, and since people now gave me drugs to hang with the ‘band,’ and since I was no longer a minor and laws changed if I was caught selling drugs -  I stopped selling.

At 17, I formed a record and publishing company and produced my first single. Music became my life. I also learned how to do lots with a little. I did not have money to compete with major labels, but by using a little extra effort and creative thinking the stuff I produced came across with big budget excellence.

At age 26, my girlfriend and I moved to LA. I did a little everything for a while: music, acting, working apprentice special effects on B movies.

In 1990, I was playing music fulltime and got a girl pregnant. I thought I would need health insurance and started to look for ‘normal’ work. I lied on an application to a major TV syndicator. They hired me as traffic supervisor. Two weeks later they fired my boss and made me traffic manager.  Soon, I ran traffic, mass duplication, vault and fulfillment services for a major TV company. It may not have been glamorous, but if you watched TV from 1990 to 1994 I was responsible for getting it to your TV set.

2. How did you become homeless?

My homelessness resulted from a series of bad decisions and severe drug abuse over a 20-year period. I was always a very high-functioning drug addict. I didn’t lose my job because I was on drugs; I lost it because I refused to obey an order to fire a Mexican to cover a mistake made by a a senior executive.

They fired one of my team members anyway. I screamed about it and the madness sent my drug abuse into overdrive and that cost me my job. I went back to old habits and started hanging out with some very bad people.

I lost it mentally, emotionally and spiritually.

I lived on or near Hollywood Boulevard off and on for about a year. I would go into a homeless shelter and kicked out.  I was brought down to the point of no support, and no security.

It’s very hard to explain what homelessness is like. Living on the streets is hopeless and horrible.  You beat yourself up with, “how did I get here” and “how am I going to get out of here” questions.

Visiting my homeless memories are not easy for me. I remember, in 1995, sitting by what was then a tee-shirt shop next to Grumman’s Chinese Theatre. My pet
6-foot-long iguana, "D.O.G." was sitting on my shoulder. My head was buried in my hands. I was lost in thoughts of my situation.

Then, a busload of Asian tourists unloaded and a group of them surrounded me. One  asked, “can I take a picture of your Iguana?”

“Sure”, I said “for a dollar.” Everyone started handing me dollar bills. It was at that moment that I started to sell photos of D.O.G. and became “The Lizard Man Of Hollywood Boulevard.”

There's irony. Grumman's Chinese Theater became Kodak Theater. Fifteen years ago I survived by panhandling in front of it. In 2009, thanks to Jeff Pulver, I presented from the stage at The 140 Characters Conference because of my Twitter experience.

That’s AMAZING!

3. Tell me your happiest personal story from you homeless days. Tell me your saddest.

There are no happy stories.

There are memories that I now laugh at, but I don’t consider them happy. Here is a post I wrote for Change.org about my first homeless night. After walking all day to find a safe place to sleep, I finally lay down in a park only for the sprinklers to go off.

Horrible then – funny now!

4. When, how and why did you decide to not be homeless?

No one decides to be homeless.

I mean, people do dumb things that often have negative consequences. But ‘Recycling Engineer’ is never an option on career day.

I can tell you right now looking at it from both sides the system is broken. I completely understand why some people give up trying. You keep hitting wall after wall trying to make your life better and eventually it wears you down.

It’s called learned helplessness.

After everything I have been through I cannot honestly tell you why or how I made it. But I did.

What I can tell you is that I didn’t do it alone. Along that way when I was at my lowest someone was there to give a hand. We must never give up on people. Ever. I was one of the worst of the worst, yet I changed.

I'm proof that anyone can change and have a better life.

5. Having been through such an experience, you elected to then spend your life working with and for the homeless. Why?

Oh please know I didn’t pick this life. Several people have blogged about me being a hero and I cringe – I’m really not that nice - I’m not.

I just could no longer walk by people and do nothing. And that didn’t just happen overnight, either. In a way, I had heart surgery and I’ll never be the same.

I November 2007, I was working in St. Louis and earning in the six figures when I lost my job. I aggressively searched for nine months, paying my mortgage and food with my credit cards.

Executive jobs were still being cut and low end employers like McDonalds wouldn't hire me after seeing my last income.

I crashed hard. I remember applying for food stamps. Walking into the building crushed me like it did when I was homeless applying for government assistance.

I was about done when I lucked into a job back in Los Angeles. I grabbed a ghetto apartment to save money since because I had all the St. Louis debt to deal with. Three months later I was one of 50 people to get laid off. It devastated me.

I felt like I had when I had been homeless 15 years earlier, maybe worse since I'd been sober all these years.

November of 2008 I started Invisiblepeople.tv.

It wasn’t this long thought-out process, maybe because the basic concept had been in me for years. As a nonprofit television producer I was tired of spinning  homeless stories. And I had wrestled around the idea of doing a very ‘raw’ project.

Since I had nothing but a laptop, a camera and an iPhone, not even editing equipment. If I had any money, I would love to edit Invisible people.

Last winter I took a temp job supporting a homeless shelter. Along with making new friends while taping InvisiblePeople.tv my life changed.

A year ago my plan was to move back to LA for a cushy marketing job, start a new band, find a hot wife and vacation in Hawaii. Today, my financial crisis in many ways is worse, but my heart has been changed.

I sometimes dream about getting a normal job, but I know deep down I’d hate it.

In homeless services outreach you never know who you are going to meet. I was called to a park in Pasadena to assist a family. I loaded the father, mother and two babies into the van driving them to our facility.  After we arrived the father was helping me unload the baby stroller from the back of the van.

Without saying anything he pointed to a rock. I thought he was helping me clean out the back of the van so I grabbed it to throw it away. He stopped me, took the rock out of my hand and handed it to his daughter. They are homeless. They live in a park. The only toy he could give his child is a smooth rock.

My heart was wrecked and I have never been the same since.

6. Malcolm Gladwell has written that most homeless people are that way for a very short period of time and that the problems of violence, property damage and emergency room costs that disturb so many people are caused by an extremely small number of people. What is your view on that?

I love what [San Francisco mayor] Gavin Newsom said, “We don’t have a homeless problem. We have a housing problem.”

You are referring to Million Dollar Murray a likeable homeless guy who cost public services over a million dollars, before he died on the street in a drunken stupor.

In Denver it costs $40k to keep someone on the streets and $14k to house them. To the taxpayer that’s a yearly savings of $26k per homeless individual being helped.

This is part of the growing Housing First movement, which I support.

Although controversial, it saves
lives and saves money

But just providing housing is not enough.

The issue is what happens when you house  people who are still on drugs or are mentally ill. Consider this: how do you stay sober when you are crapping behind a dumpster in a McDonalds parking lot?

It’s nearly impossible to stay sober on the streets. Point blank -  unless a person has dignity they are not going to change. Give a person shelter--then work on the ‘issues’

We cannot just throw a chronic homeless person into housing and leave them alone. \ People need tangible social interaction.

My friend Alan Graham is going amazing work housing people in RVs. I am also excited to be working with Common Ground this year. Both at the forefront of ‘housing first’ model.

7. Let's talk social media. When and how did it catch your attention? Tell me how you got started.

When I was job hunting from St. Louis, for the job that brought me back to Los Angeles. My prospective new boss tweeted, and was tweeting about the interview process, so of course, I looked, and looked, and looked!  I started my account.

Being a TV producer by trade, I started a Twitter experiment. Driving from St. Louis back to Los Angeles, I told the story and used a few tricks to engage people. People started to email me, “where you going?”

The light bulb started to glow and I saw Twitter's value as a storytelling tool. Good marketing is simply telling a good story.

When I started Invisiblepeople.tv,I used Twitter to market it for not great strategic reason. I did it because Twitter is free and that fit my budget.

I’m your typical front page USA Today recession story. I’ve lost everything. Layoff, after layoff, after layoff, house lost to foreclosure. I did not, and still do not, have an operating budget. I use what I can afford and will give me real-time storytelling ability.

8. What is one of your InvisiblePeople that moved you the most?

I walked under a bridge in Atlanta and met Angela. She’s dying under that bridge, and the best I could do is give her a sandwich. Food is not enough. We need to support people who need help with housing, jobs and health services. Sure,  maybe your support level is making a sandwich. Well then, make a bunch and take them to your local homeless shelter so they can save on their food budget for housing, jobs and health services.

if you wonder how Beth may have ended up under that bridge maybe this will help

9. How have your social media experiences helped homeless people in general and in specific.

I have an agenda. I am after your perceptions. Thing is a perception is a hard thing to measure, yet every now and then I get a glimpse. One day I was getting crazy traffic and clicked on the link that took me to America’s Next Top Model. You don’t have to be a genius to know models and homeless don’t mix. I scrolled down to find a comment left by a girl saying after visiting Invisiblepeople.tv she no longer thinks homeless are bums

Social media has been everything. I mean, I would not be typing this today if it was not for the people I met via social media that helped me. From the road trip to putting food in my fridge, social media changed my life. I am very grateful to everyone.

Now let’s get real. I was an unemployed guy who lost everything. With only a laptop and a cell phone I got the word ‘homeless’ to trend on twitter. Michael Jackson trends, iPhone trends – not HOMELESS – that’s huge! Even better,  probably the coolest thing that has ever happened in homeless cause marketing may be Ford mirroring my content

I search twitter for the word ‘homeless’. Sometimes I get people being ignorant and I educate, and sometimes I find others helping homeless people. Probably the most interesting is this story.

Those are only a few of many examples of how I changed the general public’s view on homelessness.

This last summer’s road trip I was told about 50 homeless kids that didn’t have shoes so they could not go to school. One hour later they all had new shoes. Because I had the courage to do something different and with the help of people on social media housing and food programs have been started. That’s really amazing for a guy who has nothing but twitter to make things happen.

12. Can you tell me a single story that illustrates what social media has done for the homeless?

This may be the best single story.

I have a chapter in Twitterville called "B2Bs are People Too.  If I were to rewrite the book, I would have to expand the chapter on B2B, [business-to-business] because it has grown so massively since June, when the book was finished.

IBM, for example, was the tweetingest company I found last June with over 1000 employee tweeters. Now that number has grown to about 7500 and that's just the IBM employees. The number would be far greater if you included the partners, consultants, customers, analysts, editors and other members of the IBM infrastructure. If you included them, you'd have tens of thousands of IBM community members communicating tens of thousand of times daily. IBM, the third largest technology company in fact is trusting a growing portion to its business to Twitter, where they are realizing significant, measurable and growing favorable results.

Another company, mentioned in my book is Sodexo, North America's largest food service company. Last year they adopted Twitter as an executive recruiting tool, integrating it with their other online tools. Traffic to their job site traffic has tripled and they have saved, I'm told about $350,000 in recruiting ad costs.

Even Pitney Bowes, the postage meter company, is using Twitter to modernize its generally stodgy image.

My favorite B2B story in the book is about tiny United Linen. Located in Bartlesville, Okla., this company was founded by a family during the Great Depression. They took in laundry from neighbors to make ends meet. Now United Linen is the largest restaurant linen and uniform laundry service in a four-state region. They use Twitter in all sorts of ways and it's activities have made happier customers, established the company as a community leader, has given them an emergency customer communications tool, which they used last winter in an ice storm. It has also generated significant coverage in BusinessWeek, Forbes, the Wall Street Journal and other publications.

While companies who use Twitter to reach public markets get more attention, simply because they are trying for public recognition, B2Bs are extremely active and at this time, may be growing faster that consumer-focused companies. You may not know much about what IBM is doing, but IBM doesn't really care. They are using Twitter and other social media tools to talk with their communities online.

I learned about United Linen from Joe Zuccaro, who is better known as the Marketing Consigliere . Joe is passionate and highly knowledgeable about B2Bs and social media. Last year, he started awarding a "B2B Tweeter of the Year Award" and it went to United Linen. When I asked through Twitter for suggestion for my book, Joe suggested the Bartlesville laundry service.

This year, Joe just asked for suggestion for the new B2B Tweeter of the Year and received a note from someone he knew that was crammed with ridicule and scorn;; someone who thinks tweeting is about broadcasting a single message, rather than having ongoing conversations, someone who in my opinion is completely ignorant to the mounting facts and stats, of Twitter''s value in B2B. Facts that decision makers I've talked with at Wells Fargo, Microsoft, SAP, HP and others have noted and embraced.

Joe's a classy guy and doesn't want to name his ignorant colleague. I would have named him and still would. Anyone who goes on the record, using disinformation or a lack of knowledge to defame those who are better informed, should be spotlighted in my opinion.

Anyway, my best to Joe. My repeated thanks for a great story in my book and I look forward to spotlighting whoever Joe selects this year in a future blog post.

When I started exploring Global Neighbourhoods in Twitterville, I never thought I would discover and connect with a Tanzanian chicken farmer turned educator. But there was Mama Lucy Kampton, smiling and warm, having dinner at our home in San Carlos, CA some 10,000 miles  from her home on the rural edges of Arusha, Tanzania, not far from the legendary Mt. Kilimanjaro.

She had come to dinner with Stacey Monk and Sanjay Patel, the co-founders of Epic Change, best-known for producing Tweetsgiving, the annual grassroots fundraising campaign to benefit the children of Shepherds Jr, a school Mama Lucy founded for Tanzanian school children in a country whose government does not provide adequate schools.

Last year, Epic Change slapped together a last-minute, short notice campaign to raise money to replace the building Mama Lucy was using to school about 175 kids when the landlord decided to bulldoze the property. In a two-day period, using blogs and tweets to promote the effort, Epic Change raised about $11,000 from 372 people who gave about $30 each.

A new school was built and the kids, who now have their own Twitter account, engraved the Twitter handles of all 372 donors into a stucco wall at the new school. [You can talk to the kids on Twitter at @ShepherdsJr.]

My connection with all this is that I wrote about Epic Change and Mama Lucy in Twitterville and I often discuss Shepherds Jr and Tweetsgiving in my public talks.

This year, Tweetsgiving went global with a series of events all over the world, each scheduled close to the American Thanksgiving. This year, $30,000 was raised. The funds will be used to for classrooms, a library, cafeteria and a dorm. The former is needed because feeding these children is an essential part of what the school is about and the dorm is needed because several orphans attend Shepherds Jr.

The school is mostly dedicated to giving a good education. Last year it finished first in Tanzania out of 117 schools taking an achievement test, despite the fact that many of the other schools were long-established, privately funded and run by people with more academic credentials than Mama Lucy, who actually holds not formal educator's credentials. This year, Shepherds Jr has expanded to about 350 students, enabled mostly by Shepherds Jr.

Uneducated herself, Mama Lucy is bursting with passion about education for her kids. She has put three children through college. That is a journey that started when each was only six-years-old and Mama Lucy had to put them on a bus that traversed and navigated a poor excuse for a road into neighboring Kenya, where her kids would stay for six months to attend real schools.

None of us knew what to expect when our three guests arrived on a rainy night December night at our door, but we somehow found  ourselves hugging and laughing and all talking at once. It was like meeting old friends for the first time and it was all because of social media and the book and we all just felt like we knew and understood each other and shared many of the same values.

Mama Lucy seemed to like our home, but what she liked best was the fire we had going and how it warmed our living room. She was in the Bay Area on part of a whirlwind trip, made possible by Epic Change and Tweetsgiving funds. She and Stacey had spoken in Amsterdam, the Bay Area and DC. In between were visits with friends of Epic Change and that included Paula and me.

Mama Lucy is essentially a shy and humble woman. She seemed more worried about her English than she needed to be. She told us a few stories with calm and dignity that showed not everyone treated her r these kids with much calm or dignity.

She told us about being treated in an insulting style by a Barclay's Bank clerk in Tanzania, who she had successfully taken on. " Some people come to Africa, but they don't seem comfortable being physically close to Africans. I don't understand why they come to where we live she told us.

It took a little prodding by Sanjay for her to tell us about an incident at a Tanzanian Game Preserve, where her son had arranged for four busloads of Shepherds Jr kids to visit. The buses of excited children arrived, but the pre-arranged entrance at the gate was denied and the kid were denied entrance.

It seems that some white visitors were enjoying lunch on the veranda and the Preserve administrator did not want to disturb his visiting guests. Apparently, people who had come to see wild animals would find the sight of African children disturbing to their digestive system.

The teachers asked if the kids, could just go in a few at a time, but the request was denied. They asked if it would be okay if the kids came in and promised to not speak. Request denied.

Stacey, at the time, was a volunteer assistant at the school and Mama Lucy asked her to go to talk to the official. Why Stacey? Because she had white skin as did the administrator. Stacey went, but the administrator hid from her. She could see him cowering in the shadows.

These were conversation that touched Paula and me. They were blended into a night where Mama Lucy revealed herself to be an overwhelmingly positive person, appreciating what so many people she has never met have done on behalf of her school project.

This trip was her first to Europe or the US. She visited with some misgiving based on experience such as she had at the bank and the preserve. But she has been touched by how well received she has been.

She does have one misgiving about the US. She thinks we could treat older people with greater respect. In her country, the title "mama" is a term of respect. Here, she sees children calling aunts and uncles by their first names and she considers that disrespectful. She also does not understand why children send off their parents to homes for the elderly. They should bring them into their homes where they can receive love as well as care. She has a point.

Meeting mama Lucy makes me want to do more to help her kids and Epic Change who is committed to finding and helping other Shepherds Jr-type situations.

There are many ways you can help Shepherds Jr. Here are a few that Stacey and I discussed:

• Money is always appropriate. The best/easiest is through EpicChange.org [link above]. It can be a modest amount. $30 goes a lot further in Tanzania than it does in say, San Carlos, CA.
• New Books. Mama Lucy is building a library. She would love culturally appropriate children's books. You can find her Amazon wish list here.
• Used books. Mama Lucy welcomes any child-appropriate books that your kids may be done with. Just ship to: Mama Lucy Kamptoni, Shepherds Junior School, PO Box 1888, Arusha, Tanzania.[no zip needed]. The bad news is that shipping is costly. he good news is that it is probably tax deductible, because Epic Change is a registered non-profit.
• Volunteer there. This story began with Stacey Monk being a volunteer teaching assistant. If you have time and inclination, or maybe some teaching talent, Mama Lucy welcomes your help for whatever time you wish to dedicate.
• Volunteer here. Epic Change is a grassroots international network. Contact Stacey at Epic Change or on Twitter [link above].

Meanwhile, on the list of things Paula and I are thankful for in 2009, is to having had the honor of Mama Lucy, Stacey and Sanjay having been guests in our home.

Where we're going

[Howard Rheingold. Photo by Oscar Espiritusanto]

Note: This is part part 2 of two parts. You can see Part 1, Where we've been here.

This title is just slightly misleading. Howard really offered no predictions of where people and technology is heading in the Conversation Age, and I didn't try to get him him to make forecasts.

While his writings have displayed more than a little prescience, he is more of a thinker than a futurist. But he did offer some interesting observations about at least one emergent technology and some useful insights into his students at Stanford and UC Berkeley and from there you might draw some conclusions yourself.

Q. You were an early champion of virtual reality, which may not have
taken off as quickly as you forecast. Do you think it is still likely to
evolve? How do you see it being incorporated into social media moving forward?

You win some, you lose some. I can't really
take credit for being prescient without taking blame for foreseeing events that
have yet to come to pass -- may never come to pass. To be fair to myself, I did
note that truly photorealistic immersive virtual worlds would not exist until
sufficient affordable computation power came along, some time in the early 21st
century. And people like Jeremy Bailenson at Stanford have been doing some
extremely valuable social science research using today's version of virtual
reality.

There are some fundamental unsolved problems. If you can move
your perceptions around a limitless virtual world, what keeps your body from
slamming into the wall when you try to run toward the horizon? In regard to
social media, I've spent enough time in Second Life to see exactly how
seductive to a small portion of the population an immersive virtual world with
photorealistic or Photoshop unrealistic avatars that can not only navigate and
communicate but build and exchange landscapes, buildings, objects with
behaviors can be.

But it's work to create an avatar and learn how to navigate it and
where the action is. In an infinite landscape, human actitivies seem to take
place far apart. So I don't see such worlds as ever becoming universal.

It's
NOT the "future of the Web."

However, I do see them getting less
centralized and easier to use, and people will start inventing uses for them
that we don't foresee right now, and the population of enthusiasts will grow
from a tiny cult following to a small cyber subculture. There are things you
can do in such environments that you can't do elsewhere.

[At right--giant sunflowers from Howard's garden. Those suckers are 16 feet tall.]

Q.I’ve argued that social media is
disrupting all institutions, business, government, education, health, etc. Do
you agree or disagree? What is your vision for how technology will make this a
better/world for everyday people 10 or 100 years hence.

Isn't it evident from what I've written that I've been immersed in experiencing,
influencing, learning about, and communicating about this disruption precisely
because I think it's the single most fundamental critical uncertainty of the
present age?

I think "better world" is an
unrealistically rosy way of framing the present situation. We're in deep shit.
Doug Engelbart and Vannevar Bush saw it coming half a century ago, and the Whole
Earth Catalog started looking at planetary-scale systemic problems decades ago
-- which is part of what drew me to it. We have ancient human problems of
tribalism, hatred, and atrocity meeting modern armaments, including WMDs.

We
have global warming, loss of species and habitat, collapse of key populations
like salmon, the energy and food needs of the world population, emergent
epidemics. I'd say that the main goal of the human species ought to be our own
survival. The next 50 years are going to require a lot of problem-solving. The
most powerful tool we have are all those people.

If only enough of them could
be healthy, fed, and educated enough to help us tackle those problems.
Technology and social media and new knowledge about human collective action
can help.

But I don't want to be quoted as saying that the
technology, the social media themselves are the linchpin. I think the way
people end up using these media,  our degree of knowledge about how our literacy
is connected with a struggle between power and counter-power, the degree of
education of the people who pollute or nourish the infosphere, even plain old
fashioned netiquette -- all matter now. I am an anti-determinist.

I believe in
human agency. But there are no guarantees that democracy will win over
totalitarianism, that tools will be used to feed people, that our social and
political and economic institutions and our own minds will be able to cope with
the pace of change that our inventions have helped us bring on ourselves.

Education
and learning haven't changed, but the circumstances under which they
take place are radically different.

The lecture-and-test method goes
back a thousand years, to the days when books were written by hand and
chained to a podium, where a professor stood up and read them. In
recent years, without (I strongly suspect) any real consultation among
faculty about the pedagogical consequences, wireless Internet access
was installed in classrooms and lecture halls around the world. For the
first time, students could look up information to determine whether the
professor really knew what he or she was talking about. Students can now
chat and share information among themselves during lectures and if the
professor is too boring, there is always Facebook or World of Warcraft.

Many professors are in denial about this, and drone on with the same
lecture they've delivered for decades. Other professors make extremely
bad use of technology by reading their text-laden PowerPoint slides to
their students. Others simply demand  their students keep
their laptops closed for the duration of class.

Of course, since I
teach social media, I can neither ignore nor prohibit laptop use, so
I've taken steps to help my students become mindful of the way they
deploy their attention.

One strategy is to have only the student
co-teaching team keep their laptops open while they are helping me lead
the class; one member of the team makes notes on the wiki, sketching in
top-level headings that the other students will fill in AFTER class,
another member of the team identifies words for the lexicon and adds
them to the wiki (and again the class, as a whole, fills in the
definitions before the next class), and a third member of the team
looks up sites online and projects them (I have three screens in my
classroom at Stanford).

Another strategy -- 20% of my students are
allowed to have their laptops open at any time, but it's up to them to
self-police. I have also made video of my students from my point of
view and from theirs and have shown it to them.

More
profoundly, social media have enabled students to engage in
collaborative inquiry with peers, engaging in online discussions that
are no longer solo performances for the teacher, but engage other
students in digging down into issues that came up in class via forums,
collaborating with each other and me in real time through a Twitter
back channel, reflect on their learning for their own benefit and that
of classmates on their blog, and learn how to learn and compose
collaboratively via the wiki.

The technologies are not used to add
contemporary appeal or techie flashiness but are affordances for a kind
of learning based more in inquiry, collaboration, and discourse than on
trying to detect what is going to be on the test and memorize it.I
ask my students to read in advance my extensive description of what is
expected of them and to commit themselves in writing to the kind of
participation I ask. It
has taken me five years, in close consultation with my students, to
come up with a set of procedures that work. It's tremendously exciting
to see the classroom come alive, and to engage students between class
meetings via their blogs, the forums, and the wiki. Here's a presentation of one of our class sessions.

Q. Can you tell me what’s on college student
minds these days?

Where we've been

[Howard Rheingold in his backyard giant sunflower patch. Photo by Shel Israel]

Howard Rheingold
is a founding father of the Conversational Era. He has spent much of his past 40 years exploring the impact and promise of the
convergence of technology and the human brain. He is a student of the many people, incidents and trends that have brought us to today, and as a prolific thinker, writer and speaker, he has contributed significantly to the body of knowledge and thought.

He's not sure just how many books and articles he has authored or collaborated on, since 1970,  but Amazon offers 72 titles with his byline.  Two of these books, The Virtual Community
[2000] and Smart Mobs [2003] have
profoundly influenced my thinking and writing over the past half dozen years and if you happened to be into social media he is among the early pioneers who blazed the trail the rest of us have followed. He has been a friend & colleague of many of the thinkers and doers who have delivered us to today and in many cases he can say he had been there and part of the collaborating team that did that. He has also been often prophetic in seeing the seeds that began as visions and have since become reality.

Arizona-born in 1947, he graduated Reed College in Portland, Oregon, then moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he became an integral part of America's most controversial Renaissance Era. He drank the original KoolAid. He also dabbled at Xerox PARC, the legendary tech
experimental tech center where, among other innovations, the personal computer's graphical interface was developed. He started writing professionally in 1970 and has rarely stopped for long.

He was editor of the Whole Earth Catalog Millenium Edition, an almanac that supported the
counter-culture lifestyle. Founded by thinker-enterpreneur Stuart Brand, Whole Earth Catalogs were a grassroots compendium of alternative lifestyle resources. A young
hippie fruitarian of that time named Steve Jobs would later describe the Catalog as both the forerunner to the
Worldwide Web and Google.

Rheingold was an early and enthusiastic member of the San Francisco-based
" Well," the first internet-based
community to gain widespread notice and momentum. His speaking and writing about it, particularly in The Virtual Community introduced a great number of people to the vision of social media for the first time.

These days he continues to write and speak on issues related to the human brain and technology--his central focus throughout his adult life. He also teaches courses at both Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley.

I have divided this interview into two parts. In this first part, Howard reflects and illuminates on what has happened so far. Most of Part 2 will discuss his thoughts on tomorrow, partly by discussing what he sees in his students.

One word of caution: this is not a quick read. It is filled with links to some of the people and events that have brought about the Conversation Age and I hope that you will follow some of these links to see and learn. Maybe it will give you some ideas on what you can contribute to tomorrow.

Q. You attended Reed College in the mid 60s, an elite liberal arts college known for free thought and lifestyle. How did that experience shape who you have become?

It's very astute to start with this question. My relationship with Reed was co-evolutionary: Reed seems to send out a
kind of invisible signal that attracts a certain kind of person, and the people
who are able to stick it out (very high dropout rate) tend to remain "Reedies"
for life.

I was a National Merit Scholar, which meant I could
have gotten into any university, but Reed was the only place I applied! I
originally got wind of it because the character in Kerouac's Dharma Bums who
was based on Gary Snyder who went to Reed. Snyder, more than Kerouac, was a hero of
mine when I was 16 years old, so that was about all I needed to know. In
retrospect, I'd say that the dominant characteristics of a person meant for
Reed are:

a.  A stubborn commitment to
think for oneself
b.  A deep and broad
interest in texts and intellectual discourse
c.  Because of the first two
characteristics, we were mostly the smart weird kids in our high schools
d.  We dropped out of the
brand-name college game

Reed alumni magazine did an article on me,
written by Wired [Howard was founding exec editor of Wired.com]  writer and fellow Reed alumni Gary Wolf.

The Reed  years were 1964-68 for me, so
these were also tumultuous times. And I took a lot of LSD. I want to be clear
on this: Many of my friends got in serious trouble or died because of drugs
(and many more because of one drug: alcohol), so I'm not an advocate of
indiscriminate use of recreational drugs. But LSD was an extremely important
influence on my thinking.

I didn't drop acid and go to concerts. I
dropped acid and stayed in my room and painted, read -- I read most of the
Bible on acid -- and explored other dimensions with my fellow travelers.

In
particular 1968 -- the Tet offensive, Prague Spring, China's Red Guards and Cultural Revolution; May revolt in Paris;
Chicago, and assassinations of RF Kennedy and ML King; riots in American cities. We
weren't participants in these events, but the world stage seemed particularly
apocalyptic. I became convinced that we were living in times that would decide
the future of the human experiment, and just as I went to Reed because I wanted
to engage in a meaningful and deep dialogue with others about the curriculum
(the sex, drugs, and rock&roll were part of it, but were always secondary
to the intellectual quest), I left Reed and entered the world with a conviction
that what I said and did with my education would matter not just to me but to
everybody.

When I got involved with people I met from the
Well, my wife, who I met at Reed  said: "This is just
like Reed. A bunch of intelligent misfits have found each other and are going
to town."

Q. The common thread that seems to tie your considerable
writing and thought together is the interaction of the human brain and
technology.  It seems to have developed in the early 80s between your work
with The Whole Earth Catalog and your involvement with  The Well. Can you walk me through how that developed?

The brain and technology--and evolution and consciousness--were
the subjects of my undergraduate thesis. One of the things that LSD taught me
was that what we think we know about our minds is tiny compared to what we have
to learn. I felt technology would open a new front, along with that of
chemical agents (it's too bad that legitimate psychedelic research was shut
down), and the approaches pointed to by Eastern mysticism, in understanding
consciousness -- which seemed to me to be the essential stuff of which the
universe is made.

I had what I later learned I could call a "noetic"
conviction about these conjectures, and was determined to somehow add to our body
of knowledge about our minds and how we could control our minds better.

3.
You coined the term “Virtual Community” and it became the title of one of
your most influential books. It’s first chapter talked about the
Parenting group in The Well.
Your stories in that chapter are strikingly close to stories I found in Twitter.  Can you   compare/contrast The Well and Twitter?
What has remained the same and what has changed?

Absolutely true! In my first months on Twitter, I told fellow Well veterans Twitter felt just like
the Well. While it would be a
categoric error to call the Twitter population in general a community, it was
clear that communities were forming there. People were getting to know each
other, strangers were engaging in discussions with each other; new forms of fun
were being invented; new ways to use the platform to communicate socially like the hashtag and retweet were being invented by users; people were exchanging
and reciprocating knowledge; social capital was accumulating in some groups.

At the same time, Twitter
was totally different. In the Well, each user might participate in different
topic threads in different conferences (forums), but the discussions were
centered on topics and were like places where a group of people accumulated. In
each discussion, we paid attention to each other. In Twitter there is no
such social symmetry. There are no topics, outside of hashtags and each person
sees a different group of others.

Despite, and because of, this asymmetry,
Twitter always had a social vibrancy.

Another similarity is the
sense among the users that what we were co-creating with the Twitter founders
would take on new forms as we went along. The Well was built on Unix, so coders
and users were in dialogue, but with the Twitter's open API and the explosion
of third-party applications, that co-evolving relationship seems to be in
overdrive.

Twestival, 300,000 tweets/hour from Tehran, the Twitpic of the
airplane that landed in the Hudson -- events that change our minds about what
Twitter can be used for seem to be happening with increasing frequency

Q. For the benefit of our studio audience, just what
do you mean when you say the computer is an amplifier of the human mind?

I've learned that most people don't know much history, and those who
know it seem to quickly forget it. Until a couple of mavericks who were not at
all related to the existing computer industry started thinking seriously about
using digital computers to augment human intellect and create new communication
media, this was a crazy idea.

Computers were for scientific calculations and
business data processing. But JCR Licklider [computer time-sharing], Doug Engelbart [the mouse], Bob Taylor [the internet], Alan
Kay [graphical interface] thought differently. What if we could move words around on a screen by
pointing at them, instead of retyping the whole page? What if we could create
documents as outlines, then expand and contract them so we can zoom from big
picture to detail? What if we could command computers by clicking on icons instead
of typing commands? What if we could link texts, documents, and different media
and move smoothly from one to another by clicking on the link?

By automating
these low-level symbol manipulation tasks, would that free the brain to take in
larger pictures, see relationships between micro and macro levels that couldn't
be observed, try many more hypotheses than old methods afforded? All these
capabilities seem obvious today, but not only were they not obvious until
Engelbart's Mother of All Demos in 1968. I told the story of this creation of
revolutionary innovation by a small group of outsiders in my book, Tools
for Thought. I started using a modem when I first started exploring personal
computer culture in the early 1980s, but didn't join the Well until after Tools
for Thought was published in 1985.

I started out to make a living as a writer when
I was 23, in 1970. I had a typewriter, a telephone, and a library card.
Comparing the tools I had for thinking, researching, communicating, organizing
back then with what I have now, it's like starting out my career with a horse
and buggy and now I have my own 747.

It took me about 5 seconds to look up the
passage of Engelbart's that originally fired me up, and to copy it. And I did
it sitting here in my garden, via laptop and WiFi. Keeping in mind what I said
previously about my interests in brain and technology and my conviction
regarding this historical moment and my role and responsibility to it, it still
makes sense to me as an answer to your question:

By
"augmenting human intellect" we mean increasing the capability of a
man to approach a complex problem situation, to gain comprehension to suit his
particular needs, and to derive solutions to problems. Increased capability in
this respect is taken to mean a mixture of the following: more-rapid
comprehension, better comprehension, the possibility of gaining a useful degree
of comprehension in a situation that previously was too complex, speedier
solutions, better solutions, and the possibility of finding solutions to
problems that before seemed insoluble. And by "complex situations" we
include the professional problems of diplomats, executives, social scientists,
life scientists, physical scientists, attorneys, designers -- whether the
problem situation exists for twenty minutes or twenty years. We do not speak of
isolated clever tricks that help in particular situations. We refer to a way of
life in an integrated domain where hunches, cut-and-try, intangibles, and the
human "feel for a situation" usefully coexist with powerful concepts,
streamlined terminology and notation, sophisticated methods, and high-powered
electronic aids. Man's population and gross
product are increasing at a considerable rate, but the complexity of his
problems grows still faster, and the urgency with which solutions must be found
becomes steadily greater in response to the increased rate of activity and the
increasingly global nature of that activity. Augmenting man's intellect, in the
sense defined above, would warrant full pursuit by an enlightened society if
there could be shown a reasonable approach and some plausible benefits.

In 2002, you authored Smart Mobs, which has been critically acclaimed for it’s
foreshadowing of social media. Among the incidents that most impressed me was
how street people used mobile SMS to out maneuver police & eventually
overthrow the government.  When the Iran election took place in June of
this year, did you see a certain similarity? How did has technology involved to
empower people. Where do you see/hope it is ultimately headed?

Let me start with the conclusion and then unpack it:
With a billion people on the Internet and 4 billion mobile phones, the ability to
gain information, to process it computationally, to organize collective action
with others, to publish and broadcast has been radically democratized -- but
whether or not that democratized communication and coordination capability will
lead to more or less democracy is not a function of the technology but of the
social, political, economic activities of the people who use it.

The events in
Iran should be an object lesson that access to digital media and networks
guarantees that it will be impossible to keep the world from witnessing massive
oppression, but does not guarantee the victory of forces of counterpower who
seek liberty from oppression. Power always wakes up and mobilizes when
counterpower threatens it.

The Iranian regime broadcast disinformation. They
shut down Internet access. They ran cloaked proxy servers as honey pots to
catch dissidents. So far, they are succeeding.

In China, the Great Firewall and
tens of thousands of human cyber-police make sure that over a quarter billion Chinese
netizens enjoy the power to do anything they want online as long as it doesn't
challenge the authority of the party.

The victory of smart mobs is not
guaranteed by the power of the tools they hold in their hands. That's just
magical thinking. However, the events I described in my book were real. There
were other forces at work in the Philippines -- there are always other forces
at work -- but the SMS-organized People Power II demonstrations were a large
part of what brought down the Estrada regime. The elections of heads of state
were tipped away from the frontrunner through smart-mobbed demonstrations and
get out the vote campaigns in Korea and Spain.

Where do I see it headed? My experiences have
convinced me that the most important focus for public attention right now
should shift to the literacies that bring power to those who possess them and
leave behind those who don't know how to use their telephone as a medical
instrument, educational medium, social radar, political organizing tool.

Chip
fabrication plants, teenage personal computer wizards and moguls, networks of
fiber optics and satellites have played and will continue to play their parts
in the distribution of computing and communication power to every human on
Earth.

But now that devices with such enormous untapped power are in the hands
of so many, the factor that will most powerfully shape the resulting social
institutions is literacy. My definition of "literacy" builds the
thinking of Neil Postman: I mean the inward-looking skill that enables an
individual to read and write, to decode and encode messages with a medium, and
I also refer to the external community to which this skill provides entrance.
As I've written recently in regard to "Crap Detection 101," the literacies I am talking about are not just about individual empowerment, but
are crucial to the health of the commons.

We can't stop the Web from being
overwhelmed with misinformation, disinformation, hoaxes, urban legends, spam,
porn, porn-spam by controlling the sources - the Web is powerful precisely
because there are no controls on what people put on it. We can only guarantee
the ultimate health of the Web as a source of useful and trustworthy
information by encouraging the spread of crap detection skills. That, to me, is
the most important meaning of the "social" in "social
media" -- that we are not just amplifying our minds and showing off for
each other, we are learning and organizing, creating, innovating, building,
liberating together.

To me, individualism versus collectivism is a toxically
false dichotomy. Humans are humans because of our individual capabilities, the
evolved genius of what we've taught each other to do with our expanded
forebrains. But the "taught each other to do" part is crucial. Our
individual genius would not only be useless, it wouldn't exist without our
social interchanges.

[Janis Krums takes & makes his shot for the Florida Lakewood Ranchers , an amateur league team. He also took another kind of shot in January 2009, which you probably saw. photo by Angie Tyler Jula]

It's one of my favorite stories in Twittterville. In January 2009, Janis Krums, the a 23-year-old entrepreneur from Sarasota, Florida was on a ferry crossing the Hudson River when US Air Flight 1549 careened from the skies, skidding to a halt on the river about 200 yards from the ferry and immediately began to sink as passengers poured out onto the wings.

Janis whipped out his iPhone and took the photo below, which you have probably seen. He handed the phone to another passenger and then assisted in the rescue of a flight attendant who had broken both her legs and needed assistance getting off the plane.

Helping the attendant to safety, Krums got his iPhone back. It was ringing and when he picked up he was surprised to find he was talking to MSNBC and his voice was being carried live on national TV. Viewers were looking at the photo he had taken less than 30 minutes earlier.

In Twitterville, I argued that the incident changed the relationship between professional and amateur journalists; that it has begun to braid the two together on social media venues. I predicted that braided journalism is how most people will consume news in the near future.

It also has changed Janis Krums. The following is an update on what he has been up to since that unintended moment on the Hudson River. He is simultaneously starting two business in two separate categories, one of which has been a passion for years. The second, something called InboxAlarm would probably have not happened had he not happened to be crossing a river at a specific moment in time; and if my favorite social media platform not been victimized by a DDOS attack that rendered it inoperable for several days in early summer.

Please see my recent interview with him below.

Q. How has the incident changed your life?

I am associated with an event that changed the perception of
citizen journalism and the evolution of news and media. The coolest part is to
see that my one tweet changed the way that CNN, Fox News, and others interact
with their viewers. They are actively engaged with viewers now, and seek the opinions
in realtime from all the available resources.

Plus, I have a great story to tell at
parties!

Q. How active were you in social media before the "Hudson River Miracle"
incident? How many follower/following did you have going in to that day? How
many do you have now? How much time did you spend on social media before the
incident. How much now?

Before the incident I was exploring all the different
services and seeing which one made sense for me. I had about 170 followers
before the incident. Now I have almost 5,800. Before the incident, I was spending maybe 20 minutes a day on updates. I think right after I
was spending a lot of time. Now I have learned some tricks and services (su.pr, tweetdeck, tweetie 2) that I use to
monitor and use the different sites more efficiently.

Q. When I interviewed you for Twitterville, you were planning working on
Elementz a nutritional enhancement drink for professional athletes. How long have
you been working on it? How is it doing?

We started a year ago with the idea of what we wanted to do.
At this point we have finalized 5 custom formulations and are finalizing the
paperwork to produce the first two products, Vanilla and Chocolate Whey
Protein. We have some very influential people on board and will be making some
really cool announcements in the near future. You can check out our Facebook
page for the latest news.

7. More recently, you announced InboxAlarm.com. Can you
tell me what it does and how you got the idea for it?

InboxAlarm is burglar alarm for your email inbox. You are
able to create decoy emails that can be as simple as fake password information
or custom emails that cater to your specific security concern. After creating
an email, you send it to one of your personal emails addresses, open it once,
and then forget about it. It sits in your archives until someone opens it. Once
opened, you are instantly notified by a text message that there has been a
breach.

We got the idea after the Twitter breach happened. In that
case the hacker had days to gather information and was able to go from one
employee's email account all the way up to the CEO's.

We thought that there should
be a way for you to protect yourself in the case someone breaks into your
inbox. There are other high profile examples; Sarah Palin getting hacked; the
latest phishing attack, and countless others that don't make national
news.

8. Is InboxAlarm potentially a new business for you, or is it just a
one-off from Elementz Nutrition?

InboxAlarm has the potential to be a new business for Eric
and I. It is too early to tell how it will go, but the initial reaction has
been very positive.

Q. How have sales gone since you announced InboxAlarm?

We have steady sales up to this point. We got some initial
press from PCmag.com
and BNET, which helped the site's exposure. As well as local Sarasota coverage )
We will be focusing on a major marketing push in the coming weeks.

Q. You have previously told me your two passions are health and social media.
Can you compare and contrast starting businesses serving in the two industries?
For example how are the the process and time-to-market similar or different? o

It's been very interesting to see the evolution of both
Elementz Nutrition and InboxAlarm. For Elementz we had the concept few years
ago, but only last year said, lets start the process and develop supplements
that we can be proud to stand behind.

We were very naive in our projected
timeline to get the products out into the market. We thought that it would take
few months to research, develop, test, etc the formulations. That estimate was
way off, it took us around a year to finalize the formulas. Right now we are
finalizing everything with our manufacturer.

However, with InboxAlarm, we had the idea in July and were
able to launch the initial site during the second week of September. We had the
core functionality thought out in the first day and after that just kept
refining until we thought it was good enough to be released to the public. I agree with Reid Hoffman's observation: "If you're not somewhat
embarrassed by your 1.0 product launch, then you've released too late."

We wanted to get it out as soon as possible and then see what the customers did and didn't
like. We've improved the sign-up process and have couple of
other improvements that are directly linked to the feedback from our
users.

No matter how different the market, at the end of the day
it's about selling and getting the word out about your product. It doesn't
matter what industry you are in, if you don't move product, you will not be
around for too long.

Jack Kennedy was president when I entered college. Like Obama today, he had a great impact on the hearts and minds of young people. In Kennedy's case, he introduced a concept of volunteerism through programs like VISTA [Volunteers in Service to America] and the Peace Corps. The attitude that we can do something to make a difference for a good cause or people in need has stayed with many of us through our lives.

When I met Jessica Evans in Vancouver last month, I was reminded of that volunteer attitude when she told me the story of Timeraiser where she has donated over 100 hours of her time in a little more than a year and how she has helped the organization expand into social media.

Timeraiser is a Canadian organization formed by the Framework Foundation. It gets corporate sponsors  finance their acquisition of selected works by local artists. Then it holds a silent auction, where mostly people, mostly in their 20s and 30s, bid their time--instead of money--to acquire a piece of art. The funding sponsors display the art in their offices for a year or so, while the volunteer works off the time pledged.

Most of the volunteer work is focused on using the professional skills of the volunteers, rather than ladling soup in food bank kitchens.

Since it started in 2004, Timeraiser has held these auctions in all major Canadian cities and has generated more than 45,000 volunteer hours for more than
250 nonprofits and has supported local artists to the tune of over $300,000.

Jessica Evans, 30 is one of those 45,000 volunteers, she is an IT professional at a Vancouver-based software company by day and has boundless energy for other activities. It was literally a rocky road she traveled that took her to both Vancouver and Timeraiser.

She tells her story in this interview:

Q. You spend much of your free time in outdoor physical activities such as bike
riding and something called "bouldering." Just what is that, and when and how did
you get into it?

Bouldering is a style of rock climbing
– literally climbing on large boulders without a rope. Your landing is protected by “bouldering pads”-
high-density foam mats similar to those used in gymnastics. It’s a great way to
climb completely free and push your limits.

I started climbing in 2001 - yes,
I think you could say I’ve traveled extensively to boulder. At the height of job dissatisfaction and
restlessness when I lived in Toronto, I
called myself out on my dream to live on the road and climb. I blogged the entire experience from the inception of the idea where I used up my
health benefits before giving my notice, through the emotional challenges and
steep learning curve while living on the road. There’s also advice on the art of living on a few dollars
a day.

It was an amazing experience and
one of unexpected personal growth. I lasted
almost 6 months, living on the road camping and climbing by myself.

I think you could say that
bouldering chose me. When I was on My
Big Roadtrip, I had my gear for rope climbing too but found that it was easier
to boulder since you don’t need to search for a dedicated partner. In roped climbing, you literally place your
life in the hands of the other person. I
found that not knowing my climbing partner well enough to fully trust them made
it tough to focus. I ended up bouldering
more and more, either by myself or trying to get in with a group that was out. By the end of the trip I found that I was a
"boulderer," and now I very rarely rope up to climb.

Sure, I traveled alone and I’ve
gone on some solo bouldering trips since. There’s a bit of teamwork involved – the energy of the group really
affects if you’re able to focus on the moves.
It’s so much better, and even a bit easier, if there’s a good group of
people.

Q. When, how and why did you discover Timeraiser?

I crash landed in Vancouver after the road trip and when I heard
about the Timeraiser in 2008, I saw it as a way to get more involved in the
community of the city I had settled in and had grown to love. Besides, I thought it sounded cool. I like art, especially by local artists, and I
had been meaning to volunteer.

It’s a mashup of silent art
auction and volunteer fair – there are representatives from local nonprofit
agencies, and about 25 pieces of local artwork.
The bidding opens for an hour and participants bid with a pledge of
volunteer hours instead of money. Too
cool.

Q. What appealed to you about Timeraiser, since there are so many other options
where you can volunteer your time?

One of the featured agencies at the Vancouver Timeraiser was Big Sisters. Being a Big Sister was something on my life
to-do list, and it was just so easy to go to the Timeraiser event and talk to a
representative in person. After talking
to someone face-to-face, there was a more natural commitment to follow up.

You could say that I fell in love with the concept at the
Timeraiser event. It was far cooler than I
had expected. Bidding on artwork gave me a taste of a
society I may never be a part of – but the concept of Timeraiser makes it fun
and easy to get involved.

Q. Can you walk me through the process in which you volunteered through the the
Timeraiser silent auction for Big Sisters and how you obtained the photo?

After talking to the agencies at
Timeraiser, I was pretty excited at all the volunteer opportunities that suited
my skills. I ended up getting the
winning bid on a photograph by a local artist  [Miklos LeGrady] and I fulfilled my pledge over the
following year by volunteering as a Big Sister. Donating time goes so far and
you can see the impact you’re having on the community. It’s more fulfilling than, say, writing a
check, though if you can afford that, go for it!

We volunteers are given a full year to complete our pledges. At this year's Timeraiser, I received my artwork.

Q. I understand you introduced social media components to Timeraisers. Can you
tell me how and why you did that?

Last spring, Timeraiser sent out a
message needing volunteers for planning the next two Timeraiser events in Vancouver. You could say I was getting hooked on
volunteering and was happy to spread the word.

I applied for the position of
Media & Awareness Leadership and my pitch was all social media. How can we reach our target demographic? Well, I’m a member of the target demographic
and I’m always online. I could see the
need to leverage Twitter as well as Facebook fan pages.

We’re getting to a point on the
Web these days where people search Twitter to connect with a business entity,
and Timeraiser needed to represent.  I also brought us onto LinkedIn and worked
with Timeraiser employees to implement the Facebook fan page.

The entire “Tweeting for
Charity” experience has been interesting.
I’ve been online since the local BBS days back in the mid-90s. Twitter is the online vehicle to reconnect with people
locally and in person, or globally due to our common interests. I’m not looking to network or promote myself
as a climber or a Project Manager, so getting out there to talk about something
I feel so passionately about – Timeraiser – feels quite natural.

One constant I’ve experienced
while engaging in social media for charity is that when I explain the concept
of Timeraiser to people, if they’re interested, they’re excited like me and
eager to help. It’s important to reach
as many people as possible to build the network of eager excited people.

I have to say it was powerful to
watch the word spread and excitement grow along with the network. We ended up selling the event out, which was
an incredible accomplishment. A CBC
reporter saw a retweet about the Vancouver Timeraiser and picked up our story the
day before the event. Members of the
blogging community posted up about the Timeraiser and some had tickets to give
away via their sites. I think everyone
worked together – Team Twitter.

Q. How has social media changed Timeraiser? What additional potential do you
see?

It was very valuable to tap into the local, grassroots media in Vancouver. Getting the word out via local bloggers is
the way to go. Civic Footprint (Timeraiser's sister nonprofit) is now working on social media strategies for other
Timeraiser cities, to connect via Twitter and social media.

In the Spring, I’ll be leveraging
Twitter again to connect with the local art community. Artists selected for the Timeraiser are paid
market value for their work. In 2009, 20
of the 25 selected artists were from BC.
In 2010, I’d like to see that extend to 25/25.

Also, it would be great if we could
get a participant to blog their experience fulfilling their pledge, so we can
all follow along. I’ll see if I can put
that into place. @Timeraiser_couv is still
the only account dedicated to the Timeraiser, but I hope to see the other
cities follow suit. I’m excited to see
how next year unfolds, since I can incorporate what I learned this year.

Q. I understand that you found romance on Twitter. Can you tell me just what
happened and how has it worked out so far?

That’s quite the bonus, I know! The
first networking event I attended as @Timeraiser_couv was a Meetup and I was
looking for others with @ Twitter IDs on their name badges. I ended up clicking with a guy there – I
remember that I could read him quite well and found him intriguing. We talked about cycling and I sent him an @
from my personal account, not Timeraiser!
When I got home, he had sent me a DM to request a coffee to “learn more
about that charity stuff you do.” We’ve
been hanging out since. You could say we
get along quite well.

Q. Additional comments.

I’m not climbing as much as I used to and it’s amusing
because I made the move out to BC to climb full-time. Dreams change over time, and I got to see my
2009 dream of selling out the Vancouver Timeraiser come true.Timeraiser helped me Commit to Vancouver, and now I’ll never leave.

Life on the road always meeting new people prepped me
for this.

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.

[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.