So, we're in an age now where, as Tara Hunt has so neatly said, social capital is the core value (forget cash, folks). What that translates into, practically, is a world where the three Rs rule--referral, recommendation and reputation.  I've written about these ideas in my recent white papers, but want to lay they out in a little more detail here, because I think they're central to understanding how to function in our trashed economy and the culture emerging as everyone becomes digital.

First of all, it's the three Rs that are going to keep you connected, making good choices, and earning money--or bartering--for what you need.

Recommendation: Back in the days when big media and mainstream media rules, and when information and authority were more centralized, we looked to experts to tell us what to do and what to buy. Dr Spock gave parenting advice. The New York Times analyzed events and laid out liberal politics. Consumer Reports evaluated products and issued rankings. And so forth.

Today, we're in a world where what other people recommend--and what our friends and extended community think, say and do--drive our buying choices and lifestyle decisions more than any big brands or authorities. Whether it's tweeting for tips on the Lazy Web of your friend network, posting a query, or resorting to peer reviews on Yelp and other services like it, we make decisions based on recommendations of people we are--or feel--connected to.

Referral: Do people really get hired for mid and senior level jobs just by sending in a resume? Don't both job seekers and job fillers rely on a network of friends and colleagues to filter and sort jobs and resumes so the whole process is less random? And isn't it true that 60% of most jobs don't make it to a help wanted ad, relying instead on more informal connections between people?  In my experience, 98% of all consulting work comes through referral, usually from either people I know well or people who know my good friends. The friend/colleague network is powerful, and in tough times, is critical to having work.

Reputation: There is no hiding on the interwebs.  Not only is everything we ever post on line hard to retrieve, once it has been indexed by Google, leading to a digital case of inter-space junk, the good stuff we do is remembered, and the bad stuff is hard to hide. In a referral and recommendation system, your reputation--your whuffie and your social capital--mean a lot.

Like, a lot a lot.
 
So, what does this mean for you?

• Understand social capital and the gift economy
• Understand that we live in social media ecosystem and that having a digital foot print makes you show up proactively, instead of reactively
• Understand that how you contribute and what you do play into how you are valued

So having said all that, here's the PPT of the WAM09 session Deanna Zandt and I did on
SocialCapital-SocialMedia.pdf. Have at it.

We had a really good meeting with about 35 people this past week in Berkeley for the Public Media Collaborative. Thanks to Raines and Betsy for hosting,.

There's a set of notes, taken by Andrea Swaney, over at the wiki that recap the discussion and the action items.

Some of the outcomes of that meeting:

• We discussed projects and actions we can work on and added an Asks and a Volunteer section to the wiki to post interests and projects from non-profits and community groups.
• We have an opportunity to get started with some trainings that could be a starting point for action
• Josh Wilson and a bunch of folks are planning a May 1st event at USF that we have an invite to do a Public Media Collaborative Bar Camp at--offering training in planning social media campaigns and strategies and using the tools-at their event on May 1st.
  

I've posted a new page titled Next steps post March 11 meeting Share ideas and inputs here where you can get involved if you wish.

• If you'd like to take part in a May 1st event and the planning to execute it add your name and a note here.
• We also have interest from a number of non profits to work with them to help them understand how to plan goals for social media and use the tools together.

One question we need to discuss is whether or not we want to do small sessions with individual organizations, or do larger one day events with multiple groups--both have value.
What do people think about these two modes? Do you have preferences, comments ideas?
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We're looking to do the next PMC meeting in San Francisco, possibly Weds, April 3rd, most likely at Tech Soup if we can get the space.  For those who want to participate with a May 1st event, we'll probably set up another April meeting and a weekly phone call, plus a roster and working space on the wiki
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Which are the tools used by social media strategists, and how do they fit together?

This section of a longer white paper on social media and social good  offers a look at the basic tools, URLS and descriptions for each, and a review of which tools each project used.
It is part of a longer paper, with three case studies, available for free download.
309Social media for social causes white paper.pdf

Here's the products you want to know about right now:
:
WordPress.com & WordPress.org: Blogging platforms

• Blogging platforms are the starting point for any social media strategy and two of the most popular are WordPress.com and WordPress.org.  Both are easy to use and reliable. What's the difference between the two?
•  With WordPress.com, you create a blog that is hosted at WordPress and has a URL such as myblog.WordPress.com. You can use skins to create distinct look and layouts, and you can customize the blog, but it is hosted at their service.
• Using WordPress.org, you download the software, establish your blog, and pick a service to host it on.

• Moveabletype.com, typepad,com: Blogging platforms
• Moveable type & Typepad.com are blogging platforms from Six Apart. Moveable Type, know as MT, is a downloadable application to create a blogging platform hosted at a third-party provider or on your owner servers.
•  Typepad is a $129 per year hosted, turnkey service running on Six Apart servers.

Twitter, micro-blogging platform:

• Twitter is a popular micro blogging platform that allows users to distribute their 140 character updates to their Twitter social network, aka followers, across multiple platforms (computer, PDA, phone).

Photo & Video resources

• Flickr: Flickr is the leading photo & video community and repository, with more than 1 billion photos stored. Owned by Yahoo!, Flickr offers pro accounts for easier uploading, but basic services are free.
• YouTube, YouTube is the largest video hosting site on the net. Users can both upload and view videos here. Videos can be viewed at YouTube or embedded elsewhere.
  
• Seesmic: Seesmic offers online video blogging, done through your computer's web cam. Videos can be viewed at Seesmic.com, or embedded elsewhere.
• 12seconds: This site offers online video micro blogging, done through a web cam. Videos can be played here or embedded elsewhere.
• Vimeo is  a video-centric social network site that allows you to post and display videos, much like YouTube, only smaller and with more community.
• Viddler is another video hosting service, with plug-in tools that make it efficient to display video at WordPress and other blogging sites.

Social networks

• Facebook is one of the largest and most mainstream social network sites, With 90 million active users, the site is a daily visit for many people. The integrated tool set, which includes a groups function, an invite feature,  fan pages that support messaging.
• LinkedIn is the largest online professional social network. Focused on careers and professional networking, Linked In has a groups feature that is useful for social networking, event promotion, and messaging.
•  Ning:, Ning offers a set of web-based tools that allow anyone to create a social network on a hosted platform. The templated, modular elements can be customized and modified by non-technical people; over 71,000 networks have been created to date.

Utility applications

• Upcoming: This Yahoo-owned service allows you to post & share events via online calendar; the social network aspects aids in event discovery.
• Eventbrite: A popular service for selling tickets online and keeping the funds in a centralized place.
• Amiando: A popular service for selling tickets online and keeping the funds in a centralized place.
• PayPal: An eBay-owned service that acts as a middleman for online payments, eliminating the need for the consumer to use a credit card in an online transaction.
• Slideshare:, Post, display and distribute PowerPoint presentations.
• Constant Contact: Low-cost way to create and manage email campaigns.
• Democracy in Action: Non-profit that provides infrastructure and tools for non-profits and political groups, including email management.
• TipJoy: Service supporting making donations via PayPal through a Twitter interface.

For more on using these apps, check out the white paper.
309Social media for social causes white paper.pdf

The Knight News Challenge, a signature program of the Miami-based Knight Foundation, sponsors an international competition open to anyone who has an idea that can change the future of news and discourse in a local geographic community. Every year for the past 2 years (there are 5 years for which funds are committed), Knight has awarded $5MM to approximately 16 projects from around the world, paying out over a 2-year period.

Projects funded include Placeblogger, the world's foremost local blog directory and aggregator, EveryBlock, a Django-based framework for RSS feeds that organized and presents data based on your zip code, Printcasting, a web to print application tool, and the Sochi Olympics Project, which will let the people of Sochi, the Russian resort city hosting the 2014 Winter Olympics, use the latest online tools to both discuss and influence the impact of the games
.
Program Objectives
For this year, 2008-09, the team wanted to improve the diversity of the applications, bringing in more from the tech and social media communities, as well as the online news area, improve awareness and grow international submissions, particularly in Asia. Two related goals were to increase awareness of the program, and to build community among the applicants.
 
To help meet these objectives, they retained me to act as the program manager and evangelist, in conjunction with Program Director Gary Kebbel, the program' developer and owner, Knight Journalism Program Associate Jose Zamora, and Knight Community Manager Kristen Taylor, webmaster Robbie Adams and Marketing and Communications VP Marc Fest.

Working as a team, along with Heidi Miller, whom Knight hired as a social media coordinator, we crafted a strategy for raising awareness, recruiting participants, mentoring prospective applicants, and raising the quality of the applications. No one on the team worked on this 100%, but working against a well-crafted plan allowed us to maximize our time
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Strategies for outreach
The Knight Foundation has well-established relationships with influential journalists, bloggers and educators in the online news and international online news arenas, and deep ties with journalism, new media, and communications programs at many universities. However, for this program, Knight wanted to reach beyond their core audience to connect with technologists, social media innovators, product developers and local organizers who might have innovative ideas for sharing news and information and supporting engagement and discussion in a specific geographic area.
 
To achieve this goal, we did an analysis that suggested using a suite of social media tools would not only be extremely effective for outreach, but would reinforce the message that we were innovative and cool. Our plan relied on using tools that had worked in previous years--web site, email, purchased ad words--but we put more emphasis on the new tools: blogging, video blogging, Twitter, seesmic, Flickr in particular
.
To communicate these messages, we created a three-month strategy to execute against

. Some of the tasks in the plan were to:
•    Create a means to have on-going events--digital and real-world that we could both blog about and have bloggers cover
•    Create a list of about 100 social media and Web 2.0 bloggers, entrepreneurs and technologists whose attention we could engage with these events
•    Send information about the 2008-09 Knight News Challenge to about 7,500 people on a mailing list, asking them to spread the word in their communities
•    Create a Twitter account and twit 3X a day with interesting news and updates to drive participation in the Knight News Challenge
•    Create a #hashtag--a tag that makes a phrase discoverable in a twitter search (search.twitter.com)-- for the Knight News Challenge--#knc08--and promote it, making it possible for interested parties to track our efforts.
•    Interview past winners and post to the blog; have past winners do Seesmic videos we could promote
•    Conduct a strong email campaign to our constituent base of online journalists and educators and a wider pool of tech, social media and community influencers
.
At the same time as we mapped these ideas, we explored other ideas that would allow us to create more of an applicant community to spread the word and support one another.
Inspired by incubators like ycombinator and TechStars, we decided to create a Drupal site called the News Challenge Garage (garage.newschallenge.org). This would be a destination where prospective applicants could post ideas and projects, receive peer comments and request online mentoring before they submitted their applications for judging. The budget for this site was low, and we built it within 3 weeks
.
Finally, we also decided to create and execute a series of real world meet-ups, in addition to an online webinar. Knowing how effective the BarCamps have been, we decided to see if we could create low-cost equivalents for the KNC08, focusing on cities where Knight staff was already travelling.

To deliver on our international aspirations, we built an international outreach and marketing plan that relied on the support of Jose Zamora, our Journalism Program Associate, Joyce Barnathan and the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ), Professor Rosental Alves of The University of Texas at Austin, Global Voices, and other connections with good international contacts. This program was heavily email based, but also included a real world meet up.

Execution
In August, 2008, we started our program by updating the web site's FAQ and call to action to broaden the appeal, then followed up with a press release and an email blast to about 7,500 influencers, friends of Knight, past applicants, journalism educations and bloggers. This was followed by the start of a Twitter campaign, the creation of the #KNC08 hashtag, and an ongoing series of blog posts on the Knight Foundation blog.

Very soon after, we launched the News Challenge Garage; we promoted its launch with an email blast to a broad target and individual outreach to the 100 influencers on our list.  The site generated great interest, and applicants began to immediately register. Bloggers also began to write about it, and about the program. We used Twitter to communicate with potential applicants and encouraged people to follow our twitstream; within a short period of time we had 300 followers on Twitter
.
To meet our goal of having fresh blog posts on the Knight blog and the Garage site, three times a week, we created an editorial schedule and assigned posts out for specific dates and themes to the team of 3 staffers. In addition, we did some podcasts with past winners, and asked some past winners to do Seesmic videos about the program.  This material generated page views, commentary and linking around the blogosphere, driving links and awareness way up (results date below).
 
At the same time that we were using the new tools, we also used the old ones. Three times during the application period we sent out email blasts; analysis showed that the email was extremely successful in driving applicants to the site, more so than advertising.

We planned the meet-ups so they could piggyback on travel and conferences already planned. We were able to do 9 meet ups--in New York, Boston, Miami, Washington, DC, Seattle, Vancouver, Austin, San Francisco, and Chicago. In many cases, we were able to also visit J-Schools and speak to students in the same trip, and to add meet-ups to other conferences, such as the Online News Association.  During a meet-up (typically 90 minutes long), we spent 20 minutes explaining the program, using a live web browser to show key URLs and examples, then used the rest of the time for discussion and Q&A. Meetings were generally well-attended, with 35-40 people as an average, but with some meetings have as any as 75 people.

To get the word out, we created Facebook groups for each meet up, listed them on Upcoming.org, and blogged them. Interestingly, many people in the social media and online journalism communities treated them as important events, exhorting friends to attend (and apply for funding).  This drove awareness.

Finally, to execute on our international outreach we not only asked numerous international organizations to reach out on our behalf, we also sent about 200 emails to personal international contacts, asking them to spread the word in their communities. Finally, during the last three weeks of the program, we worked with the Knight Foundation Webmaster, Robertson Adams, to purchase keywords that could drive awareness in China, Korea, Japan and other part of Asia
.
Evaluating results
So, what were our outcomes like? Did we meet our goals? The short version would be yes.
•    Traffic to the Knight News Challenge site increased 47% compared to the same time the previous year. The site had an average of 2,930 visitors a day, during the course of the application timeframe.
•    On the final day of the contest, 17,000 people came to the site, a record high. Both these metrics were 50% higher than the previous year.
•    2,323 projects were submitted to the Knight News Challenge. 258 were invited to submit a full proposal, 70 became finalists for the funding are going through final review this February (results not yet released). The staff considers the quality to be extremely high.

•    In 2008, there were 224 independent blog posts about the Knight News Challenge, compared to 24 the previous year. Blog posts appeared in blogs published in European countries, the UK, Korea, China, Russia, the Middle East, Africa, Canada and Latin America as well as the US
.
•    The Knight News Challenge got major press during the program-we were written up in Valleywag in October
 
•    A post in the New York Times by "Freakonomics" author Steven J. Dubner, titled "Free Money" sent 1,442 visitors to the site.

•    1,600 people registered for the News Challenge Garage site (required to comment). 800 posted projects. 466 applied for a grant. Discussion of the Garage generated 10,000 links that Google indexed, 6,000 of which did not originate from the Garage site.

•    The 8 meet ups had 400 attendees, many of whom blogged, shot video and pictures and shared about the program. Roughly 50% of the meet up attendees applied to the program. There are 700 links to mentions of the events indexed in Google, 30 photos on Flickr tagged Knight News Challenge meet up, and 4 videos).

•    Google reported over 60,000 mentions of "Knight News Challenge" on non-Knight sites in 2008; this was a 110% increase from 2007.

Conclusion
Social media tools--combined with the usage of a web site, email campaign and webinar--vastly increased both the awareness of the Knight News Challenge and the diversity of the applications, particularly in the English-speaking world.  Marketing costs were applied to supporting a part-time social media manager, rather than to agency fees, and a greater return occurred. The innovative Garage site helped to brand the program as interested in innovation and drove ongoing awareness and discussion on the net, as did the real world meet ups.
 
Overall, we were able to create an interactive, virtuous circle or open loop, where our real world community, which we successfully targeted online and off, not only got our message but then went on to publicize it on our behalf. This created a bigger impact that we might have gotten otherwise and led to a lot of success with carefully measured resources.

Note, this is an excerpt from a much longer white paper with three case studies, written on using social media for social good. The paper is available here-
309Social media for social causes white paper.pdf

Net-enabled social tools have enabled new models for grassroots activism and community building, and they have changed how we function in society -- how we communicate globally and locally, how we form ties and how we organize and connect.

What's tricky about deploying social media today is not access to the technology, but the knowledge of how to deploy it across multiple platforms.

This 309Social media for social causes white paper.pdf is meant to take some of the fear and confusion out of the question of whether to use these tools or not. An accompanying resource guide and detailed case studies provide a tool kit for using social media to promote, brand and organize around an idea, movement, program or campaign.

There's a brief of the paper here, from the WeMedia conference

The full white paper, 28 pages long! is here
309Social media for social causes white paper.pdf

Here's what's in it:
•    Introduction
•    What do we mean by social media?
•    Lifestreaming
•    Money and mobilization
•    How to use social media tools
•    The Case Studies
•    Knight News Challenge
•    Women Who Tech Telesummit, 2008
•    Q&A with Allyson Kapin, Women Who Tech
•    Twestival, 2009
•    Q&A with Amanda Rose, Twestival
•    COMMENTARY by Lisa Wiliams : What makes a social media campaign stand out?
•    Resources: Web 2.0 Products and what they are
•    CHART; The social media ecosystem, or the virtuous circle of multiple tools
•    What do I get started with?
•    Sources & Citations
•    About the author

I will be posting the sections of the paper individually as well. Hope you find them useful.

Just finished my part of  the workshop The Future is Now, from The Maynard Institute, in partnership with the USC Annenberg School for Communication. My session was about building your brand online through social media, aka navigating your way around the social media ecosystem,

Here's the preso:
March 2009 build yr brand thru social media.pdf

Its an interesting audience, mostt LA local, mostly transitioning and unemployed newsies. Smart, agile, hungry--sucked up everything I told them, and then some--lots of discussion and verve (And tons of those "Yes, but..." questions.)

The Future Is Now, How to Survive and Thrive in an era of uncertainty is a day long workshop focused on  mid career journalists and media entrepreneurs. Held by the most wonderful Maynard Institute at USC, the program features Yahoo! front page managing editor Kim Moy, former Knight Ridder HR lead Larry Olmstead, and talented executive coach Rafael Gonzalez--and me.

Admission is $75; I have one admission to give away to a deserving person. Ideally, you are local to the area, have worked in media, and would benefit from this program.  If you would like to attend, please send me a note at smernit gmail; I will give the spot to the first person fitting the description who contacts me (and let everyone know via this post when that ticket has been given awayu.)

"Ice cream and social media have alot in common, thanks to free tools like blogs,podcasts and videosharing."--Lee

Susan sez, this little video is a good stage setter for why building your personal brand is important-if everyone, or many of us, are participating by creating our own content, commenting and ranking others' work, and linking together in affiliate and affinity groups, how do you organize your own digital presence and identity to reflect who you are?

(thinking ahead to my Maynard Institute presentation on Building your Own brand for journalists and media entrepreneurs)

The Maynard Institute, dedicated to training journalists of color and helping the news media reflect the nation's diversity in staffing, content and business operations, is also focusing on retraining and on midcareer journalists.  This coming Friday, March 6th,  in partnership with the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, Maynard is offering  "The Future is Now," a one-day workshop focusing on surviving the current downturn and planning next steps (they say it more elegantly, but that's the bottom line, IMHO).

There's a team of smart people giving workshops at the event--Kim Moy, managing editor, Yahoo! front page (and someone who has reinvented herself a couple of times), Larry Olmstead, former head of HR for Knight-Ridder and now a career coach, among other things,exec coach Rafael Gonzalez,  and myself.

I'm doing a workshop on Building Your Brand through Social Media, a topic Twitter folk and friends in the tech bubble talk about endless, but that is relevant to everyone. I'll have a tip sheet and some handouts for the session, which we will post on the web as well.

If you have suggestions for papers, blog posts, and people to follow who are articulate about the whys and how-toos of brand building online as opposed to people who have done a great job building their brand but may not be articulate about it) please leave info in the comments; this is another way to show the power of networks to these participants.
 
Here's the deets:
Date: Friday, March 6
Location: Annenberg School, University of Southern California, Los Angeles
Tuition: $75--Includes morning refreshments and lunch.

REGISTER HERE

A couple of months ago, David Cohn, George Kelly, JD Lasica, Joyce Kim, Andrew Hoerner, Raines Cohen, Margaret Rosas and a couple of other folks got together to talk about starting a Bay-area group--the Public Media Collaborative- that would meet to network across disciplines--tech, social media, videography and videoblogging, journalism, community organizing, social change, local nonprofits--and work together with local groups to plan and execute projects that shared knowledge of how to use social media and made it accessible to them.

We've had one meeting, at TechSoup in San Francisco, and are planning a second in Berkeley, on March 11th, from 7-9 PM at East Bay CoHousing (thanks, Raines).  Please join is if you are interested (More info here and here). 

OR, if you know non-profits and community organizations we should we working with, please let us know who they are.

We've gotten positive support and interest from people in nonprofits, including The Bay Area Social Equity Caucus, and we invite other groups--and interested people--to come to our meeting to help set the agenda

One of the ideas we are discussing is to create a convening group and do a day of trainings at no or low cost for non-profit activist and community groups  in social media and how to use social media tools and the social media ecosystem; we've also had requests to advise and help groups who came to the first meeting (come back and we can work on that).

Who is this for and who should come?

• People who work in tech and social media who would like to be more connected to local community projects and organizations
• People with tech and social media skills who want to contribute and partner in a more bursty (ie sporadic) way
• Non profits and activist local community groups who would like help planning a social media strategy to help deepen engagement with their audience, reach new audiences, spread awareness and/or buzz about an event, program or campaign
• People who would like to train their staffs in a train the train model to be better able to deploy social media
• Non profits interested in micro donation strategies
• Non profits who want to tap into the people and projects described above and have clear, definable projects we can work on (or want to brainstorm on such)
• Folks within the SF Bay area, Santa Cruz up into the North Bay

If you think this is interesting, please share within your communities; this is a brand new group still forming; come to our meet up and help shape and plan what we do.

We have a wiki here.

Take 185 foundation people, a new program to support the information needs of communities, some hands-on staff from the Knight Foundation, and a sprinkling of outside experts, and what do you get? In this case, said result was a pretty energizing set of sessions focusing on how community foundations can support their communities needs for information and discourse in a democracy--and what are the right tools to help them do it?

Amy Webb, Bryan Alexander and Richard Cardvan did a panel, moderated by Knight's Gary Kebbel, that took at look at the future of mobile in Japan and the US and smart tactics to use mobile to engage people right now(Amy), the pervasive role of hypertext and community in web and community today(Bryan), and the virtuous circle of the social media ecosystem and how it works with media and community (Richard). 

Kati London and Kevin Slavin of the game development firm area/code talked about how games can change how we live in the real world and showed some great conceptual games comissioned by nonprofits.
.
Chris Csikszentmihalyi,, Diana Sieger, Michael Marsicano, Mayur Patel, John Kania, Jan Schaffer, and myself faciliated breakout sessions on topics ranging from how community foundations can help active residents meet their community's information needs with new media projects to how to Access and respond to the digital divide; unequal access to online resources; Kristen Taylor shot video of many of them, and notes will be posted. (Mine was how foundations and non profits use social media tools to engage audiences, a topic I am currently obsessed with (notes here).

There was an exciting sense from the community foundation community at the event that they were going to look to Knight to help power some of the next-gen transformation around leadership and strategy (with new tools being taught to support that work).

I was impressed with the high level of quality of so many of the participants and the sense this group could indeed affect positive change--and that there was strong interest in evaluating and learning these new tools.

On a more reflective note, working with community foundations offers a huge opportunity. Closely aligned both to government and the local non-profits, businesses and schools, community nonprofits fit into the infrastructure of a community, but can do so much more to support revitalization, redevelopment, improved quality of life and policy changes around specific local issues. Bringing these organizations into the digital world in a more organized and systematic way,..helping them draw the line between strategy and execution..is a promising area in which to support change.

Back in 2004, before blogging was as mainstream as it is today, and there were perhaps 2,000 bloggerati putting up links and opining views (and many more people doing their personal community thing on xanga and live journal), the whole concept of business blogging blew up.

Suddenly, there were business blogging conferences, and 200 + bloggers who hung out shingles to tell the world--especially companies with money--about blogging and why it mattered to their business (and why they had to hire these folks to tell them this stuff.)

Fast forward 5 years and we have many more people using social media tools on the web, and many more twitterati, and now we have 10,000 people, instead of 2,000, who would classify as hard core social media users, and we have 2,000 people, not 200, telling the world--the business community in particular--to hire them so they can teach everyone--especially companies with money--how to use twitter and all the other tools to support closeness to the customer, viral marketing and the new new transparency.

One take here--which has some truth to it--is that the noise to signal ratio has gone waay up, and that 50% of the people putting out their shingle don't necessarily know what they are talking about.

But another take--which I think also has some truth to it--is that there are 2,000 people across the country who really are expert in using social media, and they all have something to teach. After all, if the premise of Web 2.0 is that users can be the center of the toolset, why would it be surprising that growing numbers of users would actually become expert?

Or that there'd be an incremental acceleration of skilled users (and free agent consultants) since the tools were getting both more intuitive and better marketed (now that we have five or seven leading tech news blogs).

Of course, there is a moral to this story(sparked both by reading this post and by a chat at the Oakland meet-up yesterday): If you ARE a social media expert type, and you are looking for clients, DON'T go hang at the social media conferences--most of the customers will be elsewhere. Go somewhere else and get away from those 2,000 peers; your client pipeline will be so much better.

Given how rapidly magazines are crashing around them, it's not surprising some journalists may act confused, but the recent call to the populace at large by Bizsweek writer Stephen Baker seems more designed to satisfy his boss and new Twitterer John Bryne's desire to make BW all social media-y and transparent than to actually find the best interview subjects to talk about social media with. 

The ask--"Who should we profile as a social media maven?"--came with a list o' names that seemed like linkbait central (i,e. link to lots of people and get lots of traffic), but was low in any real critera, suggesting either that Baker, a usually keen journalist, was bowing to a Digg/twitority wisdom of crowds thing (in which case, why does anyone need him?)--or this was a stunt, pure and simple.

Yeah, I'm on the list, and yes, of course I'd like to be interviewed by BizWeek again, especially since I have a new startup that is right in the zone launching in Q1 (and yeah, I am slammed working away) but without Baker telling the planet what his criteria might be, this is a pretty sloppy mess.

Or the basis for an article about the socialable web and what--when you cast your net out--you actually get back. (That piece would be amusing indeed, but isn't there a less crude way to arrive there?)

Hmmmph.(Practicing curmudgeonly skills).

Back in the day, two years ago, when I met Elizabeth Edwards ar BlogHer, I was blown away by the transparency and accessibilty she provided (never mind we found out the secrets her husband was keeping). 

I thought of that a few minutes ago when I opened up a personalized email sent to me by my friend First Lady Elect Michelle Obama, who wanted to wish me a happy holiday and remind me that I might donate to a foodbank to help those less fortunate, or send a care package to a soldier, all with hand dandy links.  Michelle also says "the grassroots movement you helped build can make a big difference for those in need" and invites me to contribute to cause that are meetingful to her family."

wOOt!

So what happened to all the people who elected Bush two years in a row? Have they changed? Has running the country into the ground led them to embrace Obama's inclusiveness and emotional intelligence?

Communicating with a White House that continues to use the tools for positiive social change and wide spread dialogue even as they ascend to power is going to be pretty interesting; I'd like to think that Michelle is not only broadcasting out with these shiny news tech tools, she is reading the comments and blog posts her comments trigger.

So the latest round of big Yahoo! layoffs is done, and the people picking up the pieces at Big Purple can draw their wagons closer together and hunker down in the bunker and all that good stuff--at least until they take two weeks off over the holidays.

Before we all move on, however, it's worth noting the amazing transparency around this layoff--the flickr photos, the tweets, the friend feed posts.

I'm hoping some of the ex-Yahoos! document their next moves with equal transparency--Yahoo! let go some amazing people, including George Oates, the first flickr designer and the Brickhouse crew, including the wonderful Jeannie Yang, and a whole host of talented coders and engineers.

Last February, when Yahoo! did its last big layoff, Ryan Kuder live-twittered his layoff, followed my  twittering and blogging my dismissal.  Our public transparency made the news, much to our surprise--some people felt it was a first time that let go employees didn't slink off and instead shared openly.

Today, as the world watches, Yahoo! is doing another big layoff, almost 12 months later. Only nobody is surprised by the tweets and blog posts about what's going on. What's more typical this time around is the tweet from just let go Brit @BenWard, who wrote "Totally fucking laid off. You could say that I'm not very happy about it. You would be right to say that." and had at least 20 people twitter advice and job help within an hour.

Even more pointedly, it's almost a media sport, with what feels like at least hundreds of people tracking tweets and posting stories.

Even with the poor economy and all the other companies' cuts, the reaction to the Yahoo! layoffs shows that we've clearly tipped into another universe, one where America is (finally) embracing high-touch communication and transparency and where getting laid off is something that happens, even if it sucks.

I'm working with some very cool people on a new start-up we will launch on Q1 09. January is crunch month, February is beta and we're going into regular operation (we hope) by March.

Seeking the following for unpaid positions, 10-20 hours per week:
1) Blogging/editorial interns: Bloggers or journalism students or others interested in writing and researching on on-going basis. Must have clips or blog to show and must have work history showing responsibility. Will be writing and researching, with credit.
2) Research/analyst types to work on some analytic projects, create charts and graphs for web site. Prior experience with web, doing research and crunching data preferred.
3) Social markerting/marketing/biz dev student to work on outreach, distribution, and business side. Good experience for MBA still in school.

Company is based in Oakland, CA, but you do not need to be local. You do need to want to help make a cool new project happen and get credit for it. Would like a 3-6 month commitment.
 
Will bring on 1-4 people, send expression of interest, resume web links to smernit gmail. Phone interviews, in person if you are here. Sell me why this is a good fit for you (I realize I am tellling you very little about the focus, sorry....more if you make it to next round.)

So, I'm starting to engage in some very specific shifts in behavior, which I want to talk about, both as a means to better share my thoughts and output, and as a way to kick off some talk about how information sharing and discovery is shifting.  Here's the deal:

1) The best place to see what I am writing/talking/thinking about right now is friendfeed. You need to ask to follow me, but if you're not a bot, a link farmer or a spammer, I will approve you.

Why friendfeed? A couple of reasons:
a) FF is an aggregator. This means that since I am doing alot of clipping and commenting and throwing it into  delicious where I can save the info and get it again later, you can see all that there pretty easily. Since my delicious use means  I am not posting as many interesting links on my blog, if you care FF is the place to go.
b) You can comment on items there that you can't comment on on delicious as easily--in other works, the ff interface supports us having a conversation, which is one of the critical points, right?


2) Twitter is a way to escape the echo chamber and  sample voices/people.

I pruned my twitter stream a day ago. to make room for some new voices. I just went and got a bunch, mostly tied to an area I am going to spend time in over the summer. It was amazing how much I learned about the area--and about some interesting people to follow--by using the twitter location search- good way to suss out digerati in a new place.

3) Blogs are longer form and my  virtual ADD is getting worse (but I still love blogging).
I still love blogging, but so much of what I am doing right now is boiling down to snippets, and ff and twitter are good tools for that.

On the other hand, I could never write this post in either medium.

So, question for you all: How are social media tools shifting your discourse?