I have posted notes from the keynote panel and a couple of presentations at my personal blog. More photos to come...

Journalist David Tebbutt links from his blog to an article he wrote for Information World Review entitled Genie in a Bottle. In it, he explores the deep fear that some companies have about introducing social computing into their operations. As Al Tepper, head of online development at Caspian Publishing points out in the piece, some companies have quite valid reasons to be scared - and they should be. In his words, "if you’ve got something to hide, you’ve got something to fear." As Tebbutt concludes:

This is bad news indeed for those who maintain their position through manipulation, hoarding information or playing politics.

In which case, you have bigger, more fundamental issues to worry about than social media.

For some sterling examples of great business blogs, check out the Pajama Market. Every day, a different business blog is featured. If you're seeking inspiration for how your own company might use blogging, start clicking and reading.

NB Stormhoek CEO Jason Korman, who will be speaking at our event on May 17th, has even been interviewed by the Pajama Market.

For anyone who thinks that customers having online voices is a passing fad or something that can be fought with bare teeth or lawsuits, you might want to heed the tale of the ad agency that sued a blogger for badmouthing a client - and found themselves on the receiving end of an avalanche of bad PR and hostility. Individuals and communities are online and are here to stay. Some of those individuals - and perhaps entire communities - may have negative things to say about your company. You are going to need a better strategy for dealing with that than Shut them down.

AOL, which famously tried to build a walled garden which it thought could usurp the rest of the internet ("We have content, but the web doesnt,” they thought. It wasn’t so long ago, either.), has launched their own network of financial blogs.

For the initiative, AOL and Weblogs, Inc. collected a staff of journalists, industry experts, and independent investors to author single-stock-focused blogs. “Individual investors are the most passionate about individual stocks, and the further you get away from individual companies, the more the passion gets diluted,” Moe said. “What we want to do is become the place for any holder of these stocks--the place where they go there every day and know they’re going to get something they’re not going to get anywhere else."

AOL has identified a community - and it’s quite a broad one - that they’d like to influence. Whether the value they provide to readers is enough to bring great benefits has yet to be decided - and it will be decided, not by AOL, but by that community.

Link via Adriana Cronin-Lukas

As social media goes, MySpace is one of the hottest topics going. (So much so that I and my non-profit, the Engagement Alliance, are holding an event entitled What MySpace MeansLessons for Every Brand next month.)

Last night I attended an event in London called Mashup, where MySpace‘s senior vice president of marketing and content, Jamie Kantrowitz, gave what she called “[MySpace’s] side of our story”. Some interesting figures from Jamie’s presentation:

MySpace has the second largest amount of traffic of any internet site

MySpace has the single largest concentration of young people on the web (Jamie said “on the internet,” but I would be surprised if more young people are on MySpace than are on, say, AOL instant messenger. If anyone has stats about this, please feel free to share.)

99% of MySpace’s content is created by its members (aka ’user-generated content‘)

MySpace has 72 million+ users worldwide, 2.3 million in the UK, with 15,000 new UK users registering daily

MySpace’s sex split is 51% male, 49% female

The average MySpace user logs into their account seven times per month, with an average user session of 21 minutes

And in case you’re wondering how many people it takes to run a monolith like MySpace, the company has 300 employees, 75% of which are technical specialists.

Stats over, what struck me is that whatever success MySpace is enjoying has come from two very simple principles that any company can adopt right this minute:

1) An emphasis for users (that is, customers) on discovery and exploration, not on bombarding them with your own agenda.

2) Providing genuine value to customers - that is, features and services they find valuable (such as the ability to connect easily with others), not that you wish they’d find valuable (like, say, your latest TV ad as a download).

If those are the ‘secrets’ to the MySpace success, here’s hoping that they don’t stay secrets for very long.

I had a meeting today with the Managing Director of a hugely successful UK media company. When the conversation turned to blogs, the MD said: "Every company should have a blog strategy." My thoughts? "Yes, exactly." Then it turned out that the kind of strategy he was thinking of was a reactive one, all about shutting down disgruntled customers' blogs and other forums.

I was relieved that this guy wasn't actually advocating that kind of iron-fisted, backwards approach to conversing with customers - it was merely what came to his head when he thought of 'blog strategy'. The proactive, positive approach of using social media to talk with the people who matter - customers, employees, industry influencers, or even potential investors - is far from the minds of upper management in most companies when subjects like blogging enter their awareness.

Their take is, of course, one based on fear. Not only fear of what they do not know, but fear of what they cannot control. The simple fact is that this stuff can be learned, and that certain things can be controlled. Control what you can, not what you wish you could, as many wise women and men have said. But the process starts with learning and exploring, when a lot of upper management types really just want answers and numbers to cross their desks.

The MD I spoke was much more sensible and, well, clever than most. He today wondered if PR agencies were on to the blog thing yet. I told him that a lot of them know they need to be on top of it, and a few actually have the right idea. But another simple fact is that even 'new media' PRs come from a channel world, which is what they know best. The networked world - the world of conversation, not one-way broadcast - is foreign to them, too.

If you ever want to see a high level executive panic, tell him that not only do his people not know what to do, but his PR agency doesn't have a clue, either. (It is less fun to play this game, I imagine, if you are one of the people who really should know what's going on.)

You know, one blog post isn't enough to cover all the ways in which that title is true. But for now:

Certain people seemed to be very concerned with blogging and social media being 'overhyped'. I think the only problem is inappropriate hype ("Blogging will bring our politicians into touch with the People!").

I don't think people have actually grasped the extent to which social media is changing, and will continue to change, humanity.

The most basic way that social media has changed the way that I (and many people I know) interact is that we are growing used to being able to meet individuals' minds before we meet them physically. In such circles, if you're going to an event, you check out the list of attendees and see whose blogs look interesting. When you get accustomed to this, you grow a bit frustrated with not being able to do this with others. It's a much more efficient way to interact - avoid those whose online presence reveals them to be not your cup of tea, seek out those who have interesting things to say, and speed up the process of getting from "Hi, nice to meet you," to "Tell me more about your take on X." I also think of my friend Robert Avrech, whose family I have stayed with in Los Angeles, whose daughter's wedding I attended out there (the same daughter I played host to when she and her friends were stranded in London on short notice). I actually met Robert's daughter in person before I had met him; I found him through mutual blogger friends, on his blog, where he was writing of his grief over the death of his beloved son Ariel. Where else but the blogosphere would an introverted, 50-something Orthodox Jewish screenwriter in LA become friends for life with a 20-something Ohio girl living in London? And, as Doc Searls says today:

Lately I've been suspecting that the blogosphere is a home improvement job on the humansphere.

He points to one of the blogs I never, ever neglect to read, Dear Elena, started by Dan Steinberg the day after his six-year-old daughter died. Doc also points to Remembering Allie, a blog post from Terry Heaton which I read last night and which made me feel even more deeply grateful for the health of my partner and family. I read the news of the death of Terry's wife via Jeff Jarvis the other day, and actually typed up a link to it from my personal blog, but didn't publish it. I figured, "Well, I don't know the guy. It might seem creepy to say he's in my thoughts." Terry writes:

The sense of loss that I felt that morning was overwhelmed by a fear so profound that I can't even begin to describe it. My whole world was torn out from beneath me, and I was scared to death. The only -- and I mean only -- place I felt safe while I was awaiting the arrival of family and friends was right here at my keyboard. If I moved even a few steps away, I began to feel suffocated and would race back. I wrote the post and I sent an e-mail, and what happened after that kept me going. Hundreds upon hundreds of people responded, and I can't tell you how important that was to me.

That's the last time I talk myself out of extending compassion to another human being. Terry hits the nail on the head with this:

I believe -- as Doug Rushkoff wrote in his book "Get Back in the Box" -- that the internet isn't a media phenomenon or a technical phenomenon as much as it is a social phenomenon. In this sense, he wrote, it will change everything. In our increasingly postmodern culture, the greatest social connection we have beyond family is our tribe, a concept both practical and esoteric. We choose our tribe, whereas we don't choose our family.

And on the morning of Allie's death, this is what it meant to Terry, and this is what it means for all of us:

People I didn't know (I'm apparently a member of many other tribes) shared their thoughts, poems, condolences and experiences, and that was enormously helpful to one so adrift in fear and the unknown. This is profound in its implications for the future of humankind, and I hope you all can see that. We are not alone. None of us. We need each other, and we have the shared knowledge and capacity for compassion that will save the world. I mean that with all my heart. Our institutions have failed, but we will not.

Individuals are the basic unit not just of any business, but of this world, and those who think the blogosphere is some kind of blessed embrace of collectivism or Marxism are wrong for precisely this reason: It is the ease with which individuals can connect with one another across this network which brings about the spectacular effects that it does. There is no top-down imposition on these individuals. There is no governing body deciding what each individual's 'needs' and 'abilities' are, or how frivolous or worthy those might be. These are millions of individuals deciding for themselves what is in it for them, and getting from it what they want. Sometimes that's a recipe or a video of someone singing a stupid song, and sometimes it's comfort after the death of a child or loved one. If you think that's not going to continue to have hugely positive implications for us and this planet, think again.

My previous post touched on the Southwest Airlines blog, which many have found disappointing. Here's an example of the network in action: Brian Oberkirch has created five sample blogs for Southwest, showing them how much better it could be done.

Disappointingly, especially from one who is trying to sell his services as a social media consultant, Brian hasn't categorised these on his blog, which makes linking to them a pain. Ease of linking is hugely important if you want to spread information across the network. Here they are, anyway:

Sample 1
Sample 2
Sample 3
Sample 4
Sample 5

Link via Shel Israel

Bill Gates may be the most obvious public face of Microsoft, but Robert Scoble is giving him a run for his money. Scoble is a tech evangelist at Microsoft who has played a big part in helping the company win at 'the new PR' of the blogosphere. And here he is, giving some free advice to Southwest Airlines on the content with which they should be filling their blog:

Some other things I'd love to know? Is there free WiFi near their counters anywhere? What's the best restaurant in each airport? Who makes the most reliable luggage? Some craft definitely have funnier crews than others. Any way to know whether you'll be on one of those flights? ...What are their favorite online travel resources? (Flight trackers, etc). Where do they go when they want to have fun on a layover?

When I talk to groups or individuals about blogging, I often hear the same statement from at least a few people: "I don't know what our company could actually say on a blog that would get us millions of hits."

Scoble poses only a few questions here, but they shine a light on the kind of value that a company's employees can give through blogging. He has had quite a lot of practice doing just that for Microsoft. But if you start by asking yourself what people tend to ask you when they find out who you work for/what your company does/what your role entails, the ideas for what you could possibly say on a blog start to roll thick and fast.

As for the 'millions of hits'...Well, do you really want to appeal to as many people as possible, or just the people who are most likely to be your customers, potential customers, and industry peers? Most smart businesses have a niche (or a few) that they attempt to cultivate offline; online is no different. Social media just allows for much more rich and far-reaching cultivation and conversation. More on that in future posts.