ensuring etiquette never has been nor ever will be the domain of automated surveillance, or platforms (online or off) that host literally billions of conversations. Not because of the technical challenges but because of the nature of etiquette itself. Etiquette is a social norm that is instilled through acculturation in your family, school, community and broader media diet. You do not arrive at good etiquette through policing but through culture and education more do you enforce etiquette through policy and punishment. Policy and punishment are guardrails but it is community norms that constrain bad behavior.

Reading the Fast Company article on how Twitter is being used now as an accurate means of predicting sales or behavior.  In this case movies.  While the application of Twitter as an effective prediction engine …

John Battelle cited a post of mine today in his great FM Signal blog.   At issue were my thoughts on the Nestle Facebook fracas.  John makes a great point and his post helped me get …

A few months ago I wrote a post for Mashable titled: Why Social Media Isn’t For Everyone.   I wrote it out of direct experience counseling clients who were rightly concerned about the  risks of …

We tend to blame people and let architecture off the hook. But the structures we live within shape our behavior and govern what is possible just as the physical architecture of our towns both emerge from and reinforce the way we see world.

I am coming to believe that the most successful posture in business is best described as “Confident Vulnerability.” In most organizations we are terrified of saying something stupid, something that doesn’t make sense or of …

I am proud to be joining Stowe Boyd’s upcoming Social Business Edge as a speaker.  Stowe has been one of the leading thinkers on the Social Web and this event has a fantastic line up.   …

We learn by doing.
It is a blinding glimpse of the obvious but somehow this point gets missed over and over as big companies approach social media by rolling out training.   Don’t get me wrong – …

My new article for Forbes covering the real-time web is out this morning here:
There is a lot of fuss and confusion over the term “real-time Web” epitomized in this recent comment on O’Reilly Radar:
“I’ve been …

The mobile device is headed to dethrone the laptop as the de facto standard gear for knowledge work.