I would give you this piece of advice for how to keep up with new technology – don’t try. Use the technology to subscribe to people that you trust – and follow their lead.

Just because “the audience now has a voice” doesn’t mean it should be exercised without interruption.

The Social Web is a Culture of Invitation. It has its own norms just like any other social group, be it a workplace, a chess club or a church. You earn your way to invitation through being present and slowly building trust.

2009 was the year that everything received a “social” prefix; social media, social web, social business and so on. I wanted to ask John Hagel – co-chair of Deloitte’s Center for the Edge – for his take on the significance of the term and its importance for business.
John starts with a great quote, “in many respects we are going back to the future:” the Internet began as a social tool with early bulletin boards that connected small groups with shared interests (mainly academic researchers). Then the Worldwide Web came along

How long before we can scan any object and know more about its ingredients than the misleading label? How long before every in-store customer seamlessly moves online to the vast Internet marketplace to find the rock-bottom price and bargain with you?

Social technologies are cloaked in a rhetoric of liberation that tend to obscure the fact that never before have we handed so much personal information over in exchange for so little in return.

Employers have always expected certain individuals to bring their own personal “brand” to work – A newspaper columnist brings readers, a salesperson brings a rolodex, an executive brings credibility and a network of trusted talent and so on.

The punchline for me is that if you are saying that technology isn’t actually your business there is likely a technology company that is realizing that they are actually in your business.

I was fortunate enough to get a chance to sit down with John Hagel at last week’s Web 2.0 Summit and discuss a few big-ticket emerging trends: (1) the rise of the “real time” web, (2) the move from the information web (the web of documents) to the social web (the web of people) and (3) the continued promise of mobile devices.

So this is a hard question to distill into two minutes. “Is there a difference between online versus offline etiquette?” The answer is obviously yes. I have met a few …