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OK, so this isn’t really that serious… but suicidemachine.org is offering in 20101what was  unthinkable in 2009…   Totally erase your social network presence at a  single stroke… Social suicide.

Opting out of the social race won’t get this extreme but expect 2010 to see a leveling off of Facebook engagement (as measured by average # of visits and time on site per user per day).  Meanwhile   Facebook will continue to move aggressively towards its end-game:  to serve as the source of truth for online identity…

Transcript:
Question: From a branding standpoint, what is the best practice when it comes to differentiating between an individual’s personal brand and their business’ brand? Where is the line between the two, particularly for small businesses? – Alora Chistiakoff

My Response: 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. So where is the line between the work you do on your own – say running a marketing blog, and the work that you do for a company – say running their marketing team.

Here is my advice For employees: I would say that it is in your best interest to build your own personal brand that follows you. This may be as simple as just a LinkedIn profile that allows you to keep a public, findable resume up to date – it may be answering questions and engaging with the LinkedIn audience – it could be blogging about your own expertise. Doing so will deliver value to your current employer or it may help you get hired by your next one.

Here is my advice for companies: Encourage your employees to build their own brands. Here is why: “Reputation” is substantial source of value for a company. And unlike intellectual property it can’t be patented and it can’t be “owned” in perpetuity. It’s earned through relationships. If you hire a marketing specialist – it is an asset if they have a record as a trusted blogger. If you hire a recruiter, it is an asset if they are a trusted personality on recruiting sites. I can’t really think of one area where bringing a strong personal brand to the table is not an asset. I do think you need to take some measures to protect yourself: (1) clear guidelines around the use of social media so that these rock star employees know what is expected of them and (2) clear measures of job performance so that you can feel comfortable that their attention to their personal brand isn’t coming at the expense of their job. If every employee is a rock star in your company, you should be so lucky.

I flew to Boston this week on business.  My United flight was delayed after leaving the gate.   As the passengers began receiving the mandatory “15 minutes more” message from the flight crew, the woman seated next to me was receiving status updates from United directly to her mobile phone.   They were coming in with more explicit information and well in advance of the crew updates.   After a few minutes the crew were coming to her for updates.

While it seemed odd, it is in no way unusual.  There are so many emerging opportunities for self-service that the ability of customers to get accurate information on their own is exceeding the ability of organizations to keep pace (as in this case where the flight crew were less aware than their customers).

When I wrote “A Corporate Guide for Social Media“  for my Forbes column this single statement drew the most attention:

Build your policies around job performance, not fuzzy concerns about productivity.

If your employees are using Facebook at work, they are also likely checking work e-mail after dinner or at odd hours of the day. Don’t ask them to give up the former if you expect them to continue the latter. If you have good performance measurements, playing the “lost productivity” card is a canard.

It even landed me an interview from the CBS Evening News.   In the meantime I have had a lot of opportunity to consider whether my points hold up over time: (1) that social technologies don’t represent anything fundamentally new in terms of distractions, (2) that the issue of productivity is a misplaced suspicion that could be cured by properly defining and measuring job performance -(3) that employers rarely consider that they are asking employees to stay checked-in after work hours.     For the most part I think that these arguments do hold up.

While it is true that “information overload” is a defining feature of the modern workplace it is also true that business workplace productivity has increased year over year despite these challenges.     How is it that individual studies proclaim the costs of distraction (25 minutes to return to tasks after an email interruption!) while labor studies show increased overall productivity?

Paradoxically I would suggest that the same tools that we complain about in terms of lost productivity and distraction at an individual level are precisely the tools that are increasing overall workplace productivity.

The headlong rush into the real-time web means yet another acceleration of the news cycle.   At a certain point (some may say the daily paper, others the hourly blog or yet others, the 15 second refresh on Twitter) we crossed a threshold where all news become “breaking news” and the rush to pump it out exceeds the human capacity to filter on factors such as accuracy, suitability or value.

This is what happened when Terry Moran used Twitter to bit-cast Obama’s interview.  Apparently Obama, off-the-record, called Kanye West a jackass.  While this statement is basically an objective truth after West’s mic-hogging episode at the VMA Awards, it was still “off the record”.     Moran tweeted it – then regretted it.   He pulled his Tweet but too late…. Rule one on the Internet:  Past is Present – there is no erasing your record.

Tweeting from an interview is breaking news – but not the way we usually use the phrase.  I mean it literally.    How long now before any interviews conducted with anyone of note will include a ban on using any real time tools like Twitter?

Kudos to Current for capturing the image for posterity.

Platforms beat applications.  OK -    So what is a platform?  The nomenclature of platforms and applications arise from technology but I will use a low tech retail metaphor.   An application in this analogy is The Foot Locker (let’s just say) while the platform is the Mall.   The mall is a platform in that it provides many of the conditions necessary for The Foot Locker to exist;  physical infrastructure, foot traffic (no pun originally intended) etc.   This allows The Foot Locker to focus its attention on what it does best – market and sell shoes.  They don’t need to allocate finances towards owning the building and all the hazards that entails.    If Foot Locker is unsuccessful, there are other small business owners that might be eager to make use of the space in the mall.   The mall is a platform that allows myriad small/large businesses to flourish.

The best exemplar of the platform recently is the iPhone.   The iPhone allows developers to build applications that reside on the iPhone (the mall if you will).  These applications can take full advantage of the iPhone’s physical infrastructure (sensors like the accelerometer for games, microphone, GPS chipset etc.) and reach (37 million iPhones to date).  This is a compelling proposition.   There have been 35,000 applications developed – and 1 billion application downloads.   iPhone is now opening up its hardware to allow people to develop physical devices… (I imagine my iPhone as a netbook in the near future).

Platforms can be a powerful concept for re-imagining your business and is part of what I talk about when I say, Open beats Closed.   There is more talent outside your walls than within — find a way to tap into that creative potential.  Platforms are also a way of reimagining  our government….

This is the heart of Ed Felten’s recent post, Government Data and the Invisible Hand, on how to make government more transparent.  The genius stroke is right here at the beginning,

If the next Presidential administration really wants to embrace the potential of Internet-enabled government transparency, it should follow a counter-intuitive but ultimately compelling strategy: reduce the federal role in presenting important government information to citizens. Today, government bodies consider their own websites to be a higher priority than technical infrastructures that open up their data for others to use. We argue that this understanding is a mistake. It would be preferable for government to understand providing reusable data, rather than providing websites, as the core of its online publishing responsibility.

Beautiful… Felten is telling Government to build a platform that leverages citizen engagement.   It is an interesting notion to think about how new technological advancements (namely, the Internet) will reconfigure our very notion of democracy.    My Society and Frontseat (see my interview with founder Mike Mathieu here) already take available data for citizens to remix.  Imagine how powerful this can be if government saw itself as a platform rather than owning the whole mall.

This post is part three of a series raising questions about the mass adoption of social technologies. Here are links to part one and two. These posts will be opened to live discussion in an upcoming webcast on May 27. (special guest to be announced shortly)

In 1785 utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham proposed architectural plans for the Panopticon, a prison Bentham described as “a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.” Its method was a circular grid of surveillance; the jailors housed in a central tower being provided a 360-degree view of the imprisoned. Prisoners would not be able to tell when a jailor was actually watching or not. The premise ran that under the possibility of total surveillance (you could be being observed at any moment of the waking day) the prisoners would self-regulate their behavior to conform to prison norms. The perverse genius of the Panopticon was that even the jailor existed within this grid of surveillance; he could be viewed at any time (without knowing) by a still higher authority within the central tower – so the circle was complete, the surveillance – and thus conformance to authority – total.

In 1811 the King refused to authorize the sale of land for the purpose and Bentham was left frustrated in his vision to build the Panopticon. But the concept endured – not just as a literal architecture for controlling physical subjects (there are many Panopticons that now bear Bentham’s stamp) – but as a metaphor for understanding the function of power in modern times. French philosopher Michel Foucault dedicated a whole section of his book Discipline and Punish to the significance of the Panopticon. His take was essentially this: The same mechanism at work in the Panopticon – making subjects totally visible to authority – leads to those subjects internalizing the norms of power. In Foucault’s words “…the major effect of the Panopticon; to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary” In short, under the possibility of total surveillance the inmate becomes self regulating.

The social technologies we see in use today are fundamentally panoptical – the architecture of participation is inherently an architecture of surveillance.

In the age of social networks we find ourselves coming under a vast grid of surveillance – of permanent visibility. The routine self-reporting of what we are doing, reading, thinking via status updates makes our every action and location visible to the crowd. This visibility has a normative effect on behavior (in other words we conform our behavior and/or our speech about that behavior when we know we are being observed).

In many cases we are opting into automated reporting structures (Google Lattitude, Loopt etc.) that detail our location at any given point in time. We are doing this in exchange for small conveniences (finding local sushi more quickly, gaining “ambient intimacy”) without ever considering the bargain that we are striking. In short, we are creating the ultimate Panopticon – with our data centrally housed in the cloud (see previous post on the Captivity of the Commons) – our every movement, and up-to-the-minute status is a matter of public record. In the same way that networked communications move us from a one to many broadcast model to a many to many – so we are seeing the move to a many-to-many surveillance model. A global community of voyeurs ceaselessly confessing to “What are you doing? (Twitter) or “What’s on your mind? (Facebook)

Captivity of the Commons focused on the risks corporate ownership of personal data. This post is concerned with how, as individuals, we have grown comfortable giving our information away; how our sense of privacy is changing under the small conveniences that disclosure brings. How our identity changes as an effect of constant self-disclosure. Many previous comments have rightly noted that privacy is often cultural — if you don’t expect it – there is no such thing as an infringement. Yet it is important to reckon with the changes we see occurring around us and argue what kind of a culture we wish to create (or contribute to).

Jacques Ellul’s book, Propaganda, had a thesis that was at once startling and obvious: Propaganda’s end goal is not to change your mind at any one point in time – but to create a changeable mind. Thus when invoked at the necessary time – humans could be manipulated into action. In the U.S. this language was expressed by catchphrases like, “communism in our backyard,” “enemies of freedom” or the current manufactured hysteria about Obama as a “socialist”.

Similarly the significance of status updates and location based services may not lie in the individual disclosure but in the significance of a culture that has become accustomed to constant disclosure.

This post is part two of the series, “The Question Concerning Social Technology”. That appeared on Radar. Part one is here. These posts will be opened to live discussion in an upcoming webcast on May 27.

In January 2002 DARPA launched the Information Awareness Office. The mission was to, “ imagine, develop, apply, integrate, demonstrate and transition information technologies, components and prototype, closed-loop, information systems that will counter asymmetric threats by achieving total information awareness (emphasis added)” The notion of a government agency achieving total information awareness was too Orwellian to ignore. Under criticism that this “awareness” could quickly migrate to a mass surveillance system the program was defunded.

Fast-forward to last week and my near-purchase of Libbey Duratuff Gibralter Glasses (the perfect bourbon glass one might speculate). Over the course of the next few days I was peppered with exact-match ads for Libbey Duratuff glassware on several other websites; A small example of information awareness at work.

Personal data is the currency of Web 2.0. Knowing what we watch, buy, click, own, what we think, intend and ultimately do confers competitive advantage. Facebook possesses your social graph, your personal interests and your full profile (age, location, relationship status etc.) not to mention your daily (or hourly) answer to their persistent question, “what’s on your mind?”. Reviewing the “25 Surprising Things Google Knows About You” should give anyone pause. And it’s not just the Web 2.0 set. Credit Card Companies, Telcos, Insurance , Pharma… all are collecting vast stores of personal data. If you watch the trendline it is moving toward more data and more analytic capability – not less.

So why is it that we seem to have more comfort when the capacity for total information awareness lies with corporations as opposed to government? Experience shows that there is a very thin barrier between the two. To wit, the release of thousands of phone records to the U.S. government - and, conveniently, government immunity for those same corporations after the breach. Google and Yahoo! and Microsoft have all been accused of cooperating with the Chinese government to aid censorship and repression of free speech. What happens if/when we encounter the next version of the Bush administration that sees no problem abrogating civil rights in pursuit of “evildoers”?

What’s more, when we deliver our personal information over to corporations we are giving this data over to an institution that is amoral. Companies are not yet structured to deliver moral or ethical results – they are encouraged to grow and deliver “shareholder value” (read money) which is a numb and narrow measure of value. Do I want my data to be managed by an amoral institution?

To be clear – I want the convenience and miracles that modern technology brings. I love the Internet and I am willing to give over lots of data in the trade. But I want two fundamental protections:

First, change the corporation. The structure of the corporation continues to be driven by 20th century hard goals of efficiency and scale – not by more complex measures of environmental sustainability, value creation and the commonweal. These are simply not adequately factored into any structural, organizational, incentive or taxation systems of business today. Profit and profit motive are fine – but hiding social and environmental costs is no longer acceptable. I want to deal with institutions capable of morality. This is no small task – but if we can build the Internet….

Second. We need a right to privacy that matches the 21st century reality. As a friend of mine likes to say, “privacy is now a responsibility – not a right.” While it is pithy (and perhaps true), the reason we grant rights – and laws to enforce those rights in society is the simple fact that people do not generally have the wherewithal to protect themselves from large, institutional interests. In the same way that regulatory structures are needed to keep a financial system in balance (alas even the Ayn Rand acolyte Greenspan finally agrees with this truism), we need new rights and regulations governing the use of our personal data – and simple sets of controls over who has access to it.

The true work of the 21st century lies not in refining our technology – this we will achieve without any political will. The work lies in re-imagining our institutions.

During my study of classical Chinese it would take hours of contemplation to really get to the root of a poem.   That was the point.  It was a meditation proposed by the poet for consideration by the reader.  As with philosophy, poetry is a time-intensive practice that requires deep focus and concentration.   Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook and the host of real-time-web feed services belong on the opposite side of the spectrum.  They are quintessentially distraction-based media;  shallow on context and truncated into staccato bursts of conversation…  These media play off of a very real psychological factor known as operant conditioning, the addictive need to return over and over in hopes of a reward (a great link from Scoble perhaps?)…

The dominant revenue model of the web today – the ad that urges a click -  embeds distraction into interface design.   The more clicks you take – the more Google makes in ad revenue (distraction pays).   This is not to say that social media doesn’t have extraordinary value – it does – It is at  the heart the emerging social nervous system.   Yet,   The ability to pay attention, focus and strategically disconnect will be a winning discipline of the next generation of business leaders.  As the zen phrase says, “eat when you eat” meaning, give each thing you do all of your attention.  You will be rewarded from it.    Lately I have been getting back to pen and paper brainstorming.   Away from the computer.

After writing my last article in Forbes on why businesses need to understand the Social Web I decided to put up a graphic representing differences between a traditional business mindset and the social mindset.   Full article follows the graphic and provides more context.

Cross-Post from Forbes:

Language, humanity’s primary enabling technology, evolves out of the crucible of collective agreement. The words that society chooses to use as signifiers of new concepts are not capricious. They have the power to reveal. There is a reason that the word “social” is being applied as a prefix everywhere–from social media, social computing and the social Web to social capital and the social enterprise. This planetary skin of networked communication that links us together is also reshaping the way business is conducted.

Why are we seeing the rise of all things “social”? Why are people so taken with poking one another, summarizing their experiences in 140 characters or becoming fans of Coca Cola ( KO – news – people )? (Don’t laugh–Coca Cola has 3.5 million fans on Facebook). The answer follows the old punch line to a crude joke–”Because it can.” Why is our society massively adopting social technologies? Because we can.

Human beings are innately social. We are designed to share and connect with others. Period. What’s more, we are born into cultures that provide a blueprint for how to communicate and organize. We know how to join a conversation at a party, meet new people and make decisions and organize in a social setting (with varying degrees of competence).

Because we can, our innate desire and capacity to socialize is migrating to a platform (the Internet) that has breathtaking scale. The observation that these activities are meaningless, time-wasting or trivial misses the point entirely. Much of our day is dedicated to these activities already (tipping your hat to the neighbor, sharing a small experience with a coworker, sharing pictures of your kids with the receptionist). If you are wondering why people spend their time poking their friends on Facebook–stop. You are just seeing previously confined social activity being exposed to a larger audience.

Trivializing so called “trivial” activities misses a deeper point: When these tools reach a tipping point, they reveal a utility never anticipated by their creators. Twitter is a case in point. Because we can, 6 million users (and growing rapidly) are sharing bite-size pieces (140 character limit) of their lives with friends and strangers. These messages, or “tweets,” may be largely trivial, yet Twitter is becoming a critical part of the social nervous system. (See “The Rise Of The Social Nervous System.”)

“What are you doing?” is Twitter’s default question, and normally, the answer is trivial. But when the context becomes an emergency–the dozens or hundreds of answers to that question arriving in real time become important news.

There is another implication for businesses in the term “social”: a recognition that we are moving increasingly toward a new model of engagement for businesses, that is, (you guessed it!) social. We have many years of refining a model of management that centers on routinization of work and highly constrained communications flow. We have extracted as much productivity as we are likely to get from these command-and-control techniques, and we have squelched enough employee value in the process.

If the last 100 years was about gaining efficiency and innovation through scale and tight control of resources and communications, the next 100 will be about finding more fluid, open models of collaboration and cooperation. Playing on this new field has different rules. It requires shifting our concept of business from a
legalistic model to a social one. Social contracts are very different from the business contracts that dominated the 20th century corporate mentality. In the business contract, the organizing metaphor is the binding, legal document, and the motivator that constrains bad behavior is the lawsuit.

By contrast, the organizing metaphor for the social Web is relationship, and the building blocks are trust, reciprocity and authenticity. The motivating force that constrains bad behavior is social pressure and cultural norms. This is not to say that we will see the disappearance of legal contracts–they remain necessary. But in a social world, your reputation is everything. Your word is your bond, and sometimes admitting a mistake or saying you’re sorry is the best method of keeping both.

Businesses that ignore the call to be “social”–that is, to abide by a social contract with their constituents (customers, partners, resellers, employees)–run the risk of appearing pathological. I see “social” business as an inherently healthy change. Social contracts generally involve listening and talking, give and take, and trust–built over time through honest engagement. In my experience leading O’Reilly Innovation Labs, the greatest difficulty companies have in making this shift lies in realizing that the change to a social model is transformational. It is about leadership, culture and organizing structure, and very little about technology. And why will society demand that businesses adhere to a social contract? Because now we can.