Life is like a bonsai tree.

Are there any other closet Karate Kid fans in the house?  Pipe up–there’s no shame here.

It’s easy to let social media participation grow like kudzu until it completely takes over your life.  Like any thing (even good things) you have to know your limits.

Brian Solis, of PR 2.0 recently posted about the Conversation Prism, and his post contained a number of diagrams and visuals sort of mapping out his social media footprint.   I’ve seen similar maps that look like some sort of out-of-control fungal growth under a microscope.

It’s very easy to let all those outward spiraling microrelationships and conversations consume all your time and energy and attention.  Even an online microrelationship takes time to maintain, and if you have a few thousand of them… well, I think you can do the math.

There’s a reason we use the word “pay” to describe what we do with “attention.” There’s a cost involved.

The cost of paying too much attention to your work, or one element of your work (if that’s what social media is for you), is that you don’t have enough left over for the other important facets of your life–hobbies, real world relationships, your spiritual life. The cost of maintaining a thousand or so microrelationships can be not enough time and energy left over for your core real-world relationships.

So when trimming your social media participation, whether that means trimming the feeds in your RSS reader or determining which community sites you will continue to participate in, or the level at which you will participate, consider the Japanese art of bonsai.

Limbs, branches and leaves must be trimmed, not because they’re bad, but because they just aren’t a part of the shape that the gardener has in his minds eye of what that bonsai will and should become. It’s not a personal judgment of worth to de-follow a person, or drop their feed, or opt-out of a community where you’ve previously been an active participant.

The tree is never complete. Pruning, wiring and nurturing it are always going to be an ongoing process. Some of those feeds and follows will eventually work their way back into your stream of consciousness.  Or you may find yourself repeating the process of shaping your social footprint every few months.  You’re a growing human being.  That’s natural.

At certain points, the tree may be downright ugly. It takes time and diligence to get it under control.  At times, your “system” for managing your social participation may seem like a chaotic mess.  It may in fact BE a chaotic mess.  Give yourself a little grace and keep plugging away at getting things into a manageable state without sending yourself on an all expenses paid guilt trip.

The shape is partly intentional design, and partly organic, natural and unexpected. In fact, a tree that is too perfect could be considered a failure.  Some feeds, or relationships, or whatever, will remain because you just know that they’re supposed to be there.  You can’t quantify the value.  You just know it belongs.

Always protect the roots and the trunk. If everything else dies, you can always bring it back if the roots and trunk are healthy.  Your “roots” are your values, the underlying foundation of everything you do.  Your “trunk” is your core relationships–your family.   If spending all your time and energy on the outer branches is harming either the trunk or the roots–it’s time to fall back and regroup, soldier.

Social media is an exciting field that can easily consume all your attention, and participating in online communities can be highly addictive.  When your social media footprint gets too big for you to capably manage, it’s time to pull out the clippers.

Today, that discussion continues and expands on WFPL, Louisville’s NPR affiliate and public radio station on the talk show, “State of Affairs.” I’ll join host Julie Kredens and two area attorneys, Jeff Calabrese and Michale Losavio, to cover the topic, “Employers, Privacy and Social Media.” I can’t imagine me and two lawyers going back and forth not being entertaining. In Louisville, you can hear us live at 11 a.m. ET/10 a.m. CT on 89.3 FM. You can also listen to the stream on WFPL’s website and access the archived podcast of the show on the site whenever you like, as well.

There has been a lot of recent talk about personal branding and because a year ago no one in social media or, for that matter, public relations beyond Louisville, knew who I was, my name pops up. I love the discussion going on over on Paul Chaney’s Conversational Media Marketing blog about the emergence of personal brands that overshadow corporate ones. The social web is dependent upon human connection and interaction. As such, the personal brand is more engaging and compelling than the company one. I can speak to, relate to and interact with Bob Lutz (theoretically). I can’t do any of those with General Motors. Or at least I don’t want to.

Participating in personal branding, whether it be strategic and purposeful or social and accidental, is certainly a good idea. I hadn’t done this in some time, but last night I Googled my name. Not only are 27 of the top 30 results pointing to my social media profiles, blog posts or things written in blogs about me, but I finally pushed that stupid YouTube video of Jason Newsted of Metallica falling down to page three of the results. (The video is entitled “Metallica Jason Falls On Stage.”)

Google your name. Do you like what comes up? Is it you or can a potential employer mistake that risque blog post for you when it was written by someone with the same name but a different interpretation of the term, “decorum?”

Today’s talk show dives into the notion that while we live a certain portion of our lives online, particularly those of us active in social media, there are some privacy concerns and legal issues worth considering when participating there. Your employer can sometimes see the photos you upload, videos you’ve posted or even favorited, Tweets you’ve uttered that may not be the most tasteful and so on. Can they use that against you? Should they be able to?

For those of you in need of my stance, I’ll simply say anything you put online you should consider public. If it’s public, anyone can see it, including your boss or potential employer. If you are uncomfortable with them seeing your beer bong pictures from the beach, don’t post them.

From the legal perspective, it’s not that clearly defined which is why we’ll be chatting about it. Please do join. You can call in and ask questions or send one in via email at soa — at — wfpl.org.

On a somewhat related note at least relative to reputation management, we had great fun at SMC Louisville last night. Terry Boyd, a reporter from Business First , a weekly business publication in Louisville, called me out and said I hadn’t offered any empirical evidence that social media in the newsroom effects the bottom line or business of journalism. That was a fair assessment and to ensure my reputation isn’t spoiled by the whole thing, I’m digging up some examples and will respond to him more fully. He’ll probably write about it and I’ll share that when it happens.

Two guests at last night’s meeting were Bill Sledzik of Tough Sledding/Kent State University and Andy Currens of the University of Cincinnati. It was an honor having the esteemed professors there. The two are doing a video interview series on social media and public relations for their classes which I’m sure you’ll see online at some point in the future. I was honored to be asked to participate.

And just in case my ego is still hungry, Chaney and his co-horts at Bizzuka have asked me to join them on Blog Talk Radio Friday at 1 p.m. ET on the User Friendly Thinking program (formerly called Bizzuka Buzz). We’ll talk about social media, the advertising industry and I’m sure personal branding will weed its way in there, too.

Enough of my self-serving promotional obligations. I’m sorry for the pimpitude, but when I do these things, I’d much rather you know, come participate, etc. Still …

Please tell me in the comments what you think about your profile information online, how current and potential employers should use that information when considering you for a job and whether or not you think it’s fair to expect you to keep those profiles free of potential job status-altering materials. If able, I may refer to some of the comments during today’s show.

Table of contents for The Media & Social Media

1. The Media & Social Media Series: The Cincinnati Enquirer
2. BusinessWeek Readying Beta Launch Of Social Effort

Readying for next month’s Blog World Expo presentation on traditional media members saving their audiences by using social media, I’ve been able to find out about some interesting things in the works. I’ve agreed to respect the media outlet’s readiness and am holding off spilling the beans, as it were, but one such media member gave me the green light to tell you about their social media stake today.

BusinessWeek, apparently clawing for some online cachet in the wake of FastCompany.com’s over-the-top social networking bonanza, is in private alpha for an interesting social bookmarking and pseudo-social networking toolset they’re calling Business Exchange. I’ve been asked to participate, along with a few other social media bloggers I’ve discovered are there, and though I’ve not had ample time to explore it deeply, here’s what they’re cooking up for you.

The concept is essentially a social bookmarking mechanism that allows users to post articles they find (or posts of their own — And don’t think they didn’t pitch it as an opportunity to drive traffic to my own site, those clever kids!) in a topic-organized knowledge stream. The stream can be organized under headings “Most Active,” “News,” and “Blogs.” As B.L. Ochman has already pointed out reacting to their bookmarking dialog box, separating blogs from news is rather short-sighted. When you bookmark a URL, your input fields make you choose between “News” and “Blogs and Opinion,” indicating a less-than-ideal, but understandable, respect level for bloggers. I think Ochman goes a bit overboard with her criticism, but that, of course, is understandable, too.

The “most active” organization is nice but there’s little indication other than clicks or users “Saving” the article on their own profile page as to what gauges activity. There’s no voting mechanism and no apparent commenting functionality for the articles.

You can view another member’s profile and see the articles they’ve posted, saved and so on. But there doesn’t appear to be a way to contact or message them, bring attention to links you think they’ll find interesting and etc.

While the organization of business-oriented information by topic is convenient and inviting the magazine’s users in to experience some nice social functionality together is a nice step forward in the social media world for the publication, there’s nothing that seems unique in the feature set. In fact, there are some basics missing, though sometimes keeping it simple is the right approach depending upon the audience.

The good news is that it is in Alpha with Beta to come next month sometime. I’ve been told the platform is in it’s 20th iteration or so and the in-house development team is continually adding to and growing it. There is potential there, but it seems like a less-functioning del.icio.us for the time being.

Is it something that looks like the in-the-bubble folks will be excited about? No. But BusinessWeek’s target audience includes a lot more than us. The baby steps approach may just draw the mainstream readers of theirs into some nice social media habits.

To sign up for the invite-only Alpha, look for the link on the left hand side at http://topicexchange.businessweek.com/

There’s a lot to like about Dick Brown. Especially if you’re a professional communicator. Brown is the Executive Director of Communications and Public Outreach for the Commonwealth of Kentucky’s Public Protection Cabinet, the Energy and Environment Cabinet and the Labor Cabinet. He has been in the communications business for 40 years as a PR guy, journalist and more. Affable, intelligent, friendly.

Brown was the guest speaker Thursday at the monthly meeting of the Louisville chapter of the International Association of Business Communicators. His talk was called, “New Media & Politics: How Bloggers Are Killing The Message.” I went thinking there was potential for him to generalize and stereotype and call all bloggers wing nuts and Mama’s basement nerds and, as such, would defend blogging as a profession or even passion. Fortunately, he started off by clarifying he doesn’t think we’re all nuts, but a good number of us are. (I hesitate to disagree with that.)

So I listened. His presentation was essentially a primer on how to think of and deal with bloggers from someone who holds them at arm’s length, doesn’t trust many of them, thinks they are detrimental to journalism and the communications process as we know it, but will concede there are a few who do a good job. Brown’s problem is that he thinks bloggers are journalists, or at least should be.

There are some finer points of his I don’t agree with like his opinion that bloggers should report the story fairly and leave the opinion to the commentors. A statement like this just shows that Brown discounts the fact that bloggers, and journalists, are human beings with opinions. The Internet gives us a place to post them. Our country gives us the right to do so. If Brown’s version of what a blog is were true - blogger reports balanced and fair and only commentors offer reaction and opinion, as my buddy @cheapsuits said on Twitter, “Then blogs would be boring.”

He reported the Kentucky Governor’s office doesn’t respond to comments on blogs, unless they’re made by the blogger him or herself and that they took blogs off their main media list because they didn’t respect old school media embargoes.

He also lamented the fact the news media now blogs and pointed to several journalists, paid to be fair and balanced, who blog and express their opinions. To someone from the old school line of thinking where Walter Conkrite covered the news and Andy Rooney commented on it and never the twain shall meet, that’s a fair assessment. However, all of Brown’s points lead to one over-arching theme that separates old communications thinking from new, past ways of conducting business to modern and divides those who don’t “get it” from those who do.

We’re human.

To Mr. Brown, whom I do respect and in many ways admire, I would offer this: The public you serve has run to the Internet to get away from uncontrolled media environments, interruption marketing, corporate and political spin and, yes, your “message.” Blogs exists and thrive because real, live human beings, the ones who voted your boss into office and whose taxes pay your salary, don’t want to hear talking points and strategic communications. They want Steve Beshear, the governor of Kentucky who happens to be a real, live human being, to tell them what he’s going to do about jobs, gas prices, new roads and education funding. They don’t want party platform talking points. They want someone to reach out, put a hand on their shoulder and say, “We’re working our ass off. Here’s how. And it’s going to be okay.” But then they want him to mean it and prove that it’s true.

Like many communications professionals have over the last three decades, you’ve become convinced we’re in the business of communicating with the media. Not so. We’re in the business of communicating with the public. Blogging and social media have made the media less imperative because we can now go straight to the human beings that matter most. Not that the media isn’t important, but please don’t think the end user isn’t either.

As my friend Michelle Jones wrote, albeit in presumptive anticipation of Brown’s speech:

“I’m assuming that by ‘message’ the presenter means a carefully crafted campaign of very limited information that flows only one way. Simply put the marketer tells the audience what he wants us to know and we’re supposed to be happy to get it. Our only response to the message should be to either buy the product or vote for the politician the message is telling us to. Bloggers don’t play that game. Bloggers dig (and digg) deeper than the press releases or news articles they’ve been handed. Bloggers say when they disagree with political or business decisions. Bloggers say what they think but more importantly blog readers get to say what they think as well. A blogger posts, commenters respond and many people are participating in a two-way conversation.”

In short, don’t think of communicating with the public as a message. Think of it as a conversation. I talk to my bosses every day. Would it hurt politicians to really talk to theirs, too?

Granted, Brown does work in the niche of politics, which brings with it some unrestrained passion from any number of different angles. Yes, there are political bloggers who are nuts. But there are many who are cutting through the politi-speak and spin and reporting observations on our government through the eyes of real, live human beings, not face-caked, frozen hair, poster boys combing for sound bytes and better gigs. There are 63 blogs that cover Kentucky politics according to a keyword search on Technorati yesterday. They aren’t all crazy. They aren’t all rumor-mongers and liars trying to bait the other side. They aren’t all fair, but they aren’t all unfair.

What they are, Mr. Brown, are citizens of your Commonwealth. They are payers of your salary. They are voters. They are human beings. And they are tired of being fed a line by a media member playing nice with the people who fed him the line who are trying to jockey for public opinion while seldom considering the public’s real opinion.

Brown’s presentation was actually quite good with some strong points. He did report that blogging is a fact of life in the media environment today and communications professionals need to consider blogs as potential avenues to reach their audiences. But having someone who treats blogs with such uncertainty (he admitted the Beshear administration has never proactively reached out to bloggers, but has accommodated those who have built a relationship with him) advise a group of professional communicators on how to reach out to bloggers is like asking the elder George Bush how to better market the broccoli industry.

Brown gave a good talk with some very pertinent and valid information. But he also showed how far the gap is from the public and those that run our governments. We’re human. We connect. We converse. They stay “on message” and get across the “party platform” and hit their prescribed “talking points.” And as a result, the public doesn’t trust them.

Could you imagine what the American political system would be like if it were truly run by the people and for the people? If social media principles — give to get, share and share a like, be genuine, transparent and — God forbid — honest drove the ship? If there are any government officials reading this who want to talk more deeply, please call me.

In the end, I simply handed Brown a business card and said, “I don’t know if you have anyone in the administration who is knee deep in the blogosphere, but I am and you need help, that’s what I’m here for. Call me.”

My guess is he won’t because in the litter that is behemoth corporate monoliths broadcasting one-way messages to “consumers” and aren’t the least bit interested in the fact those “consumers” are real people in need of a little human interaction, government is top dog.

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However, I found one that not only has a very cool concept, but that launches today on the websites of — get this — mainstream businesses that are pushing third-party content they do not control to their customers, all in the name of a more enriching website experience. (My first question to Susan Bratton, president of Personal Life Media who pitched the idea to me, was, “Can I have your clients have a word or two with some of Doe-Anderson’s clients? Please?)

Personal Life Media has developed a widget that serves up to five different podcasts that can be played wherever the widget sits. For instance, the widget over on the right hand side has my five favorite podcasts in it. Go ahead. Click and listen. While you’re here checking out Social Media Explorer, you can listen to podcasts I choose as extra content to provide you with.

Now take it out of the blog context and put it on a corporate website as additional, engaging content.

AccuQuote is a term life insurance company. They’re going to start providing complementary content they don’t produce (or pay anything for since the feed is free and public) on their website. When is the last time you went to a life insurance website and were engaged by the content?

I thought so.

“With competition pressuring from all directions, companies that leverage the content of others in order to complement their own content will establish themselves as a consistent ‘go to’ resource,” said Sean Cheyney, Vice-President for Business Development. “At AccuQuote, we’ve reached out to our customers and asked them to share their interests, and they have responded by asking us to find content and companies that match their own interests. The widget from Personal Life Media allows us to meet the requests of our customers through an easy to deliver mechanism.”

“The genres in their podcasts happen to target our particular market base and we see it as a benefit or luxury for our visitors to have the opportunity to listen to an informative podcast on a particular subject,” explained Al Vitaro, president of Personal Life client (and way-cool furniture and accessories boutique) Zen By Design. “In most cases, we would be very concerned about the content, but Susan and Tim Bratton of Personal Life Media have created a classy presentation across the board and we haven’t come across anything that would be considered less than first class.”

Alyssa O’Mara of Cardscan also sees the advantage. She said, “At CardScan we define ourselves as a solutions company. Providing respected third party content on our site is an exciting way that we can provide our customers with information that might help them in their business.”

O’Mara pointed to the importance of selecting partners wisely when dealing with third-party content, but also said the fact the content helps Cardscan’s customers find solutions to answers the company may not have, offsets the risk. One of Cardscan’s contact solutions is business card readers.

Frankly, the widget itself is cool, but the thought that businesses — and mainstream, regular businesses, not just in-the-bubble tech types — are beginning to open their eyes to the concept of building engaging websites, providing third-party content and using syndicated, free content without aneurysms and legal roadblocks is refreshing. The combination of the two made this particular widget one worth sharing.

Bratton explained that the idea for the podcast widget actually came from marketers she was trying to sell sponsorships to:

“As I called on marketers to sponsor the 25 shows on the Personal Life Media network I heard a similar refrain: ‘We like your shows but instead of advertising on them, we want the content (the actual show) on OUR website.’ The client’s site-side mentality was a reoccurring theme. So we built marketers a free widget that they could trick out to match their site with their logo and feature up to any five podcasts they liked. And any marketer can use this with any pocasters for free.”

Personal Life Media is primarily a blog and podcasting network with shows and blogs on a variety of topics. Bratton explained that the businesses she called upon were looking for, “sticky, episodic, very germane content,” to surprise and delight their website visitors with. The visitors can then grab the player and post it on their own site or one of 23 social networking sites (Facebook, etc.) which then spreads the logo and branding of the business providing the widget.

I’m not convinced very many people will take the Social Media Explorer podcast player and dump it on their blogs or sites, but if my five shows are your five favorites, the additional Social Media Explorer branding on your site, blog or network profile will certainly be greatly appreciated. If I ever order T-shirts, I’ll send you one.

And by the way, Susan Bratton is the chair emeritus for Ad:Tech conferences and actually emailed to THANK Kat French for her not-so-good review of Ad:Tech Chicago last week. Yeah, I know. She was also trying to pitch me in the same week, but damn! She thanked us?!

So, even though I think one of the most over-used and under-impressive words in the online world right now is, “widget,” here’s one that got my attention. Check out mine, get one of your own and, if the opportunity and strategy is right, recommend one to your company or client for their next website upgrade. I’ll almost guarantee you’ll get a, “That’s pretty cool,” from more than a few people.

As you’ve no doubt surmised, (not to be confused with “summize“) there’s a story behind that statement.

Last week, I noticed that I had reached 400 followers on Twitter, the microblogging tool.  While it’s still a small number compared to Jason’s account, it was a milestone for me–so I tweeted about it.

A couple of folks picked up on my tongue-in-cheek plea for swag:

So I went off on a nice little humorous riff:

Well, I’ve now officially learned to be careful what you wish for.  Especially on Twitter.  Guess what I got in the mail this week, courtesy the extremely kind @jonathaneunice of Illuminata?

Yup.

My very own set of Ginsu knives.

That, my friends, is the power of social media.  If you’re even marginally entertaining, people will send you precision cutlery.

So because I’m a woman of my word, I finally got the webcam working.  The video quality is not exactly hi-def, but here, in all it’s cheesy glory, is my homage to Ron Popeil:

Table of contents for The Media & Social Media

1. The Media & Social Media Series: The Cincinnati Enquirer
2. BusinessWeek Readying Beta Launch Of Social Effort

Today begins journey through a topic of interest for me I think will prove extremely valuable to you as well. In September, I will lead a session at Blog World & New Media Expo on the topic of traditional media and how they can use social media to combat disappearing audiences, staff cutbacks and plummeting profits. My friends at the Social Media Club Louisville August gathering will get a sneak peek at the presentation one week from today as well.

And what kind of social media blogger would I be without some crowdsourcing? If you know of other examples, case studies or have suggestions for the series, please jump in the comments and let me know.

The Cincinnati Enquirer

I’ve blogged before about the Gannett organization’s company-wide website overhauls, but did so by pointing out flaws in the strategy and execution of adding social media tools to the Louisville Courier-Journal’s new site. Many may think since the Cincinnati Enquirer is also a Gannett property their execution would be similar. However, much of the inspiration for Gannett’s switch to community tool provision stems from the innovative approach undertaken over the last several years by the Cincinnati Enquirer.

Since as early as 2006, visitors to Enquirer.com could utilize the paper’s “Get Published” tool which allowed readers to upload their own stories, photos and more and choose which community pages the content belonged on. According to staff member Mandy Jenkins, who I met a few months ago at Social Media Breakfast Cincinnati, the tool became the Enquirer’s, “engine for super-local content. It allowed us to push information from press releases and similar sources much faster.”

In the beginning, what the newsroom saw from it’s citizen journalists was opinion-based, column-type material. But with strategic planning and intentional outreach to the community, the Enquirer began to see a groundswell. The newspaper sent a reporter to talk with community councils, special interest groups, schools, churches and more. The purpose was to teach members of the community how and – more importantly – what they could submit as content to Enquirer.com.

From storm photos to community event reports, the content slowly started to build. Nothing goes live on the site without appropriate newsroom review and anything submitted is accompanied by the byline, “User Submitted,” but take a quick browse of some community pages there and you’ll see story after story after story from Cincinnati’s citizen journalists. Sometimes, the content is strong enough to be elevated to the site’s general news pages.

The best content even gets printed in the Your Hometown Enquirer community and neighborhood insert sections that go out each week.

“The people just love it,” Jenkins said. “They can put pictures of their kid’s youth sports events. A lot of it really does get printed. The people in the community have been doing it a while and have gotten good at it.”

Jenkins credited Enquirer V.P. James Jackson with leading the innovation there. That innovation has evolved to a point where the main paper, the outlying community non-daily papers the company owns and the user-generated content is all brought together in one, seamless community news and event resource.

“It gets a lot more stories out there than we would ever be able to do on our own,” Jenkins said. “It’s very local, community-level stuff we would probably not know about otherwise.”

The community approach has helped the Enquirer not only strengthen and grow its connection with the community, but the effort ladders up to its overall mission to cover news and events in the Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky area. By utilizing self-publishing tools and asking and empowering its readers to contribute to the news gathering process, the publication is bucking the trend of downward spiral.

According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, for the six months ending March 31, 2008, the Enquirer’s weekday circulation is up 2.9 percent. The national average for the same time period was a 3.6 percent decline.

Jenkins says the outlet is in the planning stages of a new outreach effort to bring more people into the fold of using the tools. Adding sharing elements and educating the users on social networking and bookmarking elements are in the offing, as are group tools that will allow users to connect with one another more readily.

And get this – reporters and editors at the paper are part of the activation plan to grow the community efforts. Part of their charge will be spearheading community and staff collaborative blogs on particular topics. A beta test centered around transportation is already underway and the users are providing as much, if not more, content than the paid staff.

The paper recently launched a collaborative blog chronicling the Summer Olympics. Reporters Dustin Dow and Jeff Swinger provide updates, but the Enquirer also found Peter Wade, a Cincinnati-area man attending the games as a fan, who blogs from that perspective as well. The blog provides perhaps the first 360-degree view of the Olympic experience, all from one source.

As you can tell, it’s easy to get excited about what the Enquirer is doing. They aren’t just churning out social media tools and claiming to be on the cutting edge. They’re engaging and empowering their readers, embracing citizen journalism and, as a result, they are accomplishing something most traditional media outlets are losing: Relevance with their audience.

For more, explore the Enquirer at Cincinnati.com.

IMAGE: “Newspaper and tea” by Matt Callow on Flickr.

With LouisvilleMojo.com hitting 50 million pageviews per month and serving as a sandbox-type test platform for the feature set, clients of MetroMojo’s platform can rest assured features will scale and servers will be able to handle the load. Because of the diversity in feature offerings, an established advertising platform and Mojo’s approach as content enablers, not primary content providers, the solution is custom made for media properties (television and radio stations or newspapers) trying to leap the Web 2.0 hurdle.

While we were there, Keith and Chuck sat down for an episode of Social Media Explorer TV.

MetroMojo.com is the place to go for more information. You can also check out LouisvilleMojo.com to see the local social network in action. The new feature set will appear over the next few weeks in the form of content placement and promotion.

There were a few points during this week’s ad:tech Chicago conference when I was thinking “Did I brave air travel for this?”

Overall, I was somewhat disappointed with ad:tech Chicago, billed as “The Event for Digital Marketing!” (Be sure to remember that exclamation point, guys!  Good copy needs more exclamation points!)

To be fair, thanks to issues with the afforementioned air travel, I missed most of the first day, arriving just in time to catch Clay Shirky’s keynote “Here Comes Every Customer:  The Former Audience is Talking Around You.“  Which was, for me, pretty much the highlight of the conference.   I’ve been a fan of Shirky’s since I caught his Web2.0 speech, which I wrote about in a post here considering whether or not social media is a waste of time.  You won’t be shocked to hear that I think it’s not–but if you’re currently doing social media marketing work, then ad:tech may be.

When I found out Shirky was keynoting, and that the second day had several social media sessions, I was pretty excited about going.  Being relatively new to agency life (I spent most of my earlier career working in marketing on the client side, as the in-house marketing person), I was stoked about going to my first ever Big Event.

And to be sure, there were some great things about the conference.  I’d never been to Chicago, much less Navy Pier where the event was held, and I found both to be quite awesome.

I met some folks who were every bit as excited about marketing on the web as I am, and that’s was great.  I discovered that apparently, all geeks, whether ad geeks or social media geeks, love playing plastic guitars on video games.

Someone from Tribal Fusion connected me with a company in the exhibitor hall called House Party, and they’re doing some very cool things with brand evangelism.

The panelists in the sessions I attended (Power Panel: Widgets and Applications - The New Media Network, The Consumer Experience in a Multi-Platform World, Part II, The Long Tail of Social Media: Analyzing the Value Proposition for Publishers and Advertisers, and Viral Branding: Creating Brand Ambassadors) did have some interesting case studies with some impressive numbers.  And if you were a marketing director looking for some ammunition to convince your stakeholders to embrace social media, it probably would have been valuable information.

But if you are currently working in social media, following the blogs and microblogs of the thought leadership in the field, and were looking for something groundbreaking or new, you were probably sorely disappointed.

The irony of ad:tech is that almost all the sessions on social proved that actual participation in social media is a far better way to learn about it than attending a conference or event. I think that may have been the crux of the problem.  They were talking to an audience that effectively doesn’t exist:  marketers who want to understand and “leverage” social media but don’t want to use it themselves.

Or maybe that audience exists, but since they’re not participating in the social web, their quiet appreciation of the material covered was effectively invisible to those actually using it.  Come to think of it, that seems far more likely.

As I said to some colleagues at the end of the conference, it’s as if there are two groups in digital advertising: the traditional advertising folks who have finally moved through all five stages of grief and accepted that the internet isn’t going away, but still want to do things as if they’re in a static, one-way medium; and the people who embraced the interactive aspect of interactive marketing immediately and are now saying “Guys, can we please move on?”

In his keynote, Shirky said that in regards to the social web, it’s no longer a matter of who gets it and who doesn’t get it, but rather what elements of social media are a fit for which companies, communications purposes, and contexts.  I would respectfully disagree.  I think there are still an awful lot of holdouts, particularly in the advertising industry, who don’t get social media.  Because I don’t think it’s possible to get it if you don’t participate in it yourself.  It’s an intrinsically personal medium, and I don’t think you can understand it sans personal experience. Shirky was speaking at the institutional level, and I’m speaking at the level of individuals who are working in marketing and advertising, but ultimately action is taken or not taken at the individual level.

In the session on Widgets and Applications, towards the beginning one of the panelists said “if by the end of this session you know what a widget is, what an application is, and what the difference is between them, you know more than the majority of people.”

The unspoken follow up to that statement is, if you walked in here knowing that already, don’t expect to get much out of this session.  And if you didn’t know it when you walked in, it’s pretty likely you’re still going to walk away still not actually understanding what the appeal of widgets and applications are.

At one point during the “Long Tail of Social Media” panel, someone leaned over to me and said “is it just me, or are they not talking at all about the long tail?  They keep talking around the subject.”

I could basically sum up that whole session in one sentence.  “Don’t just focus on blogs with massive traffic, find the ones that have a highly engaged, if smaller, audience that has high relevance and contextual fit for your brand and message.” If I can sum up an hour long panel in one sentence, I have to ask myself how valuable that hour was.

Okay, that’s the bad.  But I’m nothing if not resourceful in trying to extract as much value as possible out of any experience.  And there was some good stuff, mostly in the keynotes I attended. And since the breakout sessions were extremely repetitive, and mostly echoed the best stuff from the keynotes, it makes summing up the big takeaways of the conference fairly simple.  So here goes.  The top 5 takeaway messages, as I saw it:

1.  Engaging the social web is no longer optional, because so far, the companies that have been most badly burned by have been the ones who tried to pretend they can ignore it. The Scrabulous debacle is the most well-known example, but there are several.  It’s now just simply too easy for massive numbers of pissed off customers to organize and make themselves heard.  Playing possum will cost you more than engaging them.

2. You have to keep up with the speed of the social web, and stop bullshitting that you don’t have the resources to do it. When it comes to dealing with problems, speed of response is critical in determining how big the issue gets.  How much do you think “Dell Hell” cost the Dell brand?  Compare that with the cost to have Direct2Dell on Twitter.  Or ComcastCares.   Can you keep up with every conversation? No.  Does that mean you’re off the hook from participating in any of them, or at least finding one outlet that works and letting the word spread organically that this is your direct point of conversation?  Hell no.

3. The emphasis in marketing on the web has shifted from trying to force everyone to come to your content, to deploying your content where the audience is. In the lunch forum presented by Avenue A | Razorfish on Social Influence Marketing, Shiv Singh said “The social web is becoming the mainstream web.”  Users are going to the web to connect with people more than “to find cool stuff”–and increasingly, even those looking for “cool stuff” are depending on their online friends to find it for them.

4. Although we’ve reached the point where the cost of ignoring social is greater than the cost of engaging it, social isn’t going to replace other forms of marketing, any more than digital media replaced traditional. All three have an aggregate effect, enhancing the others to make them more effective.  The net effect of consumers using the social web to get more organized and activated, as well as many brands taking the lead and pushing into the space, is that brands will have to have to invest in all three to remain competitive.  To borrow a sports metaphor, if every team starts using performance enhancing drugs, natural performance is going to be unable to compete.

5. Marketing and PR cannot cover over quality issues, and listening is half of participating in the social web.  Maybe the more important half, and definitely the starting place.  Ultimately, if you have a product or service quality issue, social media has leveled the playing field enough that there isn’t a media buy big enough to drown out the voices of your unhappy consumers.  And ultimately, that’s a good thing, because for the first time, companies can eavesdrop on the honest, unvarnished, sometimes unhappy, opinions of their brand and make the changes they need to make.

Okay, I think I can hear a big fat “Duh” from most of the folks reading this blog.   And that’s my final, bonus #6 takeaway: if you really want to know what’s going on in social media marketing, truthfully, you can find it faster in your RSS reader. If you’re depending on an annual conference to get caught up to date on what’s going on in the space, don’t bother.  If you’re not participating, you’re not going to get it by listening to those who are.

But on the other hand, RSS readers rarely offer an open bar or a red carpet.

I sent all my Cubs fan friends a headline that said Wrigley would become Liquid Drano Field where playoff hopes get sucked down the drain.

The SaveOurName.com effort is chronicled at http://www.saveourname.com where you can also sign the petition, add the Facebook application to invite your friends to join the list and grab the widget for your blog or profile page of choice. The Wrigley naming petition is part of the Jim Beam, “Here’s To The Stuff Inside,” campaign with which I am involved.

Meanwhile, enjoy this little number.

And kudos to the Beam team, which includes a number of agency partners. The primary ideation and work on this particular component of what we’ve been up to is from the excellent folks at Padilla Speer and Beardsley and Zezza Network.

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