MarCom Professional

You won’t find the secret to business success online.

So stop looking.

Because everyone is scrambling to produce better content more often, there’s great incentive (eyeballs and wallets) to create new and better guides for business.

I mean, Brian Solis told us how to create and cultivate a brand in social media in just seven steps.

Chris Brogan just shared a simple formula for blogging success that got him 50,000 subscribers.

Forbes thought it prudent to create a slideshow entitled “In Pictures: How To Fire Someone”

And the list goes on.

But as wonderful as these resources and others like them are, their content is really only a distillation of a larger, more complex set of ideas. More...

Given a search on Amazon returns over 31,000 books on stress, and WebMD has a “Stress Management Center,” there are plenty of other more qualified places you could go to for “tips and tricks.”

This is about stress and work, more specifically, your life at work.

This manifesto is a statement of the principles by which I intend to live. If you believe the same, I’d invite you to sign it by adding a comment below.

And if you’re inclined to share, feel free to copy a part or the whole thing. Post it on your blog. Print it out and give it to your boss. More...

As the roles of marketing and PR orient themselves away from the industrial practices of the last century to something more socially aware, I think it’s important that we question the role of “the voice of the organization.”

Should organizations speak with one voice that reflects a singular identity and purpose?

Or has the rising role of individual voices in the context of networks supplanted the need for “org” speak, replacing it with the speech of loosely connected individuals?

As a disclaimer, I’m writing this as a theoretical discussion, not a manifesto or even a how-to. More...

The catalyst

Not surprisingly, Facebook’s Open Graph has raised a series of complaints about lack of objective “openness” in the whole project.

After all, Facebook technically owns the protocol, the data, the access. But on the other hand, they’re giving the web a gift—a new understanding of the relationships not just between linked pages (like Google) but of the relationships between people who use those pages.

As TechCrunch’s MG Siegler reported, “Grab the popcorn. There is a serious nerd fight brewing.”

The bigger issue

But the issue isn’t really about Facebook. More...

In case you’ve been sleeping, yesterday at the f8 developer conference, Facebook announced Open Graph, a new killer app.

What’s changed

If you aren’t up to speed, here are the three most important updates (and you can read the rest on Mashable):

1. With the new “Facebook for Web Sites” social plugins (the like button is featured at the top of this post), you don’t need to log in to a web page to engage with its content.

More...

Beyond all of the iPad hype, beyond the lovers and the haters and the blenders, there’s a really serious question lurking, and Doc Searls nailed it in his brain dump response:

Do we want the Internet to be broadcasting 2.0 — run by a few content companies and their allied distributors? Or do we want it to be the wide open marketplace it was meant to be in the first place, and is good for everybody?

On closed systems

Searls, Cory Doctorow, Dave Winer, Mark Pilgrim, Alex Payne (cf. this post also), Tim Bray, and Peter Kirn, take the side of the open marketplace.

Predictably among the common complaints: More...

With print sales falling faster than tween girls are falling for Justin Bieber, book publishers are getting a bit panicky. In not so modest desperation, they’re looking for a savior…

Enter the iPad.

Advertisers are lining up for periodicals, and according to the Wall Street Journal, breaking out their checkbooks for iPad deals. This has caused some minor elation, even among more traditional book distributors.

This, I think, is foolish.

Fact: the iPad won’t save publishers

This is a given. Publishers and news organizations need to get over themselves. Henry Blodget tells us why: More...

If you still remember the banner above, bless you my friend.

And even if you don’t remember that banner, thanks for reading.

If you read this blog, I am deeply grateful. Thanks for trusting me with your time. You are the reason that I keep writing—even if this isn’t the biggest blog on the web, I’m grateful for each and every one of you.

If we haven’t connected on Twitter yet, it’s a shame. You can find me @wordpost. More...

Rethinking Product and Brand

Product has historically been branded as a combination of physical properties, supporting service, and symbolic value: the Lexus has leather seats, is covered by a substantial warranty, and perhaps above all else, is a symbol of status.

The commerce that’s followed has been built on quid pro quo transaction—a product made up of attributes, service, and symbol in exchange for capital. But in social business structures, it’s my prediction that this type of mechanistic exchange will no longer be the primary goal of business operation, but instead one intersection of shared time and meaning. More...

The Internet in all of its social splendor is revolutionary, some would say the most revolutionary change in the the history of the world when to comes to the way humans communicate.

It’s opened doors for some (e.g. Facebook), posted huge challenges for others (e.g. publishing), and disrupted all of our lives.

But the present experience of revolution isn’t new. Consider this from Cory Doctorow’s Content (links mine):

…forget all that business about how the Internet’s copying model is more disruptive than the technologies that preceded it. For Christ’s sake, the Vaudeville performers who sued Marconi for inventing the radio had to go from a regime where they had one hundred percent control over who could get into the theater and hear them perform to a regime where they had zero percent control over who could build or acquire a radio and tune into a recording of them performing.

More...