Soon, we should expect devices and appliances of all kinds to emit digital updates.  Will it be signal or noise?  It depends on your perspective. This “Ambient Status” is in which a non-living device or non-human beings compulsively create digital signals and updates.

With technologies at hand that allows anyone to share their opinion and status, the world becomes more connected. Perhaps one of the challenges in our overly connected world is the damage that excessive noise from many who publish causes.   It won’t be limited to just people: expect our cars, refrigerators, servers, pets and plants to start tweeting, blogging, and live streaming.  

For example, we should expect in the near future that:

• Cars to alert us in SMS, Twitter or email when they need to be serviced, have low air pressure or other service.  In fact, we’re already seeing technology that will allow your car to text on your behalf while you drive.
• Automated alerts from loved ones will be tweeted or texted to us. We know that Onstar can alert a centralized office if there’s an issue with the car being in an accident or stolen, why not alert loved ones (idea via @rototok)
• Medical devices like life alert, or wrist bands or watches that measure heart rate and pressure could be used to auto alert loved ones of sick or elderly.
• Refrigerators, washing machines, coffee machines and other home appliances will alert us when they need service or have completed a task.  If your plant can already Tweet when it’s thirsty (yes this already exists) then why can’t your air conditioning system and lights? 
• It won’t be just home appliances, expect overloaded servers, web systems, and alerts when your boss is approaching your cubicle to be able to emit signals.
• In the not-so-far fetched future, we can expect our pets, infants, and even unborn children to emit digital signals that we could aggregate in Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, SMS or email.  Heck even my puppy @goodboyrumba already tweets, (with some aid from his human servants) but we could expect new collars that measure his bio rhythms to emerge and let us know when it’s time to be let out for number 1 or 2.

The real question is, is this ‘ambient intimacy‘ or just adding to the ‘noise’.  While it may help us to be more connected, aware, and easier to manage our lives, it’s also going to make us a little more frantic, over-sensitive, and overwhelmed.

I’ve been watching this space for a few years now, and I’ve started to notice that the people (often those that we think of that are at the upper echelons) are not able to scale, as a result here’s what they’re doing to compensate:

Many social media bloggers don’t even manage their own accounts, they often hire virtual assistants to do their Facebook and Twitter follows and replies.

Quite of few of those top social media bloggers don’t even answer their own emails, they have a virtual assistant that reviews them, sorts them, and sometimes responds on their behalf.

Many of the top social media news blogs are on a race to see who can publish the fastest, why? whoever gets the earliest time stamp often gets the credit and links from other blogs, and will risest fastest on the techmeme tower or google news gauge. As a result, many of these blogs will publish the headline, then adjust, edit, format, punctuate, and add links to the post in real time.

A few authors that have published one of the thousands of social media books outsource their content to ghost writers who create the majority of the content. Although it’s the headlining author’s name that drives book sales, in many cases they don’t actually write the content.

Many of the top celebrities or top social media names don’t even write their own blog posts and tweets, they may outsource it to others.

So what does this mean? It means the social media space is starting to look like just about every other industry that starts to get mainstream. Social media is often the premise built on 1:1 relationships, and even with technology, that clearly doesn’t scale, and I can relate.

What about me? I’m asked every few days “How do you do it all” my answer is “I don’t, the wheels are falling off” Well you’ve probably noticed I’ve not been blogging much, nor tweeting lately, I’ve been under heavy travel and projects (that I’m behind on). Every blog post and tweet that you see is me, including all the errors and typos that come along with them. I will admit that sometimes, I even updated blog posts after they publish, to polish it up. I skim all my emails, read many, but if I answer, I promise you that’s always me. I may not be good at scaling my social efforts, but I assure you, I’m authentic, warts and all.

I can relate to those who don’t scale well. If you’ve ever met me at an event this last year, you may have noticed dark circles under my eyes, and somewhat of a flustered appearance. I recently had a long talk with a good friend yesterday, when I’m tired from traveling nearly every week, you may notice that I actually draw my strength from within or being online, not always from others. So if I’ve ever came across as a bit messy and sapped, I certainly don’t intend to, I’m just stretched to the limit at times. 

So what happened to transparency and authenticity?  Maybe it’s the econony, with less resources, and more pressure, we’re all being stretched to the limits.  Or maybe, this is the evoluation of every industry, music, art, and film started out simple and pure, then became institutionalized. Or maybe, I just never bothered to look  close enough.

Update: Chris Saad, who inspired me to write this, has responsed from his own blog. Paid content highlights the challenges. This post has generated a lot of discussion from my friends as I meet them in person, interesting.

I’ve helped dozens of companies define their social media strategy based on research. Often, we conduct custom research efforts to evaluate first if their customers are using these tools (technographics) then we often talk with many stakeholders to find out their thoughts on social media.

Sadly, in some cases, brands that had active customer bases using social technologies were not ready to participate themselves due to culture. Whether is paralysis, legal, or a cultural influence from management, or even location (I did a tour in Japan to find out how social media is growing there).

One example that comes to mind is a financial company I worked with, they are one of the ones that have an incredible amount of money –and a lot at risk as their customers were on the verge of self-connecting to each other without their account teams involved. Despite the clear business need to ‘fish where the fish were’ we advised them not to participate as their internal culture was not ready, there were too many roadblocks.

Recently, after a presentation I gave at the Ominture Summit last week, I was able to meet the marketing manager at Apple who’s responsible for social media. While I’ll respect the privacy of our conversation, I know the impacts of culture on deployment.

What about big companies? Yes, they are a unique beast, and typically organize in what I call the ‘Tire’, where adoption happens at the edges of the company. Let’s lean on IBM’s Adam Christensen who presented this slideshare of how big blue was able to filter social computing throughout the company.

The impact of corporate culture on enterprise social media

View more presentations from Adam Christensen. (tags: culture ibm)

What other companies really live and breathe social computing throughout their DNA? Facebook, Google, Microsoft, SUN, and of course any social media vendor.

Love to hear your thoughts on these questions that many struggle with:

1) Does culture impact adoption of social technologies within a corporation?
2) Even if customers are using social technologies, and the culture is not ready, how will you convince the powers that be?
3) How do you change a top down culture to a bottom up?

Some companies are wary of personal brands
Last week, I spoke to a social media strategist as a very large consumer packaged goods company, he expressed to me over this client call (called an inquiry) that he was concerned about employees getting too popular due to their personal brands and as a result, getting pulled right out of the company.

[Despite that social technologies can improve customer relationships, the risks may be too great for some companies to bear, as a result, some corporations will shy away from allowing employees to have personal brands]

Personal brands can bring trust to monolithic corporations
In the age of transparency and conversation, brands know they need to join customers where they are, and that often means in social sites where real people are having real conversations –it’s about building trust. As a result, social media marketing continues to be adopted by brands; I help them daily.

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Examining the risks of personal brands
Personal brands are indeed a powerful tool, for one, it’s helped me get my current and previous job, and it will likely be a factor for my next, however there are a few risks to brands:

Risk 1: The personal brand is a cost to the company: Why let employees build their own brand on the dime of the company or leveraging the brand of the employer?

Risk 2: The now popular employee is likely to get poached: Perhaps a common concern I hear is that competitors can easily identify the stars, and hire away these folks along with their market reputation and google juice.

Risk 3: Employee exits leaving a chasm to fill: In the modern workforce, we hear less of lifetime employees seeking pension than we do of job migrants, or career gypsies that move from company to company every few years. As a result, after they’ve built up trust with the market using social tools, they leave the company, and a gap is left that the brand can’t fill.

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How companies respond
Brands respond to these risks in a number of ways, I’ve categorized them based on level of sophistication.

First Reaction: Keep marketing faceless: Lean on traditional marketing, avoid human voices to come through.

Second Reaction: Approach with team or hybrid approach: Rather than encourage personal brands, you may instead see corporate team blogs that have an equal weighting to employees. Another example is with Dell and Oracle employees who fuse their name with their employer –it’s both personal and professional.

Third Reaction: Let the customers be the product face: Perhaps the most sophisticated way to market a product isn’t to put your employees on the product blog, but instead, your customers. I don’t see too many examples of this currently, but you can expect this to be an approach in the future.

Fourth Reaction: Allow personal brands to proliferate: Some companies allow for employees to create their own blogs, generate revenue on their blogs, and be who and what they want.

Portable brands desirable in the age of career gypsies and job migrants
It’s rare to hear of the life long employee who retires after 40 years of service with a fat pension, in fact many workers today move from job to job –even more frequently in the tech industry. In the end, personal brands within the enterprise are inevitable, just ask Dan Schawbel if anyone wants to track new talent, or hire Generation Y, they’ll have to accept that individuals will have personal brands and they are portable. In fact, recruiters are often seeking on forums, blogs, and social networks to seek out talent.

Personal brands here to stay, with increase in adoption during recession
In my recent post, I pointed out that no matter how hard you work, or how smart you are, you can still get layed off. As a result, expect an increase in professionals to be on social networks like Facebook or LinkedIn, and using conversational tools like blogs and twitter to promote their offerings. The savvy career gypsy will build this up before they need a job.

Now that I’ve put all the options and variations out there, I’d love to hear what you think corporations should do to protect their resources (brand, talent, and time), as well as build trusting relationships with customers?

The rapture of social media paralyzes some brands
Recently, I’ve spoken to a few large brands that have been getting the sermon from a few social media consultants about damnation to hell if they don’t convert. These type of scare tactics include suggesting radical change need to occur for brands to join the conversation, as well as handing over all control to the marketplace, should everyone in marketing can pack up and go home early?

Most brands aren’t firing their marketing group
In reality, this is rarely the case, (well cept for Dell, and a few others who had trial by fire) most brands slowly adopt these tools and the communication changes that happens, and I’ve never seen a brand completely turn over messaging control to the marketplace completely, have you? While there certainly are changes afoot, as technology impacts progress, there are course corrections happening at many companies, but I’ve yet to meet one CMO who’s fired the MarCom and Communications team in lieu of a team of external bloggers.

For conservative brands, take a pragmatic approach
Instead, perhaps the best way for conservative brands to move forward is to focus on three things:

1) Understand if their marketplace is using these tools, and how. First see if your prospects, decision makers or influencers are using these tools, do a study first, take inventory.
2) Next, have a goal, or an objective, rather than jumping in rather than being pushed in because someone else lit you on fire. Don’t allow fear to be the sole driver of your decisions, instead, focus on what success will look like.
3) Experiment internally with these tools where it’s safer, where mistakes can happen without the ridicule of the public looking on.

Focus on clear business strategy rather than allowing someone to light you on fire
While there are certainly changes happening in communication and marketing, this doesn’t mean you throw out the playbook, and react. Instead, for conservative or risk averse cultures, focus on understanding the changes in your market build a plan and experiment where it’s safe. When you look at moments of great change, see how history remembers the difference between radicals sand revolutionaries.

Let’s be objective, there’s a lot of challenges (and opportunities) with the social media industry, I’m cataloging them and tagging them ‘challenges‘.

This post is not about Thomas vs Simon B, but instead about the long term online impacts to personal and corporate brands.

A focus on online reputation and brands
I’m hesitant to publish this post, not because I don’t think it’s important, but instead, I don’t want to be caught in the cross fire between Thomas Hawk and Simon B of the SF museum. My focus is on the online impacts, not the specific quarrel these two have around photographers rights, I wasn’t at the museum that day, so I really can’t comment on what happened.

[Seventy-seven percent of recruiters report using search engines to find background data on candidates. Of that number, 35 percent eliminated a candidate because of what they found online... -StarTribune]

First of all, please note that Thomas Hawk is a friend of mine for a few years now, he supported me at my first Lunch 2.0 at Hitachi, and a blogger dinner with the CEO of Hitachi Data Systems, and even took the picture I use everywhere (see right), I admire the man’s work, we will continue to be friends for many years.

A personal brand is damaged
Yesterday, he published a post outlining a conflict he had with a director at a SF museum regarding photographing in public. The post characterized Simon B (I’m not using his full name as I don’t want to make the situation worse) as an a-hole. Thomas’s blog is well read, his social media prowess strong among his community and in true social media fashion, it spread to Flickr, Zoomr (where Thomas is the CEO), Friendfeed, Twitter and perhaps the biggest driver –it was seen by millions on Digg (including a portrait of Simon).

Today’s resume is your Google search results
Today, if you do a search result and examine the first search engine results page (SERP) you’ll notice that as of today 9/10 results are tied to Simon being an “a-hole”. Perhaps most importantly the first two results are of Thomas (we know most clicks start there), the only one that’s not is Simon B’s Facebook profile, which has very little info.

[Your relevant resume is your Google Search results. You should spend as much time managing your search results as you do your printed resume]

Simon had very little online footprint to start with, and now it will be dominated online by all of these social media elements. Even if Thomas chose to change the title of his blog and flickr, the Twitter, tailrank, and many other online echos will forever be archived –Simon’s online reputation is forever linked to this incident.

Essentially, Simon B’s online reputation has been burnt.

The Long Term Impacts of Online Criticisms on Personal Brands
For Simon, these online results are a big impact, we know that many recruiters use the web to find candidates, and seeing several results like this could result in a recruiter passing up a candidate. If a recruiter doesn’t care, or doesn’t see this, hiring managers are likely to do Google searches on the individual finding this. Of course, this could swing towards Simon’s advantage, some museums or businesses may seem him as serving as a defender of the property, if he positions himself correctly. Perhaps the biggest damage is to Simon’s personal and family relationships, who will see this incident online for years to come.

Key takeaways:

For those that don’t already participate online, and have a small digital footprint, they don’t have a strong platform to stand from.

Anyone is susceptible to brand damage, even if you’re not in this space (Simon is not in a web professional)

Bloggers with large social media platforms are incredibly powerful, and must recognize the long term impacts of their actions.

Businesses should assume every customer (and employee) is capable of impacting an individual or company’s online reputation

Companies should already have a crises plan ready to deal with online criticisms, read this article from CBS on outsourcing brand damage experts

Simon B may have to buy search ads to get his printed resume or story correctly positioned

Customers and Corporations should first consider the Company Customer Pact

Update: To be fair, if Simon or the museum come forward with a statement, I’ll update this post and link to it.

Thomas Hawk has left a thoughtful comment below, see comment #28

A similar blog post (and discussion on Friendfeed) has started to take place.

A post reviewing Thomas’s change and update to the post (it now reads “jerk”)– since the community reaction has been so fiery

August 13: The Museum has made an official statement, suggesting we move on –I agree.

Dec 3, 2008: It’s a few months later and Thomas Hawk’s blog still shows first for searches on Simon’s name in my SERP, of course, your results could vary.

Like every industry, the social media industry is plagued with problems that for now, are slowly being solved. It’s important to note the challenges in our industry in order to first identify them and eventually overcome them. There is no indicator from our data that Social Media will go away, in fact the adoption rates of Generation Y, indicate this is a trend, but with that said, let’s first examine the issues in the industry:

The Many Challenges of the Social Media Industry

A current lack of profits
The social media space, a movement where anyone can participate has resulted in low or no revenues for most participants. For example, there are millions of bloggers, and only a few of them can claim serious revenues, and even a smaller subset have built media empires. Aside from the users themselves, many businesses focus on generating hits, visits, or registered users and will figure out how to monetize. Take a look at social networks, some valued at billions, yet we’ve yet to hear success stories of hand over fist revenues. Like the universe, stars and revenues are far and few in between, a majority of creators will not generate revenues.

Some innovation spurred by funding –not revenues
Both a problem and an opportunity, investors (VCs) continue to inject money into this space –often funding unproven business models or one-off technology. In more mature industries, it’s unlikely we’d see such an influx of spending, but often because innovation was spurred off the success of actual revenues. With so many companies being funded without actual revenue, the market is exposed to a several variants of the same feature.

Low barriers to entry make competition cut throat
Commodity software is always a concern, and when this occurs, there are so many entrants the market is confused –unable to determine who to purchase from, and competiors may eat into each others margins. Take for example the crowded community platform space (aka white label social networking) industry that has over 100 vendors –all offering very similar software.

Excessive noise drowns out signal
With everyone able to create content and share the details of their personal lives in detailed minutia, the problem of excessive content becomes an issue. Every 60 seconds, 13 hours of content are uploaded to YouTube (says YouTube employee), and millions of tweets are generated every day. With so much content being created, how will one filter out what’s important?

Amateurism threatens professionalism
Nodding to Andrew Keen’s criticism of the dangers of amateurs creating less-than-professional (and sometimes incorrect) content then spreading it prolifically this has caused some concern for those who consume this content. The problem of course, isn’t really the quality of content, but the ability to quickly decipher what’s important –and what’s not.

Marketers move in without community consideration
Wherever people move, marketers follow, while some do it smart and savvy, many will approach it from a different style. For example, the concept of pay for post, social media optimization, bacn, spam-like content on blogs and social networks, and other marketing noise is and will continue to be a challenge whenever communities congregate. (updated per Jennifer’s suggestion)

Corporate and personal brandjacking
Becoming more and more common, brands –and individuals– can easily be brandjacked as others take their user name, domains, and assert themselves as someone else. Given there are hundreds if not thousands of websites to monitor one’s brand, squatting these names will increasingly become difficult over time.

Lack of standards causes disparate experiences
Although better than many industries, the open web still slowly moves towards common standards of logins, social graphs, and content types. Even protocols like Google’s OpenSocial were designed to unite activities and applications across any social network, each container (social network) requires tweaking to customize to each platform, while some –like Facebook– don’t participate at all.

Cultural changes cause resistance
Without a doubt, this movement of self-publishing and connecting is a disruption to the marketplace, media, the buying cycle, and the marketing funnel. Generation old barriers are crumbling from a command and control viewpoint to an open and collaborative style of business and personal communications. With these radical changes comes resistance from those who were previously in power (media, management, marketers, governments) who are slow to adopt –and thus resist.

Identifying true expertise challenging
In experienced industries, track records are defined by years and sometimes decades, in this burgeoning new industry, it’s often difficult to decipher who is a true expert –and those that have actually performed a social media change to make a difference. Mostly, track records only go back a few years, and few can demonstrate a return on investment.

Difficulty measuring ROI
Despite many attempts to measure “engagement” or “ROI” there still is no industry standard to measure the efforts of social media at the personal –and corporate level. While many have developed their own ability to measure on a one-off way, there’s no industry way to quickly –and easily agree pan-industry.

Conversational Marketing may not scale
Peter Kim points out that social media marketing may not scale. Primarily due to the 1:1 relationships that are needed to engage in conversations, it’s difficult for one person (despite how large their platform is) to cover all the conversations in a given market. Be sure to read the thoughtful comments. (added August 23)

Rumors can impact stock prices
This example of a rumor spreading mis-truths about Steve Jobs health actually cost a dip in Apple stocks. With rumors flying around more easily than the time it write an email, the internet often doesn’t have time to self-correct before bloggers hungry for link bait jump on, adding to the flames. We often see this pile on behavior during blog fights too.

Hyperconnected can’t scale
For some hyperconnected folks on blogs, twitter, friendfeed and facebook, they don’t scale as everyone reaches out to them, as a result, they miss deadlines, opportunities during this long battle to stay up to speed. Technology has created this problem when the world flattens out and there are no more gate keepers, I thought it would be fun to be like this, but in reality, it’s a curse too.

I realize this post could infuriate some social media purists, but I wanted to provide an objective view of what I’m seeing in order to map out danger spots on the map, so we can collectively overcome them. I hope you read my other posts where I list out challenges of social networks, widgets, blogging and others, if you plan to run in this space, first know the hurdles.

If you can think of other challenges in our industry –feel free to leave a comment, I’m curious to hear your reactions. (Update: On a related note, Jeremy Pepper is holding the experts to task)

This post has now been translated to Italian, thanks Marco