DISQUS

It is interesting to see 'little creatures' like blogs and now twitter throwing light at the whole brand thing. I have beaten that dead horse - branding - many times over the years on my blog, most recently last month after spending time with my client who is one of the largest brands in the US (no names please! :P).

http://www.mediainfluencer.net/2009/01/brand-as...

I go on about branding as behaviour, which is a point that Robin seems to be making in his post. If you think about brand as identity and branding as behaviour lots of the idiotic advice rightly ridiculed in the post just looks absurd. Fictional or inanimate characters' behaviour fools no one and is just another tool in the messaging toolbox. And one-way communication is messaging, two-way communication is behaviour. Twitter is rather supercharged on that front...

Oh and let's not forget relationships.. which you can't have until you learn to communicate and, dare I say, speak human. :)

Actually I would. Conversation online is not just in comments, it's distributed and a link to someone's post is a contribution to the conversation. Comments are often a noise, as I learnt from the days of political blogging.

Also, if you bother to publish your thoughts under your persistent identity, i.e. on your own blog - it becomes a better contribution to a conversation than a mere comment on someone else's.

As for media being social? Who cares when the term 'media' and term 'social' are both being redefined on the web... ask 5-10 years from now.

Herdmeister is spot on, as usual, about what I am trying to get across. My presentation didn't come on the back of Cluetrain actually, though of course as a groupie, I would have been influenced by it. But that's a long time ago, long enough to build on it. And in any case, Cluetrain is being updated as I type this..

The presentation was delivered to a roomful of 'communications professionals' of a rather large healthcare company (a double whammy as they are regulated out of any meaningful communication with the outside!). The slides are loosely based on this blog post: http://www.mediainfluencer.net/2007/09/power-eq... plus the context of the audience etc etc.

It was meant to reflect my experience of the (social) web and of working with comms depts of large corporations. My point was that cutting through all the 'comms skills' BS we find something much older and much more basic than what marketers, PR, agencies etc peddle as communication or, more recently, conversation. I never claimed to have 'discovered' this, merely stated the obvious - i.e. communication is older than the industry that purports to be expert at it. I make a similar point about marketing and advertising here: http://www.mediainfluencer.net/2009/02/nightmar...

I don't care about the industry/agencies/marketers/social media wannabes etc etc making sense out of all this. I care about individuals and their ability not only to create, publish, distribute, collaborate, share and all the juicy web goodness but ALSO about their ability to ignore interruptions, impositions by others and to resist imbalances of power (market or otherwise). That's why I love the web and do what I do (cue VRM).

"What I’d like to do is construct an RSS feed of the kind of things I’m interested in for my kitchen remodel. Vendors could read that feed and respond with feeds of their own that I could wrap into a consolidated feed where I could rank, tag, filter, sort, and search the RSS items. The user contract with the vendor is: don’t offer me feeds that aren’t relevant to my interest/gesture feed or you will be labeled a spammer."

That's exactly what I concluded some time ago and what I want for myself. Given that there isn't much out there (checked evernote and live mash and they don't really cut it), I decided to try to design such a tool myself. here is more, if interested. http://www.mediainfluencer.net/2008/05/i-haz-a-...

Yes, I think picking on JP's posts was on the money. :)

VRM is another way to address the data ownership and portability and the fact that there are more people having very similar conversations is an encouraging sign.

You might want to have a look at this: http://www.mediainfluencer.net/2008/02/power-to...

Open ID is a great step forward but ultimately, I don't want to be logging into someone else's platform. Also, I don't just want to be able to take my data from platform to platform/social network to social network - I want to apply various capabilities to my data directly when under my control. As I see it, there are only two platforms - the individual user and the web.

Btw, can't see where you are based but there are regular monthly VRM meetings in London (www.vrmhub.pbwiki.com) in case you want to watch the debate offline too. :-)

Yeah, I got caught by the fact it came from Dennis Howlett who's also web savvy... so I thought - will give it a try and test it.

Thanks for reading and posting about it. :-)