Make something great. Tell people about it. Do it again.

That’s it. Make something you believe in. Make it beautiful, confident, and real. Sweat every detail. If it’s not getting traffic, maybe it wasn’t good enough. Try again.

Then tell people about it. Start with your friends. Send them a personal note – not an automated blast from a spam cannon. Post it to your Twitter feed, email list, personal blog. (Don’t have those things? Start them.) Tell people who give a shit – not strangers. Tell them why it matters to you. Find the places where your community congregates online and participate. Connect with them like a person, not a corporation. Engage. Be real.

Read the complete post by Derek Powazek.

Derek argues that most of what you need to know about SEO can be described in a paragraph or so, and I’ve said so myself. However we wouldn’t steer business clients away from SEO, as long as they understand that it’s not magic, and that it’s part of a larger strategy where the emphasis is on great content, as Derek says. For many clients, an SEO consultation or relationship with a clueful, ethical search company – Apogee Search, for example – is a path toward transformation of a good site to a great site. This is because the best SEO consultants will tell you that you have to do the things Derek mentions, and they’ll work with you on content as well as keyword development. They’ll tell you that SEO isn’t voodoo. Much of what they will do is help you determine keywords and site adjustments that are most likely to increase exposure and produce conversions.

We do something broader – help you develop a strategy and roadmap for creating a compelling presence across relevant social platforms – but we start with your web site, which is the core of your web presence. Increasingly people will find you through your social media presence, as well as search, so you have to consider both part of your strategy for building a successful online presence. We address SEO as part of our complete strategic web service, but we focus more on helping you create a compelling presence – making something great.

What we’ve been talking about is <em>social business,</em> and others are starting to pick up the conversation. The Dachis Group here in Austin has been talking about these points, prompting the Neville Hobson post “Is ’social business’ the new black,” and a response from Dave in his ClickZ column. I posted a link to Dave’s column in our LinkedIn Group and on our Facebook page. We invite you to comment either place, and join the conversation.

[Note – The ‘old economy’ is the world economy, now shrinking and transforming, that produced the global consumer society.  The ‘new economy’ is the world economy emerging now that is producing a global sustainable society. The old economy created wealth by resource consumption, leading to resource overuse and depletion. The new economy produces wealth by resource amplification – doing more with less by continually substituting knowledge for energy, material, labor, finance and time. This new strategy is leading to wealth creation that lives always lighter on the Earth.]

Continuing our ride on the Clue Train down the rail to the global sustainable society…

Last week major media finally broke a story, following lively blogspace coverage, about Dave Carroll’s fun youtube song release, “United Breaks Guitars.” (Song: http://bit.ly/z2GU5; full story: http://bit.ly/mch2A)

The short version of the story is that Dave Carroll, another one of those great Canadian singer songwriters (in Austin, we love singer songwriters) wrote and produced a YouTube music video for $150 that told the tale of how United Airlines broke his guitar in luggage handling as he flew out of Chicago to a gig, and how a 9 month saga ensued in which he sought compensation, ending with United just saying ‘no.’ At the end, Dave told the United rep handling his claim that he intended to make a music video telling the whole sad tale if they refused to take responsibility for the damage. They declined. He made the video. And he posted it to youtube.

As of this morning (07/21/09, 5:40am) the video has been viewed 3.5 million times in about ten weeks.

Unsurprisingly, various follow up news stories indicate United has had a major change in attitude around all this since the YouTube video went ballistic. And the incident has apparently also resulted in a lot of well-deserved attention for Dave and his music (which I like). There have apparently been offers by equipment makers to give Dave new stuff, and offers by other air carriers to give him free rides, etc.

BUT HERE IS THE BIG POINT –

After 9 months of engaging United’s ‘customer service’ process with no result, for a cost of $150 Dave Carroll, a lone voice, self-published to the open web a message that immediately cut completely through all of United’s many layered, inaccessible, murky, confusing, difficult, complex, well funded, ‘customer service’ process – and established direct connection for Dave to the tip top layer of real control over the whole airline, with United’s top executives and board tracking the relationship minute by minute. Dave got, and has retained, very senior, very top level attention at United – for $150.

Consider Dave Carroll’s own words on this point: “…it occurred to me that I had been fighting a losing battle all this time and that fighting over this at all was a waste of time. The system is designed to frustrate customers into giving up their claims, and United is very good at it. However I realized that as a songwriter I wasn’t without options. In my final reply… I told her that I would be writing three songs about United Airlines and my experience in the whole matter. I would then make videos for these songs and share them on YouTube…. My goal: to get one million hits in one year.” (http://bit.ly/mch2A)

In the old economy, which is opaque and favors finance capital over everything else, it paid to push the costs for damaging passengers’ luggage back onto the customer. This is a profit-enhancing strategy called ‘cost externalization.’ It’s an old economy strategy that only works in a world of top-down hierarchical relationships.  In the new network world, where everyone has equal access at almost no cost to the ears of everyone interested to listen, the ‘cost externalization’ strategy is gradually falling apart. And in this case it failed badly.

Perhaps because he is a communicator and artist, Dave Carroll understood what the United senior executives did not.  Transparency can be forced onto any organization now for almost nothing. And there was nothing United could do to hold the consequences of Dave Carroll’s music videos back.

United failed to keep pace with reality, and continued playing the old economy strategy of cost externalization wrapped in opacity and layers of hierarchy, even though the value of that approach has now turned into a nest of liabilities. Consequently, in a moment when airline revenues have declined 20%+ each month for the last six months, United executives, by failing to adapt to the changing reality, have cost their firm massive amounts of critical social capital, in the consumer market and the equity market, at exactly at the wrong competitive moment for such a mistake. So for the United the change is not coming.

Executives – listen up.  In a world in which 3.5 million views can be gained through YouTube by anyone in a few days at a cost of $150 – you must embrace some serious change.  Adapt now. Don’t be United. The lesson does not have to come the hard way.

In case the point is not getting across, let me remind you of the Virgin Air social media disaster that happened earlier this year. It could have been anybody. It happened to be the most social media hip of all airlines, but they still tried to play by the old economy rules. Virgin had established an external blog for air passenger, i.e. customer, comments. Eighteen Virgin employees, stymied by an old economy-style internal run around processes to ‘handle’ employee complaints and suggestions, jumped out to the open and public passenger blog site and posted comments about Virgin’s engine maintenance and rat infestations on planes. Virgin responded, in old economy fashion, by firing all eighteen.

A blogspace fire storm followed, with significant loss of opacity, increase of transparency, to Virgin’s internal affairs. Virgin capitulated and rehired the employees, with apologies, and opened up an internal employee blog for uncensored and protected communications from employees about internal conditions. Since then Virgin has been racing headlong into the new economy and the new strategies.

We are already deeply into a real sea change, a transformation of the way we organize and coordinate and relate. It affects all our social capital, all our stakeholder relationships. This sea change is technologically based and cost driven, and it is being profoundly accelerated by the emergence of the new social media technologies which are deeply socially enabling. Adoption of these transforming technologies is not optional. Your competitors are doing it right now, along with your customers and employees and investors and lenders and suppliers. And this sea change affects every level of every organization, every moment of the day.

Don’t be United.

Embrace the change and use it to help your organization. Get on with developing a comprehensive, integrated social media strategy for your whole organization now.

opens his review with the clever idea of searching for “google” at Bing and for “bing” at Google. He says Bing gives you a concentrated dosage of stuff about Google, while Google is all over the map with its “bing” results. Well, sure! “Google” is a made-up word with only one dominant meaning, so of course Bing gives you concentrated Google goodness. But “Bing” has lots of meanings, so Google’s right to return a mix of bingy words…with Microsoft Bing as the top result. Now, it is true that, as Hiawatha says, Microsoft gives its “Google” results in convenient tabs about Microsoft the corporate entity as well as listing sub-pages within the google domain, while Google’s top return on “Microsoft” only gives you a set of sub-pages. Microsoft looks more like WolframAlpha in that regard, and that’s a good way to look. But, Google also recently added easier ways to refine and expand searches (by timeline, by WonderWheel), etc., as Hiawatha points out. So, it really depends on what you’re trying to do. As always. (Type MSFT into either and you’ll get similar boxed stock data.)

All business is moving to the web – not just sales and marketing, but all business processes. Many businesses will drop expensive internal IT in favor of cloud solutions, and they’ll focus more on cultivating internal value networks or knowledge networks. They’ll start thinking more about how to assess the value of intangibles – knowledge transactions – and how to leverage and demonstrate that value. They’ll use social technologies to find efficiencies and control costs, not just for sales. Those of us who do web consulting will be challenged to produce strategy and results for the whole business, not just sales and marketing.

David noted that, when communications technology enables transparency as it has within the organization, you can’t have an authoritarian structure. David mentioned the Virgin Atlantic Facebook fiasco, about which Oliver Marks at ZDNet says

The public firing of staff around this brought a lot of negative publicity. It’s a great example of the power vacuum that happens in companies that don’t have coherent internal networks. There is a yinyang relationship between a well organized internal network (where the fired flight attendants should have been allowed to whine and grumble, and also been given guidance) and the outward facing social network, where Virgin’s high standards of customer service should apply to promptly commune with customer questions and concerns as well as enjoy the ‘fan’ status conferred on them by members of their group.

What David and I were discussing yesterday is that the communications environment we have today makes a different style of management, not just optional, but necessary. Ignore this at your peril. We believe that all business is moving onto the web, and helping businesses facilitate that change is our mission.

This morning David sent me a Buzzstream post by Paul May, “More Proof of the Small Business Social Media Advantage.” He talks about a guy who “tried to engage with his customers and was cut off at his knees by management,” referring to posts here and here on the subject by Chris Brogan. May says, and we agree, that “we’re in the middle of the single biggest shift in marketing since the advent of television,” but we would point out that it’s way beyond marketing – everything about the way we do business is changing. He also says that “few big companies are going to really embrace this in the near term.” Again, we agree, and that’s why we work with small to medium companies and nonprofits. Not only will “The Enterprise” be slow to adopt, it may very well fail to thrive in this new world.

Dr Paul Twomey, chief executive of Icann, told BBC News that the proposals would result in the biggest change to the way the internet worked in decades.

“The impact of this will be different in different parts of the world. But it will allow groups, communities and business to express their identities online.

“Like the United States in the 19th Century, we are in the process of opening up new real estate, new land, and people will go out and claim parts of that land and use it for various reasons they have.

“It’s a massive increase in the geography of the real estate of the internet.”

I sent him this revision, which I think is a little clearer:

Jon Lebkowsky talks about the early days of Web 2.0, how Austin is evolving in the digital media space, and what he proposes to grow it.

So you were one of the early pioneers of Web 2.0. What was it like in the early days?

We didn’t call it Web 2.0. In the early 2000s, we started talking about social software. We formed a Social Software Alliance that was a nationwide group, though based primarily in Silicon Valley.

Was it made up of blogs and wikis?

Yes, the major blog companies at the time, like Blogger and Six Apart, were on board. Pete Kaminski of Socialtext, was the instigator of the Alliance. I was close to SocialText because I knew Adina Levin, one of the principals, who at the time was based in Austin.

What is Socialtext?

It’s a company which touted wikis as a social software for the enterprise. We formed the Social Software Alliance in 2002, before the Emerging Technology conference for that year, which was in San Jose. But we didn’t hang together for too long because everyone went off to do their own thing, and we realized the kinds of standards we were discussing were better supported through a standards body like the IETF — the Internet Engineering Task Force. The key issue at the time was that the blog companies (Blogger, Sixapart, and some others) wanted more robust syndication than RSS. They thought it was a too limited format. They were working on something called Echo which later became Atom. It’s a pretty common format now. It was one of the key accomplishments of the Social Software Alliance.

What was it like in Austin in those days?

Austin didn’t have much happening, and people here weren’t very aware of social software or social media. I came back from the Emerging Technology Conference where we had solidified the Social Software Alliance, And one of my partners said that nobody would ever pay us to set up a blog. The vision hadn’t sunk in quite yet, though it wasn’t long before our work was mostly social software development, and people relabeled that movement “Web 2.0” after Tim O’Reilly and Dale Dougherty wrote their famous paper. At Etech, Tim had been talking about the Internet as an operating system… the thinking that went into the Web 2.0 paper and drove even more innovation.

There’s a group of companies here in Austin that would like to see a more robust ecosystem behind the Web 2.0 space – Demand generation, SEO, and SEM companies. What can be done there?

Last night we had an Entrepreneur’s Town Hall meeting at IC2, which was developed by Kevin Koym. One of our brightest guys in the Bootstrap Austin group is moving to Palo Alto because he wants to do the semantic web – there’s nothing substantial going on here now in that space, what they’re calling “Web 3.0.” We really need to support cutting edge web R&D, testbeds etc., so that we won’t lose talent to other parts of the country – we want the key creative talent coming here, not leaving. The other thing is that in 2001, I was involved in economic development initiatives with IC2, beginning with a clean energy initiative. I helped them with that even though it wasn’t related to my web stuff, because there wasn’t much web business happening, and we needed to focus on economic development in several areas. After that, I managed IC2’s Wireless Future project, which was a real boost for the wireless industry locally. Then they wanted to have a project focused on digital media and digital convergence, the Digital Convergence Initiative, which was started by Alex Cavalli while he was Deputy Director of IC2.

The Digital Convergence Initiative at IC2 was partly focused on the Digital Media Collaboratory, which still exists. Alex had a vision of doing a project, initially focusing on digital media. Wireless Future was a first step, and was pretty successful in getting the wireless sector together into a trade association. We spent a year in meetings, working on a report, and developing a track for SXSW Interactive. We involved the city and we did well with that. That was the first step in what Alex called the Digital Convergence Initiative. They did a body of research where they inventoried the companies in the area related to digital media. As all media became data, it was quite disruptive. They found that it wasn’t just media that was going digital, but everything is going digital including medical, energy – pretty much any kind of data.

Back then wireless had limited penetration, but today it’s in every coffee shop.

DCI is not working on an Electronic Marketplace, a technology with which you can pull the various companies together and get them working effectively so they can have the capacity they need by being aware of each other and collaborating. My interest is to try and make this region competitive and it appears to be working at the moment.

What would you do for the Web 2.0 sector?

We had an earlier initiative to build a web test bed with advanced web services. We need to revive that, and bring in more Web 2.0 and semantic web thinking, collaborative research and development. We think we can enhance the productivity of companies by getting them to work together creatively. We had a party at SxSW in 2004 and demonstrated some success. That later fell by the wayside and DCI had to rethink it. The history is that we did that web services piece and then we started talking about creating a network of web developers and web business people. From that emerged projects in which entrepreneurs worked together. DCI’s approach now ist to build the electronic marketplace to allow companies to see available capacity in the region and come up with collaborative agreements. So if you are building a certain kind of widget and you lack some capacity, you can hopefully find the capacity you need through the database that the Marketplace will evolve. There also will be structures to support collaboration with technical and legal frameworks.

What is needed to get it going?

It’s an incubation thing. The traditional incubator takes a company that’s already pretty far along. What about the guys back in ideation that are basically in the kitchen trying to figure out what they can cook? How do you support those guys? We need to create support ideation among those who have a passion for technology and connect them with others in a context where they can rub shoulders, do creative thinking together.

DCI is at a point where it needs some funds to get an electronic market place up and running. It would benefit collaborative companies who would join and pay dues.