Social Media and Business transparency

I can't help but wonder if social media can have a tempering effect on business and social practices. Your social circle wields a lot of influence. Apply social media and you have an even greater reach and frequency. Those of us who look at Social Media as a business tool embrace it to inform, influence and, in the best cases, generate new products and profit for our companies. In a very real sense, smart companies are letting themselves be influenced by their customers to great mutual benefit.

Can wider adoption of social media empower the public to be the non-governmental regulators? Can't an active and vocal customer and public constituency also create a dampening effect on poor policies and practices? I'm no financial pundit by any means (ask my wife), however it seems like now there are all sorts of experts who have come forward to deride the kind of financial derivatives that have contributed to the current financial meltdown. Where were these guys while these "bets on bets of bets" were being created? There must have been a lot of folks watching, talking, playing, predicting within the financial industry. If these industry people were blogging, tweeting, discussing the pros and cons, would it have effected the direction of the market or the creation of these products?

Hobbes (yeah, remember your college Political Science?) held that the government needed to exist to help keep the "leviathan" of man's true nature in line. I wonder if a more connected, social society would be an effective way to temper man's true nature, one component of which is greed.

Look at it this way. Most people try to be reasonable about cause and effect. We recycle, reuse, reduce for good reason. And we do so because it's easy, but, and let's be honest, right now there is a significant social component to recycling. What would you think of someone who completely shunned recycling?

Well, would we feel the same about unfettered, more public, greed?

Would widespread adoption of social media create a similar effect on greed and the creation of financial instruments that are so esoteric as to really only be understood by and benefit the few?

If the voice and reason of the many were expressed, would the same financial products have been created, or would the consumer constituents have informed a better product line for these companies?

I just wonder.

Too much access!

Facebook, Netvibes, Flickr, YouTube, Yelp, LinkedIn, Blogs, Twitter...and the list goes on and the list changes. But what doesn't change are my needs to easily monitor, then step in and out of the right conversations. I use Netvibes for this, although I have colleagues who use Google Sites, iGoogle, Friendfeed and increasingly Facebook.

I guess my big issue is that I want to separate my business info and connections from the purely social. When I'm at work, I want to track the media, marketing, pertinent industry news, agency work, etc. without being distracted by the ongoing purely social interactions.

Of course, that may make me a poor social media expert, but maybe the big idea here is that we all need effective strategies for separation of work networking (workNetting?) and "neighborhood/home" social networking. Otherwise "Social Media" becomes a distraction rather than an asset.

I don't expect that there is one approach that fits all, but I'm going to set up a business related feed on Netvibes (with a public version as well) and run my social consolidation through Facebook with a Friendfeed app.

How do you monitor and separate/filter your feeds so you can be productive at work?

Still here, I think.

Alrighty then, looks like good science prevailed and we are all still here. Sure enough there's a new pile of feral cat pooh on my lawn, so we're even in the same universe (or the Cosmos has a very twisted sense of balance).

NOW FOR SOME COOL SOCIAL TECHNOLOGY that a colleague pointed out to me. Check out how Popular Media has created a few very useful social applets for websites. I love the Social Notes.

The end of the world...thanks to LARGE HADRON collider

This is probably my last entry. Tonight, while America sleeps, a band of "rockstar" physicists will start up the LARGE HADRON Collider at CERN to find the Higgs Bosun "God Particle". Shortly thereafter the time-space fabric of the universe will be ripped apart and we will all be sucked into the resulting black hole.

On the other hand we could also all be instantly shifted to another parallel universe. I hope in that one we all drive spaceships and get to carry laser pistols and the feral neighborhood cats crap on the village idiot's lawn, not mine.