There’s a lot of interesting and thought-provoking discussion about “who owns brands” being stimulated by the impact of social media. For example from Beth Harte of MarketingProfs: If you’ve hung out in social media circles long enough, I am sure yo…

Regarding “Topeka”, have you seen Peter Merholz's post on Social Media & User Experience ? He raises some good points. Wishing the UX crowd could get beyond the “social media douchebag” factor and direct their big brains towards thinking about how to design a site that effectively bridge the activities of existing community. (Although, admittedly, you're one of the few who are.) A perfectly crafted user-friendly website is great… but one that attracts and retains the attention and ongoing discussion (both onsite and off) is worth aspiring to. Are there ways as UX designers that we can shepherd that phenomenon? I'm thinking yes…. and I'd love to see more discussion about the design attributes that can spark and engage external communities.

In terms of the framework, I think that the most success in social channels happens when you approach it like radio: semi-spontaneous with a playlist of content, like radio shows. Scripted radio shows are awful. To do radio well, you need to have an outline, and then run through it before your shift starts.

Same thing goes here. You need to hire someone who can effectively work within an approved outline. There's no way to script all of it anyway. And when I work with clients, the first thing to do is explore the fears. They're often fairly irrational, and social / distributed technology is actually closer to their business model anyway.

You wouldn't expect to create a product and store it in Topeka, and then expect everyone to go there to buy. So you find out where they shop, and place your product there.

In terms of saying something wrong, this falls under something I didn't discuss here, which is the idea of always striving to bury your posts. No single update should carry too much weight. The more posts you create, the more complete, personal, complex picture you're painting. In this case, keep stepping up to the plate and bat for average (purpose) instead of power. This also helps spread liability by providing more context, as the law always sits on the side of what's reasonable in context, and saying that you said something wrong, or correcting it on the fly only adds strength to the presence, reminding the audience that there's a person behind the account.

All in all, it's no secret, as the hundreds of millions of people on social networks have already discovered as much. But hopefully, this framework will help companies consider the practical application in a more tangible way.

Thanks again, Molly!

Which leads to Yu Yu, and the fact that many cultures and subcultures exist, and the most natural way to speak with those audiences is to be of them, instead of at them. Make sense?

Take American Psycho, a good portion of it is detailed descriptions of what people are wearing. And I found it fascinating.

What one person thinks it important is an indication to others what they are about and it's a good way to get to know someone… the person just may turn out to be boring, though. Boring people will put out boring content.