The reality is, in my view, somewhat different.

We are living in a time where the acquisition of knowledge is occurring at ever increasing speed. Thanks to search engines like Google and to personal knowledge networks like Twitter, we can all find, relatively quickly a preliminary answer to the trickiest of problems. For example, if I want to know how to write a social media release, I will find good quality links to Todd Defren, Lee Hopkins, a case study by Geoff Livingston and even a webinar by Des Walsh. I could also comb back through my own del.icio.us bookmarks (or those of others), or I could reach out to my personal knowledge network (aka Twitter) -- or just enlist the charming Connie Reece.

None of this makes me an expert.

I could repeat the same process with a different challenge -- say managing an online community. There would be new names, great insight and plenty of links. But again, this does not an expert make.

Because while I have searched through all these links, spent hours reading and analysing and determining a plan for action, the world has changed. There are new services, new offerings and new approaches being launched. There are new web applications unveiling themselves. And it all happens in what seems like a matter of hours. Sites come and go, find favour and fail ... within incredibly short time frames. The flux seems never ending.

How then can I, in all honesty, advise clients/companies/anyone about "social media"?

What I do have is experience, access to people who are way smarter than me, an openness to learning new things and an ability to bear a certain amount of risk. I try before I buy. Oh, and I have failed, and even embarrassed myself.

I claim no expertise in social media ... I am continually learning too much (and working on shifting ground) to consider myself anything other than a charlatan. And I have taken the words of Connie Reece to heart -- "If someone tells you they are a social media expert, run".

At the far end of the blogging spectrum, there is the lone blogger who is writing for their own enjoyment -- the diarist. Then comes the activist or even passionate brand evangelist. In the centre is the Careerist -- the blogger who writes as a demonstration of their skills and expertise. Next comes the "expert" blogger who writes about their area of knowledge. Then there is the corporate blogger which is written from a business perspective. Professional  bloggers can roam across any or all of these categories (and I am sure there are many others). But each of these bloggers will have their own objectives ranging from the personal to the professional -- but there is something that they have in common -- a desire to create a community.

Even the most strident blogger will gain some kind of pleasure from having their material read. They will love a comment here or there. They will thrill to a rise in subscriptions. Why? It is about community. In many ways, we build our world around opposing forces -- our friends and our enemies. We can have a community that encompasses both.

So, is building a small community, or readership worth it? Clearly it is. Those blogs with a handful of readers/commenters will only continue as long as there is some form of value exchanged. But even the most personal of blogs may, at some point, become a money making venture. Take for example, the story of Lucas Cruikshank who has built a formidable YouTube subscriber base. At first instance, you can wonder what can drive a 14 year old to write, produce, star in, and distribute a series about a six year old -- but clearly, in doing so, Lucas has opened opportunities for himself and his family (while at the same time building his own skills and experience).

You may not start with the aim of turning your social media/content into a business, but once a community forms and achieves a critical mass, opportunities will be pulled into your gravitational field. This is, perhaps, the great leveller of social media -- the traditional barriers to entry in media are related to reach and production cost. Both are dramatically lowered thanks to social media.

After all, with social media, it is not where you start that is important. It is the journey, and the story that you tell (or allow to be told) along the path.

The problem with good ideas is that they take a LOT of hard work to bring them to life. Now, both Drew McLellan and I knew that going for a second edition of the Age of Conversation was going to be a challenge, but we had already lived to tell the tale once already.

Little did we know that the author list would more than double!

And while we had about 275 authors raise their hand early on, life and the other catastrophes of modern living have intervened, whittling this down to a mere 237. As a result, we are knee deep in editing right now -- still aiming for a publication date towards the end of August (we are still discussing and planning the exact launch date -- but we WILL let you know).

In the meantime, become acquainted with those outstanding individuals who have committed their time and creativity in the name of charity (after all, all proceeds go to Variety, the Children's Charity):

Adrian Ho, Aki Spicer, Alex Henault, Amy Jussel, Andrew Odom, Andy Nulman, Andy Sernovitz, Andy Whitlock, Angela Maiers, Ann Handley, Anna Farmery, Armando Alves, Arun Rajagopal, Asi Sharabi, Becky Carroll, Becky McCray, Bernie Scheffler, Bill Gammell, Bob LeDrew, Brad Shorr, Brandon Murphy, Branislav Peric, Brent Dixon, Brett Macfarlane, Brian Reich, C.C. Chapman, Cam Beck, Casper Willer, Cathleen Rittereiser, Cathryn Hrudicka, Cedric Giorgi, Charles Sipe, Chris Kieff, Chris Cree, Chris Wilson, Christina Kerley (CK), C.B. Whittemore, Chris Brown, Connie Bensen, Connie Reece, Corentin Monot, Craig Wilson, Daniel Honigman, Dan Schawbel, Dan Sitter, Daria Radota Rasmussen, Darren Herman, Dave Davison, David Armano, David Berkowitz, David Koopmans, David Meerman Scott, David Petherick, David Reich, David Weinfeld, David Zinger, Deanna Gernert, Deborah Brown, Dennis Price, Derrick Kwa, Dino Demopoulos, Doug Haslam, Doug Meacham, Doug Mitchell, Douglas Hanna, Douglas Karr, Drew McLellan, Duane Brown, Dustin Jacobsen, Dylan Viner, Ed Brenegar, Ed Cotton, Efrain Mendicuti, Ellen Weber, Eric Peterson, Eric Nehrlich, Ernie Mosteller, Faris Yakob, Fernanda Romano, Francis Anderson, Gareth Kay, Gary Cohen, Gaurav Mishra, Gavin Heaton, Geert Desager, George Jenkins, G.L. Hoffman, Gianandrea Facchini, Gordon Whitehead, Greg Verdino, Gretel Going & Kathryn Fleming, Hillel Cooperman, Hugh Weber, J. Erik Potter, James Gordon-Macintosh, Jamey Shiels, Jasmin Tragas, Jason Oke, Jay Ehret, Jeanne Dininni, Jeff De Cagna, Jeff Gwynne & Todd Cabral, Jeff Noble, Jeff Wallace, Jennifer Warwick, Jenny Meade, Jeremy Fuksa, Jeremy Heilpern, Jeroen Verkroost, Jessica Hagy, Joanna Young, Joe Pulizzi, John Herrington, John Moore, John Rosen, John Todor, Jon Burg, Jon Swanson, Jonathan Trenn, Jordan Behan, Julie Fleischer, Justin Foster, Karl Turley, Kate Trgovac, Katie Chatfield, Katie Konrath, Kenny Lauer, Keri Willenborg, Kevin Jessop, Kristin Gorski, Lewis Green, Lois Kelly, Lori Magno, Louise Manning, Luc Debaisieux, Mario Vellandi, Mark Blair, Mark Earls, Mark Goren, Mark Hancock, Mark Lewis, Mark McGuinness, Matt Dickman, Matt J. McDonald, Matt Moore, Michael Karnjanaprakorn, Michelle Lamar, Mike Arauz, Mike McAllen, Mike Sansone, Mitch Joel, Neil Perkin, Nettie Hartsock, Nick Rice, Oleksandr Skorokhod, Ozgur Alaz, Paul Chaney, Paul Hebert, Paul Isakson, Paul McEnany, Paul Tedesco, Paul Williams, Pet Campbell, Pete Deutschman, Peter Corbett, Phil Gerbyshak, Phil Lewis, Phil Soden, Piet Wulleman, Rachel Steiner, Sreeraj Menon, Reginald Adkins, Richard Huntington, Rishi Desai, Robert Hruzek, Roberta Rosenberg, Robyn McMaster, Roger von Oech, Rohit Bhargava, Ron Shevlin, Ryan Barrett, Ryan Karpeles, Ryan Rasmussen, Sam Huleatt, Sandy Renshaw, Scott Goodson, Scott Monty, Scott Townsend, Scott White, Sean Howard, Sean Scott, Seni Thomas, Seth Gaffney, Shama Hyder, Sheila Scarborough, Sheryl Steadman, Simon Payn, Sonia Simone, Spike Jones, Stanley Johnson, Stephen Collins, Stephen Landau, Stephen Smith, Steve Bannister, Steve Hardy, Steve Portigal, Steve Roesler, Steven Verbruggen, Steve Woodruff, Sue Edworthy, Susan Bird, Susan Gunelius, Susan Heywood, Tammy Lenski, Terrell Meek, Thomas Clifford, Thomas Knoll, Tim Brunelle, Tim Connor, Tim Jackson, Tim Mannveille, Tim Tyler, Timothy Johnson, Tinu Abayomi-Paul, Toby Bloomberg, Todd Andrlik, Troy Rutter, Troy Worman, Uwe Hook, Valeria Maltoni, Vandana Ahuja, Vanessa DiMauro, Veronique Rabuteau, Wayne Buckhanan, William Azaroff, Yves Van Landeghem

• Participants in a focus group are asked to rank from 1 to 100 how happy the coffee makes them feel
• On average, the ranking sits at about 60 -- which actually translates to a cup of coffee that makes you wince

However, if a high level pre-screening takes place before the focus group, the outcomes are dramatically different. If participants can self-select a style of coffee (eg mild, heavy roast etc) -- from as little as three categories -- and then that particular style is provided to the focus group, the ranking from 1 to 100 will rise to 78. A 78% ranking is a "coffee that makes you deliriously happy".

Think about this in terms of your brand. Consider it in light of your profiling and strategic approach. Perhaps we don't need to deliver value to the "nth" level of the long tail ... we simply need to deliver value to the clusters. The old adage "you can't please all the people all the time" is true -- but if you can spend your research and insight budget in a way that will identify the clusters that make sense for your brand/product, then making your consumers 78% happy will more than deliver on your brand promise. It will open new markets. Don't believe me? Listen in to the whole of Malcolm's speech.

Broken into a short format presentation style (similar to the approach we took at Interesting South), a variety of speakers provided their take on the current role and the future of media. There was a panel discussion and a debate -- all followed by unconference sessions which allowed participants to actively investigate some of the topics raised during the presentations.

In Sydney the room seemed to divide into two camps. One one side were the new media folks, furiously commenting and conversing via the Twitter "backchannel" -- and on the other the "traditional media" folks who appeared largely unaware of the un-unconference being carried on through Twitter. There seemed to be no middle ground between the two sides -- each holding firm to the belief in their own relevance.

It was, however, during the panel discussion where the Twitter conversation spilled over from the back channel onto the conference room floor. The panel appeared to be populated by people who had spent most of their careers in the publishing industry with no "new media" representative. Stephen Collins summed up the collective Twitter response along the lines of "you don't know what you are talking about". From that point onwards, there was no going back -- with the conversation becoming stuck around the relative merits of "professional" vs "citizen" journalism.

It wasn't, however, until I sat in on Matt Moore's unconference session on value networks that I began to see a way forward. It is not that there is no overlap between the two camps, it is just that there is no shared vocabulary for us to discuss shared areas of interest. And rather than spending our energies debating the relative merits of our own cases, I feel it would be far more productive identifying opportunities where each group could collaborate or experiment together. This, of course, means new ways of identifying and measuring value -- it means new approaches to community and to business.

And while there may well be a long way to go before we see such opportunities come to pass, perhaps Pubcamp is the first, tentative step forward. Next time, I hope to see greater web 2.0/social media representation; getting down and dirty with the business model discussion; less plugs for new services/offerings; discussion on the role of communities; involvement from digital strategists/agencies.

For more detailed coverage of the Sydney event, see Renai LeMay (for the AFR), Craig Wilson and Nic Hodges (let me know if I have missed your coverage). Melbourne has been covered by Ben Barren, Michael Specht, Stephen Mayne.

By delighting your customers you are adding to their happiness. By removing the pain/anxiety of your customers you are removing barriers to their happiness. Makes sense. Sounds simple ... and as Tara explains, it ties into the self actualization model of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. But how does this tie into your business strategy? How does it really become part of the way that you do business, drive revenue, and manage your costs?

Clearly activating this comes down to the experience of your product/service. It comes down to the exchange of value between your brand and its community and that means that you need to understand how your brand rubs up against the factors that affect happiness or the barriers to happiness. This is a strategic choice and should inform every iteration of your brand's product/service line. But there is also a more significant opportunity around happiness that applies directly to social media and to digital strategy. Take a look through Tara's presentation, and then continue reading below.

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Most brands are likely to position themselves on one side or other of the "axis of misery" that Tara talks about. However, the larger opportunity is to activate your digital strategy in a complimentary manner. That is, if your brand positioning is closely aligned with the four pillars of happiness, then your digital strategy should focus on removing the barriers to happiness -- and vice versa.

Many "Web 2.0" brands are already take this holistic approach. Think about Google, for example. Not does the experience of interacting with the Google Search Engine deliver value on the four pillars of happiness, it also directly impacts on the barriers to happiness. This is extended through a range of other service offerings from Orkut through to Gmail.

It strikes me that viewing happiness as a business model provides a unique way of investigating your brand's strategic positioning and provides insight in terms of its future direction. It reverses the debate around brands from one that is internally focused into an analysis which is oriented towards the experiential impact of your brand through the eyes of your brand community. Revolution? Maybe.

In the past, I have worked with teams to work through these elements. I have pushed the beginning, middle and end because it provides a context within which we can tell stories. This is especially important in digital storytelling because context can often be a battleground, signifying everything or nothing. The role of the digital storyteller, however, is to reign in the context -- to provide a focus. Precisely because the context can be so broad, the digital storyteller, must take a lead from the scientist -- to study the micro, to set an agenda that cannot be seen by the naked eye -- and deliver the razor sharp insight that will draw participants into the web of the story.

How is this done? Like anything, you need to start with an idea. This is the 1%. A good idea will get you started but an idea on its own is dormant. There is another 9% that is planning. You need to think through the what, why and how of your story. You need to consider the methods you will take to bring your idea to life.

The next 40% you need to focus on execution. This is the actual doing of the work. This brings together the idea and the strategy and makes it available to the world. The remaining 50% is participation ...

It is this final 50% that is the MOST important element. Without the participation of an audience your project is a failure. In the digital story, all MEANING is co-created. That means that, after launch, your digital story continues. It needs feeding. You need to respond to the nuances of its reading. You need to ENGAGE.

Perhaps this is why brands struggle with the concept of digital storytelling. Perhaps this is why it is harder to plan for and activate/support a digital story ... because they can, and do last forever. Mostly ...

Katie Chatfield has created a fantastic presentation that explains and profiles Marcus Brown, who is in my view, one of the premier digital storytellers of our time. In this presentation, Katie steps through the process of digital storytelling, charting the rise, life and ultimate ending of some of Marcus' characters whose digital exuberance spilled, at times, into real life. There was clearly a beginning, middle and end -- and maybe even a hint at resurrection.

For those who are seeking to understand the alchemy, imagination and sheer effort required for digital storytelling, Katie's presentation is of immense value. And for those of you who have not experienced the joy of Sacrum or the smiling nihilism of Charles Stab and their inventor, Marcus Brown, welcome and enjoy.

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I am currently writing up a review of the Sydney event, but in the meantime, take a look at Matt Moore's summary or view the twitter stream for yourself. Don't forget, Pubcamp Melbourne next week.

In this great podcast, the Podcast Sisters (aka Heather Gorringe and Anna Farmery) interview the effervescent Connie Reece about social media and where and how it fits within an overall marketing strategy.

There is an excellent discussion (at 6:30) about the emerging interest of corporations in social media -- with Anna asking whether small businesses should step back and leave social media to the corporations. And as Heather points out, there are more than 109 million blogs now online (Heather quotes precise figures -- ;) ), Connie rightly points out that the aim of your marketing (or social media) strategy is not necessarily to be the number one brand worldwide, but to be the number one brand/business in your category in your locale.

Plenty of good insight delivered in the way that only Anna and Heather can. Remember, you can subscribe via iTunes here.

Starting Thursday, Todd Andrlik has asked a few of us to do some guest posting. Here is the line-up ... so make sure you get along and see what damage/contribution we all make to Todd's already successful blog.

The line-up is:

// Thu / Leo Bottary of Client Service Insights
// Fri / Kami Huyse of Communication Overtones
// Mon / Gavin Heaton of Servant of Chaos
// Tue / Drew McLellan of Drew’s Marketing Minute
// Wed / Darryl Ohrt of Brand Flakes for Breakfast

But while I have a great affinity with Twitter, it is feeling more and more like a broadcast medium every day. Sure there are some small-scale discussions occurring but they are hardly conversational. Plurk, on the other hand, have placed conversation right at the heart of their design.

This post is continued over at MarketingProfs Daily Fix. Hope you enjoy!

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
-- TS Eliot, The Hollow Men

If we take a look at the shapes of these stimulus, if we examine the state of BEING rather than the active state of PERFORMING (in our roles of employer, employee, creator, listener, receiver, etc), then we may wonder at the particular historical moment in which we have found ourselves. The popularity and rise associated with "reality TV" shows such as Big Brother and even Eurovision only hold sway momentarily, never to be repeated in the future -- for the interactivity, voting and audience involvement is as transient as the beep notification of an SMS alert.

And while our cultural artefacts are being produced at ever greater rates, the co-creation and location of their meaning appears to be increasingly bound up in the evanescent energy of this "interactivity". David Cushman, for example, cites a press release claiming that:

More video material has been uploaded to YouTube in the past six months than has ever been aired on all major networks combined, according to cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch. About 88 percent is new and original content, most of which has been created by people formerly known as “the audience".

However, as Alan Kirby points out in this article on Postmodernism (via Amanda Chappel):

A culture based on these things can have no memory – certainly not the burdensome sense of a preceding cultural inheritance which informed modernism and postmodernism. Non-reproducible and evanescent, pseudo-modernism is thus also amnesiac: these are cultural actions in the present moment with no sense of either past or future.

In the place of Postmodernism, Kirby argues for a new defining cultural moment -- pseudo modernism. Identifying 1980 as the turning point, the pseudo modernists can also be seen as those generations succeeding Generation X -- so called Generation Y or Millennials, though like anything, is more likely to relate to a mode of being than to an age/demographic group. Kirby's pseudo modernists are spookily devoid of agency, caught in the neverland between the capacity to effect change and the overwhelming minutiae digital interactions:

You click, you punch the keys, you are ‘involved’, engulfed, deciding. You are the text, there is no-one else, no ‘author’; there is nowhere else, no other time or place.

But if this is the case -- if the central seeding authority of the pseudo modernist is "cluelessness" -- a contrasting capacity to see and act on a big picture but an inability to act as an individual (or in community), then the antidote may well lie in the social media interactions that are their cause. For while "engagement" may well mean contributing to a social action in a far off country (perhaps distributing our own agency into the network of strong and weak ties), the proliferation of "real world" meetups and the intensity around them may provide some small cause for optimism in the bleak sea of pseudo modernist reality. This desire to capture and contain the fleeting ephemera of social interaction has driven the popularity of "live blogging", the collating and curation of "favourites" via del.icio.us and other bookmarking sites and the use and sharing of photographs, videos and so on. And while the production fails (and always will) in its effort to capture the live moment, we can be in danger of focusing too much on product over process -- emphasising the cultural or social aspect of end result over being in the moment.

However, I have a feeling that the artefacts of this new reality are yet to be realised for their value. For while it is easy to discount the quality, merit or even longevity of much that passes for cultural production in the current era, perhaps it is time to re-evaluate what can and should be considered important.

The disbelief in grand narratives that Lyotard identified with the postmodernists is a handy tool when it comes to thinking through our current consumer/cultural moment. And I have a feeling that Generation Y will prove to be more culturally heretical than they might at first appear. After all, the Internet with its hypertext and self-spurning evolution could well be considered the defining achievement of the postmodern generation. But the WAY in which future generations use, activate and build upon the Internet, its applications and social, technological and intellectual networks will have far reaching effects for our cultures and for us as individuals. This generation who have been "always connected" are bound to rethink society in fundamental ways.

This has certainly got ME thinking!

A clear intersection for me is the collision between the demands/desires of knowledge workers and the expectations of the business/management. The same is true for branding. We are effectively seeing the 20th Century modes of business (command and control) being subverted by the activities of individuals. The strict hierarchies and mechanisms of control are being called into question by active (consumer) participants and employee evangelists determined to achieve outcomes (often in spite of the barriers placed in their way). As Stephen Collins says:

... there is an active and engaged community out there who want to do this stuff in their organisations or are keen to be a part of organisations that do.

And while many businesses/brands react by blocking or disabling access to social networks, the fact remains -- the PRACTICE of business (just like the PRACTICE of marketing/advertising) is changing in ways that have never before been imagined. These EMERGENT practices require new skills and flexible thinking ... and they may not yet, deliver the value you want. But they will (even the CIA agrees). We (and I do mean "we") just need to create the connections between the practices, our business strategies and our bottom lines -- this is the hard, behind the scenes activities that also need to happen (who said Web 2.0 is all fun and games).

In the meantime, if you are like me, and was unable to attend in person, get your fill of Enterprise 2.0 thinking at the Conference Community site, and start saving for 2009. And before you go, take two minutes to listen to Karen Appleton, VP of Business Development of Box, the file storage utility, talking about the importance of social networks to your business (via Enterprise 2.0 blog).