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It was a time that was waiting to happen. Already, just a few short weeks ago, we saw social media tools gaining the spotlight for their ability to highlight fast-breaking events in the wake of EU parliamentary elections in Moldova, as covered on this blog. The rapidity with which a relatively small group of activists equipped with social media tools could motivate world opinion caught the eyes of some for a few days, but not surprisingly the storm of global interest died away. This time, it may not be as easy to forget the scale of influence that captures world attention as people in the Islamic Republic of Iran have declared their citizenship in Content Nation more loudly, more proudly and with greater impact than in any previous political confrontation.

The people of Iran and other nations in which Islam is a key element of their culture are no strangers to social media, as highlighted in several examples in the Content Nation book. Unlike the handful of people in Moldova who used social media tools to help organize protests, Iran has a widely educated population well aware of social media technologies who have used them to put the focus on events in the wake of that nation's recent elections. Wikipedia estimates that there are more than 700,000 bloggers in Iran, with about 40,000 to 100,000 of those being used actively to communicate thoughts with others. Add in Facebook, Twitter, photo and video posting sites and a wealth of other social media publishing tools and it was inevitable that thousands of people in Iran would be chronicling what has happening in that nation in real-time - at a pace that some are saying has upstaged some traditional media outlets for impact, authenticity and  completeness.

Have mainstream media outlets dropped the ball on Iran coverage? Certainly reports from the BBC, AFP, Al Jazeera's foreign language services and other key outlets with front-line reporters and stringers have been instrumenal channels for distributing information on fast-paced events in Iran to people around the world. But with members of Twitter circulating message tags such as #CNNfail, U.S.-centric social media mavens are questioning whether the U.S. news outlets that used to go after many live controversies with greater vigor are more interested in serving up filler between ads than in delivering quality news coverage. At a time at which U.S. television news outlets are expected to deliver revenues much as any entertainment outlet, with as few resources as possible deployed to cover breaking news, the question tends to answer itself. The real question, however, is whether mainstream news organizations have the influence and authority to act as the most trusted "go-to" sources for learning about these events.

On this front Content Nation is clearly in the lead, with many social media outlets becoming the first points of contact, both for obtaining coverage of live events and for aggregating and editing unfolding coverage of events. The award-winning blog of Michael J. Totten, for example, provided a continuously updated post with links, videos, summaries and first-hand accounts of recent events in Iran, while Wikipedia contributors assembled in rapid-fire order a great page of links to authoritative accounts, worldwide reactions and accounts from both sides of the controversial election results. Content Nation is not content to send individual thoughts and messages to one another; social media's ability to aggregate, edit and organize information from many sources has outpaced traditional media outlets rapidly. Individual news outlets still do a professional job at aggregation, but social media's ability to look at information from all sources with a more disaffiliated eye for specific audiences often gives it the jump on aggregating information on breaking news when people are passionate about being a part of Content Nation's global influence.

More importantly, though, is that social media continues to enable everyday citizens to communicate with one another in trying circumstances to help them to receive information, to form opinions and to take action. Sometimes this information comes from unlikely channels. The Flickr photo posting service, for example, was used not only to post photos of events in the streets of Iran's cities but also to convey images of documents from key figures in Iranian politics conveying their reaction to events to their fellow citizens. With social media tools that help to collect links to such resources, it becomes possible to create a global bulletin board that guides people towards the most relevant sources of information that help them to decide on courses of action.

Whatever the full scope and lasting impact of events in Iran may bring, the past few days mark the first time that a nation in the Middle East has captured the attention and the imagination of the world to such a broad degree through social media communications. The fact that these events happened in a nation of more than 70 million people - a nation as large as Content Nation itself - only underscores the reality that institutions of all sizes must respond to the power of social media. Be it local interests, Western or Asian interests or whatever nation may be involved, Content Nation is reminding us that no culture is exempt from the influence of the millions of people around the world who have decided to declare their citizenship alongside people of all walks of life in all nations. The photo posts, messages, blogs and personal pages of these citizens of Content Nation now challenge them to recognize that political events may come and go, but once empowered by social media there can be no turning back to an age in which communications from anyone could not have both global and local impact far beyond the reach of any traditional news outlet. The importance of these people is far more profound than the self-importance of anyone else declaring them to be important.

What do you think about the impact of social media on events in Iran? Add your comments below!

Towards the end of the film "Field of Dreams," a bankrupt, frustrated and tired Ray Kinsella (played by Kevin Costner) is trying to figure out why a series of ghosts have lead him down the road of risking everything that he has for the mysterious goal of building a baseball field for them to play on in the middle of his corn fields. "I've never once asked what is in it for me," Kinsella asks, "so I want to know...what's in it for me?" Kinsella gets his answer, a very rewarding one in its own way, but not at all what he had expected.

So it is with social media. The rewards of creating content in social media are as varied as the people using it. Professionals focused on improving their career find business contacts who can help them, enthusiasts find family, friends and like-minded people who appreciate their insights and marketers find people who want to learn more about their favorite products and services. Some of these people even make money from their content by running ads on their pages or by selling merchandise or premium content. But the number of people who start up a webblog or other social media publishing outlet and actually make money simply by writing or uploading videos is a fairly small one. As I point out in the Content Nation book, many of the rewards that people get from using social media are in personal and business transactions that are completed independent of their online activities.

In the end, though, it really doesn't matter how people get their rewards from social media, because the sheer scale of publishing that's taking place using social media tools creates its own rewards for everyone involved. For example, recent data shows that Google's YouTube streams more than 1.2 billion videos through its online viewers every day - almost one video for every person connected to the Internet. That is, without question, the world's largest audience for video. More importantly, though, it's really an audience that breaks down into millions of smaller audiences that appreciate very specific videos from individuals, businesses and other organizations. Some may have ads, some may not, but it's apparently an activity that people around the world find to be one of the most universally rewarding available on the Web today - and that continues to build new streams of revenue for Google.

Similarly, the online classified ads service Craigslist is now estimated to be bringing in about $100 million in revenues annually - in spite of its offering most of its services for free. With cheap  cloud computing infrastructure and a lean and simple organization supporting its site, Craigslist could afford to match the varying types of rewards that people get from social media to the potential for revenue from its content. The New York Times recently ran an article that pointed out how relatively few weblogs are updated on a regular basis, implying that most people don't find it to be a rewarding passtime. They may be right overall, but the article doesn't take into account that people now have innumerable tools with which to express themselves online. If one doesn't work, another just might fit their needs. The Museum of Modern Betas blog notes today that for the Twitter broadcast messaging service alone there have been more than 1,100 publishing tools developed to send, receive and analyze information from Twitter.

And if people don't publish videos, blog posts or tweets every day, what of it? The ability of social media outlets to create valuable content at a moment's notice enables people to get value from publishing whenever it makes sense. On the Wikipedia reference site, for example, contributors may come and go as they update articles, leaving behind a collective legacy of valuable content. There were few people on Twitter sending messages about the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum on any regular basis - until hundreds of messages started pouring out in the wake of a shooting incident there today. The consistency of any one contributor to social media is far less important than the aggregate consistency of interesting and important points of view that engage audiences every day around the world.

This doesn't mean that people don't like benefiting financially in some direct way from their publishing; it just means that offering money for creating content is not always the most sure way to ensure a strong and growing social media outlet. For example, Mahalo, a reference Web site, offers topic enthusiasts creating content on their site the ability to receive or give cash "tips" for providing people visiting the site with useful content and links. Recently they have also added the option for people to receive ad revenue from creating topic pages. By contrast, the Answers.com Web site introduced the member-powered WikiAnswers community at roughly the same time that Mahalo came onto the scene. WikiAnswers does not offer cash compensation to its contributors, but instead offers them recognition for their particular efforts through thirty different community roles and a system of non-cash rewards points. While Mahalo has a fairly respectably-sized audience for its services, Compete.com statistics indicate that it hasn't grown significantly in the past year. By contrast, in the same period the same statistics show Answers.com nearly doubling its audience, based largely on the growth of WikiAnswers' community of more than 2.8 million members.

So while being paid for creating content may work for some people, it turns out that creating content appears to be a social function motivated by social rewards for most people. People do want compensation for their efforts, but as in most social situations compensation for their efforts comes from other than money. Recognition, influence, acceptance, enjoyment, problem-solving, emotional comfort, opportunities for improving valuable business relationships - these and other non-monetary rewards are the goals of most human communications in general, with the world of publishing simply a technological extension of those communications.

The world of traditional media outlets may grunt and groan about people making content for free as an aberration, but in truth it is the world of professional media that has been the aberration over the past couple of centuries. Now that communications technologies enable more natural social organization of publishing, the assumptions of professional media are being challenged strongly by social media. This doesn't mean that publishing as we have known it is bad or doomed to failure; it just means that publishers need to understand their roles in a publishing environment dominated by social media more clearly. Publishing technologies are utilities; like utilities such as electricity or water distribution, they can only be as valuable as the plenty or scarcity of supplies flowing through them.

Now that the supply of electronic social communications dwarfs the world of professional media using electronic publishing tools, it should come as no surprise that the most successful electronic publishing ventures are those that have adapted most effectively to the abundance of influential publishers offered by Content Nation through these very affordable and accessible utilities. The rewards for adapting to this new utility-oriented environment may not be as appealing to some publishers as their traditional rewards, but if everyday people in Content Nation can answer the question, "What's in it for me?" to their satisfaction every day, certainly the world of traditional media will be able to answer this question as well in time.

When I wrote the Content Nation book a few months ago, I estimated that the people who truly wanted to influence others through social media totaled about 73 million - a nation about as large as Turkey. Less than a year later, data from Netpop Research seems to indicate that this number has grown significantly. Extrapolating from data that Netpop collected on U.S. broadband Internet users who publish social media, It's safe to say that Content Nation, the group of people around the world who use social media to seriously influence others, is now around 100 million. That's growth of more than a third in less than a year - and places Content Nation as the eleventh largest nation in the world, comfortably ahead of the Phillipines and closing in on Mexico and Japan, according to the latest United Nations data. Think about it - a nation of 100 million people all seriously trying to influence their world through publishing. No wonder traditional media outlets have a hard time keeping up with Content Nation.

It's not just that people are using social media more and more: it's also that they're generatintg more and more content that begins to challenge traditional publishers to get people's attention. On the Twitter social text messaging service, recent ComScore traffic measurement data indicates that there are now more than 32 million people visiting that one service alone - eclipsing traditional media services such as The New York Times and even established social media services such as Digg and LinkedIn. The easier it gets to use social media, the more it gets used, it would seem.

It's not just text-oriented social media that's growing at profound rates. Google's YouTube video service reported on its blog that submissions of videos have risen by nearly a third since January of this year. There are now more than 20 hours of videos being uploaded per minute to YouTube on a typical day. That's more than 28,000 hours of programming being uploaded a day - enough to populate 1,200 24-hour television channels with all-new programming every day. The pace of uploads is likely to accelerate as YouTube has recently introduced a new feature that makes it easier to post video responses to YouTube videos, making it easier to engage in video discussions.

How much attention that YouTube and other uploaded social media videos get is still a question for debate, though. Recent statistics from Nielsen indicate that time spent watching videos online is less than 2 percent of the total time reported watching traditional cable and broadcast television outlets. However, the Nielsen stats also indicate that online video watchers are up about 52 percent from last year - by far the fastest growing segment of video viewers. Significantly, although Nielsen reports the Hulu online joint venture delivering long-format television programming from traditional producers grew more than 400 percent new viewers in the past year, most of these are middle-aged viewers who seem to be using Hulu as an alternative to time-shifting devices such as TiVo. In other words, while YouTube now produces enough new programming to blow away any cable or satellite television outlet in the world, the best that traditional television programmers can do is to rearrange the screens on which their slowly dwindling content pool appears. More to the point, it's content that people can interact with; how many of us are glued to traditional television versus those who are glancing at it over the top of our laptops, netbooks and mobile devices as we interact with social media? More than are likely to show up in Nielsen's statistics, no doubt. The televisoin screen may be on, but increasingly it's our peers in social media who have our attention.

In the 19th century Lord Thomas Malthus noted in his growth model that unrestrained populations tend to grow at an exponential rate. It's tempting at times to think that social media's booming growth will do likewise, soaring forever and forever. Obviously there are limits to social media's growth as there are limits to any population or marketing trend that discovers that the world is much more finite than we may imagine. But with more than 5 billion people yet to be connected to the Web, much less to social media, it's likely safe to say that the economic impact of social media is only beginning to be felt in spite of its soaring growth in recent months. The temptation for some marketers and publishers is to treat social media as an emerging trend to be studied and integrated over time. But the size and impact of Content Nation, now more than 100 million people who are already actively influencing opinions on brands, products, services and governments, has already moved enough attention away from traditional media sources that it compels institutions of all sizes to recalibrate their expectations to where the true growth in markets is likely to be measured for decades to come - and more, no doubt, if you have read the Content Nation book.

Traditional media outlets will be with us for years to come, but it is clear that the social media-driven economy is just beginning to empower markets that communicate effectively with people on a more personal and contextual level. This is leading us towards an era in which mass marketing brands will compete increasingly with massively personal brands for their share of the global economy.  Not all changes associated with the rise of the Content Nation economy are likely to be pain-free at first. In fact, the challenges to traditional mass marketing by Content Nation make it far more likely that many of the broad assumptions about what has powered the global economy will be challenged far more rapidly than we may imagine. When motivation to take action in a marketplace comes from a consensus of peers instead of from the centralized distribution of marketing messages, markets change fundamentally towards conversations rather than bullhorns. Many marketers are learning to adapt to these realities in Content Nation today, but those hockey stick-like growth curves for Twitter and YouTube should remind us that Lord Malthus' equation for growth doesn't leave one much leeway to react once these types of trends are under way.

It's been a busy month for the Twitter broadcast text messaging service, with people around the world praising it, demonizing it and blaming it for just about everything from revolutions to planes falling from the sky to swine flu epidemics. Things got off to a blazing start in April when parliamentary elections in the Eastern European nation of Moldova set off protests, in which some people spontaneously started to use Twitter and other social media services as tools to communicate information and ideas. Using Twitter's informal tagging standards, streams of information about protests in the nation's capital and elsewhere were available to anyone who cared to search for them (#pman, #moldova and #chisinau were among the most popular Twitter tags, which are still used regularly for updates from political activists).

While a good estimate of how many people were monitoring and resending information sent with these tags is not easy to surface, reports indicate that there are fewer than two hundred people in all of Moldova with Twitter accounts. Looking at some of the Moldova-based Twitter accounts mentioned in reports, such as Moscovici and 1arsz, most seem to have a few hundred Twitter followers at most at this time, including many curious onlookers from other nations. Whatever relationship there may be to social media and the tens of thousands who turned out for protests in Moldova may be difficult to establish based on these numbers.

What does seem to have happened, though, is that major media outlets such as The New York Times were tying people who were using Twitter to communicate with protesters to the outbreak of violence and the planting of a Romanian flag on Moldova's parliament building. Follow-up reports and Twitter messages from protest organizers seem to discredit that notion, with some finding evidence that these negative turns to the protest may have been orchestrated by the Moldovan government to stir up anti-Romanian sentiment in Moldova.

It appears as if major traditional media outlets were too quick to pick up on the "Twitter caused a revolution" theme, from both a positive and a negative point of view, perhaps knowing that "social media stories" gain wide exposure these days. There may have been significant use of social media in these protests, but the mass media, ever on the lookout for heroes and demons that help to deliver a simplified version of the truth, glossed over the complexities and limitations of how social media was being used as a communications tool.

In other words, the "Twitter Revolution" in Moldova was a significant political event, but you probably could no more tie Twitter or any other social media service to many events there than you could any other widely used communications method. Leaders organized followers, who took to the streets for any number of reasons, some of which could have very well been crystallized by Twitter or Facebook communications, but many of which probably were related to more complex and deep-rooted motivations. Tools don't make revolutions; people do. On the other hand, the more than 400,000 people on Facebook who follow the protest of Buddhist monks in Myanmar (Burma) seem to have defined a sustained global political movement with true mass scale using social media tools - with hardly a drop of mass media attention.

Similar mass media-induced hysteria about Twitter flowed through a number of stories this month. When U.S. talk show host Oprah Winfrey was guided by Twitter CEO Evan Williams through her first "tweets' on her new Twitter account, the meme sweeping the mass media was "Oprah put Twitter on the map!" Some conjectured that as many as a million people joined Twitter because of Oprah. Yet data from Hitwise and Comscore seems to indicate that the Twittering on Oprah's show was building on an already meteoric rise in Twitter usage. No doubt there was some significant add-on effect from the event, but it was more of a confirmation of a trend than the creation of one. Similarly, the mainstream media also highlighted the "race" between movie star Ashton Kutcher and cable news channel CNN to be the first to have a million followers on Twitter. Hmm, what's more important, one movie star with a million followers or millions of everyday people with hundreds of followers?

The media focus on stars - including overnight stars such as Britain's TV talent show singer  Susan Boyle - overshadows the success of social media that has been built on everyday people building extraordinary influence as individuals and as communities. As the Content Nation book notes, there's room for both the powerful and everyday people to have influence in social media, but powerful figures and institutions using social media are playing in a game that really doesn't need them to succeed. It's this lack of dependence that seems to upset some mainstream media figures sometimes - and that tends to lead to the demonization of social media oftentimes.

Recently a low-level flyover by a government jet near the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor sent off a panic amongst many local residents and professionals who feared that it was possibly an airplane headed towards local skyscrapers. People using Twitter were the first to report the event. Somehow this was transformed by some reports in the mainstream media into Twitter setting off panics amongst local people. Yet an examination of Twitter messages from that day indicates that the "sensor society" using Twitter was largely very factual about events - and quite discerning about the ambiguity of the situation. Similarly the recent concerns about a swine flu pandemic were whipped to a frenzy in mainstream media outlets, yet in spite of claims about Twitter spreading the panic many messages on Twitter were effective in curtailing disinformation - and in presenting more balanced accounts.

The truth is that Twitter is just a tool, which, like other social media tools, offers a highly scalable technology that enables anyone in the world to influence any number of other people in the world on a moment's notice. People can use social media tools wisely or unwisely, to be sure, but in general people want to communicate to other people influentially in a positive way. We like filtering information for others - and trying to separate fact from fiction. Best of all most of us don't have to sell ads to have the right to do so, which may make citizen journalism less inherently biased towards sensationalism that can attract "eyeballs." We like following the lifestyles of the rich and famous, oftentimes, but social media reminds us that everyday people can be more interesting on most days -and, sometimes, can be people who are able to change the world.

No, the people using Twitter in Moldova didn't create a revolution any more than Thomas Paine created a revolution in America with his "Common Sense" pamphlet back in 1776. But, like Tom Paine,  by daring to use social media tools perhaps this handful of social media pioneers in that small nation began to spread facts and opinions that helped to change the minds of others on their own. And that, by any measure, will become a revolution on a global scale in time.

When I accepted the invitation to speak on a social media panel for The National Press Club in Washington, DC, there was talk that Congressman John Culberson would be stopping by, but as it's difficult for people in Congress to commit to events when the people's duty calls, it was far from a given that he'd be making  the scene. It was a distinct pleasure, then, to discover that not only did Congressman Culberson make the event but as well that he was seated next to me on the panel. I featured his ground-breaking exploits with Twitter in the Content Nation book, which includes a bipartisan look at the impact of social media on politics (note of some pride: I did not use the name of any U.S. political party in this chapter and tried to offer up good examples from across the political spectrum, so that all of the citizens of Content Nation could  look at the examples with open eyes). It was great to see him in action at this event.

The panel, which was moderated moderated by Rick Dunham, bureau chief of Hearst's Washington Bureau, also included Patrick Gavin, who tweets for Politico and wrote the article, "10 Most Influential Twitterers in Washington", and Richard Hanley, director of graduate programs at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut and former head of the school's e-media programs. Prior to the event Richard was describing a new program in electronic journalism that seems to be really tuned into what today's students need to do to be successful in an online publishing environment, I do suggest that you check it out. Many J-Schools need to look at developing their curriculum much more along the lines of Quinnipiac's program.

The panel was supposed to be carried live by CSPAN, the non-profit television network that covers government-oriented events with an unblinking eye, but some last-minute changes apparently shelved that notion. No matter, Congressman Culberson leapt up and began creating a live video stream on the Web using a Web-enabled camera hooked up to the Qik videocasting service. After a short "show and tell" to the audience he passed his camera along to a waiting aide who captured the whole event in a live video stream. The "people's video" was clearly in the hands of Content Nation this day. As Congressman Culberson related his experience with using content technologies to support his efforts in Texas and national politicas dating back to the 1980s, it was clear that he has made it a point to be on the cutting edge of using these technologies to further his political goals. While some of his early efforts using Twitter and Qik directly from the floor of the House of Representatives were very controversial in the eyes of House leaders, Congress is catching on quickly to the notion that these advanced social media tools can benefit everyone's communications with their consituents - and, yes, with the mainstream media as well.

As a panel participant  it was a little difficult to capture everything that other panelists were saying, but here are a few of the key points that I absorbed from people's presentations and in the Q&A:

• Patrick Gavin of Politico pointed out that one of the keys to mastering  Twitter as a journalist is to remember that it's not such a different medium that the long-established rules of professionalism in journalism don't apply. If someone tells you that something is off the record and you decide to send out a message on Twitter about it, then you have to face the consequences of that publishing as much as you would as if it had been published in a paper. Twitter is a different medium, but the impact of its messages can affect the world - and a journalist's relationship with key sources - as much as any other medium.
  
  
• Congressman Culberson underscored that social media publishing tools were enabling the ideals of the nation's "founding fathers" to realize the "we the people" ideal for government that they helped to enshrine. He underscored especially his belief that the ideal of Jeffersonian (lower-case) republicanism would be met by people using social media tools to minimize the role of government in their lives.
  
  While I agree that social media does help people to self-organize much more easily without established institutions in the loop, I do think that it's important to recognize that both Jefferson and other key people involved in the framing of our current government were rather leery of the idea of truly democratic rule. In fact, if we are to believe the view of Joseph Ellis' recent book "American Creation ," the word "democracy" in those days was viewed as rule by the mob, as opposed to "republicanism," which was rule by the elites in the name of the people.
  
  I am not sure that Jefferson would be entirely approving of social media's ability to promote the influence of virtually anyone in society who has access to this powerful communication tool. It's one thing to broadcast to "the people" using social media, but quite another to realize that "the people" can broadcast what they choose to as they please. It's important, then, for politicians to remember that social media's view of "we the people" does not necessarily mean "we the people who agree with my point of view."
  
  
• Rick Dunham and Richard Hanley noted that one of the impacts of social media on the news business is that it was changing how news is aggregated. Certainly journalists are using Twitter to monitor what other people are saying to prepare their own news articles and they are also using it to make people aware of content on their own publications' Web sites. But even as they are doing this they are participating in a tool that is helping to shift people's attention for aggregated news away from their own publications' Web sites. This shift is inevitable to some degree - you have to get people's attention where they give it - but it's having a growing impact on the news business. My advice to news publishers: get used to proviing to the world that your news is important in this agnostic news aggregation environment - and, hopefully, get better at being your own agnostic aggregators.
  
  
• A truck driver watching the session via Congressman Culberson's Qik video sentinstitu in a question on Twitter asking whether it was really possible for someone alone in the cab of a semi to have global influence. I was quick to grab the mike on this one, in part because I had given an example in Chapter 5 of "Content Nation" of truckers using social media to build personal and professional communities. But it was also a great opportunity to highlight a good analogy of what makes Twitter work. I likened Twitter to a citizen's band radio for text with global reach, a broadcasting mechanism that enables people to broadcast text (and links) both ways. On the CB radios used by many truckers there's a "squelch" control that enables a listener to filter out signals that are too weak to be "heard" easily. The "follow" function on Twitter works similarly, enabling a Twitter user to choose just how much "signal" they get from people broadcasting Twitter messages by choosing who they want to hear from. With the ability to broadcast globally and the ability for other people to rebroadcast your messages globally Twitter provides a powerful medium for anyone wanting to tell the world what's happening from their perspective.

This was a fantastic event, there were excellent questions from both the audience and online, great panelists with great insight and the real pleasure of seeing a masterful politician demonstrating his mastery of social media communications arts. I do think that Congressman Culberson challenges all politicians to consider what it really means to be representing people empowered by social media tools. Members of the House are always under a lot of pressure to be in touch with their constituents during their two-year terms. Social media allows them to gather constituents around the virtual "cracker barrel" to discuss issues at a moment's notice - and allows those constituents to give politicians a belly-full at a moment's notice. As for the journalists covering today's politics, there will always be opportunities to make a career from journalism if you have the right skills with the right personal relationships associated with the right publishing brand. That brand may be a major media company or a journalist's own personal brand, but regardless of where their paycheck comes from there will always be room in politics for people with skills and connections who know how to tell a story about influential people well.

My thanks to the National Press Club staff who made this event possible. It was a pleasure and a privilege to be a part of this event. I hope that Content Nation has an opportunity to visit Washington again some time soon.

The NASDAQ stock market is a thoroughly modern financial trading service, providing purely electronic trading of stocks for large and small investors alike through its network of securities dealers who buy and sell stocks on NASDAQ. The day's trading on NASDAQ starts at 9.30 in the morning by New York City's clocks, an occasion that has evolved into a great marketing tool for NASDAQ. Several years ago NASDAQ moved from its downtown digs near Wall Street in New York to the heart of Times Square on Broadway - arguably the center of today's mass-market media industry in the U.S. In doing so NASDAQ built a headquarters that was perfectly adapted to providing a media stage for "opening bell" ceremonies and news commentary on the securities markets. With a street-level studio chockablock with flat panel video displays, television network studios and a video-driven display several stories high wrapping around the corner of its building, NASDAQ created a "there" for its electronic marketplace that rivals the historic New York Stock Exchange's trading floor's opening ceremonies for drama and market impact.

I've been on the trading floor of several major exchanges along the way, so when my friend David Meerman Scott invited me to a "tweetup" of his appearance at the NASDAQ market opening ceremony it sounded like a great opportunity to do some networking in a familiar setting and to reflect on Twitter's impact on financial markets. I arrived a few minutes early to pause in the NASDAQ building's dramatic lobby and then was ushered in to the studio where a crowd of Twitterers and friends of David were congregating. It's an impressive facility, kind of like Disney World for financial markets, with lots of dramatic music, videos, voice-overs and television studio ambiance to heighten the sense of this being a media event as much as a market event. If NASDAQ is trying to build a media brand as much as a securities market brand, they're pushing all of the right buttons.

The ceremony went off without a hitch, with David offering pre-opening thanks to GlobeNewswire and Shareholder.com, two arms of NASDAQ that were backing the event, followed by a big hurrah and an almost-executed "wave" by the crowd surrounding David as the 9.30 mark approached. David then signed his "@dmscott" Twitter moniker on the electronic easel in front of the podium and lead the crowd out to the center of Times Square across from the studio for some photo-ops in front of the massive video displays on the NASDAQ building. As digital photos and videos of David's opening bell ceremony flashed up on the building - including  a nifty photo of me and David at the podium - we all got our few seconds of fame in lights on Broadway, then hustled back into the NASDAQ studio to chat and to say our goodbyes.

Like other "tweetups," the event was as much about the people who came as users of Twitters as it was the messages (and public relations mojo) generated by them on Twitter. A quick scan of NASDAQ-tagged messages from that morning on Twitter shows some of the enthusiasm that people generated online for the event, which seems to focus as much on David and the people who attended as it did for NASDAQ's sponsorhip. One of the tricks of sponsoring a tweetup seems to be that there's no guarantee that you'll get lots of direct collateral in the messages generated by the event. Much of the public relations value of tweetups seems to be in knowing who decided to show up for the event - and, by implication, who was endorsing it with their personal brand. In that sense this was a successful tweetup, with many prominent associates of David providing their personal endorsement of NASDAQ by putting their "boots on the ground" at the opening bell event.

To some degree the event also confirmed that Twitter has the intense interest of public relations professionals at least as much as everyday people. There we were, the supposed "avant garde" of electronic publishing, most of us in our charcoal gray suits and conservative ties, looking as businesslike as most anyone else walking down the streets of Manhattan on a Monday morning. Marketers are intensely interested in getting their brands to connect with people on Twitter, in part because its brief text format allows millions of people to spread messages and trends quickly and in part because the people to whom they send messages are oftentimes key influencers themselves. Twitter may be at the foothills of mass audiences today, but the people using it are oftentimes powerful and highly known people who want to keep their personal, corporate and political brands in the limelight.

As for NASDAQ's role in the Twitter phenomenon, I think that the event was a good move to highlight the NASDAQ brand on a key marketing channel, but it also made me think of NASDAQ's historical roots. In days of yore, the old National Association of Securities Dealers (now subsumed into the FINRA financial markets regulation body) used to print a daily list of prices for publicly traded securities with a profile too small to warrant their listing on a stock market. These "pink sheets" gave small companies a vague shot at reaching investors, but it was hard for them to get the attention that listed stocks were receiving. Today many of the types of companies that were likely to have been on those pink sheet listings are now privately held companies, giving investors fewer options to have a shot at up-and-coming high-growth opportunities for their funds.

In a sense the Twitter phenomenon is, like many social media publishing technologies, reminding us that the "Big Sombrero" economy is there to help individuals to form their own consensus about what's valuable in the marketplaces that matter most to them. With Twitter and other social media publishing platforms there are business transactions as well as social transactions that are executed in real-time, people encouraging and endorsing one another in ways that lead to valuable relationships and, oftentimes, money changing hands. Much of the economic value of the transactions generated by the power of social media will never register on NASDAQ's glowing and flashing displays, much less on the more-humble "pink sheet" listings.

On occasion the economic power of social media can be trained on mass-market brands and economic goals, and when it does it can have an enormous impact on them as well. But for every major corporation hoping to benefit from social media's influential marketplace impact there are millions of invididuals trying to make their own personal mark on one another directly, with or without major brands to underwrite their personal commerce. In doing so we may have entered an era in which personal brands can jump from "pink sheet" status to the strength of full market participants almost overnight - or thrive indefinitely in their own niche markets using the powerful influence of social media to sustain them. Financial markets such as NASDAQ are essential tools for ensuring the health of our economy, but the ability of the Big Sombrero economy to empower its own person-to-person marketing through social media may be giving traditional stock markets a run for their money for the bragging rights to who is ringing the bell of global economic growth.

Estimates of how many people have regular access to the Internet vary widely, but the latest leading estimates available today show the total base of people using the Web at about 1.6 billion people. That's huge in and of itself, of course, but it overlooks a key factor: other current estimates have the total world population weighing in at about 6.7 billion people. In other words, about three-fourths of the world's people have no Web access. As ubiquitous as the Web seems at times, it is just in the early days of having a social and economic impact on the world at large.

While a portion of this non-accessing population could be chalked up to older people who will never make the leap across the digital divide, an even larger portion are people who are yearning for the economic and social opportunities afforded by Web communications. As I outline in the Content Nation book in Chapter 3, in the back alleys of New Delhi poor children with no previous exposure to computers were given access to the Web via a PC embedded in the wall of a building. Almost immediately they became what an adult would consider "computer literate" and started teaching one another how to publish and how to collaborate on content. The five billion-plus people who are awaiting access to the Web are largely these people, ready to make use of globally accessible and highly scalable publishing tools to change their work, their lives and their future as soon as they get their hands on them.

The question is, though, how people who have very few resources can participate in Content Nation, the global community of the millions of people already influencing the world through social media publishing. One company that is hot on the trail of answering this question is Google. Google's corporate mission is defined in very broad terms: to organize the world's information and to make it universally accessible and useful. The breadth of this mission includes organizing information from people who may not be literate or have a type of literacy that's accessible to only a relatively small group of people who speak local dialects. This is a particular concern in nations such as India, which has over 100 spoken and written dialects and languages in use amongst its citizens today, with only a small fraction of them speaking English and many who don't speak or read Hindi or other prominent native languages.

Enter Google Noticeboard, a beta service developed by Google Labs India that begins to bridge the gap between the world's publishing "haves" and "have-nots" - and that provides a new way for even sophisticated content publishers and sharers to relate to one another. Google Noticeboard enables people with limited or no literacy and who have at least some access to communications technologies to publish and share voice and text messages with other people equipped with Google Noticeboard technology on their PCs or who have everyday mobile phones. In small villages and other communities where access to computers is limited, Google Noticeboard is designed to allow those who have access to a computer that can be accessed by a community to share Google Noticeboard's ability to send and share messages.

Once installed on your computer, Google Noticeboard provides a very simple and almost text-free point-and-click interface that enables people to record voice and text messages and to categorize them using simple graphic icons - no language knowledge is assumed except by the person administering the computer. Messages can be listened to and read by people using that communal or personal computer, or they can be sent to another person's phone or email account listed in the administrator's Gmail contact list. In this way people who may not have access to computers can still share information and messages with their community by sending or replying to Google Noticeboard messages.

The graphic icons used to define the default Google Noticeboard categories give a hint as to what the designers of the system had in mind for communal messages: money, religion, relationships, agriculture and education are key targets for Google Noticeboard messages, though users may define their own categories. The concept of Google Noticeboard is in some ways a direct descendant of Agropedia, an initiative in India to build a repository of local agricultural knowledge that can collect information from anyone equipped with a telephone. Instead of spending untold fortunes trying to educate people in how to communicate in commonly published languages in order to receive and to disseminate information, both Agropedia and Google Noticeboard flip this model on its head and try to get people to build knowledge with whatever level of literacy they share in common with their peers.

Google Noticeboard enables people to communicate to groups and individuals at the lowest common denominator of available publishing technologies but still have the ability to scale their communications rapidly to be available to a broader community. Add in any number of contacts from a community or personal Gmail contact list and pretty soon you have the ability to form both knowledge bases and markets with large groups of people. And this is using only the core Google Noticeboard tools: if extended into Google's emerging Google Voice services, based on technology acquired by Google from GrandCentral, and enhanced by Google's emerging ability to search audio sources, Google Noticeboard can be thought of as the broad foothills of an emerging strategy to revolutionize shared audio as a key content source for globally-scaled publishing. People may be in awe of Craigslist's ability to enable people to build person-to-person commerce and relationships, for example, but imagine how people who can post voice or simple text classifieds to their peers in remote villages around the world can begin to change their lives.

Given that many of the five billion people who do not have personal access to the Web are not likely to become literate in the languages most commonly used on the Web any time soon, Google Noticeboard also holds out the potential for social media to connect these people to the power of publishing before they've ever had a real taste of the "old stuff" from many traditional media sources. In other words, after millennia of holding the keys to publishing while leaving much of the world's population illiterate and with no access to publishing tools, we may be on the edge of human civilization re-emerging as infinitely scalable communities who hold the ability to organize their own native communications as they please. In some instances this will mean that people choose to invest in their traditional cultures and languages, ensuring a diversity of outlooks and techniques that may eventually help humankind to ensure diverse approaches can compete to solve globally scaled challenges. In other instances it may mean that these same people opt for online translation services to participate in broader communities around the world.

Whichever way this plays, the highly scalable communications of social media are beginning to empower the three-fourths of people around the world who have been largely ignored by traditional content and technology companies. In Content Nation I highlight the "Big Sombrero" economy, the massive value being created through social media enabling people connected through social media to build markets for their goods and services together. The Big Sombrero economy many not power a huge surge in the consumption of mass-market goods,  but it may enable local and specialized economies all around the world to scale massively as never before - enough to create a whole new level of wealth in the world previously abandoned by major economic interests.

Too often we think of the social media revolution in terms of relatively exotic toys such as iPhones and sophisticated online services oriented towards relatively affluent people. Google's focus on being a simple and effective solution that can reach the broadest audience possible is opening up an addressable marketplace for social media and basic human communications five times larger than the one that most companies are chasing. In the process of doing so the real story of human evolution in the hands of Content Nation is just beginning to take form in a way that could change the shape of the global economy - one village, one message, one person at a time.

There was a post by Bill Gurley on the  Seeking Alpha blog a few days ago, noting that although Facebook's $450 million in annual revenues is nothing to sneeze at, when one holds it up to the more than $7 billion earned by major portals such as Yahoo! it's not much to shout about to stock analysts. The cry (or is it a whine?) that's rising up from many quarters these days is that social media doesn't make money as well as traditional media. Ads don't work (Computerworld quotes a study from Nielsen that shows people associate words like "false" most often with Web ads), or at least they don't work as well in social media as they do in traditional media outlets. Bill Gurley points out a counterpoint to traditional ad revenues in social media: the Chinese portal Tencent generates $17 in revenue from sales of real and virtual goods and services for every $2 they make in advertising revenues.

In other words, social media works very well for making money - when you have the ability to execute on a transaction. And that's the key thing to remember about social media from a marketing perspective. In essence, making money in social media is about building social transactions based on common bonds and attraction. Advertising has its place in social media - especially when it is used to build endorsements based on real relationships - but the essence of advertising is self-promotion in contexts that the advertiser doesn't own. Social media enables both personal and corporate brands to be built on their own turf or consensually in a peer community. Certainly you want to "dress for success" in a peer community, but in general you don't lay on the perfume and jewelry to seduce your peers. You come as yourself, so that your essential qualities will shine through and attract people who want to engage with you, endorse you or transact with you. Your brand isn't something you sell: it's something that you are that catches fire and results in sales or other forms of endorsement or buy-in.

This is a fairly intuitive concept on a personal level, but it's still highly counter-intuitive to many marketers and advertisers. For most marketers a transaction is something known as a "sale" that happens as the result of their efforts to insert their message into media outlets. With social media, much of the transaction that results in sales is pre-loaded into building and fostering personal relationships in such a way that a sale is more the underscoring of the value of that relationship than it is the essence of the relationship. As David Meerman Scott pointed out recently in his recent NYU presentation on his "World Wide Rave " marketing book, the Grateful Dead rock band became the world leader in touring events by encouraging their audience to record and share their concerts. In other words, they used their music to build relationships with their audience through peer interactions that resulted in massive ticket and souvenir sales for their concert events. The social transaction that resulted in those sales was almost entirely pre-loaded through the social transactions that made going to a concert more of a celebration of a relationship than a purchase.

So where is the money in social media? It's in building relationships that develop social transactions which in turn build into largely pre-sold transactions for goods and services. If you spend time looking at a friend's photos or a colleague's blog or a company's expert advice video, then you've already been spending your attention on relationships that get you past the trust barrier that most advertising is trying to crash through as creatively as possible with various forms of seduction or selective information. Social media is less about seduction and more about relationships. To put it in the framework of a salesperson, Social media is more like taking your clients and prospects out for golf and advertising is more like trying to grab their attention at a trade show with various hokey attention-getting schemes. So perhaps from a sales perspective you can think of social media as the world's largest and most cost-effective golf course.

The trick in social media is that many of the people who help to build the trust that leads to sales are usually not under a marketer's control. People add reviews to product sites, comment on products and services in blogs and otherwise create a fabric of relationships that factor into a person's level of trust. In other words, to succeed in social media with marketing you have to accept that you're part of a community that has its own opinions that have to be respected and managed on a personal level. You may be able to scale up that community's opinion rapidly through successful viral marketing, but that success cannot be mass-produced as a budget line item as easily as advertising or marketing materials can be budgeted via traditional media outlets. Scalable influence in social media comes through peers influencing other peers.

So there's lots of money to be made in social media, but not necessarily through the traditional tools of marketing experts. Advertising, public relations and other traditional marketing tools can help to build awareness of a brand and can help to get viral marketing off to a healthy start, but social media converts a desire for a transaction into an actual transaction far more efficiently than traditional media. It also can help smaller merchants and services providers to scale their influence in markets far more cost effectively than advertising through their own publishing efforts. As the Content Nation book points out, the "Big Sombrero" economy is where the action is in social media, enabling small and medium sized businesses beyond the radar of most traditional media to survive and to thrive far more cost-effectively than ever before.

Highly scalable personal publishing via social media tools is displacing the power of traditional mass media as the engine of our marketing economy. As this marketing engine grows, our global economy will surge - but not necessarily producing value where traditional marketing tools helped to create it. Millions of social media publishers will have control of their own personal brands and messaging and will create value both in their local communities and in a global marketplace far more efficiently than ever before. Through the mass manufacturing of highly personalized contexts goods and services will be matched to their consumers through a global network of trusted relationships - much as early humans began to reach beyond their own clans to build the world's first trading networks.

Where is the money on social media? It's right at the tips of our fingers as each and every one of us becomes empowered to market ourselves and to build our personal brands. In the greater scheme of our global economy, that's probably the most positive economic outcome that can be imagined for a world in desperate need of more efficient ways to create value for one another. So please, step up - be a full-fledged citizen of Content Nation. Your pocketbook will thank you.

I love writing about social media - heck, I wouldn't have written a book on it if that weren't true - but unfortunately the "media" aspect of social media means that sometimes people get in a pack mentality not unlike traditional media outlets. This creates what is referred to sometimes as "memes," a Noam Chomsky-esque way to say that key concepts have become accepted as truisms somewhat independent of facts or careful analysis.

A new meme exploded onto the scene recently that seems to go along the lines of "Skittles really blew it with their social media experiment, didn't they?" For those who haven't been following this tweet by tweet or post by post, the Web site for the popular pop-in-your-mouth Skittles candy appeared all of a sudden earlier this week to have been hijacked by a rotating set of social media sites, with an overlay window of links to information and promotional materials about the candy. To cover the legalisms of being exposed to content that is not controlled or endorsed by Skittles' manufacturer, one has to fill out an age check form to get to the content itself, but the impression is immediate and somewhat jarring for one used to the typically slick and over-engineered consumer product Web sites.

The result is kind of a cross between the diet soda-and-Mentos phenomenon on YouTube and General Motors' ersatz experiment with user-generated ads for its gas-guzzling GMC Yukon SUV. On one level you could say that the promo people at Skittles bit off more than they could chew, as people becoming aware of this promo scheme began to pump uncomplementary messages into Twitter and other outlets along with positive messages. This part resembles how people used the ad-generating tools provided to create your own GMC Yukon ads to slam their inefficiency and other negative points about the product and GM as a whole. But on the other side it also resembles how the Mentos candy got an enormous amount of product buzz from the use of their candies to create gushing fountains of sticky diet soda in all sorts of unique ways. All of a sudden everyone's talking about your product in social media, which at least gives your brand a chance to experiment with the power of that potential endorsement.

As an experiment to get some attention in a marketplace in which much of the daily focus of audiences is switching over to social media outlets, this is not a bad play. It's a unique attempt to see what can be done with the power of a corporate brand to endorse social media that talks about it, regardless of whether that media is positive or negative in its outlook on the product. That's a bold experiment, and one that draws on the old the maxim "any PR is good PR" (well, at least most PR). It is also an attempt to recognize that in today's marketing world the power of endorsement by everyday people's influence through social media is overtaking the influence found in traditional media outlets. So, all told and done, not a bad gain for an experiment that was very simple to set up.

Traditionally corporate brands seek out mainstream content for advertising that is predictable, highly polished in its production values and controlled carefully by professional production companies. Just as their products are mass-manufactured for mass audiences, they seek to mass-manufacture highly standardized and measurable responses to their products through advertising, One might say that mass manufacturing of consumer goods and mass media grew up together: one would not have grown without the other. Social media flips the traditional media model around and instead focuses on the mass manufacturing of highly scalable publishing contexts by individuals, whose endorsement power on a mass level is much more difficult to engineer or predict individually but which in sum creates an enormous conversation about products and services which in turn has the power to create endorsements on a very personal level around the world. Social media is a bit like having millions of Tiger Woods wearing your logo at the drop of a hat.

The Mentos manufacturers figured this out and began to sponsor large-scale events in which people were shooting off soda-and-Mentos fountains by the hundreds, and, eventually, by the thousands. If people loved doing something that used their brand, well, then, go for it. The folks at Skittles, lacking such a grass roots phenomenon, seemed to have decided to create their own conversation out of the blue. In doing so they have pushed their corporate brand on their own Web site to the side as little more than an ad and focused on what people do with their brand in social media.

As Sally Falkow notes on Social Media Today, perhaps this means that what people say about a brand in social media is becoming more important than corporate Web sites in projecting the value of a brand. I don't know that that's altogether true, but the Skittles experiment is certainly an acknowledgement that making corporate Web sites little more than a slick ad for your products is not likely to carry much weight with audiences. It's certainly far more likely that everyday people will engage a brand in the social media sites of their own preference than at a corporate site, but companies such as Google with very closely watched weblogs can enable a corprorate brand to keep a conversation going with the world of social media.

What this really boils down to is that many brand advertisers are very frustrated that there are huge audiences on the Web paying attention to social media content that either does not allow advertising or allows advertising and marketing in ways that don't allow them to communicate with audiences in familiar ways. When I look at the Skittles site experiment I see the advertising industry saying to social media Web sites, "Now, look here, THIS is where we want our ad to go and THIS is how we want it to act. Do you get the picture?" In doing so they have blurred the lines of intellectual property rights, which is an interesting twist, but not a very positive one. In other words, they hijacked social media content to run an ad campaign to force and implied endorsement for their ads.

Looming over the top of this specific incident, though, is the broader question: what will be the value of global corporate brands as social media changes what people pay attention to on a daily basis? For companies that provide unique and compelling products and services, the answer to that is probably going to be that they survive and thrive for years to come, most especially if they know how to listen to and to participate in conversations in social media to meet people's needs effectively. But for those products and services that survive and thrive mostly by trying to convince people that they offer compelling benefits when they really don't, the road ahead is not likely to be as bright. Looking at the endless aisles of flavored bubbly water in our local supermarket, or for that matter even the growing aisles of organic junk food in our local "health food" store, I think that we're seeing the beginning of the death of brands that have been built primarily on their ability to gain attention through a handful of tightly controlled media outlets.

The link between mass manufacturing and mass media is breaking down, leaving smaller voices on the rim of the "Big Sombrero" economy more bandwidth to re-establish a strong share of the global economy. Some of these "Big Sombrero" brands will be lifted up into the mass economy, and some mass brands will survive and thrive as essential tools for everyday needs and wants. But in general the era of mass seduction via advertising to a zombie-like passive audience through traditional media is beginning to recede into the background day by day.

This change is likely to have major implications for the global economy, some of which are being felt even today in the lack of confidence in global stock markets. Some of this lack of confidence is no doubt just cyclical uncertainty, but I think that there is also and underlying current that has people wondering around the world, "Can we really mass-manufacture our way out of this mess?"

In the short term the answer is probably yes, but I would not count on that being the case when the global economy meets its next challenge. It's funny to think that a little colored candy's experiment could be a harbinger of global economic change, but in the desperateness of manufacturers to find appropriate outlets for their traditional mass messaging I hear the footsteps of billions of people around the world who need to survive and to thrive in the enormous Big Sombrero economy beyond the world of mass manufacturing and marketing beginning to ask for their own share of attention.

My journeys took me through the Boston area last Thursday, so what better way to spend a few hours before heading home than to go to a "tweetup," a meetup of people who publish and follow other publishers on the Twitter messaging service. This particular Tweetup was sponsored by Forrester Research, which used the event to offer a raffle of a copy of their social media book "Groundswell" and free bar grub as the bait for showing up. I don't know how the book raffle was as a promo, but the event was packed with people who were very interested to network with other people who tweet.

Who comes to a tweetup? Pretty much who one would expect to be networking in the greater Boston area: folks who work in the content technology and media space, public relations specialists, creatives and market researchers, for the most part. But there were also people who like me came at least in part just to see what people who tweet look like. Are they wild-eyed idealists out to change the world? Well, some, to be sure, but for the most part they're typical professional adults of all ages who enjoy following others on Twitter and who enjoy learning from them and experiencing what the world looks like from their point of view in 140 characters or less.

I had lots of great conversations at the tweetup, including a chat with Mike Langford, CEO of Tweetworks, a startup working on an service based in part on Twitter's API that enables people to build groups of short messages with like-minded people. Tweetworks is its own Twitter-like platform, but messages distributed via Tweetworks can be sent to Twitter as well. Building affinity groups for messaging is not a current Twitter feature - its ad hoc tagging scheme comes close at times, but it's not really a group technology - and threaded conversations are definitely something left for the API-based Twitter aftermarket. So it appears as if Mike is on to something with Tweetworks - that something most likely being a sale to Twitter or to whoever buys Twitter, no doubt.

 Perhaps the liveliest conversation of the evening revolved around the true nature of Twitter. I advanced the notion that I put forward in a recent Content Nation blog post that Twitter is the world's first highly scalable broadcast message subscription service. This didn't necessarily resonate with some folks, who were more focused on Twitter as a microbroadcast service that enabled people to create their own highly tuned audiences. It's true enough that even the most popular accounts being followed on Twitter today have followers numbered typically in the low tens of thousands. That's hardly a broadcast-scaled audience that compares with, say, a major market television station or broadcast network. But given that stable Twitter technology is little more than a year old, I think that the more fair comparison would be with the early days of radio in the 20th century, when there were relatively few radios, much less people to listen to them. As the technology scales, so will audiences.

I do agree, though, that it's also equally true that Twitter's most powerful features is its ability to create highly tuned broadcasts that can include both highly popular sources of content as well as very close-to-me sources of content in a common stream. This is a lot like the "Big Sombrero" model that I outline in the Content Nation book; the sum of micro-markets that are off the radar of most mass marketers is far greater than the potential for mass markets, but we like having both. I like the illustration from the back of Jay Bryant's business card that I received from him at the Social Media Club meeting in New York, which I reproduced above. Same concept, but a different "get it" angle. Twitter is a powerful tool that enables huge masses of micromarkets to form and dissolve instantly, far more rapidly than the ability of most mass marketers to engage them. It gets only more and more difficult for them to compete with the self-organizing "pile of bodies" out at the rim of the Big Sombrero.

It was a great event for Content Nation, I handed out a lot of our new Content Nation postcards and flag lapel pins and introduced the Content Nation concepts to lots of people, most of whom really seemed to like them (okay, there were those few ex-Forrester soreheads who weren't so sure). Some people even "got" what the pins were all about. I find that people who are new to social media seem to get them a little more quickly than the "old hands," which is probably a good thing for Content Nation. I'll be keeping my radar on for future tweetups, if this one event is a good example of the quality of people that they attract they're worth a shot again.

The Social Media Club meeting this week at the offices of Business Wire in New York City was an excellent venue for my talk on "Content Nation" that featured a good crowd of folks (photos on Facebook) from the key arenas of content commerce in the New York area: the "new media" crowd (can we really call it that, still?), traditional publishers, PR and advertising pros and a smattering of people with exposure to the financial community. The meeting was held at the 40 East 52nd Street offices of Business Wire, which just happens to occupy space formerly used by Reuters when I was working there. It was kind of interesting and in a way ironic that in the conference room that used to be just a few feet away from a major real-time financial information data center we were talking about how social media is becoming the real-time publishing phenomenon of today's world. Here where some years ago I was working with the Reuters tech team to market real-time data feeds I was handing out Content Nation flag lapel pins. Things change.

Howard Greenstein, the Director of the Social Media Club and President of the Harbooke Group, did a great job moderating a typically energized and engaged SMC crowd through an initial open discussion of ideas and then turned the program over to my presentation on Content Nation. If you're interested, I have the slides embedded via Sliderocket at the end of this post, including a slide that I pulled up during the discussion when people were talking about the definition of content - seemed logical to pull up that part of the book for folks to discuss.

The presentation went very well and, in the typical style of the Social Media Club, I paused several times to discuss comments that came up during my talk. You really do have to come to SMC meetings, they're by and large very free-wheeling people with really good ideas who show up at these events. The interesting thing about this crowd, though, is that it also included a fair amount of people oriented towards traditional media who appeared to be grappling with the impact of social media on traditional publishing and traditional ways of doing business. I think of the ideas in Content Nation as pretty much the here-and-now of today's publishing, but I forget sometimes that for many in the media industry social media is still a very bold frontier that is at the same time both challenging and threatening to many. One person called Content Nation's vision of the far future that I outline in Chapter 10 of the book "chilling," which was surprising to me, given that it was from someone who is very much on the cutting edge of social media.

This uncertainty about a future built on Content Nation's increasingly pervasive influence was also echoed by more traditional media hands, who were insistent, among other things, about the fundamental goodness of traditional media's approach to the truth in news gathering. Well, there were many easy examples of less-than-objective news stories and reporters to toss against that idea, but clearly the idea that everyday people are pretty good at digging up and publishing the truth also is something that is still sinking in to many minds.  As a former employee of Reuters I have nothing but the deepest respect for journalists who risk their lives every day around the world in search of the truth, but, as the recent stabbing of the prominent blogger Xu Lai should remind us, press credentials are not the true borderline of danger for those seeking to publish the truth. Social media seems to imply that, like scientific research, the truth is something that we all seek together over time. It's great that some people are able to do it professionally, but Content Nation has expanded the borders of that tribe into a global community of millions.

There were quite a few questions also about the impact of social media on marketing, the future of print, and who's doing best in mainstream media with social media. I must admit that I forgot to mention some of the better examples of mainstream media using social media that are highlighted in the book, including the Houston Chronicle's great local blog community, and probably should have also highlighted recent aggressive moves by CNN to use Twitter and Facebook to build their brands and engagement. Many major media outlets are learning to embrace social media as a way to build relationships with their audience, but in general it's a slow go for them. The monetization model for social media is quite different from a typical television channel or magazine, although if you think of many social media outlets as events I do think that it lines up very nicely with many traditional publising revenue models.

I think that these conflicts are probably best illustrated by the slide that I had in my presentation of a stadium full of people at the recent SuperBowl game holding up their lit mobile phones recording the event and sharing with others. In a sense the publishing by individuals is beginning to dwarf traditional publishing, a factor that has huge implications for global economics and society as a whole. This is the essence of the challenge that Content Nation puts out there for people to consider, both the best practices that we need to use to survive and to thrive today as well as those that we will be needing to face a world that is in the process of changing far more radically than even many cutting-edge social media enthusiasts may imagine. I look forward to mapping out these changes here, at future meetings of the Social Media Club and wherever else that people are ready to learn about what it means to be a citizen of Content Nation.

NOTE: Fonts from original slides were mangled a bit by Sliderocket from originals, sorry about that.