So, what’s a vigilant corporate lawyer to do? Nothing, according to Bruce Johnson, partner at Davis Wright Tremain, LLP, in this video interview from MyRagan.com.

+++

First of all, it’s important to be clear with your boss on what social media is. It’s definitely not advertising or something disruptive. It’s not one-way communication, like most corporate web sites. At the core, it’s a participative medium, like a big democratic marketplace. Which means you can’t buy your way in. Just ask the many companies that have tried and failed at creating “viral” videos. (Viral successes don’t count, just as you shouldn’t ask lottery winners for advice on financial planning.)

That’s not to say there isn’t participation inequality. On the social Web, some participants matter more than others. Take the woman who I just started following on Twitter, who, as a guru, has 11,000 followers while she only follows about 2,000 people. That makes her an influencer whose endorsements result in lots of attention. But she had to earn that power. Just as your organization will have to.

Indeed social media marketing is low-cost or no-cost approach, which makes it very tempting in this economic downturn. But it comes with the price of being engaged, accessible and human. Because it is a voluntary medium, people won’t show much interest if they think you’re just working it like an ad channel. People who do that get shut out pretty aggressively.

Instead, people need to feel like you’re offering something of value (inspiration, information, insight, entertainment, humor, etc.) — in other words, you gotta bring something to the party. Otherwise, nobody’s interested.

What excites me is that there are so many ways to create something that will be seen as valuable in the communities you choose participate in. The possibilities are endless.

But rather than start with what you want to say, it’s best to do some homework, find some potential communities and see what kind of participation they would be most likely to appreciate.

Regardless of what you end up doing, I think your efforts will need to reflect (actually, they should be fueled by) your organization’s philosophy of practice. It should come out of your DNA.

When I was a grade schooler, my dad was in sales. I don’t know if he was any good, but he had some immutable rules about business that he would share with me, the most important of which was “Don’t ever mix religion or politics with business.”

This election season, however, I’m amazed how many professionals, consultants and business owners I know (including me) who are wearing the politics on their sleeves, whether it’s in their Facebook profiles and comments or their Twitter posts. And I don’t mean upstart office workers in their 20s, but seasoned pros in their 40s and 50s, who you’d think would be more circumspect.

What happened? Did someone slip sodium pentathol into our Lattes?

My theory is that as many of us middle-aged professionals have migrated from Linked In to Facebook and then onto Twitter, we have been changed by our experiences. We’ve discovered that each time we dare to let down our hair, the sky doesn’t fall. We don’t lose all our clients. We don’t get fired. As a result, we’ve begun to lose the fear of consequences for telling others where we stand on political and personal questions. It seems that Dad’s 1st rule of business is no longer an absolute.

Perhaps with all that we’ve been finding out online about each other’s personal lives — seeing how different and yet how similar we all are — we’re now more tolerant of each other’s differing points of view. We’ve come to realize that maybe we can be friends with Democrats or have beers with Republicans.

I’m grateful for this Glasnost, which has left us feeling more free to be ourselves. The Web has given us tools that allow us to network in ways we couldn’t have imagined and thus see each other in a new light. Credit also goes to the generation that embraced these tools first. Those crazy, uninhibited kids who were on Facebook long before we showed up. Of course, they were never not comfortable with divulging their personal selves. It is we who are playing catch up (and really enjoying ourselves doing so), even if we still look over our shoulders from time to time and might pause before clicking “Install” on the Anarchist Gifts Facebook application.

Related reads:

• Study: Baby Boomers Embrace Social Networking, in Mediaweek.
• Ohio University: Students don’t fear loss of privacy on Facebook, study finds
• When Worlds Collide: Facebook in Business, at Huffington Post
• Confessions of a LinkedIn Dropout, by Jeff Pulver, in Business Week.

Photo credit: sphinphase

• Attendees
• Location
• Topics

social media

But despite the mounting curiosity, there’s still not much action on the part of mid-size to large companies.

Waiting and seeing
I can see why some folks are taking a wait-and-see approach to social media. If you wait, other folks will figure out some things for you. One or two leaders in your industry will make a big move and you’ll be able to see whether they fail or succeed. And eventually, some kind of broad consensus will emerge regarding how companies should engage with the user-generated Web.

I believe a consensus already is coalescing, but it exists mostly among brand-me and small-business owners, technology gurus, forward-thinking marketers and their followers – some of the same people who advised us that businesses should embrace the Web way back in the mid 90s. And boy were they right, even if we had a bubble and a hiccup along the way.

An emerging consensus
The emerging consensus on social media simply says that now is the time to jump in. Now is the time to play, to experiment, to make your mistakes and start to form your own professional opinions about which domains (blogging or microblogging, podcasting, wikis, social-networking, etc.) are the most productive and instructive for your company. All while it costs you next to nothing. Think of it as a free or cheap form of education, since very few of these mediums require a huge investment.

In the same way that nobody questions the need for a company to have its own Web site anymore, I believe in a couple years we’ll be at the point where nobody will question the need for companies to be engaged, in some form, in the millions of conversations taking place every minute on the social Web. Not just because a growing number of customers will expect it, but because it could come to represent one of the lowest-cost means of connecting with people who are predisposed toward your products and services.

Price to play
What might you expect to spend getting your feet wet in social media? The good news is that participation is free. It doesn’t cost you a thing to set up a blog (start with Blogger), a Flickr account, a Facebook or MySpace account or a Twitter account. If you’re reluctant to put your company’s name out on Facebook, just set up your own personal account first and see how it goes. Oh, did I mention? Unlike some forms of marketing research, it’s lots of fun!

Now, if you think you’re ready to dip your toes in the tub, but you can’t spare any FTEs, or even a portion of an FTE, consider sloshing over just a little of the cash you’re blowing on TV, radio and print ads.

• For the cost of producing and buying a print ad in a trade pub, you could hire a consultant to establish a passive presence on all the major social networks – or, better yet, an active presence on a couple of select networks!
• For the cost of a radio spot, you could hire a team to build and help you feed your blog for a year.

If you want to get serious and be prepared for the media of the future, you just might have to borrow a little from the media of the past.

Yeah, but what’s my ROI?
With some companies spending money is not the issue, but justifying the spend is. Consequently, I hear a lot about ROI: “What’s the ROI of blogging?” “What’s the ROI of being on Twitter?” And quite honestly, that’s a tough one. For instance, I can’t tell you if this blog has literally resulted in revenue for my business. But I do know that in some cases, we couldn’t have won the job without it. The blog was one of seveal critical pieces that contributed to the sale.

As you think about what kind of return you might expect from social media, keep in mind that the ROI could be entirely qualitative. Comcast maintains a Twitter account, @Comcastcares, staffed by a real guy, Frank Eliason, which they use to monitor conversations about Comcast and then to intervene when a disgruntled customer needs personal service. The ROI? Probably pretty lackluster from a pure financial point of view. But then again, what is their reputation worth to them? And how is that reputation built, if not one conversation at a time. So, what is it worth to Comcast to have thousands of influential technology aficionados – the same people you ask for help when your computer or high-speed Internet goes on the blink – see that Comcast is staffed by real people who actually appear to care?

Give ROI a vacation
Ultimately, it’s not for me or any other consultant to predict what ROI you should expect. The whole question of ROI is an evolving conversation that I believe needs to be left as a big question mark – for now. And given how cheap it is to do social media, why put so much pressure on it to earn its keep? Your company’s potted plant budget is probably ten times more than what you’ll spend on social media…and what’s the ROI on that?

The danger is that if you approach this medium with an immediate need for gain, or to monetize it somehow, you might not have the sensitivity to see how online communities are driven not by taking so much as giving. Yes, it’s a very hippie sentiment, but guess who’s running Web 2.0? Grown up hippies and their philosophical offspring! The point is that in order to thrive in any medium, you need to understand that medium’s unique rules and mores. If you don’t your marketing could come off as clumsy and self-serving and you won’t be able to build a community around your product or service.

One way forward
I know a number of marketing managers who are already familiar with social media and are eager to jump in, but they want to do so thoughtfully. They’re looking for a framework that will lend some sense of professionalism and planfulness to their social media efforts. Fair enough.

If that’s you, let me suggest that your initial success and longer term ROI on the social web will hinge on these three things:

1. Your social media persona – Do you have a clear understanding of who your company is and what it stands for in word and deed? Perhaps you’ve explored this territory in a recent branding effort. If so, dig up the dusty brand book and see what it tells you. Ultimately, you want to determine whether your company is a teacher, a helper, a connector or a [insert a personality type here].
2. Your imagination and sense of play – This is all fairly uncharted territory with very few precedents and formulas to latch onto. You might see that as a curse. I see it as a blessing. It means that the playing field is fairly level. Are you a small bank? You have just as good odds of beating out the top banks to become a real player in social media. There are many right answers and many ways to capitalize on this sea change in online behavior. But you’ve got to explore and find them.
3. Trial and error – Since there’s no script or formula to guide you, it’s reasonable to expect that some things you try might fail or succeed underwhelmingly. Maybe you’ll build an application on Facebook that attracts just 50 installs. Don’t fret. Tweak it and see what happens. With your social media persona as your guide, look for another way to act out your company’s role oline. You’re making omelets, so just commit up-front to breaking some eggs!

Get help if you need it
Of course, you’re not entirely on your own. Without spending a fortune, you could hire a social media consultant to shortcut your learning curve. A consultant could help you clarify your company’s social media persona and explore the many ways that could translate into actions. Or simply help you narrow the field and point you to some sites or networks that your company should consider first.

But ultimately, you have to take a first step, which might be as simple as bringing up the topic with your boss. Perhaps you need to lay out the alternatives:

• Your can jump into social media now while there’s still time to experiment, learn and lead.

OR

• You can wait until everyone else does it and be forced to jump in with little forethought. Because the landscape will be more defined and some of your competitors may have already set a high barrier to entry, you may not have the luxury of picking your battles. When we do achieve this “critical mass” I believe it’s going to be a mad rush. To paraphrase wine and marketing celeb Gary Vaynerchuck: You think social media is big now? Just wait until Oprah gets on Twitter!

• WSJ Blog: Selling online software (a.k.a., SaaS – Software as a Service) isn’t as easy as previously thought. Requires old-skool marketing and sales investments.

• Minnov8 Podcast: Lawson Software dude + Larry Ellison are dissing SaaS, but the Minnov8 guys aren’t completely buying it.

• Wapo: Paul Farhi deconstructs the theatrics of hurricane reporting.

• ReadWriteWeb: Marshall K’s “How to Rock Flickr Like a Champ” is a handy article, especially if you’re, say, moblogging the RNC convention.

• The Toad Stool by Alan Wolk: A sober reminder to those of us getting into a lather over Twitter (would that be a Twather?) to stop smoking our own dope. (”Put down the bong and step away from the social media.”)

• NYT: Visualization of data now available to the masses with the release of Many Eyes. Oh, the geeky potential!

It was my cousin Rosa who suggested a trip to the Amazon as a way of salvaging our vacation. I was hesitant at first. For some reason, the jungle never appealed to me nearly as much as the mountains. With all the ancient ruins and adorable Quechua-speaking villagers, the mountains are a dream come true for the frustrated anthropologist and archaeologist in me.

Women of the Bora tribe, performing for tourists. Photo by Sarah Gillespie.

Yet, as I learned two years ago, and was reminded on our trip last week, the “story” of the Amazon jungle is very much a human story. As amazing and abundant the wildlife is, what fascinates me even more are the families that live along that Amazon, Napo and countless tributaries, eking out a living from the water and the forest.

Floating houses along a backwater of the Amazon. Photo by Sarah Guagliardo

There are very few roads in the South American jungle. For instance, Iquitos, a city of 500,000, is not connected to the rest of Peru by pavement. If you want to visit or escape Iquitos, you have two choices: plane or boat. Since virtually nobody can afford to fly, boats are the preferred mode of transportation, whether the destination is Lima (a few hundred kilometers upriver to Pucallpa and then 20 hours by bus) or just to the next village.

So, in essence, the rivers are the highways of the jungle. And like any road, the rivers of the Amazon basin are busy with traffic, from large, double-decker steamships (well, they’re not steam powered anymore, but have changed little in form since the days when they were!) to long, motorized canoes called peque-peque because of the sound they make as they sputter up and down the river. The humblest river craft is a dugout canoe, that even the poorest jungle dweller owns. It rides very low in the water. When laden with an entire family, it looks like it is on the verge of being swamped or capsizing. But knowing how to balance in a dugout canoe is an essential life skill that is second nature. As our guide explained, children in the jungle learn to canoe, swim and handle a machete at a very early age.

Boy playing in dugout canoe. Photo by Sarah Guagliardo

At first glance, you might think that the banks of the Amazon are solid walls of forest. But as you near the shore, you discover that the river is lined with villages, towns and farmsteads of varying sizes. One dead giveaway: clumps of shiny, broad banana leaves. presence of banana plants, which usually indicate a current or recent homestead.

The day’s catch: catfish and sugar cane. Photo by Sarah Gillespie.

Along the river, people are can be seen nearly everywhere, fishing, washing clothes, cutting wood, tending animals or simply hanging around. In bigger towns, some people live in luxurious concrete homes. But that’s an exception, as the annual flooding of the river will inundate any home that isn’t on high ground. Thus, the vast majority of homes are fairly open structures made of wood and raised up on stilts.

Girl with sloth. Photo by Sarah Gillespie.

As a parent, I can’t help but to the notice the children. They are nearly all adorable, with beautiful, dark brown skin of many shades and with different looks that hint at differences in tribal origins. Unlike the mountains, where the primary indigenous language is Quechua and most people of native origin call the Incas their ancestors, the people of the jungle come from dozens, if not hundreds of different tribes, each with their own language and customs. Except for the fact that they share a common waterway, similar foods and a country called Perú, many jungle dwellers are foreigners to each other.

A note about the photos: Sarah Gillespie and Sarah Guagliardo are two American women that we met at Heliconia Amazon Lodge. They kindly consented to let me use their photos for this post. I would have wanted have used my own, except that when reviewing my photos I noticed that I didn’t have a single usable photograph of people from the jungle. How odd, given the very premise of the post. But upon some reflection I realized that I am rather gun-shy with my camera and reluctant to thrust a camera in front of locals. Of course it’s all in how you approach it. There are polite and appropriate ways to take pictures of strangers. It’s something I’ll have to work on next time!

Like the Sarlacc, I take a long time to digest things, such as months-old magazine articles. But, hey, Mom always said to chew your food.

So, back to Chris Anderson’s Wired article, Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business, which I mentioned previously. In it, he gives one explanation as to why developers never embraced user experience as an important aspect of their work:

An entire generation of computer professionals had been taught that their job was to dole out expensive computer resources sparingly. <snip> As a result, early developers devoted as much code as possible to running their core algorithms efficiently and gave little thought to user interface.

Of course, computers were not free then, and they are not free today. But <snip> the transistors in them — the atomic units of computation — would become so numerous that on an individual basis, they’d be close enough to costless that they might as well be free. That meant software writers, liberated from worrying about scarce computational resources like memory and CPU cycles, could become more and more ambitious, focusing on higher-order functions such as user interfaces and new markets such as entertainment.

Of course, there are plenty of other reasons for the longtime neglect of usability, including the fact that perhaps until recently, computer programming as an educational field (and in the early days, you did need to get schooling to work and teach in the field) attracted people who were left-brain dominant. Holistic, bi-hemispheric thinkers, who might be more inclined to synthesize the functional goals of a computer program with the needs of users, are a more recent arrival in the development world. Or, at least there weren’t enough of them to make a difference until the advent of the Web.

Feast your eyes on the new gallon milk jugs, which are being adopted by Costco and Sam’s Club and will soon be everywhere. It’s inevitable, given the promised savings, which come from more efficient storage and shipping and the elimination of cartons, which require costly washing and handling.

What will college graduates use for bookshelves?

Read Solution or Mess? A Milk Jug for a Green Earth (NYT)