“We can blog if we want to,
we can leave your friends behind…”

Markets are Conversations. We’ve heard it so often, we take it for granted. And it may well yet stand the test of time as a metaphor that defines our future. But there is another powerful idea in the offing: You are your brand.

In essence, the second is just a logical postulate of the first. If a “market” is really a “conversation,” then there must be real people (with real faces and real voices) taking part. I’m okay with that so far.

“’cause your friends don’t blog and if they don’t blog
Well they’re no friends of mine”

To be a part of the conversation, you have to have a voice. “Blogs” used to be the atom of online conversation, and commenting was the proof. In fact, to this day I still have many coworkers and others that I respect who continue to be hung up on the definition of a “blog” including commenting. “If it doesn’t have comments, it’s just a website.” Never mind that many of the pioneers of modern online communications don’t allow comments. (Seth?)

“I say, we can write what we want to
A place where they will never find
And we can act like we come from out of this world
Leave the real one far behind”

If the Conversation is now the essential element, then those who are duplicitous in their conversations are going to freeze themselves out of the Marketplace. How can you trust someone who says one thing here and another thing there? Unlike the world of the fractured song-lyric above, there is “no place where they will never find.” Hello, John Mackey?

“Say, we can act if want to
If we don’t nobody will
And you can act real rude and totally removed
And I can act like an imbecile”

Yes, you can act like an imbecile or even worse. But remember, you are participating in a Conversation, and as such, you have a face. Or at the very least, a facade. With the interlinking and intermingling of social networks, it is even permissible to be a little more sarcastic on one than on another, as we expect each to bring out a different aspect of our personalities. At the end of the day, though – you still need to be accountable for what you say. The script is flipped, and you don’t just own what you write. What you write can own you.

“We can write if we want to
We’ve got all your posts and mine
As long as we abuse it, never gonna lose it
Everything’ll work out right”

…and that’s where the song fades out. It won’t work out right.

Some within the Blogoverse now see Jonah Bloom – the Executive Director of Ad Age – in competition with himself. Jonah wrote a blog posting under the Ad Age banner quite critical of Joseph Jaffe, whose already catching enough grief watching his crayon melt. This isn’t so much a problem for Bloom as it is for Ad Age. All of the tenets of Social Media and New Marketing lead back to the individual owning up to his/her words – yet there remains the expectation that “the corporation” has a “corporate identity” and a “corporate voice”, and the law even recognizes “the corporation” as a legal entity, just like an individual.

I know of what I speak first-hand. I used to blog in a more critical way about how other people, agencies, and businesses handled their crisis communications statements. Now that my name is more closely aligned with my present employer, I chose to pick a different direction so as to avoid confusion. I wasn’t asked to do so – not once. But I did it, because I understand human nature.

Human nature sees people with faces, and doesn’t get fooled so much by what’s on top of our heads. In the world we’re just now entering, there’s so much more riding on our personal reputation because it is all so eminently searchable. If the Market is truly a Conversation, then we’re still doing business one-to-one.

And even if there is no direct eye-contact, rest assured that we’re not paying as much attention to “which hat” you were wearing when you started dropping e-bombs on someone else. In the next frontier of marketing – we are all Men Without Hats.

Wow, what can I say? I guess “Now is Gone” will have to be a posthumous best-seller.

Geoff Livingston was the tragic victim of a Web 2.0 incident last night. The police haven’t ruled it an accident or intentional, but sometime around 1:30 am he did the unthinkable. He plugged his Tumbler RSS feed into his Jaiku account – then took his Jaiku feed and aggregated it within his Tumblelog. Sadly, Hollywood has warned us about the dangers of such a Lifestream disaster for decades:

Dr. Egon Spengler: There’s something very important I forgot to tell you.
Dr. Peter Venkman: What?
Dr. Egon Spengler: Don’t cross the streams.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Why?
Dr. Egon Spengler: It would be bad.
Dr. Peter Venkman: I’m fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing. What do you mean, “bad”?
Dr. Egon Spengler: Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Right. That’s bad. Okay. All right. Important safety tip. Thanks, Egon.

Who knew Social Media could be so deadly?

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All joking aside – there is a bigger issue lurking out here. As we get more ability and empowerment to “play” with our data, we’re bound to run into some pretty dire consequences. The idea of “nimble data” is crucial to our digital freedom. It allows us to aggregate and mashup in new and creative ways. It also tempts us to try the latest and greatest gizmo, app, or website in an effort to become ever more the master of our digital identities.As time goes on, we’ll see an inevitable rise in the number of services and offerings we can submit to – and the operative word is “submit.” When you “submit” your data, you are literally ceding control over what happens next. Where are the standards for web-development in this regard? Is there a universal off-switch in the monkey-brain of every coder, that prevents Geoff Livingston from dumping his Lifestream into a Moëbius Loop of eternal RSS? Where is the undo button?

The more Web 2.0 playtoys there are, the greater likelihood we’ll have of a bad marriage – two APIs locked in a battle, and your data is the killing field. Don’t say that it can’t happen – that programmers are too polished or professional. First of all, too much of this stuff is Open Source. Don’t get me wrong, I love Open Source apps. I can live with the occasional bug or burp along the way, knowing the community will squash it or squelch it. What I fear is we’ve taken too many of these services for granted.

Seriously – does anyone bother to read the technical specs before signing up? We don’t even read the EULA anymore, and more than half the time don’t read the FAQ.A responsible web service developer would know to check for self-recursion, to prevent an idiot from plugging his Output feed into his aggregator’s Input. But we’re not dealing with ordinary idiots here. I know for a fact that Geoff Livingston uses a lot of services. Once you wash a feed through a Tumblr or a Feedburner or a Yahoo! Pipe, all traces of the origin are gone.

All it takes is a faulty pass with the timestamping, and you’ve got duplicate entries multiplying like rabbit-shaped coat-hangers in the fertility closet. The next internet worm won’t be passed through e-mail – it will be a Web 2.0 service that goes supernova, belching out self-replicating data packets to every other service scraping that feed.I’m not calling for you to shut off your accounts and book the next buggy to Ludditeville, but just be careful when brandishing your brand – or you might end up where Geoff did.