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Where did Flickr's vaunted platform fail? What design wisdom can we derive from this object lesson? When can we expect the salient code-review article to be posted to Hacker News? Never, because it wasn't a design flaw or programming error that cost Mirco Wilhelm his 4000 photos. It was plain, old-fashioned user error.

In this post, we pick apart a conversation about the new PR skills to show how these relate to the six digital fluencies we have identified in our research. 

A few notable thoughts here:  "as rare as these shifts are, the early predictions about [their impact] are usually underappreciated." "the number one way that customers get information today is through "personal interaction with an employee of the firm" which trumps all traditional sources that most organizations are heavily invested in such as analyst opinion, the Press, and advertising, and that gap has widened."

Businesses who focus on numbers can easily end up privileging short-term profits over long-term sustainability, employee productivity over engagement, and exploitation rather than innovation. These actions can end undermine the organizational strategy, and even the overall mission. Rather than serving as the ends-what the business is all about-the numbers (and qualitative metrics as well) need to be used as a means to measure of how well the organization is achieving both its short-term and long-term strategic goals, and ultimately how well the mission is being accomplished.

I had written this a while ago, but i think it is worth revisiting. Many of the core reasons for the replacement of "Rule of Thumb" practice with "Scientific Management" in the early 1900's have now changed, ushering in an era where we need both. In case you're wondering, scientific management is still the basis for much of today's management practice and organizational structures. 

Imagine what your [organization] could accomplish if every employee was an entrepreneur. Not only would there be a steady flow of new ideas, but every person would treat the business as if it were her own.

Organizations that are willing to overturn their communication norms can, with today's digital tools, access these benefits. Those that don't embrace Enterprise 2.0, meanwhile, will stay closer to their historical levels of knowing what they know. Which type would you prefer to work for? To invest in?

If you didn't hear, yesterday Charlie Sheen joined Twitter. Today he very well may reach 1 million followers (as I type he's already passed the 900K mark). How did it happen?  Why all of a sudden did he wake up and decide it's Twitter time? And how was it that Charlie Sheen went from non-twitterer to hardcore twitterer overnight?  Short answer: he got a lot of help from a team of experts at Ad.ly, a small Beverly Hills start-up that focuses on celebrity endorsements via Facebook and Twitter.

If your organization fails to invest in socially responsible measures, or even if anything about your business - such as a faked viral marketing campaign - is perceived to be phony, you will be found out. You will be tweeted about, and a Facebook Causes group will be created against you. As many corporate casualties have discovered, the result of such a campaign can be catastrophic to your firm's reputation and ultimately to its bottom line. Therefore, to avoid a public relations or financial disaster, integrity needs to be part of the DNA of every organization - not just to secure a healthy business environment, but for the organization's own sustainability and competitive advantage. It's worth noting here that I believe the word "integrity" is preferable to the expression "corporate social responsibility," as the latter puts too much emphasis on the notion that corporations should do "good" in the world and be "good" citizens out of some moral or ethical imperative. Of course, that is absolutely true. But what's new - and what organizations need to focus on - is the idea of integrity, as driven by transparency. Without it you cannot build trust, and trust is essential for competitiveness in this new environment. To put it bluntly, regardless of the moral arguments, there are now some hard, bottom-line business reasons for baking integrity into every company.

The Grocer recently published its Top 100 advertisers report and showed that Coca-Cola cut ad spend by 6.6% in 2010 and invested more in social media. A spokeswoman at Coca-Cola said that while TV is still an important medium from promoting their brands,"many of our recent advertising campaigns and promotions have also utilised online facilities such as Facebook and YouTube more". With the launch of Coke Zone, a social media oriented site which offers Coke drinkers access to exclusive content and rewards, Coca-Cola has clearly realised the value of integrating offline and online marketing.

When it comes to basic computer applications, even members of the millennial generation may not know as much as they think they do. A study by North Carolina Central University found that most students overestimated their skill levels when they were asked how they perceived their ability to complete certain tasks and then tested on those tasks. Researchers surveyed 171 undergraduates, the majority of whom believed they had either an average or high skill level in Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. The students were then tested on three different skill levels - basic, moderate, and advanced - in each of those applications. Students correctly perceived their skill level only in PowerPoint, the study said, with 81 percent of students who thought they had at least an average skill level actually performing that way.

We've recently conducted surveys of the White House's Facebook fans and Twitter followers asking for their feedback on our online programs. Between the two surveys, we received thousands of responses and thought we'd share some of the results.

What superficially looks like shifts in the technological capabilities are really transformations in how businesses organize and execute. The fifth shift in this case-after the mainframe, the departmental computer, the PC, and the Internet-I will reiterate is social business. I would say what it has changed is the base nature of how humans interact with each other. These other technologies are certainly fantastic innovations that will accelerate how we get or deliver messages. But consider this: having common languages across cultures certainly accelerated how we communicated with each other, but as we can still see, the real trick is the ability to convey meaning.

Why is it that some technologies cause moral panic and others don't? Why was the introduction of electricity seen as a terrible thing, while nobody cared much about the fountain pen? According to Genevieve Bell, the director of Intel Corporation's Interaction and Experience Research, we have had moral panic over new technology for pretty well as long as we have had technology. It is one of the constants in our culture.