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"Without the support of whites, organizations and educational settings will fail in their attempts to navigate and manage the complexities of diverse work forces and constituencies," said Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks, an associate professor of management and organizations at Michigan's Ross School of Business. "In the face of the dramatic projected growth in demographic diversity, such failure could have severe economic, social and political consequences. "Our research reveals that this resistance can have little to do with prejudice. Instead, it can stem from a basic human need to belong."

Sherry Turkle on the Colbert Report. I will be reading the book soon, but i presume that digitally fluent folks know how to "put technology back in its place." 

"Confirming what a few have reported this evening: in an action unprecedented in Internet history, the Egyptian government appears to have ordered service providers to shut down all international connections to the Internet. Critical European-Asian fiber-optic routes through Egypt appear to be unaffected for now. But every Egyptian provider, every business, bank, Internet cafe, website, school, embassy, and government office that relied on the big four Egyptian ISPs for their Internet connectivity is now cut off from the rest of the world. Link Egypt, Vodafone/Raya, Telecom Egypt, Etisalat Misr, and all their customers and partners are, for the moment, off the air."

"Harvard Business Review Analytics Services has released a study on the impact of social media. Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, blogs etc. offers organizations the chance to join conversation with millions of customers around the globe every day. But even though social media has great potential, many organizations do not properly integrate social media in their marketing and communication efforts, or only use it as a one-way communication channel instead of listening, analysing, and driving conversations. The survey was conducted among HBR magazine and newsletter subscribers during July 2010. The participating organizations were mainly based in the US and in Asia."

He likens today's Facebooking, Tweeting, Flickr-ing, FourSquaring generation to our grandparents' generation. Imagine a small town where everyone knows everyone else: comings and goings, who's having babies, who's cancer is in remission, who's family is coming to town for Thanksgiving, and who's family is not (and therefore should have an invitation extended). We want people to know where we are, what we're doing, and whether we need help. It's more than just a megalomaniacal existence, it's a need for community. A virtual community, if you will.

In a sure sign that social media is becoming an entrenched pillar of the marketing mix, social media marketing freelance jobs have grown by 67% in the last year. This according to a quarterly report from DoNanza, an Isreali-based search engine which researches work-from-home projects. The search engine aggregates information from freelance sites such as elance, odesk and others on related online projects.

Nowadays, goes the theory, innovation is supposed to be constantly improving everything the company is about. Is the theory right, or do the experiences of companies reveal something different?

The New Yorker's Malcolm Gladwell is a very smart writer with a knack for smart, provocative, "contrarian" statements. One such argument that gets digerati in a tizzy is the idea that social media actually doesn't help bring down oppressive regimes, despite all the hype. That debate is back in the news with the protests in Egypt. We'll say right off the bat that we're skeptics that social media can bring down oppressive regimes. We believe Twitter makes a tangible, positive difference in the real world, but probably not quite at the level of regime change. But Gladwell wrote a blog post yesterday on social media and Egypt that just doesn't make any sense.

The adoption of social software by organizations started with the tools, and has moved to focus on the purpose for the tools. The last piece of the puzzle with be the people: their skills with the technologies and the ways that those skills affect their relationships with each other.

I wrote about how NBC has handled Keith Olbermann's departure from his show on MSNBC. Writing that story put me in mind of one of the hoary chestnuts of public relations strategy, which is to let sleeping dogs lie for some situations. Veteran PR folks are fond of refering to a minor flap as a "one-day story," meaning that you read about it in the newspaper today, but it disappears tomorrow. Unfortunately, the Internet has forever ended the technique of letting the storm blow over.