Nowadays I find it quite hard to figure out where your ‘public’ job starts and your real life ends. I know how it works for me. It’s a line a tread carefully and not always successfully, but I’ve been there a lot.

However for many executives it’s an uncomfortable issue. CEOs and Management Teams need to be comfortable with their faces being displayed in Annual Reports and on websites. They are part of the business’ assets.  Like posher sales people, who need to put themselves ‘out there’ to become the face of their product.

But how far out?  And what happens when you start to love it?

There are always cases like Richard Branson, Donald Trump, Alan Sugar and others who are actually more famous than their brands. And there are others who aspire to be, but sometimes come up short, like Gerald Ratner, Carly Fiorina or Arianna Huffington. There are certainly lots of people available to point out the deficiencies and the schadenfreude when it all goes horribly wrong.

I give you therefore this sample video that I have only just uncovered. Look at my horrible Dumb & Dumber haircut in the CRHA corporate video.

However, at other times, like in our recent Social Media at Work video, which is still running strong and gaining viewers, the time invested in putting on a public face seems worthwhile.

How can you tell what is right and what is wrong?

It might just be a question of style and level of ambition.  I like this for example:

But I find these a bit too much:

They just don’t look that comfortable.  Like they’re in a French new wave cinema picture.

However, that is still preferable to these ones: 

It seems to say: “We’ve come to steal your calculator.”

Finding the balance between public and private persona has never been harder than now.  Access to information can make everyone’s life an open book.  But you can be open and honest and still choose which pages people will look at.

/df

GREAT PORTLAND STREET - Not far from our offices is the Chinese Embassy in the UK.  Across the street there’s a booth set up and someone practising Falun Gong 24 hours a day. Falun Gong (which just looks like aerobics to you and me) is illegal in China.

It’s undoubted that they are annoying the Embassy by doing this. And drawing attention to themselves in a peculiar way — though one that Jane Fonda would approve of.

This is a very subtle, but effective, way of drawing attention to yourself.  It’s probably not for us.

How to draw attention to yourself is a question we face in professional services. We want to share our ideas and expertise with people.  But we can’t take out ads, or stage protests or stunts.

And this week we have a film to promote. We think Social Media @ Work is a very interesting online event.  We like the idea of putting experts and interesting people infront of a camera to debate.  And then broadcasting that in a form that is engaging and interesting.

We want you to see it.

So how do we do that?

/df

LONDON — We’ve just been working in the United States again a lot.  And of course we have clients in Europe, the Middle East and a lot in Africa too the moment.  So we’re pretty clear about how organisations communicate over great distances.

But social media at work is not really the answer to that question.

We’re also completing our film on social media at work.  It’s called #worksm and we’ll be launching it on an unsuspecting world in a few weeks time.  It draws together about a dozen top thinkers on the topic.

But all that only means draws the issues into slightly clearer focus.

At the moment there’s also a mad story running in the UK about super-injunctions.  Journalists, footballers and socialites have been making use of the UK’s stronger privacy laws to stop tabloids reporting tittle-tattle.  And Twitter users have been delighting in reporting some random names none the less… (Often is seems the Tweets emanate from tabloid newsrooms anyway.)

In Canada, the recent election has put the country’s election mandarins into a tight corner.  They wanted to enforce Canada’s reporting black-out across the country’s 5.5 timezones.  Meaning for many hours after Newfoundland has counted all its votes, British Columbia must still be none the wiser.  Again Twitter users were indignant and pushed out info as soon as they had it.

Democracy in action.

Right?

Yea, I’m not sure either.

In both Canada and the UK these ‘democratic’ movements to ‘liberate’ information have actually just created a massive wall of noise.  If you believe everything you read…

Well if you believe everything you read we’re all pretty potty-mouthed and pointless.

(Popular Twitter topics as I write: ‘Obsessive [X-Factor Boy Band] One Direction Fans’; Something about a Dutch footballer called Landzaat; and #youwerecooluntil which seems to be a new way of insulting friends.)

Like any new fashion, social media channels struggle to find their feet.  They will settle down and become easier to use.  But for the moment they mostly remain the Wild West.

So how does that look for your business?  Twitter? Facebook? YouTube?

There are definitely things to do.  But there’s plenty to be wary of too.

/df

LONDON — Kim’s in Egypt this week. 

Yea.  That’s something isn’t it?

You wouldn’t imagine that someone is in Egypt, after we watched the recent (mostly peaceful) revolution, and not think it mattered.

Detroit.

It’s a city that may have passed it’s prime.  Today I read that 25% of the population of Detroit has left in the past 10 years.  And that is equivalent to one person leaving every 22 minutes.

That’s amazing!  What does it tell you about Detroit?  Quite a lot.

Many of those who enthusiastically inhabit the wired world — Twitter, Facebook, etc. — will try to tell you that location is no longer important.  But it is. 

We are formed and constantly prompted by our environment.  To forget that is to do both communications and people a disservice.

/df

LONDON — We have learned not to be impatient.  Which is an odd thing. 

We know that real knowledge of the disaster in Japan won’t emerge for days.  In the place of that knowledge we have lots of information.

This is in a world where we used to wait weeks to hear about the Normandy landings or the sinking of the Titanic.  And with all our ‘live’ media, days later, we still don’t really know what has happened in Japan.  Do we?

Estimates say that 10,000 people have died in Japan.  Many people report that that will climb.  And that is a lot of people.  But with an estimated population of 127,000,000 it is not ALL of the people.  By looking at pictures and reading headlines here, you would think it was.

I have watched nuclear scientists over the past few days and read about the reactors (which is not something you’d say every day).  And, as far as I can understand, these incredibly cautious people are sounding quite optimistic about the plants in Japan.

I have worked on nuclear programmes.  There is no in sugar-coating anything.

I read today too that Japan’s “industrial heartland” has been largely unaffected.  Is that good?

Well, not necessarily, because manufacturing may be shut down to help deal with disasters elsewhere, reports say.

We don’t know.

To be clear there is no doubt that something unbelievably horrible has happened in Japan.

What is unclear is what to believe about it all.

Information ≠ knowledge.

/df

PARSONS GREEN — Like the recent ‘Jasmine Revolution’ protest in China, more spectators and officials show up at social media sites these days than actual participants.

It’s early maybe to call time on Facebook.  But the signs are definitely there.  Where once there were lots of people flapping about and making mistakes (oh, how we laughed…?) the halls of social media are starting to echo.

The early adopters HAVE noticed this. I am sure they have.  But having found a place to call their own, their slow to face the loss.

Today everything from Manchester United football team to Gorbachev’s 80th birthday party (there’s an odd one) are inviting you to ‘like’ their Facebook page, or follow them on Twitter.

Unfortunately most of us are maxed out as it is.

I follow the Montreal Canadiens (ice hockey) and the Montreal Allouettes (of the far superior Canadian football) on Facebook. And the Fulham Football Club and Formula 1 on Twitter. Honestly thought I don’t really follow them anywhere. Along with Alumni Pub Nights in places I don’t live, with photos of people I don’t know, these are things that pass by my field of vision sometimes.

Random samplings.

That’s as good as it gets.

I expect them all to move into a box in my electronic attic soon.

And where will we be then?

Pretty much where we were before: talking.

Hi, I’m David.

/df

What do they keep in their fridges in the 1950s?  Seriously.

What is art?  Maria Schneider died this week.  Best known for The Last Tango in Paris which I saw at about age 14, and found quite disturbing.  She maintained that she was abused and — yes — raped as part of the film.  And yet film buffs still whisper about it’s ‘great art’ in smoky corridors.  Which is it?

There was an early website called Bert is Evil (now mirrored and RASC’ed) by a young American student in which he Photoshop’ed Bert (of Sesame Street fame)  into photos to prove that he is evil.  Protesters in the Arab world downloaded pictures of Bin Laden off the Internet to make posters… not realising that Bert was joining their protest.

He’s evil now.

/df

HOME — I used to have a Klingon cookbook.  No, it was Lt. Uhura’s Cookbook.  But there was Klingon it it.  That was in university.  More than 20 years ago.

I never cooked anything from it.

Are you kidding?

But I moved it from dorm to dorm and house to house.  I thought its simple existence was funny enough.  (Yes, not everyone shared my sense of humour then either.)

However, my daughter has just brought the world of Fan Fiction to my attention.  It seems that Star Trek was even a pivotal modern outburst of it.  Followed by Star Wars… And today people like Stephenie Meyer and JK Rowling, for the Twilight and Harry Potter series, even actively encourage it, saying they read it.

It’s a really interesting phenomenon.  And not one without it’s legal and copyright implications.

So my question today is: Why don’t brands do it more?

People write Star Trek cookbooks because they are obsessed with the show.  And one assumes they buy other people’s Star Trek cookbooks.  But what about great brands and companies? 

Imagine some of the great BP fiction that could come out of the Deepwater Horizon situations?!

Okay, maybe that’s not the best example.

But what about other, more day-to-day examples?

I think it’s a heck of an idea.

I think I’ll talk to some clients about it this week.

/df

MARBLE ARCH — I was visited by a charming man from Brussels yesterday called Hugh. We had a nice chat about PR, communications and change management. We talked about schools in Kenya and wine in Kuwait and real estate in Cirencester.

When it came to the subject at hand — work — Hugh blushed a bit and said “I am here because, I am afraid to say, I googled ‘change management’ and your company came up.”

And I think that was the best thing I have heard so far in 2009. (Granted it’s not been a such a great year.)

There was a day when businesses like ours would try to find the biggest shingle they could and hang it above the front door. Or you might offer the “best deals” or some kind of AMAZING results or solutions. I know companies that have gone to great lengths to get in the papers or appear on TV. But today there’s one business directory that counts ahead of all others, and that’s Google.

When we started this business in September 2008 we had a lovely website that no one could see. But we didn’t figure that out until earlier this year. When we did, and our South African SEO (look it up!) guru tweeked a few things, everything changed. We climbed the ratings literally over-night.

Part of this is about technology, but part is also about noise and focus. We have tried hard to make our business offering both broad and specific. We found some words that we wanted to own, and we set about owning them.

At the same time we made as much noise online as we could. Blogging, Twitter, LinkedIn… We appeared at conferences and made sure the name was spelled right.

Has it been the making of us? So far, not really. But it can’t hurt. And it’s better than trying to lift that big shingle.

/df

LONDON — There seems to be quite a bit of excitement out there about Google Wave. Here’s a blog I was sent to earlier today. Look how many comments there are in a few hours.

There’s a lovely short video here too that will show you what Google Wave is all about.

To me it looks quite similar to the demo I saw in August of Microsoft’s OneNote. A lovely guy from Pfizer explained to a group of us how it’s should change their project processes. And I find both quite compelling. Here’s a video about it too.

In many respects I am dying to try both out.

In many other ways I suspect that I won’t and I can’t. My brain is already programmed to using email and other software. I recognise that this is better. I even suspect that in a few years or month I will be using it. But I can’t get excited now.

The Google Wave video says “email was invented more than 40 years ago, Google Wave is what we would do if we invented it now.” Well, I was invented 40 years ago and I don’t think I have out-stayed my welcome yet.

In fact, I am still quite keen on writing letters. You know, start at the top and work down from left to right on a piece of nice paper? I like that too and people are still doing it (although not in Britain with a Royal Mail strike).

/df