The real estate market is trashed, money markets are unstable, commodities are in the tank, the banking system is corrupted to the core, inflation is looming around every corner, and the politicians are engorging themselves in a game of Cerebral Gridlock.

Literally, there is no safe place to put your money.  Instead, people are investing their productivity in social media – social media is simply a storage device for knowledge assets.  Soon it will become a stock exchange for knowledge assets.  Investors should not take this lightly – the best place to store your money is in the productivity of people.

People are trading knowledge assets in social media. This exchange is denominated by a conversational currency. If we consider the structure of conversations and compare that to both the structure of social networks AND the structure of our financial system, we see a huge opportunity to develop an alternate financial system that can capitalize and securitize knowledge assets in social media.

Ingenesist.com

Music by Phil Felicia

Our culture organizes itself around winners and losers. Corporations reflect this competitive nature to the core of their Capitalist doctrine. Sports analogies abound across the enterprise straight through to the HR department always on the lookout for the most amount of superstar for the least amount of money.

Social media has every industry trying to understand the concept of community. Among the most difficult ideas to grasp is that knowledge assets in a community live on a bell curve, not in winner and loser columns. Everyone is an expert at something and nobody is an expert at everything. Someone who is not performing adequately is simply a misallocated asset, not flotsam subject to jettison at the next layoff or outsource “opportunity”.

Like most assets, there is a perfectly legitimate market for everyone in a community – nobody need be excluded, marginalized or laid off. Social Media is turning the tables on the hierarchy and old winners who don’t play by the new rules quickly become the new losers. Maybe we ought to run our economy like a community instead of losing so badly at trying to be a winner.

Any taxonomy that is used to classify information is a candidate for the classification of knowledge. This is because knowledge is related to information in a differential equation that also includes data and innovation (another blog post).

The trick is that everyone needs to be using the same taxonomy so that we can all access knowledge inventories of the people around us as easily as it is to access books on Amazon.com. This will lead to a trade in knowledge assets formally the sole domain of corporations through the process of industrialization (yet another blog post) .

Please enjoy these videos, use them as you wish and let us know what you think.

This video introduces a new way of looking at social media valuation. People find value in social media otherwise they would not do it. How is that value expressed as a financial instrument? If you engage your clients in the same currency that they are trading among themselves, the greater the likelihood you will realize the value of the new media phenomenon.

OK, the social media buzz is getting a little stale folks.

• Yes we know that social media is valuable.
• Yes we know that lots of folks are doing it.
• Yes we know that the predictive web is predicted.
• Yes we all know that all this activity will mysteriously “monetize”

Show me how everyone is related and I’ll show you a new economic paradigm. Here is how they are not related:

• They are not related by “earning” people’s trust today so you can shove your product down their throat tomorrow.
• They are not related to collecting thumbnails.
• They are not related to giving the g00gle alg00rithm an 00rgasm.
• They are not related by “The 6 Steps to [Fill in The Gap]”.

The next economic paradigm is related to transformation.

• People transform data into information
• People transform information into knowledge
• People transform knowledge into innovation
• People transform innovation into data

Under a set of fundamental assumptions that:

• All people are socially talented
• All people are intellectually talented
• All people are creatively talented
• All people are good at something
• Nobody is good at everything

This is how value is generated. This is where the mystery of monetization hides.

Visionaries Ho!

There are no shortage of intelligent and visionary social media celebrities.  They write great books about markets, social media tools, strategies, and on-line reputation for the benefit of the millions of people stuck on any part of the slippery social media learning curve.  They are infinitely generous with their knowledge and share it freely at countless conferences, blog posts, and syndicated articles.

There is, however, one thing that most of these Guru’s have in common – they consult to and are paid by large corporations. I could be considered part of this crowd for whatever my influence is worth.  So the question about causation is due – will social media develop as a function of corporate interaction with it?

If so, then it is not social media – it is corporate media.

This is no surprise, nor should there be any apparent concern, after all, everyone has to make a living and it is better that the corporations pay people to create content that benefits me.   The practice is conducted quite ethically too -most readily disclose where their financial support comes from and we all benefit from free information that helps us keep the playing field as level as it can be.

But at the end of the day, it’s all about eye-balls and bullhorns.  In order to produce eyeballs and bullhorns, people must be sitting at a computer or, at least, staring at a handset.  The longer you can keep people interacting with the brand instead of interacting with each other, the better off everyone is, right?

Social Media Consumer Advocate

A consumer advocate is someone who helps look after the best interest of the consumer for product safety and false advertising.  Social media is pushing the envelope of the corporate interaction with consumers.  “Advertising” no longer lends itself to the objective review of a billboard, commercial, or public statement.  Social Media Marketing is increasingly sophisticated and manipulative.  The vulnerable people; children and elders are no less vulnerable on social media, and may be more.

Social anomalies?

Some of the emerging research related to social media is surprising with increased instances of what can be considered social anomalies:

- Infantilism; adults doing childish things like playing silly games in ‘public’
- Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder; constantly checking for updates and new photos,
- Depression and loneliness; preference of social media over real live interaction
- Narcissism; The excessive love or admiration of one’s image of their self.

Is it social because it is media or is it media because it is social?

We need to ask ourselves what is the difference between computer enabled reality and computer simulated reality.   If we lose “causation” the entire body of analysis can be called into the question: is social media or is it corporate media?

Résumé: A French word for separating the body from the brain

We are entering a renewal in the work force.  The global imperative is for the United States to become an innovation economy now.  This is an entirely different animal than the Industrial revolution; I have long argued that the résumé system is by far the most archaic knowledge management “currency” of trade in use today.

The entire premise of the résumé is destitute, if not destructive, in the modern world.  Words on a computer screen are a very low level ‘media form’ being used to describe a very high ‘media form’; social, creative, and intellectual capital.  It’s like using crayons to design an aircraft.

If the key words are so important, why have any other words?

A manager always hires people that remind them of themselves.  They estimate the future success of a candidate based on their own limited, and often static, past experiences.  The world is moving so fast and has become so complex that no manager can possibly know enough to capitalize the future based on a viable statistical sample of past experiences – we’re all holding on for dear life in a hurricane of change.   The problems and opportunities of the future are so huge, so important, and happening so amazingly fast yet the allocation of human resources is worse than random for a candidate pool.

While the Ingenesist Project discusses a solution at great length, I’ll just stop complaining and share a few comments (self titled) that I’ve picked off some recent Human Resources Blogs:

***

1. And our future goes with it:

“Most recruiting systems I’ve seen screen out innovators. Any résumé that is unique, different or convention-defying gets surreptitiously put in the junk pile.”

2. Start by looking in the junk pile:

“The Innovation Economy requires that the talent that creates the most value for an organization must rise to the top.  Innovators are playing an increasing role in creating shareholder value – one might argue that they create the most shareholder value these days – and figuring out how to find and attract this very different breed of talent is one of the most critical initiatives you can launch within your organization.”

3. What part of “share holder value” are we having difficulty with?

“The most innovative people I have ever met don’t follow conventions in their experience or in their résumé.  Or, they get bored very quickly when they can’t innovate or are forced to focus on operations, and efficiency.  Most might look like (and even be) job hoppers”

4. Here is my favorite comment – I wish I could hug this person:

“I think it takes more than a résumé to screen an Innovator in or out. As blogs, blog posts, social networking, more powerful search tools, personal websites, the emergence of video on the web, talent platforms that offer CRM, etc. etc. etc. continue to become additional tools for an employer to consider in making a hiring decision, is the résumé still a currency for a candidate?”

***

We have an inventory and CAD model of every nut, rivet, and panel that goes on an airplane – why would we try to build anything without one?

So Please, let’s evolve out of the revolutionary times and develop a real community knowledge inventory.  It must be computer enabled and based on a taxonomy that everyone knows and understands.  It must be read, analyzed, sorted and vetted by social networks and communities of practice. It must integrate with  knowledge assets from anywhere in the world.   A self-perfecting algorithm must be developed for a predictive percentile search engine in a pull system that seeks, matches, and deploys the ’secret sauce’ of success, specific to any application, anywhere, any time – and fast.

One of my favorite aggregation sites is Business Week Exchange.  To me BX represents a knowledge inventory.  Everyone who posts to this site is a media maven, social influencer, and trust agent.   Each one represents a galaxy of relationships, experiences, and followers.   All the categories are sourced by these users.  All of the articles are sourced and often written by these users.  All the trending data are produced by the users.  By far, my highest QUALITY followers come from BX; not Twitter, not Facebook, and not Friendfeed.

The site is massive and I’ll spend a great deal of time skimming categories and reading titles to get a good idea of what people are thinking, what they fear, what they want, and what they are optimistic about.  Most articles represent real-time main street issues.

Now, when you compare what’s trending on BX and you compare what is “editorialized” in the mainstream media…and they are different, an important conclusion can be made.  What people care about and what is passed off as “news” are too often quite different from the other.  Herein lies the apex of the social media divide.  News that increases my daily productivity nourishes me.  “News” for which I am powerless to influence is nothing more than sugar calories. For Example:

The top 10 topics from BX on Monday, November 16:

Social Media
U.S. Economy
Social Media Strategy
Business Innovation
Entrepreneurship
Global Economy
Business Technology
Career Change
Leadership
Google

The Breaking News on Bloomberg the same day at any given time:

U.S. Stocks…
U.S. retail…
3Com Options…
EMI Debt Burden…
USB Debt Trading…
AMBACS Bond Insurance…
NY Pension Fund…
Obama/China Trade…
Iranian Nukes…
Bernanke says…

I tried this experiment with many different combination of categorization from the Bloomberg site and not once was I able to produce a set of priorities that represents what other people like me actually care about.  It’s great entertainment, but is it my News?

Bloomberg has an incredible opportunity ahead of them and the question is whether they will develop BX to the highest standard of transparency and promote it to the highest level of editorialized influence – if not the outright taxonomy for their editors to classify so called “news” – or will they squander an astonishing resource of business intelligence.

At the end of the day, the people who created BX and those who support the BX process got something very right in an environment when so much is going wrong for journalism.  They had the guts and the humility to listen to me and people like me.  They gave me their respect and their trust; more tangibly, they gave me their name which empowers my SEO rankings among the mainstream.  In return, we give them a look deep into our humanity – this is who we are, this is our human nature.

The creators of BX are precisely the astonishing resource to whom so many people owe a debt of gratitude.  I call it Journalism at it’s 21st Century best. Let’s hope that Bloomberg sees things our way – at the bottom line.