Social media is constantly changing and adding new sites. If you have an extra 3 minutes in your day, social media will find a way to use 4 of them. Now there is a way to measure your influence across Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. It is called Klout. Get it? Klout is as addictive as all the other digital places you can rub your fingers across. After all, it is all about your score. It’s social media as sports. I know people competiting with each other over Klout scores.

Rudy, our Jack Russell, has a Twitter page (@rudythejack) and a Facebook page (he does not give out info on this one). Klout has him pegged at 47, otherwise known as a “Specialist.” You can be a Thought Leader, Feeder, Socializer, Networker, etc. The moniker depends on the focus of your conversations. The highest number is 100. Rudy has a ways to go.

Rudy, being a dog, has no idea he even has a score with Klout or the credit bureaus or anyone else. I think he may know he is chasing Guy Kawasaki up there near the top, however. You would have to get IM’s from President Obama or pics from Congressman Weiner or retweets from Ashton Kutcher to hit the big numbers. Rudy just talks about dog stuff mostly.

Klout breaks it down for you. Being a specialist means: “You may not be a celebrity, but within your area of expertise your opinion is second to none.”

I’ve been on the receiving end of Rudy’s opinion. It is, indeed, second to none.

Klout goes on to say: “Your content is likely focused around a specific topic or industry with a focused, highly engaged audience.”

Truth.

Rudy’s focused audience of highly engaged dogs, cats, birds, horses and a turtle named Louie stay in touch with him constantly. I’ve seen the conversations. They are deep and involve all kinds of butt-sniffing, furniture-soiling, carpet-dumping, poop-eating, squirrel-chasing conversations. Rudy is a specialist in all of those areas – hence his title. It gets better.

Klout analyses Rudy’s engagement and influence with charts, graphs and probabilities. They are as cool as any PowerPoint presentations I have ever sat through, and better than most, to be honest. You would have to splurge for the paid LinkedIn to get info this solid.

One chart describes how Rudy’s “high-velocity content” will be acted on. Another indicates his ability to capture influencers, and yet another measures his true reach. It is safe to say the chipmunk in our backyard can attest to Rudy’s true reach without using a chart. He has Jack Russell teeth marks on his furry, little Alvin-ish ass.

Rudy’s current top 10 topics are (in order of influence):

1. Dogs  (makes sense)
2. #RVA   (where he lives, so that seems reasonable)
3. Blogging   (he seldom blogs, so this one is a bit hard to grasp)
4. Puppies   (yup, got it)
5. Cats   (Rudy hardly qualifies as a cat expert, but he does know a lot of cats, especially in the UK)
6. #UK   (see above)
7. Pets   (duh)
8. Furniture   (perhaps there are things I do not want to know about this one)
9. Television   (absolutely, he loves TV)
10. Investing  (see below)

Investing? What the hell? If Investing made Rudy’s top topics of influence, this may explain the economic crisis.

Recently, Geoff Stone and I attended the AAAA’s Create Tech conference in NYC to hear from several of the digital and emerging technology leaders in branding. Of course that means people like Scott Prindle and Brian Skahan from CP&B, Trevor O’Brien and Glenn Fellman from McKinney, Andy Hood from AKQA, Stuart Eccles from Made by Many, Gary Koelling of Best Buy, Kati London of Zynga among others.

When JP Rangaswami, Chief Scientist at Salesforce.com walked to the microphone people knew things were going to be a bit different. His presentation reminded me of something I saw at Princeton years ago. Very calm, deeply thoughtful, smarter than me. But Chief Scientist? I pondered this title. JP has been a lot of things in his years on this planet: one of the top CIO’s in the world, an economist, financial journalist, technology concept guru. Of all those roles, he has to like being a Chief Scientist best. I mean, who does not want to be that? It may be a little better than his title in that video up there: Chairman, School of Everything. Both are pretty impressive.

Besides his day job, he writes a blog called “Confused of Calcutta.” While he is from Calcutta, he is most definitely not confused, not at all. His brain does things few Porches will do.

“I believe identity and presence and authentication and permissioning are in some ways the new battlegrounds, where the freedom of information flow will be fought for, and bitterly at that,” he wrote on his blog page.

Before he even spoke, that caught my attention. This has been happening in real time in Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, Syria and other countries. He saw it coming. Not only is he a learner and teacher, he is one hell of an observer.

“No one is in the anti-social business. Business is inherently social,” he said, roaming around the podium, punching the clicker toward a screen filled with more information than I could possibly absorb before the next click. He only had about 20 minutes to impart a bit of knowledge to us. He squeezed in about 3 hours worth.

“Markets are nothing but conversations,” he went on to say in his professorial tone. “Technology has allowed us to speed up evolution. Fire and cooking allowed us to have a pre-digestive external stomach – so we could evolve our brains and not just deal with food digestion.”

Mr. Rangaswami tied all of this into a nice technology conclusion, yet a guy across the room sat with his mouth open, trying to take everything in, his neurons visibly crunching the information. Stupidly I realized that I was looking at my own reflection in the window. I quickly recovered and scribbled more notes.

“The new generation is about sharing. They rent information. They don’t own it,” he said. “The fundamental functions of Twitter and Facebook are built on the age-old need for conversation.”

People nodded. He went on to describe a construct for technology’s future involving stages like Meaning, Mining, Mapping, and Making. He talked about being a “Retronaut” and gleaning metadata from Flickr. It was deep stuff. And everyone knew it. I wanted to ask about the Retronaut thing, but I just Googled it later and found “HowToBeARetronaut.com.” Some cool pics there.

When it came time to ask questions, even the smartest people in the room sat in silence. Who was going to be the one to question this guy? No one volunteered. That is what happens when a Chief Scientist/Chairman of the School of Everything talks to a room full of developers and branding people at 8 A.M. on Friday.

Blogging is not dying; it’s just getting tired. Have you noticed this trend? People are rambling and posting stuff from other blogs and repeating themselves. Sometimes they just post pics, and why not? No one reads anymore. Do you want to read three pages or watch a 40 second YouTube video showing a guy with a bottle rocket in his butt? Perhaps the days of blogging are numbered. Then again, if you write a blog, you’re hoping I’m wrong – especially if you get paid to blog (and I don’t).

Some blogs have a tight focus, a concise topic. Many are awesome. Blogs about business or branding or social media or financial advice thrive. Blogs filled with insane rhetoric do really well because they cater to our basest instincts. But do you really have something interesting to say every single day? Probably not. And with Twitter tugging at you using only 140 characters, it becomes easier to just slide over there and toss in a few comments or share a link or pic and get back to your paying life. That said, nothing will make you better at writing and expressing your thoughts than forcing yourself to post a blog regularly, no matter if anyone ever reads it (see video above).

The aggregator blog is extremely popular. You don’t even have to write anything. Just repost other’s posts. These are the blogs that cull cool stuff from all over the Internet and toss it up hourly like magazines at the grocery checkout. I am particularly addicted to these sites.

Unfortunately, I am not smart enough to aggregate or fill a niche with my posts. If you read my blog regularly, you already know that I have no focus whatsoever. I do everything wrong. One day I may attempt some deep insight into branding and the next day tell a story about my cousin being impaled by a 12-point buck. Or I may not even post anything for a week.

This randomness may explain why I’m not Seth Godin. And while I appreciate the kind folks who read my verbiage, I am at a loss as to why. Consultants and Web experts have told me to make my posts about something specific, like branding, since that’s the business I’m in. However, I do branding all day long. Do I want to go home at night and wax on about something covered better or worse in 39,498 other blogs?

See, that’s what happens with blogs; you can do whatever you want. You can entertain people, instruct them or bullshit and lie and skew the truth and tell your side as fact and who’s there to edit you? It’s your opinion, right? It’s your blog. These days whole TV networks are basically televised blogs. Flip over there and see one pissed-off guy grinding the Democrats into meatloaf and then two channels later, some equally pissed-off pundit is ripping Republicans like cheap wallpaper. You can take your pick of “facts.” That’s how blogs work. Grab a hold of the First Amendment and let’s go.

Websites are even better at tossing us the half-baked turkey and calling it grandma’s home cooking. And what website doesn’t have a blog or two or ten. Blogs have become like butts: everyone has one. Sadly, I have two, so I am a chief offender.

Blogs are not dying; just the opposite. Everything is like a blog these days. There are no facts, just opinions and spin. Screw Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow, most journalists are really commentators, leaning the news one way or the other based on who’s cutting the check. Politicians’s blogs blow smoke so far up our asses our hair smells like beef jerky for a week. Company CEO’s lie so easily in their blogs it’s as if their bonus is connected to the amount of BS they can manufacture. Those mortgage companies forging signatures on foreclosure papers? That’s no different than a blogger making up stuff that seems like truth to people who aren’t paying attention. Blogging is the ultimate ode to “here’s my story and I’m sticking to it.” That’s kind of fun of it. After all, who doesn’t love a good lie, even if it is presented as the God’s honest truth?

So when you see Seth Godin saying something extremely smart in his blog – and he does every day – remember, there’s always some guy who wishes he was Seth Godin. But he’s not.

Everything is digital. And everything is social. There are no sides anymore, or a fence either. Traditional media lives within and outside both as well. I think the problem is content. And companies may not be exclusively creating content if customers have their say (and they do). We may be part of it, but if we think we can manage it using our old school processes, we will get a front row seat to the corporate butt-kicking exhibition.

More so, many companies don’t really know their customers very well because they are focused on the pipes instead of what is in the pipes. We get so excited about a new web program or a social media gadget we forget who’s talking and who’s listening. We continue to try to corral our customers and save them in files on our desktop. We simply don’t understand their emotions. And using traditional means to research targets and segment audiences and carve up consumers who no longer fit into our buckets isn’t helping us meet our goals. Worse, we are using traditional creative thinking to bother people instead of engaging them. No surprise there.

My 21 year-old daughter, for example, is establishing communication habits that no media is reaching in a meaningful way. She is doing it without even trying. She is not thinking about your marketing goals or watching your commercial or clicking your banner or even visiting your website. She lives in a constant one-on-one conversation that flows through her thumbs. She has about 1,000 Facebook friends and she is not a fan of any brand. Not one. She and her friends post pics of every single activity in their day no matter how mundane and usually it involves someone doing the eye-roll-pose. There is even a pic on her page of me sleeping. That’s the kind of everyday human interaction that branders have to compete with. If there were a championship for people with the ability to text and respond to 50 messsages at once in less than a minute, she’d win. Wait, perhaps not. She has millions of challengers across the world.

I live in a similar world and I’m over twice her age. To her, however, Facebook is as ubiquitous as her toothbrush, but she mainly talks to human beings through texts and pics on a smartphone.

Technology has made it sickly easy to communicate with large quantities of friends, family and frenemies in a series of simultaneous non-stop conversations (that advertisers will have a difficult time being a part of without some great ideas). Just typing that sentence makes me tired. Most of us filter our lives through the digits of a smartphone (or even a somewhat dumb one). We live in a world of thumbers (people who text and email endlessly). Into this deeply personal river of conversations and pics and videos we try to wedge our selling messages. It is a sticky proposition. Why? No matter the media – digital, social, traditional or whatever – our branding messages are still intrusions into personal conversations. And like it or not, people want to control their intrusions just like they control everything else.

Think about music. If you love the band Mumford and Sons and you’re listening to Little Lion Man, do you want Taylor Swift to jump into the middle of it with Speak Now? Probably not. That’s how old time radio worked – and why satellite radio became so popular. Unfortunately, we transferred that archaic thinking to Web banners and pre-rolls on Web videos. How exciting.

So how does a company trying to sell something get into this personal conversation? First we have to change how we think about messaging. And to do that, we have to realize it’s not messaging anymore. There are no targets. There are just people talking and listening and sharing. Forget about the means; think about the content. And remember, that content does not always belong to us anymore. So now what?

Give up the fearful control you’ve always enjoyed. Hell, you don’t really have it anymore anyway, so this should be easy. But it’s not, is it? Companies love control. In the old days, brands depended on it. This new world is like a little injection of Jackass 3 into a church service.

Brands like to manage and organize and categorize everything. The unruly conversation of millions of people is a tough thing to squeeze into a quarterly plan. Yet somehow Scott Monty at Ford ( http://www.scottmonty.com ) manages to do it by using some pretty basic principals. How? He starts with customers and builds backwards instead of starting with cars and building forward. He is a smarter person than me, so read his blog. He is generous with his great thinking.

But he’s still selling Fords. So what is a Ford, really? It is how my son gets to work and to a hiking trip and to a concert. It is a little excitement in a person’s day when they press that Mustang accelerator or save money with that hybrid or haul a load of furniture to their new apartment. To Scott, Ford is not a product, it’s a part of people’s lives. Ford is an experience. Each Ford is a personal story for the person who drives it. That simple truth is why so many successful entrepreneurs are fierce social media pros. Social media is in their genetic coding. For them, business is less about a product line than a lifeline. It is why Harvard Business School said social media was the most significant business development of 2010. But this is 2011.

Mobile Social is going to be the next pronouncement by Harvard Business School. Hell, they may have already said it and I missed it. It’s mobile, after all. Mobile is moving fast.  If you want to know what is next, look at people’s thumbs. Better yet, just start listening. Then start rethinking.

BTW, yes Scott Monty is sporting some seriously high-water pants in the video up there, but it doesn’t mean he’s not a brilliant giant of social media. It means he’s a regular person, just like us. Sort of brings the whole social media thing to an approachable level, doesn’t it?

I started to write a little story about social media. I did write it actually. And I went to sleep proofing it. It was pretty good, too, but in the end it was yet another post about social media. Google the topic. There is no shortage of posts about social media. At this point in the evolution of communications and conversations, why am I still talking about how my cheese is made? I just want a grilled cheese sandwich.

This doesn’t mean I think social media is boring. I don’t. I love it. I love movies too, but I don’t want to hear endless conversations about the inner workings of my Blu-Ray player or the digital projector at the theater. I just want to enjoy the show.

I love to read, but I don’t want to know how my Kindle transports the story to my eyes, I just want to enjoy the story. I don’t want to hear some publisher explain how he printed that book I love so much. I don’t care how my fuel injector works as long as I get to where I’m going. Why can’t we just enjoy social media for what it gives us without talking about the mechanics of it twenty-four freaking seven?

You have Facebook? Me too. So does 500 million (soon to be 750 million other people). You have a Twitter page? Me too. How about Four Square? Good. Got your resume updated on LinkedIn? Wonderful. Forgot your password for MySpace because you stopped going there in 2007? Join the club. Did you just get a text from your 72 year-old mom? Don’t answer that yet, I have to IM my daughter about her URL shortner. We are soaked in social media just like we are surrounded by all kinds of other things we love. When was the last time you read a blog about carpet fiber?

Perhaps we are far too fascinated by the means through which our water flows through the pipes in our house when we should just enjoy drinking it.

I have to stop complaining now. Five episodes of “How It’s Made” are about to start.

In the future, the Internet will be very different from what it has been, and very much like everything else we’ve known for years. I won’t get into the whole Internet versus Web argument by Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff in their Wired article, “The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet.”

Steve Case (of AOL fame) said recently on Mashable, “Someday it would be great if instead of being e-mail, it would just be called mail. Instead of being e-commerce it will just be called commerce, just because it is so ubiquitous that it is just taken for granted, much as we take for granted electricity or water or other kinds of utilities.”

We hear the obits about content management and blogs and the praise of mobile, clouds, apps and augmented reality. But since mood rings are back in style, and high school kids dress like they’re going to Woodstock, perhaps we are just forecasting the past just a little. Mr. Case is right.

Jeremy Stoppleman of Yelp agrees, “If you really go far out there, ideally computing sort of fades away as something that you even notice. There’s talk of augmented reality and all that. But really what it gets to is that computing blends itself into our lives in such a way that it’s just always there.”

“I think the future of the internet will basically go away in the same sense that you couldn’t really ask the question, what is the future of electricity?” says Barry Glick, founder of MapQuest.

I agree with Barry. Except for me, the future is harder to forsee when the directions I get from MapQuest tell me to go right when I should have gone left. But that’s another post.

The future of the Internet will be all of these things, but no one will care anymore. Apathy is the new app.

Democracy was once the hottest thing in the world. People died to give us the right to vote. Now only half the people vote in a presidential election.

Fried chicken was once a new invention. So were hotdogs and light bulbs. How excited do you get about changing a light bulb these days? Do you follow tweets about hot dogs? Fried chicken, on the other hand, has faired much better. It fits more into a religious category, however, so I probably should not have mentioned it. Sorry.

How about microwave ovens and remote controls or coffee makers and toilet paper? Those things were once life-changing inventions no less important than the Internet. There are no websites or apps or clouds devoted to toilet paper.

Now that I think about it, toilet paper and the Internet may have more in common than I’d like to admit.

Who doesn’t love bacon? I’ve never met anyone who hates bacon. We love bacon cheeseburgers, bacon bits, bacon and eggs, BLT’s and bacon lip balm.

Yes. Bacon lip balm is available from Thinkgeek.com. So is bacon pop corn, bacon lollipops, bacon jellybeans, bacon candles, fizzy bacon drink tablets, bacon salt, gummy bacon, Baconnaise (porky mayonnaise), bacon gumballs, bacon bubble buddy, bacon-flavored envelopes, bacon hot sauce, bacon mints, Squeez Bacon (basically bacon paste), canned bacon, bacon scarves, bacon t-shirts, Mr. Bacon’s Big Adventure board game and bacon soap. The last one I am going to buy a lot of. I love the smell of bacon. And now I can smell like it all day. Rudy, our Jack Russell, will never leave my side. He will not need a leash. Little guy will just suck up in my bacony wake and off we go.

Thinkgeek sells eclectic everything from caffeinated body wash and caffeinated marshmallows to whiskey stones (look it up), spy cam video sunglasses, unicorn meat (“FOR REAL! NO FOOLIN’ THIS TIME), and titanium sporks. I kind of want that spork, too.

This joint make’s Spencer’s at the mall look like the Hallmark store. They have it all, if it’s a little weird and you are sort of a geek. Bacon, however, seems to be one of their biggest draws, next to Star Wars. For me, it doesn’t end there, however.

Despite having never bought a single slice of bacon through the mail, I seem to heave gotten on a list of bacon purveyors across the country: Nueske’s, Harrington’s, The Loveless Café, Early’s and several I can’t remember. The pictures lure me in. I want that bacon, all of it, every slab. Perhaps when my shipment of bacon soap arrives and I take that first shower, it will fry my bacon Jones.

Hmmm, Bacon Jones. Didn’t he play for the Rams?

If you haven’t seen Social Network, go now. Go tonight. Go tomorrow. It’s a heartwarming tale of genius and greed and betrayal, brilliantly written, directed and acted. No doubt, there will be soon be movies that examine Napster’s start (a bit of it is covered in Social Network), YouTube, Google and Apple.

In watching Mr. Zuckerberg’s behavior, both in real life and on the screen, it is not his eccentricities that stand out. In fact, I began to realize about halfway through the picture that it is really not about Zuckerberg at all. It is about us – all 500,000 of us and how fast we are willing to change every aspect of our lives to follow an idea.

Like Edison and his light bulb, eventually the idea’s birth and the inventor’s actions fade in the wake of the millions of people who are affected by the cultural shift that follows in the wake of the invention. Facebook is only six years old. YouTube is a year younger. Google is not much older than either. Apple is ancient in this new universe. By next year, something new will take a little more of our daily time.

Whatever you may think of him, in Zuckerberg, we see a piece of ourselves. In Facebook, you literally see every piece of us all, splayed out for people who may or may not really be our friends. Is it not irony that a person so socially inept could create something that forever changes the definition of “friend?”

I’m not bemoaning this reality. It is just the way things are. It is no different than art directors who cannot draw. AD’s now live in an Illustrator/InDesign/Photoshop/After Effects/CS5 world of electronic hues and strokes. Try to find a pencil or pen. You’ll find a stylus instead. Again, this is the nature of change.

I’ve heard some old schoolers complain about this onrushing future, their bitching drowned out by the roar of technology and the next release of an iPad that will write for you and a Droid that will read it back to you. The traditional media has lost it’s former advantage to banners, micro-sites, pop-ups, web videos and 54,000 other versions of things that used to come in 30-second spots or printed pages in a publication.

Who is a copywriter in a social media world? Everyone. Hell, I wrote two entire novels on Twitter last year, 140 characters at a time. I’m not defending either of those works as fine literature, but unlike Faulkner, who needed a publisher, today’s Hemingway only needs access to the Web. You can publish anything on Amazon’s Kindle for less than the cost of a Big Mac. And you can get a book about that very subject from Amazon on your Kindle.

Perhaps this is a good thing, forcing writers to think about good ideas more than just words. We have enough words in our lives already. We don’t have enough good ideas.

Digitally, we will never die. We will just enter another database, easily found by anyone who remembers just a little info about us. It may not take that much. Our clicks live forever like old episodes of “I Love Lucy” floating through space to far away planets on sound waves broadcast in black and white over fifty years ago.

Into this metric world comes Bynamite, a small start-up that wants to help us regain some control of our digital selves. The app monitors information that Web marketers are collecting about us. It is less about online privacy than online transparency. According to the New York Times the founders say Bynamite “is mainly a ‘mirror,’ showing users how the commercial Internet sees them.”

In the same Sunday NYTimes Book Review, Gary Shteyngart writes about disconnecting from our iDevice/ARoid world and seeing what is around us in the real world. His observation that once engaged on a smartphone, everything disappears except the little arrow and the tiny screen, is far too familiar for most of us. We are drowning in Droids and buried in Blackberrys. This week, Apple’s Steve Jobs delivered a fix for the new iPhone so it works no matter where you hold it. The announcement made me a bit sad.
There are times when I’d like to hold my digital device in a way that doesn’t let it take the reality of my existence from me, meaning that I don’t hold it, it holds me.

I am disturbed to admit that I have become a traitor to my own humanity, constantly fondling a small re-charable square that blinds me from all that surrounds me. My kids sleep with their devices. People die texting or surfing or thumbing the ubiquitous screens. Every time I want to –

“Droid!”

Sorry, I got to get that. Catch you later.