Had your Warhol moment yet?

I was sitting under an umbrella chatting with Ben about what I call micro-fame, one of the things Generation C has to contend with.

It's the idea that we can experience just a smidge of the issues genuinely famous people have to deal with, stuff like:

• Having a conversational comment quoted on someone's blog
• Having people know you (or feel like they know you) that you don't know
• Because people feel like they know you, saying stuff that you wouldn't say to a stranger (good/bad)

Andy Warhol said everyone would have 15 minutes of fame, but it's really more like 15% of fame. Or, as some have said, "internet famous". Which I compare to being real-world famous in somewhere like Te Kuiti. (Which is not a bad thing!)

Can you be a good communicator online and off?

Image via Wikipedia

I'm weird.

I've been a writer all my career, perhaps all my life, and I can string together sentences pretty well with a pen or a keyboard.

But put me in a small group conversation, and I am an idiot.

A friend of ours thought I was putting it on once, thinking it was a business thing: he doesn't start getting articulate until you pay him!

But alas, it's just that we can't all be good at everything.

Have you ever noticed that the people who find it hardest to "get" social media are usually very competent at speaking in person. They may be great orators or salespeople, or just very confident conversationalists.

On the other hand, the people who naturally embrace social media understand what makes it special - that there's another way to get your message across apart from talking face to face.

We tend to judge people who are different from us, and I've tried to keep the language here neutral. But here's what the background conversations often look like:

Natural conversationalist: People who communicate better online are actually passive-aggressive, they can't handle reality, they're hiding, avoiding confrontation, etc.

Online conversationalist: People who communicate better in person just don't get it, they're behind the times, they're luddites, they're afraid of technology, they don't understand.

Methinks some cross-cultural dialogue could be really helpful. What do you reckon?

The changing face of celebrity

Check out this excellent interview Chris Brogan did with Brea Grant, star of Heroes (which I've got to admit, I haven't watched yet, despite a slight resemblance to Sylar).

It covers the issues facing celebrities using social media who genuinely want to maintain a connection with their fans. It's an issue that's relevant for anyone who wants to build a personal brand - and in fact small businesses too.

Meanwhile, Megan Maguire writes about why Gen Ys don't get the business applications of social media. It makes eminent sense that, while Gen Ys understand the technology, they often don't understand the business environment.

When we spoke to students who were part of the yMedia challenge, we expected them to be confident with their online presence, and honestly, we wondered where we could add value. We were surprised to hear 18-year-olds expressing the same fears and questions as large corporates - largely around how to manage their reputation (for potential employers, or for customers) and how to manage information overload.

There's a lot of work ahead! These are exciting times to be involved with social media.

Technorati Tags: social media, personal branding, heroes, celebrity, film, movies, tv

Do you perform? Are you an introvert?

JJProjects posted a pretty thought-provoking piece on Twitter yesterday:

People always talk about community and conversation, but hardly ever about performance. People don't like to speak of this in those terms

He then said it on 12Seconds:

Community, Conversation and Performance on 12seconds.tv

(Check out the following conversation)

Once I'd sorted out that he meant performance as in "Broadway" as opposed to "Performance Management", JJ's thoughts tapped into my own latent thinking about this area.

When you perform, life is fun. That's what the people in the book Fish! A Remarkable Way to Boost Morale and Improve Results found out, that having a performance mentality can make even mundane tasks into a game.

Performance could also be called acting. Some people think of acting as being fake, as being something else. But anyone who's done a drama course, or studied the Robert deNiros and Dustin Hoffmans of this world, knows that can't be true. Acting is a way of letting the real you out!

And so is social media. Yesterday I got a review copy of Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob, written on the premise that "the internet's widespread anonymity eliminates boundaries and encourages otherwise polite people to be downright abusive."

That may be so for some, but I've seen the other side of the coin - real people, exploring and discovering themselves, learning how to become "micro-famous" ... not necessarily for the esteem of others but out of sheer curiosity about what makes us tick.

So... back to performance ... how about this statement:

The self-publishing tools of the internet give people like me (particularly introverts) a playground to explore, discover what I have that is unique to the world.

It's like an incubator for self-branding.

There's a lot in this. Thankfully this is a blog post, not an article or a book, so it's okay that these are fragmentary, half-formed thoughts. There's something to the performance aspect, and there's something to the game aspect that I haven't even touched on it.

And there's also something to the introvert side of it. I find that self-expressing through blogging and Twitter has made me generally more confident in physical-world (I despise the term "real-world", as if what we do on the internet isn't real) situations.

What do you think? Love to hear your thoughts.

Possibly related:
Courage and Cameras
Virtual, or Fake?

Mark lives in Ikea - a win-win advertising model

Marie just told me about MarklivesinIkea.com. Mark is a comedian and filmmaker who had nowhere to stay for a week, so approached Ikea to live in their store. Innovative!

In return, he films it, and provides interesting content. Here's why I think Ikea are very smart to take this on:

* It's short-term
* It's win-win
* It's a great story
* That story will stick around, even when Mark gets to move back into his apartment
* It's funny, and as marketing guru John McEnroe said, "You cannot be serious"
* Mark's already got the production capacity, and (presumably) an audience

It's also great for Mark's personal brand. Like I said, win-win. How many other, similar opportunities are lying around near you today?