Had a wonderful time at the CT Business Expo in Hartford. Enjoyed chatting with lots of very nice people who seemed really interested in learning about social media. A big "thank you" to the excellent sound techs who loaned me a laptop for my afternoon workshop on "industrial strength" social media strategy. The room was hot and the audience was tired, but the PowerPoint slides kept them awake. Sometimes PowerPoint is a good thing, after all!

This Tuesday, David B. Thomas and I will be leading a panel at the MarketingProfs B2B Forum in Boston. Should be fun!

Hey, it's great to be back in the saddle. For some reason, the network connection between GoDaddy and my ISP, Optimum Online, was glitching out somewhere, and as a result, I couldn't access my blog for a while. At any rate, here's the latest: On June 9, I'll be speaking at the CT Business Expo in Hartford. On June 14, I'll be speaking at the MarketingProfs B2B conference in Boston. It would be great to see you there!

Dave and I will be leading a workshop on B2B social media strategy at this excellent event in Boston next month! We look forward to chatting with you in person! And let's not forget beer! We look forward to having several beers with you!!!

The new book has earned some great reviews in the past two weeks. Here's a quick overview of recent commentary: Tom Webster in Social Media Explorer, Alison Bolen in Conversations and Connections, and Jennifer Leggio and Rich Harris in Social Business (a ZDNet blog). There are also six highly favorable reviews of the book posted on Amazon. It's always nice when people say nice things about a book you've written. I guess that's the real reason -- and maybe the only reason -- that we keep writing!

Here's a great post by my old friend Mike Minelli that appears in GigaOM. Even if you're out of the dating game, it's still fascinating to read about how and why people choose dating partners, find romance, and all that good stuff! Happy Valentine's Day to all!

Now reading The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu, who makes a good case for the cyclical nature of communication markets. First you have invention, followed by anarchy, followed by increased control, followed by even more control, followed by monopolies, followed by new inventions that overturn the monopolies and launch the next cycle. I routinely tell my clients that now is the time to leverage the potential of social media -- not because social media has reached a perfect state, but because it's still virtually free. Give the network providers another couple of years and they'll figure out how to charge you for blogging. Now is the golden age of free social media -- make the most of it while it lasts.

Well, we put the new curtains up in time for Thanksgiving, and now we're slowly rolling through the rest of the holiday season. Fortunately, I have an adequate supply of my favorite single-malt Scotch on hand, and I look forward to welcoming the new year in a genuinely mellow fashion.

As some of you already know, my new book with a very long title, "The Executive's Guide to Enterprise Social Media Strategy: How Social Networks Are Radically Transforming Your Business," is due out in January. If you find it readable, please buy a copy for a friend. If you find it excruciating, please don't tell me.

At any rate, I'm just beginning a new book project on cloud computing. I promise that it will have a shorter and catchier title. And my name won't be on it, because I'm ghosting it for a very nice client. If anyone out there wants to add his or her two cents to the book, please contact me at your earliest. I look forward to chatting with you!

Well, the nice folks at Wiley have finished the cover design for our new book, and you are the first to see it:

    Enjoy!

Don Peppers and Martha Rogers wrote a post the other day about CRM, SCRM and VRM. The gist of their argument is that SCRM (social customer relationship management) is an oxymoron, and that VRM (vendor relationship management) is the next big thing in the expanding universe of relationship management.

It's a great post, but lots of us still have faith in the basic idea that SCRM is the logical extension of CRM. I think you can make a pretty good case that the convergence of cloud, mobile and social computing is simply enabling the "next generation" of CRM, and that some of us are calling that next generation "SCRM," perhaps for lack of a better term.

Then again, maybe the term "SCRM" is too silly, and we should just call it "CRM II." 

Chris Brogan writes a great blog, as most of you probably know. I recommend today's post (Looking for Work) and the many excellent comments that it inspired, especially if you feel like a refugee from the post-modern economy.

Chris touches on an important and very under-reported topic. And by the way, it's under-reported because most mainstream journalists (those who are still employed, that is) are working for huge corporations. As the global corporate economy continues evolving into something resembling the Matrix, more and more of us will have no choice but to rely on our entrepreneurial skills to survive. So my question is: When will the education system catch up with this? When will "mainstream" society figure this out?

The world has changed and the vast majority of those cushy corporate jobs have vaporized -- and will never return. Those jobs were the byproducts of the post-WWII U.S. economic hegemony. From 1945 until 2008, we operated as a virtual monopoly (We had a scare in 1973, but everyone forgot about it when the economy recovered in the 1980s). Now that we've got serious competition (the world *is* flat), the fat times are truly over. I'm not complaining -- I'm just amazed by how many people are still out there hunting for plush corporate gigs that no longer exist.