'Companies have no choice but to pay attention,' says Brian Solis

Brian Solis's new book, Engage: The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate, and Measure Success in the New Web, covers how social media significantly contributes to the success of brands and businesses smart enough to get in front of this burgeoning phenomenon.

Brian, the president of FutureWorks, is a longtime friend and fellow member of the Intel Insiders. Here are six ques­tions I put to Brian this week about Engage and how brands are using social media:

1Your new book Engage may turn out to be the definitive work on how social media is transforming business. Looking at the big picture, how is it changing the balance of power between customers and companies?

I invested an incredible amount of passion and also vision into this book as I believe that the time is now to lead a media revolution based on insight, intelligence and experience. I think the minute you hold this book, its intentions are clear. The impact of new media is only just beginning and the road to where we're going is, to channel the Beatles, long and winding. I believe that the destination is less important nowadays and it is this journey that we each embrace, that defines our experiences and teachings.

As in many books and blogs on the subject of social media, theory plays a role, of course. However, new media isn't as "new" as we might think. There are lessons and applied learnings that we must embrace in order to effectively change, not merely for the sake of change but for the betterment of the tattered relations between businesses, customers and the influencers and peers who connect them. The shift of balance skewed toward those who believe they held the power and, in many cases, businesses invested profits into distancing the nodes that connect us to our networks of relevance in order to reduce the cost of actually "managing" customers. When we lost the universal ability to hit 0 and connect with a live human being, regardless of medium, it was the final insult that sparked a social uprising.

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Igenerally don't write about our social media clients -- but DaleCarnegie.com has just launched its first iPhone app and, to help publicize it, they're giving away 200 copies of the classic business book How To Win Friends and Influence People. As part of the promotion, Socialmedia.biz readers will get 10 hardcover books shipped to your house.

More on the contest in a moment, but you should know about the Secrets of Success app. Here's the Newsroom Page that we helped build, offering background and media assets.

Dale Carnegie Secrets of Success App Tour

I do a lot of public speaking these days, so it was intriguing to hear billionaire Warren Buffett say in this YouTube video: "I was terrified of public speaking when I was in high school and college -- I couldn't do it, I'd throw up -- so I took this Dale Carnegie course." As soon as he finished it, at age 20, he applied to be a teacher at the University of Omaha "because I wanted to get in front of people."

What's cool about the Secrets of Success app -- which, yep, I plunked down 99 cents for in the iTunes Store -- is that it goes far beyond public speaking into tips and tactics for mastering workplace culture, presentation effectiveness, team member engagement, leadership development, sales effectiveness, customer service and lots more.

Embedded at top is a 90-second tour of the Dale Carnegie Secrets of Success App. It's one of the biggest iPhone apps I've seen, weighing in at 127MB because of all its video components -- so make sure you download it over wi-fi, not by cellular.

The app outlines basic human relations principles and shares tips, techniques and daily "confidence boosters" exclusive to Dale Carnegie Training's well-known workshops and courses. Not every video clip hits the mark, but on the whole Secrets is a good way to sharpen your professional edge or boost your confidence to grab the next rung in your career ladder.

Want a free hardcover book?

As part of this promotion that David Spark and I are running for Dale Carnegie Training, Socialmedia.biz will be giving away 10 free copies of How To Win Friends and Influence People -- which, by the way, has sold more than 15 million copies worldwide over the years and garnered 756 customer reviews on Amazon.

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From Guy Kawasaki's Twitter addiction to Evan Williams' keynote

I've learned long ago the challenge of covering South by Southwest Interactive, which hums along at its own idiosyncratic pace compared to more linear conferences. Thus, I spent last year and this year doing less blogging, conducting more interviews (which I'll roll out in the coming weeks), taking more photos and doing much more networking.

I returned home from my fourth SXSW last night after 74 exhausting but satisfying hours. Here are 54 photos from the event I just uploaded to Flickr.

Before I return to real-world mode, here are some snippets from the South by Southwest 2010:

A few random bits from SXSW

Exchange between Guy Kawasaki and Laura Fitton at the last panel I caught on top Twitter tools. Kawasaki: "There are two types of Twitter users: Those who want as many followers as possible, and those who are lying." (I've heard Guy repeatedly trot out this chestnut.)

Fitton: "Bullshit, Guy, you have to find the right followers."

I'm with Laura on this one. I could have hit 50,000 followers long ago through manipulation rather than attracting the 10,000 high-signal followers I have now. Twitter is about connecting with the right people, not creating another broadcast station, though I see how Guy has made good use of his large following.

• If there was ever a doubt that Twitter co-founder Evan Williams is a tech rock star, his keynote chat made that clear. The main exhibit hall and two ballrooms were packed to capacity. I like the modest new Twitter program @anywhere, which lets users follow a writer straight from her byline or tagline on a blog or news story without having to go to the Twitter site. As Ev says, "It reduces friction."

• Williams: "Openness is a survival technique, because some of your core assumptions are probably wrong."

• More Ev Williams: "it's been important to us for Twitter to reach the weakest signals in the world. SMS can reach all these people. It's actually profound in the right situations." Those of us who rely each day on the Internet forget that billions of people still don't have Internet access, though many of them do have cell phones. Twitter has agreements with 65 carriers in world, and people in the developing world are discovering the benefits of using Twitter via mobile carrier. "We take that [Internet connectivity] for granted, that anyone can communicate with each other," Williams said. "For Chilean farmers who hear there'll be a downpour in a few days, it can be a life-changing event."

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With serendipity and humanity we're able to connect people's digital souls

At SXSW, I bumped into Jeff Pulver and asked him to talk about his passion around his 140 Conference. It's not a conference about Twitter. It's a conference about how the real-time conversations are motivating behaviors and telling industries what they can and can't do. Jeff Pulver is insanely passionate, and he gives a fantastic rant on how the speed of real-time information is changing all ecosystems.

Watch the video over on Tweetshare. This is one of many videos I've been shooting for Tweetshare at SXSW. Browse through the entire SXSW collection. And please also read my report (if you haven't already) "Search and discovery of the real-time web."

Joe Jaffe explains how our desire to game with each other can be a useful marketing tool

At the Diggnation party at South by Southwest Interactive, I caught up with author and social media maven, Joe Jaffe of Jaffejuice and Jaffejuice.tv. Joe had actually interviewed me a year and a half ago regarding an article I had written for Mashable about social media mistakes made by social media gurus. Friday night was our first meeting in person.

I asked Joe to return the favor and let me interview him, and we talked about the rise of cause marketing. Specifically, he focused cause marketing's success not pulling at our emotions but through the fun of challenges. Our desire to game and our competitiveness alone can be a strong motivating factor. It works for financial gain, and if architected well it can also support a greater good.

Watch the video over on Tweetshare. This is one of many videos I've been shooting for Tweetshare at SXSW. Browse through the entire SXSW collection.

Set fire to a house and you too could grow up to be a top podcast host

After Alex Albrecht's rocking performance at the live Diggnation show at South by Southwest, I asked his mom, Cathy Albrecht, if she could dish up any good embarrassing stories about her son. She tells a story of him setting a fire to the neighbor's house, and then Alex jumps in, fesses up to that and also getting doused with milk. Watch the video on Tweetshare.

I'm shooting tons of videos at SXSW for Tweetshare. Catch all of the videos on the SXSW fan page on Tweetshare. If you like a video, please comment and join in the conversation. Each time you leave a comment, it gets retweeted out to your followers. And you can keep coming back to the page to follow the discussion.

Launching today, Tweetshare lets you have Twitter conversations around any piece of content

The annoying aspect of Twitter is that it's really difficult to follow conversations. There's nothing inherent to Twitter that makes it easy for you to backtrack a conversation. What many people use for conversation tracking is hashtags, and then searching on the hashtags. Problem with hashtags is they're not threaded so you can't see specifically how one person responded to another. Nor can you see the beginning of the conversation.

One service I've used before that's a good solution is Twitoaster, which allows you to follow conversations that you initiate, or someone else initiates. It's pretty good if you ask a question and you want to follow everyone's answer to it, but it's hard to back track a tweet up to its source.

Following conversations is necessary because so many people send out tweets that don't reference what they're talking about beyond the @ reply.

Launching today is a new service called Tweetshare, which allows you to have Twitter conversations around any piece of content, whether it's an HD video, picture, Word document, or anything else. Load the content, and then tweet it out from Tweetshare. The automatically included link takes readers of your tweet back to the Tweetshare space where the content resides. Each response you give includes that Tweetshare space link, allowing everyone to be in the same space talking about the piece of content. As you would with a blog or website, you can create a branded Tweetshare page to post all your tweetable content.

Tweetshare is also a brand new client of mine, and I'll be attending SXSW next week shooting videos for Tweetshare and posting them to their tweetable zones. I invite all of you to participate then, but feel free to try out the service now. All you need to do is log in with your Twitter account.

But I'm interested in knowing what services you use to follow Twitter conversations. Do you use any, or do you just use search? Or do you don't even bother because it's far too complicated?

Whether you're looking to get hired, or you're looking for A+ talent, you want to be seen as or want to be looking for super users.

This 14-minute live presentation was given at the Dice event at The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. In the presentation I explain the super user model and give examples of how companies have found, built relationships with, and hired super users.

What do you think? Do you think the 8 ½ x 11 paper resume has any future in the age of social media? If you want to get hired, become a super user. Attach yourself to a brand and/or industry. Create, share, and build relationships with industry members and other super users. And if you're a company looking for talent, look to super users. They're highly visible and passionate. You'll find they're an excellent source for marketing, staffing, and business development.

At the RSA Conference in San Francisco, I interviewed Andrew Hay (@andrewsmhay), a security blogger and Information Security Analyst at the University Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada. Hay had keynoted the hipper side security conference known as Security B-Sides earlier this week.

One of the issues Hay talked about at B-Sides was that security bloggers were becoming the voice of the security industry, and as a result, they had a responsibility to the industry. Hay said that security blogging first responsibility is to be educating everyone else and helping others understand the challenges of security. Part of that involves engaging others on how to solve security problems collaboratively.

Given that bloggers are not beholden to an editor or a publisher, the security blogging community self-polices each other and happily jump down each other's back when they make mistakes. Sure they're in security, but they're only human, so they do make mistakes.

Lastly, I asked Hay what's the best way to communicate with a security blogger if they say something for which you don't agree. He gave the most common, and I believe correct response, and that's to not air your argument out publicly online. Pick up the phone and have a conversation. Find out what the core of the dispute is. Hay's seen a lot of anger quelled by a simple phone call.

Check out more of Tripwire's coverage from the 2010 RSA Conference in San Francisco.