Who Cares Wins explains in detail the drivers and best practices of this new dynamic. Jones does a masterful job of explaining in very clear terms, why business success in the future will be driven by the authenticity, transparency, and accountability of brands and their ability to react quickly and consistently with these three qualities. In fact, he makes a compelling case for why the successful brands of the future will be those that are most meaningful in the lives of their media-savvy and socially connected customers.

On the flipside, Jones explains why those brands that ignore the impact of social media and these new customer expectations do so at their peril.  In only the last few months we’ve seen the consumer push-back against Netflix and Qwikster, against the Bank of America Debit Card Fee, on Bank Transfer Day, against the Verizon Online 2$ payment charge, and most recently the backdown of Congress over SOPA in the face of online activism.

So what Jones is talking about in this book is not conjuncture, wishful thinking, or projection, but rather a business reality that is already here. As such, he rightly positions social responsibility as an invaluable opportunity for brands to build their bottom lines while also becoming a force for good in the world. In order for this shift to gain traction and pace, large brands and entrepreneurs need case studies and proof points to justify their shift in priorities and practices. Who Cares Wins provides this in spades, and rightly positions this shift in the marketplace as one of great opportunity, rather than cause for concern. No doubt this is an educated risk that every business leader must take, and that spirit is captured in the title “Who Cares (rather than ‘Dares’) Wins.” But the risk of not engaging with this shift in business practices is far greater. Who Cares Wins is your guidebook on how to negotiate the social business marketplace in a way that builds your business and a better world for all.

To order your copy of Who Cares Wins click here, and you can follow David Jones on Twitter at @davidjoneshavas.

There are so many people I want to thank for their continued support. From insightful thought leaders like Brian Solis, Beth Kanter, Mari Smith, Valeria Maltoni, and so many friends on twitter that kindly shared the information.

I want to to thank the sponsors whose contributions have ensured that this will be a very special event. They include the UN Foundation, CauseCast, Hewlett Packard, SocialVibe Radian6, CSR Wire, and PR Newswire. We’d also like to thank  Success Magazine, GOOD Magazine, Project 7 and Chico Bags who are giving every attendee valuable and meaningful gifts.

I want to thank my We First  team, led by Morgan, that has worked tirelessly for the last four months. Natalie, Devin, Bill, Jason, Catherine, Bryan, Cameron, David and Cole. This would not have been possible without you.

And thanks to everyone in the We First community who has tweeted or retweeted the information, posted it on their Facebook profile, shared it on Google+, or passed it on to colleagues on LinkedIn.

Perhaps the most meaningful way of saying thank you is to let you know that the event is supporting over 40 non-profits that were either brought by other guests for free, or received a very special non-profit rate. This includes meaningful causes as far-ranging as pregnancy clinics, environmental groups, children’s education, and cancer research.

We are so excited about Wednesday and having a great two days at the wonderful Marina Del Rey Marriott hotel in Marina Del Rey that has been a wonderful host throughout the event.

To those of joining us on Wednesday, we’re so excited to spend these two days together building your brands, businesses, and positive social impact. If you couldn’t make it this but but are interested in the next We First Seminar, just visit www.WeFirstSeminar now, enter you name and email, and we’ll make sure you get the information about the next one first.

Image: Absolut/Fader

I had the pleasure of speaking at the San Diego Ad Club last week after Dan Burrier, the Chief Innovation Officer at Ogilvy and my former boss on the Motorola account. Not only is Dan a friend and someone I greatly admire, but he said something that evening that struck me very deeply. He said that branding is now more about the “doing” than the “telling.”

I think Dan is absolutely right. For too long, branding as practiced by advertising agencies has been focused on the Big Idea that, well told, will connect emotionally with a customer and motivate them to buy a product or service. But in this new era of transparency, characterized by Wiki Leaks, the activities of Anonymous, and the revelations about corporate practices that have filled the newspapers over recent months, a brand can no longer afford to simply trade on an idea of what it stands for. Instead, in this era of radical transparency, a brand must be willing to tell the story of what it’s actually doing.

That’s why the purpose of a brand is so critical to its bottom line success in the social business marketplace. That purpose not only informs how leadership steers the company and the satisfaction of its employees, but it also defines what actions the brand takes to improve the lives of its customers. For if a company wants their customers to grow their business by buying its products and services, that company must be meaningful to its customers lives. Such meaningfulness is found in the concrete actions a brand is taking to better the lives of its customers and the world at large in alignment with its core values.

On the one hand this is a burden on companies, in that brands must work out what they stand for, communicating it with employees, and bring it to life through their actions. This is not a simple or quick process. Yet at the same time, once you’ve done it, storytelling becomes much easier. A brand simply needs to share the story of what it’s doing with its employees, products, services, and cause work to improve the well being of others. It will enable the brand to build a community of customers aligned around shared values and connected by social media that will be happy to amplify the brand’s message using their own social media channels.

So instead of fabricating the Big Idea, and living in fear of the rise of transparency, a brand can put its shoulder behind its purpose and simply tell the story of what it’s doing in the marketplace. It’s this connection between the “doing” and “telling” of a brand’s story that defines success in the new social media marketplace. So if brands want to capitalize on social media to build their bottom line, take Dan’s advice by focusing on what your brand is doing in alignment with its purpose and values and simply tell that story.

If you’re interested in your brand storytelling, I invite you to join us at the We First Social Branding Seminar on the 1st and 2nd of February in Los Angeles at the Marina Del Rey Marriott hotel. Every attendee will be walking through a Social Branding Blueprint that takes them from the definition of their brand purpose through to its social media expression, so you walk out with a Blueprint that offers real value to your business that you can act on. Plus, every attendee gets an extra ticket free to invite their favorite non-profit. This is the last week to register, so visit www.WeFirstSeminar.com now.

The idea behind the seminar is to make sure your brand (whether they’re a non-profit, a start up, a social entrepreneur, social enterprise, mid-size company or Fortune 500 brand) doesn’t get left behind in this fast changing marketplace by learning to use social media in a way that truly builds your business. Too often brands are rushing to social technology but overlooking the importance of storytelling. Or they have a solid understanding of their brand and its story, but they don’t deeply understand how to make social media work for them. Both alternatives are incredibly dangerous to your business and future.

Getting this balancing act between storytelling and social technology right is really hard to do. Most brands are so caught up in the day-to-day of running their business, and so overwhelmed by the pace of change in social technology, that they don’t get the luxury of time or resources to focus on it. So the seminar, and the Social Branding Blueprint created specifically for it, were designed to make this possible in a condensed time frame of two days with the support of three world-class experts.

So imagine an 70-page Blueprint that distills the learning of the speakers into actionable choices, that builds in the most effective strategic and tactical options based on the best practices of the smartest marketers in the world, that leads your through the eight critical steps that every brand must walk through to build and maintain a customer community that builds its business with them – that’s what the Social Branding Blueprint does so that you spend the two days working on creating a plan specific to your business rather than just taking notes you put on the shelf that don’t translate to real value to your business.

So the real value of the two-day seminar includes:

1. Two days focused on creating a specific plan for your business rather than a series of talks.

2. That plan is built around the best practices, cases studies and ROI of the smartest marketers in the world so it mitigates the risks you take for your business.

3. An intimate environment limited to 80 people so that we can work directly on your business.

4. World class support including myself, Robert Tercek, (former President of Digital Media at Oprah’s network OWN), and Carol Cone, (Global Practice Chair of Edelman Business + Social Purpose).

5. 1 on 1 time with the experts and additional mentors to ensure you get the personal attention your deserve.

6. Networking with the experts, sponsors (including UN Foundation, HP, Causecast, SocialVibe, Radian6, CSRWire, PRNewswire, Social Media Monthly and GOOD magazine), and fellow attendees from some of the biggest brands in the world, the smartest social enterprises and start-ups, and most progressive non-profits.

7. You get an extra ticket to invite a non profit for free. So you get to make an important contribution just by attending.

8. Taking action by investing time in yourself, your business and building a better world is the thing that will set you apart from your competitors and give your the greatest fulfillment.

We have around ten spots left and obviously registrations have to close this week as it only a week away. We’re super excited to work on your business together so register now.

I wanted to share this video with you that features David Kirkpatrick, the author of The Facebook Effect, talking about the impact of social tools and technology on the way consumers and citizens around the world are demanding change. He does a wonderful job of articulating how the internet has heightened awareness around the world of economic inequality, and how social media has given citizens and customers all around the world an unprecedented platform to have those grievances heard. Specifically, David does a very effective job of framing a series of questions that every brand must answer today if they want to survive and succeed in the future. Those questions include:

- What is the purpose, mission, and vision of your company that could make it meaningful to distrusting citizens and customers?

- As citizens and customers around the world vent their grievances over economic inequality and demand greater social responsibility from brands, how do those companies respond using the very same tools?

- Given this inequality, how do companies themselves not only build their bottom lines, but shore up the well being of the society on which their own survival depends?

We find ourselves at a very interesting intersection between economy, which is why David’s film is aptly named “Techonomy.” For social technology is not only empowering citizens and consumers to have their grievances heard, but it also provides brands with an unprecedented opportunity to scale their messaging and play a meaningful role in social transformation. Ultimately, those that adapt and play a role in this shift will not only be the bottom-line success stories of the future, but will be the social architects of change.

It is these very questions that we’ll be addressing and answering specific to your business at the We First Social Branding Seminar being held at the Marina Del Rey Marriott on February 1-2. It’s a two day deep-dive into the specific challenges your brand faces, exploring how it should define its purpose, and tell that story in a community-facing way, that will be meaningful to its customer community and drive social change.

The seminar will be led be myself and Carol Cone (Global Practice Chair of Edelman Business + Social Purpose), and Robert Tercek (former President of Digital Media at OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network). What’s more, anyone who attends will receive an extra ticket to invite their favorite non-profit for free.

The We First Social Branding Seminar is an intensive workshop in which you get world-class support to answer the very questions that will determine those brands that succeed and leverage social media to build their business and positive impact. This is the last week to register, so register now at www.WeFirstSeminar.com

Last week I had the pleasure of joining other guests on This Week in Social Media with host, Robert Tercek. As always, it was a lively discussion ranging from the rise of Google+, to citizen and consumer activism, to the future of journalism. I hope you enjoy it.

The simplification turns on five simple tabs – Home, Connect, Discover, Me, and Tweet – that each provides a different way for customers to tell companies what they think of a company, its services or products, and its social responsibility. The Home tab features are familiar in that they allow customers to tweet, follow trends, see recommended people, and send direct messages, but the @Connect tab is broken out into Interactions and Mentions. Interactions lets customers watch conversations and retweets, so that if you’re talking about a brand, you’ll be able to connect with others who are doing the same, and then also see who is retweeting those conversations. The Mentions tab highlights mentions of your name in the context of these conversations and the #Discover tab takes it one step further, allowing you to see related stories and trends based on their recent popularity as well as your connections, location, and language. So if you happen to be discussing a brand, either in a positive or negative sense, conversations in and around that topic will readily appear. You can also search for them by using hashtags.

The reach of such conversations is further expanded as tweets are now embeddable, which means that you can take a tweet and embed it as fully functional content on another platform that others can then reply to, retweet, favorite, or follow. Additionally, the new hashtag button tells visitors if a relevant conversation is going on, allowing you to follow that conversation or join in with a simple click. On the brand’s side of the conversation, Twitter has redesigned its platform to ensure that brands don’t lose touch with their customers because they are directed to leave Twitter itself. Instead, Twitter has introduced Brand Pages that allow companies to promote their products and services within Twitter itself. Obviously this gives brands more cause to advertise on Twitter and customers more reason to stay there. These brand pages can be customized by the company in question so they are consistent the brand’s identity, while also giving them some flexibility to shape the visitor’s experience. Included here are three examples that showcase this new flexibility: @CocaCola and @Intel.

The net effect of this most recent Twitter redesign is that it will further enhance brand/customer conversations by making the brand experience more customized and customer feedback more social. Such sophistication is good for brands but it also brings with it heightened responsibility as customers look to the brands they support through their purchases to be more authentic, transparent and socially responsible if they want to be the success stories of 2012.

Do you like the Twitter redesign? How do you think it will change the way brands engage to their customers?

His ability to understand the present so well as to be able to reliably predict the future is something that Solis has been able to do for some time in his blog. But as his book suggests, we are now at a point where the impact of social media has drawn a line in the sand between business as we practiced it in the past, and the new strategies and relationship dynamics that will define the business success stories of the future. Solis rightly calls this “Digital Darwinism“, and as we have seen in the film, television, video, music and publishing industries, those companies that ignore the way that technology is transforming business do so at their peril.

Perhaps the most powerful message of the book is the appropriate priority that he now gives to the consumer. He explains how Millennials are increasingly defining what consumers need and want from brands, how social networks have allowed consumers to effectively have their own personal operating systems, and the growing importance of platforms like Facebook within this new “ego-system.”

Solis explains in clear and actionable steps exactly how business can respond to this new business environment, capitalizing on the fact that information is now available in real-time investing commercial relationships with a degree of intimacy unimaginable only a few years ago. The middle chapters of the book are critical to this end as he explains about the intersection between media and the human network. The importance of earning social capital for social brands, and the rise of connected consumerism, cannot be overstressed and Solis carefully walks us through how to understand them both.

He then goes on to explain the importance of mobile commerce and the blistering rise of mobile applications that will increasingly define the business landscape, making it ever more challenging for brands to maintain customer loyalty. As such, Solis provides invaluable insights into the co-creation process of the new brand/consumer dynamic. Importantly, he looks at its implications for the sales cycle, and how brands can create shared experiences that will inspire customer communities to build a business in partnership with brands, referencing case studies like Starbucks, Zappos or Dell. These examples are very instructive in terms of the emotional dynamics that are now driving customer engagement and the purchasing of products, such as social responsibility, empathy and philanthropy. Finally, Solis takes an insightful look at the role of employees within this new business culture, and the type of change management that is needed for brands to not only engage social technology, but to stay nimble enough to keep changing with it.

As such, Solis does a wonderful job of explaining and synthesizing the many competing and potentially confusing trends that are now redefining the business marketplace, and provides an invaluable guide as to what we can expect from the future in terms of a brand’s relationship to its customers, employees, and its new leadership dynamics. If you’re interested in the social business marketplace, if you’re committed to reinventing your brand for success, if you’re fascinated by the ways that social media is impacting customer relations, organizational dynamics, leadership and the future of business, ‘The End of Business As Usual,’ is a must-read. It will redefine how you see your business, the marketplace, and your future, and provide a deep understanding of the incredible opportunities available to brands today.

You can follow Brian @briansolis, here’s his blog and you can order his book on Amazon.

I recently had the pleasure of chatting to Mark Woerde who’s great new book takes a deep dive into research that explains why social good is increasingly important to consumers around the world and therefore brands.

Plus here is a link to Mark’s great slideshare presentation.

SM: Hi, I’m Simon Mainwaring and I’m here at the IVOH Summit, and I have the great pleasure of being here with Mark Woerde who has just written a fantastic book called How Advertising Will Heal the World and Your Business. Thank you for your time, Mark.

MW: Thank you so much for having me here.

SM: Tell us a little bit about the book. What inspired you to write a book like that because it’s seemingly contradictory? Advertising seems to be self-serving, yet you’re talking about healing the world and your business.

MW: Well it all started in 2009. It was my summer holiday and I felt like something was missing, a sort of meaning. Then I was thinking, “Am I the only one? How do other people give more meaning to their lives?” I did a pilot study in the US and UK and found out that I was not alone. There is a huge search for meaning. I also found out that brands and companies can play a role and give people meaning to their lives. If marketers are open to this idea (embracing concepts of meaning) companies and brands can have this huge force.

Just to give you a figure, each year 450 billion US dollars are spent on advertising, and we only need 6 billion to get rid of something as stupid as malaria, or 11 billion to stop starvation. This is not based on a nice idea or an opinion, this is based on the world’s largest research on meaningful lives and brands, which I was able to conduct with Columbia University with help from Professor Dereck Solomons. I also got a little help from my friends at the United Nations. The results are there, I wrote it all down and that’s basically the book. The book is nothing more or less than the starting signal for marketers to make their brands more pro-social and have a huge impact on society and on businesses.

SM: What were some of the more surprising things you discovered in the report? Having been a long-time marketer yourself, what really struck you?

MW: A few things. First of all, having a meaning in life has nothing to do with your social status. It’s so fundamental. That was the first one. The other one was, only 16% of people are not searching for a meaning in life. Not having found in life can lead to feelings of depression. The other thing I found out was that almost 60% of people are searching for ways to help others, like money, time, inspiration, energy where brands can play an important role. I also found out that brands are welcome by the public. 64% prefer pro-social brands over ordinary brands. The most profound finding is that 74% indicate that helping others is their way of living a meaningful life, which is quite universal across 16 countries.

SM: It’s really compelling and very aligned with the message of We First, which is why I’m so thrilled to meet you. I have to say that I’ve discovered in the last year or two that there really is a shift in consciousness, there really is a growing awareness of this within the very tough boardrooms of America and advertising agencies. What’s your experience, being from Holland? What’s it like in Amsterdam? What’s your experience in Northern Europe? Are you regarded as an anomaly?

MW: In the marketing world I do not have the feeling that I’m alone. Before I launched this concept, I spoke with marketers and CEOs all over the world who, in total, was responsible for 1 billion dollars on advertising spending. There’s no skepticism. They like the idea and say “Hey, give us the proof.” Marketers are ordinary people themselves.

The only business I find some skepticism in is the advertising business. There is this uneasy feeling of healing the world via advertising. We are used to selling stuff that people don’t need and with image management, and suddenly it has to become real, it has to be about wanting to help people help others, about social causes and healing the world. That’s a big shift for many advertising professionals.

SM: For those who manufacture authenticity, in a sense, it’s very hard when they’re challenged with authenticity. For a brand or someone who’s seeing this, where’s the first place they should start? If they did want to offer their customers, employees and board more meaning, where’s the first place they should start?

MW: There’s one thing to it. Pro-social brands are preferred by 64%, but people also have this feeling of being mislead sometimes, but they can’t tell when or why. So they still buy pro-social brands, but still have a strange feeling that they can’t put their finger on. What I always say is to please leverage your core business in finding the right cause.

SM: So, get in alignment between who you are and what the cause is.

MW: Right. The other thing is that the concept, the whole campaign, should always be based on the real brand value. Don’t have a list of brand values. Just have one. I’m a strong believer that every brand has it’s own unique value and that’s not something you have to find out with your research company. It’s what you do with your own people from the receptionist to the facility manager to the CEO… everyone involved.

SM: That makes so much sense. That internal alignment around a single value that then informs every touch point with the company. Where would people find the book, How Advertising Will Heal the World and Your Business.

MW: Thank you so much for asking me this question. It’s out there on the internet. You can download it for free on letsheal.org where you can also find the research. If you really want to buy a hardcopy version, you can go to Amazon.

SM: Fantastic. Congratulations on all the work that went into the research and for bringing yourself to this new challenge. I think it’s really important for the future of our business.

Last week I shared Part 1 of my interview with Sherry Turkle on the ‘Human Cost of Social Technology.’ Here is Part 2 where we discussed the impact of social media on our own sense of identity.

SM:  Hi, I’m Simon Mainwaring and I’m here at IVOH in the Catskills, and I’m here with Sherry Turkle, who is the Professor for the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT. I was so enjoying our conversation earlier on that I have to have more of you.  What I’d love to talk to you about is the reality we all find ourselves in now, which is that we all have multiple versions of ourselves. For example, we have the version of our self we present to our friends and even our families in real life, then we have the version of ourselves we have in our private moments with ourselves, we have the version of our self online like on Facebook or Twitter, and we may have secret accounts where we have another version of our self that we prefer to hide from others. Do you see this sort of simultaneous, multiple versions of ourselves as a common problem? What are the dangers?

ST:  Well, it’s a common state of being. I think we have to refrain, for the moment, from calling it a problem because it is how we live now. I think it’s become the norm, and each of us are keeping the fact that it is our norm a secret, almost like a dirty little secret, and when we reveal it to someone else, like saying “I really have five accounts or six accounts,” and people reveal they are having trouble keeping them strait.

The problem is that we perform ourselves somewhat differently in each of these spaces.  There’s good news and bad news. Each time we perform ourselves in each of these spaces, we actually learn something new about ourselves because each of these places is a place where we are performing a different aspect of ourselves, and thus it’s a kind of self-reflective exercise in a way. We get to see different aspects of ourselves in these different spaces.

The downside is that, particularly for adolescents who are just forming their sense of self, it becomes hard to keep things strait. They get a kind of performance anxiety in that sense and performance exhaustion because they’re constantly on. They don’t have a place to go that’s offline. They almost don’t have permission in their life to shut it down, to get off those Facebook accounts, to get off those internet accounts. They don’t have a place to go where they’re not performing themselves and that becomes a problem.

SM:  Let me ask you a question. I can see how that can clearly become a problem.  Is it, in a sense, a new definition of what the self is today, in that our sense of self is now an aggregate of all these different versions of ourselves, or are we just fractured or splintered in different ways and we are losing a sense of self altogether?

ST:  I think we now have a sense of self as multiple. That is becoming the norm, to think of ourselves as a self that is a multiplicity of selves. We are no longer thinking of that as fractured, that’s why I was very careful not to define that as a problem, because actually, there is a truth about the self that the internet is revealing. Rather than seeing it as a problem, I think it’s something we need to learn to embrace and the new goal of living is to move fluidly among these different aspects of self.

SM:  When you say fluidly do you mean authentically and consistently?

ST:  Fluidly will mean different things for different people, but it means that you don’t feel a stress, you feel that when you move in these different spaces you are learning about different aspects of yourself with which you are comfortable, but you also feel a sense of centeredness that you’re embracing these multiple aspects of yourself joyfully and authentically. You’re not saying, “Oh my god, how am I going to put it on and perform here.”

SM:  Is that hard to do when you consider that we’re effectively being led every day by media outlets that train us to perform, in a sense, to present a doctored version of ourselves out there? So the way we’re coming to this is, as media savvy consumers, in a sense, rather than centered beings that want to be consistent and authentic.

ST:  Yes, well now you’re putting your finger on the problem. I tried to put the best face [referring to earlier hesitation to call it a ‘problem’]…well the reason I did that was quite serious. Because I think that when you have a way of being in the world that is becoming the norm, you don’t want to get right out there and say, “We’re all pathological.”

Let me just say again, the positive is that moving fluidly and authentically among these different aspects of self can be a positive experience of living in the world we now live in. But, as you say, people are learning that on different outlets, they have to be a certain way. I met a young person today who said, “When I’m on Twitter, Twitter has trained me that I have to be ironic and witty, and that’s hard for me because I’m not an ironic and witty person, but I can’t get followers on Twitter unless I’m a certain kind of ironic and witty person.

SM:  So you’re saying that the media is the messenger?

ST:  Yes. The way I put it in Alone Together is: Technology is the architect of our intimacies.  Technology is the architect, in this case for this young man, of the self.  If he wants to be popular on Twitter, he has to be an appealing Twitter personality.  Similarly, the people I interview about Facebook, many adolescents will say to me, “I won’t even say on Facebook that my dog died because I want to be, on Facebook, the kind of positive, popular, wonderful person. I doctor the photographs. I doctor my life.” So we’re learning adolescents and young people learn how to be on Facebook, the Facebook way to be, and that starts to be a problem.

SM:  This addiction to what might be called faux celebrity or personal brand management, what will cause a change? Is it a function of age, or is it a function of our integration and sophistication on how we use these tools? We realize later on a better way to use them.

ST:  I think both things happen. I think, as people get older, they start to say, “Ironic?Witty? Okay, that’s my Twitter self, but I’m going to invest less and know that I’m doing that for professional reasons, but that’s not me.” That’s hard if you’re a young person and you begin to be confused because you’re thinking, “I really care about that Twitter self.”

As you get older and more differentiated from your Twitter self, you begin to see that as an other, it’s not really you. So the age thing kicks in, but I also think we are going to get better at dealing with this technology in more mature and sophisticated ways. We are smitten right now.

The trouble with this technology… or I shouldn’t say trouble… I should say, the most powerful thing about this technology, and the reason we’re so vulnerable to it is that it’s an identity technology. It’s a technology that offers us identity. It says, “You can be this.  You can have these friends. You can have these connections. You can have this love and appreciation, followers, people who want to be with you.” Things that people want.  People want this connection.

SM:  So what would be your advice to anyone, young or old, on Facebook or Twitter, as to how to garner the most integrity between who they are as a person in real life (which is hard enough to know in itself) and how they represent themselves online? Any sort of guide from all your research, thinking and Alone Together?

ST:  Yes. The first thing is that, if you’re a young person, a healthy sense of distance that being on Facebook is not being you. When I’m interviewing you, you know that if I’m interviewing you about this, you’re going to be telling me that. Make sure you remind yourself of that regularly. Keep a little bit of distance between that Facebook self and your sense of your own self so you can have a sense of distance and irony that things that happen to you on Facebook, slights, hurts, they’re not really happening to you, they’re happening to that you that you perform. I think that is a healthy use of this medium.  In every aspect that the people we are online… it’s not who we are. Separating the friends from the friended is a very important thing to do.

SM:  I’m here speaking with Sherry Turkle, who has written this wonderful book called Alone Together.  Where can we find you online?  Where can we find the book?

ST: AloneTogetherBook.com, and google Sherry Turkle MIT and all of my webpage with all my writings and research will appear.