In simple terms, that means talking about how brilliant you are / your company is without doing anything to prove it. So all the adjectives turn out to be so much hot air.

His advice is that to avoid this, you either need to:

– Prove what you’re saying, or
– Make your writing feel like you’re telling the truth.

For accountants, proving what your saying could be something like Hugh Williams’ guarantee that if his clients aren’t happy, they don’t pay. Full stop.

And we need to convey our professionalism in everything we write, say or do. Clients can tell when we’re spouting hot air rather than saying something we really mean.

Look out for my new FREE e-zine in the New Year which is going to be all about cutting out business guff.

M

The Twitter Search tweetcocking, although ridiculous at times, does bring up a core point about the future use of ‘new’ media: with data shifting away from web pages into spaces like Twitter and mobile, the need to sort through authoritative and (perhaps even more importantly for media like Twitter) *relevance*.

I don’t know what the ‘right’ Twitter Search algorithm would look like: certainly more than number of followers. (A search engine that gives me appropriate *contextual* results from Twitter streams would be nice: then I could use Google for authority…or go straight to the Twitterer to follow up.) Ambient pinging is what Twitter’s great for.

One thing I am sure about is this: if a remarkable search engine for Twitter comes around, it could be a good thing for Twitter: Twitterers would have a built-in incentive to generate useful streams. Twitter’s frivolous, stupid, asinine and almost irrelevant. But a smart Search process could change the game. (Something that needs a bit of visualizing I suppose.) In tomorrow’s post-gangster-mangled economy, we will need ‘quick and dirty’ answers to solve time-sensitive problems: Google has given us authority for long and clean (in theory); Twitter could give us relevancy. A different, but mutual, game, no?

The Long Tail of the web doesn’t mean advertising is dead. No, it just means that the old advertising models lose their efficacy. The new media create the opportunity, and consequently force the demand, for sleeker and more focused tools to effect positive ROI for enterprises.

2008 may have been a year about explaining away ROI for the fantasy-based crowd. 2009 aught to be about explaining it *in*. Accounting theory would be a breath of fresh air if it were to waft into the social media crackhouse (aren’t accountants the ones who specialize on measuring the hard-to-measure?)

I have noticed that much fun has been poked at “the suits” by the “t-shirts” in 2008. The t-shirts have their points, but the suits aren’t as dumb as they are famed to be. Once the suits sip a bit of the old Kool Aid, they’ll thirst for the the real deal and get cracking on using it the right way. If the “suits” “get it” (as the t-shirts snide), then social media may become something worth investing with time and attention. Enterprise social media needs peeps who know their s**t.

Why human beings depend on adversity for their brilliance perhaps has evolutionary reasons. Regardless, my hope for 2009: less Kool Aid, more Bread.