The benefit from a firm grasp of social media for companies is impossible to ignore. Whether you work in marketing, advertising, public relations or interactive, there are distinct competitive advantages for both individuals and businesses from a better understanding of the social web.

This post provides specific advice from in-house social media marketers including: Dell, Comcast, HP, Wells Fargo, Intel, Best Buy, General Mills, Ford, UPS, Home Depot, Cirque du Soleil and a mix of SMM consultants/agencies: Altimeter Group, Crayon, Ogilvy 360, Future Works, Doe Anderson, New Marketing Labs and others. Advice includes justifying investment in social media, strategy, how to decide on tactics and measuring success.

Our 25 contributors include:  Charlene Li, Richard Binhammer, Chris Brogan, Katie Paine, Valeria Maltoni, Joseph Jaffe, Dave McClure, Tac Anderson, Brian Solis, Rohit Bhargava, Jim Cuene, Jason Falls, Michael Brito, Scott Monty, Gary Koelling, Jessica Berlin, Tim Collins, Dave Evans, Brian Clark, Debbie Curtis-Magley, Geoff Livingston, Frank Eliason, Lindsay LeBresco, Nick Ayres and Shonali Burke -  an impressive mix of social media tal... read more >>

Social media is not about Facebook, Twitter, blogs, yada yada - and if you really want to understand it you have to look behind the scenes and see what is going on.  Here's the story, its about the separation of content from its means of distribution.  Sounds rather bland until you actually grasp what this means.

From the year dot until Gutenberg’s invention of moveable type and the printing press, information had no means of mass distribution, except through storytelling.

Gutenberg’s invention made the widespread distribution of information possible and it also cemented a marriage between information and its means of distribution that lasted for 600 years. Within this marriage, distribution became the dominant partner because it almost always cost more money to distribute stuff than it did to create it in the first place. This relationship between information and distribution - which could be termed the Gutenberg principle - meant that the flow of information within our society became institutionalised to generate the revenues necessary to pay for the high costs involved (printing presses, TV and radio networks etc).

The institutions that evolved around the...