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Of course, a few billboards, no matter how strong the photos and how fabulous their placement, won’t be seen by Selfchec’s target audience: everyone. In the connected culture, in which amateur videos go viral and celebrities have millions of online followers, the idea of reaching everyone is a tantalizing goal for anyone with something to sell – even a tiny nonprofit selling an idea.

“My “social media” learning curve has been pretty dramatic, but I am still having trouble understanding even some of the basic concepts,” says Selfchec founder Joan Peckolick, a New Yorker I met a few years ago when she attended the annual We Media conference in Miami (this year we’re meeting in New York). We’ve stayed in touch and I’ve followed, with great admiration, her relentless networking to secure donated creative help and ad space to spread her message that monthly self-exams can save and extend millions of lives. Her husband died at age 35 from colon cancer.

Mobile apps and all that social stuff sound great to Peckolick – but none of it comes naturally to her. She has a background in graphic design.

“We have a Facebook page and a Twitter account, but it scares me that we could be doing so much more if we had a social media guru working with us,” she says.

Can you help Joan? First – unbutton, unzip and feel yourself for lumps. Then – contact Joan.

I am excited to announce the launch of a new project that we are calling WeThink.

What is it? WeThink is a conversation about innovation and the future — an effort to explore new ideas and promote solutions to the challenges that our society is facing.

What’s the big deal? If you follow our work here at all, you’ll know that We Media is a movement – a concept – that helps explain how we know what we know, who we trust, and how we learn. It’s about power of the community. We Media is part of the infinite quest to harness the power of media, communication and human ingenuity for common good. And, well, We Media changes everything.  We Media changes the way we innovate.  We Media changes how we create, sustain, and grow successful ventures. We Media enhances the structures, models and economies that support human communication, interaction and achievement.  And through that, We Media challenges us to review our existing ways of operating, break apart our established structures, and re-build our approach to the future.  These changes impact all of us, and they are forcing each of us to find new ways of thinking about… well, everything.

What are you talking about? I have this crazy idea that we need to re-think the way we create, support, and sustain ventures.  We need to re-think how we innovate.  What we are doing isn’t working anymore – not as well as it should – and we need to try something different.  That means re-considering what kinds of companies and organizations are needed today, in response to the massive changes we are seeing in our society as a result of the influence that technology and the internet are having on our culture.  That means re-structuring how ventures, both for-profit and social in nature, are funded and managed.  That means re-assessing what success looks like for new companies and organizations, as well as re-considering how we measure progress of existing organizations against our needs in society.  And that means re-building the whole infrastructure of innovation… from how we teach it, promote it, cover it in the media, what skills we value, who gets to serve as gatekeepers, and more.

How will it work? Over the next year we will collect and share new ideas, highlight different approaches, ask tough questions, and propose solutions. We will lead a new and different kind of discussion about innovation. Everywhere we go we will be looking for new issues to discuss and new ideas to consider.  Everyone we talk to or encounter is invited to contribute their experience or perspective to help power this effort.  And all those ideas and suggestions, approaches and solutions will be shared.  They’ll be posted online.  They’ll be open to feedback.  They’ll be mashed up with other thoughts.  At the end of a year, our plan is to pull together a ‘solutions book’ that helps to support, and sustain, a vibrant and game-changing discussion going forward.  The rest we will figure out as we go.

The first few ideas and questions will be posted in the next several days.  So, stay tuned — the fun is just beginning.

Social Citizens BETA is a paper commissioned by The Case Foundation in early 2008 to help bring attention to the ways that young people are using new, social media to affect social change. The notion of young people as “Social Citizens” comes from the intersection of several elements: the 70 million plus Millennials or Gen Y (15-29 year olds) who are the largest living generation and having a quiet but profound impact on society, the panoply of social media tools in which they are fluent, and a culture, as I wrote in the paper, that is marinating in social causes. This combination results in an enormous number of idealistic, passionate, active, digitally fluent Social Citizens who are changing the world one Tweet, one ping, one Facebook update, and one political campaign at a time.

Download the report (PDF)

Ushahidi, which was named a “Game Changer” at last year’s conference, is utilizing digital mapmaking technology and social media to map and verify vital information in Haiti. Ushahidi plots key information on a Google map of Haiti: makeshift hospitals, locations of survivors and people still trapped and reports of unstable bridges. The map helps rescue workers locate and track of survivors, as well navigate the dangerous landscape of destruction.

The Extraordinaries, one of two winners at the Pitch It! Competition at last year’s conference, applies facial-recognition technology to finding missing people in Haiti. Since we first posted about them last week, our friends at The Extraordinaries have worked around the clock with the State Department on a coordinated technology effort to support relief efforts in Haiti. From its Earthquake Support Center, accessible by computer and the mobile Internet, The Extraordinaries’ facial recognition technology enables relief workers and family members to match faces of missing persons to images from news reports across the Internet.

“We’ve had over 31,000 image tags submitted by thousands of people, in three days,” founder Jacob Colker told us. “ We’ve also had over 640 searches queried by families looking for missing loved ones. NBC, ABC, CNN have all run stories about our efforts.” Watch the videos.

The project has also spawned a stream of information from users in the Extraordinaries growing social network of volunteers.

From a situation room at Tufts University, ten Ushahidi volunteers are working 24/7 finding, evaluating and posting relevant information on digital maps. The maps are categorized for emergencies, threats, logistics, and missing people.

Information submitted to the site via outside users are checked by the volunteers to ensure legitimacy (posts designate whether information is verified on unverified). Patrick Meier, Ushahidi’s humanitarian response and crisis mapping specialist, told the MIT Technology Review that the process could be automated in the future by the group’s Swift River platform, a predictive tagging, program that will try to cross-validate crowd-sourced information by comparing reports from texts, Twitter, news feeds, YouTube and other sources.

Like The Extraordinaries, Ushahidi has set up as social network, Crisis Mappers Net, which has become a communications channel for state departments, NGOs, and people in the technology and public health sectors. Ushahidi is also collaborating with Instedd’s GeoChat, another map-based communications platform working with the Emergency Information Services (EIS).

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Anyone can post photos of a missing person or loved one, tag and sort images for matches in a database, and deploy facial recognition software (coming) to make a match.

I’ve been thinking about the net, and its vastness, in anticipation of OneWebDay on Sept. 22. That’s an informal, loosely organized global celebration of the World Wide Web. This year the organizers are trying to focus attention on policies that can make the web available to more people. You can find a variety of events, meetings and parties in cities around the world, or organize your own, on the OneWebDay web site.

This year I’m supporting the effort as a OneWebDay Ambassador. I hope you’ll find a local event, chime in, or simply think about whether OneWebDay makes any sense. I’d like to know what you think of it.

Me?

OneWebDay, if it matters, can raise awareness of important policy issues – like Net Neutrality and the Digital Divide – that aren’t on most people’s minds every day. If the only people who care about OneWebDay are the ones who already care about those issues, then the day is pointless.

The name of the day itself has me thinking about the paradox of the networked culture. The web is hardly unified, the people who use it certainly aren’t, and as much as our assorted digital networks may connect us, they also divide us. I’m not sure I’d want it any other way.

I love the web and the idea that we may use it to carve a path toward a better future for more people. I also love the competitive market that has encouraged entrepreneurs to imagine new uses for the web, some of which may be part of the formula for a better future.

But I don’t know that the web will get us there – or, really, that the web, one for all and all for one, is as worthy a cause as earth, or Earth Day. Some days I need to turn off the web, tune out, drop out. I never feel that way about the planet – and don’t need a special day to think about it.

OneWebDay is a paradox. The web seems boundless, endless, limitless, but really it’s just vast, overwhelming and confusing. It doesn’t know everything, or everyone. It doesn’t go everywhere. Some people don’t use it, billions can’t, and while that’s a tasty social and business challenge for policy- and market-makers, it pales against life-or-death challenges like lack of clean water, hunger and infectious diseases – all of which are symptoms of what economist Jeffrey Sachs calls extreme poverty – the deepest, most desperate kind of poverty. I’d like to see amazing wireless broadband networks everywhere – but not before there’s a decent water supply, shelter, food, vaccines, education and peace on the ground. I don’t want the web to be used for better war reporting. I want it to be used to stop wars.

Maybe a better, faster, cheaper, vaster web will help us achieve these things – I’m encouraged by projects like Charity:Water and Twestival; by code-saavy activists like those from the Sunlight Foundation, which uses technology to shed more light on how government works; and by daring, on-the-ground digital media makers like those from Witness, who use video and photography on the web to document and oppose human rights abuses.

Yet the web, so vast already, deep in insight, full of promise, also churns in a great race for dominance and control. So, today, Google dominates online search and advertising built around it; Paypal dominates online commerce and transactions; Facebook dominates social networking and photo sharing; Twitter dominates microblogging; and governments vie for control of the Internet itself – and access to whatever anyone may say or do with it. Key telecom companies and governments dominate the unseen wires and fibres that pump all our data from one place to another, and devices that can monitor and filter what we say, what we see.

The net is at once open and vast as well as closed and constrained by physical limits, economic inequities and unseen forces.

This paradox of the net is at the heart of a movement of policy and tech activists who have been talking about the Digital Divide since the early days of the web. The divide, rarely mentioned in business settings, is about haves and have-nots, and in the digital culture access to the network is a bright line of political and economic division, much like access to clean water, education or a safe, secure home. In the U.S. and other developed countries, access of some sort is now widespread – at least 63% of adult Americans had some sort of broadband at home in 2009 – and that’s far less than the 95 percent who have access in South Korea.

Where ever you live, the quality of your web access – in terms of speed, convenience, freedom and the sophistication of users – remains unequal. China has the world’s biggest online audience, but the Chinese Internet, like other forms of media, is monitored and controlled by government censors. Twitter may have helped us keep up with riots in Tehran this summer – but we’re hearing less now about the trials and punishments of arrested protesters. I’m thinking about them as OneWebDay approaches.

The genius of the web has always been the hyperlink – the way we point from one idea to the next. That simple notion, coded 20 years ago into a language that both computers and people can understand, spawned a torrent of technical and social innovation – truly a creative explosion that not only redefined business and culture but gave rise to a new canvas for creativity itself. The slogan of the blogging platform WordPress captures that spirit: Code is Poetry.

I’m thinking of OneWebDay in those terms, as a vast experiment in collaborative art. Artists help us understand the world, challenge perceptions and shine light on our inner lives, on the most personal and subjective perspectives of the human experience. A few are celebrated. Most toil in obscurity. In some ways it feels like the web has turned us all into performance artists. Some of us know it, some don’t.

Seen in that light, OneWebDay seems well worth a toast. Its promise remains limitless. I can’t wait to see what’s next. The Digital Renaissance has only just begun.

One of the lingering myths repeated like a mantra by some professional journalists is that they are not only the best judges of what we should call journalism, but also the essential providers of the service. This “world revolves around us” drone earned a boost last week with publication of a study by Cornell University researchers that concluded virtually all news originates with mainstream media, typically followed by a burst of attention and links from blogs – and just 3.5 percent originating with blogs.

The finding depends on what you call a blog, what you call journalism, how you count first, how you define “originate” and what qualifies as mainstream. The study tracked the flow of 90 million stories across 1.6 million web sites. It imagined, starkly, a world informed by mainstream media and/or blogs. A more nuanced vision of how we know what we know would include our social networks – the people we know and trust far more than mainstream media or blogs; and the rising influence of institutions that are neither blogs nor what we used to consider mainstream media – such as nonprofit groups, businesses, governments, scientists, scholars, artists, advocacy groups, consultants, other experts and “alternative” media. What’s alternative in a world of infinite alternatives? The wider set of story-tellers, whatever you want to call them, is the essence of We Media – it’s all of us.

This week, for instance, I learned in an email from Amnesty International USA (a former client) of the kidnapping and murder of Natalia Estemirova, a Russian journalist and human rights defender. I missed the story of her death when it was reported last week by The Washington Post, The New York Times, Reuters, even Huffington Post, BBC, and many others. I missed New Yorker editor David Remnick’s note on the murder, with a recording of an interview he conducted with Estemirova at a memorial for another slain Russian journalist and human rights advocate, Anna Politkovskaya. Today Google News provided more than 1,000 links to the Estemirova murder story.

From Amnesty International, the news of Estemirova’s death came with a perspective and a call to action: a condemnation of the murder coupled with a campaign to investigate and prosecute the killers.

This is one of many new permutations of how news and knowledge disperse in the connected culture: from everywhere, to everyone. Traditional news companies were all over this story when it broke – but they were entirely out of my loop. Who was first? I don’t know, I don’t care. Amnesty International was first for me.

Advocacy groups and nonprofits like Amnesty have long been vital sources of news and information – producing research, providing expert sources and in many cases conducting the investigative field work that forms the bedrock of reporting in mass media. For instance, The New York Times today published a story by Matt Richtel about how the U.S. government suppressed data on the safety risk posed by cellphone use while driving a car. As the Times story made clear, the suppressed data was brought to light and fully disclosed thanks to a lawsuit filed by two nonprofit groups, the Center for Auto Safety and Public Citizen. The Times followed up with further interviews of key players to explain how and why the data was suppressed for so long – and brought attention to the story uncovered by the nonprofit groups.

Contrary to what the Cornell study implied, news originates with sources, not media. News isn’t a river, flowing from source to delta. We no longer need “the” media to know what’s going on. That doesn’t mean big, mainstream media institutions are irrelevant – the audience of global and national news brands, including broadcast and cable networks, is still large, influential and valuable to anyone who wants to get their story out. But they’re no longer essential. In the connected culture, news is gaseous. It diffuses, like fog.

Image Credit: Empire Fog by JoF via Flickr

Cone Inc released their “Cone Nonprofit Power Brand 100” report yesterday – in which it valued (and ranked) the brands of some of America’s leading social, environmental and animal organizations.  Not surprisingly, the report is already generating a lot of buzz.  People mostly want to talk about which charities were ranked and which ones weren’t, or who scored highest on the list (and why).  But I think that is the wrong discussion to have.  I want to focus on something else – the very concept of brand, and its importance for nonprofit organizations, in today’s connected society.

Go read the full post, and let me know what you think.

This morning I read a column from Media Post about Heather and Mike Spohrs, whose daughter, Madeline, passed away suddenly of respiratory syncytial virus, complicated by her premature birth just 17 months earlier.  My wife, Karen Dahl, and I spent a couple of hours the other night, after reading about their story on a blog, reading the twitter updates and blog posts that detailed Madeline’s illness and watching videos and slide shows remembering her short life.  My wife cried.  I ran upstairs to look in on our 17-month old son, Henry, who was sleeping, and put my hand on his back to feel him breathe, just because I could.

The column was about marketing, but the larger message was that social media gives us the power to change the world — something we have been talking about in the context of WeMedia for years.  But more than anything, social media reflects the way we are as people.

As the author, Kristi Faulker, noted:

Let there be no more doubt that the on-line community is, in fact, a community in the truest, human sense. Social media is the uber-gathering space — better than a beauty shop, supermarket, diner, church, pub, firehouse, school, and town square rolled into one. The scale of Facebook or Twitter is global. Yet, when a human story touches our hearts, we react as intently as we would to a crisis in our own neighborhood.

But she also identified a major challenge that comes up in the context of marketing, and really how organizations communicate generally:

As marketers, we seek to quantify the power and penetration of nascent social platforms. What percentage of the target audience is engaged in Twitter? How many women 34-55 are on Facebook? How many eyeballs does this blog get compared to that one? And for heaven sakes, what’s our ROI?

Too many organizations look at social media only as a tactic, another channel, or an opportunity to expand their relationship with the audience for the purpose of increasing sales.  All of those things are true about social media — these new tools and communities that form through them have seemingly unlimited potential from a branding and marketing standpoint.  But if that is your only focus, or your only understand how what social communities online represent, you are missing out on quite a bit.  And by missing out, I mean you are failing to recognize the reasons why people join these communities in the first place, what their expectations are for how the companies and groups they engage should act, and their desire to have an impact in the world that is larger than just one purchase or action.  Not only will that limit what you can achieve from a branding and marketing standpoint, in short time, it might take you out of the conversation completely.

When I forwarded the column to my wife, a nonprofit professional and part-time marketer, she wrote back “If only more companies did TRUE good things to take advantage of the communities they could SERVE instead of just using their ‘good’ deeds to SELL stuff to us. We’re not just connected, we care and we’re not idiots who can’t see through to the true intentions.”

As usual, Karen said it better than I ever could.

Take heed marketers (and everyone else) – you have more tools and opportunities available to you in a connected society than ever before, but more is expected of you as well.  Everything about how you operate, communicate, educate, engage, and activate people must change.  You must change as well, on the inside.  Don’t believe me?  Keep doing what you are doing… I’ll be here waiting when the audience figures you out.

Beginning today, however, the price of cigarettes is going to jump, significantly, as the new federal cigarette tax goes into effect.  The tax, which President Obama signed in February, will raise the tax on tobacco products from 39 cents a pack to $1.01.  As many as a dozen states are consider additional taxes as well, to help generate much needed income.  Before the tax hike, cigarette prices averaged about $5 a pack.  While some tobacco companies will absorb part of the tax to offset increases, prices across the board will go up.  As the prices go up, the number of people who smoke is expected to go down — significantly.

So what?

The health risks associated with smoking are widely known – and yet apparently aren’t compelling enough to compel the last 20% of Americans to kick the habit.  A simple tax, however, will push people past that tipping point.  What’s the lesson here?

Behavior change is tough, but necessary if you want to have a real impact.  Quitting smoking is a significant change someone’s life.  Could you give up something that is a regular part of your day — never eat breakfast again, or never turn on your television?  For smokers, beginning the process of quitting is not that difficult – most smokers say they have tried to quit, but couldn’t follow through.  Those who do quit, and stay that way, acknowledge that many aspects of their life change, not just the fact that they no longer light up.

Along the same lines, the holy grail of organizing – community, political or otherwise – is getting people to take action.  All the better if that action is directed towards some specific action that helps you meet your goals, and therefore becomes both meaningful and measurable.  Getting someone to act once is easy — its getting them to act a second time, and beyond, that is really tough.  To get people to take action, you have to make it easy for them to act, give them some direction and support, and make sure the incentive is clear (see next point).  But even that isn’t enough sometimes.

And that is why this tobacco tax provides an important lesson for us all.

Smokers are fully aware of the health risks associated with cigarettes, and all the other negative social aspects as well.  For those who continue to smoke, none of these reasons are compelling enough so that someone will commit to kicking the habit.  But when you add on a significant financial penalty for continuing to smoke, people’s resolve to quit grows much stronger, much faster.

Will that lesson translate to behavior change in other areas?  I don’t know.

My experience in organizing suggests that there are limitations to people’s commitment to action, no matter how compelling the issue or sophisticated the tool set we provide to support them.  I have been a part of hundreds of campaigns over the years, about a wide range of issues, and never been able to move a significant number of people to a new set of behaviors.  I can get people to click on something or sign a petition, show up for an event, or maybe call their elected officials and advocate for a cause… once.  The more times you ask, the lower the rate of participation becomes (and no, a financial incentive nor a penalty, have proven to be enough).  In the digital age, organizations so often push tools as the solution to major challenges, but that seems to me to get us further away from uncovering the real solution.

I am thinking about this challenge while watching Organizing for America (OFA) try to mobilize the public to support President Obama’s budget.  According to an article in Congress Daily, the campaign is not having much of an impact.  I’m not surprised. OFA seems to be using the same playbook they did during the Obama campaign — take a big list, email it asking for help, direct and facilitate action, and hope for a great response.  Governing is not campaigning, and urging the passage of a huge budget package is not as compelling as helping to elect a truly transformational candidate.  I think OFA will have to re-think the strategy for how they educate, engage, and mobilize people around these types of big policy challenges — and my gut says the centerpiece of the effort won’t be a media/promotional effort, but rather something much more community driven (I wrote about this for the WeMedia conference, FYI).

I have never smoked a cigarette in my life — haven’t taken so much as a drag.  I think its a disgusting habit which has the added benefit of causing any number of life-shortening health problems.  Further, I have never understood why people start smoking or why, knowing that cigarettes can/will kill you, they don’t stop (and yes, I understand that cigarettes are addictive, that nicotine makes you feel energized and alert, that peer pressure plays a big role, along with family history, education level and income, and of course, the process of quitting can be very difficult).  I’m not some crazy anti-smoking advocate either — though I do think our society would probably be better off without people lighting up everywhere.   I am curious though.  I want to understand what really drives people to smoke, and what drives people to stop smoking — and how that might translate to everything else.  The shift in our society’s behavior that results from this tobacco tax, no matter what it is, will yield some important lessons.  I can’t wait to see what they are.

My daughter Amanda took the above photo in Nepal. The picture on the right is of my new granddaughter, Elizabeth Jane. I thought of them as I discovered The Girl Effect, a project from the Nike and UN Foundation that stunned global leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

The big idea: unlocking the potential of adolescent girls in all parts of the world could have tremendous social and economic impact.

Two flashpoints for the consideration of every father and grandfather: (1) For every development dollar spent, girls receive less than one-half of one percent. (2) A woman or a girl will reinvest 90% of their income on family, a man 30-40%.

The Girl Effect is the powerful change that occurs when girls have the opportunity to participate in their society. Starting now, “Learn, Change, Share” joins the lexicon of We Media’s “End of Apathy.”

Watch the video that is spreading the story.

“Reinventing Advertising” looked at what the changing landscape of social media means for businesses, their reliance on advertising, and what they can do to better engage consumers. The workshop was facilitated beautifully by Marck Walsh of GeniusRocket and the panelists were Joe Marchese of SocialVibe, Melissa Godis of Crispin+Porter, and Sheryl Catell of LGD Communications.

The panel echoed many themes we are all familiar with: How do we make money from ads? Do ads belong on social networks? How do we get consumers excited about our brands so that they will welcome and endorse the presence of our ads on their sites?

Melissa represented the “agency” perspective and shared what I thought was the most important take-away: we must create tools for customers to engage with. Tools invite the customer into a conversation and educate them about products. Sheryl echoed the point by emphasizing that the days of banner ads will soon be over. I did not hear a framework emerge for what tools work best or how to create such tools, as we focused mostly on the questions and less so on answers. (Afterall, if we had the answers, we probably would not have needed a session on “Reinventing Advertising”).

Joe made the excellent point that everyone wants their ads to be viral sensations–the homemade video that is cheap to produce, rakes in millions, and becomes a “cultural phenomenon.” I often wonder about what features or qualities make a video viral; Joe thinks it at least has to be be funny, edgy, or scary, and does not necessarily have to carry the brand message. Check out the role of memes, if you’re not already familiar with the concept.

When we got on the topic of whether or not political campaigns will ever mimic consumer marketing campaigns, there were heated responses. Many asserted that Obama’s campaign was brilliantly executed and a shining example for companies.  Others thought that political campaigns are not quite there yet, but that both have a lot to learn from each other.

We covered a variety of topics, as you can tell, and the conversations were interesting and engaging. I was particularly impressed by SocialVibe’s ability to connect with youth through branding and at the same time empower them to be social change agents. SocialVibe seems to have their fingers on the pulse of youth culture and are using that knowledge and that userbase to positively impact the world, through young, MySpace-addicted, pop-culture-loving teenagers.

A few things have marked the Game Changers, based both on our case studies and some observations at the conference Wednesday:

1. Ignite the Spark of Motivation. Inspire people. SocialVibe, a Game Changer, showed a video with excited participants from their community saying things like “I helped build a well in Kenya,” and constantly talked about how powerful they felt by being able to make contributions through charity just by writing content and posting SocialVibe’s advertising widget.
2. Crowd Forging. Not only asking questions, and suggesting people come, but actually bringing them together, getting them to give their greatest assets: Time, Money, Passion, Energy. Shape a crowd, as much as assemble it. Listen to what it wants, and give the people more of it. (Corollary: It’s not about the technology. It’s the people, stupid.)
3. The ability to do good while also making money. Holding both capitalist and social ideas in their heads (and their business models) at the same time.
4. Play. Or, in the words of We Media co-founder Dale Peskin, “Play will be to the 21st century what work was to the industrial age.”
5. It has to be more than “lipstick on a bulldog.” Don’t just repackage an old idea.
6. Get in the game. Just do it. Don’t argue about the rules, the procedures, all the points. Game Changer Ze Frank brought us that one: “Sometimes what we do with all the media at our disposal is argue about the rules of the game, rather than play it.”

Hope that helps. (And for your copy editory types: yes, I know the bullets aren’t in parallel construction. So be it.)

WeMedia is into its second month of producing a regular podcast that features in-depth interviews with prominent media, technology, and social change figures, as well as distinguished experts on current affairs and news. This is the sixth episode. Our goal is to help the WeMedia community understand the roots of the changes taking place in our society, hear from the thinkers and doers who are on the front lines, really understand the difficulties facing the media, consumers, and others — all while being somewhat entertaining.

Today’s podcast features a conversation with Krista Van Tassel, the director or Marketing and Communications for Net Impact, a global network of individuals — students, entrepreneurs, innovators – who are changing the world their business. We talked about the future of business and how companies would benefit from some re-education — Net Impact recently delivered a memo to President Obama outlining some key recommendations for how government and business can work together to change the world. In addition, we talked about universities have an opportunity to rethink their curriculum — Net Impact recently conducted a survey of MBA students to glean their insights on what the future of business education should look like. Krista shared some advice on how to prepare for a future in business and her personal affinity for the Sunday morning political talk shows. It was a great conversation, and one that any business leader trying to find success in the connected society should make time for.

Click below to listen.

(We are six episodes into this podcast and finally getting the hang of both the tools and formats. We still want your feedback and definitely want your help — finding guests, identifying topics, making improvements. Send us your thoughts and suggestions.)