Building trust, which is the major ingredient of effective and successful communities, takes time as does creating an atmosphere or ecology of common values, purpose and all the other hard to measure human traits that community is made of. Engaging conversations that connect people and are the stuff relationships are mostly made of; developing community is an investment in people and their creativity and inventiveness and it involves unpredictable outcomes. Developing communities that have real value – if it is regarded as an actual financial investment done by one or more stakeholders – is a challenging ‘business’ and should be well considered beforehand. However, the economic results are definitely measurable as they demonstrate reduced risks, faster performance and greater or new sources of revenues; and solving organisational, social and environmental challenges through the application of collective wisdom, challenges that, if not handled properly, easily can cause substantial economic losses.

Remember, this remains a predominantly analog world. Most people are still looking for real things: experiences, connections, value, stories, emotions. And this remains a world in which most brands are failing to make the most of the existing channels available to them, where basic and very real issues are left unaddressed, like customer-experience delivery, retail-partner engagement, consistent and authentic brand storytelling and better product and service development. Sure, not all of these will make a 29-year-old marketing manager an industry rock star as fast as a spending money on cool new social media app, gadget, widget or viral campaign, but it matters a whole lot more.

The truth is that the digital possibilities out there are endless (and endlessly fascinating), but smart brands and smart marketers recognize that their potential is to facilitate and amplify, not to replace the real stuff that matters. No media or channel can ever be the solution. Not even social media.

Now there's a point of view on social media that's worth sharing with clients. Understand it, internalize the implications of it and figure out what you can do better because of it. Use it as yet another prompt to change everything you do. Use it as the final spur to becoming a customer-centric, holistic, experience brand. Then forget about it and start doing something real.

Let’s not mince words, creativity is hard work. It’s not rote production, transforming inputs using a standard process. Design, as with all creative pursuits, is all about creating something from nothing; and because of this, creative work demands it’s own pricing methods.

Price = Creativity Coefficient x Cost of doing business

The creativity coefficient is nothing more than a multiplier that you apply to your base cost of doing business. This coefficient (or multiplier) gives the designer a measure of control to help match the prices they charge with the difficulty and involvement of the projects they work on. The creativity coefficient should be based upon three things:

1. Difficulty: If the project is difficult or very involved – charge more. This should be clear at this point. If you’re producing one tri-fold brochure your multiplier may be as low as 1.20, on the other hand if you are completely rebranding and redesigning a medium to large company’s image your creativity coefficient may go as high as 10 or 15.
2. Brand strength: Simply put, if you have a strong brand behind you – charge more. At first glance this may seem unfair but, in reality, it is the simplest and most effective way to separate potential clients into the two groups that matter. The ones that just want to work with you because of your name – but are going to be a major headache (especially over price), and the ones that recognize the value that your brand brings and are willing to pay for that value.
3. Individuality: If the client is coming to you because you specialize in a certain type of design or in a specific medium and there is no one else out there that can competently perform the work – charge more. Niche work is important and there is value in being different, especially in today’s hyper-homogenized world, clients that come looking for something different will be expecting to pay premium prices for something that they cannot get anywhere else.

The creativity coefficient gives designers a simple and effective way to try and wrangle concrete numbers around the value of creativity. And because you are starting with a baseline amount that reflects your actual cost of doing business you are ensuring that your business will stay profitable.

The PR industry is certainly beginning to come to terms with online PR and social media, no doubt motivated by the proven benefits of digital campaigns, but it is less clear whether the sector fully understands the discipline. It is not simply a case of replicating your offline press releases on the web, but requires specialist expertise and an informed understanding of how people engage with news, brands and products on the web

My colleagues aren't that much older than me but they come from a different set of traditions. They aren't used to speaking to a room full of blue-glow faces. And they think it's utterly fascinating that I poll my twitterverse about constructs of fairness while hearing a speaker talk about game theory. Am I learning what the speaker wants me to learn? Perhaps not. But I am learning and thinking and engaging.

I'm 31 years old. I've been online since I was a teen. I've grown up with this medium and I embrace each new device that brings me closer to being a cyborg. I want information at my fingertips now and always. There's no doubt that I'm not mainstream. But I also feel really badly for the info-driven teens and college students out there being told that learning can only happen when they pay attention to an audio-driven lecture in a classroom setting. I read books during my classroom (blatantly not paying attention). Imagine what would've happened had I been welcome to let my mind run wild on the topic at hand?

What will it take for us to see technology as a tool for information enhancement? At the very least, how can we embrace those who learn best when they have an outlet for their questions and thoughts? How I long for being connected to be an acceptable part of engagement.

We are at the very beginning, still, of determining how to best harness the firehose of real time data. Tools like Twitter Search, FriendFeed, TweetDeck, Seesmic, TweetMeme and others are working to parse the signal from the noise. It's suggested that real-time will become a major part of many applications going forward, and users are still going to be in the experimentation phase of how they imbibe the data, or in terms of what kind of interfaces they will use to be best satisfied. There remain concerns about openness and how companies will play well with each other, especially if they are in a leadership position. And it's very likely that in five years, many of the names we consider household names today may be gone, replaced with others. It's all going to play out in real-time in front of our eyes.

The next time you log into Etrade to buy some stock, head to Amazon for a book or iTunes for an album, imagine if what popped up alongside the product description was a list of your friends who’d bought the same thing. Did they lose money on the stock? Stop reading the book halfway through? Pass the album onto their teenage daughter?

Maybe you want to know more about what made them love or hate that particular online offering, and since they’re available for an instant messenger conversation at that very moment, you can click a button and ask them. Welcome to social networking everywhere. Every web site compiles profile information from every one of its customers, then uses the Facebook-like technology to bring us all together, the way you might bump into someone you know in a supermarket.