Personal branding is one of the big themes today, for a number of reasons.

As I wrote in five key trends in how influence is transforming society, one of the dominant forces is that reputation is shifting from the corporate to the individual. People build relationships and place trust in individuals more than organizations, changing how (the best) companies organize themselves and engage externally.

In addition, professionals are increasingly shifting to independent work in a global distributed economy. As such they must build their own brands and not rely on their affiliation with the brand of the company for which they work.
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There is an interesting Quora discussion going on What are the distinctions between Social Business and Enterprise 2.0? As in most Quora discussions some of the top people in the field have weighed in.

I had to chip in myself – here is my comment.

Business terms have a life of their own, just as the meaning of words evolve depending on social usage. Each of these terms has a different meaning to what they did just a year ago.

I find it interesting that many people seems to think that Enterprise 2.0 is more about technology than business. My standard definition of Enterprise 2.0 has two parts:

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Excerpt from the list of ExaTrends of the 2010s:

See the full 3 page framework including the Map of the Decade, full descriptions of the ExaTrends of the Decade, and the 11 themes of the Zeitgeist of 2011 by clicking on the image:

ExaTrends of the Decade and Zeitgeist for 2011:

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Future of Crowdsourcing Summit is just over, and I’m very pleased with how it went and the feedback so far.

The format of back-to-back cross-continental panels over two hours means that the content is very intense, and given the size of topics we take on – the impact of crowdsourcing on work, organizations, media, economies and more – we can only really touch on the key issues, so much goes unsaid. Still, an extraordinary amount of really rich material was covered during the event.

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to keep notes while I moderated. Part of the audio of the event was captured, so we hope to get that up in some form. However the primary record of the Summit was from Twitter, with the #foc10 stream very active throughout the event. @LeslieCBarry generated a very nice visual overview of the Twitter stream at the event:

The full Twitter stream for #foc10 is here – it’s well worth a read. The event done, I now have to focus on my Future of Global Media keynote in New York later this week, but will reflect more on the Future of Crowdsourcing Summit when I get a chance, hopefully soon. This really is one of the defining issues of our times.

The invention of the graphical web browser in 1993 was the moment that ‘getting online’ became meaningful, when we could start to post ideas, photos, and more that anyone in the world with an internet connection could access. However you needed a certain amount of tech knowledge to do that, and it was only from around 2000 that it began to get easy for anyone to blog, post images, share personal media among friends, and a little while after that to upload videos for the world to see.

Those born in the last five years, in this era of ready online sharing, have rapidly gained online identities, sometimes pretty much at the same time as their parents. Internet security firm AVG has done a survey showing how quickly these images are posted to the world.

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