In the post I included the video from a more public goodbye, my talk at Debbie Weil’s Sweets and Tweets about linchpins, documentation, and growing into new roles:

One of the best things about my time in DC (aside from my work and seeing my family regularly) has been all the lunchtime and after-work event series from the politics/technology/social media community. Sweets and Tweets is the one with delicious cupcakes as well as interesting content.

World Cup - USA (and England) Gooooooal!

I’ve gotten my news mostly in real time since 1997, thanks to MIT’s zephyr instant message system, and one of the wonderful things about Twitter is expanding that to more people and more kinds of news. Now I get overwhelming celebration (as above) as well as overwhelming mourning, and if there’s news I would care about and I’m watching the stream, I’ll almost certainly see it.

I’ve started reading newspapers and blogs even more for analysis, not just what happened but what it means, since what happened is pretty easy to fit into 140 characters but why is not. And now I think many newspaper articles are too short. I suspect this is one reason Newsweek’s makeover failed and the magazine is being sold off.

I don’t want the physical version of the paper because I hate newsprint smudges and I like reading articles online (normal procedure: open lots of tabs, read through them in turn). And asking people to pay for online content doesn’t have a great track record (Slate subscriptions, TimesSelect, etc.), although some organizations have managed it (the Wall Street Journal, Salon Premium, the Financial Times, etc.). But there ought to be something else the Post could ask me besides “help us kill more trees to get our circulation numbers up.”

I have a lot of brand loyalty to the Post. I’ve been reading it pretty much daily since seventh grade, first my parents’ paper subscription and then online when I went to college. I’m used to the way its writers think – I know who writes the most entertaining Style stories (Monica Hesse), who consistently likes the opposite movies from me (Ann Hornaday), whose analysis I trust on the health care debate (Ezra Klein).

So why don’t I have a convenient way to support the Post that doesn’t involve acres of newsprint? I think they’re still stuck in a commercial model, and wish they’d adopt a bit of thinking from the nonprofit world – even if becoming a nonprofit isn’t the way they choose to go. I already see the benefits of their work, I’m a supporter, so let me participate in the mission. I can imagine seeing a message one day at the top of the homepage saying “Following our international stories? Support our foreign bureaus.” A couple of months after that, I’d see “Whether you love the Kennedy Center or the 9:30 Club, support our local arts coverage.” I’d give them $20 or $30 every so often, happily. That has to be better for them than the costs of delivering a free Express every weekday. It’s probably even better than my paying $1.50 a week for six months for weekdays plus Sunday home delivery of the Post.

The idea isn’t perfect. First, with advertising costs dependent on subscription numbers and online ads not nearly as lucrative as paper ones, my eyeballs aren’t as valuable as my blackened fingers. Second, it takes a good bit of effort to run an effective nonprofit fundraising program, and a for-profit fundraising program would require the same message crafting and analysis. Third, especially in a town where so many people are transient, my brand loyalty may be quite the exception.

But some of the blogs I read have Donate buttons in the sidebar, and if the blogger says “hey, I need help with my car repair / my hospital bill / getting to a conference” I’ll probably throw something into the kitty. At the moment the Post can’t figure out how to ask.

This is odd, because it seems computers are going the other way. Dell had taken over the world with online shopping and customization, but now retail is newly popular. Apple created its own boutiques (all white and shiny), which took off. Now even Microsoft is planning stores.

And it’s not just the branded stores that are doing well; Costco puts its displays of televisions, computers, and cameras at the very front of my local store. They’re interested enough in the electronics market to have recently announced a program for recycling your old electronics – presumably in hopes that you’ll use your Costco Cash Card trade-in money on a new toy to replace the old.

So if we like buying consumer electronics in stores (whether at Apple or at Costco), why are the refrigerators going away?

Apple’s and Costco’s big advantage is their selective product lines. Apple sells only a few configurations of computers. Costco picks a few products that it thinks will be popular and on which it can get volume discounts. The Sears website tells me “1033 products found for ‘refrigerator’.” How much space is that on the floor? How much space is that in warehouses? Isn’t it easier to tell people how wide the fridge will be and make them measure their own space to make sure it’ll fit?

It’s a do-it-yourself age. Shop online, base your decision on other consumers’ reviews, and check if your vendor has free return shipping. The best tip I learned when shopping for a TV was to cut out a piece of cardboard so you could see if the screen was actually the right size in your room. Now I’m starting to wonder if there’s a market for sets of plastic images of refrigerator insides. “Look, with this one you’d be the right height to see into all the shelves.”

Maybe virtual worlds or augmented reality can step into this gap. Maybe we’ll rely on architects and interior designers, who have memberships to professional showrooms that aren’t so decimated. Maybe someone will notice that people want to know whether the corner of the freezer door is going to hit them in the head, and a new boutique refrigerator store will be born. But it’s a good thing I’m not planning to design a kitchen soon: I’d want to pull open the appliance doors myself. Unlike my next computer, no one’s interested in helping me try a refrigerator out.

Every time I give a talk about social media, someone in the audience says, “How can I convince my manager to let me use this stuff? She thinks I’ll get the company in trouble.” The answer I use, and the one I’ve heard others use, is “Well, does she trust you to use the telephone?” Invariably gets a laugh, as well as people nodding and taking notes.

You can create problems for your organization pretty easily, whether with a recorded customer service conversation, a forwarded email, or an update on Twitter. The solution isn’t to restrict the channels the organization uses to communicate, it’s to hire people with good judgment and provide communication guidelines. Good judgment shouldn’t be a special requirement just for spokespeople.

This is why I worry about the Pizza Hut Twintern. Sure, she’s great PR (NYTimes on the job posting, Slate’s The Big Money on her experience). But Alexa Robinson is one person, new to the company, out there at the sharp end of the stick. Pizza Hut could disavow her as the traditional “low-level staffer,” so she can’t build trust in the brand the way a broader-based presence could.

Centralizing an organization’s social media efforts in one person, however awesome (and carefully vetted) they may be, isn’t the right answer. Give a real picture of your work: look at the IBMers’ blogs list or at Zappos’s Twitter aggregator, for example. Your staff are your organization. Hire with that in mind, and trust the people building your organization to represent it as well.

The short version:

1. Shel Holtz: I don’t know how you establish a long-term community around a movie.
2. Shireen Mitchell: Watching on TV is different from being there in person, and social media can fill some (but not all) of the gaps.
3. Shireen Mitchell: The way Congress responds to advocates who use social media will determine how it’s used.
4. Scott Monty: Your network is a social media monitoring tool.
5. Scott Monty: Social media can serve different purposes for different departments and in different regions.
6. Liz Strauss: As soon as you’re hired, you’re no longer a customer: learn to listen.
7. Amber Naslund: Using company resources but only building your own brand means both the company and you suffer when you leave.
8. Scott Monty (yet again): Have a social media succession plan.
9. Shashi Bellamkonda: Reach out to other internal evangelists.
10. Doug Meacham: Invite your community to spend downtime with you.

Go read on Advocacy Avenue to find out what they all mean.

I know where it comes from: Windows directories really are separated by backslashes. It’s hard to adjust from that to the web, invented by Unix users.

So why do I care? I care because I like precision. I’m a programmer, so a misplaced semicolon or quotation mark often causes all kinds of errors. I learned grammar, so “it’s” instead of “its” rubs me the wrong way. Punctuation matters.

I read most of my text on blogs, where it may or may not have been proofread. I use Twitter, where people abbreviate and leave out words to fit into 140 characters. I’m seeing more and more typos in books and newspapers, as publishers don’t have time or copyediting staff to catch them. And here the Internet was supposed to usher in a golden age of text.

I wonder sometimes how long it will be before I stop caring. I think it’ll be a while. I’m still most impressed by people who can express themselves fluently in standard written English.

Note: Actually, that isn’t quite true – I can only evaluate the grammar in English, but I’m impressed by the ideas in the blogs I read in French as well. I was pleased to find I could decipher most of a post in Portuguese the other day, too…. Global Internet, here I come.