I hope that these five great posts from last week help you catch up with your busy life!

1. I’ve often thought that blogs (and all the other social media sites, content and interactions that we produce) – when taken collectively – say more about our lives and reputations than we’d like to admit. Jen Stumbles calls this out explaining just how recruitment is changing right beneath our feet.
2. You’ve probably heard the term “gamification” bandied about, right? Well, Tac Anderson takes a deep dive into one of the hot topics to determine the truth, lies and promises of gamification.
3. It’s the curse of the Twittering class … the hacked account which then starts spamming all your followers. In can happen to anyone (well, anyone with a less than rock-solid password), and you won’t know it’s happening until it’s too late. Gavin Costello shares some tips for cleaning up the mess.
4. Great, personal article by Richard Bell on the Vibewire blog – The Mental Health Pilgrimage brings religion into the scientific conversation.
5. There are going to be words and connected thoughts that may rate as NSFW, but there is no doubt you’ll gasp (with shock or delight) with Annik Skelton’s reviews of books she stopped reading because they are so bad.

Personally, my file sizes seem to be getting larger – with higher resolution photos and images blowing out the sizing. I’m using PPTX files – and about 80% of my slides have pictures.

This deck on trends from popular web presentation sharing site, Slideshare, provides the details on just what has changed in the last 12 months. Take a look. How do you compare?

So, for the average Dunbar bound individual, it values your network at around $7.50 (there’s a premium calculation there on your individual active user value). But what does “average” look like in the Facebook world? This infographic from JESS3 provides a nice insight.

Via Business2Community.com

Mine is @ONECampaign. Who is yours? Find out here.

During the week February 13-17, 2012, Social Media Week seeks to remedy this with a focus on the business impact of social media. For those near San Francisco, you will be able to attend the “content hubs” hosted by Cisco (focusing on B2B operationalisation) and SAP (focusing on the “social audience”).

My colleague, Natascha Thomson, Cross-LOB Marketing Consultant at SAP (@nathomson), discusses the importance of knowing the difference between “hype” and “reality” when it comes to social media best practices, and what people can expect at SAP’s Social Enterprise Hub.

Topics that will be covered include Topical Influencers, Reaching Developers, Testing Your Way Into Social, Enterprise & Startups, Trading & Investment, Developer Relations, Regulation & Legal, Business Systems,  Business Information Design, Customer Relationship Management and Human Resource Management. The SAP Social Enterprise Hub should have a live feed for those of us who live too far away to attend – but details are yet to be made available.

You can check out the full schedule for the week here.

The same happens in business.

Ideas, technologies – and yes, even people – come into and fall out of favour. They often burst into our consciousness with great fanfare, gather hype and momentum and then drop lot a hot potato. The most tenacious ideas, technologies (and yes again, people) face up to this loss of prestige, gaining a new level of maturity and capability, eventually reaching a point of optimisation. Great examples of this are sites like Google+ … where initial interest was huge. This was followed by a rebound as the inert weight of user habit rebounded, seeing people maintain their account, but return to Twitter and Facebook. And now, we see the gradual maturing and more understated growth of the product – with users now finding substantial, specific value in its use.

Analyst firm, Gartner Inc, have described this process as The Hype Cycle for over 15 years now. It identifies peak points in visibility over time for technologies:

• The technology trigger
• Peak of inflated expectations
• Trough of disillusionment
• Slope of enlightenment
• Plateau of productivity

I have always loved the Hype Cycle. It explains a great deal not just about technology, but about human behaviour – behaviour that we can clearly see in the real time streams of sites like Facebook and Twitter.

But the challenge for business – especially with social media – is that there is never a SINGLE hype cycle. They always come in successive waves – for we also need to remember different people engage with, and adopt, change at different times. (And as David Armano points out, we need to deal with multiple complexities when it comes to change management – perception, thoughts, behaviours and outcomes.)

What we need within our businesses are different types of champions at different times.

I have written before on the rise of the Business Designer – a person uniquely adapted to optimise your business processes. But in line with the Hype Cycle, the Business Designer is most effective later in the cycle – as you climb out of the Trough of Disillusionment. Most businesses are not in this space as yet. And many are still facing the ascendant forces of the Peak of Inflated Expectations. It is in the way up this peak (and the way down the other side) that you need an individual uniquely suited to “getting s#@t done. You need the Social Media Mechanic.

This is the person who can implement your strategy, find the right bits and pieces and bolt them together. This person will know what needs to be done to make the right things work – and sometimes even do the wrong things (let’s face it, we’re still making mistakes and learning from them, right?).

But without the Social Media Mechanic, you’re just going to be left with a whole heap of unconnected parts. So once you’ve got your continuous digital strategy underway, start seeking your Social Media Mechanic. You’ll never get out of the trough of disillusion without one!

Without missing a beat, Kermit turns the question around, brings it back to the main topic – the movie (with humour), and Miss Piggy steps in with a power slam answer (heeey-yah). Of course, you can also follow the resulting Twitter stream (#GOPMuppetHearings).

You’ve got to hand it to the team behind The Muppets. They are consistently on message, focus on delivering the Muppet Brand Experience (MBE) – to all audiences, not just kids, and can get the audience on their side even under direct questioning. There’s plenty we could all learn here – maybe we need more MBEs and fewer MBAs?

Ah, but never fear, I am just recalibrating … taking some time to get my bearings for a new year. There is plenty on, of course, and we all struggle with priorities – but rather than rush headlong into activity, I am hoping to restructure my focus a little and maintain my sanity in the process of what I expect to be a busy year. How about you? Busy start?

If so – or even if not – these five must-reads will get you thinking in the right direction!

1. There are plenty of social media monitoring and measuring tools out there. But which one is the right one for you? Or do you need more than one? Ingeborg van Beusekom helps you find the balance.
2. Ever find social media unimaginative? Ever thought it was media in search of a good idea? You may want to read Ben Phillips’ guest post on Mark Pollard’s blog – How to Make Good Social Ideas.
3. We love using, engaging and playing on social networks. But make no mistake – they are built with a business purpose – to make money. As Craig Wilson says, it’s a war for web supremacy and you’re in the crossfire.
4. I have always thought that one of the powerful elements of social media is that it provides something that we have lost in our lives – a sense of connectedness. But what happens if it came back? Richard Huntington says the real revolution in social won’t be online. I tend to agree.
5. It seems like a long way off – but I love the thinking behind this article by Greg Satell. In the Future of Retail he writes about the omnichannel world and the way it will transform our shopping experiences. Can’t wait.