Open up your mind and say, ahh...

This week’s Facebook IPO generated a deep trove of wealth for a new generation of young entrepreneurs. The question for them now is, what are you going to do with your billions?

If you’re curious by nature, perhaps you’d like a new adventure. Since you have money to play with, maybe you’d like to play at something you’ve never played before. Maybe you’d like to get to know yourself a bit better. Or maybe you’d like to change many, many lives for the better, for generations to come?

I’ll make you a bet. Follow my advice here, and I promise you that your life will never be the same again. You’ll have newfound energy and meaning in your life. You’ll meet extraordinary people from very diverse backgrounds. And you’ll learn more about yourself than you could ever imagine. If you follow my advice and I’m wrong, you can tell me and everyone else so in my blog post. (If I’m right, you can also say so.)

Here are the first steps to putting some of your newfound wealth to work, for good.

PHASE ONE: INTROSPECTION

1. Think about what makes you curious.

Consider global, national, and/or regional issues that have captured your attention in the media and discussions with your friends. Environment, such as energy renewal; social justice and human rights, perhaps related to LGBT, women, fair trade, employment; education and technology; cultural arts; politics; and so on. Developing countries or domestic. Regional. Neighborhood and grassroots.

2. Think about what touches your heart.

Consider people for whom you’d like to help provide greater opportunities: children, youth, seniors, immigrants, vulnerable populations such as children with disabilities, people in underserved countries or communities, women who are abused, people who are incarcerated, and so on.

3. Think about the problems you want to help solve.

Most people have many interests. Another way to look at this is to think about global and regional challenges that you might want to play a part in solving. For example, you might be moved by children with cancer because of a personal family experience, but you might feel more suited to work on addressing global water issues or fostering invention and entrepreneurship.

4. Think about how to bring about change.

If you’ve seen the power of social media in changing how people interact, you might like NGOs that use mobile technologies to improve market opportunities for people in developing countries. This is one of Omidyar Network’s investment areas. If, however, your background is in human resources or public policy, you might particularly value leadership development programs to empower people who were previously disenfranchised.  The African Leadership Academy is an example.

PHASE II:  RESEARCH

5. List three areas of interest for your initial attention.

You can be broad: global development. You can be focused: job programs serving your local community.

6. Explore various approaches that people and organizations are taking to solve them.  Through twitter, blogs, books, lectures.  Begin to form some opinions.

For example, in global development, two distinctively different approaches are presented by Jeffrey Sachs vs. William Easterly. They both have seminal books presenting their approaches, and they are both lively bloggers and twitterers. Another thought leader in global development is David Bornstein.

In some cases, these individuals and their theories of change are tied to particular NGOs. Bill Easterly with GlobalGiving, where I serve on the NY Leadership Council. David Bornstein with BRAC, which I wrote about here. Then there is Hernando de Soto and The Mystery of Capital. DeSoto is the Founder and Chairman of the Institute of Liberty and Democracy.

7. Meet with people.  Visit some organizations.

Ultimately, you will learn the most by visiting a variety of nonprofits and seeing their work on the ground.  That can include visiting organizations in your community, as well as abroad. Meet and talk with the staff to learn about their approaches.

PHASE III:  ENGAGEMENT

8. Volunteer and contribute.

If you want to engage on a personal level, and you wish to really add value, the best way is to meet with the CEO or the development staff and have a conversation about that. For most nonprofits, there are many ways that you can be useful, from providing technical assistance, to serving on the board, being a spokesperson, serving as an advocate, fundraising among your friends, and so on. Without doubt, whatever you decide to do, you can help an organization to achieve its vision in making the world a better place. Matt Damon chose Charity: Water and has become a powerful advocate, spokesperson, donor, and fundraiser.

9. Create a private foundation.

Some of you will want to consider establishing a private foundation. You can make financial contributions from the foundation based on the priorities you determine according to my suggested approach.

10. Establish your own nonprofit.

If you don’t discover a nonprofit that addresses the issues that are meaningful to you in ways that you think are effective, you can establish your own nonprofit, or even an LC3. The downside is that you will be funding the infrastructure expenses of an entirely new social enterprise. The upside is that you can create something entirely of your own making. Julia Ormond established her own nonprofit and has been a highly effective advocate to stop slavery and end trafficking.

Choosing your issue, and where and how to become involved is an extraordinary journey. One of my corporate board candidates was deliberating over which of three nonprofit boards to join. He finally sighed and exclaimed, “Wow, this is like a process of self-discovery.”

Another high powered Wall Street executive whom I placed on a national board told me with great exhilaration that he is working with a Native American chief on solving what had previously seemed to be intractable issues of homelessness and poverty. This board member has been asked to chair the board–a unique leadership opportunity to impact hundreds of thousands of people in need.

Yet others are involved with organizations that range from global to grassroots, each contributing in their own way, engaging deeply with people from all walks of life and from around the world.

Finding your own unique way to give back can be one of the great adventures of your life. You will meet some of the most dedicated, exuberant, brilliant problem-solvers you’ve ever encountered. You will help improve lives and the world. And you will never be the same again.

Image: Flickr user Josh Libatique

People, meet Beepl.
It launched to the general public yesterday in the online
expertise-sharing/question-and-answer sphere after a short private test
run. Branding itself as a “social Q&A site” that “lets users seek
answers and opinion from subject specialists, enthusiasts and their
social graph,” Beepl also “understands the topics that questions relate
to and users’ interests and expertise so that questions automatically
reach the best people to reach them.” That bit of lateral thinking
differentiates Beepl in a pretty bustling market, but it’s only one of
the novel surprises from the company (starting with the lack of a launch
press release.)

As founder Steve O’Hear noted in a tweet,
“Almost all of today’s @Beepl press coverage was done without issuing
or indeed writing a press release. #startuplife #pr.” That the launch
happened during a federal holiday in the U.S. also highlights Beepl is a
little different–it’s headquartered in London and Prague, partly
because O’Hear himself is British.

Fast Company spoke with
O’Hear to learn more. Beepl’s UI is simple and easy to use–almost
Twitter-esque in its clean lines, and O’Hear notes, “We tried to create a
very simple app, because I think our competitors are getting a bit
unwieldy.” But he thinks the real power in the mix is “our semantic
technology behind the site. What we’re effectively doing is looking at
every user and we’re building an interest graph so that the right
questions find the right people, or the best people, to answer them
automatically. You don’t have to go and join the site and declare an
interest in various topics, or follow topics or whatever–the idea is
that topics follow you.”

That makes Beepl stand out from other systems, of which Quora may be the best known.

“Quora’s
trying to, as I understand it, create a massive repository of answers
to questions,” says O’Hear. “In their words they originally said the
wanted to be the ‘Wikipedia for things that wouldn’t get a Wikipedia
entry’, so they clamped down on some things. … We’re not like
that–we’re much more a social media platform, for the here and now. We
don’t mind people asking the same question again and again, because it
may have a different context or may be particularly timely.” Perhaps
this explains the Twitter-like feel.

The real-time feel is also
echoed in the automated interests graph that powers Beepl’s internal
recommendation engine, which is “growing the whole time,” O’Hear says.
“And we’re even looking into how we may expire interests. The example we
often give is if you get an Amazon Kindle for Christmas, you’re totally
into Kindle for the first four weeks, and then you’re not so interested
in the topic–though by that point you may have developed some
expertise on it. The engine behind the site means it’s a real time
network of experts.”

The issue with an algorithmic engine like this, rather than an emergent user-driven one is–as Klout has found, and Google is frequently
affected by–is that this algorithm may prompt questions like: How can
you trust that it’ll connect you to something interesting to you, or
perhaps something you have vital insight into for others? Does it mean
you may miss out on fringe questions about things you never knew about,
but may be fascinated by?

Beepl addresses this, O’Hear says,
because the  “most aggressive part is for people that are actively using
the site. It looks at questions you’ve clicked on, any you’ve answered,
any you’ve asked. It even takes a tiny amount from if you do a search
on the site.”

The system, however, may not be flawless.

“When
you first sign up we look at your Facebook likes, your LinkedIn skills,
we analyse the last 100 or 200 tweets to give you that initial on-board
footprint. We plan to refresh this if you haven’t logged in for a
while, and take advantage of all the stuff you’ve already declared an
interest in.”

This doesn’t mean the site has a completely
public-leaning publishing bent, and there are “private questions,”
O’Hear explains, where you can ask a question in private and see the
answer just with the person you’re engaging with–something that’ll be
handy for journalists, and which again echoes Twitter a little with its
“direct messaging” service.

It’s all a nice lateral twist. But
perhaps we should expect this, given that Steve O’Hear isn’t your
traditional coder or entrepreneur. In fact he was a journalist–one who
spent a lot of time covering technology and the startup scene, most
recently and perhaps most notably for TechCrunch Europe. “To be honest I’ve changed carreers every five years,” he says–and if that sounds familiar, it should.
“You’re looking at products everyday, and I’m quite outspoken. So I
thought I could see what was wrong, but obviously you don’t get to put
it right” when you’re simply covering the news.

Journalism and
some consultancy thus bloomed into entrepreneurship, a fact that makes
O’Hear different to some of his peers. “People’ve asked me in recent
weeks what have I learned since I started this. It sounds arrogant, but
I’ve not learned that much. All these things about ‘what’s your burn
rate?’ and so on, all this advice in the startup world with people
writing articles all the time about what you should and shouldn’t do.
Being one of those people who was inadvertently giving out advice, by
writing about products, reviews, startups and tracking and funding, you
go in there with your eyes open.”

Chat about this news with Kit Eaton on Twitter and Fast Company too.

If you’ve been fortunate enough to write your blog for any length of time, I can almost guarantee that you have posts from the early days that people haven’t seen that are still relevant. It’s not that they might be the best thing you’ve ever written, but they can still be of value.

For instance, I wrote If I Started Today back in November of 2008. It’s still valid. Almost 3 years later, I’d do pretty much the same thing. So, that makes it a post worth resharing. But how? And what can I do to make it interesting for you to visit?

Recycle Your Blog

There are a few ways to recycle your blog. Way number one is to pull out information from a post you want to share, expound on it until it’s a standalone post, and then link to the original post at the end. So, in this case, if I wanted to do that with “If I Started Today,” I’d write up a section about “Five Elements Your Blog Needs When Starting Out,” and then I’d link to the post at the bottom to show what else you need by pointing to that post.

The other way to recycle posts is to group them up with a post that tells a story through sharing more than one post. At this point, I’ve written about 8 or 9 posts talking about Google+. I could write a post called “My Best Advice on Google+” and put links to those posts all in one place. This would give my readers a simple way to walk through everything I’d written about the topic, and it would give me much more attention on the site, without having had to write a new post of any size or value.

Recycling Is Good For Everyone

Recycling some of your older material so that people can get something out of it is helpful. But just like you see on products that use recycled materials, you probably want to always maintain a mix of new material and post-use recycled material. And you never want to flat out reprint your posts, as that is frowned upon by Google.

So, with that in mind, look back on your blog and find some posts worth sharing again. Who knows? You might find a hit the second time around with something that went unnoticed through no fault of your own.

Maybe you’ll make some art from trash.

I’m into day two of the Inbound Marketing Summit in Boston, part of the #FutureM events that are dedicated to showing how big a tech and marketing town Boston really is. I spoke yesterday, as did author Ben Mesrich. Today, I’ll see Guy Kawasaki, Tim Hayden, and Dan Heath, among others. It has me thinking about speaking and speakers.

Great Speakers Tell Stories

A great speaker doesn’t simply preach from the stage. They tell illustrative stories that explain their points. Professor Youngme Moon talked about brands that we feel passionate about, and used Mini as one of the examples, including some of their powerful advertising. More so, she shared her own feelings about the brand and how the story related to her. These tales give us more to consider than simple numbers and data points.

Great Speakers Connect to the Audience

My biggest failing as a professional speaker right now is that I allow myself to wander deeper and deeper into a rapport with the audience, sometimes forsaking the narrative of my presentation for that spark of connectivity. However, if you get it right, that balance of presenting and connecting with the people in the audience, it’s golden. We are a society used to being entertained through glass. Break that glass and touch the audience in a way that reminds them that you’re right there. (Maybe just don’t overdo it like me.)

Great Speakers Deliver Takeaways

Not to turn this into my own personal therapy session, but where I also could use some improvement is in the department of giving the audience some direct takeaways, some actions to take, some things to do when they get back to their lairs. A great speaker not only inspires, educates, and motivates, but she or he gives some “serving suggestions” so that the audience can take these ingredients and make something useful to themselves.

Practice Wins Every Time

Practice these three elements in your speech-giving, even if your content is fluid. Make sure you check yourself for the first and third elements, stories and takeaways, and then be ready to touch your audience with a real connection. The more you work on this, the better your speaking will be.

Me? I have more practice ahead. The people who I want to serve deserve the best.

Earlier posts in this series:
Writing a Book – Finding Time
Writing a Book – Discipline

The trick with book writing, fiction or otherwise, is structure. Even with the best fiction, the most flowy-seeming fiction, there’s a structure. With nonfiction, there’s always a structure. The best book I ever read about this was Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting (amazon affiliate link). Don’t worry about whether you’re going to write a movie. You’re probably not (unless you are). Instead, buy this and read it. Get the hardcover, unless you are a good note taker on a Kindle. Because the notes will help more than anything else.

But, pretending that you didn’t heed my advice and didn’t buy “Story,” here’s some thoughts on structure.

Structure Defines Itself

When I write an article for Entrepreneur magazine, it’s around 500 words. That’s what they’ve given me. When I write books, I shoot for around 200-250 pages, because that’s a decent enough size to get the story told. With nonfiction, often times, the subject matter helps you define how much you need. So, if I’m writing about how a company will use human business to build their future wealth, I have to define what I mean by “human business.” I have to give “recipes” for what I mean. I have to provide case studies. I have all kinds of stuff that defines what I need to include in the story. See?

If I were writing fiction, I’d start with the frame of the story I want to tell. For instance, most fiction stories have three main acts. So maybe Act 1, the shortest act, would be defining the way the world is, and then ending it with what drastic change sets the story on its major course. Act 2 is the meat of the story and what happens to change the characters along the way. Act 3 is the resolution and the sense of what might come next. Within those three acts, I might define a series of actions or experiences that move my characters from the beginning of Act 1′s normalcy to the end of Act 1′s craziness.

Then What?

Authors tend to think that structure is something that just happens, but it’s not. Julien and I wrote trust agents with the perspective that we’d write six main chapters with one point in each chapter, and that we’d bookend that all with an intro chapter and a wrapup chapter. That didn’t “just happen.” It took months to decide on that structure, but once we had it, we couldn’t undo it. Once you have a structure, own it. Work within it. Make it yours. If you’ve decided to make the “odd” chapters in prose and the “even” chapters in verse, then do it. But stick with it.

Start Strong

No matter what, your first chapter has to be delicious. Your first page or two have to be delicious. Remember, when people pick your book up in a bookstore (those things that used to exist), they look at the cover, they look at the quotes (sometimes), and then they check out the first page or two. If you haven’t hooked them in the first few pages, they’re not bringing that baby home.

In Trust Agents, we started out with a gangster story. That was Julien’s idea. But it worked. More people mention that story than any other part of the book. You’ve got to wow people with chapter one, not warm them up. Even if you’re writing a mystery, that first chapter had better get me thinking about how I’m going to solve the mystery, or the book is going down.

Too many aspiring (and that’s why they still “aspire”) authors use the first chapter for throat clearing. It can’t work that way. Chapter one has to be the big open.

Oh, and there’s this old rule with nonfiction: tell them what you’re going to tell them, then tell them that, then tell them what you just told them. God I hate that rule. To me, the idea is that you’ll explain the promise of where you’re going, but don’t get all mechanical. No one wants to read a book, nonfiction or otherwise, where there are no surprises.

It’s Okay to Revise

You can revise a structure if you realize that it’s not going to work for you, but be very very clear that that’s why you’re going to do it. If you say you want to build a boat, then don’t put wings on it. Make sense? But, if you start by saying you’re going to build a boat, and you go from building a fiberglass boat to a traditional wooden boat, then you’re still within the parameters of structure.

Structure is Oddly Freeing

When writing, once you have a structure in mind, it’s so very freeing. In the current book I’m writing, I know that a chapter will be around 10 written pages. Thus, as I’m writing along, I can glance at the page count, and know how far into the story I should be at any given time. If I’m near the end, but haven’t made my points, then I have to go back and edit. If I’m near the beginning and I’ve said all I have to say, I then must determine if I’m doing the story justice, or whether maybe I defined my chapter too narrowly, and thus, have written myself into a corner.

But that structure keeps me strong. The Entrepreneur magazine articles having to be around 500 words keeps me true to telling the story in the tightest way possible. Even a tweet helps you learn this kind of thing.

Make Structure Your Friend

One last point: without structure, we throw the kitchen sink into our writing. I was once writing a science fiction story that mixed angels, demons, sci fi elements, and all kinds of other ideas in a blender. It wasn’t half bad, but it wasn’t half good, either. The problem, from MY side of the writing, was that I was just throwing everything into it and making “sausage” out of the ideas. Make structure your friend, and keep “simplicity” right close by, too.

Hopefully, you’ll find that this helps your writing immensely.

One of the biggest pushbacks I hear from people when I talk about how wonderful I think Google+ will be for business professionals is that they’re tired. They’re tired of joining a new social network. They’re tired of going through the dance of re-adding their friends and connections on yet another platform. They’re tired of having to think up even more content for yet another platform, after having finally committed to Facebook or Twitter or wherever else.

Social Media Fatigue

For a lot of people, the fatigue comes from that sense that they’re doing all the work, but not seeing the results. For another group, it’s that feeling that we’ve all done this before, so why do it again? For others, it’s just that we’re getting to the point where we feel maybe that we’ve shared all we can think of sharing, and we’re tired of rehashing the same old things over and over again.

Are any of these you?

Wake Up

Writing about social media can be boring. Writing about how to empower people, however, is pretty much always interesting. Telling people the same old thing on Google+ that you’d have shared on Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn is about as boring as it sounds. Maybe try doing something new with the platform. On an absolutely random post about eating the Swedish meatballs at IKEA, I got a comment back from writer and all around interesting thinker, Jeff Jarvis, about how he not only likes the Swedish meatballs, but he admits to liking Taco Bell. For whatever reason, I came away from the experience thinking, “Huh, I wouldn’t normally get into these conversations, inane as they are, on the other social networks. I wonder why I’ve given myself permission to do so here.”

Wake up. We can all find new ways to talk about social media by NOT TALKING ABOUT SOCIAL MEDIA. (Queue the Fight Club comments.) The thing is this: we’re using these tools to enable new connections. We’re using them to make different kinds of business happen. We’re using these tools to help causes that matter, and so much more.

It’s Your Choice

Look at your last 20 posts on any social network, and/or your blog. What are you talking about? Do you find yourself interesting? What else could you talk about instead? What would really change the nature of the conversation? How could you move from “talking about what everyone else is talking about” into talking about what’s next, what’s new, what’s personal, what’s helpful?

Make Your Own Media

These tools let you tell the stories you want to tell. They let you make something meaningful to you, to your business, to your pursuits. Nothing dictates how you use the tools to be your own media platform except your imagination and your ability to create. With that in mind, think up a few ways you might want to put these tools to use to tell the stories you want to tell.

• If you’re a real estate professional, why not bring the neighborhoods you’re selling to life in stories and videos.
• If you’re a freelance photographer, share the stories behind the photos.
• If you’re a corporate blogger, tell us the passionate stories behind the big official posts.
• If you’re writing just for your own passion, show us what you’re passionate about.
• If you’re someone selling something, tell us the stories around that product or service.

The opportunity is for us to make something interesting and worthwhile, to be helpful, to empower others, to encourage and inspire others. If we’re fatigued, let’s all wake up.

I’ll do it too, okay?

I’ve been writing a lot about Google+ , but that’s partly because it’s a very interesting social network environment, and it gives me a lot of opportunity to study a social network at its birth. Once you’ve been on Twitter or Facebook or wherever for a while, you take for granted what it was like in the beginning. This time, I’m capturing interesting things that might be of value.

This one is a little different to capture, but I think it merits a little consideration.

Google+ is a VERY Different Sharing Environment

I think that sharing is the coin of the realm in Google+. People who share interesting things get more follows, get added to more circles, and end up having more engaging conversations. I’ve been experimenting with what works and what doesn’t (adding a picture, a video, or a link to a post almost guarantees triple the engagement, for instance). But there’s more.

This environment isn’t geek-only stuff, even in its early days of the bleeding edge and early adopter types.

My last handful of conversations:

• Beer.
• A weird “fitness chair.”
• Thinking of your career as if YOU are a startup.
• A fitness ball question.
• And a few geek conversations.

I asked the simple question of where people were and got over 500 responses (and counting). Talk about engagement. It’s just a different world in there.

So How Do You Use This?

Find the good stuff and share it. Don’t just share what you’re seeing inside of Google+. Definitely don’t just share links to your blog posts. Share interesting things that open up new conversations. Then, see if there’s more there, and see who comments, and consider following and Circling them.

See how a community of interest forms?

How’s your experience been with this?

One of the best classes I ever attended was when I worked at Pulvermedia and Jason Chudnofsky taught his famous class on understanding selling and marketing. The core message: sell benefits, not features. Yes, there are many people who’ve given similar advice, but I was there watching Jason, a very successful businessman, and he was making eye contact with us and sharing his personal experiences with this. You can credit who else you like in the comments, but to me, this was Jason’s message.

Sell Benefits

In rebuilding the front page of Kitchen Table Companies, we heeded the advice of Derek Halpern, who sat in on an interview similar to the ones we give our members inside of Kitchen Table Companies. We also listened to people like Arthur Germain, Margie Clayman, Susan Giurleo, and more.

Taglines and Headlines

We wanted to put the biggest possible benefit up front: “your small business advisory board.” Small business professionals often feel a bit isolated and out of ideas. They often have something they’d like to run by other professionals to get an opinion. So we wanted that concept up front.

We reinforced that message with these four points:

Remove Barriers

The other thing to think about when selling is to remove barriers to purchasing. The team came up with this:

By starting with a $0 price point (for the very basic area of the forums), people can get into the system, get our weekly tips emails, hear what upcoming interviews and instructional tutorials are up and coming, etc. So instead of forcing a buy right off the bat, we remove a barrier by saying that people can come in and peek around.

SEO In Mind

We wanted a very colorful design that fits our “old timey vintage” aesthetic. Josh Fisher, our creative director, gave us some great graphics, but as you well know, Google can’t see graphics, so we made all kinds of plain text that explains the offer, plus makes search a possible lead generator for our product.

At the End Of It, Value and Benefits

It doesn’t matter what we tell you we’re selling. It matters if it’s working for you. We’ve started collecting Success Stories, plus featuring specific Kitchen Table Companies on our weekly show, Kitchen Table Talks on The Pulse Network. That way, people can get a hint of what we’re delivering inside, and they can hear from our successful members who feel like they are getting a value for what they’ve paid for.

We’re Learning

We ask our members what they need and want every day. It’s a fairly steady thrumming from Joe Sorge’s weekly emails, from forum topics, from our very DNA. We want to help, and we ask what we can do to participate.

My next worry is the onboarding. Once we’ve convinced someone to buy, is it really easy to know how newcomers should interact. But I’m going to observe how well we did or didn’t do with this new front end launch. I’m going to see whether our advice and the lessons of Jason Chudnofsky will give us more opportunity to serve others at Kitchen Table Companies.

How about you? How does your site sell benefits?

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Name: Opinionaided

Quick Pitch: Opinionaided polls a crowd to answer your questions.

Genius Idea: Making Q&A real time, social, opinion-based and addictive.

Approaches to dominating the advice space include Facebook’s latest feature for polling your friends, location-based Q&A apps like Ditto and Localmind, anonymous Q&A app Formspring, and niche advice platforms for categories like fashion.

iPhone app Opinionaided’s approach is visual, opinion-based and social. But its killer quality is that it’s also highly addictive.

Users post photos, attach a yes-or-no question, decide whether to make it public, and tag it with a category. While they’re waiting for responses, users can vote on other questions with a thumbs down or thumbs up (think Hot or Not). They also have the option to add a comment or share the question with friends, and they can respond to anyone who comments.

The most valuable characteristic of the app is its ready and assembled army of responders. Within two minutes, I had about 20 responses to both of the test questions I asked. CEO Dan Kurani says he believes the average number of responses to be between 30 and 100. Some of the people who commented on my question had answered more than 21,000 inquiries — even though so far the only incentive to do so outside of killing time is a gold star given to top advisers.

An engaged userbase is quite an accomplishment for a startup that launched its current product less than a year ago. But once again, we arrive at the (literal) million-dollar question: “Can Opinionaided make money?”

Kurani, who raised a $1.2 million round earlier this year, says he hasn’t nailed that part of the business down yet, despite exploring options involving professionals who want to use Opinionaided to showcase their expertise. So we posed the question to Opinionaided’s users.

Only 10 people took me up on my question this time. But they weren’t optimistic: Almost three quarters of respondents said no, Opinionaided would not be a money maker.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, mattjeacock

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

Who owns social media? Is it marketing, customer service, public relations?

Looking at a recent study conducted by the Pivot Conference, the top four departments where social media is currently run are as follows:

1. Marketing
2. Public Relations
3. Sales
4. Customer Service

Perhaps, it’s the wrong question to ask however. It’s not unlike asking who owns email. But, here’s another question and as we think about it and let’s broaden our perspective as the answer may not appear immediately.

Who owns the customer relationship?

The short answer is everyone.

If that is the case, then examining how social media is run today is not at all how businesses should think about it tomorrow. A not so long answer to the original question is “any person or department affected by outside activity where public interaction impacts decisions.”

Businesses tend to have a single or narrow view of the customer and as we’re learning, they’re connecting with one another and sharing experiences that transform their roles from prospect to advocate to adversary to influencer and everything in between.

Social media is not about conversations on Twitter and Facebook nor check-ins on FourSquare or Places, or flipped videos on Youtube. It’s about using this opportunity to build bridges to a new genre of customers and the people who influence their decisions. Our mission now is to pave paths to future relevance. The reality is that we are as much competing for the future as we are for the moment. And as a result, we are perpetually competing for relevance.

We can blame it process, hierarchy, ignorance, lack of budget and anything and everything standing in our way. Or, we can own the acts of socializing the company using social media as a banner for customer centricity across the organizing. Maybe we could all follow the advice from my dear friend Hugh MacLeod (@GapingVoid) and create our own #Evilplan for change. Then grab pair of self-sharpening industrial scissors and run through the hallways with to begin the long and arduous process of cutting red tape to free people to collaborate internally and externally.

Someone has to do it.

Without you, even through we’re operating with the best of intentions in social media, we are still operating from silos. The customer however, does not see silos, they sees the company as one. It’s time for an integrated approach to create an adaptive business, a collaborative business, an aspirational business….a business of one.