This is the last of 3 posts covering updates, thoughts and ramblings from the past 3 weeks.  The first update can be found here the second one can be seen here.

1. I’ve had 7 conversations in the last 3 months, with large brands, all around 1 topic no one seems to want to talk about: Facebook is a “frienemy” and they’re driving many organizations to rethink how close they want to partner with Facebook. For example a few weeks ago many companies realized that their 3rd party (e.g. Hootsuite) published posts were performing horribly all of a sudden. Facebook and Hootsuite denied the situation existed. To compensate for the reduced reach, companies were investing more in Facebook’s “Sponsored Stories” advertising platform. The folks at Read Write Web did some digging, gave the situation more attention and then all of a sudden Facebook released an announcement indicating they were fixing their platform to send more “signals” to 3rd part publishing tools. Sounds shady to me. In 2012, the question I’ll be asking my team, my agency partners and any new potential partners is “help me create a 3 year exit strategy for Facebook.” More to come on this topic.
2. Here’s 3 iOS apps to check out: Oink, Ness and Super Retro.
3. I’ve been investing more time of late, into tumblr. Though it often gets lumped together with other blogging platforms I see it a little differently. Tumblr is for the “lazy” blogger. It’s great for bite size content. I think that’s why it excels for companies that are heavily dependent on photos. I’m going to give it a serious whirl for the next 45 days and then come up with a more formal POV.
4. A piece of advice to folks in “sales”…especially for social software and services: please do your homework. It’s not hard to Google, “head of social media walgreens” and find out who to contact. Spamming 50 people at my organization is the quickest way to get de-prioritized. It’s lazy, unprofessional, annoying and creates a lot of extra unnecessary work for me.
5. I’ve been attending iMedia summits for years. They’re the best conference for interactive/digital marketing and media professionals. I’ve attended the summits as a client and as an agency representative. I’m excited to announce that I’ve been asked to facilitate the Marketers Only Sessions at the iMedia Brand Summit February 5th – 8th in Coconut Point Florida. If you’ve attended a previous summit and have thoughts or recommendations, please send them my way.

Peter King is easily one of my favorite sports writers. His Monday Morning Quarterback column is simply some of the best writing out there. Perhaps the best part of his column is a section called 10 Things I Think I Think.

He’s been on vacation the past few weeks, leaving Monday Morning Quarterback in the hands of guest writers. They’ve all taken their crack at filling the void, but none have really nailed it.

With that in mind, I got the inspiration earlier this week to write my own 10 Things I Think I Think column. So hear it goes…

1. I think I’m ok with TechCrunch posting all the “secret” and “confidential” documents. TechCrunch is only slightly above the National Enquirer, so it’s not like they have journalistic integrity. Their decision to post didn’t surprise me and the voyeur in me was fascinated to see the inner workings of a company clearly struggling with their own success.  I also think it was nice to see the folks at twitter realize they weren’t gods.  Sometimes you just need to be knocked down a peg or two.
2. I think Google is the ultimate frenemy. You need them to succeed, but you clearly don’t trust them. I think this distrust of Google is exactly why twitter decided to partner with Microsoft to create Bing Tweets even though Google would have given them even more exposure.
3. I think I’m just not all that interested with Posterous.  It could just be that I’m stubborn, but I don’t see the value in the platform over what WordPress, tumblr, etc. already offer.
4. I think the best aspect of the social web is that it’s helped me meet new people in person. Through twitter alone, I’ve made 6 new “real” connections. These are people that I now call upon for advice or just to talk shop. That’s the real power of social media. It’s not the technology and the platforms; it’s the people.
5. I think in the next 3 years, we’re going to see a quantum shift in the cell phone business. Consumers will be able to buy their phone and then be able to use it with any service provider they choose. This will change the face of mobile in the United States and force service providers to rethink their business model.
6. I think expectations are a good thing, but ridiculous expectations are completely silly.
7. I think the term “partnership” is overused and generally misunderstood. True partnership means more than 1 person/team/company/etc. working together for the greater good. It means give and take is expected. It means you look out not only for your own interests, but also the interests of your partners.
8. I think the whole green movement is a fad and that when put to a choice between a green product that costs 40% more than a non-green product, the non-green product will always win with consumers. When I was looking at houses in Minnesota, I explored so called green houses. The concept was cool and the payout was supposed to be fantastic because of how energy efficient they were. Sure, they are…but they also cost nearly 60% more than a non-green house and the payback happens after roughly 15 years of being in the house. Not exactly what I’d call an exciting return on investment.
9. I think as video game systems advance, I’m finding them less exciting. The wii doesn’t do it for me and if Microsoft is serious about the next generation in gaming being a controller free world, I’m done with gaming.
10. I think I’d rather work with passionate people that want to be better than smart people who are devoid of emotion. It’s not even a question.

I enjoy writing. I enjoy sharing my thoughts. The self publishing capabilities that have launched in the last 3 years have made my life infinitely easier and brought me closer to all of you out there. That’s the beauty of an always on, easily connectable, and simple to use internet. I think I’m really thankful for that.

A few weeks ago I wrote a post titled “It’s Not Who You Are – It’s Where You Are.”

Several things have happened over the past few weeks that have me thinking about how to extend that concept.

1. Had several great exchanges via twitter with Norbert Mayer-Wittmann about communities.
2. Read some interesting posts by Stephen Baker about the concept of “friends” and “friendship.” It’s something I’ve been pondering for a while as well. Specifically the definition of a friend on Facebook.
3. Unlinked my twitter feed from my Facebook account. This meant people I was friends with were no longer seeing what I was doing and saying on twitter. Since I did that, I’ve received a lot of thank you messages from my Facebook friends. I also haven’t updated my Facebook status since I unliked the two.
4. Started experimenting with Tumblr.
5. Read this great post from Stephen Baker and Ben Elowitz regarding how to make Business Exchange better.
6. Took another trip to MySpace and quickly left.
7. Created my Google profile which links all my profiles together.

Basically I’ve been doing a lot of reading, conversing, and learning about communication, communities, and integration.

Conceptually, I’ve always believed that it’s not about twitter vs. Facebook vs. MySpace vs. something else. I’ve generally prescribed to the fact each network has it’s own reason for being.

Earlier today, I felt like I made a breakthrough in my thinking. It’s not about where you are, it’s about who you’re with. The reason I don’t use MySpace (beyond it’s horrible interface) is that none of my “friends” are there. The reason I’m struggling with Tumblr (despite the fact I love its interface) is that none of my “friends” are there.  Where your “friends” are leads to the joining and retaining of you in a community.

I remember as a teenager going to a really crappy movie just to hang out with my girlfriend at the time. I tolerated a bad movie, at a less than desirable theater, that was 45 miles from home, and had bad popcorn. Why? Because I enjoyed the company. We make similar decisions every day.

Where our friends are can impact where we work, where we eat lunch, the gym we belong to, and yes the social communities we join. But, here’s the thing – your work friends aren’t the same as your old high school friends. Communicating with all your friends the same way is a recipe for failure. Consider who your friends are and where they are – when you do that you just might rethink how to communicate with them.

I’m out on vacation this week. The keys to TheKmiecs.com have been turned over to a few, select, awesome guest writers. The following has not been edited by me and is the work and effort of the original author. I appreciate the time and thinking that went into this post and hope you will too. Enjoy!

Despite the noisy dominance of the big boy social networks with millions of users (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and MySpace, amongst others), it’s easy to forget that there is a healthy amount of growth amongst smaller and emerging social networks. These smaller social networks, aren’t quite hitting the fun part of the hockey stick growth curve yet but they are significantly pushing the innovation envelope and are creating exciting new communities of users. Often, emerging social networks are rapidly innovating features to develop niche communities outside the realm of big boy networks that are more intimate, engaged and closer knit. For marketers, it’s an important to be aware of these emerging networks and burgeoning social interactions that could create new and interesting ways of meshing together brand relationships.

Most recently, the relaunch of Virb, yet another social network, is a healthy indication about the overall growth of emerging networks. With around 250,000 users, it’s a tadpole compared to the bigboy numbers but nevertheless, it’s a significant community. TechCrunch has a well written synopsis about many of the changes but most of the improved and relaunched features go about improving the social community of Virb. While many of the features sound identical to what is seen in larger networks, Virb has gone deep to allow all users to extensively customize profiles with full HTML customization. Unlike MySpace, they’ve gone further to allow a viewer to the option to view profiles without any customization. This subtle feature set has allowed a growing base of design oriented individuals and media centric profile users to create a vibrant user community. Without question, these are individuals that probably have a Facebook profile but are supplementing their Virb use to embrace another aspect of their social profile.

Tumblr, a small-short form blog provider, has been exploding with it’s incredibly simple tools to create not just text based blog posts but creative web content. As their purpose of allowing users to rapidly push content outward, they have created another community of users immersed in this world of spreading information and re-sharing information with very low technical barriers. This community is expanding because Tumblr is aggressively providing new features that improve it’s social network and differentiate itself amongst the larger crowd.

Since the teams at Virb and Tumblr are significantly smaller than Facebook, an immense amount of innovation is rapidly churning the platforms that make emerging social networks an exciting development. A particularly simple but innovative feature is Tumblr’s phonecall to audio post which allows a user to call a 1-800 number and leave a recorded message that is automatically uploaded to the tumblr user’s blog. While the concept may ring of novelty, the innovative feature idea separates out Tumblr’s social network of users who rapidly creating content from the Facebook users.

These emerging social-networks are growing because people are finding new purposes for using these social networks amongst their daily use of Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and MySpace. For users, there are many new and appealing features and communities to be found in these emerging networks and it shouldn’t surprise anyone if some of these emerging networks turned into an enormous base of users. As many digital marketing efforts have saturated the big boy social networks with effective messages, a great deal of opportunity lies with the emerging social networks like Tumblr, Virb, Veoh, Vimeo, Dopplr, Posterous and targeting specific communities of immersed users and highly engaged individuals.

Johnny Won is a strategist at an ad agency in Boston. He runs on Tumblr johnnywon.com and uses Twitter @johnnywon to keep track of his poor memory.