This summer has been filled with new clients, lots of travel and new opportunities to work with the people I care about the most. On a personal note, I was fortunate to attend six weddings this summer, four of which weren’t just weddings, they turned out to be what I have begun to think of as ‘the twedding’.

You know you’re at a ‘twedding’ when:

1.    Your wedding invitations were sent via the micro-blogging site twitter.com.
2.    All aspects of your big day have been vetted by your twitter followers who suggest everything from wedding guests to wedding vendors.
3.    Members of the wedding party take ‘candid’ photographs and videos of the ceremony and upload them directly to twitpic and twitvid for community commenting.
4.    Your wedding becomes a trending topic on twitter.
5.    The groom tweets “I’m married” before kissing the bride.

As more and more engaged couples say ‘yes’ to social media, I wondered about the do’s and don’ts of ‘tweetiquette’. Is there a ‘twedding tweetiquette’? In this era of transparency and ‘ce-web-rity’, do couples secretly want us to ‘tweet their weddings’? Below, some of my favorite brides-to-be chime in with their thoughts:

‘We don’t intend to tweet or facebook only because we want our focus to be present and shared with the actual people in attendance‘, asserts bride-to-be Aviva Gayle. ‘We’re not really concerned with the virtual audience in the internet either. I’m sure if we were guests we’d feel differently, and want to exclaim “congrats” or “beautiful setting” or “great band” or “what-have-you!“‘

Isabel Walcott Hilborne, a bi-coastal online community consultant agrees: ‘Tweeting won’t be allowed at my wedding. I frown upon people telling others (who weren’t invited and perhaps are resentful) how much fun they are having!  I think it’s snobby - “I’m here and you weren’t invited!”  How rude.  Plus - live in the moment, don’t try to be elsewhere’.

Bride-to-be Nikki Stelma sees it differently: ‘I’d have to discuss it with my fiancé but we’re both very social so if one of us started tweeting at the wedding, the other would want to as well’, says Stelma, a New York based event coordinator. ‘There are so many details that happen during weddings that it is impossible to remember it all.

‘By opening an online discussion, you’re sharing your big day with everyone and they help you collect and immortalize all of the moments from multiple angles. When you think of it, it’s very intimate’.

Brody Bond, a creative director at a brand development agency in Baltimore who is getting married in a few weeks, couldn’t agree more: ‘It’s ok to be bold about who you are and what you do. This is an opt-in world, so you don’t need to worry too much about people being disinterested.’ Bond and his fiance Lisa have already set up a twitter hashtag (#Brisa) and a new twitter account (@BrisaBond) to keep friends up to speed on new wedding developments. No stranger to social media, Bond explains:

As always, it’s not about you. It’s about serving friends and family - especially those who aren’t there.One should always be thinking “what can I do to add value? How can I serve people?” In that way, social media helps to accomplish the intended purpose of wedding ceremonies more than the ceremony.

Bond has a habit of taking photos and “tweeting live” from friends’ weddings and rehearsals so it isn’t surprising that he has chosen to apply these same principles to his own wedding. You can check out Bond’s hilarious pre-wedding twitvid here.

If using social media to share your wedding is a new trend, what are the rules of engagement for those encouraging guests to tweet? Mindy Howard, Founder and Chief  Twit at TweetMyWedding.com sums up the wisdom of the crowd with her top 5 wedding ‘tweetiquette’ basics:

The wedding couple should not be tweeting the whole time - they should be engaging personally with their guests & family.

Use a ‘Tweeter of Honor’ and a hashtag (#) for the event, so everyone can participate, congratulate and tweet for the couple.

Never tweet anything you would not say out loud at a wedding.

Tweeting before and after the ceremony is acceptable, but never ever during the ceremony.

Do not tweet during vows, special songs/music or toasts during the reception. Tweeting while someone is speaking is like talking over them - Hold off 5min!

To Tweet or Not to Tweet
In this day & age including all of your online friends in your wedding via social media could push that guest list into previously unmanageable and unaffordable numbers yet for most of us, no matter how engaged in social media we are, the question remains: Are ‘tweddings’ ‘Twagic’ or ‘Twiumphant’?

What do you think?

Juliette Powell is an author, entrepreneur and contributing commentator with HuffingtonPost.com. Her first book: 33 Million People in the Room, (Financial Times Press, 2009) details how to successfully use digital media in business. Powell is co-founder of the Gathering Think Tank Inc., an innovation forum at the intersection of media, business, advertising and technology. A popular key note speaker and commentator, connect with her on Twitter and Facebook.

Obama did it. Filmmakers are doing it and now you can do it too. ‘Crowdfunding’, a spin on ‘crowdsourcing’, is the latest funding opportunity at a time when our funding institutions are failing. With the success of crowdfunding campaigns like wikipedia.com and threadless.com, the financing of projects and people by large crowds is on the rise and a new tool to fund even the smallest of projects is now available to the general public.

In the best of times, there is always a sense that there are great ideas out there with little or no chance of funding from traditional channels. According to web-preneur Perry Chen, “the biggest trend we’ve seen so far: even during this economy, people are generous.  One reason why: people are getting big responses from their networks as people leverage their Flickr groups and other niche communities to spread the word about their projects‘. Also, small amounts are key.

“We need to move away from looking for big checks and learn to embrace small amounts.  I love people who pledge $1 or $5 to a project. Why shouldn’t we be able to become a patron each other for the price of a cup of coffee?“

Enter KickStartr.com a free online platform that uses ‘crowdfunding’ to seed small projects with big communities. Although still in beta, the funding platform launched 2 weeks ago is for everyone from artists to entrepreneurs to students. Contrary to online investment mechanism’s Kickstarter’s site says that: “People who use KickStartr to fund their projects (”project creators”) keep 100% ownership and control”.

How does one crowdfund that project you’ve been forever putting on the back burner? To find that out, I turned to KickStartr.com founder, Perry Chen.

What is the key to crowdsourcing for money or ‘crowdfunding’?
A focused project. I think we want to rally around things with specific goals. Making people feel like they are a part of something.  This starts with a compelling story — why I should support you — and then a determination to spread the word.

There is a great concept coined “Empowered Interactivity” by marketer and author Mark Hughes. Paraphrasing: Create a mechanism where people have an observable impact, and it becomes their brand, their 15 minutes of fame, their outcome.

If you already have a large social network, will it help you get funded more quickly? No question. Each person you know is an amplifier to each person they know. We all have a social network, and the key to crowdfunding is sculpting your project and presentation so that it amplifies past that first degree of your network. If it’s compelling, people will forward it.

What if you don’t have lots of online presence before using KickStartr, how do you raise awareness and get funded? It might not be the sexiest thing, but email is still extremely powerful. Send a rallying cry to friends and family, encouraging them to forward along.  Reach out to relevant blogs and organizations.  Become a marketer.

You can also go small.  One of our first projects (and we are only starting our 2nd week) was a programmer named Dan Phiffer who raised $99 to build a Wikipedia iPhone application. The funds will go to pay the Apple’s iPhone application fee. He was fully funded in a few days.

What can people do to make their idea stand out overall?
Video! It’s not required to fund a project, but we strongly encouraged it. Doesn’t need to be Kubrick, some of the best video are just people talking about their projects.  Their passion comes across, we can connect.

Along those same lines, offering benefits or rewards that have charm or value is a huge boost.  If you just put your hand out, it’s not that interesting.  Everyone can offer something in return.

One great example is a project by Earl Scioneaux, a musician from New Orleans, who is offering prospective backers some home-cooked gumbo and music theory lessons. His rewards really connect us to his project and make us feel like patrons.

What are some of the projects currently being funded?
They cover all the bases: group of New Yorkers self-publishing a book where everyone gets a page, a photographer exploring Iceland, a writer funding travel for a regional cookbook, a NYTimes crossword puzzle creator funding the release of Brooklyn-themed puzzles.

The day after we launched, two projects were already completely funded. That really blew us away. Five projects have been funded in the first week.  Five more are quite close.  The smallest funded was $35, and another is already close to it’s $3,000 goal. Several new projects are attempting to raise $10,000. I think projects will mostly be started by: people with particular ideas that have been burning in their hearts for awhile; those people that have ideas falling out of their heads; and people in creative industries that no longer want to wait to be tapped on the head. Then the second group are the audiences and networks of those folks. We think, eventually, that’s almost everyone.

KickStartr was a back of a napkin idea, and everyone has those. What if you could easily aggregate enthusiasm with resources? What project would you like to kickstart?

Juliette Powell is an entrepreneur, media consultant and author of 33 Million People in the Room (Financial Times Press, 2009), a book about social networking for business. Powell is co-founder of the Gathering Think Tank Inc., an innovation forum at the intersection of media, business, advertising and technology. You can connect with her on Twitter and facebook.

Taking cues straight from the President, this headline caught my eye: “Obama To Appoint Panel For Auto Recovery“. The story, in which writer Steven R. Hurst’s reports that the Obama administration “is establishing a presidential task force to direct the restructuring of General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC” is a great reminder of a basic life lesson:

You don’t have to be the leader of the free world to appoint an effective task force to reinvent yourself.

With record job losses and a flailing economy, how can a mere mortal survive these fickle tempests and reinvent himself? Chances are, if the car companies can’t go it alone, you probably can’t either, and you don’t have to. Just follow these easy steps:

1. Convene Your Own Advisory Board

“We are all stupid” wrote Mark Twain, “just on different subjects.” So with that little nugget of wisdom to get you started, begin by asking yourself who the top 10 influencers in your life are and list them. Next reach out to each one individually in their medium of choice. Using easy networking tools like facebook, twitter, linkedin etc. can save time and energy as you rally your troops. Whatever the means used, ask each person on your list to be on your personal advisory board then schedule a meeting.

Take notes because the network knows what you don’t know.

Social Media Week NY (SMW) is a great example of this process in action. The idea, born of a group of friends in the digital media space went from concept to implementation in just 3 weeks, under the leadership of one man, Toby Daniels. Daniels, 32, had just left a high profile job at MintDigital, an online digital platform and was looking to reinvent himself as a digital strategist.

Reinventing your career path at a time when most are fighting to save theirs might seem incredibly naive but where others remain paralyzed by the fear of change and uncertainty, Daniels began to connect the dots of his life and sow the seeds of opportunity. His first step was to convene an executive committee which consisted of academics like Jeremy Kagan- Strategy Consultant and Professor, Internet Marketing, Columbia Business School, as well as a bevy of forward thinking digital entrepreneurs like NUE: Agency’s Jesse Kirshbaum, Mashable’s Adam Hirsch and Tumblr’s David Karp. (In full disclosure, Daniels even asked me to join his executive committee to celebrate the community behind “33 Million People in the Room“, a book about leveraging social media to build social and cultural capital.)

2. Create a Vision and a Strategy Together

Remember that your preliminary advisory board meeting will set the tone for all other proceedings and needs to be more than just a meet and greet. It is the moment when you state your case about what you hope to accomplish and how each invited person fits into your vision. Share your goal and ask your advisory board to help you come up with a strategy complete with actionable items and time lines. Follow up online with a synopsis of your plan. Solicit invaluable feedback and implement tactical suggestions. If you don’t know how, ask. That is what your personal advisory board is there for.

Getting back to the Social Media Week example, Daniels created a mission statement that we could all buy-in to: “SMW aims to create an open and inclusive environment offering a series of free events, including workshops and panel discussions, and a platform for individuals, group and companies to organize their own activities.” Next, he suggested that our events would get far more press as part of a self-organized Social Media Week strategy than if we individually held stand alone events. Finally, he enlisted Tumblr to build the SMW website. With all of the week’s events listed in one place, a unified vision for SMW and how it might benefit the social media community, Daniels’ idea had became far more concrete.

3. Aggregate Your Networks and Spread The Word

People are generally willing to be of assistance when they have a clear idea of what might be required of them to do so. Delegate one specific task for each person in the group to deliver by a defined date, based on their individual resources. As we saw with the SMW example, you can’t know everything so get the most impact in terms of your time, influence and dollars by joining networks. These can be small networks of a few friends working together, or can even be the basis for new startups.

What started with Daniels’ idea, an Executive Committee and a clearly communicated vision of what could be accomplished if we pooled our resources, grew within a matter of weeks into dozens of original and free community events supported by partnerships with NY based companies like Razorfish, Fleishman Hillard, Deep Focus, For Your Imagination and Brooklyn based Drop.io. These in turn attracted higher profile alliances with media outlets such as the New York Times and Wired Magazine hosting Social Media Week events in their offices.

Adapt or Fail

In building his own personal brand through the birth of Social Media Week NY, Daniels understood a fundamental truth in life as in business: In order to survive within a social context, we must adapt or fail.

Daniel’s story could easily have been summarized as follows: He came, he lost and if novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald is to be believed, the story ends there. “There are no second acts in American lives.” In Fitzgerald’s era, if something went wrong in a person’s chosen career, there was no second chance to start it over again. These days, second acts can and do happen. After all, just ask Britney Spears, the US auto industry and Toby Daniels. (Special thanks to Marie-Chantale Turgeon for the ‘Reinvent Yourself Often” image.)

Overworked, Public, Economist – These are the 3 words Paul Krugman used to described himself as we sat back in Princeton, NJ for our interview. Add to that the titles ‘New York Times columnist’, ‘Princeton Professor of Economics’ and ‘2008 Nobel Prize laureate in Economics’ and you begin to get a sense of the man behind all of the big headlines.

In Part 2 of my conversation with Krugman, we discuss everything from the impact of the Yes We Can generation, to political nominations within the Obama administration to the small world theory.

An interview with Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman (Part 2)
By Juliette Powell

Where do you see the biggest impact of social networking and social media in the next 4 years?
Krugman: Some of it has already happened.

There have been some proposed appointments in the national security area, or at least floated appointments, that have essentially been torpedoed because the online community said no. ‘these guys are unacceptable!’ and rightly so.

There will be other areas affected but remember that basic policy formulation won’t come out of this stuff because it’s detailed. It will always require somebody sitting at a desk with lines of access and so on… But fast critique now demands that issues be brought to the front of the table when they were no being considered in the past.

Yes, the online community is gaining in power and influence and the effects are compounded because we realize it. Yes, it will be harder for this (Obama) administration to slip!

In the later Clinton years, the administration took on more of a managerial role and wasn’t as pro-corporate as a republican administration but less of a force for democratic change than one would have hoped.  That’s partly because they had a hostile congress but it’s also that there was no effective community saying: ‘Hey this is not what we elected you for!’ I think the Obama administration will have that kind of community and a good thing too!

Now that people all over the world have seen the impact that a single person can have using social networking technology – do you think that’s going to change the way that we view our own possibility to actually take control of our own destinies?

Krugman: I think there is something like that happening and it’s not just what is happening in America. What I hear a lot, is that many countries, including very oppressive regimes –

It starts as people having Facebook profiles just for friends, then something happens. It turns out that that same technology, that same involvement is also a way of getting political action together. People can be mobilized and I think it changes a lot of things.

In the 18th century, when we lived in small towns and everybody could participate and then we moved to this world where the power became very distant and news media far away, dictated how you saw the world. Now I don’t want to romanticize it but I think that it’s going to affect a lot of the world.

Take the famous Jacques Chirac quote: “The internet is an Anglo Saxon network’, that is no longer true at all. I watch my own links for my blog posts and I can see that we really are a small world. I’m seeing Chinese links, Korean links, Russian links. It’s a world now where this involvement has spread to very many cultures and indeed it is a very small world.

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when I arrived in Princeton, New Jersey to interview Paul Krugman. I had been reading him for years in the Times and he was one of the reasons I had studied economics yet a sense of relief washed over me when I met a slightly harried Krugman in the unmarked video conferencing room reserved for our encounter.  The bearded genius with the earnest eyes greeted me warmly and told me he only had a few minutes to spare; his wife had just called because she was making pasta, the water was boiling and she wanted to know when to throw in the pasta and he wanted to get home before heading to Stockholm to pick up the coveted 2008 Nobel Prize in Economics. Krugman won for his ‘analysis of trade patterns and location of economic activity’. When I told him I’d share our interview with you on this blog, he graciously extended our allotted time together to answer more questions. The result is a multi-part Q and A.

In part 1, Krugman and I discuss topics ranging from the impact of the democratization of American politics on the connected masses to the role of social capital on the economic recovery. The full transcript of my Krugman interview, along with his videotaped responses will be posted here in the coming days.

An interview with Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman (Part 1)
By Juliette Powell

Given the current economic climate, what do you feel the role of building social and cultural capital plays in our recovery?

Krugman: We’ve gone thru an era of emphasis on individual initiative and individual rights. The “greed is good’ era, and now we’ve learned the hard way that that can go very wrong. 70 years ago Franklin D Roosevelt said: ‘We’ve always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals.’ Now we know that it’s bad economics.

We are now at a time when some of those virtues of cooperation, which is what social capital is about, have been rediscovered and with luck, this can be turned into something of lasting benefit, not just getting out of the recession.

For anybody who has followed Obama’s election and looked at the impact of his team’s online campaign, it is clear that many first time voters and people that wouldn’t have considered themselves politically inclined were empowered to self-organize and use social networking tools to help rock the vote. In your opinion, what kind of impact will people’s use of social media tools really have on the Obama administration’s decisions moving forward?

Krugman: We can’t be too romantic about this. Legislation still has to be drafted by teams of people putting every semi-colon in the right place. Economic crisis management will still be done by people sitting in government offices. Conversely, there is a democratization of the ability to express opinion and to make analysis. Here’s an example that most people wouldn’t be aware of:

We had a proposal for a financial bailout presented by Henry Paulson, the current Treasury Secretary. This was the voice of authority and most of the traditional media were highly respectful of it- not me - but most everyone else was. Yet very quickly, an enormous online discussion broke out and grew into a sense of outrage around the proposal. So the quality of the economics blogging around the economic bailout was incredible. You had a lot of smart people who knew a lot about economics but in the past wouldn’t have had any ability to get their views out quickly. They were not in official positions. The number of trained economists who also have newspaper columns is – one – me. These other people did not, but their discussion. I think it helped move the policy.

Within 3 weeks the treasury had effectively completely abandoned the original approach (to the economic bailout) because everyone who wasn’t in a position of power said: this doesn’t make sense!

We can see a lot of things like that happening in the future. Still, don’t underestimate the influence of people who can treat a congressman to luxurious dinners. Being online unfortunately is never going to do away with that entirely but there is a real democratization of access.

If you were one of the people who participated in the online discussion about the economic bailout, our healthcare system or the way to maximize the usefulness of the social tools put out by the Obama team, we want to hear your experiences or send us the name and blog of an online community member who helped you understand the issues better.

Keep checking in for Part 2 of my interview with Paul Krugman, where we discuss the impact of social media and social networking tools on everything from business to globalization to national security.

~> j*

As Arianna Huffington pointed out on Dec 1: The Meltdown Will Be Blogged

Well I’d like to add: The Rebirth Will Be Seeded By Social Media!

Welcome to the new seat of influence! We’re already seeing it online and journalists like The Washington Post’s Ceci Connolly make sure that mainstream media brings the news to the people with her article ‘Obama Policymakers Turn to Campaign Tools’ and her ‘Obama Taps 1,000 Supporters to Push Health Reform’ post where she writes:

“Barack Obama’s incoming administration has begun to draw on the high-tech organizational tools that helped get him elected to lay the groundwork for an attempt to restructure the US health-care system.”

Where Connolly argues that the very tools used by volunteers to self-organize around the Obama campaign and get him elected as our new President, are the same tools that will shape our healthcare system, my sense is that this is only the beginning. As social media tools become ubiquitous and are used more and more to mobilize people around an overarching idea, co-creation tools will increasingly be wielded to shape the very institutions we’ve begun to question. From affecting government to business to our culture, we are merely at the beginning of what promises to be a bottom up restructuring process that will affect everything we hold dear as a people, not just our healthcare system. As an Obama campaign insider told me anonymously yesterday:

“During the election campaign, supporters finally had a campaign that did not rely only on events with the candidate or his surrogates, and did not only disseminate information amongst insiders.  The idea is that everyone was involved and informed, and this allowed supporters to feel ownership of the campaign. I think Barack would have won even without such strong online presence, but the social networking element of the campaign was a major building block of the organization; it made it easier to raise money, organize people, keep them informed and excited, and recruit new supporters.  All of this allowed the campaign to accomplish goals at a faster rate and for the movement to grow exponentially as opposed to linearly. The success of the Obama social networking platforms demonstrates how important social networking and online capital are in shaping our present and our future.”

Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman agrees and in an interview over Thanksgiving week-end told me:

“What starts out as a Facebook profile used to keep in touch with friends, is actually technology that will be used more and more  to mobilize people to action.” (I’ll have the entire interview I did with Krugman posted here for you in the next while, along with video excerpts).

More and more young American’s like my friend Lindsey (who didn’t get involved in the campaign during the election), are responding to Obama;s social media enabled call to action and mobilizing their friends to do the same. As the presidential inauguration approaches, millions of us are asking: “What’s next?” Lindsey’s answer came in the form of an emailed invitation to take her seat at the table; it was sent by change.gov in an effort to make a ‘more transparent and accessible transition’ for the President elect and his administration.

“We look forward to benefitting from the many more voices that will now be a part of the decision-making process.” says the note signed John D. Podesta, co-chair of the Obama-Biden Transition Project, along with a link to a video that explains how to do just that. Between this morning’s email and the one Podesta had sent the day before, Lindsey found a framework for action. She sent a note to all of her friends on Facebook that began: ‘On December 13th and 14th, Americans are coming together to reflect on what we’ve accomplished and plan the future of this movement.’

And just like that, Lindsey began to organize a Change is Coming house meeting for December 14th and link up with others who are doing the same because, as she puts it:

“If they’re crazy enough to give me the tools for change, I’m crazy enough to run with them! We begins with me.”

To host or attend a Change is Coming house meeting, just sign up!
~> j*