I’ll be visiting the San Francisco Bay Area May 5-8, and hope that you can attend some of my investor seminars to the Wharton and Columbia Business School Alumni Clubs:

Topic: “Squeezing Blood from a Stone: The Professional Investor’s Guide to Eliciting Information”

Host: Wharton Club of Northern California
Learn how professional investors elicit maximum information in minimum time from industry sources. How do you ask just the right questions to get a CFO to open up and tell you about his company? This training is based on best practices in the intelligence, psychiatric, law enforcement, and journalist communities.
When: Wednesday, May 7th, 6pm cocktails, 7pm program
Location: Perkins Coie, 101 Jefferson Drive, Menlo Park, CA 94025
RSVP and more details: http://www.whartonclub.com/article.html?aid=901

Topic: “Where are the Deals? Venture Capitalists, Hedge Funds, and Private Equity Firms’ Best Practices in Deal Creation and Deal Origination”

Host: Columbia Business School Alumni Club of Northern California
What are you doing to identify companies in which you can successfully invest? Learn about recent research on where institutional investors source their investments; how to identify companies with the earmarks of an attractive opportunity; and how to increase your inflow of worthwhile referrals from both intermediaries and investable companies.
When: Thursday, May 8th, 6pm cocktails, 7pm program
Where: Pagemill Partners Auditorium, 2475 Hanover Street, Palo Alto, CA 94304
RSVP and more details: http://www.acteva.com/booking.cfm?bevaid=158041

Also, I will be attending the Association for Corporate Growth Grow! Awards on Tuesday, May 6, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View ( https://chapters.acg.org/sv/uploads/events/922FC1DF84A74255B0B429DC3FC81104.pdf ), which may interest many of you.

Authentic social media engagement has the power to transform brands that have a declining reputation for customer service. Microsoft, led by Robert Scoble and the Channel 9 team, reversed their image as a company out of touch with its developers. Dell, spurred on by the public complaints of A-list bloggers like Jeff Jarvis (here’s a recent post with links to the highlights of that story), has now become a case study for excellent corporate social media engagement.

One of the most entries into the field is Comcast. As my business partner Jay Deragon points out in his blog, Comcast customer satisfaction is in the dumps.

But Comcast is stepping out into social media, dealing with customers directly to cut through clunky corporate processes where possible, as Carter Smith (another biz partner of mine) details on his blog. If you’re active on Twitter, you may have seen @ComcastCares doing their thing.

Now I have no doubt that Comcast can start reversing their reputation for customer service, and that social media will be a key component in that strategy. But I do have to wonder about a couple of things:

Scalability - While Twitter has exploded in popularity, it is still very much an early adopter tool at this point. I asked Frank Eliason if what they’re currently doing on Twitter will be sustainable. He said he thinks so, but admitted, "The difficulty is having one voice with others assisting." If it were straightforward to replicate the customer service experience of dealing with someone like Frank vs. the typical customer service agent you get when you call in, Comcast wouldn’t be in the situation they are in the first place. Once people start realizing they can bypass the clunky phone process with a tweet to @ComcastCares, will Comcast be able to maintain the quality of experience there as it gets to be more than two or three people can handle?

The Digital Divide - Sure, Comcast is an ISP and a lot of their customers are online. But what about those who aren’t? Or what about those who are online, but not on Twitter? Not a blogger? How does Comcast engaging in social media improve the customer service experience for those customers? And if Comcast starts giving preferential treatment to bloggers and Twitterers, they run the risk of being accused of simply oiling the squeaky wheel. Do they really want to improve the customer experience, or just improve their visible reputation for customer experience?

Social media is a powerful tool for engaging customers and improving a company’s reputation. But a social media initiative undertaken for PR purposes can’t stand on its own — it has to be an integral part of more comprehensive changes at the company. Improving the experience of your company for bloggers and Twitterers is great, but if you don’t improve it for all your customers, it’s a house of cards.

Is Comcast prepared to make that kind of full organizational commitment? It will be interesting to watch.

LinkedIn launched their blog in April 2007. One year later, how are they doing regarding community evangelism and social media participation?

I’ve set up a simple survey which I hope you’ll take a minute to fill out. For additional background if you’re interested, see my post at Linked Intelligence.

I’ve long been fascinated by the economic approach to human behavior, as described in books like David Friedman’s Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life, the popular Freakonomics and the collective work of Nobel prize-winning economist Gary S. Becker.

Prompted by a conversation on MyLinkedInPowerForum about the relative value of LinkedIn vs. MLPF — not to the owners, but to individual participants — I was Googling Becker and discovered The Becker-Posner Blog, a collaboration between Becker and legal/economics expert Richard Posner.

Besides the simply brilliant thinking and writing of these two individuals, the blog is intriguing because it’s also frequently a conversation between the two authors on the same topic, and they’re not afraid to take on some pretty controversial topics, or to take an unpopular stance on them. For example:

• Becker on The Erosion of Individual Responsibility and Posner’s comment
• Posner’s Post-Mortem Critique of William Buckley and Becker’s comment

These guys are also doing an amazing job of sparking conversation. 514 posts have generated 11,840 comments — that’s a 23:1 ratio! Not many blogs have that.

I encourage you to check it out, as well as the Freakonomics blog and David Friedman’s blog.

I could go into a long explanation about legal liability, etc., but Jeremiah Owyang said it perfectly on Twitter today:

Many bloggers I know prefer a blogging policy at work, as it helps to distinguish where the guardrails are.

Yet another great video from Lee LeFever explaining a Web 2.0 phenomenon:

Ready to try it? Join Twitter (if you’re not already on it) and follow me!

More great Web 2.0 videos from Lee:

• Social Networking in Plain English
• Blogs in Plain English
• Wikis in Plain English
• Online Photo Sharing in Plain English
• Social Bookmarking in Plain English
• RSS in Plain English

Unbelievable news out of LinkedIn tonight:

4/2/2008: Yes, this was supposed to be completely unbelievable - it was an April Fool’s joke.

LinkedIn to End Free Service

4/2/2008: No, they’re not really.

I knew this day was coming.

4/2/2008: Every April Fool’s Day has a day after,  when we all clean up the mess we made.