Yesterday I had to search for some of my friends and for some I had the hardest time to find them and add them to a list I developed. What was the issue?

1) Your Names
If your name is Roger Brown, you may be Roger Brown on one network R Brown on another, RBrown jun and so forth. And thousands of Roger Browns have that exact same issue. But the issue is not so much about your user name but your real name. Since we all learned that the user name maybe different on each network, people search for you by your real name.
What Can You Do?
Bite the bullet and start all over. Give yourself a new name – and share it across all networks. Call yourself "Roger Brown (Roggy)" or "Roger Brown (sailer)" or something else creative and unique. Make it part of your name in your business and personal life. Tell your friends what you did and why you did it. Names were created several...

Only people who care stand up and argue, defend, fight or otherwise make their position very clear. Interesting enough – the more disappointing a situation gets, the louder the conversation and the bigger the impact for a brand. An age old saying goes: "The worst thing to be talked about – is not to be talked about". A few companies are actually learning from the show business how this all works.

 

Scandals and disappointments – strategic tools

If there is no scandal – create one. Hollywood: Whether you love your partner or not – get divorced. "Shocking the nation does more to your image than being a nice guy – being Mr.Niceguy is of no value". There are at least two companies in the social web that are leveraging and mastering that technique: Twitter and Klout. Both in their very own way.

 

Cell or smart phones will be the next consumer product to be obsolete.

Apple never produced any phones, but always computers. The iPhone? Is an illusion. It's a computer with an added 5% of the real estate for the phone on the CPU board. The real smart thing was to call it a phone :)

Is it just semantics?
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Not at all - There is a critical difference: It's all about the underlying technology. Companies building "Consumer Computer" as I call it, need to have control over high performance, low power - low footprint CPUs. Apple purchased that technology for a reason ;)

There are only a few people who have the capacity to do that: Dell, Oracle (SUN's CPU production), Siemens, Samsung.... and of course Apple. Whoever wants to seriously compete with the "phone business" in general and Apple in particular needs to "think different" when it comes to "smart phones". In contrast, smart phone manufacturer like RIM or Nokia have no...

Social networks like Facebook, Twitter, lately Google Plus have rapidly evolved over the past few years. Online interaction took center stage and having a profile is only a commodity. LinkedIn developed into a different direction. groups degraded to cheap classified add boards, question and answers were basically replaced by the likes of Quora and Focus and the actual "conversation" circles all around spam.

That doesn't mean LinkedIn is dying or going away – it only means LinkedIn is not really a social network anymore. LinkedIn was always known as a place to brush up your presence when you look for a new job and a place to scan profiles if you are hiring. For the older sales generation it is a place to lookup some people on a one by one process.