The first chapter of Welcome to the Fifth Estate discusses social media empowered people that act independently of traditional media, government and corporate structures. Last Saturday night on WOR Radio’s The Business of Giving show I had the pleasure of discussing this tension with host Denver Frederick. From Syrian bloggers fighting the Assad regime to the anti-Komen Planned Parenthood social media fury in the United States, people continue to fight power structures with social media. Average citizens feel a need to circumvent established media as well as traditional government and corporate structures with online tools. Their information needs are unfulfilled and voices are not being heard. So people activate themselves online to demand change and action, or to form new …

Personal-Professional Mix in Social Media with Geoff Livingston from Kivi Leroux Miller on Vimeo. Kivi Leroux Miller, author of the Nonprofit Marketing Guide, interviewed me last week on the balance between infusing personality into your online communications and personal branding. During the conversation, we talked about how several nonprofits are handling this, including the National Wildlife Federation, the Humane Society of the United States, LIVESTRONG (Lance Armstrong Foundation), and Goodwill of Greater Washington DC, as well as corporate examples Dell and Ford’s Scott Monty. In Kivi’s words: You have to be genuine, generous, and grateful in social media to succeed, which means you have to be a real person. But if you go too far in putting yourself out there …