Maybe I’m dense, but I just don’t get the fakery trend in our culture. It could be just our continuing infatuation with shallowness and outward appearances, I suppose, but it kinda bugs me.

Several different types of fakery have recently annoyed me popped up in my world, and because I’m a monkey with a keyboard and an internet connection, I’m sharing them with you. [Caution: Snark alert]

Fakery with Padding:

A couple of weeks ago, we ended up at a big department store because our oldest (12-ish) needed wanted some new bras. Having worn the ‘sports bra’ style previously, she wanted something that looked more like a bra. It took me a while to get that fact, and to relate it to my own attempts to look or feel older as a boy, instead of pointing out the obvious, that there wasn’t a need for it. So we cruise through the young women’s department until we find the underwear section, and what do we find?

With the exception of 3 or 4 bras, they’re all padded. As in, they look like boobs already, just from hanging on the rack. My first thought was “What the hell?”

What’s the point of a padded bra for a young girl? To make it look like you have bigger breasts, right? Or maybe it’s really protective padding? It’s dangerous to be a young girl?

Appearing to have bigger breasts is not what I want for my daughter at her age (at any age, actually). We had a discussion about the issue with her, and we eventually found some that were acceptable to both her and us, so our shopping trip had a happy ending. But I left the store shaking my head, wondering “Why do our little girls need fake the size of their breasts?”

And if girls are wearing these types of bras, what about those young boys who are their peers – what are they thinking when they see their classmates with inflated chests? As a former 12 year old boy, I can just imagine the types of conversations that are sparked by those magically enlarged boobs…

Fakery with Spandex:

Girdles for men? Body sculpting built into clothes? What a bunch of bullshit.

If you’re tempted to buy into this, let me clue you in: Nobody is fooled by this. And if you can take an honest look at yourself in the mirror, you can stop fooling yourself as well.

The same types of people who look at athletes and say “I wish I could do that” while sitting on their couch seem to be the same types of people who will shell out the bucks for some fancy underwearthat disguises the body, the same way that wearing lots of makeup disguises the face.

The way I see it, if you’re carrying around some flab, you’ve got two options. Option one, accept the way that you look, be proud of it, flaunt it even. Option two, ditch the junk food, get off your ass and start getting physical (cue Olivia Newton-John).

If you go with option one, kudos to you for accepting yourself as you are right now. Please move on to option two unless you want to be that guy for the rest of your life.

If you go with option two, congratulations on your decision to accept that for the most part, the way your body looks is dependent on what you eat, how much you eat, and how hard you play.

I decided some time ago that I wanted to be fit enough to keep up with my (future) grandkids, and that I don’t want my fitness level to limit my activities – I want it to increase the number of things I can do. And you know what? It doesn’t take hours in the gym to get and stay fit, as I used to think. My current workouts are short and intense, focusing on functional fitness, not building a better bicep.

Your mileage may vary. Of course, I’m wrong at least as much as I am right, so maybe the Standard American Diet and a spandex undershirt is better.

Fakery in Profiles:

I spend a lot of time on the web, and I’ve noticed another disturbing fakery trend in the ways that people choose to represent themselves in their profiles and profile pics. Many times in the last week, I’ve been on social media sites and clicked through from someone’s profile, only to find a completely different “face” for them – such as looking 20 years older.

If you don’t always look like you walked out of Glamour Shots every day, don’t post that as your profile picture. If you don’t wear a tuxedo all the time, don’t post that picture either. Skip the cartoon-ization too.

And in related fakery…

Fakery in Titles:

You can’t call yourself an expert, guru, maven, or thought leader. Other people can refer to you that way when you earn it, but introducing yourself to me as an expert is not the best option. Just sayin’.

I want to know what you do, not what you know. If what you do is compelling enough, I’ll want to know what you know.

Don’t be this guy.

And now back to your regularly scheduled programming…

Related posts

• Social Media, Virtual Communities, and Generosity (45)
• Hide Your Kids: The Social Media Marketers are Coming (34)
• Facebook is Putting My Mother Out Of Business (2)
• About Derek Markham (2)
• 10 Ways to Change the World Through Social Media (6)

One of my pet peeves is the amount and type of advertising targeting children.

Specifically, the ads promoting products that negatively affect their health, such as those promoting junk food (and fast food).

I take offense when I see pieces of the marketing campaigns for obvious junk food items (we don’t have a TV, so it’s not often). Soda is the easy target here, and I’d lump the so-called ‘energy’ drinks in there as well.

<rant>That stuff is just junk. Seriously. It’s bubbly water, with artificial colors and flavors, maybe some caffeine for an upper, lots of high fructose corn syrup, and a fancy label. I don’t drink it, and we don’t allow our kids to drink the so-called ‘natural’ sodas except for once in a blue moon. That’s just how we roll. I think it’s a waste of money and can only have a negative health effect on the body, especially growing kid’s bodies. </end of rant>

But at least the commercials and ads in traditional media look like ads, and – aside from product placement in movies and TV – are fairly above board. You know it’s an ad or a marketing campaign.

[I won't get into the subject here of the subtle (and not so subtle) self-esteem issues kids get from being bombarded with traditional media (TV) commercials about other products - you know, the ones with the shiny happy people, the haves to our have-nots - which begins the cycle of longing for material goods (for more STUFF) so prevalent in our culture.]

With many new media campaigns embracing social media marketing, not just display ads (banners), sometimes you aren’t even aware you’re being sold to – you think you’re having a conversation, but it might be a sponsored one, with money behind the message.

I use my social media network to share information, to have conversations, to collaborate, to get feedback, and I’ve even been the focus of a social media fundraising campaign. And when I choose who to include in my network, I screen people based on their usual stream (Is it helpful or interesting to me? Or is it just selling to at me, over and over?). Once in my network, I then come to trust those people, and I don’t expect them to try to sell me something.

So when I read about the latest social media influencing schemes targeting kids, I had a very mixed reaction. The piece talked about two companies, one of which was promoting music/artists/bands, and the other, which promoted stuff. You know, Coca-Cola, Nintendo, a Barbie mp3 player… stuff.

I think marketing music and artists with social media is already pretty powerful, and it has certainly changed the music industry, so engaging more people in those campaigns is alright in my book. But the people being compensated (with gift cards, freebies, etc.) are kids. And I have issues with brands employing kids. Period.

The other company mentioned in the article is employing kids to push stuff like Coke, but to do it subtly – by inserting references to the products in their conversations and interactions on social networking sites such as Facebook and Bebo.

The problem I have, setting aside the issue of using kids to do this, is that kids usually have a smaller network, made up of people they already know. And now they are selling to their friends.

That’s a lot different than most adults, who may connect with a large network of people they’ve never met, but who also have the maturity and experience to determine who to trust and who is full of shit.

The ‘brand ambassadors’ and ‘street teams’ made up of kids are being paid (compensated, anyway) to promote brands within their circle of friends, on the networks they use for digital socializing, and I don’t think it’s a good idea. Maybe it’s a great idea for marketing, but for parents? Not so much. Isn’t enough that just about everywhere kids look, from schools to sporting events, they are bombarded with ‘brand’ messages? Now they will have to be on guard for marketing from their friends?

“children should promote “key campaign messages to friends, both on and offline” by posting comments on message boards, through instant messaging, such as MSN, and by hosting parties where product samples are distributed.

They should prepare their product pitch by “thinking deeply about how you would describe it to your best friend … Write down the key points in your own words and make sure it doesn’t sound too rehearsed. Be natural; be you”.” – Times

Sheesh.

One of the companies responded to the piece on their site to make sure people know that kids under 16 need verbal consent from their parents to participate, and that:

“we do not pay people aged 12 to “say stuff online about sweets”, but we will send as much cool stuff out to our Insiders as brands will allow – as long as these are suitable and do not contravene any regulations, guidelines or good old fashioned common sense. Everyone under the age of 16 who applies to the Insider scheme must have the explicit consent of their parents.”

They say that kids only promote the brands they like, so they aren’t being coerced into endorsing things they don’t like. OK, kids get free schwag to talk about products to their friends. Peer endorsement is what we’re talking about. But sodas are still junk food (see above).

And they want “young people aged 7 – 24″ to join their “youth panel”. I understand that companies need this information to sell more stuff, but 7?

Seriously? Seven years old? You’re going to use other seven year-olds to influence my seven year old with social media?

Tell me what you think: Should kids be involved in these types of social media marketing schemes, either selling or being sold to?

As far as I’m concerned, this type of scheme should only start at age 16, maybe even 18. Just like a job.

Related posts

• Two-fer Tuesday: DIY Baby Shoes and a Daddy Blogger Lets It Rip (4)
• Social Media, Virtual Communities, and Generosity (45)
• Padding, Spandex, Social Profiles, and Other Bits of Fakery (4)
• Mainstream Media to Men: You’re Dead Inside (16)
• FTC finds that 44 major food and beverage marketers spent $1.6 billion to promote their products to children under 12 and adolescents ages 12 to 17 in the United States in 2006. (0)

As a blogger, I thought I really understood social media and knew the potential for using it for doing good things in the world, but it wasn’t until I became the focus of a social media campaign myself that I felt the true power of it.

On January 15th, I took a big fall, which put me flat on my back, unable to work, with medical bills piling up because of it.

For the first week, I stayed positive about it all, determined not to get beat at the mental game while I healed, but after that, I started to really get down on myself. Not only was I going to miss out on climbing, biking, and playing soccer, but I was also unable to keep up with work, which meant missed income, and I couldn’t participate as usual with the family.

As those of you who know me can attest, I’m a heavy Twitter user, usually sending out links to notable items in the green scene, along with random, non sequitur observations, and tidbits about my life. So when I got the first big medical bill in the mail, I tweeted this:

I got a couple of responses to it that related to health care in the US, and then my friend Jerry tweets this:

I got a good laugh over that, not taking it seriously, ’cause it’s Jerry, and we josh each other all the time, and then I receive a direct message from another friend, Dave:

To which I respond – I got nothin’.

Another friend, Adam, calls me up and says, “Hey, David, Jerry, and I want to do something to help you out with your medical bills, and we wanted to know if we should just pass the hat quietly, or if we can post about it online and make a social media event out of it. Would you mind if we promoted it publicly?” Since I’m pretty public with my life, I don’t mind it being promoted, I told him – in fact, I’d be flattered that they took the time and energy to do so.

When I woke up on February 1st, I saw the fundraiser posted at The Good Human and Twilight Earth , and started watching the tweets fly about it. It was quite amazing – the links were getting retweeted all over the place, from friends of mine with few followers, to accounts with huge amounts of followers, like Twilight Earth, Elephant Journal,  Planet Green, and Treehugger. The potential reach of those tweets was enormous, exposing me and my situation to thousands and thousands of people who have no idea who I am.

And then some other green bloggers joined in, with posts going up at Elephant Journal, MNN, The Fun Times Guide to Green, and A Little Greener Every Day, along with a huge amount of tweeting and sharing via Facebook. The outpouring of support was amazing, with people sending me best wishes via direct message and email, which felt great.

The fundraiser ran all of that week, and when David, Jerry, and Adam told me that people had donated over $1800.00, I was blown away by the generosity of all of the people who took the time to donate some of their hard earned money to a guy they had never even met!

While I do have more bills than this amount will cover, it doesn’t matter – the fact that people would be willing to donate to my situation at all is incredible, and it’s not just me that benefits from it, as this also greatly affects my family as well. So it’s a huge gesture toward my whole family, and one that I don’t take lightly.

Here’s the kicker:

I’ve never met Adam, Jerry, David, Shea, Robin, or Jeffrey before (the only one I’ve actually met is Waylon Lewis), yet they blogged about it and helped promote this fundraiser. I’ve only interacted with them online, via Twitter, Facebook, their own websites, as well as talking or chatting with them on Skype.

So they are part of my community, except it’s a virtual community, a digital village, not a local community. And they came through for me and made me really feel the connection and reap the benefits of it. That’s amazing to me.

I just need to say, from the bottom of my heart, a huge thank you to every single person who helped with this social media campaign, whether through donating or just spreading the word.

It’s been a testament to the power and reach of social media, and I feel honored to have such a great virtual community that would be willing to ‘get my back’ when I am in need.

Related posts

• Green Living Ideas and Twilight Earth Form New Major Environmental Network, Simple Earth Media (6)
• Please Give Just $1 For The Charities That You Help To Choose (14)
• Padding, Spandex, Social Profiles, and Other Bits of Fakery (4)
• One Dollar, One Minute, One Choice: Buck for Charity Ends Soon (1)
• Meet a Few of My Community of Awesome People (3)

This post is a collaboration between Mashable’s Summer of Social Good charitable fundraiser and Max Gladwell‘s “10 Ways” series. The post is being simultaneously published across more than 100 blogs.

Social media is about connecting people and providing the tools necessary to have a conversation. That global conversation is an extremely powerful platform for spreading information and awareness about social causes and issues. That’s one of the reasons charities can benefit so greatly from being active on social media channels. But you can also do a lot to help your favorite charity or causes you are passionate about through social media.

Below is a list of 10 ways you can use social media to show your support for issues that are important to you. If you can think of any other ways to help charities via social web tools, please add them in the comments. If you’d like to retweet this post or take the conversation to Twitter or FriendFeed, please use the hashtag #10Ways.

1. Write a Blog Post

Blogging is one of the easiest ways you can help a charity or cause you feel passionate about. Almost everyone has an outlet for blogging these days — whether that means a site running WordPress, an account at LiveJournal, or a blog on MySpace or Facebook. By writing about issues you’re passionate about, you’re helping to spread awareness among your social circle. Because your friends or readers already trust you, what you say is influential.

Starting a blog is easy, and can be free or low cost. Stop just reading blogs, and start writing about the causes close to your heart.

Recently, a group of green bloggers banded together to raise individual $1 donations from their readers. The beneficiaries included Sustainable Harvest, Kiva, Healthy Child, Healthy World, Environmental Working Group, and Water for People. The blog-driven campaign included voting to determine how the funds would be distributed between the charities. You can read about the results at Twilight Earth.

You should also consider taking part in Blog Action Day, a once a year event in which thousands of blogs pledge to write at least one post about a specific social cause (last year it was fighting poverty). Blog Action Day will be on October 15 this year.

2. Share Stories with Friends

Another way to spread awareness among your social graph is to share links to blog posts and news articles via sites like Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Digg, and even through email. Your network of friends is likely interested in what you have to say, so you have influence wherever you’ve gathered a social network.

You’ll be doing charities you support a great service when you share links to their campaigns, or to articles about causes you care about.

3. Follow Charities on Social Networks

In addition to sharing links to articles about issues you come across, you should also follow charities you support on the social networks where they are active. By increasing the size of their social graph, you’re increasing the size of their reach. When your charities tweet or post information about a campaign or a cause, statistics or a link to a good article, consider retweeting that post on Twitter, liking it on Facebook, or blogging about it.

Following charities on social media sites is a great way to keep in the loop and get updates, and it’s a great way to help the charity increase its reach by spreading information to your friends and followers.

You can follow the Summer of Social Good Charities:

Oxfam America (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube)

The Humane Society (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, Flickr)

LIVESTRONG (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr)

WWF (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr)

4. Support Causes on Awareness Hubs

Another way you can show your support for the charities you care about is to rally around them on awareness hubs like Change.org, Care2, or the Facebook Causes application. These are social networks or applications specifically built with non-profits in mind. They offer special tools and opportunities for charities to spread awareness of issues, take action, and raise money.

It’s important to follow and support organizations on these sites because they’re another point of access for you to gather information about a charity or cause, and because by supporting your charity you’ll be increasing their overall reach. The more people they have following them and receiving their updates, the greater the chance that information they put out will spread virally.

5. Find Volunteer Opportunities

Using social media online can help connect you with volunteer opportunities offline, and according to web analytics firm Compete, traffic to volunteering sites is actually up sharply in 2009. Two of the biggest sites for locating volunteer opportunities are VolunteerMatch, which has almost 60,000 opportunities listed, and Idealist.org, which also lists paying jobs in the non-profit sector, in addition to maintaining databases of both volunteer jobs and willing volunteers.

For those who are interested in helping out when volunteers are urgently needed in crisis situations, check out HelpInDisaster.org, a site which helps register and educate those who want to help during disasters so that local resources are not tied up directing the calls of eager volunteers. Teenagers, meanwhile, should check out DoSomething.org, a site targeted at young adults seeking volunteer opportunities in their communities.

6. Embed a Widget on Your Site

Many charities offer embeddable widgets or badges that you can use on your social networking profiles or blogs to show your support. These badges generally serve one of two purposes (or both). They raise awareness of an issue and offer up a link or links to additional information. And very often they are used to raise money.

Mashable’s Summer of Social Good campaign, for example, has a widget that does both. The embeddable widget, which was custom built using Sprout (the creators of ChipIn), can both collect funds and offer information about the four charities the campaign supports.

7. Organize a Tweetup

You can use online social media tools to organize offline events, which are a great way to gather together like-minded people to raise awareness, raise money, or just discuss an issue that’s important to you. Getting people together offline to learn about an important issue can really kick start the conversation and make supporting the cause seem more real.

Be sure to check out Mashable’s guide to organizing a tweetup to make sure yours goes off without a hitch, or check to see if there are any tweetups in your area to attend that are already organized.

8. Express Yourself Using Video

As mentioned, blog posts are great, but a picture really says a thousand words. The web has become a lot more visual in recent years and there are now a large number of social tools to help you express yourself using video. When you record a video plea or call to action about your issue or charity, you can make your message sound more authentic and real. You can use sites like 12seconds.tv, Vimeo, and YouTube to easily record and spread your video message.

Last week, the Summer of Social Good campaign encouraged people to use video to show support for charity. The #12forGood campaign challenged people to submit a 12 second video of themselves doing something for the Summer of Social Good. That could be anything, from singing a song to reciting a poem to just dancing around like a maniac — the idea was to use the power of video to spread awareness about the campaign and the charities it supports.

If you’re more into watching videos than recording them, Givzy.com enables you to raise funds for charities like Unicef and St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital by sharing viral videos by e-mail.

9. Sign or Start a Petition

There aren’t many more powerful ways to support a cause than to sign your name to a petition. Petitions spread awareness and, when successfully carried out, can demonstrate massive support for an issue. By making petitions viral, the social web has arguably made them even more powerful tools for social change. There are a large number of petition creation and hosting web sites out there. One of the biggest is The Petition Site, which is operated by the social awareness network Care2, or PetitionOnline.com, which has collected more than 79 million signatures over the years.

Petitions are extremely powerful, because they can strike a chord, spread virally, and serve as a visual demonstration of the support that an issue has gathered. Social media fans will want to check out a fairly new option for creating and spreading petitions: Twitition, an application that allows people to create, spread, and sign petitions via Twitter.

10. Organize an Online Event

Social media is a great way to organize offline, but you can also use online tools to organize effective online events. That can mean free form fund raising drives, like the Twitter-and-blog-powered campaign to raise money for a crisis center in Illinois last month that took in over $130,000 in just two weeks. Or it could mean an organized “tweet-a-thon” like the ones run by the 12for12k group, which aims to raise $12,000 each month for a different charity.

In March, 12for12k ran a 12-hour tweet-a-thon, in which any donation of at least $12 over a 12 hour period gained the person donating an entry into a drawing for prizes like an iPod Touch or a Nintendo Wii Fit. Last month, 12for12k took a different approach to an online event by holding a more ambitious 24-hour live video-a-thon, which included video interviews, music and sketch comedy performances, call-ins, and drawings for a large number of prizes given out to anyone who donated $12 or more.

Bonus: Think Outside the Box

Social media provides almost limitless opportunity for being creative. You can think outside the box to come up with all sorts of innovative ways to raise money or awareness for a charity or cause. When Drew Olanoff was diagnosed with cancer, for example, he created Blame Drew’s Cancer, a campaign that encourages people to blow off steam by blaming his cancer for bad things in their lives using the Twitter hashtag #BlameDrewsCancer. Over 16,000 things have been blamed on Drew’s cancer, and he intends to find sponsors to turn those tweets into donations to LIVESTRONG once he beats the disease.

Or check out Nathan Winters, who is biking across the United States and documenting the entire trip using social media tools, in order to raise money and awareness for The Nature Conservancy.

The number of innovative things you can do using social media to support a charity or spread information about an issue is nearly endless.

Can you think of any others? Please share them in the comments.

Special thanks to VPS.net

A special thanks to VPS.net, who are donating $100 to the Summer of Social Good for every signup they receive this week.

Sign up at VPS.net and use the coupon code “SOSG”to receive 3 Months of FREE hosting on top of your purchased term. VPS.net honors a 30 day no questions asked money back guarantee so there’s no risk.

About the “10 Ways” Series

The “10 Ways” Series was originated by Max Gladwell. This is the second simultaneous blog post in the series. The first ran on more than 80 blogs, including Mashable. Among other things, it is a social media experiment and the exploration of a new content distribution model. You can follow Max Gladwell on Twitter.

This content was originally written by Mashable’s Josh Catone.

Image: yoppy at Flickr

Related posts

• Social Media, Virtual Communities, and Generosity (45)
• Padding, Spandex, Social Profiles, and Other Bits of Fakery (4)
• One Dollar, One Minute, One Choice: Buck for Charity Ends Soon (1)
• Hide Your Kids: The Social Media Marketers are Coming (34)
• Facebook is Putting My Mother Out Of Business (2)

Citizen journalism, open government, status updates, community building, information sharing, crowdsourcing, and the election of a President.

Editor’s note: This is first guest post from Max Gladwell.

Our children will inherit a world profoundly changed by the combination of technology and humanity that is social media. They’ll take for granted that their voices can be heard and that a social movement can be launched from their laptop. They’ll take for granted that they are connected and interconnected with hundreds of millions of people at any given moment. And they’ll take for granted that a black man is or was President of the United States.

What’s most profound is that these represent parts of a greater whole. They represent a shift in power from centralized institutions and organizations to the People they represent. It is the evolution of democracy by way of technology, and we are all better for it.

For most of us, social media has changed our lives in some meaningful way. Collectively it is changing the world for good. Given the pace of innovation and adoption, change has become a constant. Every so often we find the need to stop and reflect on its most recent and noteworthy developments, hence the following list.

Please note this is not a top-10 list, nor are these listed in any particular order. It’s also incomplete. So we ask that you add to this conversation in the comments. If you’d like to Retweet this post or take the conversation to Twitter or FriendFeed, please use the hashtag #10Ways.

1. Take Social Actions: The nonprofit organization Social Actions aggregates “opportunities to make a difference from over 50 online platforms” through its unique API. It recently held the Change the Web Challenge contest in order to inspire the most innovative applications for that API. The Social Actions Interactive Map won the $5,000 first prize. The result is a virtual tour of the world through the lens of social action. “People are volunteering, donating, signing petitions, making loans and doing other social actions as we speak — all over the world. To capture the context of the where, this project uses sophisticated techniques to extract location information from full text paragraphs.” You can also join the Social Actions Community, which is powered by Ning…which now boasts more than one million individual social networks.

2. Twitter with a Purpose: This list could be exclusive to Twitter. The micro-blogging sensation was featured on our first two lists (a three-tweet), and it’s certain to be a fixture. From Tweetsgiving, the virtual Thanksgiving feast, to the Twestival, which organized 202 off-line events around the world to benefit charity: water, it’s become the de facto tool for organizing and taking action. Tweet Congress won the SXSW activism award, and celebrity Tweeps Ashton Kutcher and Kevin Rose Tweeted their two million followers about ending malaria. Max Gladwell recently initiated the #EcoMonday follow meme as a way to connect and organize the Green Twittersphere.

3. Visit White House 2.0: Inside of its first 100 days, the Obama administration has managed to set the historic benchmark for government transparency and accountability. The President’s virtual town hall meeting used WhiteHouse.gov to crowdsource questions from his 300 million constituents, complete with voting to determine the ones he’d have to answer. All told, 97,937 people submitted 103,978 questions and cast 1,782,650 votes. The White House continues to raise the bar with its official Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter channels. In so doing President Obama is not just setting the standard for state and local government in the U.S. He’s establishing the world standard. The Obama administration is spreading democracy not by force but through example. Because you don’t have to be an American citizen to be a friend or follower of White House 2.0.

4. Claim your Zumbox: What happens when all mail can be sent and delivered online to any street address in a paperless form? That’s the big question for Zumbox, which has created an online mail system with a digital mailbox for every U.S. street address. And while the answer to that question remains to be seen, it promises to be as liberating as it is disruptive. A key quality for Zumbox is that it’s closed system much like that of Facebook, only instead of true identity it’s true address. This will enable people to better connect with their communities including their neighbors, local businesses, and the mayor’s office. The primary agent of change, though, might not be that this uses street addresses but that it enables direct and potentially viral feedback, which is a virtue that e-mail and the USPS do not offer. The first methods are to request exclusive paperless delivery and to block a sender, but others are certain to evolve such as real-time commenting and ways to share mail with friends, family, and colleagues. Welcome to Mail 2.0. (Disclosure: Zumbox is a client of Rob Reed, the founder of Max Gladwell.)

5. Host a Social Media Event: This is the year of the social media event. No meaningful gathering of people is complete without an interactive online audience, especially when it’s so easy and cost effective to pull off. Essential tools include a broadband connection, laptop, video camera, projector, and screen. Add people and a purpose, such as entrepreneurship. Promote it through social media channels, and you have a social media event. A recent example in the green world is the Evolution of Green, which was hosted by Creative Citizen, a green wiki community. It celebrated the launch of a new Web property, EcoMatters, while also establishing a new Twitter tag. By posing the question, “How can we go from green hype to green habit?” and including the #GreenQ hashtag, it sparked a conversation between attendees and the Twittersphere in real time. Thus was born a new mechanism for getting answers to green questions via Twitter.

6. Travel the World: More than anyone else, Tim O’Reilly knows the potential for social media to change the world. In his opening keynote at this year’s Web 2.0 Expo, he called for a new ethic in which we do more with less and create more value than we capture. This provided the context for SalaamGarage founder Amanda Koster, whose presentation followed O’Reilly’s. The idea is that social media has enabled each of us to have an audience. Whether through Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, or a personal blog, each of us can have influence and reach. What’s more, it can be used for good. SalaamGarage coordinates trips for citizen journalists (that means you) to places like India and Vietnam in conjunction with non-government organizations like Seattle-based Peace Trees. The destination is the story, as these humanitarian journalists report on the people they meet and discoveries they make. Their words, images, and video are posted to the social web to gain exposure and because these stories just need to be told.

7. Build It on Drupal: You may not have noticed, but the open-source Drupal content management system (CMS) has quickly become the dominant player on the social web. While we still prefer WordPress as a strict blogging application, Drupal has emerged as the go-to platform for building scalable, community-driven Web sites. It powers Recovery.gov, a key part of President Obama’s commitment to transparency and accountability. PopRule uses it as a social news platform for politics. And Drupal will soon become the platform for Causecast, a site where “media, philanthropy, social networking, entertainment and education converge to serve a greater purpose.” This is especially significant because Causecast CEO Ryan Scott is transitioning the site off of Ruby on Rails because Drupal has proved more efficient, user friendly, and cost effective. (Disclosure: Max Gladwell founder Rob Reed is co-founder of PopRule.)

8. Green Your iPhone: Looking for an organic diner within biking distance that has a three-star green rating? There’s a app for that. It’s called 3rd Whale, and you can download it for free. (Except that the star rating is actually a whale rating.) Complete with Facebook Connect, this iPhone app locates green products and businesses in 30 major North American cities. It uses the iPhone’s dial function to select a category (food), sub-category (restaurants), and distance (walking, biking, or driving). In Santa Monica, this might give you Swingers diner for its selection of veggie and vegan fare. You could then get directions from your current location using the iPhone’s built-in Google map, rate your experience on the three-whale scale, and write up a quick review. 3rd Whale recently released a new feature that integrates green-living tips, which can show how much energy or waste you’ll save by taking a given action.

9. Unite the World Through Video: Matt’s dancing around the world video inspired many to tears. Today, more than 20 million people have viewed his YouTube masterpiece, where he performs a kooky dance with the citizens of planet earth. The most recent example of this approach is Playing for Change, which connects the world through song. The project started in Santa Monica with a street performance of the classic Stand By Me and expanded to New Orleans, New Mexico, France, Brazil, Italy, Venezuela, South Africa, Spain, and The Netherlands. The project was superbly executed via social media, complete with a YouTube channel, MySpace, Facebook, and Blog. It’s received tremendous mainstream media exposure and also benefits a foundation of the same name.

10. Rate a Company: The conversation about corporate social responsibility (CSR) takes place across the social web on blogs, Twitter, and YouTube, but a central hub for this information and opinion is still to be determined. SocialYell seeks to address this by building an online community around the CSR conversation, where users can submit reviews of companies together with nonprofit organizations and even public figures like Michelle Obama. The major topics are the Environment, Health, Social Equity, Consumer Advocacy, and Charity. The reviews are voted and commented on by the community in a Reddit-like fashion with both up (Yell) and down (shhh) voting. The site is relatively new and still gaining traction, but there’s no question that a resource like this is needed to shine a bright light on CSR and and other related issues.

11. Publish a collective, simultaneous blog post on a universal topic: As Nigel Tufnel might say, this list goes to eleven. Let the #10Ways conversation begin…

Final note: This is Max Gladwell’s third list of “10 Ways to Change the World Through Social Media.” The first was posted a year ago today on Sustainablog.org, and the sequel followed five months later. If a single headline can capture the Max Gladwell raison d’etre, this is it.

Related posts

• Facebook is Putting My Mother Out Of Business (2)
• Social Media, Virtual Communities, and Generosity (45)
• Sexism: There’s an App for That (15)
• Padding, Spandex, Social Profiles, and Other Bits of Fakery (4)
• Natural Papa Nominated For Treehugger’s Best of Green (7)

We used to get a phone call from our mothers once a week with the news from home: weddings, funerals, births, stories of who was doing what (and with whom). Now we can just login and have all of that same information in real-time, with social media.

My buddy recently heard about a wedding proposal in his family via Facebook, and he joked that social media has enabled us to tell our moms what’s happening, instead of the other way around. I laughed because I hadn’t experienced that yet, but the next time I opened Facebook, it happened to me.

I was scrolling down through my friend’s status updates, and there was my sister-in-law with a message that said “Susie is… knocked up.” Woah. Hadn’t heard that through the family grapevine yet…

As a freelancer, I spend tons of time online, either writing, researching, or promoting my work. I started using Facebook so that I could do more networking for my writing, but now I also keep up with friends and family there. I may not always call them to find out how they’re doing, but I’m tuned into their channel just the same, through social media.

I also use Twitter quite a bit throughout the day, partially as a micro-blog, and partially to communicate the latest news and cool links from people I follow. I can ask a question, and if someone has an answer, I hear back almost immediately. It’s become an important tool for me.

Status updates and Tweets are more limited in some aspects of expression than a phone call or face-to-face conversation, but they are richer in others.

Social media messages:

• Can be in real-time, posted live
• Are quicker, with no waiting for someone to answer their phone or to leave a message
• Can have a link or picture or music in them for additional context
• Make you un-shushable

The phone is still great, and meeting in person is even better, but when you can’t do either, then social media is the perfect compromise.

If our mothers took their power to the web, there’s no telling what would happen.

We’d have Grandma on Twitter, telling family stories, 140 letters at a time…

Image: Alessio85 at Flickr under Creative Commons License

Related posts

• 10 Ways to Change the World Through Social Media (6)
• Review of The Evolution of Dad Film (1)
• Providing for Your Family isn’t about Presents, it’s about Presence (19)
• List of Twitter Dads to Follow (8)
• It’s Not the Fall So Much as the Impact (25)

Personal, Parenting and Natural Living Bio:

I’m a husband, a father, and a carrier of things.

I think peanut butter on anything is great.

I love big mountains and little kids, ’cause they make me smile, and I drink a double americano almost every day.

I’m a nature boy, a tree-hugging dirt-worshiper. I try to live with reverence for our web of life.

I like big trees and large boulders, cold mountain streams and redrock desert, the smell of pinyon and sage. I’d rather be sitting in a canoe in the wilderness than the backseat of a Rolls Royce.

(As long as the canoe had an espresso machine and a wireless connection…)

Things I dig include: simple living, natural fatherhood, attachment parenting, natural building, unassisted childbirth (homebirth), bicycles, composting (sawdust) toilets, organic and biodynamic gardening, vegan peanut butter cookies with chocolate chips, bouldering, and the blues.

In my life I’ve been a factory worker, a farmer, a grocery clerk, a handyman and jack of all trades. I’ve worked at fast food joints and car washes, for temp agencies and day labor hire, for moving companies and landscapers. I’ve driven forklifts and bobcats, and I’ve installed solar panels and sold fruit at the farmers market. I spent 10 years in the natural foods industry, most recently as the general manager of a natural foods co-op.

I support local food production and am a regular at the farmers market and our local food co-op. The dream of a sustainable homestead is still alive for us, and our self-sufficient zero-energy input green home is being planned. Our permaculture oasis is a sustainable small-scale village. Single-speed bicycles, drumming, and DIY anything can really make me grin.

Professional Bio:

I’m a freelance writer, available for content creation, editing, and proofreading. I can advise and help implement social media strategy for green and sustainability businesses, and I enjoy the conversational nature of engagement with readers and customers. I’m full of ideas and off the wall thinking, and can help you with your business ideas and strategy.

Follow me on Twitter: @derekmarkham

• Nominated for Best of Green by TreeHugger: Celebrity and Culture (two years running)
• Featured as a Top 10 Green Twitterer on Huffington Post Green
• Featured as one of 10 Green Twitterers You should Follow on Mother Nature Network
• Featured on LOHAS as a Top 50 LOHAS Twitterer
• Named on the Voices for Change Honor Roll by Greenhouse Neutral Foundation
• Named as one of the Top 25 Green Folks On Twitter by Greenopolis
• Named in 10 Green Bloggers We Love by Greenopia
• Named in Top 10 Green Twitterers to Check Out at OpenForum

I’m a Stumbler: d-man413

Let’s Digg: derekmarkham

Link up with me at LinkedIn: Derek Markham

My Posterous: Derek Markham

Sean Daily interviews me on GreenTalk Radio: GTR Green Blogger Series: Natural Fatherhood Blogger Derek Markham

Drop me a line at derek (at) naturalpapa.com.

And remember, two heads are better than one…

Related posts

• Why Dads Need to Dig in the Dirt (15)
• Two-fer Tuesday: The Revolution and Baby Burritos (0)
• Two-fer Tuesday: Cosleeping and Homemade Music (0)
• Two-fer Tuesday: Circumcising Your Daughter, and the Optimal Number of Kids (6)
• Two-fer Tuesday: Bullies and When Mom’s Away (1)