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In The Harvard Business Review, blogger and entrepreneur David Armano asks, “Are you living social?” The piece advises companies who are already engaged in or about to embark on, a social media initiative, to think long and hard about what it means to be fully engaged in the socially networked popular culture arena. Social media “isn’t a one shot deal,” cautions Armano, but rather, requires commitment, sincerity, transparency, and real-time response. Or to borrow a metaphor from Drew McLellan, social media marketing is a marathon, not a sprint.

The best way to launch and maintain a social media presence is to recruit and retain employees who are already adept at living social. Armano presses CEOs to ask themselves: “Do any of the people who make up your company, agencies, partners and so on actually live social? Do they demonstrate that they work and play in a connected fashion?”

Armano concludes with a warning to administrators who might, on the one hand, prohibit social network access on company time/workstations, and on the other, hire a digital PR company or task an intern with managing a twitter feed: “If you’re not genuinely, honestly engaged in the social network, you won’t get far with those who are.”

What this Harvard Business Review piece is pointing to are the key ingredients of participating in socnet culture: authenticity and credibility. The kind of realness that comes from consistent investment in social media community building, online content creation, contribution, and curation, and genuine two-way communication. To foster a culture of connected living and working, we need only look to companies such as Starbucks, Zappos, and BestBuy who are out in front—or any of the highly influential companies profiled by Razorfish in their yearly index of socially savvy organizations.

For individuals, the dynamics of living social are no different from the “rules” for brands, as described by the experts cited above. Increasingly we judge other people on their lifestream, digital footprints and e-presence in social networks—on what Seth Goldstein calls “identity spaces” such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. To stay up-to-date, relevant, and “in order to get ahead in today’s information and online driven world,” Dan Schawbel (author of Me 2.0) writes,”you have to participate or be extinct.” Moreover, to opt-out of social computing may mean a loss of credibility, since for many of those who are living social, “If Google Can’t Find You, You Don’t Exist“—to borrow the title of an insightful blog post by Rosetta Thurman.

One of the emergent trends for 2010 according to Schawbel is elevated importance placed by employers on individuals’ online participation: “You will be judged on voice, not just your resume,” he warns. But it’s not just in the worlds of work and marketing that living social matters. In a culture where Googling new acquaintances romantic interests is commonplace, it should come as no surprise that the next trend in online matchmaking is stream dating.

Although LavaLife, eHarmony, Match.com and other major online matchmaking services have anonymity as the foundation of personal profiles that form the basis of compatibility quests—today the Facebook Generation seeks connections (romantic and otherwise) that are vetted via identity sites and their personal social graphs.

All of which raises the question: how would a prospective mate (or employer) rate your suitability, sociability, work-life balance based on a Google search? How would they assess your potential, relevance, influence, and vitality/appearance—and if there isn’t enough accurate/current information online to build a full picture of you, do you think they won’t do so anyway with whatever data is ready at hand? Today, for better or for worse, “our selves are all in the hands of Google,” but “social networking allows us more control over the image we present,” observes Andy Oram (in a 7-part series for O’Reilly about online identity). Configuring and refreshing one’s personal SEO is an ongoing everyday act in an increasingly real-time web—one that effectively identifies those who are adept at living social.

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