Microsoft

Looks like FWD.us will have its work cut out for it in terms of being able to communicate its full scope.  Though written in black and white, somehow the sentiment seems to be that this PAC is solely focused on immigration and is done so at the cost of American jobs.  Seems that many people are either over-looking or do not believe the additional future work on education and more.  This is important to not because perception is very key in the SmartPower era.   Due to current social situations, any organizations now not only benefit by being very transparent, but also, very skillful in creating alliances and tangible results in areas of interest in order to actual drive home the focus of the overall mission.  Given the shift in mindset demonstrating that people are moving further and further away from blindly believing the "headline" of an event, organizations such as this will have an interesting set of next steps to take.  Fasten your seatbelts!

Here it seems we have a combination of elements going on in the comment-sphere.  First, there push-back regarding corporate giants having what is perceived as too much control and heavy-handedness.  As we see such actions as Twitter users throwing back MSFT's recent #DroidRage hashtag experiment back in the company's face and more, we see yet more evidence of individuals becoming more and more vocal against the "machine."  Though we're in the very, very early days; watch this behavior as it signals awareness of greater feelings of empowerment that could easily be used to shift market share in a heart-beat in the future.  Most companies are and will simply not be ready for this!  In addition, we also see that the comment-sphere exhibits a bit of that "leaderful" attitude, as in Comment #2.  "I can direct. I know what the company should do."  As these two elements converge, watch for an interesting 2013.

Interesting. A nice variety of comments on this one - ranging from light-hearted to lack of trust to concern over priorities.  This is indicative of more of the shift in our society.  Who controls what, when, how and why is being examined on every level.  New territory may not necessarily best be decided by the old-school particularly now that bottom-up is the rule, rather than top down.  We'd like to say that this is a new version of what sociologist call something like emergent group behavior, thought and action where cultural guide-lines are non-specific or inadequate.  Watch for more here, for certain!  In the meantime, who got to select Dubai for the meeting?  Pretty luxe, no?

To invade privacy or not to invade privacy, that is the question of the era and one which will have huge implications as we continue to move deeper into technology usage.  From the comments, our hunch here would be that there are two categories of thought on this:  "yes I know, and whatever" or "yes, I know, and it's not cool."  The interesting thing here is that there is a question over whether new digital voice communication should or should not be subjected to the exact same thing the old skool rotary dial was.  Similar to how sociologist Nicolas John noted on his blog recently,  this is about the "transgression of boundary between the inside and the outside."  This will need to continue to be tracked. In the meantime, we guess the best thing to say here is watch what you say, where you say.  LOL