To all people out there who celebrate a brand new year in the middle of miserable cold weather, please rethink who the real joke is being played on. It is being played on All the King’s subjects that obeyed his silly law for the last 446 years. Long live King Charles IX!!!!!!! The people on earth are still the sheep that fall for your April 1 jokes. Lesson learned: Perceived reality becomes the only reality if you tease/supress people long enough.

Some graduates include:

- A high school teacher
- Security manager at a Fortune company.
- An American Advisor to Ministry of Public Health in Afghanistan
- An quality Engineer
- An American Superconductor Applications Engineer in Taiwan
- A wealth management advisory company president in Boston
- A systems admin for a state tax commission.

Even worse, there is a medical diploma mill that Dr. George Gollin is fighting right now called St. Luke School of Medicine.

They already have “a graduate” in Linkedin, a fellow Realtor who decided to become a “Doctor of Naturopathic Medicine”. I love Google, don’t you?

Above is one of my childhood’s favorite scenes from Back to the Future 2 where Michael Fox takes off with a hoverboard running into a flying car that just landed in the year 2015. I have read the news today that China has taken over US in car production. So what? We are five years away from 2015. There are no hoverboards. There are no flying cars. There is just a beaten up economy where everyone tweets and noone dreams. We need to get rid of this old concept of the car and the roads. The spirit of Benjamin Franklin needs to arise again. Americans need to learn to envision and literally relearn how to fly. 2015 and the dreams of our childhood are only five years away.

Clearly when it comes to information prescription and control, both Google and China are dictators. Google would like to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” in a format that would bring it the most advertising revenue. China would simply like to control information that flows to its citizenry so that such information will not create a risk for its controlling “communist” regime.

Google has given an ultimatum to China about China interfering in Google’s information dictatorship (aka. corporate/government espionage and hacking practices on its information database). It is the first time a corporation dared to publicly challenge a nation. It is also the first time Google confronts another information dictatorship. The entire so far seems to be a motion to force China to the negotiation table more than any other ideals that Google claims. Time will show. In terms of directly pulling out of China, since Google is a publicly traded corporation, every stockholder would hunt the Google board if it was to back out of serving 20+% of the world population with its ad space.

I hope they can get what they want from the Chinese doing this negotiation dance before their PR balloon blows up completely in their face. Winning a battle with the Chinese in their own home field is something that happens only once in a 1000 years. Winning that battle is not for every one even if you are the most valuable brand in the world. The last person conquer the Chinese was Kublai Khan in 1271

In a funny irony, these maze of events, a classic movie dance classic by Charlie Chaplin in the movie “Great Dictator” (1940) as the character “Hynkel” (representing Hitler). The dance is about its dreams of controlling the entire world. Of course his balloon also pops up representing the failure of every dictator that dreams of world dictatorship. Charlie Chaplin at his best…

Some men aren’t looking for anything logical. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn – Alfred Pennyworth (Michael Caine) – The Dark Knight

There are web mobs everywhere.

• Democrats and Republicans used it in 2008 to flood the media channels with thousands of emails when a media channel wrote something that does not fit their agenda.
• The reason why Wikipedia is never a trusted source in a university is that it is ruled by a Mob mentality, where many controversial articles are nothing but a virtual fist fight.
• Whenever you see a video about Chinese human rights, you see the Chinese commenters flooding it with an onslaught saying it is Western Propoganda.
• Any politically incorrect opinion gets squashed because the opinion holder is turned into a racist, fanatic, etc. through a slaught of comments
• Theories that are thrown out there for discussion are killed by web trolls who know nothing but to criticize and ruin the theory .
• Digg.com, the biggest English speaking bookmarking website in the world is ruled by a mob who will bury any bookmarking effect

There could be hundreds of examples for these mobs. They are like leaderless herds with no individual goals. Their only goal is to quiet the opposition. The internet is becoming a place of mob mentality. The courage to oppose a mob is becoming less and less as everyone is scared to “ruin” their online reputation. Internet is not becoming a place for the single individuals to raise their opinions but for mobs to quiet them.

Will you there to be an individual? Will you dare to rise above the crowd? Will you dare to be the thought leader that will run his/her own mob? Without a mob it seems, the world wide world becomes a very lonely and scary place. And your first amendment rights?? Without a mob, just like your privacy it becomes nothing but a concept on an old piece of paper. Because not some men but a lot of them (and women) just want to watch you burn.

Inonu Stadium - BJK.com

What makes a small crowd become so driven?

Loyalty only happens when you feel like you belong. And belonging only occurs with the perceived value of ownership. These feelings do not necessarily occur with multi million dollar stars or flashy TV advertisements. This type of loyalty cannot be driven through a company sponsored program. It can only start through a grassroots movement in groups like Carsi, Besiktas’ unofficial fan club. Such a driven group is not only a fan base but a culture on its own. It has almost overtaken the club culture and branded it with its own. The group does not only reflect their loyalty but they have become a megaphone for taking on unique social problems of the country such as poverty, terror, etc. The brand of Besiktas is synonymous with Carsi. Does your identity have a Carsi group of its own?

Organization/Company leaders should answer these questions,

Do you have a fan base for your organization?

Does your fan base stand for something greater than your brand?

How do you support and thrive an “independent” fan base?

Do you have the right PR toolsets to ride the wave of the unruly fan base reputation issues?

Most importantly, do you have the guts to lead it?

Above questions are the nightmares that Brand Managers have. But a “perceived” lack of brand control is sometimes the differentiating factor between the great and the average. Just ask the Body Shop. Sometimes leaders like Anita Roddick (RIP) can become the leaders of the unruly fan base and make the brand something much bigger than it is. That requires a genius and faith in something bigger than you will ever be.

Your fan base should be as loud as the video below. I have yet to see such a thing in USA . It is an incredible feeling.

In an ever complex world, the success of any task assigned to any one of the above silos/agencies rely on the others’. How do companies expect to have a voice in the light speed world of the internet? Even more importantly, how do agencies survive with such limited scope and control in such a complex world that has hundreds of different variables that dictate their success? Imagine a house where there are multiple bricklayers who are trying to start bricking different parts of the house without a house plan. Consider SEO, PPC, PR and all the other tools as bricks with different colors and shapes. The agencies/corporate silos are the different bricklayers trying to brick the same house without coordinating with each other. The end result will probably be the ugliest house in the world.

The concept of the traditional business school of organization chart has to be reexamined where bonuses are based on team work coordination rather than individual performance. Without such coordination, the business landscape will be full of ugly homes.

The above Onion parody about Google’s take on your privacy is not too far of a stretch. How much are you truly willing to pay for your privacy when you are willing to take the bandwith of Facebook, Google, Twitter and countless other websites for free. Nothing is for free. You pay for it., literally…with your life. I look forward to meeting you in a remote island real soon.

You’re playing and you think everything is going fine. Then one thing goes wrong. And then another. And another. You try to fight back, but the harder you fight, the deeper you sink. Until you can’t move… you can’t breathe… because you’re in over your head. Like quicksand. – Shane Falco (Keanu Reeves), The Replacements

In an economic depression, many small businesses and unemployed people look for a lifeboat to save them. They forget about the life fundamentals that bring them there and look for the next “great thing”. Nowadays, that “great thing” became social media.

Every corner you turn, you find another overcrowded social media seminar/workshop full of experts trying to teach you how to become successful. Suddenly there are 1000 experts telling you to be in it or lose it. Peer pressure combined with a mob attitude creates a chain of untested opinions. We jump in head first trying to learn about the “coolest” social media channels. We spend hours wasting ourselves in twitter, facebook, youtube & many other social media websites.

The stereotype profiles who fill these low budget training seminars are

• the desperate business owners who think they might learn an idea that will save their business;
• the unemployed who have given up finding a job
• Other social media addicts who dream that they will be the next great blogger or social media celebrity.

At the end of the day with no preplanned strategy for their personal and business lives; they simply act on desperation & impulse. They disappear in the quick sand still dreaming about becoming a social media success story.

I would truly love WhiteHouse.gov to give instructions every single day about how you can help your fellow countrymen/women as much as it gives instructions about how to help Haiti just for a week or two until the headlines fade away.

My fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man – JFK, Jan 24, 1960