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I am watching, as many others apparently are, to see how the LinkedIn IPO will fare this week. This is the first of the Social Media platform giants to hit the stock exchange, now to be offered on the NYSE, rather than on NASDAQ, as originally proposed.

I’m not only interested in the value of shares (Mashable has been covering this intently), but the whole question of whether social media will now have a new kind of legitimacy for the typical business leader, particularly over 35 or even 45 years old. This has happened at least twice before in the past 30 years: specifically, when Apple (back then “Apple Computer”) released their Apple II desktop computer with a spreadsheet application (Visicalc), the desktop computer for business use was made legitimate by IBM’s PC (crushing the field with Lotus 1-2-3 sitting on Microsoft’s plain-Jane operating system). The World Wide Web became legitimate for business first in the early 90′s with the Netscape browser, again to be superseded by Microsoft with Internet Explorer.

Colleagues and I joke about the “facebookification” of LinkedIn, or the Twitterizing of LinkedIn, but I would say there are two ‘killer apps’ hidden in the bowels of the LinkedIn world:

1. Job Listings/Resumes
2. Group discussions (with moderation)

These are not new application—Monster.com was a leader for a long time in the job hunter’s world. Craig’s list, the de facto Web classifieds (at least for the US) has been around for a while. But the combination of the online resume right up front in the business/working ethos of LinkedIn makes it easier to manage than both of these older stalwarts.

However, I have really taken to the Groups and discussions, even though I am trying to give Quora a fair shake. What’s the difference? In my case, ease of use. LinkedIn is just easier to follow the Groups, topics and discusssions I want to follow. It’s easier to make a connection when I want to connect privately with someone about something under discussion. I trust the moderation, and even with Quora’s voting system, I still find the jumble of questions and answers harder to sort through.

And let me be bluntly clear about the interface: it does the job adequately and quite directly. As my fellow UX friends will say, that’s smart and that’s good, because as Google has clearly taught us, fancy graphics and an intrusive interface that slows down GETTING IN AND GETTING OUT will not improve the user experience. And what does the average business user want?

They want something that’s tested and works. They want it easy to use and relatively painless. They want it to be unobtrusive. They want privacy a la carte. And they want something that’s proven to be profitable as a business, to insure that it will last—this already happened, as opposed to some of the other (major) social media entities.

Visually, the unprettified LinkedIn may be low on pictures, but it puts connectivity right up front and center, with personal/professional background info and group interactivity just a layer or two below. Not glamorous, but it does the job. And, unlike Facebook, there are no great controversies over privacy issues and the ownership of content.

So, Thursday, I’m watching the New York Stock Exchange to see how it goes…and I might have to disclose that I own shares in LinkedIn by Friday, if the path to legitimacy for social media roars open.

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If success in Social Media is to be understood as ubiquitous, simple and easy, here’s an example of a great use of a commonly available tool that can work for business requiring no special app or interface design.

In a recent trip to Mexico City I was advised to not hire a taxi by walking out into the street and just raising my hand to flag one down, as I would in New York City. There was signage at the hotel warning visitors to only get cabs from their taxi stand, as well as local business people who gave me warning beforehand, so I was prepared to either make a phone call to get a recommended car service or wait patiently at the hotel’s manned curbside entrance.

On day 1 of the my trip in order to get from the hotel to the conference site, I dutifully went out to the hotel’s cab stand. A cab pulled up, operated by a driver who spoke adequate English, enough for my traveling partners’ comfort. He drove us as efficiently as possible through the tangled traffic (including using side streets to get past massive major roadway reconstruction that reminded me of Boston’s “BIG DIG” project), and handed us his business card as he dropped us off at our destination. “Call me anytime, day or night, if you need a taxi,” he said. Great! We had safe transportation, at a reasonable price.

At the end of the day, I called him to get a ride back to the hotel. He asked if I would mind if his son would come to pick us up. I thought, “why not?”, and a young man, probably in his mid-20′s, driving a different car (with the company logo discretely painted in the front window) arrived 20 minutes later.

In the course of the trip back (again through all of the short cuts that an experienced driver would take to avoid construction and traffic), I discover that this son was part of a family-owned fleet of six taxis, a combination of brothers and cousins and their sons all pooling their vehicles and sharing fares. At the end of this trip, Mauricio then gave us his business card, branded with the fleet’s logo and giving his name and his cell phone number (see below—but read the tips first!).

My business partners and I then called him regularly over the next two days for our travel, but the most interesting element of my experience with this cab driver and his use of mobile technology occurred on the last night of our stay, where we all had early flights back to New York.

Mine was the first, where I asked to be picked up at 2AM. “No problem,” says Mauricio, the taxi driver.

Here comes the social media surprise:

At 2:05 AM, I am patiently waiting at the cab stand driveway. No sign of Mauricio’s small grey car. At 2:14 AM, my phone rings. It’s Mauricio texting me, reporting that he is waiting for me—however, he’s on the opposite side of the building, at the rear entrance of the hotel.

Not a problem: a few more short text messages, and he has pulled around the building. Off we go.

I’m amazed…I can’t imagine having the same experience with a New York cabbie. Perhaps I could with one of the “gypsy” cabs (the private fleets that tend to service the areas of New York City that our expensively-licensed yellow cabs don’t want to drive through), but this fellows nonchalant use of texting to conduct business offered an important view of where customer service needs to be: EVERYWHERE. All he needed was my phone number.

Social Media doesn’t have to be hard. It just has to be organic in the way you communicate with customers.

The 5 tips:

1. Keep it simple.
2. Make it easy to be accessible.
3. Boil it down to getting the message across (both ways).
4. When it’s over, don’t linger (customers have other things to do).
5. Satisfied customers come back when they are ready—and they tell their friends.

With that last point in mind, if you’re in Mexico City and you need a reliable cab driver, call Mauricio Escobedo:

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Transmedia has gone beyond simply infiltrating the social media channels: last year I participated in a transmedia storytelling property called “Crushing it! A Social Media Love Story” which used Twitter, YouTube and a collection of blogs to create a story and engage an audience over the course of one week. Getting audience participation in creating the flow and defining the outcome of the story was an important element in the activity. I would say that if we had a pre-constructed plot line or a fixed, predetermined ending it really wouldn’t be correct to call it “transmedia”. Adaptation, surprise and collaborative genesis to both characters and story threads are now considered integral to a transmedia property. The key to success was how the writing team worked on the project: they “performed” as actors, primarily in real time via Twitter, writing in the voice of their characters. They could respond naturally and convincingly when interacting with people on-line, and then follow up with scripted material played in front of the camera on YouTube which reflected conversation that occurred earlier in the day. What happens when an automated content generator, which we usually call a bot or spammer, is unleashed to engage us via Twitter or Facebook?

In the past month I have noticed a sudden wave of new spammers, bots and other blatantly unrealistic Twitterers following me. For example, take a look at the profile of someone who tried to follow me in the past few weeks (This account has already been closed by Twitter, by the way).

Screen shot of a spammer's Twitter account

What are the giveaway signs? The name and the “glam shot” profile picture are a good place to start—sort of like those photos that go into picture frames that are sold in a store, but you wouldn’t put them up in your home because they aren’t really you. The bio is also rather suspicious.

The tweets are a collection of gibberish or odd listing of websites. In this case, the creation of a fake account is pretty easy to spot. But what about a more carefully planned creation of a false identity, or persona?

Social Times reported last month that the U.S. Air Force was looking for the development of  ‘“Persona Management Software,” software that manages online “personas,” allowing a single human to assume the identities of as many fake people as they’d like.’

A month later, as I check back on the article (which has not been pulled offline), I notice it has received eight comments. I have no idea how many views the article has had, but I would have thought it would have gained more attention. In the meantime, I assume that the best “fake” personas would be created and maintained by creative individuals working in real time, building their characters and weaving their stories as they do in ARG’s, World of Warcraft, Second Life and other places where the completely fabricated persona is the norm, but created through the regular interaction of a real person. Persona Management Software will have to be written to appear to care about the people it is engaging with in conversation, and will have to display concern, interest, and the ability to draw from both knowledge and experience to seem real.

There are at least 4 valuable lessons to learn from these automated content generators that apply to social media, transmedia, and storytelling as it applies to brand management or customer relationship management:

• Interaction in text-based social media is perceived as “real” when the content seems conversational, with a natural give-and-take. One-way or scripted messaging isn’t satisfying. Although you should answer questions or acknowledge requests for contact, social media is asynchronous communication and you can afford to take time to make your words relate and make sense.

• Personality, much like the defining qualities of a brand, is perceived through  expositional content or information over time — one tweet, one tag line, or a 2-line bio on a twitter page is, a best, an ice-breaker. The collected information others receive from us gives the audience a larger picture, and establishes credibility. Bots, spam engines and some over-eager marketers never exhibit patience — they routinely “overshare”, and often don’t create a satisfactory “back story” about who is the person behind the message.

• Asking questions does draw people in, but a response that reflects comprehension keeps people engaged.  Automated voice response systems have become much better at this, but when it gets too complex they are still triggered to bring in the live person to get full satisfaction. Spammers lose our attention if they cannot answer questions—that’s why they pepper their text-based messages with phone numbers to reach a live respondent to attempt to sell us a story.

• Offering to help before knowing what the message recipient wants or needs is a dead giveaway that you’re probably not real—or rude, at the very least. Telephone solicitation scripts in recent years have moved to the “may I ask you to participate in a survey” model to find out if the subject fits the sales target before making the offer. By signing on for social media interaction through Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn we may have given away a large chunk of our privacy, but it doesn’t mean we will accept intrusive behavior. Asking someone to visit a link in an introductory message is often considered suspicious.

This might seem like common sense more than secrets to social media or transmedia success, but how to handle consumer interaction is a thorny question for customer relation professionals  and marketers who are looking at the growing use of Facebook and Twitter by consumers and potential consumers. Even the casual social media user  is not a passive audience member; he/she is substituting Facebook messages, tweets, blog comments and YouTube posts in place of or in addition to phone calls and emails, and the conversation is often both revealing and quite public. Automation, despite winning at ‘Jeopardy!’, isn’t ready to take the place of human interaction. At least, not until spammers really learn how to program the algorithm(s) of natural conversation in satisfying sync with real life.

Spammers and unaware business enterprises attempting to utilize social media appear to be as artificial as the actors in silent movies overtly gesturing and posturing to convey their message. It takes hands-on participation and conscious interaction to make social media or transmedia to work—even if it’s use is to fulfill a role.

Twitter Spambots - Austin Powers would have them as a new nemesis' minions.

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Thanks to Howard Greenstein, I was able to get into the the Social Media Club meeting in New York City last week on short notice. The details about the meeting, along with video, is posted here: http://www.socialmediaclub.org/author/howard/

I didn’t want to tweet about it, which I am finding is now a great way of making notes, but I did bring pencil and pad to write down things that might interest me. The first speaker, Fraser Kelton (@fraser) spoke about Glue, and the issue of “walled gardens” keeping data from transferring between applications.  My pad and pencil responded with this:

The second speaker was Tina Alexander, talking about the community sites currently in beta on The Wall Street Journal’s site.I was struck by the idea of “Curated content”, a phrase she used, and drew this:

The images come from the talks, and they serve as reminders of the talks. Sometimes from listening, pictures are created in the mind that are more striking than anything projected on the screen. Sometimes, you have to close your eyes to see.

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