A recurring theme that has been running through my mind lately surrounds the topic of authenticity.

Ramana Maharshi, the late Indian sage, is famously known for repeatedly asking the question,

At the time of this writing, I have over 91,000 Twitter followers. No, I don’t read every word they type. No, I don’t recommend that you try to get 10s of thousands of followers. But I’m frequently asked how I keep up with everyone, and so, I’m going to update something I wrote once before in November of 2008. I hope this is useful to you.

The news may overflow with stories about the social networking giants, such as Facebook and MySpace, but a horde of companies are doing their best to reduce the fundamental features of these websites to mere commodities. These up-and-coming companies provide so-called “white label” social networking platforms that enable their customers to build their own social networks (often from scratch) and to tailor those networks to a range of purposes.

Facebook may have recently passed MySpace as the most-visited social networking site in the US, but it’s facing stiff competition for the attention of social media marketers. By some metrics, Twitter is more popular in the marketing world.

A recent survey conducted by Proofpoint found that 8% of companies had terminated employees due to social media usage (common causes including sharing sensitive information on a network). And while the statistic seems significant, it only underscores one of several upcoming challenges nearly every organization will face as changes in people, process and technology fueled by the collective movement we call social media begin to transform business.

I'm slowly coming down from a big 'high' due to an amazing three day socialmedia event Podcamp Boston.

The only hangover from this party will be organizing and implementing the awesome ideas shared by some of the biggest thought leaders in social media for business and technology.

It’s an odd dynamic I see in play today - in today’s ever connected environment marketers tell me they feel even more removed from direct customer interaction.

As a former sale person, I used to schedule “ride-along” time with my sales team just to get out on sales calls and hear how we position ourselves in front of the customer, how that message lands on the customer and more importantly what the customer is saying in reaction to how we are positioned.

You've read the big social media blogs, followed the pundits' advice and tweaked your social media profile to your heart's content. Make your social media presence even more engaging with ideas from these 3 inspired social media profiles:

In my last blog post we discussed How Social Commerce will lead to Advocacy Based Marketing (ABM) because of things like Facebook Connect. And if we start to move to Advocacy Based Marketing (ABM) then perhaps a new measurement – the Cost per Advocate model will need to be born.

If there’s one thing I wish every company would realize, it’s this:

Brand and public relation disasters are not CAUSED by social media. Social media is what lets you SURVIVE them unscathed and better for the wear.