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Strategy and  “The Rectification of Names“.

Longtime blogfriend and sometime collaborator Critt Jarvis has a guest post on “branding” and social networks up at Strategis:

Dear Brand Manager

 Here’s the dirty little secret so-called social networking “experts” don’t want you to know: “US consumers are most interested in brands that keep them up to date and improve their knowledge. And they do not want brands to act like their friends.

Critt, who has been involved in a number of edge tech projects is usually ahead of the curve. Critt is best known for convincing Thomas P.M. Barnett to start blogging back at a time when blogging was an emerging “fad” and the idea of a “serious” defense or national security expert blogging was regarded as ridiculous ( and it probably sped Tom’s departure from the Naval War College and into the big leagues of writing and consulting). Today it’s hard to think of an important foreign policy-defense type who doesn’t blog or at least try to promote their articles and op-eds in the blogosphere and sites like SWJ.

Critt’s calling attention to the point that once you get past the novelty of having a twitter account or a facebook page, your institution’s online presence has to actually be delivering value in terms of useful content and substantive interaction on a regular basis.

He’s right, but it is going to take some time for the crowd to catch up to him.

If you have visited SWJ Blog today then you have already seen that novelist and blogger Steve Pressfield is running an important paper by SF Major Jim Gant at his Tribes site:

One Tribe At A Time #4: The Full Document at last! 

I’ve been promising for several weeks to have a free downloadable .pdf of One Tribe At A Time. Finally it’s here. My thanks to our readers for their patience. On a personal note, I must say that it gives me great pleasure to offer this document in full, not only because of my great respect for Maj. Jim Gant, who lived and breathed this Tribal Engagement idea for years, but for the piece itself and for the influence I hope it will have within the U.S. military and policymaking community.

One Tribe At A Time is not deathless prose. It’s not a super-pro Beltway think tank piece. What it is, in my opinion, is an idea whose time has come, put forward by an officer who has lived it in the field with his Special Forces team members-and proved it can be done. And an officer, by the way, who is ready this instant to climb aboard a helicopter to go back to Afghanistan and do it again

Here is Major Gant’s PDF:

One Tribe at a Time: A Strategy for Success in Afghanistan

This matters because the Afghanisatan debate has been too much a COIN or CT or COIN/CT Hybrid discussion and this paper puts forward a strategy option based upon decentralization, which given the strongly localist tradition of Afghani politics, should have been on the table from the inception.  The nation-building, NGO, IGO community love to think in terms of “top down” or “capital city outward” but not every country has that kind of political tradition embedded in their national culture.

Is coming.

Thanks to the kind invitation of S. Anthony Iannarino, I have been on the much vaunted, often coveted,  Google Wave beta app ( I do not have any invites yet, sorry ) which mashes up email, realtime transparent instant messaging, other embedded web 2.0 apps and a wiki-like functionality. The interface looks like this ( from O’Reilly Radar – who can explain Google Wave far better than I can:

What is it like?

First, for me, it’s a small handful of my blogcircle ( most of who are techies) milling about chatting, trying to figure out the functionality. The champ so far is Sean Meade, who is Tom Barnett’s webmaster and also the web editor for ARES; Sean assembled a tutorial “wave” for the rest of us that I have just begun to plod through. It is not easy to find other googlewavers which is why people are posting calls on Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites.

Secondly, this is a very unfinished symphony of a beta – at least compared to prior beta experiences I’ve had. Sliderocket, by comparison was very smooth and probably 95 % ready when I received a beta account while with Google Wave I’d anticipate significant differences before it becomes generally available. As it is going to be open source, the potential creativity for future apps is vast.

Cool, interesting, not entirely sure how I will eventually use it on a regular basis yet.