Super Empowered Angry Customers describes the shift in power that has taken place with the popularity of blogs, video sites such as YouTube, and websites such as “______CompanySucks.com” Companies have always claimed to listen to customers, but in practice many companies have routinely ignored many customers — and when this happened customers had little option beyond taking their business elsewhere.

Now they can take their business elsewhere AND cause a public relations disaster for the company that disappointed them. This has completely changed the dynamic between customers and companies, shifting the balance of power toward the customer to a never-before-seen degree.

So how shall we use our power, people? Will we use it for good or for evil? Every customer is not always right, and not every complaint is justified. It can be a very good thing to have more power, yet history is full of lessons about power being abused. Let’s try to use our power for good.

But when are we going to be able to use the cool javascript widgets and gadgets that other blogging platforms permit? I just wasted 20 minutes trying to add a little FriendFeed widget to this site, so people could post to their FriendFeed from here. Nope, you blocked it over and over. I had to settle for the little chiclet link, instead.

I have friends who know I blog, and when they want to get started blogging they ask me what platform they should choose. I used to say WordPress, but now I plan to send them elsewhere. You’re holding us back, as well as yourselves, WordPress.

Over time, I hope this blog will become another good resource for learning about the online community organizer role, as I will be posting about my experience, and my learning curve, going forward.

clipped from fastwonderblog.com Seth Godin recently called the Online Community Organizer role a Job of the Future. This brings me to the most common question: “What exactly do you do?” I see the online community manager role as having several key elements: ongoing facilitation, content creation, evangelism, and community evolution. There are certainly many more tasks, but I suspect that 90% of the work falls into one of these four very broad categories.

So, one decision I made was to let this blog include any and all content I felt like blogging about. I know people who have different blogs for different kinds of content. That makes sense, and if you’re trying to build traffic to your blog it’s probably best to be targeted in what you write about, so readers interested in that content will find your blog valuable.

But I’m not doing this for the website traffic and I couldn’t commit to keeping up with more than one blogs, such as one about work topics and one about things of personal interest to me. So I made this blog a blend that reflects all of me — all of my interests, whether professional or personal, the serious and the silly, the carefully considered and the random tidbits. I’ve decided I like it this way.

Now, my career has changed direction and blogging is suddenly part of my official job, internally in my company. So, now I have several internal company blogs I write in, leaving me with less work stuff to write about here (unless I choose to cross-post in both places, which is a possibility I’ve considered). And I really want to blog publicly about what we’re doing in my company with social media. So, do I start a new blog solely for this, or do I mix those posts in here?

Well, I’m still working this out, but the path of least resistance is to just to stick with putting all my external blogging in here. That means that my professional posts in here will shift from call center topics to social media topics. If you’ve been coming here for the call center content, you’ll find less and less that is new of interest for you here. If you come here for the non-call center stuff then you won’t see much change. If you’re interested in social media, then I hope you’ll find this blog to be a rich resource of ideas on that topic.

If you have any thoughts on it the direction I should go with this, please share them with me!

Here’s a glimpse:

For the past few hours, the wind has been rising and falling, the precursor of a storm coming in from the west. When the wind climbs, a kind of elation blows through the house — it’s the hushing sound of the leaves outside and the way the breeze sweeps the floors and lifts the curtains and slams the doors. The dogs snap to and look around when it gusts. And when the wind drops, it seems to drop us — the dogs and me — into the trough of an ordinary summer day.

I’m loving the rural lifestyle, myself, here in my cottage on a horse farm. It’s nice out here

So, apology and excuse offered, I’m shutting down and getting out of the house.

Since I find far more of such items than I have time to write about, I just slapped these into the blog. In fact, the fastest way to post them was to use Digg’s feature for automatically creating a blog post, so you’ll see the “read more” and “digg this” links on those posts. Click on “read more” to go the article referenced.

So far, many of those 56 posts are uncategorized, too. But I’ve spent far too long simply posting them today and it’s time to get other stuff done. I’ll go back through and assign them to categories later.

Hope you find some of them of interest. I welcome your comments!