NOTE: I will strive to be politically balanced in this post, and report the facts, not push an agenda. It is fine if you do not agree with me, but please check the facts for yourself.

The past few days, Sarah Palin has grabbed the headlines with her resignation as governor of Alaska. The battlelines were drawn instantly and there seem to be three camps.

I am not going to address either the conservative or liberal view, but if you think Sarah Palin is not a player, think again. I put her name into Google a second ago and she has 61,600,000 links. By contrast, I have 52,900 and if you are thinking she is a lightweight, I suggest that you put your own name into Google and see how many hits you draw.

And she uses Twitter skillfully. Her handle is AKGovSarahPalin and she has over 93,000 followers ( That will probably have to change now that she has resigned. ) Granted the past 48 hours have been some sort of wierd meltdown, with all the talk of lies and similar discussions:
- Attached is my “thank you” sent yesterday to express gratitude, & smack down lies at same time http://tinyurl.com/q28wl5
- Trying to keep up w/getting truth to u, like proof there’s no “FBI scandal”, here’s link http://tinyurl.com/nzlae8 Thanks, AK!
- Critics are spinning, so hang in there as they feed false info on the right decision made as I enter last yr in office to not run again…
- To see full text of the letter from my attorney on baseless allegations of past 24hrs check http://tinyurl.com/mmhv4u

And that is all in about ten hours, but if you go back to May and June, you will see her working to share news and gain the support of Alaskans and also the DoD. It will be interesting to see how Sarah Palin uses Twitter and other social media the next few weeks, but no matter what your political beliefs, do not count this woman out!

And while many people are counting her out, she is one of the best known names in the Republican party. Now to be sure, there are signs that she has a meltdown problem as this well researched Vanity Fair article, but with the right handler, and if she listens to that handler, she could be a player. She may never become President, but right now the Republican party needs some sort of makeover and she might be a key in keeping some of the conservative religious powerbase they must not lose.

I will try to do an update to this post as things shake out, but you know the old adage, press is good as long as they spell your name right. For now anyway, Sarah Palin is getting press, she can be photogenic, and she has a book deal. Alan Paller of the SANS Institute, who has been my mentor in life, taught me that you have to manage expectations. People are going to say things about her, second guess her and so forth. The clown quote of the day from Twitter is:
- madkahta Sarah Palin was going to run in 2012 but she had to quit because, it turns out, she can’t count that high.

If you have not heard of Neda, the ~22 year old lady gunned down in Tehran you probably need to get out ( on the Internet more ). When I first saw the video, I struggled, it did not appear that her head was covered, that would not play well in Iran; was the video fake ( and a lot of people are concerned it might be fake, as I write this Wikipedia is trying to sort that out). Well it turns out she was wearing a ball cap, if you get shot it is perfectly reasonable the ball cap does not remain on your head. At this point I think the odds are about 70% that the video is real.

Let me be clear, I am not sure about the source(s) for the story/video, but I am sure this is a validation for Social Media. Gazillions of Twitter and FaceBook users are posting and reading on the topic. You may be thinking, sure, but what can these social media outlets actually accomplish in the real world. Here are some thoughts:

- At one point a post came through asking everyone to set their home town to a city in Iran. Not sure if that actually makes a difference, but it does have the notion that people can be part of the revolution.

- I am only slightly invested, whichever side comes out on top will probably still pursue nuclear weapons, still pursue global destabilization, hate the USA and desire the termination of Israel.  This is interesting to me from a “is Internet 2.0 changing out world perspective”, but to say that it is requires far more than toppiling a totalitarian regime, (we could do that pre-internet and with internet 1.0) to prove game changing would mean a start of communication that allowed people that speak Farsi to communicate with people that speak English/Spanish/French and to explore our similarities and differences. I would be happy to be proven wrong, but do not expect that to happen.

For Neda’s death to have a true impact on perception management there needs to be a name, possibly a song associated with the event. People die every day and it does not change our lives. But I was young and impressionable when the Kent State Massacre happened:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings  and the song “Ohio” ) still plays in my brain and still colors my thinking about governments to some extent. And it was the nail in the coffin for the pro-Vietnam, anti-peace forces. Will such a thing happen with Neda? How would I know, but that or something similar has to happen to make the average world citizen engage. Iran is such a bunch of losers, the United Nations wisely ignores them to the extent possible. Is it possible the death of one young lady and reshape all of the entrenched hatred and rhetoric? I would have to vote probably not, but social media has the potential of being a game changer. If Elton John ( substitute you most influential rock star ) was to release a song, if, if, if the world might change. I am betting on status quo in this instance, but the world learns, the internet learns, natural selection means more than temperature change.

The Tehran government is attempting a total information lockdown, in response people are trying to get information out to the world. This is the classic information warfare struggle and governments and activist groups alike will learn much from this no matter how the endgame plays out. We will learn a lot from this event about what is and is not possible in the world today.

A lot has been written about the benefits and risks of business using social media. Here are some practical things to keep in mind. A BusinessWeek story says, “When in doubt using Twitter, “don’t say anything you wouldn’t say to your mom.” The article goes on to say how an advertising company risked losing an account because they saw the company was courting one of their competitors . . . on Twitter.

They have another article saying don’t spend a dime on your own social media, use the existing ones, but that puts your information out there for all to see.

I read an article recently about a Canadian Marketing event and they were talking about blogs. When I read this sentence: What if users say bad things about us on our blog? What if nobody shows up to participate? What if this flops?” My jaw dropped, we just started a SANS blog and these are exactly the questions that I was concerned about.

I could go on about risk, but I think we all get the idea, we can disclose sensitive information, we might disclose erroneous or inapproriate information and people might say bad things about us, true or untrue. Now what are the rewards?

Charlene Li’s book, Groundswell, has plenty of examples of social media being a benefit to business, go to your library and borrow a copy. I did an Internet search and found a few more thoughts. Social Media helps you do market research, it helps you know what your customers are saying. As an example I try to use search.twitter.com and look up “SANS Institute” to see what people have tweeted.

Like most people, my first impression of Twitter was huh? I came back six months later after reading about Twitter being used to report on Flight 1549 as it landed in the Hudson river. I realized that anyone with a mobile phone could be a reporter, especially if they had followers. Twitter also has an amazing ability to let people outside of events interact with events. Time ran a story about #hackedu, where people tweeted during a conference to hashtag #hackedu, then the outside world got involved and it is still going on today to some extent three months after the conference.

These technologies allow collaboration on a scale never seen before. A video was posted of a kitten being killed to the Internet, but people decided to bring the killer to justice, they analyzed the background determined the identify of the killer. And that is not the only time it has happened as this compelling article shows.