Reading about Gutenberg, movable type, and printing in general always makes me think about just how far we’ve come in the realm of communications and the ability to disseminate information. As many of you know, I’m a letterpress printer, using machines that aren’t much different from the ones Gutenberg himself worked with five hundred, yep, that’s 500! years ago!!!

On the other end of spectrum, though, is the work that I’m lucky enough to do every day in the realm of electronic communications. Read the Wired, This Day In Tech, article, and allow your mind to wander, thinking about, imagining, the world of lead type, and heavy cast iron that was needed to get a message out there. Then think back a bit further to a time of hand scribes, and no dissemination at all except what could be passed word-of-mouth.

It’s kind of hard to imagine especially in a world rapid-fire tweets, Facebook status updates, RSS feeds, and blog posts just like this one, that not too long ago there was no Web, or iPhone, or Blackberry or anything else that permitted such awesome real-time, in the moment, communication. Just sayin’… pretty awesome.

Our struggle now isn’t the media, but finding the attention to dedicate to it all… Exciting stuff.

It used to be that you would find special niche businesses with an exceptional online presence. This was especially true with record labels, niche book publishers, used book sellers, such as Powell’s and a variety of other businesses that found great growth opportunity through the interconnectedness of the Web when they couldn’t find sustainable means in their respective locale. However, things have begun to shift in recent years as energy and sustainability issues have become more and more of an issue.

Scientists, universities, and businesses alike are all investigating sustainable means for producing energy and/or just making less expensive and less environmentally toxic means of transport. However, on all accounts we’re a long way from the energy silver bullet. What’s happened because of this is that local has become the new exotic. As we move towards this emphasis on local goods and services, including locally grown food, locally made goods, local entertainment, stay-cations and the like, small business is faced with huge opportunity on the Web.

Historically only a precious small percentage of small, local, businesses have bothered with the most basic Web presence. The thing is as more and more folks are using iPhones, Blackberries, Twitter, Facebook, and Google to find family restaurants rather than national franchises, and small boutiques over big-box stores, or just trying to find something unique and different in their locale they’re turning to the Web. More and more, I’m telling small business owners and would-be small business owners to get their company online before you worry about the Yellow Pages and the like. Even a basic, professionally done Web presence is better than no Web presence at all, especially if you’re doing something truly local and truly unique to your community.

Closed… that’s how many companies today think they can operate their business and successfully employ a digital strategy.

In a world where the lines between what’s work and personal become more blurred, and folks are reviewing message on their Blackberry’s in bed at night, or doing more and more work from home, how can any organization expect that there won’t be some blurring between not just the work into the personal portion of life, but also the personal part of life bleeding into work. They’re hand & glove, and in a world where business wants to leverage social media, transparency and openness for business gains, that doubled-edge sword cuts both ways when social aspects of the business can’t be contained in quite the same way they were in days of old.

This makes businesses very uneasy, and this Business Week article: Web 2.0: Managing Corporate Reputations serves to illustrate this. While a fair journalistic effort, at least from the model of closed, and old model business communications, the story offers very little in the way of what it means to be open, and how openness and transparency can transform corporate reputation, and in some cases define it (Read: The truth will set you free… or when there’s nothing to hide, there’s nothing hide from). However, we’re in a transitional phase, so it makes sense that an open and transparent perspective can be lost especially when you’re talking about big businesses who’s business it’s been to keep things cloaked in darkness.

It’s not fair to think that business can expect employees to be on Blackberry, Facebook, or Twitter dealing with clients, customers, reputation, etc, thus leveraging these new outlets… and that somehow the personal aspects of people’s lives won’t enter the fold. The human experience is messy business, and if you don’t want those lines being crossed then make those lines very clear, and eliminate these pieces from your strategy, because they’ll just be inauthentic in a forum where authenticity rules. Otherwise, the fact that humans can have off-days and make bad decisions is inevitable, and it’s also inevitable that some of that may bleed into business. It happens to everyone, all the time, let’s just be with that, and move on. If a company is authentically open and transparent, nobody will care about an employee’s drunken mis-step or other unsavory details of their life getting out.

An organization with a successful digital strategy embraces openness, transparency and the reality that we’re operating in a world that’s forever out of our control.