If any of you in PR/Advertising/Marketing hasn’t read Howard Rheingold’s “Smart Mobs,” this mind-expanding book will give you a bigger jolt than Al Reis’ death knell: “The End of Advertising.”

Rheingold touches on two areas that I am currently working on :

1. REPUTATION MANAGEMENT
In the intro, ‘discussing reputation systems’ he observes that the online trust brokers are the equivalent of those in the offline world. In his Alvin Toffler-like purview of the future, he sees reputation systems and gossip intertwined. Ask anyone in Asia how the gossip/rumor connection works. It brings down governments, creates havoc in markets (ask Sonia Gandhi’s party!) and sometimes messes with products (ask Coke about Dasani’s ‘tap water’ story and Bromate problem in England!)

This point was driven home to me when I found this FUNDRACE site that allows you to check people’s U.S. campaign contributions by zip code! That’s right, this is public information, but now searcheble. You can even search by people’s last name! (There is only one person who turns up under a search for ‘Fernando’, but several pages of people with the last name of ‘Bush’ or ‘Heinz’)

2. ‘PROSUMERS’
He doesn’t use this term (I think it was Toffler who coined it) but he says how the reputation business is impacted because “the consumers are also the producers of what they consume” in these cyber markets. Famous examples are Ebay, Amazon consumer reviews etc. But what about bloggers?

Reminds me of a line from an IBM TV spot: “the game of business changes.”