This Friday, Minnesota Women in Marketing and Communications (MWMC) is holding their spring conference, 2008 Women at Work (W@W).

Past President of MIMA and founder of Brain Traffic, Kristina Halvorson, will be presenting, along with Nina Hale (Nina Hale Consulting) and Lori Baker (Evantage Consulting) on the Website Ring of Fire Panel.

MWMC is offering a “Friends of MIMA” discount for those who wish to attend the conference on Friday – $200 will get you in.

I’ll admit it. I’m bonkers for bunko. Johnny Bunko, that is, in the just-released paperback, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko, “America’s first business book in the Japanese comic format known as manga — and the last career guide you’ll ever need.”

The book is written by bestselling author Daniel Pink, with art by Rob Ten Pas, who graduated right here in our backyard: at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

Johnny Bunko is stuck in a dull, demanding accounting job, running numbers, testing scenarios, and considering enrichment courses like ‘Best Practices for Operationalizing Your Managerial Headset,’ when he bleats — “I want to go into advertising or work in a big design or branding firm.”

Well, okay then, Johnny Bunko. Come join all of us here at MIMA.

Through Johnny Bunko, Pink is displaying his none-too-subtle right-brain leanings, which he expounded upon in his bestselling book, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future. In that book, Pink claimed we’ve moved out of the Information Age and into the Conceptual Age, where succeeding requires “the capacity to detect patterns and opportunities, to create artistic and emotional beauty, to craft a satisfying narrative, and to combine seemingly unrelated ideas into something new.”

Exactly what Pink’s done with The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: craft a satisfying, if a bit juvenile, narrative, while combining the seemingly unrelated ideas of manga and career advice.

(By the way, apologies to all you left-brained MIMA members. We value your expertise. Really, we do.)

Pink’s read-it-at-one-sitting book is packed with career wisdom that would be preachy were it not delivered by a Japanese comic book heroine, who is, according to the trailer on YouTube, “the most kick-ass career advisor you’ve ever seen.”

Here are the six lessons she teaches Johnny Bunko:

1. There is no plan
2. Forget about your weaknesses
3. Persistence trumps talent
4. It’s not about you
5. Make excellent mistakes
6. Leave an imprint

Pink offers wonderful, quotable advice on each of these lessons, such as “the world is littered with talented people who didn’t persist (lesson 3), “you’re here to serve, not self-actualize” (lesson number 4) and “the most successful people make spectacular mistakes” (lesson number 5).

No stranger to marketing, Pink has also created a new word to accompany his book, “bunko” (not to be confused with bunco, the parlor game), cleverly working it into the story line by having Johnny look in the dictionary to find the verb form of his name, between the nouns bunionectomy and buns. (I warned you there was grade-school humor.)

bun-ko — (v) to make a mistake from which the benefits of what you’ve learned exceed the costs of the screw-up.

I predict it won’t be long before this verb appears in Merriam-Webster’s Open Dictionary.

The book’s trailer has some nice tight scriptwriting, including this enigmatic tagline: “explode your mind, embrace your chopsticks.” Read the book and it will all make sense.

Matter of fact, in the time it took you to read this post (and I thank you for that), you could already be through two chapters of The Adventures of Johny Bunko.

(Hat tip to Marci Alboher: Career Advice for the Short Attention Span.)

Today I spammed everyone on my AIM contact list with an invitation to join Facebook. I was searching for co-workers on the social network, trying to understand the more useful apps and plugins available to the average user, when I inadvertently clicked yes and authorized Facebook to contact everyone on my buddy list. I was distracted. I was multitasking. I was not as careful as I should have been. And, with one click, I was totally humiliated. My heart stopped for what seemed like an entire minute while I prayed for a confirmation screen that never came. I had misread a question, given my permission, and there was no going back. I just sat there and wondered how I’d explain to my colleagues, friends, peers, and, of course, the random total strangers I’d added to my list along the way, that I was a complete idiot who’d let Facebook hijack my buddy list to solicit memberships. I was one more unsuspecting pawn in the Facebook battle for world domination.

There is value in centralizing data. So many of us are out devouring and contributing to content-rich websites and social networks, connecting with long-lost friends, classmates, colleagues. We’re finally in a position to leverage ‘who we know’. Because, what have we always heard? It’s not what you know, but who. And the who has never been more accessible. We’re separated by miles and years and jobs, but we’re just a click away thanks to networks like Facebook and MySpace and LinkedIn. There are new social and professional network sites trying to get in on the action every day. Today alone I had two colleagues try to get me to join Plaxo Pulse. I couldn’t help but wonder if they even knew they’d asked me to join. Recently a friend’s contact list had been hijacked by Spock (I refuse to link to this evil entity) to invite 2500 of his closest friends to join him there. I felt better about my 125 AIM messages when I compared it to 2500. But the sting was still there.

As more and more of these networks fight for our information, who’s going to prove the front runner? Clearly he (or she) who owns the most data wins. And Facebook’s shift from social network to ‘platform’ seems to suggest they believe they can connect all of this decentralized data floating around on the web and make it accessible via their single, simple, interface. So while the data might be scattered amongst iTunes, flickr, Amazon, AIM and other lesser known entities, a series of simple web applications can integrate all of it into the Facebook platform. What’s more, Facebook turns it around and provides an aggregate snapshot of your contacts’ data. It’s really a win-win. Or is it?

Recently Facebook has taken some heat for invasive marketing tactics via it’s Beacon system. Beacon takes data from external websites and makes it available to your contact list with the intention of promoting product through passive endorsements. If you bought something on Amazon, and you’re my friend, the thinking is I might be interested in that product as well. Because you, my friend, are just so darn influential in my life. The problem with this theory is you might be my friend, but I might not want you to know I just bought zit cream from my favorite zit cream website. Its an invasion of privacy and Facebook is still working that one out. Beyond that though, Facebook is starting to look like the Borg. Resistance is clearly futile. If you want to be in touch with anyone in this 21st century the easiest and most practical way to do it is through the web/Facebook, and peer pressure is unavoidable. Come on, everybody’s doing it. There’s a suggestion of youthful trendiness that we all fall victim to. Once you make the leap, though, you’ve sold your soul to the internet’s equivalent of the devil. Because once you create that profile, there’s (allegedly) no getting that data back. You can’t quit Facebook. Not really, anyway.

What does it all mean? To those of us working in technology? And those of us consuming it? These are tough questions to answer. But it seems clear that one of the most valuable assets of our time is our data. Our information. Yet, in spite of that reality, our data is clouded by a mix of fear (identity theft) and ignorance (my dog’s name is my password!).

What’s our responsibility as creators of content, and websites and systems and as participants of networks? What is our contribution? How can we influence how all of this unfolds? I believe that how we interact with, and collect data from users, needs to reflect truth and authenticity. Sure, we publish privacy statements and terms of use policies. We won’t store data or we won’t sell it or give it away or use it without permission. But it’s more than that. We need to help users understand what it is they’re providing and how easy it is to exploit. We need to give them an opportunity to change their minds, or confirm their understanding of an interaction. In my case for instance, a simple ‘confirmation’ page would have saved me the embarrassment of having to apologize to 125 friends and colleagues for that unwanted IM spam. Facebook knew exactly what it was doing when it required only a single click to access my list. I think it’s a cheap tactic in the race for the most data. The downside is, I’m no longer as enthusiastic about the value of Facebook as a networking tool. I see it as suspect now. The upside is I’ll be more careful when I use little web apps like that.

But our standards for collecting this data aren’t set in stone. We’ve only just begun, so what more can we do to extend real value for the user, and tap into the thing that’s most valuable to our clients? We can consider a user’s understanding of their valuable points of data as part of our commitment to simple, usable web experiences. We should see how we collect data as part of usability. We should only collect what is absolutely critical to the experience and we should make certain the user understands the cost of sharing their data and the return on their investment of trust. Finally, we need to keep our promises. Sharing data should have some reward for the user, in terms of access to content, or connections or something of value. We should treat our user’s data as sacred. If we expect to foster a long-term customer relationship, we need to respect what we know about a user and what we continue to discover. It’s common sense, really. Any of us, even presumed ‘experts’ can fall victim to guerilla data collection tactics. It’s embarrassing. It’s painful. It’s avoidable. The difference, though, is we have the ability to influence change. We have the option of applying some code of conduct to how websites interact with users. We’re not done. We’ve only just begun. Facebook doesn’t get to decide. We do.