Back in the mid-1990s, getting clients to take the Internet at all seriously was like pulling teeth. They used to look at me, in my much younger formatting, and will me to age and be wiser, to grow out of this foolish, trendy Internet thing. These days, corporates are far more curious about the possibilities—not least because Gen-Xers and Millennials, almost all of whom are Digital Natives, are now in influential positions.

Back before they saw the light, the mid-’90s objection often went something like this: “Only computer geeks are on the Internet, how could it possibly increase sales?” The notion of customer engagement was barely a twinkle in a few eyes. Clearly, things have changed a lot since then, as was recently demonstrated by some exciting initiatives from PepsiCo.

PepsiCo not only sponsored the gloom-busting SXSW music festival from March 13 to 17 in Austin, Texas–so far, so corporate–it also took sponsorship to the next level by harnessing the power of Twitter to bring the event to life online. The PepsiCo Zeitgeist site, included cloud animations of popular subjects, maps tracking where people were in town and tweets of scintillating snippets of overheard conversation. And on April 1, 2009, hard on the heels of SXSW, PepsiCo joined forces with a bunch of social media geeks—including me, and trust me, I feel lucky to be included in this crowd of young, modern-day mavens who not only get it but are doing it—to spark a Twitter-based conversation about global trends, to coincide with an in-person trends presentation I did in Brooklyn for PepsiCo’s top 100 Global Communicators.

A total of 171 people from around the world signed up for the conversation, which generated 1,786 Tweets. Hundreds of others turned up, without having pre-registered—jumping in with the #peptrends hashtag, following along and tweeting in. And no, it wasn’t all about soft drinks and pop culture, although those subjects came up. The conversation ranged across big themes such as Total Convergence, Value and Values, Healthcare and Wellness, and Local/Global, as well as Social Media. Once it got going, the action was fast; many participants said they learned a lot. My hunch, though, is that a lot of the learning wasn’t just about the specific ideas and opinions that were shared.

The content of the tweets only told part of the story. The event was also about the experience of sharing these ideas on a new, live social media platform. Participants were learning in real-time—about the rhythm, the pace and the style of the medium, as well as about the other participants and even themselves. It reminds me of my Cyberdialogue experiments doing early online focus groups way back in 1993 and 1994. It was a real thrill back then, and it’s amazing to find that almost two decades later, it’s still a great buzz to harness the power and possibility of technology to interact and to learn. It almost makes me feel young again.
Funny too that it’s PepsiCo, the company whose “Forever Young” commercial I replay on YouTube again and again, that got me so energized that for 90 minutes online and on stage, I was the Marian I had been in 1992—just a little wiser and a lot better traveled, and not quite so worried about 2400 baud.

The World Economic Forum’s recent gathering in Dubai brought together 700 members to discuss the world’s hottest topics—not just the economic crisis but also the environment, finance, development, energy, mining and mobility. And the result of all the debate among experts was a call for a “fundamental reboot” of the basic systems that drive the world’s economies and societies.

The term “reboot” conjures an image familiar to anyone who has faced a computer system crash. It implies starting the system fresh, and figuring out what caused the crash in first place. Critics argue that the systems don’t need rebooting or even repairing, but rather replacing with different systems. Either way, there is agreement that we need a radical change.

It’s no coincidence that “change” was a core theme of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. And once Obama is sworn in January 20, the Reboot dynamic will swing into action. Most of the global players will be in place and can really start making decisions that will aim to reshape our country. Only time will tell whether the decisions of individual countries or even groups of countries can reboot the world’s systems, let alone replace them. So until further notice, anything and everything is up for questioning, as individuals, communities, industries and governments work to figure out ways to put things back together again in a more robust and sustainable way.

The catalyst is people’s desire to conserve cash. If you have something to offer that’s of value to others (goods, skills, time), and have a want or a need someone else can fulfill, you’re in business. As in so many areas of life, the Internet is connecting the dots of niche supply and demand.

Unlike cash transactions, once the connection is made, barter exchanges often involve negotiation and/or face-to-face interaction, which lead to more personal connections, more local community building.

We thought we had it nailed, more or less, but then the current economic crisis proved us all wrong. It’s not surprising that many ordinary citizens became dizzy in their money management, but now it’s startlingly clear that high-flying financial professionals did too. Where did all those hundreds of billions come from and how did they just disappear? How could financial instruments that were supposed to spread risk ended up amplifying it?

Now authorities are doing whatever they can to keep even more money from disappearing into a vortex. But not even the loftiest can be sure that their initiatives will do the trick, because we’re in uncharted territory. We’ve never before lived in a world where news circles the globe instantly and where so much money exists only in electronic form.

Assuming things return to “normal,” will we be any closer to mastering money, or will it always be more powerful than its creators?

So is it an either-or choice between economic growth or environmental salvation–a tussle between real-world pragmatists and tree-hugging idealists? President-elect Obama doesn’t see it that way. He’s aiming to create a whole new driver of economic growth and jobs by building a “clean energy future.” And high-profile venture capitalists such as Vinod Khosla and entrepreneurs are seeing cleantech and greentech as “the next ICT.”

The difference is that much of ICT growth (personal computers) was driven by consumers wanting to play games, write documents, swap e-mails and access interesting content. In contrast, the adoption of low-carbon technologies will be in the hands of legislators who frame the rules, decide on the incentives and make policy. If only some techies could invent must-have personal cleantech gadgets.

These times call for cool-headed leaders who can think clearly, take a long view of what’s happening and execute measured, decisive action.