I'm a fan of the Fox show "So You Think You Can Dance," an amazing combination of creativity, personality, drama and, most importantly, expression. While it's frequently presented as a competition between dancers, the truly captivating conflicts are when a dancer who comes from a specific background overcomes internal insecurities and learns how to communicate through a previously unknown form.

It's a conflict and achievement many health marketers can appreciate when it comes to social media. And one dancer's experience, in particular, underscored both the contrast and the reward.

Although he was subsequently injured and is out for the season, Alex Wong did not bow out of the competition before leaving an indelible mark. A year after not being permitted to move on in the show because of his contractual obligations with the Miami City Ballet, Alex routinely showed himself to be a powerful and skillful dancer.

But a question remained: could the ballet master crack the nut that is hip-hop?

In partnering with dancer tWitch for the show's first-ever male-male duo, not only did Alex master the free-flowing moves that so many street dancers exhibit with ease, his routine to the apropos "Get Outta Your Mind" by Lil Jon featuring LMFAO garnered the most explosive ovation the show's ever seen.

All of this, while super-entertaining for a hip-hop fan like myself, had me thinking about the many organizations in health marketing that aren't accustomed to "getting down" and changing their ways of doing things to connect with a larger, younger audience via tools like social media.

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Foursquare, it seems to be just another way for people to shout out, "Hey I'm somewhere doing something! Look at me!" and formost users (including yours truly) that’s what it is. But Foursquare can be so much more, especially for companies and brands. The guys over at AboutFoursquare.com have plenty of tips as to get more out of the Foursquare experience. Below are two examples of how powerful Foursquare can be when combined with Google.

Google Maps + Foursquare

First up, here’s how to map your Foursquare check-in on Google Maps. Follow these two easy steps:

1. Visit your Foursquarefeeds page. Right-click the KML link and copy it to your clipboard (butdon't download it).

2. Visit Google Maps and paste the link you copied into the search box. Hit Enter.

All your Foursquare check-ins will be pinned on the map and you can share this information by clicking either Send or Link at the top of the map. So what can you do with this information?  What about embedding the map into your website? This could allow clients, consumers, whomever to interactively see where you’ve been. For example, a brand might check into expos/events that it is a part of.

Google Calendar + Foursquare

How about sharing your Foursquare check-ins in a GoogleCalendar?  All it takes is a few easy steps:

1. Visit your Foursquare feeds page, right-click on the ICS link and copy the link location (but do not download the file)

2. In your Google Calendar, find the Other Calendars box on the lower left and click Add.

3. Choose Add by URL.

4. In the pop-up that appears, paste the URL you copied from the feeds page and click Add Calendar.

5. Wait a few minutes for Google to import the calendar.

6. When the calendar first imports, it’s name will be the long URL you pasted in; to change it, click the dropdown arrow next to its name in the Other Calendars box, choose Calendar Settings, change the calendar name to something more friendly (like “Foursquare History”), and click Save.

You could then make this calendar public, allowing your contacts to see when you went someplace. This could be useful for a street team, where a company wants to show when they were at a specific event.

The possible uses for these mashups are almost limitless (especially if you can figure out how to add Twitter in for a social media trifecta), and can greatly enhance your sociability on the Web.

Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s time for me to check in and try to regain mayorship of the Genuine office.

Mike Miles is a backend developer at Genuine Interactive. Follow him on twitter @mikemiles86 or on foursquare  @mikemiles86.

Shortly after catching the session “Customer Panel: Avoiding Defeat from the Jaws of Victory” at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, I caught up with Robert Maguire, Executive Director SBS, Enterprise Portal & Support Services,  for Merck. In talking during a reception he mentioned that he started using Mafia Wars as a way to get those in his organization to better understand, and embrace, community and collaboration.

Once I heard the phrase “pimp my mom” I quickly pulled out my flip cam and asked if I could interview him about this experience. He was gracious enough to say yes.

Enjoy. (FYI, the transcript is posted at the end of this post)

Pimp my mom: One Merck manager's approach to teaching online collaboration and community from Genuine Interactive on Vimeo.

There are so many things I love about this approach and how it succinctly showcases where we are on the web. The lines blur a bit more each day between tools (and identities) inside and outside the work environment. While employees often struggle with how to handle Facebook invites from colleagues, IT departments struggle with how to handle information sharing needs that are often inspired by Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr and others.

And while some people are driving these changes with their increasingly prolific uses of tools that live outside corporate firewalls, others are simply trying to remain relevant, competent or otherwise above the tidal wave of options and information that’s constantly being dumped on them.

This notion of games for training isn’t new. The notion of “gaming the news” as a means of getting a new audience interested in an outlet’s reporting has been going on for nearly a decade now.

Still, when the vernacular includes things like pimps, addictions, mafia and marriages ending, it can be a bit jolting. Of course, none of that is as jolting as recent changes to the online landscape and what that means for corporate infrastructure.

TRANSCRIPT

One of the things that I really struggled with, is the idea that people don't get the whole communities thing. So I used Mafia Wars and the reason it works is because your power is completely driven by how many connections you have. I explain to people, 'give it a shot' and people get really pissed at me because it's incredibly addictive, they call me up (and say) "my wife's ready to leave me."

The other cool part of it is, you can't accomplish tasks unless you trade gifts and things like that. So I've used it, and it actually works.

Q: When did it first occur to you that this is something you should share?

I got put in my role about seven months ago. I was always kind of on the edge of this stuff, and I'm not really an early adopter on these things, but I like games and I've played some games and stuff like that. I saw Mafia Wars, and I started playing it and when I got this role, I went "This is perfect, this is collaboration. It's the perfect thing to use."

Q: Who are the types of people that you tend to recommend it to?

Pretty much anybody. I mean, I'm not going to recommend it to our CIO, because I know he won't play it. But there are people in our company that work for me, or who are trying to "get" collaboration at my level. I probably wouldn't recommend it to a vice president, but there's quite a bunch of people who called me up and said "why'd you do that to me? My wife's ready to leave me, I play Mafia Wars 24 hours a day!"

Q: Talk about the first time you recommended it to someone. What motivated you?

I think it was mostly related to the role. One of the things I like to do, and a little bit because of my role. I'm responsible for the portal and things like that - social networking - so I like to be a little bit edgy. So, to make a recommendation around Mafia Wars to somebody, really makes them step back, in a corporate situation. "You're telling me to play Mafia Wars?" And the whole pimpin' out thing, I was actually in a meeting the other day with some people in our organization, and I was kind of dancing around the edge of it, not really using the words, and she goes "Oh, you pimp your mom out!" Which was pretty funny.

Q: How did your mom react to that?

She thought it was hilarious. She was happy because she got like 200 more people in her mafia. Mom went up a couple levels.

Q: Are you playing it a lot?

No, I don't play it at all. It's funny, I've got one of those personalities where I get real interested in things, and then I move on to the next thing. So I got all of these people caught up in the game, and then, I quit.

Q: Is this a secret plot to just make everyone less productive than you?

I don't think so. But now that I think about it, I should probably be more careful about who I actually give that to. I don't want someone who actually works for me getting addicted to Mafia Wars and going off and playing it forever.

Business strategy and information technologist Stowe Boyd was sitting one row in front of us during the Microsharing session at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference at the Westin waterfront in Boston on Tuesday. He talked about recent missteps in making content public by Facebook and Google, the changing notion of privacy and even what self-identity means in an era of global information sharing.

Stowe Boyd on the public getting 'Smacked in the face by the future' from Genuine Interactive on Vimeo.

Genuine Interactive: ... At the We Media conference, you talked about the concept of ‘publicy’ and I think a lot of people were aware of it, maybe inherently, but it was before a lot of the Facebook controversy; you know, default viewing of their content. Can you talk about what’s happened this year in light of your perspective?

Stowe Boyd: Well there’s been a series of missteps, to be polite, by Facebook and others including Google’s Buzz launch, where it became evident that it was relatively easy for these large companies to basically smack people in the face with the future, and do it in a way that was at the very best caustic, if not life threatening.

So in both cases they launched new versions, new iterations of connectiveness that people were unaware they were about to inherit as a feature of these products. In the case of Buzz it was this first launch no one had tried, and in the case of Facebook it was yet another version of their privacy arrangements. So a minute ago I characterized it as being ‘smacked in the face by the future’ because I believe that we are in fact, relatively quickly, moving to a time where more and more information will be shared publicly as opposed to being held private as a function of the basic structure of the way the web works.

On the web in order for anyone to know you’re there you have to publish information, it’s like playing Marco Polo in the swimming pool. You have to go "Marco!" so the other person can go "Polo!" otherwise you can never really find each other because we’re not really in physical space, you can’t see each other or bump into each other, you have to transpond; you have to send a signal so that people know you’re there at all. And the nature of the signal is some kind of information about yourself, an interchange or question or whatever. For those things to happen, they have to happen so that people can connect at all.

As there are more and more people on the web and there are more and more sites that are content-specific or domain-specific, people are sending more signals, asking more questions and learning more about themselves or the nature of their relationships with other people. As a result, there is lots of this information out there to be mined and potentially misused, or potentially used in a relevant and helpful way. So I’m relatively optimistic that, despite all these gaffes, there’s a reason why people are working so hard to get involved in a social web. There’s going to be a lot of knee-scraping but at the end of it good things will come about.

I think though that a lot of the discussion about it is misleading or unhelpful. For example, one of the reasons that we think so much about privacy is we think that we are individuals first. We are very individualistically minded in the western world, but one of the things that I think that is happening as a result of the web influencing us is that we’re becoming more and more aware that we exist as people who are involved in relationships with other people; and a lot of the things that formerly we would have considered personal attributes are actually attributes that arise from our involvement with other people. So it’s very difficult to actually say “What about this information is about me, or is it really more about this association that I’m involved in with twenty people talking about cult movies?” You know, if we’re having a big interchange and a twitter stream or a social context and hundreds of people or dozens of people are saying dozens of things, and I’m one of the participants and I’ve learned things or I’ve shared things… Where do I begin and where do the other people end? So I think there are some of those transformations that are going on culturally at the same time. So we’re having this tendency to examine this new kind of social interaction using the lens and the terminology of the previous era. And that’s one of the problems that we’re constantly running into as well.

Genuine Interactive: Are you surprised anymore at what people are willing to share?

Boyd: No. I mean in principle, if you get into some of the interesting corners of the web, people will literally share everything, including things that aren’t real. It gets into the fantastic, literally fantasy land and everything in between. So no, nothing surprises me.