Then there was the Brooklyn Flea, a homespun hub of folksy branding for purveyors of lobster rolls, vintage cowboy boots and kimchee-strewn hot dogs.

Now there is the Greenpoint Food Market, an incongruous oasis of scrumptious micro-enterprise in a church basement in North Brooklyn. You can only catch it once a month, and I was there for the May edition on Saturday, May 22nd.

I admit that what drew me initially was the novelty of what was, essentially, a bake sale in hipster drag. I wanted the chance to scope out what a new generation of culinary mischief-makers would plate up in a subterranean space much better suited to church mixers and girl scout troop meetings.

To wit, hand pumped hibiscus soda:

But in between mouthfuls of handmade chocolate and pork buns, I had to stop and marvel at what a weird and wonderful time it is to be a creative person with an idea and just a little bit of gumption. It takes risk to start a business, but thankfully venues like these make that risk much more manageable.

In social media circles, we talk a lot about the notion of “self-branding,” that is, bringing all of the disparate channels of your online self into a coherent package. Nowadays anyone with can appropriate the trappings of “branding” from an elite world of ad agencies and corporations. Bring incubators like the Greenpoint Food Market into the picture and a robust trend toward micro-branding can transcend a set of snapshots of your pooch or plate of brunch. It can suddenly make creating a business within the reach of a lot more people.

I stumbled across Greenpoint Food Market not through press but through social media channels. I was watching a “haul video” and the young woman at the center had just received a package from a baked goodie company called Fanny & Jane. As soon as I heard the word “chocolate-covered red velvet cake,” I was on the case. A few Google searches connected me with not only the Market’s website, but also some of the vendors’ blogs and Twitter presences.

I’m well acquainted with a whole constellation of craft blogs that extol the virtues of the “passionately handmade” and it was enjoyable to see the hand-made food crowd doing much of the same, while trading the yarn for free-range eggs.

Jen Curran of Fanny & Jane runs a blog that is called, appropriately, Follow My Bliss, about her path from desk job to baked goods artisan and comedienne. The baked goods at the Market did not disappoint, and it looks like Jen and her partner have set up a great online shop with very reasonable prices and shipping for what are products of exceptional quality. I would highly recommend one of these bundles as a gift.

Another nascent business I found fascinating was Milkmade Ice Cream. I frequently make ice cream and consider myself a tough critic. The friend I had brought to the event was skeptical of Milkmade’s pricing structure–$50 for 3 pints of their ice cream, delivered to your door on a monthly basis. However, I tasted the product and after checking out the various web properties of the small company, I have to say I’m rooting for this duo to succeed.

They’re doing three things really, really right:

• Their ice cream is not a product, it’s the manifestation of being a part of a very small and selective club. Like the late-night TV pitchman says: “This amazing ice cream is not available in stores!” To get it, you have to buy a three month membership. At the Film Society, we’re currently working on membership campaigns and this sort of model, applied to ice cream, appealed to me. Instead of a simple transaction, it creates a relationship–and to me that’s essential for a grass-roots business to succeed.
• In cultivating scarcity, they enhance their efforts. Building off the above, offering fans membership into a small, select group, Milkmade further burnishes the specialness of the experience by vowing to never make the same flavor twice. I’d be more than willing to pay a premium to enjoy an incredibly rare experience.
• They are using the web and social media to great effect. Blog, check. Facebook page, check. Twitter, check. The photography they’ve got going is utter food porn, and the only pointer I might give them is to create a luscious gallery of those images on their site. That, paired with a list of flavors that just aren’t available to anyone else, is sure to drive up the mania for their product.

My excursion into Greenpoint was just a taste of the vitality that’s been gathering steam in Brooklyn over the past few years. And even though the Greenpoint Market was filled with whimsical notions that would surely make your typical product marketing manager blanch, I was thrilled to see  all the initiative–and the creativity packed into this unlikely space.

It was a screening of Ondi Timoner’s We Live in Public that first got me thinking about the dark side of the rise of social networking. Timoner’s film tells the story of early Internet pioneer Josh Harris, and how some of Harris’s theories about “living life in public” are now playing out on a mass scale thanks to social networks like Facebook and MySpace.

The film was great—a reminder of just how rapidly the Internet has become a part of our lives—but one of the most interesting part of the evening (part of New Directors/New Films) was the post screening Q & A. With the room filled with quirky creative types and Internet old-timers, it wasn’t long before conspiracy theories edged into the discourse, from the audience member spouting 9-11 “Truth” movement rhetoric to the resounding boos of the audience, to the director herself, who looked askance at the potential for data-mining via sites like Facebook.

Seeing as how Facebook and the like are filled to the brim with so much ephemera, I’ve always felt that any one person’s predilection for the Arctic Monkeys or knitting dog sweaters is like so many drops in an endless ocean of data. So forgive me for wanting to hand out tinfoil hats to those ascribing “Big Brother” like capabilities or motives to social networking sites that comprise an immense amount of largely irrelevant data.

But after having seen the powerful positive potential of social networks to give voice to the average Internet user and connect brands and business to their base, have I been living in puppy-dogs-and-rainbows land? During the past few weeks I’ve been paying attention to some signs and signals that there’s trouble in this little paradise we’re creating. And though I don’t think social media is in danger of falling into the hands of evil multinationals or unruly populist mobs, I am more aware than ever of the conflicts that may fan the flames of a social media backlash.

Mob mentality: #amazonfail

Last week, when a number of LGBT book mysteriously lost their rank on Amazon.com, outrage spread like wildfire on social media networks, and especially on Twitter. It was amazing how fast an erroneous consensus view emerged among users of social media that Amazon was perpetrating a major anti-gay conspiracy. In fact, a small technical glitch had resulted in the temporary delisting of the books in question. Writing about the fracas and its aftermath, Clay Shirky owned up to his own role in the angry mob: “When a lifetime of intellectual labor and study came up against a moment of emotional engagement, emotion won, in a rout.”

Social networks are a particularly good place for the viral spread of provocative ideas, whether you’re talking about a gorgeous voice inside a not-so-glamorous body or the juicy tale of a corporation perpetrating some kind of evil scheme. It is a shame that some of the more pressing issues of our day—lack of available healthcare, the fact that the New York City unemployed have some of the lowest unemployment benefits in the nation—don’t have the ability to grab hold of the imagination in quite the same way. I don’t know what would have stopped #amazonfail. Like all memes it took on a life of its own after a while, but I do recognize that the power of social networks to rapidly spread false information—and the madness of crowds—is a real and troubling one.

Privacy concerns & the challenge of running a business that’s fair to the people who built it

Until April 23, Facebook is submitting its privacy policy to a vote by users. This action followed a controversial move in February in which Facebook revised its Terms of Service to encompass broad control of the content users create on the site.

Though I think people can tend to be a little overwrought about Facebook appropriating their intellectual property, as inane or ephemeral as it may be, this effort to institute a Terms of Service that pays attention to user needs and wants is obviously is an important one. Less, I think, because Facebook really wants to use all that material for some nefarious purpose but because part of building a user-generated-content empire is respecting the users that created that empire. Only problem is, Facebook is only going to pay attention if a certain number of us vote. So let’s all go over there and vote now.

In a cover story for New York magazine on April 13, Vanessa Grigorgiadas offered a highly anecdotal assesment of Facebook filtered through her own point of view, one reluctant to buy into the site’s vision of tamed Internet built around the “sharing” of information. Though the article was several thousands of words long, I’m still not completely sure of what her concerns are beyond a vaguely articulated annoyance with being asked to track so many unrelated “friends” status updates. And to the people who are sure that Google and Facebook are after mind-control via data-mining, I don’t know what to tell you. I think it’s a generational thing. Notions of privacy are changing, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing, or not as bad as some writers make it out to be.

Criminal activity: from Casual Encounters to “cyber bullying”

Social media’s alleged facilitation of criminal activity is one of the more thorny quandaries brought about via the rise of social media. It’s front and center in the news again, as an arrest has been made in the Craigslist killler saga. But the use of social media technology in the commission of crimes has grabbed headlines before.  Remember the MySpace cyber-bullying case, in which a teen’s mother was accused of using a MySpace profile to edge her daughter’s rival to a suicidal state?

When talking about tragic crimes like this, I think it’s important not to ignore their rather complex underpinnings. Sex workers are the disproportionate victims of violent crimes, whether we’re talking about crimes facilitated by the Internet or not. The taking of any life is wrong and we should be doing all we can to protect the vulnerable, including sex workers. “Cyber-bullying” is not more disturbing iteration of what is reprehensible to begin with. The existence and pervasiveness of bullying itself is the problem, not the means of bullying. While legislators may get headlines by proposing “cyber-bullying” bills, what resources are available to combat the more deep rooted demands of how we raise children to have a sense of self-esteem? The role of the Internet can too easily become a convenient screen upon which to project our fears, when the real issues deserve our attentions and efforts.

These are the hot button issues I’ve been tracking, anyone have any other “tales from the social media darkside”?

Getting the okay to start an official, company-sanctioned blog may take some doing, however. Your organization will likely have people who don’t know what a blog is, to those who furtively check Perez Hilton daily. A “blog”—an online publication with datelined posts—encompasses so many different kinds of outfits, from a mommy blogging about Junior’s first words to the Huffington Post, that perhaps it’s natural that the concept strikes fear in the powers-that-be in many a company.

Starting a blog is a worthwhile endeavor for many outfits, however. And you can put your organization on the couch, listen to its fears and allay them. Here is the heads up on some of the objections you’ll encounter and how to deal with them head on.

Organizational fear #1: What happens when we can’t control what the public says about us?

This, I would say is the # 1 fear organizations have about social media: if we give people the ability to comment on what we are do, what if they use our site to say bad things about us? Leave this part out of your spiel to the bosses, but the days of completely controlling the public’s ability to talk smack about your brand or product is over. Social media has put a lot of power in the hands of users. So you’re either in or you’re out—you’re using social media to spark, leverage, and maintain positive chatter, or you’re letting the public completely define who you are in the social media space.

But what will soothe this key fear? A few precautions will help you:

• First, make sure that people have to register to comment. This will weed out the vast majority of people who are out to cause problems in comments.
• Work with a lawyer to hammer out a solid “Terms and Conditions” policy that establishes the community standards for your site. Yes, it’s the mousetype that no one reads, but in the unlikely event that anything goes wrong, it’s the policy that indemnifies your company against bad actors. Assure the head honchos that malicious commenting on an organizational blog is actually very unlikely. Chances are what you post won’t be the most controversial stuff in the world, and thus unlikely to start a flame war.
• Realize your worst enemies are going to be spammers, who are easy enough to deal with via sophisticated spam catching software.
• Do establish monitoring of commenting activity on your blog, but recognize the real risks are actually very few

Organizational fear #2: What if no one comments on our posts? Doesn’t that mean we are a failure?

The fear above has a flipside: the fear of launching a blog and then hearing nothing but crickets. As blogs aren’t traditional marketing or traditional PR, you have to carefully manage your bosses’ expectations about what they can and can’t do.

Blogs that aren’t updated frequently won’t catch fire. Blogs that don’t offer their readers any value—that is to say, do nothing but promote the organization—won’t get you far in the online space. But even when you attain a measure of success with an organizational blog, you may not get a tremendous amount of comments.

Why not? First, remember that it’s only a tiny slice of the readers of any site that actually take the time to participate—some experts put it at 10%. Second, commenters are drawn to provocative, controversial content, something that an organizational blog will likely not cultivate.

Finally, remember that the number of comments aren’t the only way of judging the impact and influence of a blog. Number of visits certainly matters, and so does the number of links you receive from other sites. Are other sites talking about you? Can you use your blog to make ripples across several social media platforms like Twitter or Facebook? When you are using a blog to cultivate awareness and affinity for your organization, sometimes it’s these trickier measures that mean the most.

To survive and thrive, a blog has to be lively, but remember to take in a full range of different metrics when looking at the success of your blog.

Organizational fear #3: We have a really established “voice” and we can’t be messing around with that.

Moving from a “read-only” culture from a new digital age “read/write” culture has moved once sacred branded properties into the hands of consumers, Lawrence Lessig writes about this in his book Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. Today, your brand has to live on platforms you don’t own like Facebook and Myspace. Its needs to, in other words, learn to speak new languages. A blog is one way to take your “voice” down a peg and make it a little more accessible to the consumers who are currently dying to interact with you.

Organizational fear #4: Aren’t successful blogs always driven by a single personality?

Many of the most popular bloggers—Dooce, Perez Hilton—have carved out their fame on their individuality. However, when you look at Technorati’s ranking of top blogs, group blogs are all over it: Life Hacker, Boing Boing, Gawker et all.

Whether your organization blog is voiced by a single person or several employees is a key decision that will affect the way your blog is perceived. There is no right answer to the question of how your blog’s “voice” should be defined. It’s an evolving process—chances are you’ll go through a process of trial and error before getting it right. And that’s okay—that’s what blogs are for. The bottom line is that any blog, even an organizational one, should have a personality, even if that personality belongs to the collective.

Organizational fear #5: Won’t this take our employees away from more important work?

Because blogs are rather informally written, people sometimes underestimate their power in reaching out to an organization’s audience. And it’s true that blog don’t write themselves. They take a lot of care and feeding in order to survive—a person or group who are willing to champion the medium as a way of connecting with new audiences and building a new channel of communication. Building a quality conversation with your audience—especially in the social media saturated world we live in—isn’t just important work, it’s critical.

Amanda McCormick maintains the filmlinc blog for the Film Society of Lincoln Center.