Well . . . I’ve done it. I’ve caved. I’ve given in.

No, I haven’t stopped drinking. Don’t be ridiculous. And no, I haven’t stopped being a Cubs fan, as ridiculous as it is to be one.

No . . . I’ve caved on something far more important. I’ve actually gone ahead and joined an online “social network” site.

I’ve lived in fear of these sites—such as MySpace or FaceBook—for years. Not for myself . . . but for my son.

I don’t want Zach to be one of these computer jockey kids who spends his “social life” on the computer, interacting with other kids and with 47-year-old naked, greased-up perverts pretending to be kids.

I want my kid to be like Huckleberry Finn! I want him out climbing trees and skinning his knee and playing baseball and building forts and kicking a can down the alley and rolling around in the alley with the local bully!

I don’t want him counting how many virtual friends he has in MySpace, and learning his communication skills from a bunch of bedwetters who don’t know how to use proper grammar. I want him learning communication skills while he sits in an alley and drinks warm beer and smokes ragweed reefer . . . like I did!

Most Dads probably live in fear of the day their sons come to them and ask, “Daddy, what’s a vagina?” Or, “Dad, can you be pregnant if you’re a boy?”

I live in constant fear of the day when my son comes to me and asks: “Daddy, what’s a MySpace page, and can I have one?”

But . . . all that may be changing. Because I have joined a social network, and I kind of like it!

No . . . I haven’t joined MySpace or FaceBook or one of those other bastions of sad, lonely people who live through their computers.

I have joined a professional social network . . . a place where communicators can hang out, swap ideas, meet like-minded people, learn about communications, and talk shop.

It’s called MyRagan . . . and it’s at www.myragan.com. It’s the brainchild of Mark Ragan, publisher of all the newsletters I write for, and sponsor of all the seminars I teach. Mark has been building this site for almost a year . . . and it’s live. And it’s cool. Really cool.

This morning when I checked in, more than 300 communicators had already signed up . . . even though it’s only a week old, and they’re still beta testing it and ironing out the kinks.

There is a whole slew of people from the UK out there, as well as communicators from Greece, Ireland, Australia, Canada, and Lithuania (is Lithuania still a country? I think it might be. My instincts tell me that it used to be a country, then it was the USSR, now it's a country again. If I'm wrong about that, I apologize to all the Lithuanians, or whatever you are called now).

This thing has all the tools that an online world should have—chat functions, group discussions, forums, bulletin boards . . . it’s got everything. I’m going out there now to form a group called “Uncle Fester’s Peeps,” which is going to be for all the people who come to my seminars.

After we’re done drinking in the hotel bars at the seminars, we’ll be able to continue the discussions in my own special group on MyRagan. I’ve always wanted something like this, and now it’s here.

And the site has already gotten some rave reviews from people who have already forgotten more about these kinds of things than I will ever know—people like Neville Hobson and Allan Jenkins.

So it must be good. I thought it was good . . . but since I’ve never been on a social networking site before, I couldn’t be sure.

So come on out and network! Join the online party. One problem: you have to bring your own warm beer and ragweed reefer.

By the way: Check out my cool new voice mail thingy at the top of this page where you can leave voice mails! My podcast, “Corporate Punishment” will be up and running any day now, and this will be a way for people to leave feedback on the podcast right here!

I’m told that it doesn’t work on all computers, but it does work on most. So let me have it!

In the past two weeks, I’ve heard a corporate phrase for the first time, and I think it could be pretty useful in private life.

Have you ever heard that a meeting was going to have to “have a hard ending?”

Here's how I've heard it used in the past two weeks:

“Listen, I’ve got another meeting at 2 p.m. that I can’t miss, so this meeting is going to have to have a hard ending at 1:45.”

Or, “I’ve got nothing after this call, so we don’t have to have a hard ending at 4.”

Or, “There are quite a few people in here who have to get on flights today, so the seminar needs to have to have a hard ending at 3:30.”

At first, I didn’t know what the hell anyone was talking about. Since the only person I meet with at my company is my wife, Cindy, and I usually try to have all of our meetings in bed, the only “hard ending” we ever have is if I flop around too much and fall out of bed.

Which happens more often than it should, especially since the only time I ever try to convene meetings is immediately after a three-hour margarita lunch at El Jardin's.

That, believe me, is a hard ending. Hard on my ego, hard on my body, hard on Cindy's rib cage because she's laughing so hard . . . . just hard, all the way around.

But in the corporate world, a hard ending is when the planned ending time of the meeting arrives, and everyone just immediately leaves. Or, if you're on the phone, hangs up. No small talk, no lingering discussion, no extension of the meeting time . . . it just ends. Immediately.

I love hard endings!! Every meeting should have a hard ending, no? When I worked at Ragan, a meeting that was supposed to go from 1 to 2 would go from 1 to 5, because Mark Ragan would show up with seven gazillion new product ideas, and want to talk about all of them.

If only I knew about hard endings then! I could have saved myself countless hours.

I think I’m going to start using hard endings in my personal life, too. What if you could put a hard ending on every conversation you have—with your mother, with your siblings, with your friends . . . wouldn’t that be great? I can see it now:

Mom: “Listen, I’m glad you’re doing well, and I appreciate you calling. Now, I want to talk to you about your sister. I think she needs . . .”.

Me: “Damn! Sorry, Mom. 2 p.m. Hard ending. Bye.”

Or on the phone with a Ragan accountant:

Me: “But I sent all the receipts in hard copy, like you asked.”

Ragan Accountant: “Yes, but on one receipt, you are claiming a dinner in San Francisco in the amount of $345, including a $250 wine bill. We need to talk about . . .”.

Me: “Hard ending. Bye.”

Has anyone else heard of this wonderful phenomena before? The hard ending. It’s going to change everything.

And one more thing . . . sorry. Hard ending. Bye.

In their Advanced Writing an Editing seminar—which I taught with them last year—Mark Ragan and Jim Ylisela talk a lot about leads.

Other than the headline, the first sentence or two of a story is the most important thing you write, we all agree. And most writers would, too.

The first sentence that the reader reads sets the tone for the entire article, right? Of course it does.

But it occurred to me the other day that “leads” exist outside of writing, too. Leads happen in the real world, don’t they?

Can’t the first sentence you hear in a meeting set the tone for the entire meeting?

When I was the editorial director at Ragan years ago, before I learned that I wasn’t cut out to manage anyone other than myself (and that’s questionable), a lot of my meetings with my bosses would start out with sentences like these:

“How could you fuck this up?”

“Do you have any idea how much money this is eventually going to cost us?”

And my personal favorite:

“Are you running an editorial department out there, or a fucking circus?”

Those first sentences set the tone for the entire meeting . . . and, for that matter, for my entire career as an editorial director/manager of people.

And I think leads exist on the domestic front, too. The first things you say to your spouse—or the first words he/she says to you—can set the tone for the entire day. Sometimes for the entire week, month, or year!

This occurred to me the other day. Cindy and I had been out late, at the Blues Bar that we go to whenever we can, and things got a little fuzzy towards the end. As they sometimes do, at the Blues Bar.

When we woke up the next day, here are the first things we said to each other, word for word:

Steve: “Why am I not wearing any pants?”

Cindy: “I think I yanked a hamstring.

That's a lead that makes you want to read the story, no?

Now, you may think this sort of exchange happens almost every day at Crescenzo Communications, but you’d be wrong.

First of all, I never go to bed without pajama pants on. Or at least sweatpants. I have some caveman instinct in me that won’t let me get comfortable unless I am adequately dressed, should I need to get up and defend the house against intruders.

So the fact that I wasn’t wearing pants was important.

And Cindy is a dancer. And she is in training right now. She doesn’t pull hamstrings easily. I can yank a hammy leaning into the refrigerator for a bottle of champagne . . . and I have. But Cindy’s legs are the ninth wonder of the world . . . so for her to yank a hamstring, extraordinary things must have taken place.

Can you see how that “lead” could set the tone for the entire day?

And that got me to thinking about other morning “leads” that are common in the Crescenzo Communications marital bed. They are all tone setters for the day. Play a game with yourself, and try to figure out which person—me or Cindy—said the following leads:

“Oh . . . . shit. My head.”

“Want to?”

“What the fuck with the pillows?”

“I’m going to kill your cat and show you the bloody carcass.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be somewhere else today?”

“Don’t even think about it.”

“We have a bit of a situation here, honey.”

[Sung in someone’s best Marvin Gaye voice]: “Let’s get it on . . .”.

“Poke me with it again and I’ll rip it off and flush it down the toilet.”

“The cat stays. You don’t have to.”

“El Jardin’s?”

“Sorry about last night.”

"How many did I have, exactly?"

“That Goddamned Murray.”

Of course, there are plenty of normal mornings too . . . where we say things like, "Good morning," and "How'd you sleep?" and "I love you," and "What should we do with Zach today?"

But those aren't as much fun to write about.

Well . . . I did it. I switched teams. I have taken up residence on the dark side. And I’ve never been happier.

I am a Mac user. And I can’t believe it took me this long. After 15 years of PC hell, at least eight different computers, hours of gibberish spoken on "tech support" calls and hundreds of broken promises and useless warranties, I've made the switch for good.

Long live Mac!

After years of worrying about viruses, of forgetting to download the secret updates that you’re supposed to somehow know about, of blue screens, of incompetent foreign-speaking IT “help” desk people, of sudden and deadly crashes, of slow-moving systems, of low battery life, of fruitless visits by the Geek Squad . . . I decided to give Mac a try.

God I’m glad I did.

I chucked my $2,700 Sony Vaioio (or however the hell you spell this rotten-ass computer that now sits in the corner of my office, serving as a huge square drink coaster, which is all it ever was good for to begin with) and bought a $1300 MacBook, which was about $1800 with a complete warranty that gives me exclusive service at any Mac store in the world.

Besides setting drinks on it, I'm keeping the Sony to remind me of the bad times, less I'm ever tempted to go back.

My Sony’s battery would last 35 minutes. Since it took 15 minutes to get itself turned on, I usually had about 20 minutes of work time before it crapped out.

My little Macster has, as far as I can tell, about five hours of battery time (I don’t know because I’m yet to run out of battery; I left it on by accident in New York and four hours later I still had 28 percent of the battery left), and it takes exactly 6 seconds to turn on.

I am starting to see what all the fuss over the “multimedia Web” is about. My Sony Viaoao wouldn’t recognize most videos. And if it did, it took forever to run. Even simpe audio was a problem.

My Mac recognizes everything! And they run immediately. I actually get podcasts right into my iTunes now!

My Mac is intuitive, user-friendly, handsome, and efficient. And it’s tiny! My Sony weighed as much as one of my legs, and I’m fat. I now realize that the pain in my left side is NOT from an oncoming stroke . . . but because that’s the side where I carried that damned behemoth.

I can balance my Mac on the fingers of one hand . . . and it’s a joy to bring on a plane. Even if some asshat wants to recline his seat all the way back in economy, I can still work . . . . for five hours if I want to.

Oh, my wireless? It works everywhere. And I mean everywhere. And I don’t even have to turn it on!!! As soon as I turn my computer on in a strange location, it asks me if I want to connect to whatever networks are available.

One more thing: The Mac people . . . I love all of them. They actually transferred all of my files from my old Sony to my Mac . . . including my old e-mails. As part of the service of buying a Mac!

The only problem was that I lost some e-mails, and I blame that on the Sony, too. So I had to call Mac tech support after the purchase to iron out some e-mail problems.

But guess what? The call took five minutes, the person spoke English perfectly, and they solved the problem immediately.

If it was a PC, I would have haggled with someone in Bangladesh for six hours, and they still wouldn’t have fixed the problem.

I feel like I have been in an abusive marriage for the last 15 years . . . and I’ve finally broken free.

My Mac and I are going to change the world. Just you watch.

In May, I was asked to give the keynote address at Ragan’s 16th Annual Corporate Communicators Conference in Chicago.

It was my 12th CCC conference, but the first time I had ever given the keynote. In it, I asked the audience a simple question: What kind of communicator do you want to be?

I then gave five categories of communicators that I’ve met over and over again in the years that I’ve been teaching and consulting—sort of my version of, “The Five People You Meet in Heaven,” only I called it, “The Five Communicators I Meet in My Seminars.”

Of course, there are more than five different kinds of communicators. There’s probably more like two hundred and five. But these are the five I see the most. As you read this, ask yourself the same question I asked the crowd: Which of these do you most closely resemble?

Group #1: The “Julie from the Love Boat” communicators. These are the people who desperately want to be the social director at their companies. They meticulously keep track of the service anniversaries, the promotions, the new hires . . . and some of then actually still run baby announcements and local bowling-league standings.

Then, all the Julies come to communication conferences and stand around in the bar and bitch about they get “no respect,” and how they’re “out of the loop on everything,” and how they can’t “get a seat at the table.” They should probably get out of the communication business, and go into the party planning industry, but they don’t want to hear that.

Group #2: The “Larry King of the Suckups” communicators. “Journalist” (and I use that term very loosely) Larry King never met a softball question he didn’t like. If he had Adolph Hitler on his show while Hitler’s panzer blitzkrieg was sweeping across Poland, King would have asked the dictator about his dog.

Larry King of the Suckups communicators never ask the hard questions, either. They never push their executives; they never challenge the legal department; they always write the party line, and the party line is always “everything is fine!”

The company could be going through massive layoffs and reorganizations, and Larry King of the Suckup communicators choose to ignore all that and run stories about the new intranet portal.

Group #3: The “Barney Fife All Talk” communicators. Remember Barney Fife, from Mayberry? Barney would always talk tough . . . but he would always cave in when it counted. There are communicators who do this, too.

They talk a tough game about the best way to communicate when they talk to the print designers, the Webmasters, and the HR people . . . but then they almost always give in and let bad communication happen.

They let the print designers run text in circles because it’s “artsy.” They let the Web heads put all kinds of useless Flash applications on the Web site because it’s “cool.” They let the HR people write indecipherable stories about the benefits program, and then run those stories in the employee communication vehicles.

They do this in spite of the fact that they know it’s wrong. Just like Barney Fife used to let Otis the drunk have his own key to the town jail so he could let himself in and out . . . even though he knew it was wrong.

Group #4: The “Dr. Phil Me Up With Bad Advice” communicators. Dr. Phil “I’m practically obese but I wrote a diet book anyway, and I can’t believe people actually buy it” McGraw is the king of the worthless, patronizing advice. He’ll tell a heroin addict to “get real.” He’ll tell a wife beater that he needs to “straighten up his act.” Thanks, Phil.

Dr. Phil communicators put the same kind of worthless, patronizing “life advice” in their communication vehicles. Over the years, I’ve seen articles on how to lose weight, how to change a tire, how to plan family vacations, and how to drive safely.

If your employees are looking to the employee publication for life advice, they’ve probably got more problems than you can help them with.

Group #5: The “Winston Churchill Stand and Fight” communicators. These communicators—and they are out there, believe me—are the ones fighting the good fight.

They stand up to the lawyers, they push and coach their executives, they smack down the designers when they need to, they won’t be bullied by HR, they make marketers and accountants communicate like regular human beings.

I even rewrote Churchill's most famous quote. You know, the one where he says:

"We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender!”

The Winston Churchill Communicator's version of that would be:

"We shall go on to the Fourth Quarter, we shall fight in corporate headquarters, we shall fight in the branches and silos, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength for Social Media tools, we shall defend our copy, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight in the IT trenches, we shall fight in the accounting offices, we shall fight the crazy Web designers and the clueless HR people. We shall never surrender!”

In my seminars, I’ve certainly met my share of representatives from the first four groups. But I’ve also met enough Churchills to know that they can not only survive, but also thrive, in the corporate world.

So, to all the Winston Churchills out there: I salute you. And to the Julies and the Larrys and the Barneys and the Phils . . . what are you waiting for?