Here’s the dilemma: all blog content isn’t created equal. On the one hand we’re told people should write in a casual manner, be transparent, say what’s on their mind. But when does sharing become oversharing?  Take the case of conductor Leonard Slatkin who was “pelted by brutal reviews” and bowed out of the production in humiliation after he blogged that not only was he new to “La Traviata,” but that he was”somewhat naïve in this repertoire.”

A few years back, Curt Schilling started blogging on 38Pitches.com about every pitch and what was going through his mind.  Managers told him point-blank—stop.  Give away the mechanics and you risk losing the awe of your fans.

In business, it’s not a company’s mission to tell customers the most inner workings of their organization; product development secrets, what regions they’re thinking about expanding into. Companies keep those cards close to their chest and divulge the information when and if it’s time.

If the conductor or the baseball player’s blog had been treated like any other media outlet, the organization could have nipped those blog posts in the bud. Ideally they would have had a content strategy and coached the writer on what’s acceptable and appropriate to write about. And more importantly, what’s not. They wouldn’t have been forced to censor.

Transparent, authentic voices—yes. But within guidelines.

Jim Sterne does an excellent job of laying out the current social media playing field in his book, Social Media Metrics: How to Measure and Optimize Your Marketing Investment. He provides numerous examples and resources to further our understanding of metrics.

Sterne begins the book by suggesting the three business goals we should be most focused on: raising revenue, lowering costs, and increasing customer satisfaction. He says desired business outcomes are measurable and include things like: awareness, survey completions, subscriptions, registrations, blog comments, blog posts, leads, and purchases.

Sterne cautions us that social media results can take time. He cites Marshall Sponder who surveyed social marketing experts and practitioners, and recommends that you plan on spending six to twelve months of effort and data collection before you can tell whether “you have hit a jackpot by fluke or have actually built a long-term, brand building program.”

While web sites can be measured by key performance indicators (KPI), Sterne suggests we take a look at Chris Lakes’s list of social interaction metrics/KPIs which includes 35 metrics to help measure engagement–everything from alerts to wishlists. See the full list.

The social media reader coming to Sterne’s book may be looking for the answer to the question–are we improving our brands standing by using social media?

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A couple of months ago we reviewed Chris Brogan’s new book, Social Media 101.  Since reading the book we’ve thought about what we would ask Chris if we could. We’re delighted to have had the opportunity to discuss the book with Chris in this Impressions through Media exclusive interview. Welcome, Chris!

DH: You wrote in Social Media 101 that some people advise organizations to go for a blog as a first option in their starter moves for introducing social media, and that you think blogs are possibly not a good first choice. Universally are there any good first choices for organizations? Or do you think it’s more a case-by-case situation? Are there any identifying factors to help organizations decide e.g. by type of business, size of organization?

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There’s been a lot of interest in Gretchen Rubin’s book, The Happiness Project which was published in late 2009 and became a #1 New York Times Bestseller. The book is a memoir of the year Gretchen spent “test-driving the wisdom of the ages, the current scientific studies, and the lessons from the popular culture about how to be happy–from Aristotle to Martin Seligman to Thoreau to Oprah.”

As a blogger, and someone who derives a great deal of pleasure and happiness from blogging, I loved the part of the book where Gretchen describes launching her blog.

While my blog posts usually have more of a business focus on topics such as social media marketing, I wanted to take this opportunity to share Gretchen’s perspectives on blogging—mostly because I identify. And, because I often talk with people who are contemplating starting a blog and wondering how it will be for them. These passages describe my experiences so perfectly. I believe that if you want to blog, once you get through the initial steps,  you too will reap the benefits which come from blogging.

In Gretchen Rubin’s words from The Happiness Project:

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Social media marketing requires a good deal of listening to keep up with what’s being talked about in the social-sphere. This week I spent time looking at a few tools to help streamline the process—personal web portals and social media search and analysis.

Frank Barry has a great post entitled “Set Up Your Social Media Listening Dashboard in 30 Minutes or Less” about using iGoogle. The information was very helpful for me since I wasn’t getting enough from what I’d set up for myself previously on iGoogle. I had limited myself to more generic sources and searches. This time around I dug a little deeper thinking about searches and feeds. Setting up an iGoogle page with RSS feeds gives you the ability to get fairly specific.

Barry recommends five tools which he says should be at the core of all your listening: twitter search, social media fire house, google alerts and technocratic blog search, and digg. He suggests searching for a word or phrase and then getting the RSS feed for that search.

How do you find the RSS feed for a search?

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The Office television series on NBC can be frighteningly realistic at times. The depiction of office employees in the Scranton, Pennsylvania, branch of the fictional Dunder Mifflin Paper Company makes viewers feel their happy times, as well as their pain. Do you relate to the wacky boss, less than perfect co-worker dynamics, and what it feels like to watch your company being sold off?

Now that the staff in the Scranton office of Dunder Mifflin is settling into life post-Sabre corporation buy-out, it may be time for the company to revisit their online presences, see what they’re doing well and where there’s room for improvement. And besides, they make for a great case study!

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In Brian Solis’s new book, Engage! The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate, and Measure Success in the New Web, he uses the metaphor of “new media university” to take the reader through the basics and onto a more advanced education. As he says, “We are forever students of new media.”
See what’s in the book.

In 2010, there’s an overabundance of social media tools at our disposal. However, Brian Solis cautions us to keep what’s important in the forefront, namely, content.

He writes about the need for producing compelling content as a way to gain and earn friends/followers. He reminds us that everyone in a company plays a critical role in communicating the brand; and to be effective in social media, a company needs to engage as a team. Consumers want a meaningful way to connect, and businesses must be ready to listen.

Brian Solis offers the Conversation Prism, a visual representation of social networks, and the Social Marketing Compass which he created with Jesse Thomas. These are invaluable resources and will serve as guides as you embark on developing a social media plan, as well as in your efforts to garner the support and participation of the organization.

The author does much more than simply introduce us to social media tools. Engage! is truly an education. If you take the time to do your homework, trying out the suggested resources, your efforts will pay off. There’s something for everyone in this book regardless of where you are on the new media learning curve.

I found myself captivated by several things in particular: social media dashboards, aggregation and syndication, geo location and mobile networking, social objects and social media optimization.  Engage! is a book you will be able to pick up on any given day and find what you’re looking for as a way to keep on track with your social media goals and objectives.

At Impressions through Media, we’ll be talking with Brian Solis about the book and then posting part two with our Q &A.  If you have any questions you’d like to add to the list, suggest them here. We’ll include your name and link back to you.

This is the first of two posts on Engage! by Brian Solis.

In the book

• Integrated marketing tools organized by categories and instruments
• Content communities, social bookmarking and livecasting
• Multimedia, Forums/Groups and url shorteners
• Social media dashboards
• Aggregation and conversational threading in activity feeds, lifestreams, microblogs and microcommunities
• Geo location and mobile networking, widgets and applications, video broadcast networks
• Social objects (as the connection of abstract objects that trigger and host related dialogues and activities), Social media optimization
• Syndicating social objects and aggregation networks
• Establishing an online presence, shaping the brand persona
• Real-time web and tapping into the statusphere
• From Web 1.0 to 2.0 and ultimately to web squared
• Online reputation
• Talking with meaningful exchanges
• Policies and guidelines
• Rules of engagement
• The Conversation Prism
• Listening and searching the social web
• Differing levels of participation
• Creating a social media plan, using a social marketing compass
• Social Media as a team effort
• Social relationship management
• Earning friends and followers/buying friends and followers
• Return on participation, experience and influence

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* DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION Special thanks to John Wiley & Sons for providing a review copy of Engage! for this blog post. Wiley books are available at your local bookstore or by calling 1-800-225-5945.

Blogger, Rich Brooks, raises many good points in his recent post, Social Media Marketing: Are You Spread to Thin?

Brooks suggests that with the influx of social media spaces that companies may feel they need online presences everywhere. “If social media is keeping you from doing your job, it’s time to re-evaluate.”

These days many companies are using feeds to publish to multiple locations. For instance, when I publish this post it will automatically show up on the wall of our Facebook Fan page by importing the rss feed to notes, it will also appear as a tweet on a twitter facebook tab by using involver , and by using the WordTwit plugin for WordPress blogs it will post to our twitter page.   If you want to publish to substantially more locations than these you can use a service such as ping.fim where over 40 social sites can be updated at once.

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Weber Media Partner’s President, Catherine Weber, will be speaking tomorrow at Geek Girl Boot Camp Cape Cod – March 6th, 2010 – Hyannis, MA.  Join her for a Primer on Social Media, and to learn about the Power of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn for your business. Promises to be a great day!

With so much to keep up with in social media and technology these days we asked Weber Media Partner, Jackie Mosher, to tell us what she’s learned about some of the newer kids on the block–Google’s web browser, Chrome, and their social media venture, Buzz, and Microsoft’s search engine, Bing.

DH: What are your impressions of Google’s new browser, Chrome?

JM: Fast! Based on my experience, it is markedly faster than Internet Explorer.

DH: Are you able to do everything that you can with other browsers?

JM: Chrome isn’t able to run all web applications. For example, with Chrome I can run a Blackboard program and flash programs like Hulu’s video player. However, I can’t view a Webex meeting or log into a demo program.

DH: What do you think about Chrome’s approach as a cloud computing operating system?

JM: There are a lot of network effects that will make this transition hard for people since most workplaces rely on Word, PowerPoint, Outlook and Excel, and as a result they can’t unilaterally make the decision to switch over to Google’s free cloud versions of these programs. That being said, Chrome’s cloud computing OS is a key signal of where Google wants to go this decade, and there’s a lot of potential for cloud-based computing. It’s much faster, and much cheaper!

DH: Are there particular features you like about Chrome?

JM: I like what you can do with tabs. You can drag a tab away from the current window and into a new window which is something Internet Explorer and Firefox can’t do. Also when you open a new tab in Chrome it shows a thumbnail or list view of your most visited sites. You can customize themes, similar to Gmail and iGoogle’s homepage. This allows users to show off their individuality. and it can be changed as often as you change a Facebook profile picture, Twitter background or ringtone.

DH: What are your immediate impressions of Buzz?

JM: Buzz is integrated with Gmail and I like that you can get to it easily from the left-hand navigation whenever you’re logged in to your email account.

DH: How flexible is Buzz in terms of integrating with Twitter and Facebook?

JM: You can connect Buzz to your Twitter feed easily, but even though it only takes a few steps, I’ve noticed that my tweets don’t instantaneously appear in my Buzz feed. In one instance, there was a five hour delay. I’ve found connecting it to your Facebook status to be much harder.

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