Through its sleek, easy-to-use website, Coursesmart offers an ever-growing selection of “e-textbooks” – electronic versions of the traditional print texts that can be read on desktops, laptops, iPads and even iPhones.  Coursesmart’s e-textbooks give the reader the ability to highlight sections, take notes in the margins, print selected pages and cut and paste selections.  Now there is no need to carry around tons of heavy books – you can keep them all on our laptop, read for easy access with just one click.

I was particularly impressed by Coursesmart’s synergy with Apple products.  Being able to access textbooks from an iPhone is the ultimate in transportable texts.  Furthermore, the iPad opens the door to more interactive and impactful textbooks.  (See image above for an example of a Coursesmart text viewed on a iPad.)  The Wall Street Journal discussed the iPad and Coursesmart’s innovative e-texts in a recent article, stating that the new device makes book publishers “eager to exploit its color, video, and touch-screen capabilities.”  I, for one, would love to test drive this exciting new technology.

Of course, this new technology comes with a big price tag.  Coursesmart’s e-textbooks, while less expensive than print versions, can still run in the $100 range.  And then there’s the iPad, priced at $499 – a very pricey item to pile on top of an already expensive back to school season.  Another textbook innovator, Chegg, combines new and old technology to offer a more affordable alternative.

Chegg is the Netflix of the textbook world: users can rent paper textbooks, and then return them for free via UPS when the semester ends.   (The name is a play on the classic “chicken and the egg” dilemma.)  Chegg touts its used book rental services as both economical and eco-friendly.  Rental prices are often more than 50% off the purchase price – a welcome treat for students and their parents.  On the green side, Chegg promises to plant a tree for every book rented.

I love Chegg’s merger of the low tech (sharing books) and the high tech (fast, searchable, easy-to-use website).  This year, Chegg has launched two more ways to take advantage of its service – a new iPhone app that allows users to rent books via their phone, and a pilot program of rental stands in college bookstores that brings the “rental experience” onto campus.

Finally, Chegg is running a fun promotion this season called Golden Chegg.  Rent books now thorough September 13^th, and you are entered to win one of thousands of prizes.  The winners are tracked on Chegg’s Facebook page.  Saving money and winning prizes?  Sign me up!

I hope you have enjoyed this survey of the best of Back to School.  Do you have any innovative, fun and important campaigns to add to the list?  Share them here or on Weber Media’s Facebook page.  Happy shopping, and to all fellow students, I wish you good luck this school year!

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Target is a popular destination for college students stocking up on dorm necessities.  To help ensure these coeds get everything they need, Target has developed an interactive checklist accessible via Facebook.  The checklist has three options (“buy,” “have” and “pass”), and includes links to purchase specific products on Target.com.

The best part about this campaign, however, is the roommates option.  This part of the app allows students to share their list with their roommate(s), helping ensure that one suite will not wind up with four vacuums and only one lamp.  The app also features messaging, calendars, and even a bill splitter – definitely something I wish I had in college.

Once the checklist is complete, students can select the print option and bring the list along on their shopping trip.  The checklist is even available on Target.com in a more traditional PDF format.  All in all, this campaign is a helpful tool for college students, as well as an ingenious way to show off the megastore’s seemingly innumerable product offerings.

Stop by our blog on Monday for the conclusion of this series, in which I discuss two innovative and cost-effective alternatives to the traditional college bookstore.

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As a grad student, I’ve done the Back to School ritual more times then I’d care to count.  So, to liven up the hunt this year, I’ve added an additional item to my usual list of notebooks, highlighters and (of course) new shoes – find my favorite Back to School marketing campaigns.  I sought out campaigns that are innovative, fun and helpful, both to the shopper and the community at large.  A lucky few made it to the top of the class, and I will detail those campaigns in a series of three posts.  Today, I will profile Staples’ philanthropy.

Students and parents browsing the aisles (or web site pages) of this office superstore for back to school necessities can do more than just buy – they can give back, too.  For the third year in a row, Staples has partnered with teen-centric non-profit DoSomething.org to collect school supplies for children in need.  Donation bins have been set up in Staples retail locations across the country, and school supplies of all kinds will be collected now through September 18^th.

This year, Staples used Facebook and a celeb-filled online game to help students get involved.  Teen can vote to join their favorite celebrity’s “pack,” and in the process donate $1 to the cause.  Donations are also accepted via text message.

All in all, I loved Staples’ idea and its execution.  These simple donations are a great way to teach everyone from preschoolers to high schoolers the importance of generosity and kindness towards those who are less fortunate.  Furthermore, through their Do Something 101 microsite, they provide helpful tips that help students run their own school supply drives – the lesson being that teens can really “do something” big to help their communities.

Judging by the 28,000 Facebook fans and thousands of votes on the contest page, this event is a proving to be a success.  Even Staples’ archrival Dunder Mifflin is getting in on the action!  With that endorsement secured, I now know where I’ll be purchasing my paper…

I hope you have enjoyed this first installment of my survey of the best of Back to School.  Be sure to visit our blog soon to see who else made the list!

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This band did everything differently– they produced only 13 albums over 30 years but instead toured constantly, doing more than 2300 shows. They played different songs every night from their catalog of 500 and supported the fans need for live shows by letting them record from a special section in the audience. Their brand lives on more than 15 years after Jerry Garcia’s death, and new fans are discovering them even now.

So, when I heard that David and Brian Halligan of Hubspot had written “Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead: What Every Business Can Learn from the Most Iconic Band in History”, I knew I needed to review it here. It covers how the Dead did the marketing basics differently: Their unique brand, message and offering, their fans(customers), and finally, their business model and operations. It’s a perfect guide for CEOs and marketers to learn to think differently and  create a break through brand.

I like it’s size and structure, small and easy to digest, but with a lot of good concepts that will make sense to marketers. There are also great examples of businesses that succeeded using some of these principles.  If you don’t know much about the Grateful Dead, this material will help you to understand them and why they were the most successful touring band in history.  To learn more, visit the Facebook Fan page.

As a result of reading this great book, I am considering how Weber Media Partners can better grow our fans, one at a time, by listening and collaborating with our clients to deliver the most innovative and effective marketing programs. Read the book and maybe you will too.

Oh, and, take some time to listen to the music. It’s just that good.

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While influence is nothing new, the many ways we’re influenced is, in more and more ways.  If you consider all of the consumer buying decisions we make: where we shop and dine out, which movies we see and what music we listen to, we have always made decisions with influence from our family, our friends, and, even perfect strangers.

Now, in addition to in-person influence, we are often influenced by a virtual community made up of people that we know, and their friends, many who post their opinions on Facebook, by liking a page, or on Amazon, by reviewing a product, or on Yelp, by reviewing a restaurant or local business.  (Yelp, by the way, got in trouble with site users for manipulating reviews in favor of advertisers and has changed their policy based on widespread negative feedback.)

That’s why Facebook has been making it easy for companies to incorporate the Like widget on their websites and blogs. Everything you “like” is cataloged for all of your Facebook friends to see.

This summer, my family decided to take a road trip, and I started using Foursquare, which posts my visits to restaurants and hotels, as well as my review of the experience.  Location-based social influence is in its early stages with the general public, but growing.

Recently, Google has started incorporating reviews into search results. Rather than navigating to a review site, google delivers the reviews,  saving the user clicks, and keeping them on their site.

Businesses who understand how to harness their own customers’ influence can make the leap from a few testimonials on a their About page, to a fan club spread across the web, where ever their customers and potential customers might be found.

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During a discussion on  blogging, one of our clients pointed out that everything they see on blogs is BORING, longwinded, and is more like stream of consciousness thoughts vs. useful information.

If you Google “Why Blogs Fail”, you will get more than 89 million links to articles, many of them blog posts to this very topic.  The reason blogs fail is not a secret, and some statistics claim  that 95% of them do.

• Blogs fail because the organization has not made a real commitment to resources
• Blogs fail because there is no clear content strategy
• Blogs fail because the author doesn’t know if anyone is listening

What is considered blog success?
If your blog

• contributes something of value and demonstrates your expertise regularly (at least once per week)
• set you apart from your competition
• has visitors who read your content (how many depends on what share of the audience you want)
• gets comments and starts conversations

you can feel pretty good that your blog is going in the right direction.

That is why we always help our clients create a blog strategy first that clearly articulates:

1. the objectives for the blog
2. who the audience is and what content do they care about
3. who is going to manage, write and moderate
4. an editorial calendar for 6 months to a year
5. where story ideas will come from
6. set up a process for moderation and approvals
7. set up analytics to track traffic

While corporations make a financial commitment to many types of marketing programs, blogging isn’t often give the same respect. I suspect this is mainly because we need to demonstrate measurable value on par with other programs.

Positioning Blog Value

Blogs demonstrate your thought leadership and increase traffic from organic search. Traffic from organic search can be transformed into qualified leads with the right offers and landing pages.  If you are struggling to get management support and budget to start and maintain a blog, it may be wise to bundle it with other, more conventional lead generation and SEO programs which are more widely understood and supported.

So, rather than think of white papers to present thought leadership and case study PDFs,  think blogs, videos and ebooks.  More on video and ebooks soon.

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This is a true story. Yesterday morning I met a friend for coffee. She’s owned and operated a business in the design industry for many years where she’s worked with both B2B and B2C customers, and lately has grown more curious about social marketing.

My friend told me that she’s always been an early adopter of technology and has even been a little surprised that she hasn’t considered social marketing earlier. Like so many other business people, she hasn’t known where to begin.

It wasn’t until driving back to my office after the hour we spent together that I realized I had used the ROAD map as a way to walk her through the basics of social marketing. As a refresher, MarketingSherpa identified ROAD as Research, Objectives, Actions and Devices.

Here’s how we approached the topic together for her first time:

Research: My friend told me that she reads a number of blogs in the creative design industry and has for some time. There are blogs she’s come across which she thinks are excellent and others that in her opinion, don’t provide any value. This is a great first step and I suggested that she take it  further by trying to identify what she thinks are good about those blogs. What could she emulate in her own blog if she were to start one? What would be the topics and focus? What content would best demonstrate her firm’s expertise? What would set her company apart from others? Ongoing research of blogs and other social media channels will be an important part of the process.

Objectives: Like any marketing efforts, social marketing needs a list of identifiable objectives you’re hoping to achieve. My friend explained that her business uses their website and photographs to help show prospective clients the work they do. So why would they need more? Social marketing content could drive traffic to their website. It can help get the company name and their services out in front of people on a frequent and regular basis. With social media marketing a company’s values and personality can be readily  communicated. In this step my friend needs to identify what she hopes to get out of social media marketing for her business. Coming up with objectives will help her to undertake social media marketing efforts for the right reasons. It will also give her company a meaningful way to stay in touch with existing customers.

Actions: MarketingSherpa defines actions as a tactical plan that will show you how to get there from here. In my friend’s case, she is at the very beginning of an exploratory phase. She won’t be able to implement a social media plan until she understands more about social marketing and the implications for her business. Like many other business people the decision whether to take on social marketing isn’t a unilateral decision. Her first steps will be to talk with others in her firm about what she’s learned so far. The question of how to manage and fund social marketing initiatives will most likely be a key part of the discussion. The conversation won’t happen or be resolved overnight. It will take time. In fact, actions may involve taking one step forward and two steps back. And that might happen a few times along the ROAD.

Devices: This is where my friend and her colleagues need to identify which social media channels would make the most sense for the business (assuming that’s the direction they choose to go). Social media marketing isn’t a one-size fits all proposition. They will need to think about whether written blog posts are what their audience will respond to. Or perhaps Facebook updates with links to events and posts. Will tweets work with Facebook, or could they stand on their own? Would the business benefit from having a presence on Flickr or YouTube? These are all considerations. By talking through the various channels and learning more about them by going to different companies pages they will be able to make more informed decisions about social media channels. As MarketingSherpa suggests the “number of social media sites in your social marketing architecture is not important. What is important is that they each have a clearly defined purpose that supports your tactical plan of action.”

I’ll be interested to follow her companies’ discovery process. What about you? Where are you on the social marketing ROAD? What key lessons have you learned along the way?

image credit: jurvetson’s photostream

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Infographic Source: Ethan Bloch, Flowtown.

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We had a great group of panelists who provided a balance of tools, case studies and strategy. My task was to present on strategy.   While everyone had a Facebook presence, only two or three audience members had a strategy to back up their social media activities. This is common amongst most nonprofits and many for-profits.  Unfortunately, without a strategy in place, these organizations may not be creating content that serves their audience, delivers on their organizational objectives or have the triggers in place to understand how successful their programs are.

The great news is that once your strategy is created and you know what you need to do, your daily social media marketing activities are efficient and carry more impact. Having measurements in place is rewarding. Once you know what’s not working, you can eliminate  time spent on them and focus on successful tactics. This is crucial for justifying resource allocation and funding.

The main steps in creating a strategy are:

• Develop objectives for your marketing and social media program
• Conduct a competitive review to hear best practices in your industry
• Profile your audiences and understand their needs and how you can serve them
• Draft a plan that identifies objectives, tactics and measurement strategy for 6 months
• Implement the program and measure it monthly, tweaking as you go.

More resources

My slides

Nonprofit Social Network Benchmark Report

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The title of MarketingSherpa’s 2010 Handbook, Social Marketing ROAD Map, is not only a clever analogy referring to the territory marketers must navigate to map out a social media strategy, the acronym is memorable and quite right-on. ROAD stands for: Research, Objectives, Actions and Devices.

I know writers are supposed to resist the temptation to use clichés—but I can’t help it—so indulge me here for a moment while I offer you a personal perspective. For me, someone who fears getting lost, my Global Positioning System (GPS) has changed my life with its turn-by-turn voice directions. The ROAD Map Handbook offers the comfort and confidence that I’ve come to rely on from my GPS. I think you too will find great direction from the guidelines, best practices and tactics, templates, suggested resources, worksheets, list of social media platforms, and comprehensive glossary.

Whether you’re a marketer just starting out in Social Media or have been traveling these roads for some time, you’re bound to find many valuable tips and strategies in MarketingSherpa’s Social Marketing Road Map Handbook.

You’ll want to read the Handbook yourself to receive the full benefit but to get you started, here are some of my favorite marketing signposts. See if any of the concepts speak to you or challenge how you’ve thought about your social media and search campaigns. (Share your thoughts in the comments.) Also, check-out MarketingSherpa’s upcoming social marketing workshops that begin next week in Boston.

Signpost #1: Include tactics that maintain viral momentum when building social media campaigns.

Signpost #2: Integrate social media with your other online marketing tactics.

Signpost #3: Get on board with integrating Social Media and SEO tactics. Social Media has the potential to greatly improve your search engine campaigns.

Signpost #4: Social content is getting indexed by search engines and generates increased number of listings in search results.

Signpost #5: Social Media’s true benefit to search campaigns is increased clickthrough rates which will bring: increased traffic to your website, leads and online sales, email addresses, and more items added to shopping carts.

Signpost #6: Social Media generates reams of online content which needs to be optimized with targeted keywords.

Signpost #7: A key tenet of Social Media Marketing is to provide value through great content and interaction.

Signpost #8: Add relevant URL’s to social media profiles, e.g. Facebook, twitter.

Signpost #9: SEO keyword research can identify keywords and phrases to use in social media channels to attract more visitors.

Signpost #10: Creating a blog enables you to share your industry expertise with clients while generating massive amounts of keyword-rich content for your domain and search engines.

Signpost #11: Social sharing allows email recipients to share email content on popular social networks and other social media sites.

Signpost #12: Assess and select specific social media brands that will most effectively power the tactics and fit into the social marketing architecture. Lack of architecture results in “random acts of social marketing.” 
Brands include: Social Networks (e.g. Facebook and LinkedIn), Microblog (e.g. Twitter), Video sharing (e.g. YouTube), Photo sharing (e.g. Flickr), Presentation sharing (e.g. SlideShare), Document sharing (e.g. Scribd), Social Bookmarking or News (e.g. Digg).

Signpost #13: The number of social media sites in your social marketing architecture is not important. What is important is that they each have a clearly defined purpose that supports your tactical plan of action.

Signpost #14: Many of the most successful social marketing architectures have a common structure based on a hub and spoke design.

Signpost #15: A website can be the hub of your overall marketing strategy while a blog is the hub of a social marketing strategy.

Signpost #16: The website offers key touch-points for attracting anonymous visitors and converting them into identifiable leads or customers by offering marketing information needed to make purchase decisions.

Signpost #17: A blog is an important aggregation point for frequently updated content and destination point for inbound links. Blogs are very search engine friendly, usually achieving rankings above a website.

Signpost #18: Social networks, multimedia sharing, and social bookmarking sites serve as spoke sites for the hub by feeding traffic to the hub and enabling the hub to feed traffic back to them for engagement and community building.

Thoughts? Comments?

* DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION Special thanks to Sergio Balegno, Research Director, MarketingSherpa for providing a review copy of  Social Marketing ROAD Map for this blog post.

Image by JMC Photos via Flickr

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In this post, we will review the findings of a recent report from intelligence provider Social Media Influence (SMI), and share our own analysis to help you handicap this race to success.

In their June report entitled “The State of Social Media Jobs 2010,” SMI surveyed the marketing departments of all Fortune 100 companies, to find out whether they have in-house social media resources, outsource their social media campaigns, or have little to no investment in social media marketing.

The graph below shows the results of their survey.  The blue line represents the total number of companies in that industry, while the red line represents those companies in that industry that SMI deems “social media-savvy” (i.e. they devote significant in-house resources to social media marketing efforts).  As you can see, the leaders of the group include Tech/Consumer Electronics, Healthcare, Retail and Automotive.  On the flip side, the laggards are Petroleum/Energy, Financial Services/Insurance and Utilities.  (Click to enlarge image.)

Based on my experience as a business school student and a professional focusing on the field of social media marketing, this list of early and late adopters conforms to what I expected to see.  Yet I did some digging of my own, both to test this conclusion and to single out companies that typify/contradict this survey data.

Leaders

With all of the coverage detailing how social media is impacting fashion, dining and entertainment, I was not surprised to see retail high on the list of the converted.  Tech/consumer electronics is also an expected leader, given the increasing importance of social features to their gadget-loving consumers.

Yet it was healthcare’s spot on the list that was the biggest surprise for me.  Health-focused social communities like Inspire and PatientsLikeMe have been steadily growing in the last few years, and have been garnering press and academic inquiry along the way.  But who are the social media exemplars from the healthcare industry?

To find out, I surveyed the numerous, renowned hospitals in my hometown of Boston to track and evaluate their social media presence.  I found 14 Boston hospitals with active Facebook pages – and that’s just in the city itself.  These 14 hospitals together attract a total of 168,398 fans as of July 13th.

Particularly striking is Children’s Hospital Boston, a world-renowned hospital whose Facebook page attracts over 150,000 fans.  Their Facebook page features numerous freely-given testimonials from patients and parents, hospital news and awards announcements, links to children’s health articles and videos, and even Spanish-language posts. The hospital, which also has a presence on Twitter and YouTube, is fully embracing social media as an important mode of communication with its patients, their parents, the Boston community and the medical community at large.

Laggards

The SMI report shows that the financial services industry is one of the clear laggards in the social media race, again an unsurprising finding based on my experience.  The name of the game here is regulation.  In the wake of industry upheaval and some headline grabbing scandals, the industry is understandably reluctant to make a big leap into this ever-changing new marketing environment.

In January 2010, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) released guidelines for the use of blogs and social media by financial firms, at the request of the firms.  The 10-page guidelines include rules regarding record keeping, suitability, supervision, training and third-party posts.  (For a summary of the guidelines, listen to this 10-minute podcast from FINRA.)

Tracking the social media forays of financial services firms in light of these new guidelines will be key in 2010.  Based on a brief survey, I found the large players in the industry have begun to engage with social media.  Fidelity Investments and Vanguard both have sizable Facebook followings (over 3,000 fans and over 9,000 fans, respectively).  Unsurprisingly, both pages also feature lengthy disclaimers and detailed posting guidelines.

In contrast to this industry’s slow move into social media, one big player in another social media laggard industry – petroleum/energy – was thrust into the media this year in a very public way.  I am talking of course about BP.

Search Facebook for pages with “BP” in the title, and you get more than 500 results, with names like “Boycott BP,” “I HATE BP,” “Make BP responsible for the Gulf Coast oil spill” and more, some with language we won’t publish here.  In other words, outraged people have inundated social media with protests, boycotts, and other harsh words for the oil company.  There was even a very public battle with a parody Twitter account BPGlobalPR, which is still active and has attracted over 180,000 followers.

In response, BP has created their own Facebook page to “engage the public in an informative conversation and dialogue about [BP’s] efforts associated with the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.”  This site, which also links to an official blog, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr accounts, provides updates on the spill and the cleanup on an hourly basis.  The site is full of interactive, detailed information, but its number of followers pales in comparison to the hundreds of thousands of followers on the anti-BP sites.  Whether BP’s social media efforts will continue in the future is unknown; what is known is that they had to quickly catch up in order to join the social media conversation.

Will BP’s lesson affect its industry’s social media reluctance?  Will the new FINRA guidelines and industry leaders spur more social media interest on the part of the financial services industry?  Will healthcare continue to be a social media innovator?  Whatever the outcome, 2010 will no doubt bring more new developments in the race to achieve success in the ever-changing field of social media marketing.

Now we want to hear from you.  Do you agree with this list?  Do you know of any companies that support or contradict these findings?  Share your thoughts in the comments below, or via Facebook and Twitter.

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In the new book, The Yahoo! Style Guide, bloggers are advised to “write for the world.” We’re reminded that the web is a worldwide medium and “site visitors probably come from more than one country and more than one culture. Collectively, they probably speak several languages.”

I review the analytics for this site on a regular basis and am often intrigued to see the far-reaching range that posts can have. This past month visits came from 47 countries/territories and 23 languages. (Drilling down a little further I could even see that one recent post was picked up and cited on a blog in Brazil and then viewed most heavily in Sao Paulo.)

So what’s a blogger to do?

• You can start by following five best practices from the style guide: 1) Keep the sentence structure simple, 2) Include “signposts”: words that help readers see how the parts of a sentence relate, 3) Eliminate ambiguity, 4) Avoid uncommon words and non-literal usages, and 5) Rewrite text that doesn’t translate literally.

• If you’re not tracking where your visitors are coming from, you may be surprised. Check out the Google Analytics tabs for map overlay and languages.

• You can also view a selection of instructional videos about Google Analytics on YouTube. Below is a helpful introduction to get you started:

Image by CLUC via Flickr

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Via: Medical Coding Certification

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In a new post by Denise Wakeman she suggests repurposing your blog posts into different formats to “get more exposure and more value from the time you’ve initially invested in creating the content. Not to mention that you can drive more traffic back to your home base.”

What can you do with the post once its been published on your site? Denise suggests turning the content into different formats such as “reports, white papers, articles, slide shows, videos, podcasts, teleseminars, ebooks, etc.”

One place where you can repurpose your content is in your email newsletter by including a few lines in a short piece and linking back to your blog. That way you’ve not only repurposed the content but possibly have taken your non-blog reading client to your posts and demonstrated to them what they’ve been missing. Include too, a call to action to to sign-up to receive updates about your posts via rss feed or by email subscription.

This approach is consistent too with the findings of  new study by GetResponse e-mails where they found that that including options like share on Facebook or Twitter generated a higher click-through rate than e-mails without them.

Another good practice is creating a list of your recent popular posts and again driving the traffic back to your blog.  Ebooks, too, are very big and if you want a quick and easy way to turn the content into a pdf, a good tool is zinepal which we wrote about in an earlier post, Repurposing the Written Word: Getting the Most Bang from Your Content.

Speaking of email newsletters, you can also archive your past newsletters and create links from your website and blog back to past issues. Of course Twitter and Facebook are good for promoting your posts but you can take it a step further by using snippets of the content to draw readers to the site.

When you start thinking about repurposing content you’ll come up with a lot of creative strategies for insuring that you get the most value you can from the time you created original content.

What strategies do you use for repurposing your content?

Image via Wikipedia

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We’ve been thinking more about the one deal a day business model since our post last week, “Who’s Buying In to Groupon, LivingSocial & the One-Deal-a-Day Business Model,” which explored the demographics of users.

In a recent post by Barrett Lane,  a blogger for Yipit, he  looks at considerations for businesses who are contemplating running an online daily deal.  We also found a post by Jim Moran, co-founder of Yipit, which sheds some interesting light on the psychology of persuasion and what motivates individuals to act on a purchase.

Last but not least, a discussion of one day a deal offers wouldn’t be complete without looking at how engaged a business is in social networking.

Factors for Businesses Considering Online Daily Deals
Barrett suggests five things you should know if you’re interested in learning how your business can cash in on the daily deal craze:
1. Evaluate the best day of the week
2. Pick the deal service that delivers the right volume for your business
3. Look for chances to up-sell your higher end product
4. Find your niche site e.g. Groupon, LivingSocial, Village Vines, BlackboardEats, etc.
5. Encourage customers who like deals to sign up for your mailing list, follow on twitter, Facebook and check in via Foursquare as a way to get additional discounts.

What Motivates Individuals to Act on a Purchase?
Jim Moran, co-founder of Yipit, referenced  Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, a book by Robert Cialdini in his post. Ciadlini suggests that five factors motivate individuals to act on an opportunity:
1. Scarcity-Is the opportunity available for a limited time
2. Social proof-are others purchasing the deal
3. Commitment-is the decision consistent with a choice the individual has made in the past
4. Liking-does the individual know and like the purveyor
5. Authority-does the source hold sway.

Social Networking Engagement
As Barrett suggests customers should be encouraged to follow-up and sign-up after purchasing an online deal. The rapid proliferation of companies flocking to one deal a day websites makes us curious about how well the business is doing with social networking sites. We suggest the following:
1. Social Networking for the Long Haul-Businesses should be in social networking for the long haul e.g. not just the weeks before the deal and the immediate weeks which follow
2. Offer Compelling Content-Along with follow-up opportunities for additional discounts, offer compelling content. People don’t always want to be sold to. Constantly coming at them with another way to spend money may be off putting. Instead if you’re a day spa who offered a deal about a facial, offer content about tips for cleansing the skin, staying hydrated during the summer, how to maintain healthy skin.
3. Experiment and Assess Social Networks: Find out which network works best with your followers. Are they more inclined to read your blog, follow you on twitter, read your facebook updates, subscribe to an email newsletter? If you don’t know, you can ask them in a quick survey. Most important, offer different types of content in the different channels. Re-purposed content should offer another slant or an expanded discussion. Don’t look the same everywhere you are–your users will become bored and move on.

What factors would you add for businesses to consider about online daily deals?

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

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There’s a lot happening on the Internet these days. People are looking forward to checking their e-mails and following businesses on Facebook and Twitter all in the name of deals, not any deals for that matter, but the “one deal a day” type. One deal a day is a web-based business model in which a single type of product is offered for sale for a period of 24 hours…and operate within geographic territories.

People are not only checking their e-mails and reading online content about deals but business is reportedly up for Groupon, LivingSocial and their competitors. Techcrunch reports that people are buying coupons for restaurants, massages, discounted memberships to fitness clubs and museums, local activities, tourist attractions, and merchandise.

Marketing has always been about looking at demographics and understanding what sells in specific markets. Techcrunch states “You can tell a lot about a city by what is being bought on Groupon.” Apparently Boston residents love laser hair removal, Segways, and learning how to fly a helicopter. San Diegans are into Pole Dancing, unlimited carnival rides. Denver loves Cold Stone Creamery and Speed Raceway. Atlanta is into NASCAR and Chicagoans enjoy the Tall Ships.  The site has accumulated 3 million subscribers and currently manages roughly 40 markets. Groupon states that their customers are socially active, both online and off. 68% are between 18-34; 50% have a bachelor’s degree, 30% graduate degree; 49% are single, 33% married; 77% women, 23% men. 66% read Groupon write-ups every day and use Groupon primarily as a guide to explore their city. (see more about groupon’s demographics)

From a company’s perspective there’s really nothing to lose by signing up to promote a business on a “one deal a day” website. If the minimum number of people haven’t signed on, the deal isn’t on. One deal a day websites do the upfront work. Groupon for example, will write the copy which they say “ranges from the straightforward to the whimsical and bizarre.” A recent article in the New York Times pointed out that one write-up for a spa focused on trivia which related to the the spelling of “spa” e.g. Spackle should never be used as toothpaste and Spanky was the only member of the Little Rascals brave enough to donate his brain to science during World War II. As Times writer, Randall Stross says, “If good advertising is supposed to be memorable, this is very good.”

Groupon refers to the experience as “collective buying” and offers consumers discounts of 40 to 90%. Participating merchants collect 50 to 70% of the face value of the deal. LivingSocial takes the process one step further after you buy the deal by sending you a unique link to share. If three people buy the deal using your link, then your deal is free.

Will you consider using a service like Groupon or LivingSocial as a consumer? For your business? If you’ve used already, what have your experiences been like?

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That’s how I felt about the 20 best reader responses when I read them, which Mashable has classified with key characteristics such as: collaboration, network, conversation, sharing, etc.

I’d add to their list: Timely: Social Media is all the news fit to blog, tweet and post.

What about you? What would you add?

P.S. Tell Your Friends & Followers & Join in the Celebration of Social Media Day on June 30th!

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Foursquare is a location-based social networking service for the web and mobile devices, as well as a game.

The mobile app, calculates your location, and provides you with a list of restaurants and stores in the area.  You find your restaurant in the list, select it, and touch “Check-In Here.”  If you are hoping to locate people, you can include a brief “shout-out” message – “mini college reunion with Rachel and Pam!” -  which quickly spreads to your friends on Foursquare, and also Facebook and Twitter.

This is just one example of why city dwellers are tapping into this new service.  In addition to this friend-finding aspect, Foursquare is also a game.  Users compete citywide to earn the most points each week.  Each check-in earns that user one point.  Extra points are earned through “badges,” awarded to the user after certain events (25 different places checked-in, out four nights in a row, etc.)

As the number of users has grown, the rewards have become more tangible.  A user becomes the “mayor” of a location if he or she has checked-in there more than any other user.  Businesses in turn are rewarding their mayors with real-world benefits.  Local bars and restaurants are offering free or discounted food and drink, and chains like Starbucks and Whole Foods have launched coupon programs for Foursquare mayors.

And Foursquare promotions are not limited to food and drinks.  Higher-end fashion chains like Diesel and Marc Jacobs have also launched Foursquare campaigns, as have media outlets like NBC, the New York Times and The History Channel.

Given that this is social media, and these campaigns are both new and ongoing, exact ROI numbers are difficult to find.  Starbucks has garnered the most press for its use of Foursquare, and its campaigns are likely to be tracked extensively in the blogosphere as the key test case for the viability of Foursquare marketing.

While the ROI of Foursquare marketing is uncertain, what is certain is that location-based social networking is becoming increasingly in-demand and important for marketers.  Twitter added a geo-location feature in November 2009, and Facebook’s location options are set to debut this month.  Foursquare also has a growing number of competitors in the location-based social networking sphere, including Gowalla and Yelp.

Mike Proulx of Hill Holiday recently shared some good examples of businesses using Foursquare on the company’s blog.

With 15,000 new users joining Foursquare every day, this new social media tool is fast becoming a new and powerful way to engage with customers.

[Catherine Weber contributed to this post]

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With this story, Charlene lays the groundwork for her new work about the ways in which social technology has changed the shift in power, where “individuals have the ability to broadcast their views to the world.”

Throughout the book, we learn from one example after another, how leaders need to find a way to communicate as openly as they can, and how this comes more easily for some than others. Charlene includes Open Leadership Self-Assessment tools so leaders can determine where they fall in the spectrum. She offers hope too for those who may not naturally be inclined towards openness by suggesting they start small. As she says, “It’s hard to suspend a mind-set that’s driven you throughout your professional career-it may feel completely unnatural to you and go against every fiber in your body.”

The book also includes useful Action Plans and Open Strategy Checklists. We learn too how leaders can (and should) partner with the optimists and strong collaborators in their organizations, and create a culture that supports being open.

While all leaders won’t comfortably gravitate to blogging or maintaining a presence on Facebook, Charlene gives two great examples of how some businesses have found workarounds. She tells the story about Bill Marriott, the CEO of hotel chain Marriott International who started blogging in 2007. But Marriott wasn’t comfortable with using the technology and couldn’t even type so a member of the communications staff records what he wants to say, transcribes it, and posts the text and audio file on his blog. John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems, was concerned that blogging wouldn’t be a good fit for him so instead he tried a video blog.

The last chapter of the book, “How Openness Transforms Organizations” includes seven recommendations: 1) create a sense of urgency with information sharing, 2) identify the values that will carry you through the transformation, 3) lead by example, 4) encourage risk taking; reward risks taken, 5) start small to win big, 6) institutionalize systems and structures, 7) be patient.

With many valuable lessons and tools of the trade, Open Leadership will rightfully take its place on the virtual and brick-and-mortar Best of Business Book shelves for years to come.

If you had to answer the question right now, would you say you and your organization are open to practicing open leadership? What would make it possible?

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

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The Atlantic Monthly’s story “How to Save the News” by James Fallows, describes the ways in which Google is trying to “bring the news business back to life.” Fallows writes that Google now considers journalism’s survival crucial to its own prospects. Two important developments for Google were Google News, “a kind of air-traffic-control center for the movement of stories across the world’s media, in real time and Google Alerts, a way to stay on top of the topics important to you.

Fallows says, “But all of their [Google’s] plans for reinventing a business model for journalism involve attracting money to the Web-based news sites now available on computers, and to the portable information streams that will flow to whatever devices evolve from today’s smart phones, iPods and iPads, Nooks and Kindles, and mobile devices of any other sort.”

The three pillars of the new online business model are described by Fallows as “distribution, engagement, and monetization… getting news to more people, and more people to news-oriented sites; making the presentation of news more interesting, varied, and involving; and converting these larger and more strongly committed audiences into revenue, through both subscription fees and ads.”

Of course, the critical ingredient for news whether it’s online or in print is well-written and compelling content. Readers will engage with a story when the story draws them in and keeps them there to the end. It’s no longer a given that we will read a newspaper from front to back. Readers will pick and choose. A good website and a good print publication will keep tabs on what their readers want to read.

Fallows says, “Spending time with an article, whether in print or online, is of course the definition of ‘engagement’.” If you’re interested in the converging worlds of new media and journalism, I think you’ll find the article “How to Save the News” well worth your time.

Enjoy your Memorial Day Weekend and let us know where you’ve been reading the news (e.g. online, print, desktop, smartphone, iPad, etc,) and what stories kept you engaged.

Photo Credit: Tharum Bun

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For starters, you can brush up on the Facebook facts you might not have known before this fun infographic.  And here’s another new hot-off-the-internet story about how Time Magazine’s May 31 issue will hit newsstands with a cover and feature story about Facebook and how it’s redefining privacy.

What Facebook facts or trivia can you add to the conversation?

[Source: Online PhD Programs]

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MashableMashable

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I decided to pose the following question to a group of marketers on LinkedIn–to see if I’ve been missing something.

“When you do a Google Search, do you click on the sponsored links on the right-hand side of the page? -Sometimes, never, always Why? Do you click differently personally vs. professionally?”

Here’s some of their comments below:

1. “Have to admit I never even look at the sponsored ads on the right hand side. They don’t catch my attention and I never think to even read them. if what I’m looking for isn’t in the first few search results I’ll tend to try a different search string, but I’ll never glance over to the ads. maybe that’s ad blindness caused by excessive web use!”

2. “Sometimes, if the description seems directly applicable to what I’m looking for.”

3. “I rarely click on any banner. Perhaps once a month.
Mainly, I’m too focused on what I’m doing or seeking to waste time on a tangent.”

4. “Rarely. I am much more inclined to click on the organic listings, however I have clicked on a PPC ad a couple times when I’ve been in the market to buy a specific product online (like area rugs or picture frames).”

5. “I mostly stick to the organic search results. If the ads are directly related to what I am looking for then I might click on it.”

6. “Of course the free clicks unless I want to spend my competition’s money?”

7. “Very rarely. I tend to trust organic placement as Google is pretty hot on scam sites. Sponsored links need to be relevant to a search query but are higher risk.”

8. “Fortunately a casual user will not necessarily know what a sponsored link means. I use PPC for testing keyword effectiveness so that is probably a good thing.”

9. “I rarely click on sponsored links – They rarely offer what I’m looking for.”

10. Never. Unless I’m just in the mood to spend my competitors money….

11. “Never, unless I would have chosen them anyway.”

12. “Never! It’s weird, I’ve never once clicked on a Google ad of any kind. I always assume search results will have what I need and if not I use a different term. Same with the links in my gmail account — just seems like spam to me.”

13. “Sometimes, when necessary, sure…”

14. “Even before I fully understood Search Engine Optimization and how Search Engines utilize logarithms for natural listings, I would rarely click on sponsored links. This is because organic listings seemed to be more effective at providing me with the information I needed.”

After studying SEO and implementing SEO strategies, I now may click on a sponsored link once a month. Simply, the organic search results are more relevant. Companies pay for sponsored links to appear when certain keywords are searched, but organic listings are direct results of relevant content.

I have had discussions with other students at my university and it seems like the preference of organic listings is a consensus. Consumers are smart. They want relevant and meaningful results. After several searches, consumers learn to ignore the links that are being pushed on them (sponsored links) and prefer those that they are pulling out (natural listings). In my case this sediment has been applied both in my personal and professional spheres.

What about you? Do you ever click on the sponsored links? Sometimes, never, always.
Why? Do you click differently personally vs. professionally?”

image credit: Danard Vincente

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Andrew Cohen of Forum One, recently wrote about the session he attended at the South by Southwest Interactive Conference, which identified legal issues as the top concerns of hospital administrators. Second to this is “lack of comfort with social media by administrators as well as staff…”

With patients helping themselves to information on websites that may or may not be good information, hospitals and other healthcare organizations like lifecare facilities have an opportunity to help guide patients and their families to good information and support.

In fact, every department needs to consider how social media effects them including human resources, legal, marketing, IT, patient services, and each and every medical specialty.   In 2009, we met with many of the SVPs  at a major teaching hospital north of Boston, Lahey Clinic, to give them a sense of what they need to think about.

Key to a social media strategy that has many public facing thought leaders guidance and training. For these programs to be successful, they need to have participation and commitment from all of the major leaders in the organization.

Components of a social media strategy

Some of the components of a good strategy should include:

• Guidelines for usage-legal, HR and IT need to work together to determine what is appropriate social media usage on the job, and create a social media policy (or guidelines) and educate employees on their expectations for behavior.
• Marketing and media relations- the organization should update their media policy to include interviews on blogs, podcasts and web videos, as well as provide guidance for medical professionals on giving medical advice online.
• Thought leadership-Marketing should also develop a strategy on how to use the thought leadership of top physicians, through blogging, twitter accounts, podcasts and video, and mobile apps to promote the expertise of the hospital.
• Patient Services -Hospitals can engage patients through community forums and help them get answers to questions about their illness, surgery or recovery.

Marketing should implement these strategies centrally in a coordinated fashion as an extension of the overall marketing strategy, rather than leave it to each medical specialty to fend for themselves. Ideally there would be a new role at the hospital for a social media director who would work along side and collaborate with the traditional Marketing Communications Director.  Some hospitals hire outside consultants to start, then figure out what is needed in house after the initially strategy is developed.

The message is this: social media is the new way that we all get information, and it must be taken seriously. Hospitals and other healthcare organizations cannot afford to ignore it.

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1. Using a weak password
2. Leaving your full birth date in your profile
3. Overlooking useful privacy controls
4. Posting your child’s name in a caption
5. Mentioning you’ll be away from home
6. Letting search engines find you
7. Permitting youngsters to use Facebook unsupervised

What else do you do to protect your privacy?

Also of interest:
Facebook’s Eroding Privacy Policy: A Timeline
How To: Disable Facebook’s Instant Personalization” [Privacy]

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Not a day goes by when I don’t hear someone talk about the challenge of keeping up with technology. Most of the time it’s an individual talking about things like new mobile phones, iphone apps, google docs, search engines–you get the picture. But think about how difficult it must be for CIO’s and people working in corporate Information Technology departments; people who are responsible for choosing systems and applications and having to make decisions on where and how to spend their IT dollars.

This is why people like Phil Simon are so important. Simon is the author of a new book, The Next Wave of Technologies: Opportunities in Chaos, who collaborated with a network of experts to write about a wide spectrum of Enterprise 2.0 technologies.The book demystifies topics you may have thought were hands-off to you: SaaS (software as a service), enterprise search and retrieval (ESR), service-oriented architecture (SOA). The book also covers topics which may feel more mainstream at this point such as cloud computing, mobile technologies, and social networking.

The Next Wave of Technologies is a must-read for IT professionals who are scrambling to keep up with the implications of new technologies and a book for their colleagues who need to interface with them. Students and consulting firms will also benefit from reading the book. Simon writes, “…it does not provide all of the answers to any one technology, but summarizes the questions that readers should be asking themselves.”

Simon concludes, “In the end, no one has a crystal ball predicting how any technology will ultimately be used and by whom. Even the experts in this very book cannot foresee with any degree of certainty where we are going, much less how we are going to get there. In five years, any one of the Enterprise 2.0 technologies in this book may have already fizzled. We may look back at any one of them and say, “What were we thinking?…It will be a bumpy but exciting ride with magnificent rewards at the end for those able to find opportunity in chaos.”

One thing is clear, we can’t bury our head in the sand until the next wave of technologies settle. All of us who want to stay current and competitive need to have a good picture of the choices out there today and the effects they will have on the ways we communicate professionally and personally.

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

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I can’t say that I took particular issue with fanning a company, product or brand. To me it’s more about winning me over, doing something which stands out—deserves recognition and acknowledgement.

We have lots of choices today about where we can take our business: fly a particular airline, shop at which local supermarket, buy a certain brand automobile. The list goes on and on. Everyday we’re faced with choices. This brand over that brand. That company over this company. Bottom-line, the companies who win our business need to do something to earn it and keep it.

Will you think differently about which Facebook pages you like?

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Are you using Hootsuite? What’s been useful for you?

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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.

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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?

But Sterne says social media KPIs are a little fuzzier, and suggests that what’s needed is “creating and fostering a community.” He points us to the top community metrics which came out of Forum One Communications 2007 survey and included: unique visitors, new member registrations, page views, retention/attrition, member loyalty, member satisfaction, most active members.

Sterne asks, “How then, does a marketer make the most of this new mode of communication and measure whether the efforts are paying off? While social media becomes more and more important from the standpoint of getting the word out, the impact of that word is still going to be measured by the number of people it drives to your web site, your store, and your wallet.”

For me the take-away message from the book is one which Sterne credits to John McKean, Executive Director of the Center for Information Based Competion, “Organizations are already dangerously behind the consumer’s ability to leverage the Web for online and offline information…The consumer has the best knowledge regarding their future buying actions and verifying their buying intentions.”

McKean goes on to say, “The sheer resources (time and money) that organizations invest to “guess” what to sell the consumer as opposed to the consumer telling the organizations what they want to buy is immense.”

Social media measurement takes time. And social media could potentially be a waste of time if we don’t focus on creating community, listening to what consumers have to say and integrating the information into how we develop our products and services; and in the end, giving the customer what they want.

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

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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?

CB: I think listening is a universal first choice. Without using the new listening tools out there, you’ll miss the opportunity to understand where your people are, what they’re talking about, what types of opportunities might be out there, and then what one might do to make a choice. I think listening is universal as a first step. Beyond that, everything is variable.

DH: You write, “Abandon all thoughts of Twitter being a professional marketing tool– that it’s not meant for that purpose.” In your opinion, are there any companies using it well for marketing? What can we glean from how they’re using it?

CB: There are some companies using Twitter well for marketing. Dell did it by making relationships happen. They spent a long while just answering customer service issues and just being there, and then they rolled out their discounts and bargains twitter streams and pulled in over $6 million in revenue over 2009. That’s pretty successful. My point in saying to abandon those thoughts is that I want mainstream marketers to realize that it’s conversational or relationships-based marketing, and not just a place to stuff coupons.

DH: You said that you personally have mixed feelings about Facebook. What do you think about Facebook  for businesses who want to be on Facebook? Are there benefits over having a business profile on LinkedIn?

CB: I’m not all that jazzed about Facebook Business Pages because unless you’re just using them for lightweight community management, I’ve not really seen many conversions. I’ve seen more sales and marketing success with LinkedIn, but in all, Facebook just hasn’t yielded a lot for me, business-wise.

DH: You do a great job in Social Media 101 of breaking down different social media by function: listening, speaking, community and rich media. Do you think businesses just starting out should use one from each segment?

CB: I think businesses starting out should ask whether they should be using these tools to listen, connect, and publish. Maybe they start with listening, then realize that engaging the community via connecting is a good thing. Ultimately, companies will think about publishing and making rich media. They build on each other, is what I’m feeling these days.

DH: We read stories about businesses who  are trying to decide whether to use traditional media or to opt for social media initiatives for their marketing. Are there any words of advice you would give to businesses around how to make these decisions? e.g. is the price differential of social media a good enough reason for businesses?

CB: I think businesses should consider both. Traditional media still often has the much bigger reach. The opportunity now is to thread good social media into the project before, during, and after the traditional push such that there’s a deeper spread of the media, a bigger opportunity to connect with people who experienced the media, and a chance to do more than what’s allowed in the format of the original traditional media. One doesn’t kill the other, but one sure can help extend the other.

DH: How do you think email marketing and social media can complement one another?

CB: Email marketing is just another flavor of social media. It’s usually a bit more one way, but if you’re using a good email marketing company (I’m hosted by Blue Sky Factory, for instance), they’re already letting me blend the two together. My emails go out with the ability to share content with people via Twitter, Facebook, and elsewhere. This ability to share and extend means that my email message, which is somewhat one-way, turns into a two-way opportunity through the use of social sharing. They go nicely together, in my world.

DH: What are your initial impressions of Buzz and will it make it?

CB: I’m not impressed with Buzz and I don’t know that it will stay too long in the hype sphere. It’s a bit redundant to other things we already use, and not nearly as interesting as those other things.

DH: Where do you think social media is going? What’s the next wave? And how will it affect your work as a blogger and someone who spends their time writing about and educating others on social media?

CB: I think mobile applications and location-centric social media is one big wave. I think devices like the iPad will power this even more. I think that closed or velvet rope social networks are the next wave, where we get more specialized and where we keep people from pushing in. I think that all of these waves are great for me. I love mobile (as chrisbrogan.com is already an iPhone, Android, and Blackberry application), and I can’t wait for more closed social networks so that I can deliver value with more niche-minded communicators.

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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:

So how was I going to incorporate novelty and challenge into my happiness project? I wanted to choose a goal related to other things I liked to do–no violin lessons or salsa-dancing classes for me, no matter what the experts said. At the point when I was trying to figure this out, my literary agent suggested that I start a blog.

..reading the research on the importance of challenge to happiness had convinced me that I should stretch myself to tackle a large, difficult goal. Not only that–if I did manage to start a blog, it would connect me with other people with similar interests, give me a source of self-expression, and allow me a way to try to convince others to start their own happiness projects.

But despite the promise of a big happiness payoff, I felt apprehensive. I worried about the time and effort a blog would consume, when I already felt pressed for time and mental energy.

Preparing to launch the blog reminded me of two of my Secrets of Adulthood:

It’s okay to ask for help. When trying to get started, I floundered until I thought to do the obvious: as for advice from friends with blogs.

By doing a little each day, you can get a lot accomplished.

Since then I’ve posted six days a week, every week.

Seeing that first post hit the screen gave me an enormous rush of triumph. I couldn’t believe I managed to do it.

I quickly discovered that even after I’d launched it, my blog remained an excellent source of happiness through challenge. To put it more baldly, it often drove me crazy with frustration. The more I did, the more I wanted to do. I wanted to add images. I wanted to drop the word “typepad” out of my URL. I wanted to podcast. I wanted to add live links to my TypeLists.

My blog gave me a new identity, new skills, a new set of colleagues, and a way to connect with people who shared my interest. I’d expanded my vision of the kind of writer I could be. I had become a blogger.”

image credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com’s photostream

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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?

Let’s say you go to twitter search and enter for example, the words “social media marketing and small business.” On the right-hand side of the results page you’ll see the orange RSS feed icon with the words “Feed for this query.”

By clicking on that link you’ll land on the Google “Add to Google” page, and underneath your query words you’ll find a long url. In this case, the rss feed is http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=social+media+marketing+and+small+business.

Copy and paste the url to a clipboard or somewhere you can easily go back to access it.

Then once you go to iGoogle, click on “add stuff.” You’ll want to click on the orange RSS feed icon on the left side with the words “Add feed or Gadget” .

Paste the url. (Remember, since there’s already an http;// in the box be sure to either delete the one in the box or remove it from the feed url you’re pasting so you don’t end up with two http’s.) Then, click “Add”.

Entering the RSS feed is a similar process on other portals e.g. Netvibes.

On Netvibes you can access the RSS feed area by first clicking on the green tab with a plus sign on the upper left-hand corner of the page. You’ll see a list of choices, the one you’re looking for is the orange RSS feed icon with the words, “Add a feed”.

Netvibes sets up in a similar manner to iGoogle in regard to using RSS feeds. What I like about Netvibes is having the ability to set up multiple tabs so you can categorize each of those pages, e.g. listening, social media presences, news, weather, etc.

You can go to social media fire house, google alerts and technocratic blog search, and digg, as well as search engines, and be as specific as you like, duplicating the process to access the RSS feeds. Once you’ve added all your searches, you’ll have a personalized web portal to help you listen and add to the buzz.

Socialmention
If you haven’t discovered Socialmention, I recommend taking the time to explore it. Socialmention is described as real-time social media search and analysis. In addition, to bringing up comprehensive search results you’ll find great information on the left side of the page, such as:

Percentages related to strength, sentiment, passion, reach; top keywords, top users, top hashtags, post rank and sources plus others.

Socialmention also gives you the ability to set up alerts which you can receive email results about on a daily basis. Socialmention will scour (depending on what you choose) blogs, microblogs, networks, bookmarks, comments, images, news, video, audio, Q&A, and all.

Social media marketing gets a whole lot easier and more precise when you use personalized portals and tools for social media search and analysis. How are you using personalized portals? What search tools do you recommend?

image credit: kay_olsen’s photostream

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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!

The Dunder Mifflin Paper Company has an up-to-date website. Graphic design-wise it’s laid out very well. The color scheme is attractive. It’s neat and clean with an easy to read font, and a good navigation structure making it possible to find your way around easily. There’s a contact form, links to email newsletters which go back to August, 2007. Their corporate intranet is accessible from the home page where you can get see information on employee profiles, branch information, active forum discussions, a company directory, employee manual and more. And, there’s a login where I’m sure the private data must be stored.

From the website’s home page, you can access an online store (where we can shop for company shirts and other assorted nicknacks!)  All in all, the Dunder Mifflin website would get a good grade. Let’s see how they’re doing with social media.

Twitter: There’s a theofficenbc twitter page and good use of a hashtag, #theoffice.

Facebook: There’s a facebook page for Dunder Mifflin, with 1,283,204 fans (at the time of researching for this case study) and up-to-date posts on the wall with links to the baby blog, and good use of facebook for reporting updates the public would be interested in e.g. don’t miss Ed Helms on Jay Leno, places where you can upload fan videos, ask questions, etc.

Blog: Some employees even have blogs, such as Dwight. Pam maintains one called the Halpert Baby with pix of the baby and musings on maternity leave.

LinkedIn: Corporate page for Dunder Mifflin.

YouTube: Many great videos are available on the Dunder Mifflin YouTube channel.

You may ask, how’s Dunder Mifflin doing? Compared to most companies they’re doing a great job maintaining all of their online presences. Where there’s room for improvement is when it comes to integrating them, so in all places the user would be able to click to get to each of these spaces. An easy fix.

What would I recommend? Links to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn from the home page of the company website, which currently doesn’t have links to any of the social media presences. Should note here that the newsletters have links to Facebook and Twitter, which of course is good, but would be even better with all four of the social networks listed.

By the way, the NBC staff is doing a great job with this, for a fictitious company and all. And where they’re really shining is on the nbc office website, which has a nice dashboard look and feel going on with Twitter updates, Facebook feed, link to an office forum, link to Dunder Mifflin intranet, “today’s notes” which includes updates from Dwight’s blog, Ryan’s photo blog, and Jim and Pams’ photos. To step outside of the fictional world for a moment, I’d give NBC’s website for The Office an A+ for their great job bringing together all the presences.

Creating and maintaining meaningful company presences on social networks can be time consuming but well worth the effort. If you build it, they will come. But only when they know how to get there.

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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.

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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.

As appealing as that is the question has more to do with which of these sites makes good business sense for you and your customers. Rich Brooks says the way to determine the right answer begins with business goals. Good old fashioned, Business 101. Look at your top 2 or 3 business goals, and then look at your social media activities. “If your Flickr account isn’t helping you reach your goals, drop it like a hot potato…If your podcast isn’t driving traffic to your Web site, put it on hiatus. Ditto with YouTube, your blog, or any other site you may be active on.”

More isn’t always better. But how do you know for sure which are working for you? Brooks says, “By looking at your site traffic you can determine where your best traffic is coming from, be it Twitter, Facebook or your blog. You may also be able to determine… from the people buying from you, or at least filling out your contact forms for more information.”

How do you assess the effectiveness of your social media spaces? Have you changed your focus over time?

photo credit: cambodia4kidsorg’s photostream

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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.

DH: Are there any inconveniences associated with using Buzz?

JM: Buzz is linked to Gmail so you need a Gmail account to join.

DH: What’s it like following people on Buzz?

JM: You can easily use your existing contacts and can search for people to follow. When it comes to businesses, I quickly found media sources such as NPR, New York Times and Boston Globe but noticed that none of the popular mall clothing stores have any official presences yet, whereas they have strong presences on Facebook.

DH: Are there any features in particular that you like about Buzz?

JM: Photo sharing is very easy. You can upload photos directly, or link to your accounts on Picasa and Tumblr. Pictures appear as thumbnails in the Buzz feed, and you can either expand the post to see the full size image, or click on the image to see it appear full size in a separate window. Also, I like the mobile phone features which are similar to Foursquare where you can tag your location and your friends can see where you are. You can see all the public buzz near your location.

DH: Last but not least–what do you think about Bing?

JM: For one thing, its moved up the search engine rather quickly; it’s now the #3 search engine, following Google and Yahoo. There’s been some discussion about Microsoft being in talks with Apple to make Bing the default search engine on iPhones.

DH: How would you describe the look and feel of Bing?

JM: It’s the complete antithesis of Google’s simple white screen, with alternating colorful home page photos – today its of Bora Bora. The search results are fairly similar to Google: news on the top, blogs at the bottom. Bing’s results feature more images and videos and don’t have sponsored links. In some test searches I did comparing Bing and Google, Bing actually turned up more results. When I searched on “oscars 2010” Bing found 39,500,000 results compared to Google’s 15,400,000.

DH: Are there particular features that you like about Bing?

JM: A popular feature of Bing is video previews–if you hover over the video images that appear in the search results, you get a preview of the video with sound. Bing’s also known as a great restaurant search engine. Wired magazine pointed out that unlike Google, Bing crawls listings at review services such as Yelp.com and CitySearch. It summarizes the results and displays a scorecard for each, and rates service, drinks, food wait time, and lunch offerings. Bing’s also very helpful searching for travel deals.

DH: All in all, how do you think Bing will compete with Google?

JM: With Bing’s niche competencies and with other search engines gaining prominence for their unique niches, too, Bing might not be the symbol of an all-out Google war, but instead a war of attrition, slowly chipping away at Google’s impressive lead in the search engine category.

DH: Jackie, thank you for sharing your impressions.

Jackie also recommended the following links to learn more about Chrome, Buzz and Bing:

What is Google Chrome

Google Chrome & Privacy – Browsers, Privacy and You

Inside Chrome: The Secret Project to Crush IE and Remake the Web

Google Buzz

Facebook Must Tell Google to Buzz-Off (Or Else)

Google tweaks Buzz privacy settings

Top Ten Ways to Fix Google Buzz

Google Buzz: 5 Opportunities for Small Businesses

Cool Search Engines That Are Not Google

photo credit: flickr Stuck in Customs’

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Twitter’s advanced search page provides many options, tweets based on: words, people, places, dates, attitudes, and other–which include containing links and retweets. To simplify searching on twitter you can also add it to internet explorer or firefox.  A few good twitter search engines include: Tweetscan, Trendistic and Twitterfall.

What twitter search tips do you have?

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Chris Brogan’s new book, Social Media 101: Tactics and Tips to Develop Your Business Online*, is a collection of posts that originally appeared on his blog, which he has since updated and edited. I can attest to the fact that having it in a nicely bound book with the new additions will serve you well (and besides it has such a cool cover!) What he accomplishes so perfectly in this book is tackling the discussions about social media tools and social networking, and coming at them from multiple directions. As you read the book, you’ll undoubtably entrust Chris Brogan with taking you on a social media journey, and as a result, you’ll feel more confident about the tools you’re currently using and the ones you decide to pursue.

Social Media 101, goes well beyond the usual discussions of Facebook, Twitter, blogs. LinkedIn. MySpace, Flickr and Digg.  Brogan explores rich media–audio, video, video hosting, and live video, browsers, internet , social bookmarking, IM aggregator applications, blogging platforms–home base blogs and mobile blogging, listening tools, shared documents, collaboration, and screencasts.

Many of the pieces are literally chock-full of useful information and tips e.g. 50 ways, 100 tactics, 5 moves, 50 steps. He references and includes links to bloggers and websites you may never come across on your own, but you’ll be happy you took the time (as I am) to stop and visit those sites.

Chris Brogan writes about uses of social media in business and addresses blogging policies, social media strategies, marketing, and how to keep communities alive with community building. He offers lists of topics for blogs, and considerations for blog design. While he does a great job highlighting issues for business/industries generically, he also singles out freelancers, entertainers, real estate, entrepreneurs, hotels, and musicians.

Brogan suggests we build accounts on various web platforms (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc) because as he says they serve like “passports” and are needed to visit virtual places. I think you’ll find in addition to your passport you’ll want to take your copy of Social Media 101 with you, which will prove to be a great itinerary plotted out by one of the most trusted travel agents around.

* DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION Special thanks to John Wiley & Sons for providing a review copy of Social Media 101 for this blog post. Wiley books are available at your local bookstore or by calling 1-800-225-5945.

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What’s the difference between 3G and 4G? According to Snyder, “3G networks were really about better technology to deliver more of the same, 4G networks are about new technology coupled with a transformation in how people use wireless, moving control to the user.”  Scott calls this the “Digital Swarm.”

In order to succeed in the Digital Swarm he identifies 10 common success factors which can help your business adapt and win:

1. Wireless savvy/literacy: The percentage of employees who own latest-generation wireless devices and subscribe to latest-generation wireless services

2. Wireless broadband access: The penetration of wireless broadband among employees for accessing work applications

3. Wireless innovation: The percentage of new products and services that leverage wireless as an enabler or delivery medium

4. Organizational authority: The extent to which decision-making authority in the organization is distributed (peer-to-peer) versus centralized (hierarchical)

5. Wireless ecosystem: The overall percentage of employees, customers, partners, and vendors who actively connect, communicate, and transact with each other through a wireless network

6. Wireless technology: The rate at which wireless technology and applications are updated/refreshed with the latest versions

7. Wireless content: The percentage of your organization’s content that is geared toward an immersive wireless experience

8. Wireless interconnectedness: The level of seamless interconnectivity between your wireless users and your organization’s other networks

9. Wireless mass collaboration: The extent to which the organization uses text messaging, IM, blogs, and wikis accessed via wireless handhelds to communicate and organize initiatives

10. Wireless social networking: The extent to which your employees use wireless for social networking to accomplish higher-level goals beyond just work (relationship building, charity, entertainment)

How is your business using wireless technology? Will you be ready for yet another transformation?

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Click chart to view larger image

Marketing Sherpa reports in their recent chart, Social Marketers Preparing for the Challenges Ahead, that key performance indicators such as ROI and conversions have become increasingly more important challenges for marketers.

Sergio Balegno, Marketing Sherpa Research Director, writes, “Two years ago, a popular marketing myth was that ROI for social media programs could not be easily measured. Marketers have dispelled this myth…the return on social marketing invest is exceptionally high.”

He further suggests that marketers are learning that social media programs are more effective when they are strategically integrated into the marketing mix versus approaching them as standalone tactics.

Let’s face it anyone can create a Facebook and Twitter page, and in fact, more and more businesses have jumped on the bandwagon in recent months. But what some have failed to recognize is that not only do those pages need to be maintained with relevant, worthwhile content and reflect well on the company but more importantly they need to engage fans and followers and provide what I like to think of as a curiosity factor—who you are and what you’re doing.

If our curiosity isn’t peaked, and if we aren’t asked to identify our needs and how a business can fulfill them, then social media won’t be operating at full capacity. As we know once we make that click onto a website we don’t want to have to do guesswork. We want to know what we can about a business, how long they’ve been operating, what their key attributes are, who we can expect to hear from when we make an inquiry and ultimately who we will be working with.  Impressions are made as soon as we make that first click.

Use them well.

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Auletta provides a great overview of how the company has evolved over the years. You probably know yourself that somewhere along the way Google slipped into your lexicon. Ultimately it became such a frequently used verb that it was officially added to the Oxford English Dictionary in June 2006 and to the Merrian-Webster Collegiate Dictionary one month later.

Google is creating new ways for us to access information every day. One of the best ways I’ve found to keep up with the myriad of changes is to read their official blog and checking the posts on the many other blogs they publish regularly. In fact, if you haven’t checked out Google’s options lately to see what else they’ve been up to it’s a good page to visit from time to time so you don’t miss all that they’re up to.

Here are a few recent activities of Google’s I learned about by reading their blogs:

1. In the past few weeks, Google’s Geo Team has done some great work helping with the relief efforts in Haiti using their mapping tools and publishing updated satellite imagery in Google Earth and Google Maps.

2. Google worked with PicApp to add 10 million high quality stock images from stock imagery repositories such as Getty Images. The service and use of the images is free.

3. Google added  click to call phone numbers in mobile ads.

You may also enjoy the video below which provides a great history of the company.

How has Google caught your attention over the years or more recently?

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How do you know if you’re engaging your social network fans and followers? The facts. Nothing but the facts!

When it comes to Facebook for example, you can use the Insights tool to analyze your page views, the demographics of your fans, and the number of people who view (or stop viewing) your News Feed posts. If you’re considering ads on Facebook you can more effectively target your demographics.

This past week there’s been considerable interest in Facebook’s new Post Insights product which lets page administrators find out how many impressions each story on their Page receives and what percentage of those impressions result in action (likes, comments or clicks). But unless you have a page with more than 10K fans you won’t be able to see information broken down by posts. While small businesses might lament that this feature isn’t available to them it shouldn’t be too much cause for distraction. Work with what you know.

Julie Waite’s recent post, “Growing Your List Via Social Media & Blogs” makes a case for expanding your reach with your existing Facebook fans, Twitter followers and Blog commenters who are already connecting with your company and brand. Instead of treating each of these as fragmented groups why not use a more integrated approach and work on a communications strategy which includes all of these messages?

Are your twitter followers fans of your Facebook page? Are they reading your blog? Do they know you have an email newsletter? While social networks aren’t about selling your product but about engaging your followers, it’s largely up to you to make them aware of what you’re communicating by tying the presences together and avoiding social media disconnects. A new addition worth checking out is the NutshellMail Facebook application which lets fans opt-in to receive emails that highlight recent content from your page.

Addendum: Oh, and in case you were wondering, Weber Media Partners does have presences on Twitter, Facebook as well as a thought-provoking quarterly email newsletter which you can also sign-up to be on our mailing list—so be sure to follow, fan, and sign-up.

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Last week I listened to a National Public Radio On Point segment called Where the Web Went Wrong, about the impact of social media on relationships, individuality and communication skills and a new book by Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto.

The show covered many issues, but the one I can most resonate with is the deterioration of manners, interpersonal communication and good judgment.  A 28-year old man who called in to the radio program complained that in person meetings were always interrupted by friends distracted by their devices, checking what’s going on elsewhere.  Complaints abound about the lack of manners in public places, of the lack of live personal attention. The endorphins we get from hearing a new text message come in are beating out our real, in person conversations.

This fall I watched a prominent panel of business experts talk and noticed that all but one were in wrinkled street clothes, despite the role they had at a major business conference. The moderator wore a baseball cap which concealed his face, and the presentation started with the showing of a video was predominately expletives. I was interested in what this panel had to say, but I was also offended. Maybe I am old school, but I still think that manners are important, and, it’s not just what you say, but how you say it,  that counts.

With all of the useless content one must wade through to get to the valuable insight, don’t complicate the already muddy waters with time-wasting drivel, or worse yet, offensive and glib presentations. If we take our roles as ambassadors of our brand (personal or corporate) seriously, we should respect our audience and be useful and polite.

That means, don’t clutter the email boxes of others with chain letters, don’t post mundane irrelevant updates on Twitter. Remember that you are communicating with people, not computers. The quality of your communicate (or the lack there of) is equal to your image, your personal brand.

These tools are not going away. While the way we communicate evolves, we should always bring along the basic manners we were taught before they came along.

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If you’ve thought that having a working knowledge of YouTube covered your video bases, you’ll be in for a wonderful treat by reading Steve Garfield’s new book, Get Seen: Online Video Secrets to Building Your Business—which lets you in on some of the best kept secrets out there.

I was completely engrossed in Steve’s book which I read in one day, only stopping to try out many of the things he references. Within a short period of time,  I found myself streaming video from my iPhone on qik, creating blog posts on posterous, developing unique videos on animoto, researching mics for iPhones, checking-out vimeo, blip.tv, how to create a playlist of our videos on youtube, making a screencast on jing.

By half-way through the book I was convinced how no social media marketing campaign will be complete without video.

While high-end video cameras and experienced videographers are certainly one way to go, Steve demonstrates how by having an interest in shooting video and a wide range of tools to choose from, video is within every business’ reach regardless of your budget. Above all, Steve demonstrates how interest and passion will be your ticket.

Steve is right here to tell you about his book himself (in his video, of course!) And after viewing, keep reading our exclusive interview.

DH: In your book, Get Seen, you wrote “Video is just one part of a marketing plan. It fits certain messages and people better than others.”

What messages do you think video serves better than the written word?

SG: Video is better than a bunch of words on a web page. People come to a company’s website to get to know what the people are like in the company. They could all write blog posts, and visitors could read those posts, but you could interview them and visitors can see what they’re like through the intimacy of video.

You might also want to give visitors an inside look at the kind of work the company does.  Video would be a perfect solution for that.

DH: Do you think videos work better for any specific types/sizes (small, medium large) of businesses or industries?

SG: I think video works well for all types of businesses although I think that larger businesses might be more reluctant than smaller businesses to use video in their marketing. I might give the advantage to small businesses who take advantage of using video.

DH: What does citizen-journalism mean to you?

SG: I’m not actually using the term citizen journalism anymore. I’ve defaulted to calling it citizen reporting. Citizen journalism implies that you have journalistic training or you apply a certain set of rules to your reporting.  Citizen reporting is more broad and it’s just people formerly known as the audience capturing and sharing stories

DH: In the interviews you conducted for your book you asked what advice would you give to a business getting started in online video.

What are three key pieces of advice you would give to a business getting started in online video?

SG: Three key pieces of advice, first, find someone in the organization who is a natural born video blogger. You found the bloggers who enjoyed writing, find someone who enjoys being on video.  Second, get good audio. The key to successful video is good audio. Third, share freely, widely distributing your video and provide a link back to your company’s website.

DH: Since you launched your video blog in 2004 there have been many changes to the world of online video. Where do you see the world of online video going in the next 3-5 years?

SG: New technologies are coming out. I saw one very recently from a company called VisibleGains, and what they have is something called a video application. It’s more than just watching the video. It’s an interactive video where, while watching the video, you can direct where it goes, kind of like an adventure game. It can also collects viewer supplied data. Very powerful.  On the backend, it easy for marketers to put together a video timeline from a library of videos, add text and questions, and push that video live without having to rely on a video editor. The power to create is just going to get easier and easier.

I’m happy about that!

Thank you, Steve. Best of luck with your book. Looking forward to learning more from you on your video blog and across the web.

* DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION Special thanks to John Wiley & Sons for providing a review copy of Get Seen: Online Video Secrets to Building Your Business for this blog post.

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Before you begin it’s always a good idea to plan your pages in advance and gather the company information, usernames, profile images and other assets you will need.

For one thing the number of characters in usernames differ from network to network, the size of profile images are different dimensions, and some pages are more forgiving in terms of editing than others. Below are some guidelines for pages as well as a list of helpful resources.

Facebook

When you create your Facebook business page you will be asked to select a category upfront. You’ll want to choose it carefully since once you do you won’t be able to change it.

A category will also have an impact on the applications available to you.

Username:
 Facebook username 56 characters

Description:
 When you create the page you will need to include a description. A maximum of 200 characters may be used for your company description.

Profile Picture Size:
140 pixels x 185 pixels

Twitter

Username: Twitter usernames permit up to 15 characters.

Bio:
 One line bio no more than 160 characters

Page Design:
 Twitter you can Select a page background, or upload your own.

Profile Picture Size: 48 pixels x 48 pixels

YouTube

Username: YouTube usernames permit up to 20 characters
Your username can only contain letters A-Z or numbers 0-9
Once created, you cannot change your username. Even the slightest change will necessitate creating a new account.

YouTube videos are limited to ten minutes in length and a file size of 2 GB
YouTube accepts video files from most digital cameras and camcorders, and cell phones in the .AVI, .MOV, .WMV, and .MPG file formats.

Profile Picture Size
: 130 pixels x 100 pixels

LinkedIn

Your name becomes part of the url on LinkedIn which can contain 5-30 alphanumeric characters e.g. http://www.linkedin.com/in/yourname

Profile Picture Size: 
80 pixels x 80 pixels

Learn more about LinkedIn Company Profiles
http://blog.linkedin.com/2008/03/20/company-profile/
http://learn.linkedin.com/company-pages/

Helpful Resources for Social Networking Presences

Mypictr is a free online tool for creating profiles, resizing to the exact dimensions for each site

How to Build an Impressive Social Networking Presence, Beginning With Facebook

Build Your Own Opportunity Network: Getting Started in Social Networking

Social Media Tools 101 (From Blogs to Wikis)

Social Media Marketing An Hour A Day Hands On Worksheets

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The years 2000-2009 have been amass with great changes in our technological landscape. Today I went searching for timelines and found an excellent one on PoynterOnline where David Shedden has been keeping track of the history of new media and online journalism from 1969 to 2009. If you have the time to read through the entire timeline you’ll be amazed by where we’ve come in 40 years. It’s striking to see what changes have evolved in this past decade, and even within the past 3-4 years. The growth and changes are truly remarkable.

Timeline: 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009

I don’t think anyone could have accurately predicted in December of 1999 where this past decade would have taken us technologically. I won’t even venture to guess what changes we’ll see in the years ahead, and I have no doubt that they will be awe-inspiring and continue to change the way we communicate.

Best Wishes for a Happy & Healthy New Year, and here’s to looking ahead for a new decade filled with new and exciting technological advances!

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