Social Business

November 25th, 2009

Facebook as a living obituary aka 'goodbye old friend'

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 12:03 pm

Categories: Facebook, Social Media

Tags: Facebook, Social Networking, Intellectual Property, Online Communications, Marketing, Advertising & Promotion, Research & Development, Business Operations, Jennifer Leggio

A few weeks ago I got word that an old college friend had passed away quite unexpectedly. A mutual friend notified a group of us, as she learned by visiting his Facebook page that he was gone. None of us were close enough to be notified by the deceased’s family, yet we all revered this man as one of the greatest hearts we’d ever met.

I immediately rushed to his Facebook page, which was still there and more active than ever. Friends and family had linked to dedications and obituaries and had been writing messages to him as if he was still here. While we knew that he was an inspiration to many — a strong man with the most gentle nature — I was blown away by the amount of people who had come to remember him. It was more moving than I was expecting.

So, after a sobbing phone call to a dear mutual friend, I started thinking about the bigger picture.

There’s been a lot written about what happens to our social network presences after we die. As a matter of fact, my friend Adele McAlear has proposed a compelling South by Southwest Interactive (SXSW) session on the matter it’s so top of mind. But most of the existing discussions I’ve read circle around what happens to your intellectual property, who manages the accounts, etc. Legalities and technology questions aside, what happens to the online memory?

In the case of Facebook, they were already a step ahead. As a matter of fact Facebook director of security Max Kelly blogged just a couple weeks earlier about Facebook’s feature that allows loved ones to report people as deceased so that the profile can stay on a site as a living memorial. Kelly said that the discussion of what to do with profiles postmortem came up after his best friend, a fellow Facebook employee, passed away four years ago.

“When someone leaves us, they don’t leave our memories or our social network,” he wrote. “To reflect that reality, we created the idea of ‘memorialized’ profiles as a place where people can save and share their memories of those who’ve passed.”

The wall remains, as do photos, but Facebook removes other sensitive information and also ensures that the profile does not show up in the “suggestions” section of the news feed, and so on. It’s just a small form, and it’s somewhat hidden on the site, but could make the world of difference to someone wanting to memorialize a dear friend or family member.

What do you think of Facebook as a living memorial?

November 23rd, 2009

Quick'n'Dirty episode 23: TripIt and Twitter lists top talk

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 9:43 am

Categories: Podcast, Quick'n'Dirty Podcast, Social Business, Social Media, Twitter

Tags: Network, Twitter Inc., Crowdsourcing, TripIt, CrowdCampaign, Twitterer, Podcasts, Social Networking, Networking, Internet

Can you believe we just finished episode 23 of the Quick’n'Dirty podcast? Time flies when you’re having fun. Or, well, skipping episodes. As my co-host Aaron Strout wrote last week it had been a good few weeks since we’d last podcasted together due to travel schedules and a minor health emergency on my part. But we were back in full force this week with a fun social network of the week, a great guest and a fun point/counterpoint.

We started by talking about CrowdCampaign, a neat crowd-sourcing tool that allows you to ask your network — or a broader unknown network — to chime in on queries, or even do contests or other types of voting. CrowdCampaign was recently used during the Web 2.0 Expo in New York for potential Q&A’s for Beth Noveck. The possibilities are endless and Aaron and I discuss some of these on the show. CrowdCampaign is brought to us by the brilliant minds at The Social Collective, which boasts the my.SXSW portal among its many impressive projects.

Next up was our special guest, Will Aldrich of TripIt. Will is the company’s vice president of product, and he joined us to talk about how the concept of TripIt was developed, how the company has been able to oust Dopplr as a the more popular travel social network incumbent, as well as how travelers can really benefit from the tool. If you aren’t familiar with TripIt, it has a bunch of cool travel features, from connecting trips with your friends to see who is going to be in what city when you are, to helping you organize all of those pesky, disparate travel confirmation documents. I would use it all the time if only they had a BlackBerry application. Aaron did a TripIt Q&A on his blog prior to our talking to Will on the pocast, so either give his interesting interview a read or listen to the replay, or both!

As always, we introduced a “featured Twitterer” of the week. The featured Twitterer is someone that we find to be informative, funny and engaging, and someone that we believe more people should know about and follow. This week’s was none other than Del Jones, aka @jonesdel, USA Today leadership reporter and all-around entertaining and smart guy.

And finally, we had our usuall point/counterpoint, and on this one we sort of disagreed for a change. The last one where there was absolute disagreement was when we did our iPhone vs. BlackBerry war, which seems to still be continuing in the background of every show. This week’s topic was around Twitter lists: are they good for businesses or are they just a big ego stroke? Aaron, as he’s usually the more positive one between the two of us, discussed some good uses and examples of Twitter lists. Me, being the pesky cynic, talked about how I don’t care much about public Twitter lists and the annoying redundancy they bring. It was a good one, so you’re going to have to listen to find out where we ended.

The Quick’n'Dirty podcast will be off the air this week so Aaron and I can eat some turkey with our families, but we will return on Thursday, Dec. 3, with Peter Shankman, the man behind Help A Reporter Out (HARO) and so many other social media successes. Get your questions ready!

Reminder that you can always listen to archived shows on BlogTalkRadio or find us on iTunes by searching for “QuicknDirty.”

November 19th, 2009

Hello Salesforce Chatter, so long Yammer?

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 12:37 pm

Categories: CRM, Corporate Social Networking, Dreamforce 2009, Enterprise 2.0, Marketing, Salesforce.com, Social Business, Social Media, Social Networks

Tags: Salesforce.com Inc., Sales Force Management, Sales, Jennifer Leggio

Salesforce.com yesterday announced its new Salesforce Chatter at Dreamforce 2009. Dubbed as an enterprise collaboration application and social development platform, Salesforce Chatter promises to provide a secure social network within the enterprise, complete with individual profiles, status updates, feeds, applications, as well as integration with existing popular social networks such as Twitter and Facebook.

“Why do I know more about strangers on Facebook than my own employees?” asked Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com. “Now, through Salesforce Chatter, my business is tweeting me. My employees can use the models they love to get the collaboration they need.”

When the product is available in 2010, not only will companies be able to use the standalone Salesforce Chatter features in new applications within the enterprise in a more secure fashion than one-off cloud offerings, Salesforce.com plans to immediately make social its other 135,000 native Force.com applications.

This is a good opportunity for Salesforce.com, as enterprise hesitation over pure in-the-cloud social networks is rampant — and legitimate. With Salesforce.com being a trusted enterprise collaboration and application development solution already, this could up-level the use of such social enterprise applications, and bring more Twitter and Facebook data, into the enterprise.

Salesforce Chatter’s biggest threat seems to be that of SocialText, which provides similar services and offers compelling enterprise-worthy collaboration and social networking services. It’s likely now, however, that current Salesforce.com customers would choose the incumbent offering, so Salesforce Chatter adoption might grow through current user base first.

Other competitors, such as Yammer, may not have as much of a leg to stand on in competing with Salesforce Chatter. While Yammer has made some enterprise traction, most companies that use it are smaller to mid-size businesses versus large enterprises. Most large enterprises with whom I’ve spoken about Yammer express trepidation over the service’s pricing and community model. At the same time, SMBs with whom I have spoken about Yammer don’t seem to have the same security or expense concerns, so Yammer could stay a viable solution for the smaller markets. The introduction of Salesforce Chatter, and the already strong SocialText solution, should knock Yammer out of enterprise consideration.

“We are constantly evaluating tools that promise to increase the productivity and collaboration of our employees. Salesforce Chatter recognizes that enterprise collaboration is more than connecting people, but also connecting content and apps. With Chatter, collaboration within our company will truly come alive, all from within our trusted Salesforce apps,” said Daniel R. Chiazza of Harris Interactive.

November 12th, 2009

What the duck? Aflac gets quackin' on Facebook

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 12:49 pm

Categories: Corporate Social Networking, Facebook, Fortune 500 Series, Social Business, Social Media, Social Networks

Tags: Facebook, Aflac Inc., Branding, Benefits, Vertical Industries, Marketing, Human Resources, Jennifer Leggio

Usually in my Fortune 500 series I take a look at a company’s broad social media strategy. But this time I decided to have a little bit more fun with it and dig into one company’s use of Facebook in terms of supporting its brand awareness as well as its charitable giving. That company is Aflac. You know, the insurance company with the endearing little duck.

Whether or not you are an Aflac customer, you’ve at least once tried to mimic the Aflac duck’s quacking of “Aflac” at the end of its commercials. After its commercial success, Aflac has taken to Facebook with a two-fold approach: increase its brand awareness through a fan page for the famous Aflac Duck and through a presence in the “Causes” application on Facebook for the Aflac Cancer Center at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, the same city in which the company is headquartered.

The Aflac “Cause”
With the Causes application, users have created more than 300,000 charitable causes that have benefited 60,000 nonprofits in the United States and Canada, raising more than $14 milliion in total. Aflac was able to raise $1.16 million to benefit the Aflac Cancer Center at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta during Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, making it the largest sponsored campaign in the history of Causes.

The company donated $1 for every Facebook member who joined its Cause page, as well as matched all monitary donations. As of today, the Aflac Cancer Center Cause has more than 1 million members. According to Laura Kane, Aflac’s vice president of external communications, the Causes application was chosen because it seemed to have potential to reach a wide audience.

“The fundraiser was very much a test of the application to determine whether it would be an effective platform –which it clearly was,” Kane said.

The company is still determining whether or not it will use the Causes application for another fundraiser, though the Aflac Cancer Center is the company’s main charitable focus and fundraising continues year-round through other means.

Just Ducky
From a brand awareness perspective, the Aflac duck has more than 164,000 fans. The company uses this page to interact with users, disseminate company information as well information about its charitable cause, and promote contests for friends of the duck. What I found most endearing about the fan page is how the duck’s “personality” shows through with its individual updates. Some are more serious, of course, but you can get the duck’s thoughts on even mundane daily things such as Halloween candy or even fantasy football.

While the duck’s fanship might be modest in comparison to some other consumer brands, this particular fan page is an example of how using a brand’s character as a cornerstone to a social media program is better than a static corporate presence. In direct comparison, Aflac the company has a page too, but it only has just over 2K fans in comparison to the duck’s 164,000. Aflac was smart about engaging the little duck to create customer loyalty and engagement through its Facebook presence.

Aflac isn’t currently tracking how its Facebook fan interaction is turning into sales of insurance policies, but more tracking it as a brand awareness activity on its own.

“Aflac views social media as an opportunity to generate awareness and a establish an ongoing relationship with users in a way that is relevant to their lives,” Kane said. “We don’t have any numbers that we can provide in terms of how many of the Duck’s ‘fans’ go on to become Aflac policyholders, but we do measure the number of people who become fans as a reflection of our success.”

November 10th, 2009

Creepy elves and disco dancing: A business win for OfficeMax

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 1:58 pm

Categories: Advertising, Branding, Corporate Social Networking, Customer Loyalty, Facebook, Fortune 500 Series, Marketing, Social Business, Social Media

Tags: OfficeMax Inc., Dance, Portals, Web Technology, Internet, Jennifer Leggio

Who knew that weird dancing elves could be good for business?

OfficeMax today announced the return of its Elf Yourself portal, a silly site that allows people to create elf-like images of themselves doing a variety of dances from country to disco and even hip hop. While I’ve been a fan of Elf Yourself for some time but had no idea that it had come back for the 2009 holiday season until ZDNet colleague Jason Perlow posted his (hilarious) personalized elf last night. While all of this is entertaining, I got to wondering about what value this is really driving for OfficeMax. Last year I spoke with OfficeMax vice president of marketing and advertising Bob Thacker about the company’s social media strategy for my Fortune 500 series, and he brought Elf Yourself up as a social media success.

“Social media embraced the ‘Elf Yourself’ concept, endorsed it and readily shared it among online communities, which turned this campaign into a digital phenomenon that attracted millions, set a new viral marketing record and landed a considerable ‘win’ for OfficeMax,” he said.

I reached out to OfficeMax again today given the launch of the new site, which is now chock full of Twitter and Facebook connectivity. As a matter of fact, users of Elf Yourself can just connect to the site with Facebook Connect and select a picture from any album, saving hassle and upload time. And later today, the feature will launch that allows users to automatically post these elves to their own walls or their friends’ walls, spreading the Elf Yourself chaos even further than before. An OfficeMax spokesperson said the company selected to leverage Facebook this year to enable a deeper social media experience.

But, beyond creating giggles, what is this really doing for Office Max? The stats I received from OfficeMax are surprising:

• The Elf Yourself site has had 284 million site visits each holiday season since the tool’s launch in 2006. These site visits were measured over only a two-month period each year when the site was live.
• Of these 284 site visits, 256 million elves were created
• A study in 2007 showed that more than 1/3 of Elf Yourself users said the visit to the elf portal influenced their decisions to visit OfficeMax

What’s so great about Elf Yourself is that while it’s clearly an OfficeMax deal (powered by JibJab, of course) it’s not so in-your-face with its marketing that you grow tired of the brand. Yet, somehow it gets engrained in its users that OfficeMax is behind the whole thing.

What do you think of OfficeMax’s Elf Yourself? Oh, and here’s my terrifying Elf:

November 9th, 2009

American Express OPEN keeps 'pulse' on small business with social media

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 9:44 am

Categories: Brand Management and Monitoring, Branding, Corporate Social Networking, Customer Loyalty, Fortune 500 Series, Marketing, Microblogging, Small Business, Social Business, Social Media

Tags: Social Media, American Express Co., Small Business, Small Business Owner, Business Owner, IQ, OPEN Forum, Jennifer Leggio

The Fortune 500 series has historically focused on how large companies are using social media to help to further their own businesses. One company, American Express, has a division called OPEN that is exclusively dedicated to the success of small business owners and their companies. The growth of these businesses in turn means that OPEN will succeed, and the company has realized that social media has become a priority for small business owners and is putting a great deal of focus there with its social media activities and its new Pulse offering.

I spoke with Jason Rudman, director of strategy and marketing for American Express OPEN, about the company’s social media strategy and delivery, as well as benefits to its small business customers.

Q. [Jennifer] How exactly is American Express OPEN is leveraging social media to grow the business of its customers?

A. [Jason] Business owners tell us every day that their business resiliency and growth depends in part on their ability to connect with others for advice, support and networking. At the same time, many business owners have what we call a “high relationship IQ” but a “low social media IQ.” Beginning in 2007, OPEN Forum established itself as a leading source of business insight and advice. We have evolved the experience to be both an online resource and networking site created to meet the needs of small business owners, to help them solve problems and to start to bring relationship IQ and social media IQ into equilibrium, thereby helping our customers through the social media learning curve.

Q. How did OPEN’s social program begin?

A. Originally launched in 2007, OPENForum.com initially served as the on-line companion to a live event-driven platform created with the goal of providing key networking opportunities for small business owners to grow their businesses.

Q. What are the most important objectives that American Express OPEN is trying to meet with social media?

A. Engage business owners in a new set of experiences that increase loyalty, value perception, and relevance of our brand and continue to lead in the online engagement space to attract partners, so as to ultimately create additional compelling benefits for Cardmembers and convert prospects.

Q. How are you measuring the success of these programs?

A. For OPEN Forum, we keep a pulse on how we are doing by measuring engagement and soliciting feedback. The level of engagement in both our content and the business interaction among our Cardmembers is the best indicator of our success.

There are a set of metrics that we focus on monthly, such as unique visitors (UVM), repeat visits, time spent on the site, enrollments in Connectodex^SM [our proprietary networking tool for OPEN Cardmembers], etc., that form the basis for how we are resonating with business owners.

We are also starting to measure the brand impact that OPEN Forum is having for OPEN – it has been extremely positive since we started measuring our impact in Q4 2008, as well as amplification effect of our content and the “buzz” quotient of all that we do. Finally, there are some emerging stats that are peaking our interest – for example, how many times and how frequently is OPEN Forum being retweeted; this again shows a level of engagement and interest in what we are providing business owners.

Q. Marcy Shinder of American Express OPEN said during her presentation at the Conversation Marketing Summit that social media was invented by business owners. Why do you think this is true?

A. Small business owners are successful by building individual relationships – for example, with customers, prospects, vendors – based on an innate ability to talk to everyone, to get to know people. You might say this is “social IQ” and that many entrepreneurs possess this in droves. You see it frequently when a small business owner engages their customers or reaches out to new ones through a very personal style of marketing. Social media as we know it today is just an extension of this in the digital universe.

Next: Introducing Pulse –>

November 6th, 2009

Twitter Lists will change the social dynamic

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 10:30 am

Categories: Social Business, Social Media, Social Networks, Twitter

Tags: Twitter Inc., List, Twitter Lists, Productivity, Public Relations, Strategy, Marketing, Corporate Communications, Management, Jennifer Leggio

* Jennifer Leggio is on vacation

Guest editorial by Mitch Lieberman

Twitter lists are absolutely going to change the way people use Twitter – exactly how is not really clear yet, it may take a little while before the dust settles on this one. Lists have added a new social element to Twitter, which did not exist up until now.  Lists will either be the great equalizer, or create a pseudo ‘class’ system within Twitter.

A ‘Class’ System, how so?
Those included on the cool Lists and those that are not, the influencers and the influenced. There are some lists that are purely factual, for example, people who work at XYZ company. Twitter, by its nature, does have a self policing mechanism, but I am not sure if it will work here. Needing differing perspectives, I decided to ask some friends and collaborators; Josh Weinberger (@kitson), of DestinationCRM has this to say:

“Sure, but that’s no different than the situation with a personal Twitter account. But if there’s status or “class” to be derived from whether others value your curatorial efforts, that’s something new, something Twitter itself doesn’t really provide. I may not want to follow @scobleizer in my main Twitter feed, but I might value his knowledge of the startup scene and want to follow his #List of entrepreneurs — and leave it to him to maintain it going forward.”

I framed my question a bit differently, when I asked Nicole Ravlin (@pmgnicole) a partner with PMG, a PR firm in Burlington, Vermont. I was seeking input in regards to how she might guide her clients, as they create lists.

“I think before you can address any of this you have to consider your [Company] overall strategy for using Twitter. Building Lists thoughtfully so that they are useful to you and your followers is key here.”

With respect our conversation in general, Nicole had this to add “From a stand point of organization of data and people, it [a List] is great, but what is more intriguing is what it will/might do on Google Ranking. I also think that it would be helpful for new users [to Twitter].”

Not yet convinced I was seeing a common theme, I spoke with Martin Schneider (@CRMoutsiders, also of SugarCRM) we tried to think of Lists in the context of a company [or vendor]. “Here Lists represent something a little different.” Beyond creating a List of people who are ‘on’ Twitter from your company, or who represent your brand, companies risk alienating people by way of exclusion. This brings out the emotional side of Lists. Companies will need to remain objective regarding Lists. Companies will likely have lots of private lists, just sayin’.

Read the rest of this entry »

November 4th, 2009

Nothing is viral, but everything is contagious

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 10:42 am

Categories: Corporate Social Networking, Marketing, Social Business, Social Media, Social Media Best Practices

Tags: Digg, Web Site, Web Site Development, Web Technology, Internet, Jennifer Leggio

* Jennifer Leggio is on vacation

Guest editorial by Brandon Mendelson

It was approaching midnight when the phone rang. Usually, one of two things go through your mind when someone calls that late: “Who died?” or “Do I have enough to make bail?” I was wasn’t so lucky. It was a television show host I was working for, calling from a hotel room somewhere deep in the heart of America. They had an idea. “We’re going to make this campaign go viral! What do you think?” I said the idea was terrible and went to bed.

You don’t need to be Miss Cleo to know how the campaign ended; however, there’s an important lesson for those new to social media: How does something really spread?

Thankfully, there’s a paint by number formula to answer that:

Step 1: Create something funny or informative. It used to be in the form of text, now it’s almost exclusively video. This material has to be good. So good, your friends like it enough to comfortably share it. If you stop promoting here, your prospects will taper off because we can only know so many people willing to share your material. (150).

As a tip: You can measure if something is truly viral if it spreads into the real world. Usually when that happens it’s watered down and / or no longer funny. So be warned. Example: Everyone at work using “Fail” in regular conversation.

Step 2: Then, through a variety of ways, but most notably through Digg’s upcoming section, you and your friends promote the item. You need about thirty friends, the more the better, to help vote for the item. Unless you bring in the votes, nothing is going to move on Digg under their current system.

The point of submitting to Digg and having your friends vote isn’t to get on Digg’s front page. The point is to keep your item visible for websites who pull content off Digg. There are many who do this and twice that of people who find rising items to submit to these sites. And increasingly, to their own followers on Twitter. In turn, there are larger websites who monitor these smaller websites and pull the content from them.

That’s why you often see the same stuff posted online. It’s rarely if ever viral, people are just pulling material from the same source.

Step 3: With luck, you can make these feeder websites and that’s where the content begins to legitimately spread. Why? Credibility. From here, the material might make the Digg front page, a celebrity might talk about it, or a  mention on a national media outlet may occur, which is where the item then translates into something mainstream.

Doubt it? If I told you something was funny, only a few of you would take my word for it. If George Carlin told you something was funny, you would all take his word for it.

We trust George Carlin. We trust the celebrity. We trust the national media outlet and their blog. We don’t trust random, unknown bloggers or Twitter users that no one has heard of.

That second step is often glossed over or totally ignored by social media “experts” but it is critical. No matter how great your material is, and it better be contagious, you need to make it visible and allow for others to feature it. This lends your item credibility and allows for it to spread legitimately.

If all else fails, buy your way to success. A lot of deep pocketed marketers have figured out they can buy access to these web sites and have them feature their content, inflating their view counts and creating the “illusion” of viral success.

Don’t buy the hype or the books. This is something anyone with a motivated group of friends and good material can do.

Brandon Mendelson is the author of the wannabe viral sensation, Dracula And Kittens. When not desecrating public domain masterpieces, Brandon can be found blogging about social publishing, whatever that is, on Soap Box Included.

November 3rd, 2009

Developing government's human voice

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 9:19 am

Categories: Government 2.0, Social Business, Social Media

Tags: Voice, Lovisa Williams, Government, Vertical Industries, Jennifer Leggio

* Jennifer Leggio is on vacation

Guest editorial by Lovisa Williams

What is Gov 2.0? There has been much heated debate about this subject. We have spoken about Government as a Platform, Government 2.0 as a way to influence and change behavior and how Government should be bringing citizens closer to Government. There are a wide range of ideas which can be seen in the video interviews about “What is Gov 2.0 Mean to Me?”. We definitely do not agree on the definition and perhaps that is not a bad thing.

To add some additional thoughts to the discussion the bottom line is there is no App for Government. Government can function as a platform, but Government is not as simple as this. Although, it is a great way to sell products and services to the Government. Don’t get me wrong, some of the Apps that have been developed are interesting and perhaps even useful, but I really see them more as one of the outcomes and not what our goal should be.

The world is changing. How we work and how we think are changing because of advances in technology and the speed in which we send and receive information. Development of new tools and technology is happening all of the time, but a fundamental shift in how we think and how we work does not happen every day. It is occurring now whether we like it or not. If we choose to ignore this fundamental shift we run the risk of becoming obsolete organizations. This is not just a Government thing, this is an everyone thing! Government, unlike private sector companies, has not had a major review of its business processes and corporate culture. We are long overdue and now is the time to explore how we can modify, re-engineer and make government more useful to citizens.

Read the rest of this entry »

November 2nd, 2009

Social book reading in the digital age

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 9:28 am

Categories: Social Media, digital publishing, ebooks

Tags: Twitter Inc., Blog, Andy Santamaria, E-books, Blogging, Personal Technology, Internet, Jennifer Leggio

* Jennifer Leggio is on vacation

Guest editorial by Andy Santamaria

I know what you’re thinking. You read the title of this post and thought, “Books have always been social, we share them with friends, form book clubs, and bend at Oprah’s will.”

That’s all true, but like many things, It’s going to be re-invented for the digital age. It’s also true that ebook readers aren’t catching on as fast as iPods did. Amazon sold 500,000 units in 2008, which is pretty good but not anywhere near a runaway success. Barnes and Noble just announced their Nook, which looks pretty cool — and I own a Kindle 2. I think 2010 will unveil a few more competitors to the market and then we’ll get into the inevitable format war nonsense.

Social reading. I’m not talking about B&N’s very limited feature of lending a book to a friend who also owns a nook.

What if you could have a book lover’s profile, like a digital version of your dusty bookshelf?

This could be something like a profile of all your books that you’ve read, are reading, and will read. It could be easily sociable, so there could be widgets similar to the way gdgt members have a gadget profile.

What if you could easily share passages, quotes, and concepts on your blog, Facebook, Twitter, etc?

This is the no-brainer part that seems mandatory for something to catch on. It’s not the only thing you can do but these platforms have optimized themselves for sharing. Being able to share your favorite passages would be great. Keeping them archived online would be even better. You could search them and pull them out for presentations, general reading, and helping you organize data. Now I’ll take it one step further.

What if you could read books that were annotated by literary stars and influencers?

I can’t even tell you how excited I’d be if I could read a book on my kindle with custom annotations from Malcolm Gladwell, Chris Brogan, or Clay Shirky. I would pay twice the price for a book that was annotated by someone I admire and learn from. This could create a whole other channel of influencers. People who read books and take good notes to explain things. They could have their own blog where they just read books and annotate them along the way.

All this and more is going to be possible with advent and innovation of ebooks. It’s only a matter of time.