Social Business

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’.

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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.

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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.

October 27th, 2009

2010 Predictions: Will social media reach ubiquity?

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 9:19 am

Categories: Blogging Best Practices, Brand Management and Monitoring, Branding, Corporate Social Networking, Enterprise 2.0, Government 2.0, Marketing, Microblogging, Public Relations, Social Business, Social Media, Social Media and Security

Tags: Social Networking, Facebook, Marketing, Network, Twitter Inc., Social Media, Foursquare, Poken Pulse, PR People, Jennifer Leggio

The year 2009 has been a pivotal one in social media. We’ve seen the explosion of a previously misunderstood social network as well as the rampant adoption of social media by major brands. We’ve seen these companies take big chances, some ending in success and others ending with harsh lessons learned. It seems that almost everyone’s brother, sister, mother and grandfather are now on Facebook, and that social media itself is a bubble baby no more. At the same time, it’s important to note that both business users and consumers have barely scratched the surface of opportunity that the tools and strategies around social media can provide.

In order to achieve continued success many things have to happen. Cracks in the echo chamber, widespread communication of proven successes, best practices for return on investment (ROI) are just a few. And as companies embark on their 2010 planning, they are hoping for a glimpse of what is to come.

Rather than create a wish list, I followed Peter Kim’s model and turned to my network to find out what it believes social media will become in 2010. I asked about 40 people to participate and 31 responded with at least a few words on what might happen next year.

The predictions are meant to be thought-provokers more than gospel, and come from a mix of thought leaders, entrepreneurs, and folks who get their hands dirty every day dealing with social media for their companies. Predictions range from general social media to enterprise 2.0, government 2.0, security, public relations and even location-aware social networks. But the over-arching theme of most of the predictions say that 2010 is the year that social media will just be, rather than serving as a shiny new toy.

Without further ado, here are the 2010 social media predictions.

Next: David Armano, Karen Auby, Andrea Baker, Nenshad Bardoliwalla –>

October 20th, 2009

PR + Google Wave: When opportunity meets overkill

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 11:06 am

Categories: Advertising, Branding, Google Wave, Marketing, Public Relations, Social Media, Spam

Tags: Google Inc., Social Media, Jason Perlow, Blogger, Obviously Wave Etiquette, Public Relations, Cyberthreats, Marketing Research, Blogging, Spam

Marketing and public relations professionals are sitting on a bevy of opportunities for outreach: phone, text, email, and, heck, even old-fashioned faxes. Over the last couple of years these professionals have been given cookiespatted on the back for making “good” use of social media and specific social networks to reach their target audiences as well. But when is enough enough? Here are some common offenses:

1. Adding a journalist / blogger on Facebook and entering into a trusted network only to blatantly pitch said journalist / blogger on his or her “wall”
2. Spam @ messaging a journalist / blogger on Twitter multiple times to get them to review / write about your news or technology
3. Commenting on unrelated FriendFeed posts to try and get the writer’s attention

Those are annoying yet pretty controllable by either taking the person out of your network or blocking them. However, my ZDNet colleague Jason Perlow yesterday pointed out a new form of digital marketing spam that’s harder to control — and wickedly invasive: Google Wave spam.

It appears that POM Wonderful, the popular brand of pomegranate juice, was experimenting with Google Wave by adding a group of food bloggers to an unsolicited Wave. Perlow writes:

Well, welcome to the next generation of spam. Commercial, unsolicited Google Waves. As if using and trying to get used to Google Wave was bad enough, the PR agencies and marketing firms of the world have decided to start taking advantage of us, because we’re a captive audience and if they’ve ever contacted us in the past via e-mail on GMail, they now have a full contact database of people to torture by Google Wave if they were able to get an invite onto the system.

But it’s more than just annoying. It’s risky. Perlow points out that since Wave is designed to be collaborative, and people can’t opt out of Waves, by the time you delete an unsolicited Wave the damage is done. “People who have never made acquaintance with each other do not necessarily want to be “Waved in” with other people. There’s no “Blind CC” with Wave. Obviously Wave Etiquette is venturing into the world of the unknown,” he writes.

Is this a time when the PR and marketing industries need to police themselves? I had a colleague once say to me, “If you’re out there, you deserve to be contacted.” However, does that mean that if you have an email address — or a Google Wave account — are you supposed to lie down and just take unsolicited spam and Waves?

“In a perfect world, PR people would have such a great story, tailored so perfectly to the right journalist, that they could deliver it by carrier pigeon and it would still get printed,” said Peter Shankman, founder and CEO of Help A Reporter Out (HARO).  “Sadly, a good number of PR people use technology as a crutch to mask their lack of a good pitch, lack of homework, and lack, in the end, of caring about their craft. And that’s sad. For a lot of PR people, Google Wave is just the next crutch.”

What do you think? Let me know in the TalkBacks.

October 13th, 2009

Twitter starts to get serious about spammers

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 3:11 pm

Categories: Security, Social Media, Social Media and Security, Social Networks, Spam, Twitter

Tags: Twitter Inc., Spammer, Spam, Cyberthreats, Security, Spam And Phishing, Jennifer Leggio

Today Twitter announced a new way for its users to alert the service of spammers with a quick link to a “report [user name] for spam” link next to the “message” and “block” links in the right column. This appears to be Twitter’s latest attempt at controlling the rampant abuse brought to the site from spammers, and a replacement to it’s already existing reporting feature, the @spam account.

In a blog post, the folks at Twitter write:

Click the “Report as spam” button under the Actions section of a profile’s sidebar and our Trust and Safety team will check it out to see what needs to be done. No automated action will be taken as a result of reporting a user as spam (in other words, it can’t be used to incite an angry mob against an account you don’t like.) And once you report a profile it will automatically be blocked from following or replying to you.

This is a decent attempt from Twitter to help give the users more control in reporting spammers, as it’s previous @spam reporting methods were often a one-way conversation. The instructions on the spam account currently read to DM the account for reporting, yet the report is only following roughly 30K of the 100K+ users following it. And while many users would report @spam through public messages, there was no way to know if Twitter was listening.

However, regardless of how good the spam reporting is, Twitter still need to get more serious about what it’s doing to stop spammers and bots in the first place. The battle seems to be currently led by the spammers.

This will definitely help those with protected accounts since we didn’t have any way to report spam before. Since @spam didn’t follow us, it couldn’t ‘hear’ us,” said Kevin Riggins, senior information security analyst, Principal Financial Group. “Whether it is any more effective at actually having an impact on spam is an entirely different topic and I think it is going to take more mature automated processes to help with that.”

October 13th, 2009

Nine 'don't miss' social business sessions at Blog World & New Media Expo

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 12:59 pm

Categories: Blog World Expo, Blogging Best Practices, Brand Management and Monitoring, Branding, Community Management, Conference News, Corporate Social Networking, Social Business, Social Media

Tags: Media, Blog, Social Media, Jennifer Leggio

Next week kicks off the long-awaited Blog World & New Media Expo in Las Vegas. The conference is an annual event dedicated to trends in new media, including blogging, podcasting, social media, online video, music, television, radio, gaming, entertainment and communities. Keynotes include many of the usual social media suspects: Chris Brogan, Brian Solis, Jeremiah Owyang, Guy Kawasaki, Laura Fitton, and so on. There will also be some entertainers on hand to keynote as well, such as Kevin Pollak, Anthony Edwards and Jermaine Dupri.

The most interesting pieces of the conference, to me anyway, lie in the Social Media Business Summit, a track that focuses on tools and guidance for businesses using social media. This summit runs Thursday through Sunday alongside the other tracks at the regular conference. Here are the business sessions that I have marked as “don’t miss” on my own schedule:

• B2B Social Media
• Internet Marketing for Smart People
• Why Blogs Are Your #1 Search Marketing Tool
• Crisis Communication in the Era of Social Media
• Listening 2.0: Activating Social Media Across the Enterprise
• Bullseye Marketing: Precision Targeting on the Social Web
• Social Media Customer Engagement, Customer Loyalty
• From Skeptic To Advocate: Proving the Business Case to Your Boss or Client
• Social Media: The Bad and the Ugly
  

I’d like to selfishly note that yours truly is speaking during the Social Media Business Summit at 12:45 p.m. on Friday on “Don’t Jack My Brand: Security Awareness for the Marketing Manager,” a session that puts some of the security onus on marketers who need to protect their customers, partners and corporate entities against the risks of brandjacking. Add it to your schedule here.

I’ll also join Jeremiah Owyang of Altimeter Group, Ted Murphy of Izea and blogger/entrepreneur Wendy Piersall on the keynote panel “Sponsored Converations” at 2:45 p.m. on Thursday. Please join us.

What other sessions are a “don’t miss” for Blog World & New Media Expo?

October 12th, 2009

Quick'n'Dirty Podcast: Lucky number 18 and hashtag chats

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 9:49 am

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

Tags: Podcast, Twitter Inc., Chat, Jennifer Leggio

The latest edition of the Quick’n'Dirty Podcast was an abbreviated one, but a very fun one to host. My jet-setting partner in crime Aaron Strout was literally leaving on a jet plane at the time our show was recorded, so I went solo. Well, not entirely solo. I was joined by the fabulous Deb Robison as she came up with the idea for — and helped us research — our topic of the week, which was Twitter hashtag chats. And, I must confess that we ended the show about 15 minutes early due to my having tickets to the home opener of my beloved San Jose Sharks. Priorities, right? Hockey aside, here’s the recap of last week’s show:

• Social Network: Digsby. So, it’s not really a social network, it’s a client. But it’s our podcast and Aaron wasn’t around to protest so I went with it. I use Digsby religiously. Not only does it have a super cute logo, but it’s highly functional. I use it to integrate multiple chat accounts, multiple Web mail accounts, notifications, a couple of Twitter accounts and once upon a time I used it for Facebook. I like it because it’s reliable and it’s current unmatched in terms of instant message integration. I did confess that I don’t use it as my primary Twitter client because TweetDeck has it beat in terms of usability, but I do use it to monitor some secondary accounts that are only seasonally used.
• Featured Twitterer: At least I know Aaron wouldn’t protest this one. I chose @marshallk aka Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb as my favorite Twitter this week due to his great sense of humor, informative tweets, and ability to say what’s on his mind, whether or not the sentiment is a popular one. Deb also said she likes following Marshall due to his “calls ‘em like he sees ‘em” attitude. Definitely worth a follow and his blog posts are always worth a read.
• Point / Counterpoint: We didn’t really do a point / counterpoint this week but rather had an extended discussion about hashtag chats — you know, those chats on Twitter in which everyone includes the hashtag and tracks the discussion. We issued a survey a few weeks ago asking people to give us their feedback on their hashtag chat experience. Deb and I had discussed that while there are hashtag chats aplenty, it’s really hard to keep up with them and also not lose followers who aren’t interested in the chats. However, most users of the chats find them incredibly valuable, with a only a small percentage wishing that they were more streamlined. We talked about some of the most popular chats, the top of which was #socialmedia, discovered a chat for designers called #dcth, and Deb talked about the research she did around #solopr.

To listen and get all of the gritty details, check out the replay or search for us on iTunes under QuicknDirty. Next week Aaron and I will broadcast live from BlogWorld & New Media Expo, where we are both speaking. So tune in next week for a surprise edition of Quick’n'Dirty, when we hope to pull some folks live from the show floor.

October 9th, 2009

BreakingPoint's letter to Twitter: 'Let us help you'

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 12:42 pm

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

Tags: Twitter Inc., BreakingPoint, Networking, Jennifer Leggio

Amid all of the whining about Twitter downtime, one company is finally putting its money where its mouth is. BreakingPoint Systems, a network testing company, today published an open letter to Twitter in which it offers the social network free user of its server load testing and other products to help reduce the downtime and improve network performance. Blog author Kyle Flaherty, the company’s communications director, writes:

Yesterday, when Twitter was down due to a “bug triggered by an edge case in one of the core services“, I thought about how important Twitter had become to our business and me. I watched the predictable posts complaining about the fail whale and it hit me; rather than throwing criticism, I would be best served getting my hands dirty and helping with the problem. An idea surfaced, which I talked through with our CTO and co-founder Dennis Cox (@denniscox), and the green flag was waved.

BreakingPoint is a leader in network testing tools with customers spanning from giants to even companies of Twitter’s size. The cry to help Twitter was fueled after yesterday’s Twitter downtime / stream freezing issues after the social network reported a “bug.” Rather than join the myriad of people complaining about the service disruption, Flaherty and BreakingPoint decided to offer up some help. The Twitter loyalty is fueled by the company’s rampant adoption of Twitter used by both employees and members of its community of load testing professionals and network and security engineers. Recognizing the value of Twitter early on, the company even developed afeature to test the ability of network devices and application servers to handle Twitter traffic.

With Twitter’s continued of downtime it’s clear that they are having some scalability issues and BreakingPoint is a trusted company for dealing with such issues. Will Twitter take the company up on the offer? This user hopes so.