Social Media Now 10.31.08

I’ve been doing these social media round-up posts every couple of weeks but there was so much good stuff this week I couldn’t wait. Did I miss something? Email me or add it to the comments!

• Jay Deragon wonders if social media ROI is really so important, read more posts on ROI from Jason Falls, Janet Fouts and Brad J. Ward, find some good tools and posts on the topic on Constructing Social.
• With all the focus on Social Media ROI, Amber Naslund wonders if every social media initiative has to succeed to be valuable.
• Pistachio gives her 2 cents on Magpie, a new scheme to monetise Twitter.
• Brian Solis discusses brand management and the social web..
• ReadWriteWeb added a jobs board to their site. In these times we all need a little extra info?
• Marc Meyer suggests we all quit talking to each other so much and talk to the clients instead.
• Beth Kanter writes about prioritizing your web marketing budget and social media’s slice of the pie.
• In typical Chris Brogan (and Bryan Eisenberg) style, a way to trick or treat on Twitter and raise $$ for a good cause. Go do this.

Bright Shiny Objects

• TweetGrid Create a Twitter search dashboard that updates in real time. It’s not sexy but if you’re a topic watcher it’s a wonder.
• Tweetburner Get reporting on the links you shorten and post to Twitter and Friendfeed.
• QikCom is another microsharing app for the enterprise.
• Docstoc Let’s you email a document to it for storage and sharing with your friends.
• What would Seth Godin do? is a new Wordpress plugin that helps you build your subscriber base.
• Firefox for Web Marketing Ninjas lists some ways to make your web marketing easier.
• Ever want to look fondly back on the early Twitter days? My First Tweet will show you the first Tweet of any user.

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Social Media Workshop Hawaii - Update and Thanks

Aloha! We are so excited to be here in Hawaii to share what we have been doing for the past several years and enjoy this beautiful island.  I have said it before and I will say it again, Kristie and I are some of the luckiest people alive – we get to do what we love, with people we love, enjoying some of the loveliest parts of the world along the way.

If you hadn’t yet heard, it’s officially “Geek Week” in Hawaii by a proclamation of Governor Linda Lingle.  We are here to help our good friend and all around incredibly amazing human being, Roxanne Darling, launch the local Social Media Club by hosting a Social Media Workshop tomorrow, and we also are privileged to speak at PodCamp Hawaii on Friday. Roxanne’s dedication and hard work is really paying off in a big way and we are grateful to her for making this all happen.  She is truly someone who not only gets it, but shares it (and makes it better too!)

Tomorrow we will gather at the Hawaii Prince Hotel Waikiki with a couple of dozen local professionals who are interested in understanding how to leverage Social Media in their lives and their work.  We have a great day planned, not too short, not too long, but just right – a good mix of conversations, presentations, and ideation.

It goes without saying that these sorts of events couldn’t happen without some great sponsors (or patrons as I like to refer to them, connecting with the renaissance era more explicitly).  For this event in particular, due to the higher travel costs, we would not have been able to pull it off without their financial and moral support.

In particular, we want to thank:

HTDC – The High Tech Development Corporation is working to cultivate and retain high tech companies and talents on the island.  We are expecting several of the key leaders to be participating and look forward to working with them.

Chi.mp – Provides individuals with an identity on their own domain together with a passport to the thousands of sites that offer OpenID signon. Myles from the SF New Tech Meetup connected us with the founder Rob, who were already working with PodCampHawaii, so it was just a natural fit.

KnowHowCafe – Roxanne Darling and Shane Robinson’s new company is going to be a great educational resource for people looking to learn more about how to engage with Social Media, marketing and more.  Can’t say enough about Rox, and we are looking forward to meeting Shane finally.

HubSpot – After seeing their advertising on Facebook for the last few months, I finally got a chance to get the inside scoop.  They have some great software (as a service) for small businesses that makes it easier for them to have solid presences on the Web and be more effective with their marketing.  They also have some really cool tools with WebSite Grader and Twitter Grader. Since Mike Volpe of Hubspot couldn’t fly out, he gave away his ticket through a Twitter haiku contest to Arlene Anderson who wrote “Vivid stars twinkle/ Waves crash only to recede/ Thoughts bare on the sand” – awesome job!

Viddler - Viddler is a platform for video publishers which has clearly been taking the podcasting world by storm.  In fact, Jim Louderback of Revision 3 said “”We love the advanced features of Viddler’s streaming video player - they’ve done an amazing job building in interactivity and navigation.” I have not met these folks before, we had to fly all the way over here to the islands to catch up with them.  I imagine we will be hanging out a bit talking shop this week.

Well, now its time to go prepare for the workshop, do all that last minute stuff.  For once, I am not personally doing a powerpoint presentation, but rather a talk.  Am also getting my chapter on Social Media Principles ready which I am going to release as a PDF on Friday morning at Podcamp, so until next post, Aloha!

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Social Media Now 10.22.08

Here’s a quick round-up of some recent news in social media. Did we miss your favorite social media news story? Add it in the comments or email us to add it to the next post for social media now.

Shel Israel writes about not mistaking popularity for influence. There’s an interesting post on Mashable about top blunders from the social media gurus, with a little something we can all learn from. Chris Brogan reminds us that it’s not necessarily true the famous bloggers are the only ones with anything important to say, and to promote and encourage others to keep the conversations fresh. Blog Action Day showed how social media can help us raise our voices and awareness about critical issues and thousands of bloggers responded in their own ways. Nonprofit Bootcamp happened in San Mateo, and over 2000 people got the resources they needed to get down to business online. Nielsen online ratings showed huge traffic growth for several social media sites this year, especially Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin, while some other sites like Buzznet and imeem slipped a bit, and imeem may be doing some cutting back. FriendFeed announced their real-time API, so now you can keep up to date on your friends in real-time.

Bright Shiny Objects

• AppLoop is an iPhone friendly RSS reader that’s getting good reviews.
• Lijit search just added advertising to it’s bag of tricks.
• Twine can help you track your bookmarks and other content, and learns what you like the more you use it and then makes recommendations based on your usage.

Related articles by Zemanta

• FriendFeed Announces Another Update
• Followers, Friends, and Fans: Expanding Your Online Community - Emetrics Summit DC 2008 - Day 1

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Who Owns Social Media? SF/SV Panel

We had a great conversation tonight about the question, Who Owns Social Media? When I asked it originally, I had meant to ask it within the context of ‘within the enterprise’, but in twitterland, had to shorten it a bit - as we discussed, it was also the question I was being asked by many different clients.  We found some very interesting insights along the way.  I have much more to add, but not enough time to do so tonight.

Thankfully, these folks already did manage to write some more…

• Andrew Mager liveblogged the event over on ZDNet
• Kenneth Yeung posted a ‘rebuttal’
• Ashley Messick furthers the conversation
• Daniela Barbosa gets a chance to ask her question (panel was too short, yes, so we continue here)

Well, I have to do a little more work before getting to the airport in the morning (heading over to facilitate Social Media Workshop Hawaii and then speaking at PodCampHawaii), so will need to pick this up later THUR… will hopefully see your thoughts here.

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David Meerman Scott in Minneapolis

Hello everyone. I think you will really like the next few events coming up in the Twin Cities with Social Media Breakfast and Social Media Club of Minnesota.

On October 31st at 8AM, Deluxe Corporation is hosting national speaker David Meerman Scott. He is the author of “The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to use news releases, blogs, viral marketing and online media to reach buyers directly.” You can tune into this live at http://smbmsp.ning.com/ at 8am Central.

Event Info:
- Where: Deluxe Corporate Headquarters, 3680 Victoria Street North, Shoreview, MN 55126
- When: October 31st, 2008 from 8am to 10am Google Calendar
- RSVP: http://smbmsp8.eventbrite.com

Each attendee will get a free copy of David’s Book (up to 100 attendees), which he’ll be happy to sign. (Courtesy of our friends at New Horizons Computer Learning Centers. www.nhmn.com)

Other Speakers at the Event:
- Steve Nielsen, President & CEO PartnerUp, a Deluxe Corporation Company
- Fallon folks talks about their Twitter campaign for SciFi’s “Eureka”
- Post-Networking with David, Steve, and everyone else!

Check out David Meerman Scott’s Blog:
http://www.webinknow.com/ and download his free ebook The New Rules of Viral Marketing: How word-of-mouse spreads your ideas for free at http://www.davidmeermanscott.com/documents/Viral_Marketing.pdf

Listen to Albert Maruggi’s Marketing Edge podcast interview with David Meerman Scott http://culld.us/l2442251

Special thanks to Graeme Thickens and Rick Mahn for organizing the event.

Social Media Breakfast and Social Media Club
“Local Conversations, with National Connections!”

Hope to see you there.
Doug

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Weekly Chapter Call

Over the last three weeks we have been hosting a weekly call every Wednesday morning at 8am PST to answer questions about launching and managing local Social Media Club (’SMC’) chapters.

Howard Greenstein made a suggestion in last weeks call to alternate times every week to hopefully help folks join live, as our audience is global and the world does not necessarily circle around early California mornings. LOL, duly noted.

It is a great idea, so we are implementing it starting this week (we still need to find a new time for folks in the Asia Pac region to talk live).

Tomorrow, Wednesday, October 22nd,  we will hold the call at 5:30pm PST. Next week will hold the call at 8am PST. The week after, back to 5:30pm PST. Call times/dates will be posted on the SMC events calendar going forward so please4 check there to make sure you have the right call time.

We have started to put together some documentation together that we recommend you review BEFORE the call takes place (scroll to the bottom of the page where you can also download a .pdf if you rather). There is a podcast Chris Heuer did with Jason Falls from the Louisville chapter that makes for a good listen too.

To join the weekly call, please dial into the following:

Free Conference Call
Conference Dial-in Number: (269) 320-8400
Participant Access Code: 509633#

If you cannot make the call, it will be recorded for up to one week for you to take a listen at leisure:

Free Conference Play Back
Playback Number: (641) 715-3445
Access Code: 509633#

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Feature your video or presentation on SocialMediaClub.org

Would you like to have your presentation featured on the home page of Social Media Club? We are looking for the best educational materials on all things related to Social Media (web 2.0, community, new marketing, pr 2.0 and other related materials). Please let us know it exists by adding a link to it in the comments below along with a short description.

When reviewing our media literacy program with Michael Brito the other day, we hit upon another potentially big idea for this important spot on the home page, a weekly course focused on a different strategy or tactic.  By this I mean that one week we could feature a new presentation/video each day on the same topic , such as Blogger Relations.  In this case, we would look for someone (hello members!) to put together an online ‘course’ on these topics that has five lessons in it.

What do you think? How might we do something like this best? Are there any pieces of free or SaaS software out there we could use in conjunction with this program? Please let us know!

PS - we are also starting to develop our webinar program and need help in selecting a vendor.  We will be posting separately on this program, but since it is related, thought I should mention that here as well.

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SMC Members: We need your current blog URL

If you are a paid member of Social Media Club (including student/non profit members), please go ahead and post your current blog below in the comments. We are doing something very cool to help promote each of you, but it seems that we don’t have blog addresses for everyone. If you don’t get it to us now, you can always update it later, but I think you will be happier if you do it now…

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Hawaii Geek Week: October 18 - 25, 2008

Pulled from an email received from Roxanne Darling, Barefeet Studios.

——

Governor Lingle has declared the week of October 18-25 ‘Hawaii Geek Week‘.

There are several events focused on “the social web” - which is by far the best business opportunity since typewriters were invented! We hope you will join us as we learn, network and promote Hawaii to the world using the best tools of Web 2.0.

We are offering several opportunities that may be of interest to you, your colleagues or even your friends and family. They are equal interest to for-profit, non-profit, and governmental organizations.

Here is an article defining Social Media, how these events affect the Hawaii business community, and how to decide which events to attend:

+++ Social Media Workshop +++
Thursday, October 23, 2008; 8 am - 3 pm
Hawaii Prince Hotel

$125 per person, includes continental breakfast, lunch, and charter membership in the Hawaii chapter of the Social Media Club. Send 4 from your organization and the 5th attends Free!

Register Here.

This is a small, exclusive business event to give you the 30,000′ view of the social web and how it is already affecting your business. Get one-to-one consulting and work with several mainland experts so you have specific ideas and action you can take to build your brand on the internet. “Geek Speak” not required.

+++ Podcamp & Wordcamp Hawaii +++
Friday and Saturday, October 24 & 25, 2008; 8 am - 5 pm
Hawaii Convention Center

Free to attend. Register Here.

This event is open to the public and will include lots of short sessions and hands-on workshops with local and mainland speakers. We have 350 people already registered to attend this event. It is a perfect follow-on to the Social Media Workshop and we recommend organizations send as many of their staff and volunteers as possible.  Rob Halper, of  the Johnson & Johnson Health Channel and Christine Lu, of the China Business Network, will join many of own local experts.

+++ Music and Hula Spots Available +++
We have openings for local artists to share their culture with our attendees at Podcamp. We will be live video streaming much of the day to viewers around the world, and think this is a great chance to share their talents. Plus there will be many podcasters there doing interviews and making media about the event. Please forward this email to anyone you know who may be interested in performing. People can sign themselves up on the wiki: http://www.podcamphawaii.com/wiki/

We hope you will join us at one or both of these events.

Mahalo.

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Creating Awareness and Common Licensing

So today is the day that Creative Commons and the Social Media Club kicks off the Creative Commons partnership to focus on increasing awareness on a standardized way to license content online as announced in a post last week. So pursuant to the 3 concepts of posting the widget, providing an overview on Creative common or highlighting a licensed piece of work, below is a photo from a flickr user, “Phyllis Spa”, which makes me want to be somewhere else than Vegas and luckily it is licensed under Creative Commons and I can share it with you and you can mix it up and share it with others since it is licensed by CC.

SOURCE:http://flickr.com/photos/phyllisspa/288083831/

Let us know what other great content you find and feature today, October 15, Creative Commons Awareness. Cheers!

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Bloggers Around the World Taking on Poverty: Blog Action Day (October 15, 2008)

By Kelly N Patterson

 

If you happen to be a regular blogger, I am confident you have already heard through the virtual grapevine that October 15^th is Blog Action Day.  Bloggers everywhere will unite (from sports blogs and tech blogs, to entertainment and cooking blogs) and publish posts on October 15^th that discuss poverty in some way.

The BIG IDEA is that by all bloggers posting on the same day, we as the social media, can change the conversation that day, to raise awareness, start a global discussion about global and local poverty issues, and hopefully, inspire people to action.

What Can You Do?

Well, the easiest thing you can do if you have a blog is to write something about poverty that is relative to your unique audience. If you have a personal blog, you can document about poverty issues in your own life and how you dealt with them, or someone else close to you.  If you have a celebrity blog, you can blog about celebrity charity work (think George Clooney!) 

If you don’t happen to have a blog, you can just look for a good blog about poverty that speaks to you, and share it with your family, friends and colleagues.  Spreading the word is critical to raising awareness and continuing the global discussion on poverty issues.

My 2 pesos:  My definition of poverty: having to choose between medicine and food.  What is your definition?

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Be Common on October 15, 2008

Ever since the original launch of the interim board, the group has actively been working to move the goals forward for the Social Media Club, it’s members and the industry.   As part of the outreach to the community, members of the Social Media Club have engaged numerous groups to see if there are opportunities to align activities and initiatives to encourage best practices social media.   Creative Commons, a non-profit organization, who focuses on providing a standardized way to manage the netherworld between copyright and public domain content represents a key standards focused organization for encouraging best practices in social media.  The licensing provided by Creative Commons allows creators to share content which can be remixed or even used for commercial purposes while providing the necessary acknowledgment and controls for the author/creator.

As stated in Chris’ post on the Social Media Club’s 4 projects, increasing awareness and adoption for industry standards is central to the mission of the group.  To that end, October 15, 2008 represents the first opportunity to evangelize the importance of standards and move this mission forward in partnership with Creative Commons.

So what can YOU do to help create more awareness around the important service Creative Commons provides?   There are 3 ideas which certainly would help which have been bantered around, but I suspect the community can come up with more by October 15th.  The key theme is just to identify a way to let folks know about the best practices around the sharing/creating of creative works leveraging a Creative Commons License.  So which one of the below are you going to do?

1. Post an article describing the services Creative Commons provides to content creators and why YOU think that is important.
2. Add a widget to your blog to encourage financial support.
3. Create and/or focus a creative commons licensed work via your preferred social media channel (Twitter, blog, facebook…)

There is definitely the opportunity for you to do all three if you like.  The important part of this initiative is to find a way to highlight the benefits of Creative Commons licensing and leveraging best practices in social media.  Ultimately, a standards based approach to rights management is needed for both creators and consumers alike –  so spread the word — October 15, 2008 is Creative Commons Awareness day.

It’s not very often you have the chance to be common and that actually be a good thing, so take advantage of it.  Dare to be common!

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Social Media Now 10.4.08

Social media sites are growing at lightning speed, partly because it’s now so easy to implement your own network. Dan Farber points out Ning is about to reach 500,000 communities soon, and Peter kim lists 234 Social Media Marketing examples.

A pretty amazing example of the power of social media showed up in the stock market this week when CNN’s citizen-journalism site iReport reported Steve Jobs had a heart attack. A flurry of Diggs, cross posts and retweets later, Apple stock took a serious header until the story was disproved. Read Henry Blodget’s post on why Silicon Valley Insider ran the story.

Shel Israel posts his thoughts on how Twitter is changing the way we sell things online.

The first and only VP debate was a much anticipated event and viewers had a number of Twitter enhanced options. My hands down favorite is Steve Nelson’s Twitter feed into Capitol Hill in Second Life.

Giving bloggers everywhere hope, ,Johns Wu sold his blog Bankaholic to the financial information portal BankRate for a whopping $15 Mil. Read the story on Mashable.

Bright Shiny objects

• Quite few Tweeple seem to just ♥ Twitterkeys which allows you to easily paste special characters into your Twitter posts.
• A new music network popped up called JamsBio where you can share and discuss your favorite music.
• The Obama campaign’s iPhone App is creating quite a buzz. poll your personal network and see who they are voting for.
• What does your blog look like on an iPhone? WPTOUCH is a WordPress plugin that can help it look good.

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Using Social Media for Good Causes

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