Social Media Now 3.30.09

Here’s what’s been going on in Social Media over the last week or so. Missing something? Email me or add your news in the comments section.

• Jeremiah Owyang discusses the debut of ExecTweet as an example of sponsored aggregation might impact the community.
• Peter Kim shares some metrics on his wiki of social media marketing examples. The list is up to almost 1,000 entries.
• Adam Ostrow points out that social networking is becoming more popular than email as a means of communication.
• Renee Lemley is collecting local small business social media cases in the Baltimore area and shares some quick tips for small businesses to engage.
• KD Paine shares her thoughts on PR Newswire’s Visibility Reports as a step in the right direction.
• Chris Garrett shares results from a survey of 900 marketers on how they use social media.
• Scott Monty ponders how marketing can influence an entire generation.
• Adam Cohen boils down “the real purpose of SXSWi” and reminds us that relationships deepen when you connect face to face.
• Adam Metz shares the opening salvo for his book titled (at least for now), “The Brand Lies Down on Broadway.

Bright Shiny Objects

• retweet for the iPhone shows off the most popular retweets on Twitter. It’s an easy way to scan for emerging trends and get in on the conversation.
• Speaking of the iPhone, won’t it be cool when we can Skype from the iphone? Mashable’s got the skinny.
• Everybody’s been playing with Mailana, a new visualization tool for your Twitter network.
• Josh Peters shares 30+ apps for doing business on FaceBook
• Blellow is an emerging micro-blogging site for freelancers to collaborate, learn and find jobs.
• Need to make a tough decision? Hunch uses machine learning to help you get it right.

How do you know if your social media vendor gets it?

As Social Media Club gets set to present the result of its Social Media Buyer’s Guide Survey at Web 2.0 on Friday, April 3, the SMC editorial board convened to mull one of the questions that wasn’t quite asked: How do you know that people know what they’re talking about with social media? In the spirit of our motto: If you get it, please share it, we’d love your thoughts and examples:

Social Media Club Question of the Week:

Does your vendor understand social media? And how do you know ?

Please tag your response #SMCQ3

Social Media Club NYC – March 25th meeting

Last night in NYC, Social Media Club met at the Roger Smith Hotel for our monthly meeting and a Tweetup/Party sponsored by H&R Block.

The meeting started with a presentation by Fraser of Adaptive Blue, showing Glue. Glue is a plugin that works on sites where you look at music, movies, books and many other ‘objects.’ It lets you see reviews, and also lets you share information about those objects with friends. It also lets you take actions – one action was viewing a movie on IMDB and via Glue adding it to your Netflix queue.

We took a brief raffle break, courtesy of Pearson Education Publishers, who provided us with books from Addision Wesley, IBM, Prentice Hall, FT Press, Que and Sams. We gave out books including 33 Million People in the Room, Putting the Public Back in Public Relations, and a host of others.

Then Tina Alexander showed us about the community sites currently in beta on The Wall Street Journal’s site. While she admitted that the community software, written in house, isn’t ground breaking, the WSJ is doing a bunch of things to keep conversation on a professional level, including requiring real names, and offering photo avatars to make sure you know who’s really giving the advice or opinion. The community features looked quite solid, and Tina was open to feedback from members of the group who were already beta testers. She gave out 1 month trial codes to the entire group, as well as very cool WSJ mugs for all attendees.

After another Book raffle break, Wilma Hayes of H&R Block got up to tell us about items relevant to freelancers and others running small businesses. We learned that there have been over 500 changes to the tax law in 2008 alone, and that there are all sorts of credits people often don’t take advantage of. @LesBlatt tweeted “$282 billion left on the table last year by taxpayers who did not claim all deductions and exemptions due” and “Job search expenses are deductible – from ink toner for printer to money paid to a recruiter.”

Once the group was done asking Wilma questions, it was off to the Starlight room for the H&R Block-sponsored Tweetup. The team from the Roger Smith Hotel really made us feel welcome, with good food and a great spread of crackers and cheeses and snacks and drinks expertly poured by bartender Paul. Thanks to Martha, Brian, Adam and the entire @RogerSmithHotel team for their generosity in supporting this event.

You can see pictures from Flickr below, and video will be forthcoming as soon as we can compress and upload it is below.

Part 1 of 3

Part 2 of 3

Currently available (converting) at http://howardgr.blip.tv and will be embedded soon.

Part 3 of 3

www.flickr.com HowardGr’s Social Media Club NYC March 2009 photoset

SMCQ2: Weighing in on the Responsibility of Social Media Services

In light of fluctuating terms of service and questionable archiving policies by some popular social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo), the SMC Editorial Board posed the question What are the responsibilities of Web 2.0 services to engage with and respond to the community it serves and what are the responsibilities of the community to the service? to discern how much content was being shared versus given away, what was being stored or simply abandoned, and who perhaps gets to do the giving away.   Free, as it turns out, often comes with a price tag and the deeper communities get in with their use of social media tools, the clearer some of the ambiguous terms of service become. As the following comments demonstrate, the question regarding responsibility of both service community spawned as many questions as real answers:

“the real question is whether  it’s reasonable to expect a certain level of service or % of uptime when you’re not paying for a product?” wrote Kai MacMahon http://kaimac.wordpress.com

MacMahon’s comments were echoed by Chris Dickens (@CravenDickens) in a comment to the original post: “The terminology we use (social media) is misleading and oddly seductive. We use these channels with a greater sense of ‘ownership’ than email and IM tools yet that is all they are – tools. And we have no ownership.”

“Archiving, maintaining, making accessible/findable, and distributing appropriate/relevant content contributed by the membership comes first.’ — Rich Reader (@Rich Reader)

“the responsibilities by web 2.0 services include uptime and modernized features. Be open to hearing feedback & also to communicate constantly with community so they know what’s going on with the service (eg not like how Facebook handled the Terms of Service fiasco).” — Ken Yeung, http://blog.thelettertwo.com/

” Community is not something that will necessarily be efficient, the metric for success should be quality and impact. Social media companies need to understand how to add value through their systems, not how to extract income. And if they can add value, the numbers will follow.” — Brian Reich, http://thinkingaboutmedia.com/

Will Social Media providers take note? Our board will be reviewing our findings on Podcast Radio, Friday, March 27, 2009 at 8am PST. Tune in and share your view on how terms of service are being defined, conflated, changed, negotiated and renogiated. We welcome your views and experiences!

Social Media Club Workshop Series

On April 25th we are kicking off the first in a series of Social Media Workshops to help you understand why Social Media is such a hot topic, and what your organization should be doing about it.

Social Media Club’s Founder and Chairman, Chris Heuer, will be traveling to five* cities in this first leg and is pulling together a team of industry leaders and Social Media practitioners in each locale to develop sessions for the workshop(s). Each city will have a slightly different focus and flavor, depending on the practitioners chosen and on the specific needs of the local community. You learn from lectures, conversations and interactions and walk out of the workshop with a full understanding of what Social Media can do for your business, and an actionable plan that you can then implement into your marketing program.

The six cities in this first leg are:

• Birmingham, AL (USA): April 27, 2009
• Miami, FL (USA): May 2, 2009
• Hamburg (Germany): May 8, 2009
• London (United Kingdom): May 12, 2009
• Paris (France): May 15, 2009

Early bird discounts apply to all events, so book early and save a little cash.

After these events, we are heading to the Northeast USA and the Midwest USA in June, and will be in the land Down Under in November – so stay tuned, as there will be more dates added soon…

We are also looking for sponsors for individual workshops, as well as the entire workshop series (17 workshops being held in the US, Europe and the Asia Pacific Rim detween April and November 2009). Please contact us for details on the various levels of sponsorship available.

UPDATE: * The Raleigh workshop has been moved to June due to scheduling conflicts.

Social Media Buyers Guide Ver 1.0 Sneak Peak

The results are coming in from the Social Media Buyers Guide Survey and there are definitely some valuable nuggets of gold we are finding.  We are keeping the survey open to get your responses, so if you haven’t contributed yet, the survey is still waiting for you to weigh in and share your own insights.

As a little sample of some of the stuff we are preparing to go into the presentation next week at Web 2.0 Expo, we wanted to share a bit of the more helpful information we are collecting.  For starters, we thought that since this is a buyer’s guide, we would share some of the key questions people reccomend asking of any service provider, media company or techynology vendor.

We asked respondents to recommend the top three questions buyers should ask any social media technology or services providers before closing the deal and here is what they shared with us:

• What does the technology accomplish that can’t be accomplished without it?
• How secure will our info be?
• How will you help me achieve my business objectives?
• How will you measure the results you have promised?
• Can you explain why you are on each of these platforms and what is your strategy for engaging with others on each platform?
• Can I see your case studies? Have you performed these services for more than yourself and one other client?
• Can you provide references?
• Is it robust?
• Will it deliver my requirements?
• Do we own the data?
• How accurate is the reporting?
• Will it let me have two way conversations?
• Our goal for this project is X. How does your service/technology help us achieve that goal?
• How sophisticated is your analytics package and what makes it unique?
• What do you like about our current infrastructure?
• What do we need to improve in order to be better positioned?
• What technology is relevant to our situation and what do we need to do in order to leverage it?
• How are you going to manage my brand’s good name?
• How popular is the site?
• How easy is it for people to respond to posts?
• How easy is it to manage?
• When would you NOT recommend this?
• What is your SLA?
• How stable is your operation?
• What needs does your tool/service specifically meet?
• What training will my users require to be able to use this effectively?
• Do you have business consulting experience?
• Have you established alliances with market leaders in the social media arena?
• How long have you, as a company, been involved in social media?
• What have been your biggest hurdles/what have you learned from them?
• What is your niche/specialty?
• What do you know about MY audience in terms of tech savvy, resources and current trends?
• What can they do to bring value to your customers?
• What will we do if this doesn’t work?
• How do you use social media in your everyday personal or professional life?
• How are you different than the free alternatives to your service, and why should I pay for your service?
• Is your product or service’s use case or value proposition clear enough that I can explain it to others in my organization and they will immediately see the same value that I do?

If you would like to contribute to help other people benefit from your experience, please fill out the survey!

Also stay tuned for updates on the Buyers Guide presentation at Web 2.0 on Friday, April 3!

Finally, big thanks to William Gaultier and E-Storm for helping make this happen.  They have been excellent partners and friends throughout this process.

Question of the Week: Responsibilities of web services & their community

Once again, our Editorial Board convened to discuss one of the more compelling questions the Social Media community is facing as it contends with archiving, owning, distributing and maintaining its ever-growing archive of content. To whit, the hugely popular Facebook has suspended accounts if it ‘thinks’ users have misused the services based on what an algorithm finds and changes friend feeds at will. With millions of users, Twitter is noticeably absent in the customer service department, is in dire need of a functionality upgrade and its archiving protocol is subject to debate. Is this ‘fair’ to the community it serves? And how, in turn, should the user community really behave? What do you think? Please let us know your thoughts, experiences and examples of the social media community and social media service working both in tandem and NOT. 

Social Media Club Question of the Week:

What are the responsibilities of Web 2.0 services to engage with and respond to the community it serves and what are the responsibilities of the community to the service? (Twitter, Facebook, etc)?

Do you have examples to illustrate this? 

Listen in to the very short podcast discussion and contribute your perspective.

We welcome your comments, tweets and blog posts. Please tag your responses with the following tags:

#SMCQ2, #Responsibilites

‘Coopetition’ in Action: Responses to SMC Question of the Week 1

Social Media Club’s Question of the Week kicked of 3/15/09 with the question “How can we best support our social media community and our peers knowing full well we’re often competing for the same clients and client money?”

We were pleased to have our social media community respond with a variety of comments, tweets and posts. True to form, members called for a combination of professionalism, collaboration and social innovation. We’ve highlighted some of the responses below.   

“Sharing what has worked and admitting where strategies have been punked is invaluable to our collective knowledge base,” @mollyrobben

“The only way to advance the profession is through collaborative efforts by social media professionals.”  — Pete Codella, http://www.petecodella.com

“If you look for a natural fit; a totally symbiotic relationship – it isn’t competition so much as finding what’s right.” @hhotelconsut

“So, if we are to pursue our individual passions and interests we need to know who else is doing neat things. The active use of social media in this regard leaves the other options in the dust. Without interaction we’re only as good as our individual thinking,” wrote Anthony Power at http://apowerpoint.blogspot.com. “Social media has one confounding problem,” he also noted. “it’s not only a tactic we can apply to client, it’s also the vehicle by which we communicate with one another.”

“After all, social media is a set of tools. I use them. I may help others learn to use them. Why should I even think of myself as competing with my colleagues? There are about 25 million small businesses in the United States alone, all of whom can benefit by learning to use social media. I will never reach them all.” —Francine Hardaway, http://blog.stealthmode.com 

Listen in Sunday, March 22, to hear the Social Media Club Editorial Board refine the second Question of the Week and check infor a post on the call so you can comment, blog and tweet your thoughts. After all, as Leslie Hawk at Life is Better with Lipstick wrote:

“Sometimes I find that if I am in a project too long, I only see what I want to see. I might miss a new angle or new avenue that we could explore that would benefit our clients. If I ignore what is being said about my project, client etc in the social media world, I am limiting myself as to the heights I can reach. I would say then that cooperation fosters competition – it breeds success!” —http://lifeisbetterwithlipstick.blogspot.com/

SMC Question of the Week: Supporting our Peers & Ourselves

SMC Question of the Week: How can we best support our social media community and our peers knowing full well we’re often competing for the same clients and client money?

Interested in addressing how players in the industry who are seeking to walk the transparent talk that its business is built upon are succeeding, or failing, at using the tools in a way that truly serves the community, members of the Social Media Club Editorial Board gathered on Sunday amid the SXSW Interactive conference in Austin to kick off the SMC ‘Question of the Week” initiative by discussing and refining our first question.

At the same time that social media tools loosen the boundaries of communication to allow more avenues for both advertising and regular communications, it can present a temptation to those who are more interested in attention than service…or acting out of a scarcity model rather than abundance.

Call it cooperation, call it competition, or call it all out rivalry, doing business in Social Media is at once open, collaborative and governed by the bottom line.  SMC might call it ‘coopetition.’ Whereas some leaders in the field are interested in teaching best practices; others are more interested in number of followers, or becoming micro-celebrities in and of themselves. Often what on the surface appears to be a collaborative effort is derailed by competing agendas.

David Peck, of www.newmediachatter.com, concurred: “When I’m doing a project or something, I always look to my community because we’re a community, first.  If we could pull those resources together… competition is good but look here first to support each other.”

“A certain level of cooperation benefits everyone,” noted Kimberly Turner, cofounder and editor of http://regator.com.  “If I have a blog on a particular topic, and you have a blog on a particular topic; we might be competing for the same advertising dollars, but if we could get a discussion going and add value to one another through comments and blogging and referencing one another, we are adding value and it makes it easier, in the long run, for both of us.”

“Egos are a part of human nature,” said Julie Wohlberg, Director of Communications at Multiply, Inc.  “Unfortunately, social media sort of brings that to the forefront.  I think you do what you do, the best you can, and then people will ultimately figure out who is genuine and honest, who is competing, and what’s going on.”

Social media is free, media space is more abundant than ever in the new ‘knowledge economy.’ Some people are interested in true reach, others motives may not be so clear,and perhaps, the emphasis on free, may diminish the inherent value in having a real knowledge base.  

“It’s not so much being an influencer,” noted SMC’s Chris Heuer. “It’s being a teacher.”

We’d love to hear what you think. Please add your comments on the question below. Or better yet, blog about your experiences both supporting and perhaps competing with your peers, and tag your blog appropriately #SMCQ1, #Coopetition so we can report back on how the social media community is addressing the question:

How can we best support our social media community and our peers knowing full well we’re often competing for the same clients and client money?

TAG: #SMCQ1, #Coopetition

 

 

Social Media Club NYC – March 25th Meeting

For March, SMC NYC is being hosted at the Roger Smith Hotel (thanks to @RogerSmithHotel @BSimi @AdamJWallace) and will be sponsored by H&R Block!

THIS IS A 2 PART MEETING – Part meeting, part Tweetup/Party!

PART 1: SMC Regular Monthly Meeting

We’ve got a night full of interesting things that Social Media Practitioners need to know about:

* Chris Phenner will show some new “Mobile Virtual Goods” from NYC developer ThumbPlay.
* Tina Alexander, Product Manager, Wall St. Journal/DN will show some of their community projects (a response to the discussion from February about what main stream media is or isn’t doing)
* Laura Giaimo from Adaptive Blue will show Glue.
* A special guest from H&R Block will talk about how to save on your taxes, and relevant items to those in social media, especially sole practitioners and small businesses.

NOTE: This event will be recorded. By purchasing a ticket or attending, you agree to be captured via video, audio, and photo. All media will be released under a (CC)Attribute-Non-commercial-share-Alike license.

PART 2:

A Public Tweetup Sponsored by H&R Block – with Open Bar for as long as it lasts. Admission first to people who signed up to the Social Media Club Meeting, then guest list as long as there’s room. Walk ins only if the guest list is not finished, so please register.
Title: SMC NYC – March Meeting
Location: Roger Smith Hotel, 501 Lexington Ave. at 47/48th
Registration Link: http://smcnycmar.eventbrite.com
Start Time: 18:00
Date: 2009-03-25

Insights from B5Media: Social Media Buyers Guide

Social Media Buyers Guide Survey – Please Contribute

Last month we began work in earnest on the Social Media Buyers Guide project by starting to collect information, ideas and questions on the Social Media Club wiki.  Last week we hosted our first podcasts. Today we are beginning to seek contributions to our formal Social Media Buyers Guide Survey that will be the basis for our presentation at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco on Friday April 3 at 2:40pm. Next week we will be hosting another series of podcasts with technology vendors on Monday at 10am PST and Thursday with service providers at 11am PST (to make up for tech troubles we had this week).

Our mission is, as I have been ranting incessantly, to help companies stop selling and shift the focus/intention to helping their customers buy.  Never before have we been able to leverage the tools with such broad, global access to each others’ insights and lessons learned.  Never before has the business climate been so open as to encourage this type of sharing.  Its interesting that so many people have asked “what do you mean, help people buy?” – we are so indoctrinated into being sold, its hard for some people to make the mental shift to examine what advice we can share to help others make the right vendor and service provider decisions.  But that is our goal, and we have some great insights already captured.

Now we need your help: please share this with your colleagues.  Please retweet the link.  Please contribute to the Social Media Buyers Guide Survey yourself, sharing as much or as little information as you can (the survey could take between 5-30 minutes based on how much, or how little you want to write.  This is also an opportunity for you and your company to be featured as a case study, or you can submit the information anonymously. If you are an agency, you should also reach out to your favorite clients and encourage them to complete the survey. If you are an organizational buyer who contributes to the survey and are in town for Web 2.0 Expo, you may be selected for helping present the findings, and your case study, during our panel.

So what are you waiting for, go ahead and complete the survey now. Then please share and invite others to contribute too… [ RT @socialmediaclub help us help you! Take the Social Media Buyers Guide Survey so others can learn from your experience http://bit.ly/InWra ]