Sunday, August 31, 2008

I'll be answering questions tonight at 5pm EST for the School of Social Marketing. Call 718-766-4782 or Join us - http://ping.fm/BmwgB
Broadcasting live on BlogTalkRadio as a featured show for the School of Social Marketing at 5pm EST U.S. Join us - http://ping.fm/BmwgB

Friday, August 29, 2008

It's time to speakupsavelives.org and have a massive Impact on Teen Suicide now! Impact Boot Camp recap http://ping.fm/hNBpP
Michael Berkley lays out a plan for having a successful viral campaign through the use of social advertising. http://ping.fm/Rrw6O

Thursday, August 28, 2008

Online tool for Building Your Customers' Social Technographics Profile Now from Forrester Research & Groundswell http://ping.fm/63Eh4
If you are wanting to find ways to use Twitter in your marketing and branding plans, get this free report http://ping.fm/ssgRi
The Freelancer's Dream List from Codswallop: 100 Web Applications for Everything You Might Possibly Need Online http://ping.fm/7sHpG
3rd in series: Using Mind Maps for Creativity, Note-Taking and Productivity. Good overview from Codswallop http://ping.fm/LrMGB
2nd in series: The Excel Magician: 70+ Excel Tips and Shortcuts to help you make Excel Magic from Codswallop http://ping.fm/DHa1C
Oldie but Goodie: Conversion Central: 101 Tools to Convert Video, Music, Images, PDF and More from Codswallop http://ping.fm/roEtT
Ron Jones claims leveraging social media is the key to educating & distributing information on social issues. http://ping.fm/Twzwu
If "content is king" why do marketers rely on gimmicks to deliver it? Share trends you observe http://ping.fm/VPATe

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Recommendation for
Fact - One in 11 high school students made a suicide attempt in the past 12 months! Have an #Impact. Support http://ping.fm/LbEK3
School of Social Marketing limited offer with access to a "World Class" Adjunct Faculty covering all Web 2.0 http://ping.fm/Wnsgz
Online collaborative tool for creating and sharing flow charts, schematics, diagrams, floor plans and more. http://www.gliffy.com/ - Web 2.0

Sunday, August 24, 2008

Critical Info about Google Social Network broadcast at 3pm EST today @ http://ping.fm/1iyLN very powerful info you need!!!
Critical Alert Call about NEW Google Social Network & why it is critical to all of your social marketing efforts. Call 646-716-6448 @3pm EST
Live your life so you are happy with the answers to these question at the end: Did I Live? Did I Love? Did I Matter? Live a life of impact

Saturday, August 23, 2008

"Words have Impact!" @DonnaFox is absolutely right! We are symbol using creatures who are here to induce cooperation with others!

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

I could use an invitation to http://ping.fm/gxBxu for a birthday present. I'd like to review it before @KenMcArthur's Impact Boot Camp
Discussion of the evolution of Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 with charts showing estimated adoption times. http://ping.fm/NM1Cp

Monday, August 18, 2008

Morning all. Interesting data demonstrates why you should target teachers and educators online. http://ping.fm/Y0pWQ Requires Free Reg.

Sunday, August 17, 2008

Great feedback on today's BlogTalkRadio show you can download it here http://ping.fm/lOdd9 share with friends and subscribe to RSS Feed

Thursday, August 14, 2008

Google may not be the only search engine but it certainly is the most used by anyone's measurement View the graphs http://ping.fm/lgK01
A potentially valuable resource for you to monitor and connect with the ever expanding Hispanic Market http://ping.fm/ACNPI
It is easy to tap into growing social networks like HI5 and Bebo with Ping.fm and here's why you should http://ping.fm/nt3kp
Paraphrasing the political advice "It's about the economy, Stupid!" Social Media is all about the customer. http://ping.fm/Q4ln3
Pew Research Institute Study shows significant growth in people using web search engines http://ping.fm/UIznq

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Don't be fooled by misleading numbers! "Baby Boomers" can be found online, actively using social media platforms http://ping.fm/7xGee
Overview of the Global growth of Social Networking platforms beyond North American borders. http://ping.fm/fzTMg

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Thanks to @JoshSpaulding for sharing this Directory of the Top ranked Article Submission Sites. It updates weekly: http://ping.fm/9GKGz
Considering publishing your own book? Download this new book and review for Aaron Shepard of the Publishers Blog. http://ping.fm/p3CRR

Monday, August 11, 2008

Counterpoint to earlier contention of Duncan Watts argues finding influencers is key to making WOM marketing work: http://ping.fm/mdDFH
A resource some of you may not be aware of is HP Labs http://ping.fm/vjHq7
Nice collection of research & studies
Social Media optimization makes it as easy for your site visitors to help you out by bookmarking your information. http://ping.fm/Kz31S
New article from CIO that shows how Social Networking Benefits Businesses. http://ping.fm/Uy9wi BlogtalkRadio Updated for playback

Social networking stands to benefit businesses

Mention social networking and most people immediately think of sites like Facebook, MySpace or Bebo which let people create lists of friends, send messages to each other, share photos or music, join groups with like-minded-individuals and just generally keep in touch.

Content from SUW Charman-Anderson

It’s not just Facebook

Mention social networking and most people immediately think of sites like Facebook, MySpace or Bebo which let people create lists of friends, send messages to each other, share photos or music, join groups with like-minded-individuals and just generally keep in touch.

Images of industriousness rarely spring to mind, yet many organisations have realised that it’s not all just super-poking and games of Scrabulous, and want to use their own social networks for the benefit of their businesses.

The potential for social networking tools to connect huge numbers of people has been clearly illustrated. Companies want to harness that power themselves, and not just for marketing or recruitment, but also for internal communications and collaboration.

One HR executive recently, rather mournfully, said to me, "Fifty per cent of our staff are on Facebook. Why can’t we get that kind of buy-in?" Although Facebook is primarily a tool for organising your personal life, people also use it for business and, increasingly, companies realise that they have to provide such tools internally or else employees will communicate over the web, potentially risking sensitive company data.

Another significant driver pushing companies to adopt social networking tools is the need to locate expertise within companies whose employees are dispersed across many locations and time zones, a problem exacerbated by restructured offices that emphasise teleworking and hot-desking. It was this, along with the emergence of Web 2.0, that formed the backdrop to IBM’s exploration of social networking.

"One of the most important things within IBM is finding expertise," says Alastair MacKenzie, Lotus Software brand executive at IBM.

"It is fundamentally important to us both in terms of our efficiency and our competitive advantage in the marketplace."

IBM started in the most logical place: Blue Pages, its internal phone directory, to which it added profile pages that employees could update. Now those profiles can be tagged with keywords.

"We started hot-desking seven or eight years ago, and we became unable to find people [within the organisation]," says Brendan Tutt, social networking subject matter expert at IBM.

"So we had to build a tool to enable us to find people and the skills they have. Having found them we can tag them with keywords useful to us. Tagging is a very big part of our internal tools: tagging yourself, tagging documents, or tagging people."

But Blue Pages is not just a way to find people by keyword, it is also a way to research a particular person or subject area, by pulling together blog posts, bookmarks (saved in a Del.icio.us-like social bookmarking application called Dogear), and documents related to that person or subject tag. This gives the searcher not just a good overview of how someone describes themselves, but how they are defined by others, and by their own actions and interests.

These interconnections are also described in a graphical view which shows how people are linked together, and thus who to approach for an introduction to required expertise. Social network mapping exposes the network’s structure, so it’s easy to see who is best connected in a given community.

IBM has also built status and location awareness into its tools, so it’s easy to tell whether someone is busy and which time zone they are in. This lets people pick a more appropriate moment to get in touch or schedule meetings. This is, in a business context, what’s called ambient intimacy - the quiet broadcast of information about what you’re doing - which allows people to feel connected to you.

Having battle-tested the software internally, IBM decided to fold five Blue Pages technologies - Profiles, Communities, Blogs, Dogear and Activities - together into a commercial product, Lotus Connections, which became available in June 2007.

Jeff Schick, vice-president of social computing for the IBM Lotus division, says that Blue Pages clearly lent itself to a commercial product. "We were hearing so much marketplace buzz and so much was going on in Web 2.0, and it was clear we had an opportunity to build something for the enterprise," he says.

Banking on Facebook

While IBM has created its own tools, Standard Chartered Bank is piloting the use of Facebook for internal use. The London-based bank has over 75,000 staff in 76 countries and with many functional units spread across multiple locations, Standard Chartered needed a way to connect people within the organisation. But why choose Facebook?

"Why should we build a better wheel, if someone has already invented it?" says John Meakin, group head of information security at Standard Chartered.

"So long as one can overcome the security issues, and be convinced of reliability of the service, then why reinvent it just so that you can say you own it?"

Meakin has been piloting the WorkLight WorkBook, a Facebook application which saves the company’s data to their own servers, since the beginning of the year. The pilot has focused initially on a worldwide community of developers who are collaborating and exchanging information.

"Some of them are working in very similar areas, and we are trying to encourage inter-working across the project teams," says Meakin. "We are also targeting senior management groups, another archetypal business group which is spread across various locations."

He is optimistic, yet also pragmatic, about their experiment. The bank wants to improve productivity and communications, but Meakin admits that "if the building of communities doesn’t deliver any tangible business benefits then we will limit our investment."

He adds: "We’ve seen lots of enthusiasm for all sorts of different potential uses, which we’re trying to foster, but we are not sufficiently naive to believe that this will run itself and that all uses will be beneficial. We obviously need to monitor carefully the degree of business use and if we don’t think that it gives real business benefits, we will rein in the extent to which we invest in the platform."

It’s too early to tell whether Standard Chartered’s use of Facebook is a success, or to even start discussing individual use cases, but what’s clear is that the organisation has a sensible attitude towards the tool, has been careful about data security, and is open-minded about how the experiment may turn out.

But when companies do use tools that are usually associated with personal social interactions for business interactions, the lines between personal and professional can become uncomfortably blurred. Often this is because personal use has bled over into the workplace in an ad hoc manner, without consideration of the business use case and without providing users with good-practice guidelines.

A MINDSET, NOT A TOOLSET

It’s key to remember that while there are websites that we call "social networks", social networking is an act, not an application. Kevin Marks is Google’s developer advocate for OpenSocial, a community-led social networking standards project. Marks’ job leads him to work with a very diverse and geographically scattered group of people. Somehow he needs to manage all these relationships, a task he achieves using an array of tools, including blogs, internet relay chat (IRC) and instant messaging, and sites such as Twitter, Dodgeball, Dopplr, Orkut, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

"Often I will have made a connection with someone through a group or an event," Marks explains. "Because I blog and Twitter publicly, a lot of people respond to that and connect with me that way. Twitter is particularly useful at conferences, because it gives you an extended sense of who’s there and what they’re doing."

But for Marks, social networking isn’t about the applications, but the attitude. Many of Google’s tools have built-in sociability.

"In Google Docs," he says, "the social stuff is pretty subtle, you necessarily don’t see it right away. But multiple people can be editing a document at the same time, and it keeps track of who’s written what. And if you use the spreadsheet or presentation tools, you can also chat while you’re editing, so it becomes a tool for both immediate and asynchronous collaboration. It makes a big difference to how I work."

One woman, who preferred to remain anonymous, talked about her experience in a large media company.

"When I started to use Facebook it was because of work pressure," she said. "Everybody in the office was using it, and it became difficult not to be there, because everybody was swapping photos, arranging work nights out, and even swapping shifts on Facebook. I held out for as long as I could, but eventually I signed up.- At that point, she didn’t understand how Facebook worked and didn’t realise that as soon as she put her work email address in, it would sign her up to her company network.

"The minute I did that, I got lots of people requesting me as a friend," she said, "Several members of management, six or seven layers above my head, requested me as a friend. I would never have requested them, but you can’t say no because if you reject them they can tell, and so you end up being stuck with these people.

"One of the worst moments was when my boss messaged me at 11 o’clock on a Friday night and said, ‘Why are you still online? Aren’t you working tomorrow?’ I was sitting at home with a glass of wine in my hand and I thought, ‘That’s too weird’."

This uncomfortable invasion of privacy can become disturbing. She tells of how one senior member of management ‘friended’ her in order to try and dig up personal information on one of her ex-partners. As a matter of course, she is very careful not to post anything revealing, but she is not so confident that her colleagues are as careful with either their own or her privacy.

There is no doubt that social networks are useful tools for helping people in business find each other, communicate, collaborate, and maintain large networks of contacts. The right tools, implemented in the right way, can bring a lot of value to any business, whether large or small, and in any sector. Business is inherently social and, whereas once upon a time business relationships could be maintained in meetings over coffee, and with an annual Christmas card, now we need tools to help us nurture our ever-expanding network.

CREATE OR AGGREGATE?

Having looked at Facebook and its brethren, and decided that there is value in social networking, the obvious first step is to replicate the tool internally, creating an application people can populate with information. But the problem with social networks, just as with corporate phone directories, is that profiles get stale.

On a personal site, it doesn’t really matter if your photo’s a bit old or you’ve forgotten to say that you’ve moved house, but in business you need to provide accurate and current information, although we’re almost always too busy to do it ourselves. Instead, automate as much as possible so that information is gathered on profile pages regardless of whether we remember to update it.

It’s also more useful to define people by their actions, rather than through hurriedly written self-descriptions. Blogs, wikis and social bookmarking applications all produce RSS feeds which can be aggregated, thus drawing a picture of the individual’s interests and areas of expertise. Profile pages can thus act as a starting point for people to discover more about an employee through what they read (via bookmarks) and write (on blogs and wikis).

People who are good at maintaining broad networks also have the advantage of access to their contacts’ networks too, allowing them to draw upon a vast pool of knowledge. Such people can become more efficient, and can make great leaps of progress through drawing on others’ expertise, and are thus more likely to be successful.


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A good primer for "Engaging Social Media: Getting Started Guide to Social Media Marketing" A Techrigy White Paper http://ping.fm/4pIz6
Duncan Watts is known for his social network research and he contends Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point is bunk! http://ping.fm/BrQv1
Call it Ken McArthur's Impact Boot Camp or Impact Bootcamp it is sure to Impact your life if you can join us in Philadelphia in 10 days!

Sunday, August 10, 2008

Call in 5 minutes at http://ping.fm/Qi013 share with friends, get RSS feed and mark as a favorite! Thanks
Updated study of gender and ages of those using social media platforms by Rapleaf. Full Dataset download available http://ping.fm/VmrdA
Listen or join me on BlogTalkRadio at 12:30 EST http://ping.fm/Qi013 The Call-in Number: (718) 766-4782

Saturday, August 9, 2008

School of Social Marketing Show Sunday August 10th at 12:30 EST Call-in:(718) 766-4782 http://ping.fm/Qi013

School of Social Marketing BlogTalkRadio Show #2

We did our first BlogTalkRadio from the porch of the Helen Black Bear Lodge in the northeast Georgia Hills last Sunday and it is available for replay online. We have a second show slated for tomorrow (Sunday August 10th) at 12:30 Eastern. View show info here The Call-in Number: (718) 766-4782.

I would love to have any and all of you take a moment to call in and introduce yourself and the School of Social Marketing to the world.. We are beginning to create a strong organic search presence for the School of Social marketing and social marketing radio. In addition, several of you may find some surprises in your own organic search rankings. ;-)

Please take a moment and let me know if you think that you'll be able to make part of the call tomorrow.

In addition, I'll be interviewed by Ken McArthur about using social media platforms for his Impact Group and then he and I will be employing some to the strategies that we will discuss during his upcoming Impact Boot Camp. The Impact Boot Camp is scheduled for August 22-25, 2008 in Philadelphia. These are the particulars for the event Use the code "IMPACT" to waive the registration fee if you are able to join us at what should be a great networking event that will show you how to IMPACT the lives of others!

Ron aka Dr. Ron the NicheProf

Nicheprof.com
Twitter
Rejaw
NetVibes
Facebook Profile
MySpace Profile
Plaxo Profile
LinkedIn Account
Xanga
Interesting web 2.0 application for the creation of collaborative and searchable timelines, flipbooks and maps. http://www.dipity.com/

Friday, August 8, 2008

Excellent foundation for a free social media library of 20 eBooks from a man who knows social media...Chris Brogan http://ping.fm/LgBJA
If you do podcasts, BlogTalkRadio or streaming video, download this report from Edison Research today http://ping.fm/QD5hP
Good morning all! Working on slides and promos for School of Social Marketing. Preview here + BlogTalkRadio show http://ping.fm/O8Fud

Thursday, August 7, 2008

Great call with @KenMcArthur about his upcoming Impact Boot Camp http://ping.fm/m1kYq If you want to attend drop me a note!
Why check out Rejaw? 1000 character limit NOT 140. Post Videos and Photos. Micro-Blog and Chat. Worth a look! http://ping.fm/tqSOz
Take a moment and claim your spot on the new micro-blog Rejaw. Interesting potential. Clean interface. Follow Me http://ping.fm/tqSOz

Wednesday, August 6, 2008

Diigo.com and others are beginning to carve out their own piece of the multi-billion dollar social media market. http://ping.fm/3gH1W
Quantcast has released July Data. Quantcast is a MUST for any serious marketer. Significant free data available: http://ping.fm/QilfK
Several of you have requested added data about the mature demographics. Enjoy these: http://ping.fm/WwkMX
The full 43 page survey report of those turning 100 years-old here http://ping.fm/cYXbl
You're never too old to network and use social media. New survey out http://ping.fm/NqCZC

Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Most marketers fail to get the "social" part of social marketing. Discover why most marketers fail at it. http://ping.fm/lVxO6
Apprise is a 100% open source and free tool that allows you to share all of your news from your reader. http://www.apprisereader.com/

Monday, August 4, 2008

Social Networking List (Many with DO FOLLOW & Pligg Core 301 Redirects - that also work) http://ping.fm/Q4nue