Welcome to Social Media U

For those of us who missed this boat during our college days, maybe because we majored in some other area, or because people still took notes with pen and paper during our university years (cough, cough), or maybe some of us didn't go the college route, there are some interesting things going on in universities today when it comes to learning the ins and outs of social media.

Today, you will find Communications and Marketing majors heavily involved in learning to use new media to their advantage. The end result of these classes is going to be a wide range of young professionals entering the business world with tricks up their sleeve that some of the the old pros have no idea (or only a vague idea) about.

So, what's on the curriculum? To get a feel for what students are studying in Social Media U, you only need to do a web search because many of the students aren't just learning how to, they're blogging about it too.

Of course, the entirety of social media can't be summed up in one blog post, so these are just a handful of subjects listed below. 

Lesson # 1 Personal Branding

Dan Schawbel, EMC's first social media specialist, returned to Bentley College to do a presentation about personal branding and social media. This is a concept that is a direct result of the internet age we live in today. Among other things, personal branding involves an understanding that you have a public image (whether you want to or not). If you're googleable, you have a brand, so you should learn to control it.

Branding is a result of many things including your blog, your social network profile, your online resume, and  how good you are at reputation management, to name a few.

Advice for students: buy yourname.com to secure your brand, make a video resume, start a Wordpress blog, use Google Reader, participate (comment on blogs and link to them), get on Facebook and LinkedIn, network, and more (see slideshow below):

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Lesson # 2 Know What Web 2.0 Is And How To Use It

Dean Whitney, an executive with global digital marketing agency Digitas, also taught a class at Bentley (a hip school?) on the subject of understanding Web 2.0. One of the interesting things they did in this lesson was to learn about tagging and how other people's opinion can shape our perception of both individuals and brands. In the PowerPoint shown during the class, Whitney also took on the big task of defining Web 2.0:

Lesson # 3 : Learn To Use YouTube To Convey a Message

Michael Wesch, PhD, an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University is best known on the net for that video, The Machine is Us/ing Us, which is a great example of how to use the medium to convey a message that's more than just scripted rhetoric, but that has meaning. (Side note: great interview with Wesch here).

What you may not have seen, though, is the video his students made: A Vision of Students Today, a video which summarizes how students learn today. (I think they've got it!)

Lesson #4: Learn to Blog

What better way to learn to blog than to begin with blogs in the classroom? You can find numerous examples of this on the net, like the What is Fair Use? blog, maintained by Peter Friedman and the students in his Legal Analysis & Writing classes at Case Western Reserve University of Law.

Soon-to-be sophomore and official Yale blogger, Sam Jackson, puts this concept to work on his own site, where he blogs about higher education marketing trends. He points us to a useful resource called The College Blog Network, where college students can blog. Think of it as Facebook for bloggers (well, before Facebook was for everyone.) Speaking of Facebook, the site makes it easy to be private - you must have a .edu email address to blog here. And they mean it, too, saying "At TCBN we respect your privacy. No jumping through hoops to keep your information private. Thanks Facebook." Another resource for finding student blogs is at StudentBloggers.org.

Lesson # 5 Use Social Networks

Be it MySpace or Facebook or whatever network works for your target demographic, companies and individuals interested in maintaining their personal brand need to establish and maintain a presence on social networks - especially if you're looking to connect with the younger crowd. For old-school businesses, this may seem like a mysterious world, but not learning to navigate it will be at their own expense.

In fact, social network use is so ubiquitous these days that students are even using them to apply to colleges via a Facebook app called The College Planner. Talk about College 2.0.

Lesson #6 Master Wikis

Bentley is just all over the web when it comes to social media tools because they're not shy to put their knowledge into action for their own use. Take for example, their WetPaint wiki for marketing students looking for career guidance.

Like Marshall recently mentioned in his post Wikis Are Now Serious Business, Wikis are not just for internal use, but can be used for many things...things like teaching, for example. He pointed to Liz B. Davis's wiki called Integrating 21st Century Tools into Your Teaching, which shows you how to use Del.icio.us, GMail, Ning, Google Docs and more.

Lesson #7 Learn to Twitter

For the Twitter holdouts, take heed: As far away as Singapore, where Daryl Tay attends Singapore Management University, social media classes are being held. Here they learn about social media tools like RSS, Delicious, podcasting, videocasting, blogs, wikis, and yes, even Twitter.

He recently told me that every week they have a mini-presentation on one aspect of social media (past topics included ethics, social networks, and social bookmarking). One of the topics was microblogging, and Twitter was discussed. Since then, the students have formed their own vibrant community on Twitter. (Now if it could only stay up, we would be in business).

Lesson # 8 Learn To Podcast

Panela Seiple, about to graduate from Boston University this month, learned how to make a podcast in her New Media and PR class. Her tools? Audacity and Utterz. Her subject? The Social Media Release.

Conclusion

As mentioned at the beginning of this article, one blog post can't possibly cover all that is social media. Other topics (or "lessons") could include the following: RSS, flickr, Wikipedia, social bookmarking, search engines/blog search engines, virtual worlds, VoIP/Skype, mobile media, interactive gaming, and other tools that can be found on this nice list on the Teaching PR blog.

Extra Credit: OPML for Social Media U

For those of you interested in continuing to follow the subject of "Social Media U," we've compiled an OPML file that contains most of the sites mentioned in this post.

You can download it from here. Alternately, you can just subscribe to a "best of" RSS feed here.

Congratulations! You graduated!

Source:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/social_media_u_take_a_class_in.php

Social media measurement is one of those topics about which everyone has an opinion, but nobody agrees on the solution. The question about how to measure the return on investment (ROI) for social media participation comes up in every workshop I deliver, as definitive, statistic-based metrics seem to be the primary way communicators feel they can secure approval and budget for these programs from their management teams.

If you’re waiting for someone to provide that magic bean, then put away your watering can. It ain’t gonna happen. That’s one of the reasons why I tend to think that social media (by which I mean actual conversations and relationship building exercises, not widgets and Facebook fliers) is more aligned with the goals of a PR program than it is with marketing.

In the absence of any accepted metrics, businesses still need to be able to determine whether or not a social media program is moving the needle, moving product or otherwise making an impact. This largely depends on the company’s social media objectives. Because these dramatically differ based on the organization, it’s impossible to agree upon standards. That doesn’t mean we can’t measure ROI at the company level, though.

With that in mind, here are a few ways to consider measuring social media ROI for your business:

Qualitative

First, determine what you want to measure, whether it’s corporate reputation, conversations or customer relationships. These objectives require a more qualitative measurement approach, so let’s start by asking some questions. For example, if the objective is measure ROI for conversations, we start by benchmarking ourselves with questions like:

- Are we currently part of conversations about our product/industry?

- How are we currently talked about versus our competitors?

Then to measure success, we ask whether we were able to:

- Build better relationships with our key audiences?

- Participate in conversations where we hadn’t previously had a voice?

- Move from a running monologue to a meaningful dialogue with customers?

There are companies that offer services to assist with this kind of measurement, which requires a great deal of human analysis on top of the automated results to appropriately assess the tonality and brand positioning across various social media platforms.

Quantitative

If the goal is to measure traffic, sales or SEO ranking, we can take a more quantitative approach. There are some free tools that can help with this type of measurement, including:

AideRSS allows you to enter a feed URL and returns statistics about its posts, including which are the most popular based on how many times they are shared on a variety of social networking sites (Google, Digg, Del.icio.us).

Google Analytics and Feedburner are essential, free tools to help analyze your company’s blog traffic, subscriber count, keyword optimization and additional trends.

Xinu is a handy website where you can type in a URL and receive a load of useful statistics ranging from search engine optimization (SEO) to social bookmarking and more.

In addition, you might look at how many people join your social network (or become your connection) in a given period of time, how much activity there is in your forum or what the click-through rate is to your product pages from any of these platforms that result in direct sales.

Conclusion

The key takeaway, regardless of how your company chooses to measure engagement, is that you have a success metric in mind before you begin. Without some sort of benchmark, it’s impossible to determine your ROI.

As I said at the beginning, this topic is one that has been tossed around in the blogosphere for a long time and this is an overview. For further reading, I recommend you check out Katie Paine’s blog, where the conversation about social media measurement continues to evolve. And I’m sure there are many companies that would be happy to automate this process for you. Look for their thoughts below in the comments.

[Aaron Uhrmacher is a social media consultant. In addition to his posts on Mashable, he blogs at DISRUPTology.]

Source:

http://mashable.com/2008/07/31/measuring-social-media-roi-for-business/

Written by Richard MacManus

Source:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/brandstreaming.php

Older Article By Michael Brito - still very interesting:

A Strategic Approach to Social Media Marketing Social media marketing is more than just implementing social bookmarks on your site in hopes that your content spreads like a virus. It’s more than seeding your content in sites like Digg; and/or trying to game their voting algorithm.

It’s more than creating profiles and adding bulk loads of friends in all the social networking sites and blasting out bulletins.  It’s more than creating a link bait video and distributing it in Youtube. And, while social media optimization is an important approach to your marketing strategies, there is more to it. Since the majority of marketers plan to increase spending on social media, it’s time to start thinking strategically about social media marketing. I have mentioned in a previous post that social media is community driven. It’s within these very small and targeted niche communities that viral marketing can give birth; and where conversational marketing can begin to take root. However, before you start spending countless dollars on social media marketing, you should read on.

Define Your Target Audience

It would literally take me days to list out all the social networking/social media/web 2.0 sites that exist today; and even if I had the time, there would be dozens more launching tomorrow. The point is that these sites attract very different users. The demographics of Myspace have changed dramatically; and just because they have several million users doesn’t justify you spending time, energy and resources there. To begin the process of defining your target audience, you should first take a quick snapshot of your users/customers you have today; and ask yourself:

• Who is your most profitable user/customer?


• What’s their demographic profile?


• What characteristics do your users/customers have in common with each other? In other words, what is their psychographic profile?

This valuable research will you help you answer many questions (i.e. where they are spending their time? What are their interests, desires, and hobbies? What are they passionate about?What motivates them?) Additionally, defining your current users/customers will help you craft a marketing strategy and give you direction on which social media channel you should pay attention to. I have seen too many brands that have Myspace profiles just because their competitors do; with no clear strategy on what they are really out to achieve. Establish Your Metrics Measuring social media is definitely a challenge. There are no easy metrics to measure the performance of such campaigns.Of course, I there are the standard metrics (clicks, impressions, etc.) as well as some other metrics to think about if you are blogging, podcasting, etc; specifically around social media optimization.

Without a clear understanding of what your goals are from the beginning, you will find yourself questioning whether or not social media is the right channel for your business. If it’s just web traffic that you are after – no problem – but be sure you have analytic software installed; same concept for your conversion metrics. In most analytic packages, you can set up goals and monitor the conversion rates from specific websites. Regardless of what your metrics are; it’s wise to know what you will be measuring before you actually engage.

Be Authentic

In addition to transparency and disclosure, another characteristic of social media is authenticity.When marketers decide to engage with social media users and begin having community driven conversations, they need to talk with real voices. It’s called Conversational Marketing and it’s something all marketers must embrace if they want to succeed. These conversations should be open-ended and the community should be in the driver’s seat.  Forget the marketing fluff and don’t just pretend to be interested in what they are talking about. Listen. Don’t inundate them with offers, banners or marketing speak.Consumers today are savvy enough to see right through it.

It’s Relationship Marketing 101 with a twist; whereby marketers first build long-term relationships with customers and then focus on monetizing those conversations.

Monetization

Speaking on monetizing these conversations, every marketer will approach this step differently.It really depends on the nature of your business (what you are selling). However, once you define your target audience and understand their true needs and motivations; and, after you reach out to them and have “real” conversations with them – then – you can begin your monetization strategy.I would recommend taking it slowly and start monetizing in steps with a clear process in mind. Otherwise, if you put on your direct marketing hats too fast, you may scare your consumers away.

Keep the conversation alive

So you finally defined your audience; built a relationship with them and even made some extra cash.  The last thing you want to do now is abandon them. Your life-long goal should be to increase the value of your target audience; and essentially create brand ambassadors.These ambassadors will be the cornerstone of your brand and will stick with you through thick and thin.You can do this by keeping the conversation fresh and alive; soliciting ongoing feedback about your products; and of course throwing in some awesome rewards. The best example I can give is what Dell is doing with their site, Ideastorm; where they are giving voices to their customers and soliciting their feedback for future product releases. And guess what? Dell is listening and acting on those suggestions.

Face the facts

Guess what? Consumers today demand to be heard, whether or not you are listening.  And, if you try and interrupt these conversations with a direct marketing approach; your product may go viral, but not with the message that you were expecting.

There is a time and place for direct marketing, don’t get me wrong. I am a big believer in it.But, not while you are conversing with them about topics they are passionate about.

Source:

http://www.webpronews.com/expertarticles/2007/10/29/a-strategic-approach-to-social-media-marketing

In the era of the social Web, communications is evolving back to its origins of communicating with people, not at them. It may seem implied, but communications does not, for the most part, embody two-way discussions.

Over the years, communications has evolved into a one-way distribution channel that broadcasts messages at target audiences. In the process, communications stopped being about communication, focusing instead on the marketing aspects of top-down message push and control, what we now commonly refer to as marketing communications aka marcom. Marcom embodies traditional and new marketing branches that include advertising, PR, Web/interactive, event, among many other disciplines (depending on the organization).

With the soaring popularity and adoption of Social Media, companies are realizing that in addition to marketing communications, listening and engagement is quickly becoming pervasive and necessary in order to compete for precious, yet thinned and distributed attention. The days of focusing solely on Web stickiness, eyeballs and clickthroughs are fading. These are the days of immersion, conversations, engagement, relationships, referrals, and action.

So what do we call this important and history making transformation?

Some call it Social Media Marketing, others refer to it as Conversational Marketing, and factions of other thought leaders simply classify it as the socialization of the media and marketing in general.

In the world of marcom, we’re simply placing the communication back in communications. It’s the transformation of monologue to dialog, and it’s breaking down that walls and barriers that separate people from brands.

The problem with Social Media Marketing and Conversational Marketing as classifiers is that both still involve the word “marketing.” It doesn’t imply authenticity and the two-way process of listening, internalizing, and responding. Each is complementary to traditional marketing, but their intent, practice, and metrics are different. And, the socialization of communications is also unique.

Social Media Marketing is the use of social media tools to participate online in distinct people-powered communities. Conversational Marketing is first the understanding that markets are conversations and at the same time, conversations are also markets. The tools, channels, and approaches are different in this case, and actually span across advertising, marketing, SEO/search, widget marketing, word of mouth marketing (WOMM), among others – mostly. In the world of PR, Social Media Marketing, for the most part, concentrates on blogger relations and comment strategies. This is the practice of working with bloggers to retell your story and also sharing feedback and insight within comments that link back to something helpful to the community, while also benefiting the company you’re representing.

Again, the difference across each of these disciplines is the intent, execution, and results of any program.

But what’s transpiring now is so different, so revolutionary, that it deserves its own classification, for now, in order to advance within organizations and impact its soul and change its outlook and role within society.



For the first time in years, we’re seeking to adapt Harold Lasswell’s maxim as a means of describing the field of communication Theory, “who says what to whom in what channel with what effect.”

Factoring peoplenomics into the modified Communication Theory aka Social Theory equation, it now epitomizes, “who hears what, who says what to whom, in what channel, with what intent, and with what effect.”

The definitions and results will radically vary depending on how you mix and match those variables and which marketing or media discipline you represent.

It’s now the art and science of socializing _____ (fill in the blank.)

This is the era of our “Industrial Revolution:"

Towards the end of the 1990s, the Web, and its architects, forged the tools that would spark a renaissance of influence and empowerment. These tools would inspire people to build new interconnected platforms for content that would collectively and ultimately ignite a social revolution and usher a new exchange for information that has all the signs and economic potential of a modern day Industrial Revolution.

The socialization of media and information is our Industrial Revolution. For the first time in history, media technology and the tools and channels for broadcasting information has been disrupted and open for true global collaboration, while also effectively changing how people interact with each other.

The Social Revolution is the catalyst for the democratization of content and exchange of information, but we're still experimenting and wrestling with the true impact of this change and how exactly these new models, on every side of the equation, will ultimately settle.

So, if we’re in the throws of a Social Revolution, does the act of socializing outbound communications require a new division within an organization?

Even though, Social Media is a stage in the overall evolution of marketing and media, and it will give way to something new and different.

In the meantime, what do we name this new division or discipline and is it simply an extension of the existing marketing department that already encompasses advertising, PR, marketing, Web, and new media? A rapidly growing list of organizations are hiring experts to lead the integration, with some earning titles of Social Media Officer and complementing existing Chief Marketing Officers.

Certainly there’s no shortage of genuine and purported Social Media Experts and Social Media Gurus. But what does that mean to be an expert, and more importantly, who’s truly qualified to socialize real world marketing departments with real world business demands, dependencies, infrastructure, opportunities and responsibilities?

The answer is, experience and the understanding of business and service dynamics and how the socialization of communications, development, and support impacts and benefits people and their peers. Period.

And, not the level of experience that one earns from talking about Social Media or simply participating in the newest networks.



Conversations don't scale. Talk is cheap and action speaks louder than words.

It takes so much more than the ability listen and engage. It definitely encompasses much more than the ability to create profiles on every popular social platform and the process of befriending everyone across the networks. It’s the ability to identify meaningful conversations, comprehend them, determine those valuable enough to participate, and then feed that collective insight back into the organization (marketing, service, produce development, etc.) for positive change. It also requires the ability to uncover opportunities and crises to trendcast into proactive initiatives that prevent reactionary and defensive responses.

Proactive = relevancy.
Reactive = damage control.

As good friend Hugh MacLeod observed four years ago in The HughTrain, "There's only one thing harder than starting a new business: Re-inventing an old one."



Web and social tech expert Louis Gray calls Social Media Experts the “new” Webmasters. Social tools developer Greg Narain compares the current state of Social Media to the “e” in the old “e-conomy.” Early on, I predicted that we would eventually see Social Media Officers as the new Chief Marketing Officers.

They’re correct. And, what they share is the fact that these classifiers emerged to document important shifts, migrations, and growth stages of new mediums as well as the roles that further solidified them as catalysts for maturation.

Obviously, we’re in need for a new, important stepping stone in order to escalate to the next phase in influencer and customer interaction.

Brian Morissey wrote in a recent article for Adweek, that brands need a new kind of leader, claiming, “As conversations with customer matter more, brands seek social-media evangelists.”

So, which division within an organization is ready to fund this experimentation? Is it one division or is it an amalgamation of several departments?

So far, experience shows that it’s different depending on the company, and the champions within each.

Peter Kim, formerly an analyst for Forrester research, recently joined a startup to help large companies engage in social media. The company was funded with $50 million from Austin Ventures was created by Razorfish founder Jeff Dachis.

Deborah Schultz, a communications professional, was tasked with creating a social infrastructure for consumer powerhouse Proctor & Gamble.

Scott Monty, a marketing expert, was recently hired to socialize the Ford brand.

Dan Schawbel, a personal branding evangelist, is the first Social Media Specialist at EMC.

Jackie Peters, an interactive and social Web marketing authority is helping Sun socialize its Startup Essentials program

Shel Holtz, a PR pro, is assisting Coca Cola and other consumer brands into Social worlds.

Connie Bensen, a community relations expert, is the Community Manager for Network Solutions.

Chris Heuer, a Web and New Media visionary, is currently guiding Intel Corporation on best practices and new opportunities for Social strategies. The company also tapped several social activists, including yours truly, to advise the company on Social Media.

Marshall Kirkpatrick, a thought leading blogger in the Web 2.0 landscape, actively publishes stories related to how companies can or can not benefit from community managers, those charged with listening to the conversations fueling relevant social networks and coordinating necessary responses and change – outbound and internally.

Personally, I've received calls from major beverage, auto, medical, green, aerospace, and entertainment brands, asking advice and seeking referrals for an internal Social champion and expert – all with the last few weeks.

The list goes on and on. These stories are only the representative few of a bigger shift within existing marketing departments as they attempt to socialize their brands.

These are the times when the social revolution is redefining how we not only communicate with our constituents, but how we as a collective organization of people, process the information, intelligence and insight garnered from external conversations to more effectively and genuinely participate.

But, Social Media isn’t limited to marketing or outbound activity. Social Media benefits and develops every department within an organization. And it’s for this reason, that its future and its effectiveness depends on its champions, participants, analysts, and opportunists.
The intelligence that is collected during the process of listening and observation affects everything. We can improve our products and services based on the real world input and feedback from a true, vested public focus group. We can improve and tailor our story specifically to the assemblies of people we're hoping to reach in a way that's convincing and accurate. We can enhance our inbound customer service practices to transform cost centers into customer investments. In the process, we’re humanizing our brands and transforming customers into evangelists, people into storytellers, and brands into resource centers.

We’re connecting brands, and the people representing them to new groups of important people, in the places where they discover and share new content and in turn, interact with each other.

This is the latest incarnation of digital communications and for the moment, it takes us back to the foundation of relationships that started everything – this time however, it’s not only the tools that have changed, it’s the realization that people matter to everything we do.

It’s the socilization of:

Communications
Advertising
PR
Customer Service
Product Development
Interactive
Sales

Whatever discipline you represent, you are the champion for the socialization of that branch as it relates to the greater good of the company, brand, and stakeholders. Only you can specifically understand how Social strategies affect and complement the day-to-day campaigns that are already working well for your organization.

Ultimately, social initiatives will be implemented and deployed independently by each department, working with a social coordinator such as a Community Manager or Social Media Mangaer in conjunction with a CMO, VP of marketing or even a Chief Social Officer. Everything depends on the existing infratructure and social-savvy of the organization. However, it won’t always be simply rooted in Social strategies. As the communications landscape evolves, business will always be influenced by new and interactive media. The landscape of communicatins and the tools used to connect people and stories will continue to evolve. Remember, this is about the sociology of Social Media. Technology changes, people don’t.

Just wait until you see how semantic platforms will change the dynamics of information discovery, creation, and connectivity.

In the meantime, the future of your business hinges on the ability for champions to arise, implement, and justify the socialization of your company’s ability to listen, empathize, respond, advise, and evolve based on the online discussions that are currently taking place with or without you.

Source:

http://www.briansolis.com/2008/07/new-communication-theory-and-new-roles.html

This is a guest post written by Chris Brogan, who blogs about social media for business at chrisbrogan.com.

There are only so many hours in a day, and you’ve got to determine which social media tools drive business, which ones build community, and where you can learn the most in the process. Maybe you’ve built a blog or a home page or some other starting point for your online presence. How do you manage the rest of your online presence, and how do you keep track of everything? I have some ideas for you. Let’s start by building the following:

Listening Post

Get a Google account and get Google Reader. Go to Technorati and Google Blogsearch. Find the search bar and put in:

-Your name in quotes.
-Your company name (if that matters).
-Your competition’s name.
-keywords to your industry.

Every time you do a search, look for the orange RSS subscription button on Technorati, and click it. Look for the RSS subscription link to the left on Google Blogsearch. Click it. Add all of these to your Google Reader (upper left area of the left sidebar).

You’ve just built a rudimentary listening post.

A Social Hub or Two

Go to FriendFeed. Build an account and add your blog, your Flickr photos, your Upcoming.org, and your whatever-you’re-doing-on-the-Web into it. This is another way to share out what you’re doing, but also another place where conversations are happening that you might not see if you’re not there with another kind of listening post.

You might also check out Lijit, a service that offers a different spin on a similar thing.

Some Social Network Outposts

At this point, my top 3 choices for social networks are:

-LinkedIn - for professional networking.
-Facebook - for social circles.
-Twitter - for everyday conversation and networking.

I belong to and use several other networks for different things, including Utterz (I’m on their advisory board), Flickr, several Ning sites, and a few other niche things. The three listed above are the ones I think have the most resonance. You might substitute MySpace for Facebook. You might like Jaiku more than Twitter. The details don’t matter. I just listed what I feel are the best choices at present.

On those sites, amongst other things, be sure to point links back to your primary site or your blog. Thread the needle for people.

Note: several of these sites also have RSS subscriptions for comments and other updates. You can add those to your Google Reader, too, to keep track of it all.

What to Do With It All

This is partially difficult to answer, as it’s up to you what your goals are for using social media. But some of the things you can do once you have this all in place are:

-Learn who’s talking about you (or your company, or the other keywords you put into your reader), and engage them in conversation on their site.

-Make relationships with others before you need them on social networks.

-Find other professionals in your field, or in unrelated fields on social networks.

-Connect with old friends and business colleagues.

-Discover new people through reading and learning, and follow the media they make on the various networks, and/or in Friendfeed.

-Learn more about your competitors through the media they make, and discover where you can build more value.

Obviously, there are dozens more possibilities. If nothing, I hope to have provided a potential starter kit for managing some of the elements of online presence around your primary blog or website. You might have some different experiences along the way, and some parts might not work, so feel free to adjust. Your mileage may vary.

Would you add anything else to this premise?

Source:

http://mashable.com/2008/07/18/building-your-online-brand/

Micromedia tools such as Twitter, Plurk, and Pownce have introduced the concept of group conversations. Similar to instant messaging, Twitter allows you to send quick, short messages to hundreds of friends at once. Anyone that signs on to “follow” your Twitter profile will receive an alert—via instant message, mobile text message, or email—each time you send a new message.

How can you use services such as Twitter to build your reputation? The service is still relatively confined to early adopters, but is already showing great promise as a tool for building your brand.

Assuming that you’ve already matched your Twitter username to your personal or company brand, here are some suggestions for using Twitter to build your online reputation:

1.Start conversations with notable peers.

Don’t be the guy that jumps on Twitter, “follows” 10,000 people, then tweets “@” them every two minutes. That’s not the type of reputation you want to build for yourself.

Do be the guy that follows those that have influence and audience in your industry. You’ll learn a lot just from listening to their often unguarded comments, but if you have something valuable to add to their conversation, send them an @andybeal or @chrisbrogan, or @garyvee. If you can engage them in a conversation, they might just @ you back–alerting their thousands of followers that you’re a person worthy of their time, in the process.

2.Share valuable industry news.

If you’re the kind of person that’s always discovering breaking stories, share those with your Twitter network. Maybe you’ll “tweet” something not yet seen by a popular blogger. They may not always give you credit in their blog posts, but you can bet you’ll quickly get on their radar.

I’ve personally credited and linked to Twitter followers that gave me a “heads-up” on a breaking story and seen others credit me for sharing a story with them. How’s that for reputation building? You’ve just become the guy that keeps the top bloggers “in the know.”

3.Build your blog audience.

We all know how hard it is to build a blog’s audience. How often do you check your Feedburner stats to see if you’ve inched up or down that day? Conversely, building your following on Twitter can take much less time, and work–I’m adding up to three times as many Twitter followers each day, than blog subscribers.

OK, but how do you get your Twitter followers to start reading your blog? Er, you ask them? Well, actually, you cherry pick your best blog posts and share them with your Twitter followers–many of whom likely don’t already read or subscribe to your blog.

Tools such as Twitterfeed can automate the process for you, but be careful not to overload your Twitter followers with blog post updates–you want to build a positive reputation, remember?

4. Stay connected at conferences and trade shows.

Twitter really shines, when it’s used by conference attendees. “OMG Google’s Larry Page just farted on stage,” while fictitious, would be great fodder for the Twitterati. You may attend a conference as a complete noob, but Twitter can help you leave as a “someone.”

The next time you attend an event, look for the official Twitter account. @BlogWorld is one example of a conference that makes heavy use of Twitter. Follow the Twitter updates at your next conference and you’ll learn the location of the secret parties, or where Guy Kawasaki plans to have dinner that night. For anyone uncomfortable with networking, Twitter is a great tool to connect with other conference attendees and build your reputation without having to actually shake hands.

5. Monitor your Twitter reputation.

Monitoring Twitter for mention of your personal, or corporate, brand can save you a lot of future reputation headaches. Conversations about your brand can happen on Twitter, hours before someone decides to migrate the conversation to something more widespread, such as a blog.

Here’s a real life example. I recently had a bad experience with Office Depot. On the evening of July 14th, I posted this on Twitter:

The next day, my “Office Depot Joins the Reputation Deadpool” post went live on Marketing Pilgrim. If Office Depot were actively monitoring Twitter, it could have saved itself a huge reputation headache by resolving the situation, before I posted to my blog.

Don’t panic, you don’t have to monitor Twitter manually 24/7. You can use search.twitter.com (formerly Summize.com), TweetBeep, or Trackur to automatically alert you of any Twitter discussion involving your brand.

There are many more ways that you can use Twitter to grow your brand and manage your reputation, but it wouldn’t be fun if we’d didn’t keep the conversation going. Leave your tips in the comments or tweet me @andybeal.

Source:

http://mashable.com/2008/07/17/twitter-branding/

Here is the complete List:

http://vandelaydesign.com/blog/social-media/list-social-networks/

Thanks!

Great!

This post was inspired by an item in my referral log: “Google Search: how media affect our identity”. It started me thinking about how we behave when using social media and online in general. Do we just be ourselves or do we play a role?

Shakespeare famously wrote

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts

I can’t help wondering if our normal behaviour is influenced by the online communities we join. Do we participate for ourselves or for others? Do we share things we like or things we think our followers will appreciate?

As has been discussed before: do we have an obligation to our followers - the, so-called, implied “social contract” and is the correct way for us to act?

It is readily apparent that some act in a certain way in order to try to fit in to a given group and, despite the openess of the web and social media, clique forming is rife and probably exaserbated by the ways in which we connect.

Extremes

Chris commented that “small focused groups can readily turn into extreme pots of shared interest, and manifest ideological amplification” - a bold statement but a true one. We have the option of who we follow but, on many social networking services, we also have the option to block others which can cause divides between groups if used inappropriately; if you don’t fit in then you can’t be part of the conversation.

We also have the ability to hide behind the technology and deviate from our normal behaviour and intent so we have a responsibility to police our own actions or the internet will just become the playground of cowards.

I moved my focus from technology to social media as I see the potential it has to improve communication and flow of information, to connect people and to break down barriers but when others are reinforcing those barriers you have to question why.

The intersection for most between our online and offline lives is small so our behaviours will differ but, even taking this in to account, what part are you playing?

Source:

http://colinwalker.me.uk/2008/07/11/how-social-media-affects-our-identity/