You know, we’ve loved the web and watching the online community grow for over 12 years. We’ve been active in many roles over the years and it’s never been as exciting as it is right now. Social Media may seem like another buzzword to some, but for us it’s been a way of life for a long time, and it’s finally come of age. Products are exploding on the market so fast it’s a full time job just to keep up with it.

You’re probably reading this because you either are part of that community and just checking in, or you’re looking for places to learn about social media and how to integrate it into your marketing plan.
For that second group, here’s a little bit about what we do. Perhaps we can help you?

Social Media Strategy Development- Develop a strategy for getting your message out with the greatest potential for social media engagement. We do this by looking at your existing content, branding and marketing goals and develop a plan that is a part of your overall marketing and communications strategy.

Community Outreach- Reach out to the Social media community to build awareness of your message through communities, bloggers and create relationships with the influencers in related social networks.

Content optimization – Optimize existing web-pages and content-including video, press releases, inter-actives and web content- to maximize re-distribution and discussion.

Campaign Management- Managing your on-line campaign from social media outreach to search engine optimization and marketing and AdWord campaigns.

Monitoring and Reporting- managing these campaigns takes diligent monitoring to maintain the quality of information and effectiveness of ad campaigns. We use state of the art monitoring systems to manage your campaign and “listen” to how the message is being received.

What are the advantages for you?

Increased Revenue- The more eyeballs that see your message and the more often they see it, the more opportunity there is for them to hear you and get engaged.

People are listening- Focused interest and increased user engagement returns in user loyalty and higher traffic as well as increased revenue.

Amp up the brand- With the cacophony of ads and media on-line, your message needs to be delivered clearly, in multiple venues and often to get your brand to stick in user’s heads. Entering into the conversation can help users develop a knowledge of you and your business that will get your brand heard.

Quality traffic- There are lots of ways to increase traffic, but what you need is quality traffic. If you sell buzz saws and you get a lot of traffic for people looking for Buzz Lightyear, what value is that? We drive traffic based on who you are.

Competitive data- Most likely you are not alone in your message. We can show you how you rate against your competition, and help you keep track of their social media presence too. Find out what they are talking about and market changes at the speed of the web.

Heard enough? Call us. We can build a strategy for how you want to engage–within your budget. 415.990.3991

Everywhere I go people are asking me if I can build a Social Media Release Template for them.
Social Media News Releases are all the rage in the PR world right now. Just sending out a PDF with the basic information on it, or actually FAXING press releases to your media contacts is just not going to cut it anymore. It’s time to adjust to the market. Journalists have less and less time to get to press and they want all the information they need in one place. Now. They don’t want to have to email back and forth for days for pictures or to ask if there is any video.

Where did the idea come from?
The concept was inspired by Tom Foremski of Silicon Valley Watcher. Todd Defren and Shift Communications picked up the idea, and who better than a PR house to run with the idea and use their own tool to create a whirlwind of interest?

The company quickly released a template (download it here) and then a very Web 2.0 online tool to build your own Social Media release (PRX).

What makes a social media release effective?
In short, a well developed Social Media News Release will make it easier for a journalist to put together the information they need quickly, so they are more likely to run with the story. It will also provide a consumer with all the info they need in a medium they are getting more and more used to.

Social Media News releases are designed to take advantage of a number of social media distribution tools like Technorati, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon and Digg and make your release search engine friendly to boot. You can add links to your favorite bookmarking or rating sites and boost the visibility of your company to a much broader audience than traditional releases. Some sites offer rss feeds to their releases, so journalists can subscribe and instantly get the new releases as soon as you post them.

A good media release doesn’t stop at just the release itself, it reaches out and stimulates discussion, offering differnet viewpoints through varying media. You have an opportunity to take advantage of all of your social media outlets. For example, you may have images on Flickr, Videos on YouTube or a Facebook or Twitter account. Take the time to link to and from these elements with the press release. These cross links increase the probability that someone will discover one or all of the parts of the release, and hear your message. They may also start to talk about it using thise same social media tools and help start a viral marketing program you could dream of.

OK, I want one. Now what?
It’s an idea whose time has come to be sure, but for some companies building a Social Media News Release seems like a huge effort. If you don’t have the in-house talent to build a custom layout, here are links to a couple of options to get you started.

Get a free account at PRX Builder. Click a button, fill in in the blanks and voila, a Social Media Press Release.
This page has links to the API so you can run it on your website and a WordPress Plugin that allows users to build the PRX right in WordPress.

Conversation Marketing Offers an XHTML version as well, available in a zip file so you can just download it and click away.

Can we build it? YES, we can.
If you don’t want your releases to look like everybody else’s, we can easily design one specific to your needs. It’s not rocket science, but a simple layout that needs to be coded. You want a different look and feel or layout by department? You want it easy to update? Whether you are looking for an HTML page you can modify, a WordPress page or a MS Word doc you can turn into a PDF, we can do it for you.

So what are you waiting for? Get rid of your old press release and start sending a Social Media Press Release. Time to get to work.

I can’t tell you how many titles I had for this post. “Social media, do you really want to?”, Social media, participate or go home”, and “Social media – it’s about the interaction stupid”. Basically it all comes down to one thing; if you are going to get involved in social media marketing do it because you’re interested. Do it for the love of community interaction and interacting with current and future customers. But don’t do it with the sole motivation of increasing traffic or collecting “friends”.

I answered a question a few days ago on a popular business networking site and got a response from the poster that really triggered me. Many of the posts he’d gotten were flippant and self centered. Not many took the time to even fully read the question, much less think about it. It was clear they were posting to increase their number of answers rather than to help. He didn’t feel he’d gotten much value out of his interaction on the site.

This kind of behavior is very common, and it devalues the whole idea of social media. It’s supposed to be a community folks, it’s supposed to be about helping out some people and learning from others. There’s not a day goes by that I don’t learn a dozen things from my social media contacts. Sometimes it leads to a job, but often it’s not a job I landed at first contact, but after having helped someone find a solution and then developing a relationship.

A colleague recently told me a story about a meeting where she was asked to set up a personality on LinkedIn complete with seeded questions and answers, connections that topped the 500 mark, and recommendations from “customers and colleagues”. They didn’t have time to engage their own customers. She refused the rather lucrative offer, but probably they found somebody to build them their persona.

I fully understand the idea that the more leads or connections you have the more likely one of them will develop into an opportunity. It’s just not the way I want to do business.

The same holds true on social media sites like myspace, Facebook and Twitter. If you’re going to take the time to be a presence there, participate! Add value to the community and the community will remember you as an asset. Post an overwhelming number of “me too!” comments, or send daily invitations to fight your vampire and people are going to tire of it.

If you want to participate in social media, that’s wonderful. Spend the time to learn what tools are right for the way you do business,(or hire me to help you figure it out). Decide how much time you have to spend, and what you really want to get out of it. Then set up a blog, dive into some of the existing networks and participate.

If you don’t have the time to participate, give back to the community and get involved, do us all a favor and just don’t.

Twitter has officially taken over the universe. In my previous post I talked about why, and how it can be useful to you and your business.
As with everything web, tools are popping up all over to help you make Twitter more productive and interesting.

Twitter stats
Tells you what your stats are. How much you post and relative to whom. You might be surprised what words you use the most and who’s the most active in your circle.

Tweet Clouds
Want to know what you favorite Tweeter is talking about the most? Tweet Cloud pulls all the words out of a user’s archive and organizes them in a tag cloud. Try yours and see if your messaging is as on target as you think it is.

Twitterment
Search Twitter by keyword, not just posts, but bios too, so you can find th people who are talking about your subject or work in that space.

Twitterverse
Quickly scan tag clouds of the most recent discussions

TweetLater
Allows you to set ups your tweets to be sent when you want them to. Planning a product launch but might be on a plane at the crucial moment? Problem solved.

Twittervision
Get a map view of your twitterlicious world

Email Twitter
Send your tweets by email and skip the SMS charges.

TwitDir
A nice mashup that shows you the top 100 followed, posters, favorites etc, or type in a name or location and find people who are tweeting.

Hashtags
When an event is being tweeted by a group, it’s a great idea to pull all the archives together so that participants and others can view the tweets and gain as much value as possible. When Mzinga and Prospero merged their companies they used Twitter for the Q and A sessions on the merger. The South by Southwest conference (SWSX) was widely covered by Twitterati.
Hashtags is an opt-in service. You must follow @hashtags for the service to index your tweets.

Group Tweet
Allows you to send private messages to a group of friends, rather than just one.
Now you can spam all of your friends at once! No, really. It’s useful if you have a work group or team using Twitter to communicate and you don’t necessarily want the whole world to read the post. Maybe a replacement for other IM clients?

Twitter Clients – 3 of our favs.

Twhirl
Twhirl lets you keep a stream of your timeline in a pop-up window and tweet to your heart’s content. One of it’s best feature IMHO is that it allows you to reply, direct message or re-tweet someone’s post with one click.

Twitteriffic
A Mac client very much like Twhirl, but less prone to crashing.

Twitteroo
A windows client for twittering the day away.

Twitter Firefox Add-ons

Twitbin
A Firefox Add-on that allows you to post and see posts in your browser window.

Power Twitter
Photo and Video sharing with embedded youtube or flickr
tinyurls are unwound so you know where they link to before you click the
Additional user information is mapped to twitter users flickr accounts, blog posts, del.icio.us links etc

Twitter Bar
Let’s you post to Twitter right from your address bar

TwittyTunes
Post your favorite tunes to Twitter, or send links to favorite videos, websites

WordPress and blog tools for Twitter

Twitterfeed
Will scan your blog at specified times and post the blog to Twittering

Twitter tools
A sweet WordPress plug-in. Archive or digest your tweets on your blog, post to twitter from your sidebar

Twit this
Make it easy for people to tweet your posts

Twitter Sidebar Widget
Update your blog with your Twitter brilliance in an easily customizable format.

When I tell people I use Twitter, I get one of three responses. “What’s that?” “What a time drain…”, or “I just love Twitter”

For the first one, I know they probably aren’t aware of Social Media or what it can do for their business.

The second have a vague awareness of it, and may even have a Twitter account, but they haven’t yet made it work for them.

The third group are either young and use Twitter as an extended SMS or chat feature, or they are business people who are progressive enough to see it’s value.

I’m somewhere in between.
The first time I signed up I posted a couple of times and gave it up as a time suck. Posting every time I get up to let the dog out seems vain and frivolous, and it takes valuable time that could be used to get things done. As it was, I was spending at least 2 hours a day catching up on the rss feeds of the various blogs that serve my industry.

Then I started noticing that the people who are blogging the most about Social Media have Twitter accounts, and they often micro-blog about their posts or other news on Twitter, (Doh!) I started following them on Twitter, where I could see the micro-blogs of my favorites all in one place, complete with links to news of the day, and if I want to comment on it I can enter the conversations going on in a much more immediate way than by posting a comment on a blog or web page.

For a business like mine, Twitter works because I can keep up on what’s going on in several areas of interest and participate in those discussions in a relatively short amount of time. I can learn about new standards and practices almost as they are developed.

Come on, how can it possibly be useful?
Twitter can be useful in a number of ways that aren’t readily visible at first glance.

I posted a frustrated tweet with a new browser that I was testing, and didn’t recommend it. Within 15 minutes someone from the browser’s social media team had direct messaged me and asked how they could improve their product. I was floored. Turns out that you can use Twitter’s powerful tracking feature to get a direct message delivered by SMS to your phone or chat client whenever somebody tweets about the keywords you request. Companies like HR Block uses tracking to respond to people who tweet about them. Imagine the power this adds to your customer service team. You can address issues and put out potential fires before they even flare up. Or can use it to track applications that you use to keep on top of the latest news.

For example, I can set a track for “WordPress” and see every Tweet related to WordPress.
Just sms one of the following commands to your Twitter account:

• track – get a list of subjects that you are currently tracking
• track off – turn all tracking off for your account
• track subject - starts to track subject
• untrack subject – turns tracking off on subject
• whois username – find out more about the person sending the message

Twitter up your events
It’s become quite common for companies to ask people to twitter their events. You can get a blow-by-blow account from people who are right there and see multiple perspectives at once. You can ask questions about the event or the speaker when the tweeter is still there, and interact, even though you’re not there.

I regularly Twitter my training schedule for the Avon Walk this summer, and have seen several donations to the cause from people I don’t know and would otherwise not have reached. I also got a job designing a social media newsroom from a response to a question posted on Twitter.

Even more impressive is the Frozen Pea fund, started for Susan Reynolds when she discovered she had breast cancer. Not only is she helping others through her regular posts about her life with cancer, but the community has rallied to help pay medical bills.

San Francisco war protesters used Twitter to organize protest events and avoid arrest.

Connect connect, connect
Twitter allows you access to people who are at the leading edge of their field. Don’t abuse the privilege and harass them, but take advantage of the opportunity to let them know you respect their opinions, and add yours when it is appropriate. Add your favorites to other networks like Xing, Linkedin and Facebook. If they aren’t accepting new invitations, fine, be respectful of that and just remain part of the conversation.
Don’t just listen to your own circle. Check out who the people you are following follow and see if you want to add them to your list. Periodically check the public timeline to see who’s talking that you might want to follow.

Don’t follow everybody
As un-social as that sounds, trust me, it’s good advice. There are people who try to follow just about everybody to get the most followers they can. Just because they are following you doesn’t mean you have to follow back. If you don’t know them, peruse their archives and see if there is a shared interest. See if they frequently post reams of drivel and then decide if you want to see their posts in your timeline.

Market yourself
Don’t think anybody is going to stay following you if all you ever talk about is yourself and how wonderful you are. You have to reach out more than that and participate in the conversation. Re-tweet posts you think others may not have seen yet. Send links to information you’ve found of value or have a question about that someone else in your circle might find useful. Help people out by answering their questions for them or directing them to someone who can.

Too much tweeting
If you don’t have anything useful to say, don’t say anything. Blabbering on about your ingrown toenail isn’t going to make you friends. Neither is endless griping about your job, your boss or the guy in the next cube. Don’t forget, Twitter is archiving it all for posterity. Unless you delete your account and start over, your words live on a lot longer than you may wish them to. If you get un-followed a lot, check to see if you are staying on topic or just sitting in a corner griping to yourself.

Stay tuned for part two, Twitter tools, where I’ll give you a list of tools that can help increase your Twitter productivity.

If you just scanned the recent New York Times article suggesting that writers are blogging themselves to death, you may have wondered how this kind of thing can happen. The Times associates blogging with sweat shops and relates the two recent deaths of prominent bloggers to the 24/7 nature of our industry. “Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.”

Michael Arrington from the popular technology blog Tech Crunch is quoted as saying “There’s no time ever — including whenyou’re sleeping — when you’re not worried about missing a story,”.

How has journalism changed from the old “Stop the presses” rush to get a story posted before the print run? Remember His Girl Friday?

OK, so a lot has changed. There is more money in it if you’re successful, and the presses run 24/7. But let’s not blame writers passion for the death of two bloggers.

Jason Calcanis, founder of Mahalo, knew the bloggers in question, and has a different take on what killed them. Entrepreneurship. Any one of us who survived the dot com boom can recognize the signs. We’ve all driven ourselves into the ground at one point or another. Spent days living on Jolt and red Twizzlers delivered by Webvan because nobody wanted to leave the office for food.

Many of us look back on those days and remember the post-traumatic stress disorder when the crash came. Some of us took it as at lesson and learned to find balance in our lives and our work and not go there again.

But others who either didn’t step back from it and see it for the madness it was, or who believe they can “do it better this time” are still out there, slamming down jolt and passing out over their keyboards to meet their deadlines. I still find myself snowed under site launches and marketing campaigns and unable to see the top of the pile on occasion, and it’s only my faithful partner dragging me off to the beach for some downtime who saves me.

Blogging can develop into an obsession whether it’s your revenue stream or not. Gaping Void’s Hugh MacLeod puts it brilliantly in his cartoon about the obsession of micro-blogging, and why he deleted his Twitter account.

So what’s the answer?
Nobody knows. People will always be driven to stay on top of the heap. It’s not like you can just step back for a minute and
take a break. Or is it?

We’ve been working on some custom WordPress templates lately, and several will be appearing for download here soon. Who knows, someday we may actually find time to update our own WordPress blog with some cool mods! In the meantime, here’s the newest WordPress template, called “Clean Machine”, as modified for Talk to CJ. You can also check out the custom templates we built for BigFix. Please let us know what you think and what you’d like to see. As we develop these templates it’s a great time to hear new ideas for WordPress designs!

We stay on top of the latest browsers to make sure all our sites look consistent in them and Flock is no exception. It’s based on the Mozilla platform , and we pretty much got what we expected.
But Flock has a different viewpoint on the Web. It’s more than a browser, it’s a social network browser!

With Flock you can keep track of all your social networks in one place.
Once you’ve logged in to your various networks like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flicker you can click the option at the top of the page to remember your account there. From that point on Flock will track what’s going on in that network. It can show you what your friends are up to and give a nice summary of all of them in one place. You can also add your favorite RSS feeds and easily scan the headings all on one page.

Pluses

• You have one browser for all your social media links, your rss feeds etc.
• Bookmarking can sync with your del.ico.us account.
• Everything is automatically updated, and it’s in an well designed interface.
• You can upload files to flicker or YouTube easily and all in one interface.
• The built in blog editor allows you to post to your blog from wherever you are, rather than having to login.
• Your favorite Firefox extensions will mostly work with Flock. After all it’s the same base platform, but there are some nifty new ones to explore that are specific to social networks.
• The inline feed viewer allows you to

Not so Pluses

• Flock weighs in at over 56 Mb so you’d best have some room on your drive.
• You can’t run Flock and Firefox at the same time. You must quit Firefox to import your favorites from Firefox.
• There’s a bit of work to do to add all your social media networks and configure the browser.
• while it’s true you can post to your blog, Flock won’t let you pick the category it’s posted in and it saves drafts locally and not online, so if you save a draft you have to post it finally from Flock or re-write it.
• There’s also a learning curve to use the browser itself, though thee are tutorials available.

Privacy issues
Somewhat like Facebook’s much maligned Beacon, Flock keeps track of what your friends are up to all day. And what you’re up to all day. Extensions like Me.dium shows you and your friends what each other are up to, what sites you’re surfing and even discuss the sites while you’re there.
There are lots of other nifty features like this, so if you are privacy conscious then choose your add-ons wisely.

Gonna to use it?

Yes and no.
I’ll use it for testing until I’m sure that Firefox and Flock render our designs the same way, or we see how to adjust.
I won’t use it while I’m working or researching. Partly because it doesn’t play nice with Firefox open at the same time. (Because I’m constantly testing I often have 2-3 browsers open at the same time.)

I’ll use it for browsing my rss feeds, social networks and surfing for fun.

Basically it will be where I keep my links for fun, talk to my friends and play, but not where I live.

Here we go folks, another year behind us and 2008 is waiting for instructions. How will you be promoting your business online this year? Believe me the days of “put up a website an they will come” are long gone, and so are the days of “If I throw a bunch of $$ at SEO they will come.”

If you really want people to find you and want your services or products you have to get them to want to know more about it. And about YOU. Whether we like it or not our names, faces and personalities are soon to be plastered all over the web, and if you want to get ahead you’ll need to find ways to increase your visibility through social networks.

Maybe you’re not really the MySpace type. You’ve got a profile on Linkedin, maybe Facebook and you’re using Plaxo for your contact database. That’s a start, but if you want to be seen you have to DO SOMETHING with these accounts. You have to create a presence, with a consistent message that establishes you as an authority, then move that message through as many channels as possible to broaden your reach.

So, enough lectures, what are the options?
Well, let’s say you have a blog. Good, that’s a start. How often do you post? Are the post’s relevant, the message consistent? (I’m probably not the best role model here) If yes, bully for you. Now spread the word.

Twitter
Yes it seems silly and egocentric at first, but if you let people know what you’re thinking about, rather than “brushing my teeth”, and use it to start discussion, it can circle back to your blog, your website, or your other social networks and before you know it a viable discussion is blooming.

Google Reader
The new sharing feature can be very useful. Promote your latest blog post, your new Stumble or del.icio.us bookmarks, or links to pertinent material on other sites. It’s not all about you after all. It’s about your knowledge of the industry.

Facebook
Yes Facebook. Use your profile here the same way you do at other business related sites, but with a personal twist. Not so personal that you can’t go to client meetings anymore, but show your leisure side. Join the local groups related to your business, your neighborhood, you personal interests or causes. Use the Facebook RSS feeds to promote your twitter and blog feeds.

Linkedin
Of course you have a business profile here and you’ve carefully cultivated a list of contacts. So, now what? Answer questions. Ask questions. Feeding the community adds to your knowledge base as well as building your reputation as a knowledgeable person in your field.

Blogs
Not your blog. Other people’s blogs. Post comments, offer opinions and links to resources. Share, share share. Add to your blogroll and request a link to yours.

de.licio.us, Technorati, Stumble and Digg
People want to find organized links that quickly get them to the information they want to find. Find a way to be that resource. Keep your own personal version if necessary, and keep a business oriented one with links to relevant data as soon as you find it. Comment or review your finds so that others gain insight into the industry.

What am I missing? Do you know of other resources to add to the list? Well, now’s your chance to start posting those useful comments…
Happy New Year!

BigFix is a company that strives to be on the leading edge, both in the security universe and how they present themselves on the web. We’ve just finished an overhaul of their website, converting static pages to a new format that will enable the BigFix team to constantly keep it fresh with dynamic content, and make it much easier to update. The site is optimized for Adobe’s Contribute to update pages and add new content.

Of course a company like BigFix can’t have a plain old press room, so we used a highly modified version of WordPress to keep all the best news from their three blogs, press releases, media attention, videos and a virtual media kit right on the front page of their new social media newsroom.

If you want to get the skinny on who BigFix is, and what they do (how could you not know??) check out the Buzzroom..

Oh, and if you’re looking for your own social media newsroom, a modified WordPress blog, or need to figure out what kind of social media will work best for you, drop us a line. We’ll be happy to help you carve out your own unique space in the online community.