I sat across the lunch table talking to Craig Bruenderman and Sam Gracie of ResonantVibes.com yesterday, talking about their community of electronic mix music producers and fans, smiling at what I heard. These are young, tech-oriented entrepreneurs, immersed in all the code and programming most of us fear. They use social tools to build their business around. They’re digital natives. What did they say that made me smile?

“How do you choose which social networks and channels to focus on?”

I heard the same thing from a small business owner in LaGrange, Ky., last week. I heard it the week before from the brand manager of a major consumer products company and the day before that from a marketing manager for a bank.

There are three main focal points you need to concentrate on in order to manage the volume of it all. And they’re not nearly as foreign as you might think.

1. Play Where Your Audience Plays

Think of your ideal customer or conversation partner online. Who do you want to connect with? Now find out where they are. Is Facebook their thing? Twitter? Are they more apt to dive into more granular communities like forums or message boards? No matter who your ideal consumer is, be they for your blog or your product, there are places where they and people like them congregate online. Find out where by doing some cursory research which can certainly start with asking them.

It turns out Craig and Sam need to keep a finger on the pulse of the Ruby On Rails development community since they develop in that language. Ruby users are Twitter freaks. Those guys need to be on Twitter to accomplish that connection.

Ask around. You’ll find out quickly where your ideal audience is. Prioritize based on which networks can show you the biggest impact and develop content and participation there. Sure, having a home, or at least a place holder, on as many social outposts as possible is probably not a bad idea. The notion you have to be there to participate 100-percent of the time, however is ludicrous. Fortunately, your audience will understand that so long as you tell them. Just drop a little note on your MySpace page saying, “Thanks for visiting. To connect to us faster, find us on Twitter,” and you’re probably set.

2. Do What Your Comfortable With

No matter how hard you try, you may just not get Twitter. That’s okay. If you can find a strategic reason to use it for your business, great. If Facebook is more native to you, then focus your efforts there. Obviously, prioritize the networks where your audience is most often, but don’t force yourself into an uncomfortable role. Not everyone is cut out to star in their own TV commercials (namely any car dealer ever). You may not be cut out for off the cuff conversations on Twitter. And that’s okay.

The good news is that if you tell your customers where they can find you, they’ll find you. If they discover they can get you on Twitter quicker than commenting on your blog or website, they may even go sign up for an account just to get to you. Find a network or two where you’re comfortable then let folks know that’s where you’ll be.

3. Find Tools To Help

There are a number of social tools that can help you communicate across several networks. Broadcast options like Ping.fm have been around a while. I don’t advocate their use because the temptation to blast the same message out to multiple networks is high with these platforms. If you do that regularly, you’re spamming the communities in which you don’t participate often.

However, there are ways to go about using these tools that protect you from being a spammer while also helping you communicate in multiple places with relevant messages. The biggest rule of thumb is to be sure to jump into Facebook and participate there when you can, don’t just auto post your Tweets there.

A new tool I really like is one called Minggl. This makes communicating on the big six (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Digg and Flickr) super easy by giving you a browser sidebar tool complete with tabs for notifications, an in box and people tabs. You can broadcast a message to all six (or any number) at once by checking a few boxes. Or you can filter messages by network and concentrate on one at a time. It also allows you to post Google Sidewiki-type annotations on pages your friends can see if they’re also using Minggl.

Just be sure you don’t blast to certain networks and forget to participate in them genuinely and you should be okay.

There are a number of other thoughts here. You need to monitor all of the social web to not miss out on conversational opportunities to defend or promote your brand. Google “social media monitoring” to find more articles on that. You’ll probably also want to learn to use RSS feeds to your advantage. But the three tips above can help you participate in social networks for yourself or your company in a more efficient manner.

I’m sure you have more ideas. Drop yours in the comments and help your fellow readers manage their social networks.

Now go download some funky techno tunes on ResonantVibes and have a great weekend.

IMAGE: By Doruk on Shutterstock.com. Used with permission.

The era of the social web has given us unprecedented access. We can see more about each other’s lives, know more about each other’s daily routines and find each other easier now than ever before. We have access to what would have been millions of dollars in software applications and platforms now, too. But they, in turn, have access to us. Our lives, not just our computer programs, have become open source.

And we plod along, going with the flow and accepting the fact that the creepy guy from junior high is now commenting on our Facebook pictures. We’ve mostly grown wise to not sharing our credit card or social security numbers with sites we don’t know and trust, but we’ll announce on Twitter we’re leaving town for a two-week vacation without hesitation, inviting anyone with sinister motives to come over and enjoy our stereo systems all the way to their house.

While speaking to a leadership group of the Association of Educators of Communications and Technology (AECT) last week, a cell phone went off in the audience. No one seemed to notice. Not even me. Later in the question-answer period, an audience member pointed out that we’re becoming desensitized to the technology and what it brings. Five years ago, every head would have turned to look at the person with the cell phone. Ten years ago, they’d have been escorted from the room. Today? Shrug.

As I pointed out on Monday, Facebook is hoping we all become less sensitive … more desensitized … to sharing our information across technology and networks. But should we? An article in my local newspaper Sunday pointed out the big brother-type data gathering companies have been mining out of our web browsing and usage for years. For the most part, we’re unaware sites like Facebook, Yahoo and even Google are tracking our behaviors, sites visited and more every time we log in. Should we be concerned?

I’m of the mindset that these companies would be in a world of hurt if they used that information in a sinister fashion. But is serving up more relevant advertisements to you sinister? It’s not for me, but it may be for some. Can we opt out? I’m sure we can, but how do we even know who is collecting what and where to say, “No thanks!”

The social web will require more trust, both for and from us. There will always be individuals out there misusing and even violating that trust. So how do we allow our newfound connectivity to prosper without the, “Oh shit!” moments many of us are sure to have in years to come?

The only thoughts I have are to take a few minutes the next time you log into any website that requires it, including your email, and look at the account settings with particular regard for security settings. (Selfishly, I want you to back your data up, too. See Backupify.com, a company I’m involved with that backs up your Web 2.0 data.) Read the fine print, check the right boxes and set things up to share what you’re comfortable sharing. Think of this for your company or brand as well. While you have to be careful – participating fully in these networks often requires a minimal level of openness – you need to make sure you aren’t lulled into a false sense of security.

Because when we open the flood gates, the waters will rise. Are you ready to swim?

IMAGE: By NDZ on Shutterstock.com. Used with permission.

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Companies, brands and their respective marketing and public relations managers are clamoring to know what people are saying about them on the web. I would offer that social media monitoring has been the single-largest technology-based industry boom in the last 10 years, though search engine optimization firms might win that title.

On a parallel path, Facebook has surged past everyone else to emerge as the go-to social network. Brands grabbed up profiles, then group pages, now brand pages. Some still have all three. (You probably ought to move to the brand page exclusively, by the way.) Naturally, then, marketing managers wanting to tap into the conversation online are ultra-interested in conversations on Facebook. Unfortunately, the aren’t seeing them.

Almost all the social media monitoring services mine Facebook for data and present results when they happen. Unfortunately, Facebook is still a bit of a walled garden and a good portion of the activity there goes unseen and unreported by the monitoring firms. While my friends with several monitoring firms report they’re seeing an increase in volume of data from Facebook, they also agree there’s a lot more there to be had someday.

Facebook’s terms of service and technical firewalls only allow monitoring firms to search public-facing pages, discussions and Facebook groups. This means a public facing brand page wall should show up in your monitoring service’s results, taking care of what you already know. (Assuming, that is, you look at your own Facebook brand page.) When you post something on an individual person’s wall, the monitoring services don’t see it. While the wall is public, users can set their privacy so that only friends see it. This essentially means an individual public wall is actually semi-private.

Unfortunately for brands this is where the majority of Facebook conversations take place.

This is why the recent Microsoft announcement that it would soon include status updates from Facebook and Twitter posts in results on Bing is so interesting. Facebook has long wanted its members to be comfortable sharing more of their information publicly. With the Beacon advertising fiasco, however, they learned the majority of the users weren’t ready for the curtains to be drawn back on their online rooms. The Bing announcement means more of our information will be made available to public searches, and thus to the monitoring firms as well.

This is good for brands. It may not be all that comfortable for individuals. But I would anticipate Facebook learned it’s lesson and will baby step toward opening the door so wide.

Until those status update gates are unlocked, don’t expect to see too many conversations about your brands on Facebook showing up in your social media monitoring service. It’s not their fault, though. It’s just Facebook looking out for its users … whether they really want to or not.

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Mediaweek magazine puts together a “Digital Hot List” each year of the websites or companies they see as having the potential to wow the web world. Their list never seems to be much of a surprise, especially when you consider Google, Facebook and Twitter are sort of default entries, but there’s always one or two on it that raise an eyebrow.

This year it’s the Wall Street Journal’s website, WSJ.com, in at No. 8. Yep! The website property of a traditional media outlet is on Mediaweek’s Digital Hot List. And no, it’s not a joke.

To further perplex the digerati, The Journal is one of the few papers that did not take down its pay-to-play subscription model a few years back. That’s right. You have to pay to see much (not all, but still) of the WSJ.com content, a policy considered blasphemous by many in the social media set.

The online audience at WSJ.com has spiked by as much as 44 percent in recent months according to ComScore, it is now the largest newspaper in the U.S. and both the print and online versions are profitable. Mediaweek calls their model the, “envy of the industry.”

“They made a decision a long time ago that most didn’t,” Mike Shields, Mediaweek’s senior editor for digital media told me yesterday. “The Journal is not free. They never wavered or changed that. That is as key to the success as the content they deliver. That precedent is enviable and hard for someone to copy, particularly if you’ve been giving away your content for 10 years.”

Called crazy in 2005, The Journal is on a hot list in 2009. And, unfortunately, their success is leading many newspapers to consider charging for their content. I say unfortunately because most of them will do so at their own peril. For The Wall Street Journal has two things going for it the others don’t.

First, The Journal is a niche publication focused on the financial world. The people who read the journal can afford to subscribe. Many of them probably have their businesses pay for the subscription in the first place. For many, The Journal is a requisite of their job. You read it or you fail.

More importantly, however, The Journal has the one thing most newspaper’s do not: an abundance of quality, original and exclusive content.

Pick up your local paper. Now go through the first two sections and count how many stories are actually local. My guess is fewer than half. For some newspapers, 25 percent is more like it.

“(The WSJ) reporting is really good and they provide content that isn’t going to be anywhere else,” Shields said. “They aren’t repurposing A.P. (Associated Press) stories.”

Shields noted there’s nothing wrong with A.P. stories, but most “local” papers would be “local” flyers without the wire services.

My hope is that newspapers don’t fall into the trap of thinking they can do what The Wall Street Journal has done. Sure, they can do it, but not without increasing editorial staff and changing their focus to hyper local. They can’t do it unless they’re willing to be more than just copy-paste engines with a few good writers covering stories relevant to their readers.

And I’m fairly certain few publishers will have the vision to see the solution does not lie in how you charge for your content, but in what kind of content you produce.

For more on the Mediaweek Digital Hot List, visit the story at Mediaweek.com. For The Wall Street Journal, visit WSJ.com.

A funny thing happened on Twitter last night. David Armano and I got into a (light hearted and fun) discussion about the two of us being sexy bitches. (I know … silly, but bear with me here.)

Somehow the notion of me shaving my goatee to raise money for a good cause came up. So, I’ve decided to support Movemeber, the male cancer awareness movement, by pledging to you that if we can raise $1,000.00 by Nov. 15, which I will donate to the Prostate Cancer Foundation, I will shave my goatee. Sure, it’s a small personal sacrifice (I’ve had my goat since roughly 1977), but it’s for a good cause. Click below and help us raise money for a great cause.

Thanks for considering. You may soon get to see my baby-face.

And a big “Thank you!” to David Armano, who is not only a sexy bitch, but a personal hero. You rock, dude.

Disclosure: Postrank is a sponsor of Social Media Explorer which pays to advertise in the right hand side bar space. I have written extensively about them before they became a sponsor and will continue to do so because they offer a service relevant to you. Their advertising here does not effect my editorial comments or recommendations about them (I’m free to criticize), but it’s safe to say I dig Postrank. Fair?

If you’re in charge of reporting how successful your website is and you’re still relying solely on Google Analytics, WebTrends or some other such tool, you’re under-reporting your success. I’ve offered up some explanation of this before, explaining that the new metric for Internet marketers is not how many people see your website, but how many see your content.

We now operate in a world of really simple syndication or RSS. Your site may have RSS feeds but it doesn’t have to in order to be syndicated. Using services like FeedYes you can effectively scrape new content off any website and create an RSS feed. I could be reading your content in my feed reader without you ever knowing it.

Because content is king and must be made ultimately portable for today’s online audience to consume it (audiences will consume content where they are … not where you are) website analytics becomes less definitive of a metric. We must now practice content metrics to quantify and understand how many people we reach and how effectively.

Postrank has recently expanded their services to help us draw better insights from the content metrics around our blogs, websites and more. The Waterloo, Ontario-based company started by giving us a plug-in for Google Reader and other feed readers that gave posts a 1-10 score based on how engaging they were compared to others on that blog, in that particular folder in your reader, etc. We had a way to say one post was better received than another.

Click for a larger version.

Not too long ago, Postrank unveiled Postrank Analytics, a subscription service ($9 monthly, U.S.) which allows bloggers (or content producers of any sort, so long as your effort includes an RSS feed of your content) to judge how socially engaging their content is. The image here shows two recent Social Media Explorer posts with their 1-10 Postrank score in yellow. On the right side, you can see how many times the posts were Tweeted, discussed (comments), posted on FriendFeed, bookmarked on Delicious and more. While I’m not 100-percent sure how the engagement points are determined, it’s an algorithm that is consistent across everyone’s content. (You can learn more about their measure of “engagement” on the Postrank Blog.)

These numbers by themselves don’t mean much, but looking at them over time gives you trending information about how your content is doing. That is relevant in measuring and reporting the value of your efforts as a content producer, blogger, public relations professional or community manager. Postrank offers a Trends tab where you can view these numbers in convenient charts and graphs as well.

And to one-up themselves again, Postrank recently released Data Services which allows your developers to request Postrank API access. Your team can take the Postrank service and use it to develop your own custom reporting and dashboard platforms for your clients.

I’m dying to be able to afford a full-time developer to start wearing this API out, by the way.

The biggest reason to familiarize yourself with Postrank and its various services is they are the one service out there that is giving marketers, public relations folks and bloggers a deep, meaningful set of measures of online content. There are lots of blogs and websites that get hundreds of thousands of website visitors. You can go out and buy traffic if you want. There are dozens of blogs that get dozens of comments, but a lot of them are meaningless, “Great post!’ type entries. Postrank gives you a look at how impactful a given piece of content or website is, both within your site and across social channels. They also allow you to judge posts in comparison to one another on a given website or in comparison to other blogs in the same category.

Postrank is systematically organizing and prioritizing blogs and websites for us based on how engaging the content is. That’s pretty valuable.

Is Postrank the know-all and end-all to the measurement piece of social media? Heck no. But they’re offering a damn fine start. Please do check them out.

Have you used Postrank’s Feed Reader plugin to filter out the best posts? (Check it out here if you haven’t.) Are you an analytics subscriber? Jump in the comments and tell us how you’re using it or how it can get better.

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If you’ve ever had doubts about the power of the groundswell or social media, allow me the opportunity to introduce you to J.C. Hutchins. In 2006, the Louisville native (only one of the many reasons I dig the guy) was dutifully submitting his sci-fi trilogy novels called 7th Son to book publishers. No one would give him the time of day. The stories were about human cloning, complete with a conspiracy sparked by the assassination of an American president, but they were probably a bit too “out there” for publishers at the time.

But J.C. Hutchins had access to something many struggling authors weren’t aware of: social media.

Hutchins decided if he couldn’t sell the work, he’d give it away, only not by putting the full thing online, but narrating readings of the work via podcast. With little more than a computer, an Internet connection and the want to do it, Hutchins began building a community around 7th Son – A beta clone army, if you will.

How did he do it? Here are some snippets of his podcast/book marketing plan:

• Hosted a launch party for the podcast in Second Life
• Conducted the first nationwide podcast book tour by doing more than 50 phone interviews with podcasters around the globe
• Got 7th Son fans to contribute short stories, images and videos to an anthology of the first “book” in the series
• Coerced celebrities from sci-fi and horror films, books and more to appear in the original podcast series.

Today, his podcast, conveniently accessed on the website at 7thsonnovel.com, has over 100,000 monthly episodic downloads. The downloads are free.

Why is this a story? Because today – October 27, 2009, St. Martin’s Press releases the actual, hard copy, tactile and printed version of 7th Son: Descent. Hutchins used three plus years of groundswell and social media marketing to realize his original dream of publishing 7th Son as a novel. The works have already been optioned by Warner Brothers for motion picture development as well.

(I’m standing and clapping as I write this.)

Because J.C. is a friend and fellow Louisvillian, I asked if there was something special I could do to help him today besides tell his story. He turned it around and gave all of us something.

You can get a 10 chapter PDF of the book, by clicking here. It’s a free preview, so to speak. Once you’re hooked on the story, you should go buy a copy of the book and a few others for gifts for your friends. (Amazon links here are my affiliate links, FYI.)

Better yet, check out the Google Reader embed below to check out the preview.

I’ll be the first to admit sci-fi thrillers aren’t necessarily my thing, but I’m halfway through the book already and have been brain sucked into becoming a Beta Clone myself.

Hat’s off to J.C. for the wherewithal and faith to build his own groundswell and realize his dream. It’s an inspiration to all of us, individuals and businesses. If we believe in it, someone else will. If we use these tools to connect those dots and build community around our ideas, we can realize the success we know is possible, regardless of those who tell us it isn’t.

Today is an historic day in social media thanks to J.C. Hutchins. How will it inspire you?

Laura Fitton, perhaps better known as Pistachio on Twitter and the proprietor of OneForty.com, an application store for Twitter, and I shared a car ride recently. I took advantage of the opportunity to talk to her about her new company, it’s eggs-in-one-basket model and the recent TechCrunch rumors that Twitter was buying the start-up. Always entertaining, Fitton proved to be one of the more interesting guests I’ve had on SME-TV.

Fitton On OneForty.com, Twitter Purchase Rumors & More from Jason Falls on Vimeo.

Check out my profile on OneForty.com. Give the app store a browse to see if there are some applications there that can help make your Twitter experience more productive.

You can also order a copy of Twitter for Dummies by visiting Amazon.com. Find Laura on Twitter as @pistachio.

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In our explorations of social media monitoring firms, one differentiating factor between services is often the ability to parse out sentiment and tone of online conversations found about your brand. This task is performed by sophisticated computer functionality called natural language processing (NLP). It’s not the sexiest topic in the world, but it’s a very important one for public relations professionals, marketers and brand managers to understand.

Fortunately, I caught up with Jeffrey Catlin, the CEO of Lexalytics, an Amherst, Massachusetts-based NLP firm, recently to dive into the subject matter a bit. In this episode of SME-TV we learn what drives natural language processing, what the types of accuracy rates should be expected when using tools that provide the functionality and that Lexalytics has some consumer-facing products on the horizon we can be on the lookout for.

Exploring Natural Language Processing With Lexalytics CEO Jeff Catlin from Jason Falls on Vimeo.

As a follow-up to the chat with Catlin, I spoke with a couple of my friends in the monitoring space. A couple of them agreed with most of Catlin’s assessments of the accuracy question. One, however, noted that their service does use a vendor like Lexalytics to provide a foundation of NLP for their tool, but has built an ever-learning algorithm atop that technology. Because they can train the tool to understand the dynamics of conversations around a particular client and build upon that learning in an ongoing fashion, they can produce accuracies in the low- to mid-80s over time and are even around 83% on some clients now.

Another NLP hang up is that tools like Lexalytics were trained to interpret press releases and more formal journalistic pieces. Social media is chock full-o-typos and other truly natural human language quirks that the machines can learn, but only if they’re told to do so. Plus, there are dozens of sentiments around brands, not just positive, negative and neutral, so NLP has its limitations. Still, as Catlin said, with a large amount of information, it can give you a broad brush stroke of look at what’s out there.

Regardless of the tit-for-tat debate over who is more accurate or if they even are, at least we know understand the process and environment better. Hopefully, this helps you make better decisions in social media monitoring solutions for your company or brand.

Be sure to keep an eye on Lexalytics in the coming weeks, however. Their free tools, which I’ve seen demonstrations of, are simple, intuitive and most useful for those of us who have data (perhaps blog content, customer surveys or focus group interview transcripts) and need a tool to process and analyze it without chewing up a lot of budget. I’m excited to see how you can leverage those tools.

And, if you have more questions about natural language processing and its application in the social media monitoring and measurement space, please throw them out in the comments. If I can’t answer them, I’ll do my very best to find someone who can. (Plus, I’ll bet the Lexalytics and social media monitoring folks will be reading with interest.)

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Five days in Las Vegas with my Internet friends always forces me into a fit of introspection about where I’m going, how fast and who with. Blog World & New Media Expo brings together a good number of my online contacts. We talk, learn, laugh and enjoy each other’s company for a few days, talk about the state of things in the social media world and sometimes even reset our focus for the upcoming year.

Where do you spend the most of your marketing energy?

Perhaps it’s because I attend a fair number of conferences and can grow road weary or a bit of personal cynicism, but my thoughts this weekend kept gravitating to the superficiality of online relationships. I’m friends with these people, but I don’t know them well. Nor do they know me. There are exceptions, of course, but the absence of depth to the friendships leads me to question their inherent value.

Apply the same thinking to online networks for your business. Are 10,000 Facebook fans or Twitter followers really all that meaningful to your brand? They are if those 10,000 people invest their time and money in your product or service. If they just click “Become a Fan” or “Follow” just to get a coupon or participate in a promotion, then their interest wanes, was your time and effort really worth it?

With consumer audiences we tend to spend a lot of time and energy worried about acquisition. In the business-to-business (B2B) space, there is more focus on retention because each customer generally spends a lot more money to be such. Sure, you want to acquire new business there too, but it’s probably more important to keep your customers than just go get more.

Social media success lies in relationships. Not just the building, but maintaining as well. Perhaps your initial efforts there should be to connect and empower your loyal customers rather than chasing new ones. Perhaps your personal focus should be upon those closest to you and not the fleeting acquaintances found in the online world.

This isn’t to say that potential customers (or friends) aren’t important. Only that we shouldn’t under-serve our current ones at their expense.