If you missed it, the Social Media Today webinar was moderated by Maggie with participants Peter Kim, Managing Director, North America at Dachis Group, Cathy Brooks, communications expert and founder of Other Than That and Paul Gillin, writer, speaker, online marketing consultant you can click here to give ‘er a listen.

The topic was When PR and Marketing Collide but it began with a marriage proposal from Robin Carey, Social Media Today to Maggie Fox. See? Our social media experts are deeply committed to joining forces in efforts of mass collaboration. A lot of ground was covered including predictions of where social media is going in the next 18-24 months.

The panelists pretty much agreed that the introduction of social media has interrupted the traditional flow between earned and paid media but are they truly stepping on each others toes? Should social media be opened right up for employees or simply shut down due to lack of training and its unpredictable nature? The conversation that transpired may surprise you.

We are living in the 21^st century, but it seems like our audiences are responding to marketing from the past. Back to the Future? Hear why. Predictions are, that moving forward, more money will be spent on earned media and social media. Want to know why? And how does 17^th century marketing even blend in the digital age?

If every employee is a broadcaster at home or at work, who should really speak on behalf of a company especially in the face of new communications rules by the FTC? And does social media place every employee into a customer service role? As if this webinar didn’t sound interesting enough, measurement, ROI, integration of paid and earned media was also discussed.

Head over here, turn up the volume and feel free to send us feedback!

In honour of Sesame Street’s 40th birthday, I’m taking a page out of Google’s book and tossing up one of my personal favourite sketches to start off the roundup.

Yipyipyip…uh huh.

Party. Party. Party.
In SMG news, our 3rd anniversary party and #savethebou tweetup last night was a rousing success!  More on that next week in a full blog post, but thanks to all who attended and to @photojunkie and @modernmod for providing photo ops and bangin’ tunes.

Better Blogging through Pet Worm Ownership
Sonia Simone at Copyblogger has a great post this week on how Oscar the Grouch makes a great blogger role model, and it’s hard to argue with. I know that’s a blog I’d subscribe to. Slimey doesn’t actually feature in the article, but he’d probably make a decent editor.

Lists, Trends, and Retweets, oh my!
In Twitter news this week, Doug Haslam has a great analysis of the Lists feature rolled out last week, including a ringing endorsement for personal ego-surfing.  Not content to rest on its laurels, Twitter began more focused efforts to curate its Trending Topics and started rollout of its new retweet feature, which Mashable is doing a great job of unboxing on the fly.

nth Life?
Second Life has taken the wraps off the open beta of their Enterprise product, allowing businesses to operate their own private virtual world behind the firewall.  The office dress code just got a whole lot weirder, and catching a flight to a meeting has taken on a whole new meaning.

SNCR Always Satisfies
The 4th Annual Society for New Communications Research Symposium & Awards Gala kicked off this week, and has already generated reams of conversation. Congrats in advance to all the award winners to be announced tonight.

1. Stop building temporary microsites and spending millions in media dollars to send people there, only to shut it all down (or leave it to wither) when the campaign ends. Attention is an expensive gift – think about how you can recycle it.

2. Who cares if companies like Honda have 2 million app users on Facebook? You should – they can engage with and activate 2 million qualified brand enthusiasts in the future, at virtually no cost.

3. Think like a broadcaster – if someone has spent time and money making channel 14 highly rated, are they going to launch a new channel to air their new show? No – they’re going to piggyback on the money they’ve spent and the eyeballs they’ve attracted. Knowing this, why are you reinventing the wheel every time you have something new to share or talk about?

4. Your plan should be to build permanent real estate (your own and on the social networks of choice for the people you are trying to reach) that can be strategically leveraged to let you connect with the people you want to talk to most and who want to talk to you.

Old habits die hard – we’re all still getting used to the scary fact that social media means millions of consumers are publishers – they no longer require a TV station or newspaper to get their point across to a vast audience. But business needs to take a breath and realize these new rules apply to them as well. This of course requires a re-thinking of where marketing and media dollars go; something that’s a lot more than scary for a whole industry.

“You need to start thinking like a media company. You need to build channel.”

In a Hallowe’en vein this week, I think we should start our roundup off with a lovely bit of Tarantino noir: remixed.

…and on with the show.

Facebook notes that sometimes, people die
Facebook has finally noticed a flaw in their “Suggestions” algorithm: it occasionally serves up the dead.  So they’re rolling out new “memorial pages” for those who have passed on.  Zombies need not apply.

Good news for pedants, bad news for typos
Twitter has (finally) fixed their search so that the delete-a-tweet function actually works as advertised.  In case you hadn’t noticed, didn’t know, or are the sort that never makes mistakes, deleted tweets used to hang around in the search and various apps using the twitter API.  Now those accidental not-so-Direct Messages and typograffikal errors will disappear just like you’d expect.

Google Labs gets by with a little help from your friends
In a move not at all connected to their recent deal for Twitter results, Google Labs has opened up a new Social Search Experiment which looks to have real promise.  The basic premise is that it allows you to focus on the content from your circle of friends/contacts/enemies, which presumably indicates more trusted material.  Great for search, less great for the SEO obsessed webmaster.

Geocities, we hardly knew ye
Actually, we probably knew ye all too well, anigifs and all.  This week, Yahoo! pulled the plug on the network that launched a million webrings and introduced the world to home web content creation.  Slate has a great eulogy, which touts Geocities as the spiritual ancestor of the Social Web, hideous as it may have sometimes been.  So a tip of the hat, and a lamenting screech of a connecting 56k modem to granddaddy Geocities.

Well, at least they didn’t break them again?
Poor David Carroll.  It’s not enough that United Airlines broke his guitars, though he did receive a settlement eventually, it wasn’t until after launching his internet stardom that he received recompense.  And now, after all the hoopla has died down, this week United lost his guitar. We can only hope this means another catchy YouTube video is en route.

Maggie will be moderating a Social Media Today webinar on November 4 about the relationship and impact of social media on Marketing and Public Relations with Peter Kim, Managing Director, North America at Dachis Group, Cathy Brooks, communications expert and founder of Other Than That and Paul Gillin, writer, speaker, online marketing consultant.

Learn what these expert think the ideal new relationship between marketing and PR looks like, who is best suited to manage a campaign that includes social media and how to create strategies that include both new and old tactics. Does the blending still sound like a train wreck to you? Let the experts explain how the collision between social media, marketing and PR can become a serendipitous marriage!

The webinar takes place on November 4, 2009 at 2pm ET, 11am PT at www.socialmediatoday.com. If you miss it, you can check back here for archived audio!

I saw this video a while back and my friend Anne shared it on Facebook today. I think we all need quick hit of adorable ahead of our weekly SMG Roundup.

Cute overload eh?

Henry Blodget at Silicon Alley Insider reported findings from Perry Drake that Facebook now accounts for 25% of U.S. online pageviews. Wowzers.

I’d be remiss in not mentioning that Facebook announced public status updates would be searchable on Bing this week. And in a related news, Twitter has inked a deal that offers Bing and Google Search access to their public status updates (Details at TechCrunch). It makes perfect sense given the that Pew Internet and American Life Project announced this week that 19% of Internet users use status updates (via Mashable). If you want to dig deeper into this news from the world of Social Search, check out the analysis from Charline Li and Jeremiah Owyang.

Coca-Cola has opened up voting for a team of three people to visit the 206 countries where Coca-Cola is sold in 365 days as the next stage in its Expedition206 campaign. The winning team goes on a global quest to find out what makes people happy and share their discoveries through the official campaign site and across Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Flickr. (via Brand Republic)

Yesterday, SMG was proud to sponsor the afterparty at meshmarketing. It was an incredible lineup of speakers, workshops and heavy-hitters from the social media scene. I’ll migrate the #followfriday meme to the SMG blog and suggest you look up some of the wonderful speakers who had great insights – @kdpaine, @esotto, @danmartell and @jquipp.

Given my Internet services background and how much we rely on Yammer for team communication here at SMG, I was interested when Yammer experienced an extended outage earlier this week. For a time, Yammer was reduced to Twitter to communicate with its customers. Given how critical Yammer has become for business, it seems like a great opportunity for Yammer to take a look at thier systems for customer communication and ensure they’ve got redundancies in place in the event of an outage. Read about it on the Yammer Blog and at The Washington Post.

Finally, we are pleased as punch that our client Ford Motor Company has won the Society for New Communications Research 2009 Fellows’ Choice Award for Brand of the Year. From the SNCR release “Brand of the Year: Ford for its innovative use of social media to improve the way the company communicates with its stakeholders”. For more on this great news, please see the Digital Snippet on Ford’s SMPR site.

Thunder rumbles in the distance.  The candle light flickers.  Gather closer children, gather close.  The midnight hour draws close and it is time for a tale that will send shivers down your spine and creep you out like no other.  A tale of a creature that lurks, listening to your every word.  In the shadows it waits, biding its time.  It may pass you by once, twice even, but if you make the fatal mistake of tweeting its name thrice, then it strikes.  The brand manager.

(cue dramatic flash of lightning)

There was a time when our idle conversations were just that.  They were transitory in nature.  If you were not physically there to hear the conversation then it was gone; residing in the memories of the participants or faded into the aether.

Technology has allowed these conversations to be preserved beyond their initial position in time and space, and what’s more to allow others to join in and participate.

The idle conversation that would have occurred over the back fence now extends around the globe and can draw participants days, weeks and months after the initial statements.

Search and aggregation provide the means of sifting through all the miscellaneous missives and finding just those that matter.

With the growing adoption of these tools and a trend towards public disclosure, the idle conversation becomes a treasure trove for companies and brands willing to listen.  How are people using your product?  What do they think about it?  What do they think about the brand?  It’s all out there amongst a sea of tweets, blog posts, forum discussions and blog posts.  Every idle mention of your brand is there to be discovered, examined and evaluated.

But it’s not a one-way flow of information.  Anyone can join into these conversations.  Including you.

Someone is blogging about problems with your product.  You can be there.  Someone is podcasting about how much they love your service.  You can be there.  Someone is tweeting that they don’t know whether to buy Brand X or Brand Y.  You can be there.  What an amazing power for the brand manager: the ability to suddenly materialize out of thin air and proclaim the wonders and benefits of your brand.

But hold on there.  Not so fast.  Before you go beaming down into that dinner party to offer folks a chance to squeeze the Charmin or hop into that backyard bbq to proclaim the health implications of smoking or drop into the coffee shop just to tell folks you’re brilliant, you need to know that with your new found powers come great responsibility.  You have the power to enhance your brand like never before, but you also have the ability to really creep people out and forever turn them off.

Here’s how to avoid turning you and your brand into the next creep:

Wait for an invitation (or a gesture that is invitation-like).
When a person makes a positive gesture of affinity, such as friending, following, tracking back or outright asking “is (your brand) on (social media platform of choice)?”, then they are clearly issuing an invitation. Step up and joint them in conversation.

Questions can be an invitation to engage, statements are not.
If someone is asking ‘how much sugar is in a Jookie Soda‘, then it’s fair game for the Jookie brand manager, or member of the Jookie team, to pop in and provide an answer.  Not so much an invitation to follow, friend, poke, nudge, share blood type or bank card PIN numbers.  They had a question.  You had an answer.  The social transaction is done.  Stop lurking and move on until they tell you otherwise.

If someone just remarks on your brand, ‘Hot today, think I might grab a Jookie Soda‘, then popping out of nowhere will not only come across as creepy, but needy and just a tad desperate.

It’s okay to correct statements about your brand – but only when they’re really off.
If someone states a clearly incorrect fact about your brand, you should step forward to correct and then engage as long as necessary.  Focus on the most egregious errors.  Be able to provide links – preferably to third party data and not your sales brochure – that help back up the truth.  This is about setting the record straight so that misinformation doesn’t fester.  Don’t try and correct someone on a fact if you don’t actually know the real answer and don’t even think of correcting someone if they are actually right.

It’s not okay to challenge the opinion of random strangers.  Go pick a fight on your own time.
Your job is to manage your brand, not other people’s minds.  If they are not already amongst your network, they haven’t asked a question and they simply have an opinion about your brand, then it’s not your place to argue them into submission or cajole them into changing their minds.  There is nothing to be gained and there is a great deal to lose. You weren’t invited to that conversation.  Just accept that there are going to be people on the Internet who are ‘wrong‘.  Let it go.

Opinions favourable to the brand may be interpreted as an invitation to connect, but even then, tread lightly.

What happened five minutes before they said your name matters.
Before jumping in to engage, take a few minutes to learn the history. Have you talked to them before?  Have they talked about your brand before?  What was said?  At the very least, take a minute to scan their last few posts, tweets or updates.  You don’t want to be leaping in to engage if you don’t fully understand the context.  There are all kinds of levels of inappropriateness that can arise from that sort of behaviour.  Unlike the dinner party where you have no idea what was said before your arrival, the online conversation gives you a chance to rewind and learn all the relevant details before you open your mouth.

Just because they’re your friend here, doesn’t mean they’re your friend there.
People use different networks for very different reasons.  Unless there is an explicit invitation offered to join their other networks, don’t take an engagement on one platform to be an invitation to engage on others.  A question asked on twitter shouldn’t be answered on Facebook.  A private message shouldn’t be responded to publicly.  If you feel it necessary to respond on a different platform, ask permission to do so.  Otherwise, respect people’s spaces and engage with them on their terms, not yours.

Having been to past Mesh events, I’m looking forward to the calibre of speakers, diversity of discussions and valuable networking opportunities that the Mesh folks are so keen to supply. While the keynote and panels are stocked with talent, I’m personally most interested to attend the afternoon workshops (specifically the Facebook-focused one). My hope is that the workshops give delegates a chance to get into the really geeky stuff that we are so fond of.

And après all that geekery, it’s important to note that SMG will be sponsoring the after party–conveniently located at Circa as well!

If you haven’t already got your ticket, there are still some available here: Mesh Marketing Tickets. And if I haven’t convinced you yet, check out the 5 reasons to attend Mesh Marketing.

*cue ominous music and thunderclap*

Right. So here’s the goods; all the stuff that we found interesting in the last week or so.

Social Media Intelligence, Socialized
Social Signal celebrated its fourth anniversary in the social media consulting space by committing to open-sourcing all of the intellectual material they’ve built up since their founding.  Their goal? ‘To build a field, and not just a business.’  A formidable task, but certainly a money-where-your-mouth-is move.  Kudos!

The Beginning of the End for the Digital Divide?
Finland has become the first country to establish broadband internet as a legal right for all citizens, with a goal of 150Mbit access by 2015.  Please direct future correspondence with Social Media Group to our Helsinki office.

The Most Talked About Brands
With an eye to a different take on Interbrand’s Best Global Brands, Sysomos ranked the Top 100 by Social Media mentions over the past month, putting Google, Apple, and Microsoft in the top 3.  While this raw data is interesting, I can’t help but side with commenters who mused about a ranking based on interactivity and participation, rather than the passive ‘mentions’ provided.

#Pepsifail
Pepsi was the latest victim of #[insertbrand]fail over the weekend, over their Amp app for the iPhone, Before you Score. The app was lambasted for its poor portrayal of women, and its encouragement to share your ’scores’ online. Pepsi was quick with the mea culpa, and even appended the #pepsifail hashtag to their apology post, ensuring widespread eyeballs.

Why the Twitter Firehose May Not Be Worth It
After news that both Google and Microsoft may be vying for access to Twitter’s firehose, unfiltered, Marshall Kirkpatrick over at RRW broke down the reasons the real-time engine may not be worth the big bucks.

How to Comply With the FTC in 140 Characters or Less
With the release of the FTC’s updated advertising disclosure guides last week, discussion ranged from ‘the sky is falling’ to ‘it’s about time’ to ‘weren’t we doing that anyway?’  Shel Holtz, meanwhile put his backing behind a standard for disclosure on twitter, where 140 characters may be a bit slim to get all your conflicts out in one post, and still get a message across.

The Agenda with Steve Paikin is current affairs program that engages with its audience. You can submit show ideas online, contribute to live discussions from home or comment on one of their regularly updated blogs or Facebook group. The program is available on demand for audio or video download in the podcast section of the TVO website. So, if you’re outside the broadcast area and can’t tune in live to see Leona in the hot seat, feel free to check the episode archive.