Search Engine giant Google, has shown the world how it is reshaping the way communication happens over the internet with the soft launch of Google Wave. And it has done so in a way it knows best – through invite based viral marketing.

The internet witnessed tremors of excitement when 100,000 exclusive invites to Wave were sought after by surfers who were curious, passionate, and addicted to Google.

A sense of Déjà vu is hard to avoid. Google sent out similar invites when it launched Gmail in 2007, to build hype. Privileged invites led marketing has been a potent weapon that Google has learned to wield well, and with Google Wave, it intends to go for a big kill…

Read the rest of the article at http://www.trendsspotting.com/blog/?p=1631

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For the past year, I’ve been asked to speak at a number of internet marketing conferences. That, in itself, is not odd since I’ve been speaking at web conferences since 2002. What has been different this time is the types of conferences I’ve been asked to speak at lately. They’ve all been conferences directed at Women and particularly, Moms.

Why all of the seemingly sudden interest by corporations in marketing to multicultural women? Perhaps the stats can help tell the story:

• At $1 trillion, the purchasing power of women of color represent the 10th largest global economy – as large as Brazil’s GDP! (Source: World Bank Indicators Database, Sept 2004)
• The earning power of women of color is highest.
• Businesses owned by women of color represent the fastest growing segment of the U.S. economy.
• African-American women are the primary household decision makers.
• The ethnic beauty industry is expected to grow to $11.0 Billion by next year (2010)

Clearly, it’s easy to see why marketers are looking for ways to promote their products to a more diverse audience of women. The economic benefits are really exponential if marketers get it right and don’t market to stereotypes.

I’m honored to be considered an expert in marketing to women of color online, as a woman of color myself, who’s been involved in web marketing since 1999.

My overriding goal is to help marketers understand and target multicultural women better. I help marketers to nix stereotypes, nix generalities, engage better, build growth and loyalty.

Kudos and many thanks to the conference organizers who have asked me to speak to their largely female audiences about social media marketing on behalf of all women of color.

• Blissdom
• Touchpoint
• Blogaglicous

I’m looking forward to building a future with marketers who recognize this incredibly important market. If you’re a marketer who wants a bit more information on what multicultural women’s needs are, check out these key takeaways to our Blogalious panel on Social Media and the Woman of Color.

Recently I was interviewed by an amazing writer for www.Examiner.com on Social Media for bands. The article picked up some speed and got picked up by Associated Content. In it, I share some of the best secrets I’ve learned about how bands are using social media to promote their tours and music.

If you have a band, or work in music promotion, get started using social media by using these secrets:

1. Your artist or band website: This is really your home base, the hub around which all of the other social media tools can revolve. If we were in the brick and mortar world, your own website might be the equivalent of your company’s main office. Some points you may want to consider for your site include:

• The site should be, among other things, user-friendly, creative in a way that is reflective of your band image, yet still as clear and uncluttered as possible.
• You want people who come to your site to easily find all of the vital information about your act (i.e. your bio, electronic press kit, show/tour schedule, email list sign-up, booking info, management contact, music, and merchandise, etc.). It needs to be a place for fans, yes, but also for the professionals to come for information access (for example, the press, booking agents, club and venue owners, labels, etc.).
• While you might create a blog or a conversation corner where fans can comment about your shows or whatever artist-related topic they’re up for, you might also direct them to your MySpace site instead and invite them to participate in your blog there. This will help create differentiation between those two sites.
• Your website can also be a great location for your band store. It can enable you to make your highest margins on your merchandise (T-shirts, posters, caps, etc.) and your CDs (you may want to consider having a third party handle the actual fulfillment of your CDs and merchandise, unless you have friends or fans who…continue reading here:

More about the article author, Christopher Harding: “Christopher Harding has spent 20 years as a songwriter, author, filmmaker, producer, and executive of film, TV, and music.”

How wideband social media is changing the world’s cognitive structure

People working together is like a large brain performing a computation, but in which each neuron has legs and tends to wander off at random moments. Hutchins coined the phrase distributed cognition for when people work together to achieve an outcome (see the book “Cognition in the Wild”), but for my taste, “neurons with legs” paints a sharper picture.

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If you can imagine that people working toward a common outcome – whether a play, a business initiative, a software release – are like neurons with legs, then it is clear why working in a war room with project maps on the wall has always been the preferred mode of intense collaboration.

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Working in different locations is comparatively unattractive, even if it is the “way of the world.” Communication wasn’t really free to start with, and the cost shoots up dramatically as soon as the neurons can’t see or hear each other, or notice when the others have wandered off.

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Software teams are getting practiced at working intensely across distances. The best teams use phone, voice- or video-Skype or equivalent, voice conferencing, online chat, online document collaborative and code synchronization tools to keep up with each other as much as they can … and of course, plane trips when they really want to communcate heavily.

(Why is it business people so often set up all the contract details by internet, but then fly to be in the same room when it comes time to close the deal?)

So far, pretty standard.

However, those communication mechanisms are deliberate, operating with the directed intention of transferring information from one wandering neuron to another. “Directed” is the key word.

Wideband social media adds a twist. By “wideband” social media, I mean broadcast media such as Twitter, Facebook, and geographic location revealing apps.

With wideband social media, the group of wandering neurons contribute to an emerging picture, which none of them could paint alone. The data that arrives is spontaneous, unpredictable, and informative in surprising ways.

“I’m going to lunch at the Mac.”

What information could this possibly hold? Well, if sent on Twitter or group-linked geopraphic locators, it produces a spontaneous get-together of friends and not-yet-friends, which produces a conversation, a company, a manifesto or a new friendship, all with long-term unexpected effects.

We’re only seeing the beginning of the story here.

Like any new technology, there is a dark side as well as a light. You can follow, but you can also be followed. Police can take steps to increase safety, or to oppress. The new GIS (geographic information systems) frankly scare me. I wonder how long before we forget who’s watching our movements and what they’re doing with it. However, that scary scenario is not part of this particular blog entry.

What is part of this entry is the question about what this means in a commercial context ( beneficent, let’s pretend, just for now .

Wideband social media extends a company’s ears.

• A person doesn’t like (or does like!) your product – you get to hear about it in a casual online complaint. You can move to take care of it immediately, long before it would hit a customer service rep.
• You get to see trends in the marketplace early, through gossip, long before the retailers publish the trend in their public reports – or even before it hits their cash registers.

And getting back to the start of the story, how does this impact commercial cognition?

I don’t have the answer to that yet, but I see an outline. The outline is real and current, just not yet tagged with words. Competitive companies will work it out long before we writers have words around it.

What I see, though, is a corporate idea with millions of remote dendritic connections, remote cognitors that live inside a picture that changes as rapidly as whitewater rapids. The people help paint, recognize, understand, and further change the picture, all at the same time.

(End note: Teilhard de Chardin coined the term “noosphere” (no-o-sphere) in “The Phenomenon of Man” in the early-mid 20th century to describe what he saw as the natural evolution from atoms to multi-cellular organisms (us) to a cognitive entity in which we would be only contributors. Scientific meetings, then the www were considered to be early versions of the noosphere, but from what I’m seeing, both of those pale in comparison to what’s about to happen with broadband social media as enterprising groups realize the power of so many dendritic connections wandering around acting with wideband social media attachments.)

Alistair

Short URL: http://Alistair.Cockburn.us/neurons+with+legs

Come join us Sunday, July 19, 2009 to help the author of  The Whuffie Factor: Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business, Tara Hunt and the crew to live her “dream …to quit my job and karaoke across America, bringing peace, love and brotherhood with me along the way.”

RSVP: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=97903985919

Twitter is yet another example of where brands have to accept a loss of control. In this case, it is not about putting the brand in the hands of the market but in the hands of the people for whom the brand is their livelihood. A certain amount of letting go is a necessity. We will undoubtedly see a few missteps in C-tweets, and we’ll learn and move on. Ultimately, the medium may change but basics of branding still apply — both for the brands themselves and for their executive stewards: Be true, be relevant, be transparent, respect your brand and your customers, don’t make a promise you can’t keep.

Check out the rest of the blog post about C-Level Tweeting at AdAge.

Last week, Yahoo released a real-time Twitter monitoring tool called Sideline. I’ve been playing around with it for a few days, and though it’s no Radian6 monitoring tool, it does have some neat features your company may find useful.

Trending Topics on Twitter

Want to know what the cool kids on Twitter are tweeting about today? Check out Sideline’s Trending Topics screen. This is great for monitoring topic trending related to a conference, new product release, or any other much-talked-about situation that affects your brand name.

Engage Customers Better

You can also create and group custom queries by topics of interest. This allows you to create as many search groups as you’d like. Theres also a Favorites button, and you can reply directly from the Sideline interface to any tweet in your group.

Customer Attitudes Matter

My favorite feature on Sideline is the Advanced Search Builder. It allows you to build a Twitter Search based on Words, People, even Attitudes. Smart companies pay attention not only to mentions of their brand on Twitter, but how people feel about it. A huge credibility free-fall is when a company auto-follows any mention of their brand without taking the time to see if the tweet is bashing the product or praising it. Granted, for some companies, it’s a LOT of work to weed through mentions to ascertain the attitude of the person toward the brand – but this Sideline feature makes this very important job a little easier.

One more note about Sideline: It’s an open-source tool, so have your developers take a look at it.  It’s an Adobe Air app aimed at users looking for info from the Twitter public sideline. Definitely a tool worth taking a look at.

There’s an interesting topic being discussed over on Web-Strategist.  Once again, Jeremiah Owyang challenges us to think of a new paradigm that could change the way companies relate and react to their customers.  Ultimately, I disagree with what he says although I think he’s onto something:  communities of customers, when banded together will have greater power in product development to the extent that companies will have to adjust their product strategies to meet these demands.DIGITAL STREET JOURNAL

You should read the whole article.

I must admit being pleasantly surprised by this new application. SalesForce Inc. is helping corporations harness the real power of social networks – namely the Twitter community. Comcast has been a model in providing solutions to customer problems via Twitter, and is one of the first customers of SalesForce Inc’s new app.

It basically seems to be a way to easily track conversations on Twitter, and is not the only app to provide tracking, but could be the most expensive. Pricing is ”$995 a month for five agents and five business partners, and support for 250 customers.”

Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang wrote about the possibilities for Twitter if it were to create it’s own CRM/brand management tool on his Web Strategist blog.

Read the full BizJournals.com article about SalesForce Inc’s new Twitter CRM app here: http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/othercities/sanfrancisco/stories/2009/03/23/daily4.html?

I happen to love the attention I get from personal brands. There’s nothing like feeling that you’ve been singled out to be chatted up by a Tony Hsieh – CEO of Zappos.com, or Gavy Vaynerchuk from WineLibrary.tv, or any of the many personal brands who are active on social networks.

That’s just one upside…and for me, it’s all personal.

Well, actually, as smart companies know, it’s not all personal. Good one-on-one interaction is good business.

It makes it easy for consumers to choose that company’s products and service offerings. So much beauty in social networking – companies engage in online conversations and customer communities to boost business! Who doesn’t love to feel like they’re getting personally heard from a company representative? It’s so Mom & Pop, but with much better, faster service due to the internet.

So what’s the downside?

The sole person behind a personal brand simply cannot maintain the same level of personal interaction a team who is representing a company can. So, one day a ‘lone cowboy’ personal brand may interact heavily with customers and prospects. The next day, business obligations may prevent any interaction at all.

For some customers, this is just enough for them to loudly proclaim to their social network that Company X sucks because Personal Brand at Company X ignored their pleas for product support, or whatever. You get the idea.

From a customer standpoint, personal brands can potentially cause more brand damage than good for the company. Customers demand attention when they want it, and don’t give a flying flip about anything else that may be more pressing to personal brand respresentative. Upset customers vent all over the internet. The reputation management fallout is a lot more expensive for companies than simply hiring a team to help manage their brand online.

This is all just common sense. Companies, if one of your star employees is looking to become a star on the internet, seriously consider whether it’s in your company’s best interests to support that during work hours. If you decide that your business will thrive by having one shining star out of your employees represent it, definitely develop a contingency plan – a Social Media Brand Management Plan B, if you will, in the unfortunate event of that employee’s exit from the company.

Considering the precarious nature of managing your brand via Social Media in the first place, what should your Social Media Brand Management Plan B entail? Here’s a few, for starters:

• Immediate team brand deployment to regain control of conversations regarding your brand.
• Company branded Twitter, Facebook, etc, social network accounts.
• Full access to conversations and contacts made by your previous social media star