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I’m looking for people who have a business, site, or social network that somehow figured a way to latch onto a big news story (e.g. Presidential Election or Michael Jacksons death) for critical and financial success? Did you and your business do this? If so, I want to hear your STORY.

• What did you create? And how did you actually connect it to your business/site/social network?
• What was the net result? Did you get traffic, an increase in your social network, a surge in revenue, and/or
  critical recognition?
• What did you learn from the experience?

Got a story?

PLEASE email me at daspark AT gmail DOT com. Thanks.

NOTE: This is for Mashable so Im looking for people who did things online. So stories about selling Michael Jackson memorial t-shirts for profit is not relevant. Thanks.

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I discuss it all with Curtis on his show. Listen to the 11 minute segment, or download it.

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NOTE: My criteria for including a feed is number one if it actually provided valuable information specific to the San Francisco community.

Take a look at the list. All provided valuable San Francisco information as do I (sometimes) at @dspark.

News
@abc7NewsBayArea, @Kron4News, @SFChron_Alert, @Green960, @SFist, @KTVU, @SF_Weekly, @SFBG, @KCBS_Morning, @KRON4News, @KCBSNews, @KGORadio, @ActionNewsSF, @NBCBayArea, @SFBusinessTimes (SF business news), @SFCityInsider

News outside of SF, but in Bay Area
@MercuryNews, @Oakland_News, @InsideBayArea

Extremely local news
@94110Now (Mission and Castro district) @NoeValleySF, @CurbedSF (real estate news)

News aggregators
@BreakingSFNews, @CaliforniaBeat, @SanFranNews, @SFnews, @topix_sf

Alerts
@sf311 (Access San Francisco’s 311 services through this account), @SanFran_Weather , @CAQuake, @Emergency_In_SF

Transit
@realBARTworkers, @streetblogSF (Street level news alerts, with a lot covering local transit), @SF_Flyer (Alerts on cheap flights out of SF), @MuniDiaries, @SFMuniRy, @Caltrain, @SFBART, @NJudah

Events/Entertainment
@GoldenGatePark (Events going on at Golden Gate Park), @7×7Magazine, @Lovings (SF escorts), @BayAreaCheap, @BayAreaTreks, @FamilyEvents_SF, @BayAreaGetaways, @TheFillmore_SF, @SFhappenings, @IgnighterSF (group dating for Gen Y community), @SFupDates, @AmoebaMusic, @FillmoreSF, @Flavorpill_SF, @CitysearchSF, @freesanfran, @SFshows, @EventSanFran, @SFparty, @MyOpenBar_SF (alerts you about open bar events in San Francisco), @SF_FilmSociety, @SanFranMag, @sfstation, @106KMEL, @LIVE105, @SFStandUp (news on the SF stand up comedy scene), @SFZoo, @GoldstarSF

Food
@bayareabites, @SFoodie, @crembruleecart (Food cart that roves in SF. Where’s the next location?)

Sports
@SFGiants_News, @CSNBayArea, @OaklandAs

Government
@SFgov, @sfprotest (SF protest news), @Schwarzenegger, @GavinNewsom

Religious Groups
Jewish: @JewishBayArea, @sfJbay, @JewishSF (News from the J magazine)
NOTE: I’m having a difficult time finding other San Francisco religious groups on Twitter. If you can recommend any, please let me know.

Miscellaneous
@GrouponSF (One coupon every day for SF that you can purchase for deep discounts)

As a reminder, if you have any more recommendations for San Francisco-specific Twitter accounts to follow, let me know.

In other news, since I’m such a big San Francisco fan, I sometimes give walking tours of the city through my friend’s business FOOT! Tours. These are comedian-led walking tours. I’m a former stand up comic myself. My specific tour is entitled, “Nude, Lewd, and Crude: The Rise of Strippers, Beats, and Comedians in North Beach from the 1950s to 1970s.” If you’re interested in taking my tour or any others, contact FOOT! Tours through their site.

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With that said, here’s my personal Twittering policy. I invite you to share yours as well.

The only times I send out a tweet is if it satisfies one of the following conditions:

• Share - If I find something cool online, I’ll share it, with a link.
• Self promotion - If I just created something (e.g. article, video), I want people to see it.
• Promote others - If a friend is doing something I like, or an event is happening I want others to attend, I’ll happily promote it.
• Be funny - Sometimes I just have something funny to tweet.
• Question - If I’m having a problem that I think my followers could answer.
• Answer a question - If someone has a question for which I know the answer.

Two last personal rules:

• If what I want to tweet doesn’t satisfy any of those conditions, I don’t tweet it. (On very rare occasions I’ve broken this rule.)
• All my tweets must be self contained. Meaning that each tweet can be read and understood on its own, and has value. I don’t write tweets for which you’d have to be following my conversation to know what I’m referencing.

Do you have a personal Twitter policy? Does it achieve some personal or company goal? Does it help you build your brand? Or have you not even thought about it until now? Let me know.

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Jeremiah Owyang, Forrester

“We did research and asked consumers who they trust. 90% [of the people responded] said ‘people like them.’ Under 10% [of the people responded] trusted corporate blogs,” said Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester, as reported by Louis Gray at the San Francisco American Marketing Association (SFAMA) event last week, “How Tech Bloggers are Leading the Marketing 2.0 Revolution.”

Owyang is an industry friend and respected social media analyst, but I find this result to be obvious, yet at the same time misleading to the entire story of what corporations can do in the social media sphere. The question of “Do you trust corporate blogs?” is a leading question. Of course we know how people are going to answer it.

I attended the SFAMA event last Thursday and because I got distracted, I didn’t get a chance to question Jeremiah further. If I had, I know I would get a more in depth story, since consulting about social media for large corporations is what Owyang does for a living. The problem is when someone of his stature uses his well respected research outlet to make public statements such as, “Only ten percent of people trust corporate blogs” it resonates as if there’s no hope for corporations in social media and they simply should give up.

What were the questions Forrester asked that yielded those results? If all you do is simply ask a question, “Do you trust your friends’ blogs or corporate blogs more?” of course you’re going to get people saying they trust their friends over corporations. Even if Forrester split that question into two questions, it still would be lopsided.

What I’ve learned from all the social media events I’ve attended and research I’ve read is that social media research is chock full of leading questions. I’m sure that Forrester asked more involved questions, but unfortunately “corporate blogs are not trusted” is the result that’s being quoted. What researchers need to do is spend more time questioning the reader to see if there is any preconceptions, confusion, or conflicting stories. That’s where the real stories in social media research lie.

For example, sure, go ahead and ask that leading question, “Do you trust corporate blogging?” But then dig deeper and see if there are inconsistencies. Start asking the respondents the following questions:

• Do you read the blog Nuts about Southwest or follow @SouthwestAir on Twitter?
• Do you read any of Zappos’ blogs or follow @Zappos on Twitter?

(Continue asking if they read or follow any other well known corporate brands in the social media sphere)

• Can you remember anything you read? Have you ever commented, retweeted, or responded to anything they’ve said?

You’ll be surprised that the same people who fell in the camp of “not trusting corporate brands” are also huge fans of well known and trusted corporate brands such as Southwest Airlines and Zappos. If you read, respond, and have a personal connection with a blog or Twitter account, you know there’s a person behind it. In those cases, do those respondents who track Southwest and Zappos even consider them as corporate brands?

What I would have liked to hear Owyang say, “Yes, we got people saying they hated corporate brands, but when we dug deeper, we discovered that they loved corporate brands that had a strong social media presence.” The problem is there’s a preconceived notion when people are asked, “Do you trust corporate blogs?” Please note that I am making this up and it’s only my prediction, but I’m sure there’s plenty of truth to it and I invite Owyang and anybody else who researches social media to agree or refute my estimates.

IDC’s misleading research about online advertising

A year ago I attended another social media conference, the SWAT Summit in San Francisco, and a woman from the research outlet IDC conducted an analysis of consumer social media use and attitudes towards targeted online advertising on social networking services (SNS). In the study, IDC asked people the question, “Do you want services tracking your online behavior and information so as to serve you more targeted advertisements?” Once again, as you might imagine, the overwhelming response was no. At the same time, they also asked people if they use Web 2.0 services such as Facebook, Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, and Gmail which all track user behavior to serve up more targeted advertising. Do people even know that? Would they stop using them if they knew that? Did they even connect the question they were being asked to the way those tools behave?

Here’s what I was amazed by. The IDC researcher didn’t cross reference those responses. There’s obviously a huge discrepancy between what people say they want and what they actually use when it comes to Web 2.0 services. At the time, the IDC presenter said that since she had the information, all she needed to do was cross reference the results and she’ll get her answer. She said she would send those results to me. Guess what? It’s been one year and there’s no information. I’ll send her a reminder.

BTW, as a side note. In every single case where I’ve asked the question of “Do you have this information?” I often get the response, “Not right now, but I’ll send it to you.” In all the years that I’ve asked that question, no one has ever followed up, ever. I think they think if I’m really interested I’ll follow up with them and hound them.

Research companies need to tell the stories of discrepancies

The cross referencing of IDC’s research, between what people say they want and what they actually use is the story they should have uncovered. And that’s exactly what research companies such as IDC and Forrester need to do. Go ahead and ask the obvious questions, but show where people are confused about the tools they’re using. Don’t let them get away with an answer such as “security is really important to me” without discovering how often they change their passwords.

Ultimately though IDC’s data didn’t go deep enough and I need to learn more about the Forrester study.

My question out to all of you reading this is, do you take social media research results at face value or do you question them? Do you question the research methodologies? Do you simply never question the studies because you implicitly trust the research outfit? I mean, geez, it’s Forrester, it’s IDC, they’ve got to know more about research than I do, right?

No, not always. Because they’re not going for the stories that the research can reveal. It’s your job to push them and to constantly ask the questions. There’s always a story to be told.

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No surprise that the mood of the room was that cloud computing is inevitable. The argument, as Sagan pointed out, is that every category now has a SAAS solution.

Here’s Sagan’s simple overview of cloud computing.

Ingredients for Cloud Computing

1. Via the Internet
2. Outsourced, shared infrastructure
3. Scalable resources
4. On demand
5. Metered use
6. Reporting, insight, and security

Why cloud has become inevitable

1. Acceptance of Web-Enabled Technologies
2. Economics of shared infrastructure
3. Accelerating application time to market
4. Security Improvements
5. Greater efficiency and “Being Green”

Cloud Computing Enablers

1. Virtualization (VMWare, Xen Server, Windows Server 2008) (below, built on top of each other)
2. Infrastructure as a Service (Amazon Web Services, EMC2, Sun, HP, IBM, Savvis, Terremark) - enables this.
3. Application Platform as a Service (force.com, Azure, AWS, Netsuite, Google App Engine)
4. Software as a Service (salesforce.com, NetSuite, Taleo, OfficeLive, Autodesk, Concur, Bullhorn)

During Sagan’s sales pitch for Akamai, he claims (as he’s done for the past tne years), that the missing layer is optimization.

Top CIO Concerns with Cloud Computing (in order of concern)

1. Security
2. Performance
3. Availability
4. Integration
5. Customization

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Andy Sernovitz, Gaspedal

Andy Sernovitz’s company Gaspedal produced BlogWell, a half-day seminar of social media case studies. A total of eight companies presented, but I could only be in the room for four of the sessions. Here’s a summary of the sessions I attended and what I thought it was cool and what was not cool.

Cool/Not-so-cool (UPDATED) - Announce engagement options upfront - At the meeting’s onset, the presenter announced that they welcome everyone to blog and tweet at the conference. The Twitter hashtag for the event was #blogwell and that if you added @gaspedal to your tweet they would retweet your tweet. It also verged on not-so-cool because they never actually put those words up on the giant screen to remind us what to do.

UPDATE: I am updating this post and calling it “Not-so-cool” because @gaspedal didn’t retweet people’s tweets yesterday like they said they would. In fact, they only retweeted two tweets when there were more than 40 tweets that @ replied his company Gaspedal. My tweet wasn’t one of those two tweets. Andy spoke at great length about ethics during his presentation midway through the show (see below “Social media rules of disclosure”) and I think he kind of blew it. I don’t think it was intentional because that’s not Andy’s style, but unfortunately that’s how it came off. His partner publicly asked the audience for publicity and said he would return the favor, and he didn’t. I chatted over email with Andy about this and he admitted that it fell through the cracks as there were many issues going on at the event and unfortunately they missed this one. But it’s not too late to rectify it. I invite Andy to now go ahead and retweet all those people that @ replied his company.

I should also mention that Andy was very kind to give me a pass to come to his event.

Cool - Don’t give coupons away online, mail them - Want to start a mailing list of people interested in your product? Mail them a coupon instead of letting them print one out for free. Yoplait Kids asked a simple question of their audience of moms: “If you liked our product so much, would you give us your name and address if we mailed you a free coupon?” Many of them said yes. General Mills collected the addresses, and the moms got the coupons. Later in the campaign they gave away coupons online and lowered the value on them. Ultimately, General Mills gave away 285,000+ free to high value coupons to moms and the redemption was exceptional. In return for the blogs, Yoplait Kids got tons of online conversation in traditional and new media. A total of  5,800 placements with 800+ on blogs. All those mentions delivered nearly 100 million impressions, said David Witt, General Mills Brand PR.

Cool - Influence of mom bloggers - Social media is the most credible and effective way to reach moms. I learned this last year when I attended the BlogHer conference in San Francisco. And according to a study they did last year with Compass Partners, more than half of women consider blogs a reliable source of advice. Not only that, but General Mills learned very quickly that mom bloggers want to give their opinion. For Yoplait kids, General Mills identified and built relationships with mom bloggers that would find their information relevant. They targeted moms with kids 0 to 4 years of age. They provided product information, samples, coupons, and prize packs that they could give away. In addition, they partnered with influential sites such as Sittercity, Modern Mom, Bargain Briana, TwitterMoms, Savvy Auntie, MommySavers, MomSpace, MomLogic, and My BlogSpark. This helped them get a a nice response from traditional media as well.

Cool - Reputation management system based on points - SAP gives points to community members for participating and contributing. You get points for blogging, wiki entries, reviews, and presenting at live events. Not redeemable, but you get reputation within the community.

Not-so-cool - PowerPoint presentations with way too much text - Uggh, when will people ever learn that you can’t copy and paste a document into a PowerPoint presentation? SAP’s presentation about communities was flooded with tons of text all over the screen. Much of it was really small so that us in the back of the room couldn’t read it. Nor are we speed readers that can also concentrate on what the speaker is saying at the same time. Yes SAP, you may have created tons of fantastic communities, but if you want to tell us your success story, you’ll have to reduce confusion. Deliver it to us all in a digestable format, not showing and telling us everything all at once. Reveal a little bit at a time over time. The overwhelming volume on text on screen was so distracting that it actually took away from the presenter. Honestly, I had a hard time understanding his points because with all that text it was unclear what the points were. And now I’ve stopped paying attention to him.

Not-so-cool - Making your presentation non-applicable to the audience - SAP’s presentation was so self-centric. It was all about SAP with no learning points as to how you could apply community within your organization.

Cool - Social media rules of disclosure - Sadly I have to say this is cool because basic rules of ethics in social media still need to be taught. Andy Sernovitz reminded the audience of word of mouth marketers that the average reader needs to understand the relationship between the content, who produced it, and their relationship to the organization in question. To pull this off you need to answer these questions: Who are you? Were you paid? Is it your real opinion? Often, said Sernovitz, you can answer all these questions at once with one simple statement, “I work for Company X, and this is my personal opinion.”

Sernovitz went on to explain that the two areas where we fall into trouble is when companies forget to train their employees about these ethical processes. And second when you question if something is ethical or not. Simple rule of thumb, if you have to ask if doing something would be considered unethical, then the answer is always no. If you questioned it, you’re probably not the only one.

Not-so-cool - Presenting a “case study” without explaining what you did - Kaiser Permanente’s case study “Harvesting the Low-Hanging Fruit of Internal Social Media Channels” was supposed to be about using internal collaboration tools to connect employees within a very large organization (160,000 employees). The entire presentation was spent on what their problems were but without focus. At one point she did explain that they used a wiki to reduce requirements. But many of the problems she presented she never answered, such as “How do you find people with expertise within your organization,” “How do you get people to collaborate,” and “How do you innovate within the organization?” She did explain that they have tools that they use, Jive Software, but she never explained why they chose Jive and how they actually used the tools to allow people to connect and collaborate. How did they get people to actually use the tools? In her entire presentation, there was one brief success story on one slide, but the rest was all very vague.

Cool - Integrating social media into your application - In an effort to help people who get confused and stressed by their products, Intuit is beginning to integrate social media directly into its products, such as QuickBooks. As you’re working, QuickBooks searches the social media sphere to find discussions on the area of the application you’re struggling with.

Cool - Shift from measuring impressions to growing connections - Consumer products such as Pepsi fall into the cycle of watching interest in their product go up and down with each marketing campaign. Shoot out a ton of advertising get lots of impressions. Stop the advertising and the interest falls away. Josh Karpf, Manager, Digital Media at PepsiCo wanted to move away from this yo-yo effect and to the gradual upward slope of growing your audience. To acheive this, here are some projects they tried that helped in building connections with their audience.

• To promote Pepsi’s logo Pepsi sent cans with different designs from over the decades to 25 influential bloggers and invited them to a Friendfeed room to engage in conversation.
• One person tried to fake Pepsi’s official Twitter handle (@PepsiCo) by following everyone interested in Pepsi and it caused a lot of confusion as to which was the official Pepsi account. Pepsi made a public statement and Twitter ID’ed the fake Pepsi handle and shut it down.
• Podcast playground at SXSW - At must meet events such as SXSW in Austin, TX, Pepsi created a studio where bloggers and podcasters were able to record their podcast and have an experience with the Pepsi brand.
• Track trends at SXSW - Showed visualizations of conversations on Twitter for others to see at the event.
• Hired video bloggers at SXSW

For more, check out Renee Blodgett’s write up as well. She covered a few sessions I wasn’t able to attend.

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Frances and Angela had just been eliminated/quit NBC’s “reality” show, “I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here” (Here’s their bio page on the show site). They’re scheduled to go back to Costa Rica to film the last few days of the show, which will air live. (UPDATE: According to their Twitter update, Frangela will NOT be going back to Costa Rica for the finale.) My wife and I had lunch with Frangela in Los Angeles, and the two of them told us all the horror stories of the production crew.

Watch “I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here” and it looks as if all the celebrities are sitting around doing a lot of nothing. That’s far from the case. The production crew constantly had the celebrities working their tails off: hiking, washing clothes, emptying latrine, gathering firewood, purifying water, making food from scratch, and more. But you never actually see any of that. While they truly were in the jungles of Costa Rica, all the hot lights on them makes it look like a sound stage.

Plus, the producers didn’t seem to truly care about the health of the people on camera. People would be getting hurt on camera, for example Lou Diamond Phillips got bitten by a rat, and the enormous production crew just stood there and stared instead of rushing to his aid or at bare minimum calling someone who could help. In addition, the producers simply forgot to give any of the celebrities bug spray for the first few days and everyone got horribly bitten up. I saw the bites all over Angela’s legs and arms.

Watch my eight minute video interview with Frangela as they dish the dirt on the show “I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here.”

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