In the time it’s taken you to read this sentence, an approximate 1500-2000 people wrote a Tweet (more on this here), almost double that number of Facebook status updates occurred, and an hour of video was uploaded to YouTube. And many would argue we’re still in the early days of “update mania” and content creation.  Now I don’t have any stats on the nature of those updates, but it’s fair to guesstimate that a decent chunk of them are people praising or lamenting about companies, products, and services. We’ve blogged before on how complex the modern era is for anyone in a company’s marketing department, and are following up with some specific strategies and advice for companies and other agencies to use.

1. Decide on your overall real-time focus
   Not *every* company need pay attention the same way to real-time content the same way. If you are a consumer-facing brand, you probably care a lot about how consumers talk about, use, and think about your product. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they are going to use Twitter to vocalize their sentiment, further it’s entirely likely (and probable) that the cross-section of people who use Twitter to discuss your brand are not representative of the masses who use your brand.  Facebook and MySpace, for example, might not be as hype-driven with regards to media coverage, but together boast over half a billion users.  So before you jump into “real-time”, think about exactly what you want to accomplish, what you need to pay attention to/learn, and then identify the right strategy for those goals.
2. Think long-term before thinking about the instantaneous term
   They don’t call it real-time for nothing!  There are new tools and services cropping up literally every day that let you participate, monitor, interact, engage, observe, and otherwise pay attention to the real-time Web.  If you attempt to use them all, you will inevitably fail in many, which will do more harm than good.  I highly recommend you watch new hype-driven trends with caution until you see where they are going.  This is doubly-true in Silicon Valley, where, as Chris Rock once said, “here today, gone to-day!” I recall back in the “getting hot” days of FriendFeed when Pepsi showed up and created a “Pepsi Room” – as an early adopter of FriendFeed, I was completely skeptical as to their purpose and intent of being there.  They soon after abandoned their room, which made me feel even more like the company was trying to “buy their way in” to where technology influencers were spending their time online.  Google Wave is another example of a new real-time service, this time from the hugeness that is Google, launched with much flair and hype, yet now in a bit of an idle state (from a media perspective). I’m not saying to ignore new technologies or trends, but to be aware of the simple reality that many technologies fail to yield the results often anticipated/associated with them.
3. Staff up accordingly
   You can’t take the same PR/Marcom team you’ve been employing for eons and now tell them they also have to monitor a dozen new services, and be ready to respond in real-time. Further, there are different skills required for different mediums, and the reactions to deal with real-time issues are different from those who might plan out a longer term strategy.  My strongest advice is to have someone on the team (or outsourced to a third party, if well-affiliated) who is a good “crisis-mode” kind of person.  I’d suggest having your overall marketing planning/strategy get built with input from the combination of Team Planned Activity and Team Real-Time.  Which leads me to…
4. Listen and React.
   The classic line of social media marketers is “engage” (also known as “join the conversation”).  This is nice and all, but it’s also about the how, when, and why you react.  First, make sure you have built infrastructure and culture for absorbing feedback – I still meet many companies who have literally one person in charge of product strategy, and virtually no mechanisms of delivering customer feedback to that person.  Real time content and sentiment monitoring is something that should be added to outreach programs, with a focus both on the media and consumers.  It’s vastly different to watch Tweets and blog posts gauging the media’s reaction to your new product than it is to read your actual customers’ opinions after a feature update or new service addition.  Make sure you are appropriately filtering this type of content to the right people. But…
5. Don’t (always) react in real-time!
   Eons ago, when all you had to do to pay attention to social media was watch blogs, we often counseled folks to mostly ignore commentors.  This is a bit of a “dangerous” topic (there happened to be a big debate on it yesterday), so let me explain my position.  Ideally, comments allow anyone in the world to add a little, wait for it, commentary on a given blog post or topic they see.  And if that were exactly how it was used, it’d be great.  But this isn’t fiction, it’s reality, and in the real world, Internet commenting is just barely a notch more mature than the banter in Xbox Live gaming.  For every bit of constructive discussion or actually added-value commentary, there’s the inevitable troll, attacker, competitor, or a variety of comments that bring the conversation way down.  With the massive amounts of ways to “hear” people out there, you simply must assume there are people who you cannot appease.  Use experience and judgment to figure out when a response is warranted versus when the topic will disappear into the ether.  You cannot win them all, and you cannot possibly make everyone love you – I’m not advising not to try, but you do not need to correct every tweet, comment, status update, or other negative mention you find.  This truly is the time when experience helps.
6. If you try something, give it a reasonable commitment
   This goes into the “must-do” category.  You are significantly worse off by jumping in to something new, playing around a teensy bit in a halfhearted manner, then bailing, than you are by never engaging in the first place.  I’ve seen companies “half-listen” on Twitter, which only causes more frustration around their brands.  Ditto for blog/commentor engagement and other real-time interactions.  Pick something, create the plan of how you will fully commit to it and for how long, and then evaluate at the end as to future engagements.  Further, you should communicate your policies – if you are only going to use Twitter to send out company updates, that’s fine (not really, but I understand), but then make sure you are clear about that policy.  To complicate this more…
7. Try not to play favorites
   While it’s understandable (and recommended) to engage with known influencers whenever possible, it’s just as important to engage with “regular folks” as well.  In fact, if you ignore the random people and only pay attention to “named individuals” you are going to have the opposite effect you are seeking by interacting with these services.  You’ll be considered elitist and alienating to your actual customers.  This really ties back in with the aforementioned “staff up” comment – the bigger your brand and the wider your customer base, the more you open yourself up to a radically high quantity of people to engage with.  For organizations that deal with the wider masses of consumers, I recommend having a team in place for dealing with Twitter, Facebook, and any other service where you plan to engage in real-time, and have a system for how to make sure literally nobody falls through the cracks.
8. Clearly communicate your policies
   If you can only monitor Twitter from 9-5 EST, tell people.  If you don’t plan to respond to comments, make that clear.  Whatever you are (or are not) going to do, your customers and the media should know.  Further, as I’ve stated a few times, whatever you commit to, stick to. Consistency is huge.
9. Be personable
   Nobody wants to directly engage with “a brand”, they want to talk to “people at a brand.”  When I see companies having named individuals participate on twitter, communities, forums, or even in comment discussions, I see much more directly engaged users.  This is a major change in thinking for bigger brands, where there’s a “company-first” policy of virtually everything, but in the social media landscape, specifically true in the real-time Web, personalized engagement trumps bland company messaging everytime.  Oh, and this should go without saying, but just in case: don’t make up personas/fake people!
10. Pick the right tools for the job
    Google alerts, even if delivered “as it happens” are slow in comparison with Twitter feeds, RSS, and virtually any monitoring software.  There are a lot of tools to pay attention to real-time activities.  I am not going to endorse nor recommend any specific company, since your needs will unlikely be the same as mine, or someone else’s.  I will say this much: try free stuff, but allocate some budget if you are going to take the space seriously.  Just like anything else, the more you put in, the more you get out.  That said, try not to get fleeced along the way!  Also, you should unquestionably get free trials of services prior to shelling out a dime.  And you should also make sure you’ve had the team who will be using the tools give their feedback – you don’t want to forcefeed technology on the wrong people.
11. Feel free to experiment
    The real-time Web isn’t exactly the Wild West, but it is safe to say there’s so much in flux that there’s exactly a specific blueprint we can all follow.  Much of my advice here is on how to formulate your strategy.  The tools and services used today may be gone next year or next month, or may be growing like the weeds in my garden.  While you should have a sound plan in place to execute upon, it’s certainly okay to try new things and see how they go.  Maybe a Retweet contest will put your brand into the limelight, or maybe it’ll get ignored.  Learn from it, adapt, try again, etc.
12. Beware false prophets
    The number of people who can honestly say they’ve mastered these skills is roughly zero.  The rules are changing far too fast, and there’s far too short a history to claim true expertise.  If you are hiring individuals, consultants, or agencies, ask very specific questions and look for very specific answers before making decisions.  Just because someone can advise you on how to create a Twitter account doesn’t mean they know what to do when a behind-the-scenes video leaks onto YouTube!  Community engagement is not the same as crisis management.  Blog writing and engaging on forums are different skills.  Sure, some people will be capable of managing all of this, but think through your needs deeply, and don’t accept glib responses, internet-famous people, nor shallow resumes to manage such critical work!

I hope this is helpful for any company seeking to engage with consumers in new, fun, interesting, and productive ways.  We feel like we’re still learning a lot of this here at Stage Two, and will start putting up some product/service reviews in the coming weeks.  Looking forward to comments on what areas we may have missed!

Today, the entire team from Stage Two spent the entire morning helping the community. For the second time this year, we were honored to participate in some community service at the San Francisco Food Bank to do some social good – a perfect tie in to Social Media Week in the city. Joining us this time were Alyce Lindquist, the president of the San Francisco/Silicon Valley chapter of the Social Media Club and Dana Oshiro, writer for tech blog ReadWriteWeb.

While last time we had a good time packaging orzo pasta, this time we were needed to package cabbage and oranges that would be sent to schools and other non-profit agencies who would distribute the goods to those who needed it. You might think it was tedious work for the three hours, but it was really fun to talk with other volunteers and the employees there about the Food Bank’s mission.

To help highlight our efforts to bring social good to Social Media Week, both Jeremy and Dana Oshiro were guests on the Social Media Hour – a weekly podcast that highlights different trends in the industry and is hosted by storyteller and thought-leader Cathy Brooks. You can listen to the entire podcast by clicking here.

At the end of the day, our reward was hearing how much we have helped the community. For just three hours, we packaged around 12,000 pounds of food! If you consider the fact that 150,000 people in the city alone go hungry every day, the amount that was done in such a short time just by volunteering speaks volumes and can greatly help the people that truly need it.

To help out at the San Francisco Food Bank or to learn more about what you can do, please click here.

Here are some photos from our time at the SF Food Bank (and even a short video!)

Most of the entire gang that helped out today at the San Francisco Food Bank

Team Stage Two and volunteers packaging cabbage

Jeremy Toeman doing some social good

Even the oranges were happy for the help!

David Speiser helping to package some oranges

Mielle Sullivan with her specially formed orange

Jeremy Toeman just can’t stop himself from packaging oranges!

Clicker.com is partnering with a major, public CA university to provide access to an enormous index of online content.  The University of California, Los Angeles has created a portal to Clicker.com on their student site, my.ucla.com

This serves a number of different purposes:

1. Original student-generated and University-generated content will be indexed on Clicker.com for student (and public) convenience
2. All the regular (network and other broadcast content) indexed on Clicker is available to students
3. This provides a comprehensive guide to legal content available on the Internet
4. Rather than downloading or BitTorrenting content they want to watch, students can use Clicker to find legal versions hosted online. Clicker is a great solution for this because:
   • they index full length and high-quality show
   • they index TV shows, movies, and music videos
   • they let you know what is (and what isn’t) available online
   • they have a huge index of content (400,000 episodes from more than 7,000 shows)

The MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) has offered a quote in the release, supporting the effort by private companies and public universities to offer legal viewing options for content online.  This announcement went live through a press release this morning at 6AM PST.  Already several publications have covered the news, we’ve added links below for the coverage we’ve tracked, and we’ll update as we see new stories appear.

• LA Times
• ReadWriteWeb
• SoCal Tech

Today marks the beginning of Social Media Week around the world. Social media enthusiasts gather in Berlin, London, New York, Sao Paulo, Toronto and here in San Francisco. To kick off the week, Chris Heuer & Kristie Wells of Social Media Club organized the Social Media Camp in the Presidio. Designed to be both a conference and an unconference, today’s event centered around helping people understand social media. Presenters offered much more than a “101″ view on social media and gave lively and informative discussions on things like how you can measure your return on investment, creating a social media business, understanding the synaptic web, professional storytelling and a panel that addresses the reality of the real-time web.

If you’ve never been to an unconference before, the standard model is that at the beginning, the attendees submit panels that they are interested in participating in, typically as a speaker/panelist. Once voted on, the ones the majority find interesting are placed into different times. Essentially the agenda isn’t set until that actual day so participants will be able to have a thorough and customized plan for the day.

The Social Media Camp opened with three great keynotes. The first one was by Echo founder Khris Loux who talked about the synaptic web and how the depth of connections was a powerful mechanism designed to continuously bring important information to our attention. After that, Ribbits/BT’s Vice President of Web Services, Kevin Marks, took the stage to promote the chief communication officer before Cathy Brook’s thought-provoking keynote on personal storytelling and why the hell we are really matters.

Afterwards, the agenda went into full swing with breakout “camp” sessions and more panels that helped educate and influence the way people used social media. According to the organizers, the hope was that the attendees would enjoy hearing from leading voices in social media and make some connections with people of different backgrounds.

Even our very own Jeremy Toeman took part in helping to educate folks at Social Media Camp. During the last panel, he teamed up with Collecta co-founder Brian Zisk and ReadWriteWeb’s community manager & blogger/reporter Jolie O’Dell to wage battle on the reality of the real-time web. It was a lively debate on how people how people have & are responding to customers almost immediately and even presented some great takeaways.

When all was said and done, the attendees left hearing from these “thought leaders” on a wide arrange of topics. It wasn’t about how to use Twitter or what benefit you could get from Facebook fan pages or anything elementary. The Social Media Camp helped teach people how to communicate using social media with an emphasis on listening and customer service. It was all about understanding the fundamentals of social media and not about transparency, authenticity, credibility or any other buzz word imagined.

So for the opening day of Social Media Week, I’d say it was a good one. I’m definitely looking forward to seeing more in the next few days.

I wanted to call this a tweetup, but if I’m blogging it I think that breaks the rules? Just kidding. Anyhow, a bunch of us mobile/gadget/convergence folks wanted to get together, chat about how the world just changed (or didn’t), and also talk in advance of Mobile World Congress (aka 3GSM).  We’ve teamed up with Lisa Whelan, from SocializeMobilize, to gather fun people and the great people at Jillian’s (at the Metreon, spitting distance from the event. literally) put aside a little space for us.

No RSVP needed, but all the details are available here.  Looking forward to seeing you there.

I’ll buy a drink for the first person to show up WITH whatever new thing got announced at the event. :)  Yes, multiple winners if there are multiple things.

BTW – you can visit my personal blog to see recent thoughts I’ve shared on the supposed tablet.

No client updates, no social media marketing thoughts, nothing but a brief plea to send some help to those in need in Haiti.  Our friend Andru Edwards at gearlive.com has put together a great gift-matching program, and we’re supporting it.  The Red Cross has created an SMS-based donation plan, and we along with a few other groups and individuals will gift match to a certain dollar amount.  Details:

Starting now, if you send an SMS donation to either the Red Cross (by texting the word HAITI to 90999) or to YELE (by texting the word YELE to 501501) Gear Live will match it, up to $500. In addition, we have a bunch of our friends joining in as well:

• David Geller of Eyejot and WhatCounts will match up to $2500
• Leslie Camacho, President of EllisLab (which makes the fantastic ExpressionEngine CMS) will personally match up to $600
• Nate True of Tap Tap Revenge and iPhone hacking fame will match up to $500
• Jeremy, Adam, and the team at Stage Two will match up to $500
• Dave Taylor, the man behind AskDaveTaylor.com, will match up to $250
• Don McAllister of Screencasts Online will match up to $250
• Robert Scoble, the face behind Building43, will match up to $200
• Local Gear Live fan Shauna Causey will match up to $100
• Parnassus Ventures, the folks behind 140: The Twitter Conference, will match up to $100
• Jason Neudecker, a Gear Live Twitter follower, will match up to $100
• TechieDiva.com will match up to $50

In total, so far, that’s $4500 $5400 $5650 in pledged matching donations! For each donation you make, each entity above will match it, until their limit is reached. In other words, with our current eight eleven twelve contributors, your $10 donation will actually be matched six nine eleven twelve times, resulting in a $70 $100 $120 $130 payment. So, what do you need to do? This is the easy part. Just scroll down and leave us a comment letting us know that you made a donation, and whether it was a $5 or $10 contribution. If you do it multiple times, let us know that too. Even better, if you want to be on our list as a person or company that will match donations, let us know!

I just read a piece which claims that over 300,000 people are now homeless.  And this is a poor country with very little quality infrastructure – in other words, it’s not going to just “get better” without some serious help.

Huge kudos to the Red Cross, Andru Edwards, and the millions of people who will inevitably help.

As one side note, and not to distract from this, we at Stage Two have decided we’ll be making a monthly stop at the SF Food Bank.  If you feel moved to help the ONE in FIVE residents of San Francisco that live at or below the poverty line, please get in touch and you can join us!

The Pogoplug launched at CES last year, so coming back this year with the second generation and a bunch of new features was a celebration. We saw some old friends, met some new ones and had a lot of Showstoppers style fun.

This year, CES was all about the connected home: gadgets and appliances that communicate to each other and the pull information off the web. The Pogoplug, already being a master of connectivity, expanded it’s range to the PS3 and XBox. Now you can view photos, share files and stream music and movies through your Pogoplug –all without putting down your game controller.

The company also announced its first retail partnerships: you can now find the Pogoplug through TigerDirect.com on shelves at Fry’s electronics–just look for the pink box.

VUDU is at the Consumer Electronics Show today (as are most of the staff of Stage Two btw.)  They have a few amazing pieces of news to share today, and have issued not just one, but two press releases to announce that news to the world.  The brief synopsis of that news, in three parts, is as follows:

1. Expansion with existing partners – many new HDTVs and Blu-ray players (BDPs) with VUDU on them will ship in 2010 from exisiting partners LG Electronics, Mitsubishi and VIZIO.
2. New partners: Samsung, SANYO, Sharp and Toshiba will all ship products in 2010 with VUDU services embedded, both HDTVs and BDPs.
3. Launching VUDU Apps: The VUDU Apps platform delivers a wide range of Internet services and applications to HDTVs and BDPs.  These services include streaming video, music on demand, photo browsing, social networking and more.  More than 100 applications are available on VUDU Apps, including Pandora, Picasa, Flickr, Dailymotion and leading news providers, such as The New York Times and The Associated Press.

The VUDU blog post goes into additional detail.  VUDU is announcing this from Las Vegas, as some of their CE partners also announce the relationship as well via press release or press conference (or both.)

CES is always a noisy time of year to try and announce something important and expect to get significant news coverage.  But VUDU has managed to transmit some signal despite the noise, and a few outlets have already covered the news.  The full list is below, and we’ll update as we see coverage come in.

• Gizmodo
• NYT
• NewTeeVee
• Engadget
• LA Times
• CE Pro
• IGN
• PC Magazine
• Electronic House

VUDU Apps

It’s been a while since we’ve moved into the new office and we definitely wanted to celebrate the holidays, so we figured that this year, we’d knock off some long-delayed things to celebrate, including having a nice office “housewarming” party and  to celebrate our third-year anniversary.

To help spruce up our place, we turned to our friends at 1:AM gallery and Quinn Wharton who generously provided art and photography work that is currently hanging on our walls. And not one to leave our friends famished and parched at a party, the fine folks at Work of Art event planning & catering made some delicious hors d’oeuvres and set them up on our very own meat tree – yes, you heard that right…we had an artificial tree that was filled with meat on a stick on the tree. It was absolutely delicious!

Stage Two also made a couple of cool announcements as well, including a new “soon-to-be” website for the company and our next new product called Gunman – the first iPhone First Person Shooter using augmented reality. We encourage you to give it a shot and to let us know what you think.

We thank you for stopping by our office for our Holi-Warming-Versary party and regardless of whether you were there or not, here’s a recap of photos:

Some of the artwork provided by 1:AM Gallery

Photography art provided by Quinn Wharton

Legacy Locker’s Gregg Delman

Stage Two’s Adam Burg & Jeremy Toeman

It’s our very own meat tree!

Decorating the meat tree.

Transforming the Stage Two office.

Ron Hirson of BOKU and Sol Lipman of 12seconds.tv

David Cohn of Spot.us and Stage Two’s Jim Schaff

David Cohn, Dave Mathews, Jim Schaff & Kevin Brown checking out Gunman

Jeremy Toeman with CNET’s Rafe Needleman

And what holiday party wouldn’t be complete without some Foosball? It’s David Speiser, Gregg Delman, Andrew Kippen & Jim Schaff.

To view more photos from our holiday party, please click here.

So the secret is finally out. The hours of playing Call of Duty have finally paid off. Today, Stage Two Labs is absolutely jazzed about the release of the world’s first augmented reality first person shooter for the iPhone – aptly titled “Gunman”.

We’ve been playing for hours around the office, hiding under desks and popping around corners – basically acting like kids again. Gunman combines all the fun of real-world games like paintball and lasertag, without requiring people to carry around any special equipment other than their iPhone.

The result is a laser-tag style game that takes the fast-paced multiplayer action of popular online and console titles and brings the war into the real world by allowing players to target their friends and see who *really* has the most skills.  Once a target is hit, players can save or Tweet “scoped” pictures of their favorite hits to the world – making the target’s shame eternal and proving their dominance as a Gunman. In addition to the local multiplayer version, players can “go Pro” in a solo mode by collecting bounties on celebrities appearing on the Gunman “Hit List”, and even track their prey via location-based service Foursquare (Ashton Kutcher, MC Hammer, Shaq, and 50 Cent should watch their backs). Of course, this is only the beginning, Gunman will receive regular updates such as team-based tactical missions (like capture the flag mode), an arsenal of new weapons, an international leaderboard, and more.

The game uses a variety of high technology services to create a fun and engaging experience for the players.  Some key components include:

• Gameplay involves “augmented reality” by adding layered services on the iPhone’s camera
• Detecting “hits” is done through a proprietary new color detection system.
• Local multiplayer gaming includes automatic peer discovery of other players.
• Sharing one’s accomplished shots incorporates the popular Twitter and Twitpic services
• Finding targets on the leaderboard is integrated with Foursquare for location lookup

Download the game here

Check out the Gunman website here

• Engadget says Gunman “finally makes augmented reality awesome”