Brians_cat and PETCO haz a conversation

That’s right folks.  PETCO pays Natalie Davis, Director of E-commerce to talk to pets.  We even convinced her to get her cat Leo to start getting up and running on Twitter.

We cats are better equipped than you humans for taking over the social media sphere anyway.  Here’s just a few signs of our prowess:

1. The expression is LOLCats.  Ever see a LOLhuman? Pssh.
2. Cats sleep 18 hours a day, so we’re better rested.  Besides, humans are always too busy “working” to mess with Twitter as we cat professionals are.
3. We outrank you.  @Sockington has 3/4 of a million users following him on Twitter.  Ashton Kutcher and CNN are clearly fronts for the feline empire.
4. Twitter is a bird.  Cats catch birds.  We’ve caught you.

Image credit: Twitkitteh

This has been an informal update by Brian’s Cat - if you want more informal thoughts, follow me on Twitter.

photo credit miamisunpost.com

Unfortunately in the past once the excitement of the event dissipated the attendees often fall back into their daily grind and lose their zeal. The positive drive is taken away by the dream stealers and opposing elements. The mega builders in the MLM industry have spoke of this for as long as I can remember. They were always looking for a paradigm shift. Looking forward from where I am at, has technology brought this downward spiral to an end? Can the mix of an online presence keep the energy going?

Let’s look at online social networking; we have so many places to congregate. Every day I am approached by someone new with an idea or thought on how to make communication online one step easier. Although most of the concepts are spun over and over, often there is a spark of true imagination that pops into view. The main downfall of so many ideas is the lack of true open communication. It is difficult to pass the same feelings over phone, let alone a keyboard. If you lack communicative skills you may feel that your voice may never be heard. Video and webcams do help to transfer the visual imagery to a point. If there was a way to capture the intimate relation of one on one conversation like that of being in person, online long distance communications would also see a parabolic leap in growth.

I am one of the biggest supporters of both online and offline congregative tools. Conferences and Barcamps are great for connecting with your online social graph, but only occur over large periods of time. Refresh Miami and Social Media Club of South Florida hold monthly meetings that I have attended for close to a year now. (Both organizations are opening events, some may be near you.) Before that I was also very active in the local Meetups that are held here in South Florida. Now there has been a great surge in Tweetups popping up all around me. Some are even specializing these Tweetup events. Craig of Worst Pizza has taken this idea even further with starting Pizza Tweetups. These events are great sources of support for your online endeavors. They help you to cement your online bonds with the brick and mortar world that many of us are quickly leaving behind. Plus they are a great source to build your social graph with users that would ordinarily not friend you till a physical connection has been made.

I wrote this post to quite some thoughts on what needs to be addressed about online and offline social networking. Do we really need that physical connection to build our networks or is a virtual world something that we are all going to embrace in the future? Tell me, do we really need to attend offline events to grow? Are these events something that will advance the online world? Are these offline events dragging back the innovations that we need to make the next leap forward to a truly virtual world?

What is your view?

The idea of group learning has fascinated me since high school when I realized how much faster and better I could prepare for a test if I studied with friends.

Maybe that’s why when I happened upon the first Plurkshop last spring, I was hooked. And then when I heard Mack Collier (of The Viral Garden and the new MackCollier.com) was leading a weekly workshop on blogging, I knew I had to check it out.

Perhaps, like me, you’ve been to workshops where someone “leads” (ie has complete control of the conversation) and the only real communication that happens is when the leader asks a question and allows the participants to answer it.

When you attend a blogchat, forget that idea. Instead, picture a giant round table discussion, limited only by the number of people who are interested in the subject.

To enter, all you have to have is twitter, although it’s handy to use a chat program such as Tweetchat to make the tweets easier to read. Tweetchat will also append #blogchat to the end of every comment you send from their page, so you won’t forget to add it.

I also recommend bookmarking What The Hashtag to easily be able to read the transcript from previous blogchats and even subscribe via RSS.

Categorizing and Tagging Blog Content

Sunday’s night’s blogchat was one of my favorites of the ones I’ve attended so far. Not just because the topic is one I’ve wondered about before, but also because it seemed to have a more relaxed feeling (or perhaps I’m starting to feel more comfortable and “among friends” at them so I’m relaxing).

Sunday night was also the first chat that I really noticed splitting in several directions at times. Last year when we were having Plurkshops, that would often happen, with one person wanting more info on a subject while someone else had an entirely new question.

As a result though, I’m only going to share some of the discussion on the original subject. If you’d like to read all of the chat, you can find the transcript here.

As usual, Mack started us out by announcing the topic and who suggested it. “Tonight’s #blogchat topic is from shannonrenee, we’ll be discussing categorizing and tagging your content. Strategies and tips.”

As a blog reader, how important are tags & categories to you?

Shanan_S: Pretty darn important. If I’m a new reader chances are I came to your blog for info about something specific.

ad_web: Sometimes a quick look at categories and tags on a blog tells me what the blog is about or what is normally posted there.

Eric_Urbane: I tend to follow bloggers, not tags or categories.

hacool: I find it easier to find older entries on blogs with categories for broad topics and tags for more detailed topics.

GrantGriffiths: Consumers don’t use RSS, bloggers do and that is why categories will continue to be important.

Mandy_Vavrinak: I start with categories to browse new blog, tags for finding specific content.

GrantGriffiths: Very important when you look at the big picture. Easier for reader to find content.

GrantGriffiths: Categories are and should be used as the index to your blog. Much more important than archives for that purpose.

markalves: When reading a blog for 1st time, you get a quick sense of scope (types of categories) and depth (# per category)

What’s the difference between categories and tags?

Teeg: I haven’t quite figured out the purpose of tags, it seems a repeat of categories often.

3keyscoach: What makes best presentation so tags are useful to people?

markalves: Categories are table of contents, tags are the index.

30lines: I tend to agree with that approach. Categories= more general, tags = more specific.

Teeg: Why not use nested categories for that? I guess that’s why I get confused by having both.

hacool: I’d think of categories as broad topics: produce, meat, canned goods and tags as detailed: lettuce, bacon, chicken soup

Teeg: So tags can be things I might only use once, while categories are topics I’ll cover again and again? Okay, I can see that.

hacool: I might have unique subcategories that could pull a unique menu, but use tags across multiple categories.

MackCollier: So then we should go for fewer categories, and be liberal on tagging?

AngEngland: If you cover several food categories but wanted $5 dinners in several “Chicken, Beef” categories, use tags.

hacool: The categories are like topic funnels and tags can connect across channels.

How important are categories and tags in terms of SEO?

FreshPeel: Categories and tags definitely add to SEO. Indirect benefit to readers?

AngEngland: If tags/keyword lists don’t match content Google can penalize u.

FreshPeel: In my blog, tags are only visible in the code and used for SEO and recommending similar posts to readers.

Eric_Urbane: Our blog, NOT related to our company and our tags have now brought us to page one, number one to three on Google search

MackCollier: Which has more SEO punch on a blog, tags or categories?

FreshPeel: I’d say Google gives more value to content, but as with all things SEO, it’s not an either or.

GrantGriffiths: Content written for the human reader and not the search engines is most important for the SEO. If human likes, Google likes.

hacool: I think it depends on how one codes the tags and categories. (IE semantic markup, H1, H2, H3, p, etc.)

Eric_Urbane: So should Blog Content have keywords and phrases laced within the body of the blog post?

MackCollier: Eric, my view is when you start trying to place keywords in a blog, you dilute the content’s impact. Not worth it, IMO.

Eric_Urbane: So should categories align with keywords?

hacool: If keywords and categories align naturally I think it makes sense, but I think we must write for humans 1st bots 2nd.

How many categories and tags?

Eric_Urbane: So how many categories should each blog post have for optimal SEO?

GrantGriffiths: Use 1 category and try to limit tags or keywords to around 5 for SEO.

FreshPeel: Too many categories can make it seem like your blog has no focus.

MackCollier: So each post should only have ONE category for maximum SEO benefit?

FreshPeel: I think 8 is a good number. AT 17 categories, I need to slim mine down.

markalves: Make blog categories list fit on 1 screen

Resources

I always come away from blogchats with a new list of links to check out. Here are some that were mentioned Sunday:

Organize your categories: 5 practical tips

Tags and Categories - SEO and Usability

Five Essential Elements of Good SEO

Are Your Stumbled Pages Sticky?

Everything I Need to Know About Twitter I Learned in J School

List of Twitter Chats

In closing, let me apologize for anyone who was at Sunday’s chat that I left out. Even after all the times I’ve reread the transcript, I’m still noticing new items.

By the way, if you’re free Sunday evening, we’d love to see you there.

Teeg is a Social Media Explorer who has been exploring the social part of the web since 1996, when she first discovered chat rooms. She details her exploration of various social media sites on SU Comments and Social Media Mom.

“I think women put more emphasis, focus and time into their social media browsing than men. Men seem to be very ADHD with social media, jumping from news story to story, whereas I’ve noticed women take slow time and incorporate what they read more into their daily life and lifestyle planning.”

Loren Baker, Search Engine Journal

A great thing about social media marketing is that you literally get a first-rate, hands-on education in human anthropology. You learn what moves people. You learn what people want. You learn how to tug at heartstrings and drive emotions to their limit. You learn how different groups of people respond to different types of content. It’s simultaneously liberating and disillusioning to discover how predictable groups of people behave.

[Note: for the rest of this article, I err on the side of gross generalization. This is necessary to make a general point. There are definitely exceptions to the rules and it's your duty to identify them;-)]

One of the more interesting observations I’ve made over the years as a participant in social media is how differently males and females participate. It is easy to see a strong analogy between the playing field of social media and the playground from elementary school. On the one hand, you have the males who are driven by aggressive competition, accomplishment and the highs of “victory” (football at recess/24 hour digg voting marathon). Sure, there are some females who join in, but for the most part, the aggressive side of social media is dominated by men. Just like how dodgeball games during gym class were usually dominated by the boys. Females, on the other hand, tend towards activities that are cooperative, non-aggressive and friendship building. As I recall, during recess in elementary school, the girls would teach other things like hand-clapping rhymes or sit around in a circle making bracelets (or each others hair). Not all the girls, but most of them. I think the same holds true in social media. Women are looking for like minded people to learn from, to share with, and to build lasting friendships.

Men use social media as a means to some other end. Men want success. Men want traffic. Men want money. Men want to be the best. Men compete to be the best at social media like athletes compete to be the best at their sport. Just like there are superstars in sports, social media sites like Digg and Reddit also have clearly identifiable superstars (and their fanboys).

Now, it would be silly to say that women don’t want things like traffic, money, success, etc. But the point is just that most men are using social media for something other than the social interaction. Women seem to actually use social media as an end in itself: they use it for socializing.

So whereas men use social media to accomplish things and gain status, women seem to use it for “deeper” stuff like building genuine relationships, solidarity and discussions about life (which men might call gossip;-) In my experience, women are much less likely to hit you with a dozen social media vote requests in a single day. I have half a dozen guys bombard me everyday via AIM with non-stop vote requests without even stopping to say hi. Women, in my experience, like to drive real conversation. They actually take the time to read stories and then tell me what they thought rather than just skimming headlines and voting blindly. Women are energized by compliments and pats on the back and affirmation. In other words, women are more social with their social media because in reality, women are more fundamentally social beings.

Women also tend to be more principled in their social media voting. This can be good and bad. The good is that if I send a story to a woman and ask for a thumbs up on StumbleUpon, if she actually likes the story she is more inclined to take the initiative and submit it to other social media sites she is active on (Twitter, Kirsty, etc.) The bad is that women are much, much, much more likely to secretly downvote a request if they don’t like the story (or the person who wrote it). As an example, I’ve stopped sending any “Hot Women” articles to my female social media friends because I have strong empirical evidence that the majority of them end up downvoting. This is not surprising at all and I should have figured it out much earlier given what I know about my wife;-)

Observations

So before getting to a list of some observations and a handful of insightful quotes from my social media friends, let’s draw a conclusion. I believe that the social media professional will be much more successful at his or her craft when taking gender differences seriously. The key, really, is to understand the needs of each person you interact with. Offer them something in return. But don’t assume that everyone wants the same thing. Take the time to understand what motivates each of your social media friends and go above and beyond the call of duty to interact with them so that when it comes time that you need something, they are eager to help. And remember that it’s very easy to wear out a social relationship of any kind (marriage, friendship, business) if one party is not having his or her needs met or if one person is carrying too much of the burden.

Before ending this article I’ve included a few more general observations that come from various social media friends who chose to be anonymous. We’d love for you to add your thoughts in the comments.

• Men often make accounts that look like attractive females for pragmatic purposes (to motivate more action by other social media participants)
• Women tend to use Twitter more for chatting and real conversations
• Men tend to use Twitter more for marketing
• Women are more likely to forward chain emails
• Men are more comfortable with manipulative behavior so long as it helps them acheive their goals
• Women like sites that facilitate discussions about life and offer a peek into others’ lives
• With men, social cooperation comes down to swapping favors
• With women, you have to earn social cooperation through relationship

Quotes from Social Media Users

More men are using it for networking and establishing authority/credibility. More women are using it to share their lives and to connect with other women who share the same values or similar experiences. Women are using it more for solidarity. They’re social beings, and social media has given them the amazing capability to find like-minded women instead of feeling judged and misunderstood by the women in their immediate families/geographic regions.

- Daniel Dessinger

Social media is a lot like relationships in real life - men tend to want information and to give out info if it will help them get ahead or achieve a goal. Women tend to take it a step further and are more willing to connect on a deeper level.

- Charlene Polanosky, Essential Keystrokes

Men seem to promote more, it’s more “about me,” whereas women are natural networkers and seek cooperation and participation. Don’t throw tomatoes at me, I’m just making a generalization in what I’ve obserrved.

- Brian Wallace, NowSourcing

I think women socialize more, but they both use it too boost careers and brands.

- Deb Ng, Freelance Writing Jobs

Women want to be popular or communicate, men want to make money or be considered cool.

- David Peralty, BrandingDavid.com

The biggest difference is that women are actually more naturally atuned to the whole social aspect, and tend to spend more time interacting and consuming the content, whereas men tend to be more fly by visitors and less interactive.

- Elise from Cell Phones .org

I’d say women are more drawn to social services like facebook and twitter, where communication is the feature as opposed to something like digg where there’s a competition like atmosphere.

- JD Arney

I think men want success from their participation on the social media. I think women mostly want to be social and have fun.

- HART, http://twitter.com/PetLvr

Of course while some social media is audio based we are much more likely to rely on humble text to create a “social bite”.

What Is A Social Bite?

A social bite is a short piece of text to describe an article, post or idea which is easy to understand and easy to distribute through viral networks. A social bite must still carry the post’s message and goal but in a way that quickly impacts with users in essence:

A “social bite” is a short, concise and engaging message to gain traffic on social networks

The Perfect Social Bite

So what makes the perfect social bite, well it has two parts the hook and the line.

The hook are the words within the message - the thing to grab attention. This is doubly important as the hook will have no context once it has left the site. For example a hook is unlikely to reference the site so must be compelling, so that someone would visit the page without knowing where they were going.
The line is simply the url, sometimes this will be the page url but more likely to conserve space a url shortening service would be used. This compounds the need for a good hook as the only other potential reference to the site will be hidden.

The Twit Effect

Most social bites these days will have to pass through twitter at some point therefore a bite needs to be suitable otherwise people might change it. A normal tweet has a limited number of characters but while it may be tempting to use all 140 possible chars, this would severely limit the maximum potential of the social bite as it fails to take in retweets therefore the maximum number of characters is much more limited.

Twitter does not allow usernames longer then 20 characters and only shows usernames of 15 characters this means in practice to cope with every possible twitter name we would need to save at least 25 characters for retweets (20 for the name plus RT and two spaces one between rt and one after name and an ampersand before the name) even assuming 15 character names thats still 20 characters out of our 140.
With characters at a premium is it reasonable to expect usernames of 15 characters?

Taking a list of 1000 twitter usernames revealed the mean average length is 9 characters:

• 0-6 – 13%
• 6-9 – 58%
• 9-12 – 27%
• 12+ - 2%

taking these results its possible to assume the space needed for a retweet is 17 characters

Line Length

Assuming use of shortening service allows us to roughly determine how much room the line is going to take up. Its worth remembering users often swap out the url in favour of their own shortening service so as to gather statisitcs for themselves therefore even if your URL is shorter then the average it could be worth including a buffer.
Looking at various shortening services the average length is 18 characters including the http:// therefore the line length should be at least 18 characters plus a space making a line length total reserve of 19 characters.

Final Social Bite Anatomy

A hook within a social bite can potentially be longer than a page title, which in turn is not necessarily the same as a page headline.
It may also be important to allow for additional commentary to support the predetermined social bite, or to allow for SEO friendly URL shortening which can also boost response.
A single article can have multiple social bites that will attract different audiences.

Propagating a social bite

There are three routes to start a social bite on its move

1. Inject the hook without the line into your post article in much the same way as a sound bite works
2. Add the sound bite into the social networks yourself
3. Get someone else to do it for you

Of course you can always do all 3.

Many people reading this article may be thinking its very much twitter based but social bites have a tendency to cross social networks indeed that is the very point, and with social aggregators like Friendfeed and to a less extent Facebook something which starts on Twitter could well end up anywhere even getting to the ears of non twitter users such as myself

Do you use social bites? What other things should people think about?

Editor’s Notes (Andy)

Tim popped out to a bloggers meetup of Northern Gits Geeks, thus just adding a few additional references.

Dan Zarella recently took a scientific look at reteets over on Mashable
Louise wrote a similar article over on Twitip, but that was mainly aimed at retweeting tweets that originate on Twitter, where you know the length of your own Twitter usename.
Guy Kawasaki went into the psychological side of retweeting over on the open forum.

Many of you have heard of the 3 P’s of marketing: pills, porn, and poker.  They are the bane of most people’s online existence, as we are constantly bombarded with seeing these kinds of “offers” being sent to our spam filter.

Enter Twitter.

As you know me by now, I like to look at the positive things in life.  And after navigating through Twitter for some time, I’ve found that Twitter has the 3 C’s:

1 - Cats:

Sometimes a good lolcat can put you in the right mood. We can work endlessly on a killer blog post and a funny cat pic and caption will beat the post 9 times out of 10, though though Mr. Nielsen may disagree.

2 - Coffee:

I’ve put out breaking news and useful links, but tend to have more conversation when it’s around coffee time talk.  @DunkinDonuts has achieved its twitter fame.  Coffee Groundz, a local Houston, TX coffee shop, literally doubled their clientele through twitter by being the first company on record to accept orders through Twitter.

3 - Comedy:

Everyone needs a good laugh once in a while.  Sometimes particular accounts aren’t what is funny, but rather what you find via Twitter.  @Octane pointed out that he found this great piece from the Onion.  The Twitter song is rather amusing as well:

Let’s add in a 4th C, just for fun!

4 - Common Sense.

As always, common sense still applies to the Twitterverse as well.  Don’t have a public meltdown, feel free to post news on latest and greatest apps, and by all means, be careful what you say.

Either way, I’m always up fer playing with shiney new things and if someone wants to listen to my rambling, that’s an issue for their therapist.

If we know one thing my friends, as well as we do any, there are waaaay too many tools out there. Whos Talkin falls into the void of catch phrase greatness, buzz monitoring. As regular readers may remember, we looked at Google Custom Search Engines and other buzz tools for blog posting, not so long ago. Avid search geeks just have a thing for information discovery, indexing and retrieval.. so it’s natural.

What’s the buzz? Tell me what’s happening?

For all you information magnets and buzz stalkers… I say, give Whos Talkin’ a try. It looks like a pretty good tool that has a future. When asked, some of my other mates gave it a go and agreed that WT does seem to find mentions that other locales (Technorati, Google Blog Search and their ilk) weren’t finding. Add to that the handy segmentation and it’s definitely worth keeping in the tool box.

Lay of the Land

OK… give you a quick look and then you might as well head over and give it a go for yourself…. Simply start off at the clean (Googlish?) home page; put in the term you want to check on (can be anything from topics, names, places, researching blog posts). From there you are presented with the results, in a nice simple interface. For me the text is a tad large, so CTRL- sorts that for me…  

Anyways…I searched the drama du jour …

What is quite handy are the titles in the side panel, these are for segmenting the results. These options include;

1. Blogs
2. News
3. Networks
4. Videos
5. Images
6. Forums
7. Tags

We can get as granular as you like depending on what you’re looking to do. I find that pretty hand as in the past I cobbled a variety of Google Custom Search Engine’s together to get the job done as I did with Search SEO Pros and Research your blog posts with buzz monitors.

The major teaser at this point of course is hitting the ‘Options’ tab where we’re told some great features are on the way such as saving searches, RSS and even an API (which had a few trail riders drooling). While it is good as is, many of the people that tried it out were asking about the upcoming additions. Thus being and SEO geek, searching out the buzz man was the next call of order…

In talking with Joe it seems apparent the early reactions have done well, “…(the) first week after launch we had a little over 20,000 unique visitors” which is not a bad start, although he followed up with near irony, saying, “…..it does slow down when the buzz wears off” – he oughta know I’d imagine.

Features and the Future

While the final plans aren’t in place, they are looking to start rolling out a pro version soon;

“I am thinking like one package that can do everything you need, and then in the future expand into more packages that folks that are more serious about monitoring might want.” Joe said, while venturing that Pro accounts could have;

1. Saved Searches,
2. RSS,
3. Email Alerts
4. Trending data.

 Beyond that, as with any good social tool they’re considering an API among other things. You’d have to think there is potential for even a white label version, but I’m wandering now.

iGoogle gadget

He’s even whipped up an iGoogle gadget, which I promptly whacked onto one of my many tabs;

What can I say? That’s just toooo much fun. As you can see I have a few buzz tracking toys on the go there. Having Who’s Talkin right in my Google Homepage was a definite bonus.

Link checking

Another bonus is that you can also use the ‘link:’ command to find websites/blogs that have linked to you in a given article - an added layer of digging that works as well… Here’s a video on that;

And there are a few more videos HERE…

WhosTalking certainly has some potential. Where it goes from here is about as easy as predicting when this damned snow will melt away upon my Canadian doorstep. I can tell you that the tool has some handy applications and the team seem committed to growing it even further – a great job for a small shop ( one simply has to root for the underdog oui?) I want to thank Joe for asking me along and for answering questions… and I wish him only the best for the future.

I shall report back when the next changes come out… until then, get yer buzz on

Twitter.  We’ve been quiet on this front for far too long.

While it won’t be all of us running the account, expect some solid updates from @nowsourcing and @thegypsy.  Why follow? Well, we have some interesting things to say and will also be sharing great links collectively.

Google Friend Connect. You might call us Collective Forgetfulness if we didn’t have the latest and greatest blog widget from our friends at Google.  So we’ve added Google Friend Connect.  It’s an interesting concept, and will be fun to see what people make of it beyond the simple “here are the friends that like my site.”

MyBlogLog.  You might say that this is old news, but we updated the MBL widget to the more sleek, iPhone looking UI.  What’s really interesting about MBL is the community/site itself beyond the widget.  Personally, I’ve liked the service for a long time because it allows you to visually see who your recent visitors are - a different crack at the data vs. a more 1’s and 0’s Google Analytics approach.

What about you - what have you done to make your blog more social for 2009?

It seems that now-a-days we can do most things online… clothes shopping, looking for Colleges, buying Holiday gifts, doing our banking… pretty much anything.

But there is something else we can do online….. something much more personal and sacred. We can even work on mending our inside pain and turmoil.

Before I get deeper into this topic I want to show why finding support groups online can make a lot of sense.

The Definition of a Support Group

Support Group - A support Group is a group of people who support each other over a problem they all share.

The Definition of an Online Community

Online Community - A group of people online who share a common interest.

Wow, both of those definitions sound very similar, don’t they?

An online community and support group are on the same type of idea. They have a common ground…. a common interest. And, the group builds from there. Because of this it makes sense that support groups would work online…. that they not only work, but they thrive.

A support group is usually a group centered around a very specific issue. This group of people usually come together to give and receive both emotional and practical support. When people come to a support group it is because they need to be with people…. to surround themselves with people that understand, have been through or are going through the same thing and can offer help, suggestions or just a shoulder to cry on. Most people aren’t looking for anything to be solved, but just to be with others in a similar situation can offer a sense of belonging and get them through the difficult time they are going through. Knowing that everyone who is part of this support group share the same problem and that they are not alone can be extremely helpful.

Social Media and online communities can be so helpful when it comes to support. I have shared issues of mine on my blog and the community has lent their support. I have on many occasions mentioned an issue I was having while communicating on Twitter and my friends their didn’t let me down.

But, what if you needed more? What if you need more specific help?

I love that my friends and colleagues want to lend their support. They want me to know that they care. But, what if i wanted to communicate with someone with my same problem…. a non-judgmental person that I can freely say what’s on my mind about our shared problem? Could that happen?

Sure, that’s where online support groups come in. Your friends and family are wonderful support, but when you need more specific help such as support on a specific topic…. support groups offer a safe environment for mutual support and encouragement. In order for a support group to work, online or in reality, you must feel safe.

What to look for in an Online Support Group / Community

• Needs to be User Friendly
• Easy Navigation - No confusion
• Clean and bright

  This Online Support Group / Community is The Virtual Wellness Community. It is a great website that provides free support,
  education and hope to people with cancer and their loved ones. It is beautiful, easy to navigate, completely user-friendly even for the casual computer users. Their Online Community has plenty of articles to educate yourself on Cancer as well as inspiration and hope. It is a great place to meet other people with Cancer as well as loved ones who are dealing with the pain of someone they love having Cancer. People coming to this community are looking for support, friendship and strength. It truly looks like a safe place to be….. exactly how a support group / community should.
  
  
  

• Clear Guidelines on how to use the support group.
• Easy to follow as well as easy to find online support group rules.

  This Online Lupus Support Group is a perfect example of how to make sure make sure the online support group guidelines are right out in the open so that there is no question as to what the rules are. This way all support group community members are following the rules and not making any members feel unwelcome or unsafe.
  
  

• Message Boards / Forums and Chats - This is a very important part of support groups. Forums and message boards are where community members can ask questions, get advice and others can offer suggestions and help. Even though the conversation is not real time, forums and message boards can be extremely beneficial. And, for many Online Communities the only conversation that can happen on the website are via message boards and forums. Chats are real time and also a great benefit. Make sure there is some kind of moderator in the chat…. sometimes sensitive and difficult conversations can get out of hand. It is helpful (and safer) to have a non-judgmental third-party moderator on hand.

  
  
  Look for a message board that have plenty of activity….. like this Eating Disorder Forum above. The more activity there is then you know it is an established forum and that the community enjoys it.

• Links to important information and Websites. Forums and discussions are wonderful. But, you also need to understand the issues you are having…. why you are having them, what are the symptoms, when will they go away, etc. Good Support Groups and Communities should have plenty of information for you at your fingertips. Or, at least point you in the right direction.
• Find a Doctor - These online support groups should also offer you the resources you need to help you find a Support Group in your area and a Doctor if need be. Online Support Groups are great, but sometimes you need a real person, real hug, real conversation…. reality.

  

These are just three examples of great Online Support Groups. But, there are so many more. And, most that I have found are doing an awesome job at combining Social Media and Community Support.

Twitter as a Support Group

Twitter has yet to add a group function to their Microblogging site. It’s coming…. at least that is what we are promised. But, as of yet…. nothing. There are an amazing amount of people on Twitter….. many with issues. This would be a great place to have groups. And, with Twitter the groups can have conversations real-time. As close to reality conversation with many people as it gets.

People use 3rd-party Twitter tools to create groups…. such as TwittGroups, GroupTweet, Hashtags (Hashtags website wasn’t working during the time of this post), TweetParty, Twitter Groups, TwittBot . Nothing that looked like it would be worthy of a support group….. except TwittGroups. Not spectacular, but it is as close as it gets as far as Support Group worthy on Twitter.

Searching for support groups on Twitter was not easy. I assume it will get much easier once Twitter finally adds group capability to the Twitter website. But, until then it is going to continue to be a struggle. I understand that these 3rd party Twitter Groups that I mentioned above have the ability to create Twitter groups, but why can’t I search the groups to find one that will match with my needs? Maybe I was doing something wrong or it wasn’t clearly visible on their sites, but I couldn’t find it. However, TwittGroups was the only place I could search the Twitter Groups easily. You can choose to either look through all their Twitter Groups , look through all the popular Twitter Groups, or do a search of Twitter Groups to see what is a good fit.

Once you find a group that you find interesting…. click on the link. You will find something that looks like this:

This is the Homeschool Twitter Group. They have a nice group going on, I must say. If you scroll down on this page you will see all the members. I’m not going to put an image of that here….. they have a lot of members. But, if you click on the link that says, "Show Members" it shows you all the members of this Homeschool Twitter Group.

Now go back to the main page again that looks like the above screen…. the main page of the Twitter Group you picked. Click on "TweetGrid"
and you will get the tweets having to do with your support group. Here is what the TweetGrid of what the homeschool support group looks like….

This is where you can see all the conversations having to do with your support group and the tweets done by the members of the support group.

Now, go back to the home Support Group page again and click on "Post Tweet" This is where you will post a tweet to the group. Doing it this way will label your tweet perfectly so that it appears in the TweetGrid.

Well, there ya go. Support groups can be a wonderful and helpful thing. I’ve used them several times to help with issues…. I totally agree with support groups. With Social Media it opens up the mediums that you can get support from… take advantage of that. It can be a wonderful thing.

Note: Please keep in mind that online support should not take the place of medical attention that you should receive from a doctor or professional.

With us today is Matt Daines, lead developer of the popular Twitter directory, Twellow.  Twellow just released Twellowhood, so we thought now might be a good time to check in with him and see how things were going.

1.  Give us a bit of background about yourself.

Originally from Utah, I’ve been in the IT industry for over 13 years, having worked as a programmer/designer in various family-owned businesses ranging from medical transcription to e-commerce retail and distribution. I left the family business to return to school a few years ago, and I received my Bachelors in MIS from Utah State University in 2007. Upon completion of the degree I worked briefly for a large printing company, which I did not enjoy (it took over a month to get my computer). I looked around, found iEntry, Inc., and felt the company fit nicely with my skill set. It’s been good to be back in a smaller company where everything is not red tape. For the last several months I have been working as the lead developer for Twellow, along with various other duties at iEntry.

2. Where does the name Twellow come from? What made you go forth with this idea, considering the sheer number of Twitter related sites out in the space?

The name Twellow was something Rich Ord (CEO and Founder of iEntry) and I came up with together. We were discussing the whole concept in it’s early stages, and the connection was made to the yellow pages. While I was looking at the various “tw” apps associated with Twitter, the combination of Twitter and Yellow came together, as in “yellow pages”. The first name that came up was twellowpages.com, and we were going to go with that, but as I started looking more into it I thought a shorter name would be better. Twellow.com was available, so Rich jumped on it.

We went forward with the idea since there really weren’t any useful Twitter directories at the time. Twellow has been around since May and there have been a lot of Twitter apps that have come online since then, but I feel Twellow remains the premier directory service for Twitter. And Rich’s vision for where we want to take Twellow is fairly significant.

3. How do you plan to allow developers to hook into your system?

We are looking at various ways that our system could be opened up to outside developers, and have a limited API in operation currently to allow the grabbing of the categorizations for certain users. With the recent deployment of TwellowHood we have more options for providing demographic data that could be used by others.

4. Tell us what inspired you to come up with Twellowhood.

TwellowHood was Rich’s idea. He’s always recognized the power of location-based search, and we’ve been talking since the beginning about ways to make Twellow more geo-targeted. It’s just been the last month that we’ve really focused on it and found the tools to make it happen.

5. What are the advantages of claiming your profile?

The main advantage is that users can control their own listing. Once logged in a user can adjust which categories he or she belong to, as well as change bio, name, location, and other aspects of the listing. Users can also add an extended bio which allows up to 2,000 characters, including limited HTML formatting, so it provides a good tool to enhance your existing social-media presence. Twellow also offers several “Social Links” options for logged-in users to link to their other online profiles.

6. It would be cool to see overall state rankings, not just by city.

This is something that we’ll look into. Having the “heat-map” with the shading based on users in that state/region gives a good visual idea of where the big states are, but it’s always good to have the option to see text in a list.

7. How do you think that the electoral map would have looked if it were based on twitter followers?

That’s an interesting question. Twellow searches for people who identify themselves as either conservative or liberal, Democrat or Republican give some hint as to how they might have voted in the election. We might look at applying the results of this data to the map in the future so people could see the red or blue level of their state on TwellowHood. Blue states generally tend to have higher populations, so there might be some correlation between the deeper green states on TwellowHood with blue states, and the lighter ones tending to be red. Population density would need to be taken into account, as with the very blue Northeast, but it’s an interesting question.

8. What should a user do if they want to be removed from the directory?

There have been very few people who have requested to be removed from Twellow, but we do make the option available in the profile editor. For those who are not comfortable claiming their profile in order to have it removed we also respond promptly to requests received through our contact page.

9. What about false positives? Example for judge, are you going to work to make it context based as well?

Twellow is a work in progress, and we will continue to work on making it more accurate as it evolves. We’ve been looking into methods for context-based matching and have discovered a few options that should work well for us. As they say, youth is wasted in the young, and that goes for computer programs as well. It’s only after you’ve tinkered with it for a while that you find out how you could have built it better to begin with. But in the future we will be able to implement the experience we’ve gained and make the system even better.

10.  Technorati is in many ways at least a partial equivalent to Twellow, and for years has had unique logins and various methods to claim a blog - posting a link, possibly a one-time login. Other services use unique files, placing code on a page, or changes in meta data.
Twellow, run not by a couple of programming geeks, but by a professional internet media company fully aware of possible issues, decided that it was quite ok to request the username and password belonging to a twitter account every time it is accessed.

Andy for one is highly negative of any Twitter service that asks for access to his Twitter account, and it is even worse if you have to repeatedly provide it. It is a security risk and shouldn’t be encouraged.

Can you provide a legitimate reason why Twellow is so poorly coded?

We are well aware of the security issues involved with Twitter passwords. A legitimate reason for us not dealing with it up to this point is that Twitter doesn’t offer an alternative method for authenticating users. We are following Twitter’s progress on their implementation of an OAuth system to address this issue and will be working with whatever solution they provide as soon as it becomes available.

You can read the discussion regarding the OAuth issue on the Twitter API developer forum at the following addresses:

http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/browse_thread/thread/334099aade593e49/f80f9061a661a473

http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/browse_thread/thread/7694f3857f2059d4/354eaef5a760a41d

As you can see from the discussion this is an issue many Twitter API developers are dealing with, and our “poorly coded” method for authenticating users is only a reflection of Twitter not providing a solution for their own API. However, iEntry, Inc. is a “professional internet media company” that is well respected among it’s users and clients. If people do not trust us to use their information in a responsible manner, they are entirely free not to participate in our service.

Thanks Matt!

Congrats to all the winners from the gang here at Collective Thoughts and to you my fine reader, get festive and surf some new finds. And now the final winners (and runners up) for the Mashable Web Awards for 2008;

Mainstream & Large Scale Social Networks

Embeddable Widgets

Blog Plugins

Social News

Social Networking Applications

Social Bookmarking

Search & Social Search

Sports & Fitness

Photo Sharing

Video Sharing

Start Pages

Places & Events

Travel

Music

Social Shopping

Fashion

Celebrity & Gossip

Mobile Applications

Dating & Romance

Wiki

Politics

How-to

Environmental

Non-Profit Causes

Online Games

Niche Social Networks

And there’s the list for this year… for more see the Mashable Web Awards for 2008

We decided to skip the perfunctory  “Happy 1st Birthday, Collective Thoughts” year in review and turn it on its edge.  We were all talking and wondered the last time you saw a birthday post that you’d refer to later on.

Birthday post are formulaic and predictable.  You can usually expect:

• contests and giveaways
• highlights of best posts
• goals for the future

With aggregation and bookmarking tools, it’s pretty easy to find out the best posts on your own.  This is web 2.0, so we need to give you more.  Let’s delve further into the social experiment.  What’s a birthday for? Aside from celebrating your first day out in the world in your birthday suit, it’s a day for people to focus on you.

We are nothing without you, our community.  You help make us great, spreading the word, retweeting, and the like.  We’re also aware of the uncertainty of the financial markets these days.  We’d like to use our birthday to cast some light on you, and develop community here.

We want our readers to “give” us their best posts of the last year, so we can publish them in the next post.

Readers should aim for the post they most want highlighted, the one that is aimed to show their expertise in the best possible light, possibly the one they wished had got more attention.

Let’s take a look at some of these findings:

Trend: oDesk
Popularity: Google Trends # 1

oDesk is a site that allows you to “Hire, Manage, and Pay remote contractors as if they were in your office.” Although oDesk’s hot trend rank is more than economy based, with the current mass layoffs it’s easy assume how a site like this would become very popular during a recession. Virtual employees do not require commuting (gas and auto costs) and can operate anywhere. All while saving employers money on costs like health coverage, on utilities that a normal office would consume, and since it’s hourly based pay only, there’s no worry that employers may be paying for employee downtime which would normally be the case with salary-based pay.

Trend: Etsy art
Popularity: Google Trends # 11

Etsy is a popular craft site that allows artists to display and sell their wares. Most often you can find great deals on handmade jewelry, scarves, art, etc. Basically anything that could be handmade can be found here. With the holiday season right around the corner, I anticipate Etsy will be riding high.

Trend: waste management jobs
Popularity: Google Trends # 20

When Benjamin Franklin said “In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes” he forgot to mention trash. Waste management is a high paying yet low demand job that doesn’t require a college degree. It’s also not a municipal service that would likely fall victim to budget cuts like police and fire departments.

Article: Wal-Mart posts higher 3Q profit
Popularity: Addict-o-matic > Yahoo News

Unfortunately many American’s love Wal-Mart and I’m not going to get into why Wal-Mart is bad for the U.S. economy but I will say the common perception of Wal-Mart is that it’s the cheapest and easiest place to get just about everything. Penny pinchers think shopping here will save them money when in actuality middle-America might still have some coin if Wal-Mart never existed.

Article: Apple may launch most aggressive Black Friday sale yet
Popularity: Addic-o-matic > Digg

Retailers are going to have a hell of a time selling much of anything in Q4. Luckily the consumer comes out on top when retailers compete. Even though the holiday season is near and consumers will benefit from heavily discounted sales, it still may be very difficult for retailers to make their investors happy.

So what can we piece together from the above? Well, besides needing a drink or anti-depressant (invest in pharma now), we know that hiring through oDesk may be a good option for small to medium-sized business owners, we know that Etsy may be a smart place to get some good deals on quality holiday gifts, we know that jobless claims are up and people are looking for work in not-so-desirable places, we know that people are in the money-saving mindset, and consumers are going to get some great deals this holiday season.

Buckle-up folks, we know it’s going to be a bumpy ride…oftentimes social media will tell us just HOW bumpy the ride will be.

I was playing with some toys earlier and thought; why don’t we look a little deeper into the world of Buzz Monitoring. And I don’t mean for tracking buzz altogether either. What about utilizing it when crafting new content or blog posts? Buzz monitoring need not be a glorified vanity search endeavour when it can unlock a genie of information to bring life to your content generation efforts.

While you can certainly use a buzz monitoring program to track activity relating to ones blog or company metrics, it can be also used to track/research just about anything. You can use it to track news on markets for projects and can suggest the latest trends and/or buzz for content creation programs and general business intelligence.

Information is the currency of content

What is most certainly a great way to leverage them is when used for researching your next blog post. It is not only a good way to find nuggets of varied perspectives, but also shows you the latest discussions that are going on in a given topic area.

This can be important as you can continue existing discussions in either a supportive or converse perspective and hopefully catch any existing momentum that already exists in the marketplace. You may even find the research into the most recent activity begins to craft your post in directions you may not have started off on in the fist place.

Some tools to play with

As it has been said by the ever fascinating Johnny Long; Google is your friend – so let’s start there.

(Johnny Long… Not related.. but entertaining)

Anyway, let’s continue on… Often freshness matters as much as quality and other times aged, respected feed sources are the call of the day. In the former, where freshness plays a roll, try a quick run though various searches on Google;

Google Blog Search; which can be set to various time frames – you can also grab a widget for your iGoogle or set up alerts for desired topics.

Google Search (regular); using time delineated results (1 week here) – a variety of Google search hacks are always handy for researching anything. But that’s another story.

Other useful blog stops include;

Now this method works on a larger scale but also tend to have a higher noise-to signal ratio than one may want when creating content. Timely content isn’t always the best content. One of the next options is to do a little Google personalization in the form of known, respected sources….

PostRank (consolidate with Aiderss) – another handy buzz monitor tool is PostRank which will scan a feed and give you a 1-10 scale of each post. This can be handy when analyzing a given post or topic type to ensure you have the best possible chance of creating a popular post of your own.

Do-it-yourself

The Google Custom Search Engine; a service that allows you to search only the sites you wish and even segment them. I like creating GCSEs centric to areas of study. In my case that would be search engines, search marketing and social media marketing. To that end I created a couple engines to study what I felt were some of the more authoritative barometers of the genre

The SEO Search Engine – which we can search ‘buzz monitor’ to get results on the topic from top SEO blogs.

The SMM Search – which contains many of the top social media marketing blogs and we’d get this for ‘buzz monitor’

What is advantageous to making a custom search engine is controlling the source material. Even if you are writing for a niche you’re not familiar with, once populating with known entities in the space it is your crystal ball to mining content ideas and opinions.

Should we be tasked with creating content for a fishing store/blog you would not only mine the client and his suppliers for leads (on influencer sites/blogs) but head off to locales such as Technorati , Alltop or MBL – to get a good cross section and identify influencers.

Add them into your custom search engine and away you go…

Regardless of how you populate them, utilizing a Google Custom Search Engine can make for a great signal to noise tool for ongoing project needs. Segmentation helps to narrow the focus where that is often needed to catch the influencers in a market segment.

Segmenting the social world

Next we want to be able to JUST search the social world for activity. Once more utilizing the GCSE we can segment the various social sites not only choosing which to include, but also segment by basic type (social media, networking, bookmarking etc…). To that end;

Social Activity Search – which enables searching of the various major social sites like so..

Twitter/FriendFeed/Plurk Search – for watching the world of micro-bloggers - our search

The main point being to load them up with sites you feel you are targeting or interested in for a given campaign. It takes very little time but gives you a tool at your control that makes getting the feel for a buzz in a given niche easy and accessible.

If you’re looking for a good list of sites to mine for data, I just happen to keep a list here which might come in handy. You can even go old school and make one to search the forums in a given niche – you’re limited by your imagination and uses for qualitative as well as quantitative data.

Also, if you want to track buzz on Twitter, use the real-time search - which we can use with topic markers (#seo for example) or use the advanced search goodies which are here - of interest is the ‘sentiment’ search which can help if you’re after a positive or negative spin on your post.

What to make of it all?

Now that you have all this information it is a matter of mining it for data.

Start by making note of;

1. Common topics; old staples that are the everyday
2. Popular topics; ones that are hot on social sites
3. Controversial Topics; those that raise the emotions
4. Timely items; news that is bandwagon friendly
5. Resource lists; topically relevant tools and resources.
6. Popular sites; top influencers often cited (show some link love)
7. Chronological anomalies (is more content published on a certain day?)

This can be a scientific excursion utilizing a spreadsheet or other application or a more informal process of making notes of the areas that stand out to you. What is more important is that you get a feel for the target audience and the market itself before even setting about the content creation itself. You may already have a topic in mind, you may not; the goal is to understand the space.

Then Target your approach; using traditional hooks;

1. The News hook
2. Resource angle
3. Freebies and give-a-ways
4. The passion poker
5. The Ego baiter

Armed with your research it should be easy to find topics, resources and influencers to match up with more traditional link bait approaches to make a compelling page/blog post. Once more we are merely looking to get the creative juices flowing through this process. Beyond buzz monitoring there are other factors such as past analytics and openly available trend data from locales such as Google Trends and Compete from which we can draw from. Utilizing buzz monitoring is merely another tool in deciding on the ultimate direction of any content creation plan.

 
Just links in the chain

There are many other considerations to be had when putting together a content creation plan – but buzz monitoring is certainly a tool with many uses. Hopefully turning to these tools for more than mere engagement metrics and benchmarks will enhance your own imagination to how these tools can be used. If you approach them as a blank canvass awaiting the first stroke, you will find much value to be had beyond traditional uses. Next time your writing or seeking inspiration why not give it a try ;0)

And because we’ve merely opened a new door into Buzz Monitoring; What else can they do? Research and Development? Business intelligence? Qualitative data?

There is more here than a mere vanity search nor fickle engagement metrics – get creative

Here are some goodies that came out of this expedition for more of your creative endeavours;

Finding were your customers are talking about you. – Vanessa Fox
13 Tools for Tracking discussions in the Blog-o-sphere - Mashable
26 Free Social Media Tracking Tools – Marketing Pilgrim
Reputation Management made easy, and Free! – Search Engine Land
Tools to monitor your brand effectively – Social Media Trader
Top 10 reasons to monitor your brand online – TopRank Blog

Other toys for tracking

Megite - social news aggregrator for uncovering the most relevant items from auto-discovered news sites and weblogs. Here’s an example using Lee Odden’s Big list of marketing blogs.

Zemanta - Any user-created text (a blog post, article or web page) is directly “read” by Zemanta; it then combs the web for the most relevant images, smart links, keywords and text, instantly serving these results. Zemanta can be deployed on all major content publishing platforms and web browsers through a simple plug-in.

Paid Services – I haven’t had the opportunity to review these, use at own risk.

Trackur
SentiMetrics
CyberAlert - NetPinions
Umbria
Buzz Logic
Nielsen Buzz Metrics
ScoutLabs

Open Web Awards is the only multilingual international online voting competition that covers major innovations in web technology. Nominate your favorites in a ton of categories ranging from Social News to Niche interests! The first Open Web Awards achieved over 250,000 votes combined between Mashable and 50 international blog partners including Collective Thoughts!

Rules for Voting and Nominations
Mashable and PollDaddy reserves the right to analyze any of the nominations or votes before determining an official nominee or winner. Due to the nature of online submissions, the following are the rules for voting and nominations:

Nominations:
1. Any site or application can be nominated in as many categories as seen fit
2. Nominations is one Site per Category per person (validated through PollDaddy)
3. Nominees with the most submissions and/or determined by Mashable will move to the voting round

Voting:
1. Voting is one vote per Category per person (validated through PollDaddy)
2. IP tracking and e-mail confirmation will remain in place
3. E-mails will only be used in regards to alerts about the Open Web Awards
4. Winners will be determined after voting round is closed and data is verified

Winners:
1. “People’s Choice” Winners will be validated by Mashable and PollDaddy before any announcements are made
2. “Blogger’s Choice will be validated by Mashable and compiled from our Blog Partners

Presented by:

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What triggers do you use to put yourself into a highly creative state of mind?

For this to have its greatest impact I would really like you to stop whatever mindless activity you are thinking of and follow a few simple steps. First stand up and take three deep breaths. Holding each breath for a few seconds will calm your mind. Go ahead and do it now! No one is watching! I would enjoy having your positive attention for a few minutes before you develop your own creative triggers.

Moving on, please start with a fresh beverage of choice. I often find a rich chocolate coffee helps to slow things down, other times cracking open an ice cold coke “in a can” grasps my full attention to the task I have before me. But we’re near the end of 2008, more than likely your beverage of choice happens to be a clear, but simple bottle of water. As long as you begin to relax and focus your mind, you will learn what triggers are best for you. Find your mental escape!

I also like to start my creative process with the use of a location trigger to place myself in to a specific state of mind. You may find that a location may offer you more of a targeted trigger, more so than an object trigger, depending on what you want to convey in your message. Parks are a great source of inspiration that creative people have used for ages. Close your eyes and think of sitting on a deadfall at the edge of a meadow.

What are the sounds you hear as birds sing, the leaves rustle as squirrels fight over the last of your popcorn? What smells trigger your senses? Is it autumn and you sense the first hint of someone’s fireplace? Or is it spring and the musky smell of fresh turned flower beds hover in the air? Do not limit yourself to one location.

Another place I like to go to is my “second office.” It is a picnic bench located at the top of a dune overlooking a public beach. In fact this post was first written on a notepad while the smell of suntan lotion drifts up off the beach below. Take another deep breath and you will also smell the soft smell of coconuts. How long will the smell of suntan lotion now linger in your mind? Use the location triggers as a starting place then let them take you forward.

How does this creative trigger post make sense on a social media blog? Collective-Thoughts have a very broad selection of readers. Many are seasoned content developers creating amazing content on their own, but some are just in the beginning stages of their careers. By looking into how you select your inspiration, it will help to heighten your senses to expand your talents over all of the various aspects of social media. Some triggers will help you to brainstorm for video; while others are better suited to help you facilitate your writing. Some make Stumbling more fun. Anyone play drinking games while Digging?

Now on to the question of the day. Do I add a shot of Patrón XO Cafe into my coffee before I start my next post?

With us today is the Daniel Honigman, part of the social media team that’s responsible for Colonel Tribune, a persona formed for the Chicago Tribune. Thanks for joining us.

1- Give us some background about yourself.

My background is in reporting and traditional journalism. Right now, I work as a social media strategist for Tribune Interactive (Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, etc.), where I work on ways to build local and national communities around our content. I also help evangelize the use of Web 2.0 tools in the newsroom.

2 - What was the aha moment at Tribune that lead to the establishment of the Colonel? Is the team full-time dedicated to social media, or is it incorporated with other duties?

When I started with the Chicago Tribune, I looked at people’s touchpoints with the digital brand, and I saw that while there were some traditional ways people could reach the paper, including via e-mail, there was nothing to inspire the local digerati, really.

I thought about Facebook pages, YouTube pages and Twitter, and seeing that someone had already reserved @ChicagoTribune on there — it was an RSS feed — Bill Adee and I decided to create something, and we settled on Robert McCormick, an historic figure in Tribune lore. We built out a persona for the ChicagoTribune.com and, all of a sudden, we had our Colonel.

3 - Is this a fad? Surely there’s a beginning and end to things, but as web ambassadors, does social media seem like a worthy investment for the Chicago Tribune with long-term benefits?

From what we’ve seen, just from a traffic perspective, social media is worth the effort. But I believe that for local news organizations, it’s essential to create one-on-one connections with people in your market. But social media is something that all mainstream media should embrace, because it’s only going to get tougher and more cluttered out there.

4 - How does The Tribune use social media, and do you see it as a threat to your business? Many fear that blogging killed the journalist. Your thoughts?

It’s not a threat to the business. Traditional media has sold on a CPM model, but for mainstream media to survive, it has to think outside the box. As an industry, look for more aggregation.

But for newspapers to survive, they need to ratchet things down for a bit. If anything, blogging has been a shock to the journalism system. But journalists still have skills that many bloggers just don’t have: access and accuracy. They just need to embrace the 24-hour news cycle and, I believe, be format-agnostic.

5 - You’ve had some successes through social media, such as being able to report a bomb threat. Care to elaborate on the experience or share some others?

Just having a line to the social space can bring you all sorts of information that you may not have had before through traditional channels. As reporters cultivate their beats in real life, social media can help them tap into sources and audiences they never knew existed for their work.

The reason the Colonel got the tip, however, is that he has the reputation of a man who knows what’s going on. And if he doesn’t, he can try to find out. Not many people have that sort of connection with their hometown newspapers.

6 - What has the Chicago Tribune’s social media team found to be the best ROI sites for it’s efforts? What sort of strategies seem to work the best/least?

When we find them, we’ll tell you. The great thing about social media is that there’s no one right way to do it. Everyone’s feeling their way around the space right now, and it’ll probably continue to be that way for a while.

7 - Do you use any tools to monitor people submitting their articles to social media? How do you attempt to monitor your brand in social media?

Metrics are the Holy Grail of social media. Right now, I look at referrals, number of friends in different networks, number of brand mentions in different spaces, some direct feedback and the amount of conversation going on — both about the Chicago Tribune and about Colonel Tribune.

8 - Have you had any negative backlash from the self promotion? Example - when looking at the Colonel on Digg, 9 of the last 10 submissions were Chicago Tribune articles. We’ve seen in many cases that if a Digg user only submitted stories from a single source to which they are clearly connected, they would be flagged as a spammer, even if it was Techcrunch, Cracked or Ars Technica. In fact about the only person who can get away with submitting all his own content is Kevin Rose. Comments?

The thing about anything in social bookmarking sites is that if your content is good, it has a good chance get popular. Period.

But it’s not just about the content; you have to find other ways to contribute to these online communities, whether it’s submitting outside content, commenting on other stories or sharing other stories. It’s important to bring something else to the table and to show you’re willing to be a part of the group.

9  - Ok, so who would win in a fight - Colonel Tribune or Colonel Sanders?

Funny story: My girlfriend Mollie’s grandfather opened the first KFCs here in Chicago, so he and Colonel Sanders were good friends, actually. But I still think Colonel Tribune would win.  Colonel Tribune has a pretty big posse, you see.

Thanks again for speaking with us, Daniel!

Shouldn’t a blog be more? I sure think so.

Sure, sure…content is king. But shouldn’t it be original content? As we are nearing the 1 year anniversary of Collective Thoughts, I wanted to share with you a peek into very selective process in finding great bloggers to head it up.  The single most important factor was that each contributor was totally original and the real thing.  You know it when you see it.  That said, here are the aha moment that I had in when reading the work of my esteemed colleagues:

Andy Beard - For me, Andy has had more thought provoking posts than any of the contributors here, so it was really special for me that he’s part of the team. If I had to pick one post there, it would be the Wordpress Masterclass post.  An oldie but goodie, and may show many of you how little you know about Wordpress after all

Brendan Picha - Brendan is also a newcomer, and showed his stuff with a Digg submission that made it to Diggnation!

Dave Harry - While Dave is a relative newcomer to Collective Thoughts, I’ve been a fan of his writing for quite some time.  The Sphinn awards got my attention - great way to get a community buzzing!

Mark Laymon - Mark is quite a character.  For those of you that don’t know him, you probably know of him as the guy that relentlessly throws sheep and pokes you in Facebook.  This post on getting a PDF to the front page will live on forever in my memory.  I’ll bet every commenter on Digg had their jaw to the floor when it happened

Shana Albert - As we all know, everyone loves Shana.  Shana is a rare talent that has an outstanding writing ability to capture the human spirit.  She actually started writing on Collective Thoughts prior to the almost immediate debut of Social Desire.  Would have to say that my favorite post of hers has been how social media is like high school.

Tim Nash - I believe that his name will forever be associated with StumbleUpon. Who can forget the Stumbleupon Algorithm post? No doubt that this was a different thought than the crowd.

What post has been the aha moment for you? We’d love to hear from you.

The new features have been slowly being coming along for beta users for a while, these include:

• Expanded use of ratings via the 5 star system
• Revamped Friends system, no more 200 user limit but limitations on friends per day
• 
  New profiling system to identify likely friends

Along with the obvious cosmetic changes, pundits expecting to see new toolbars for Safari and Google Chrome will be disappointed. Few people are suggesting see changes to the amount of stumblers coming to their site most reporting lower numbers but with no official comment it is more likely these come from a decreasing userbase.

Mutual Friends

One of the things not immediate obvious is the way friends are added has changed, you may notice your fans are now called subscribers, and when they subscribe they send a friends request (it appears in your inbox) it is unclear how StumbleUpon plans on handling the thousands of existing fan relationships but at a guess they will simply leave them as they are. However the move has put the site more in line with other social media sites.

Enough to stop Stumbles rot?

So are the new changes enough to stop the rot within StumbleUpon? Over the last six months they have been plagued with bugs in the toolbar, slow site and a significant drop in users are the cosmetic changes enough? Or will StumbleUpon slide perhaps the new “web toolbar” will be the answer? Or perhaps maybe it will take a new buyer?

Empathy is the ability to understand the depth of another person’s feelings. Empathy comes through conversation and building relationships. Empathy is something that our parents and grandparents showed us how to feel, relate, respect and love others. It is very important for any business to have Empathy, but it should not be absent from the Online Business.

Absence of Empathy in an Online Business could cause Failure. That statement might seem ridiculous to you, but it is a strong possibility. And, do you know why? Because empathy earns a potential customer’s trust. Without trust you have no customers. Without Customers…. you have no orders.

Of course, there are other reasons why a customer purchases online. Such as…

• Convenience - not having to leave the house
• Ease - Product is shipped right to your door or to someone
  else’s door if it a gift.
• Out of the ordinary products - Find products that you couldn’t
  easily find locally

But even if an Online Store has the ability to do all three of the above things…. without trust the customer will go elsewhere.

Empathy Builds Trust

Remember, Empathy is the ability to understand the depth of another person’s feelings. Our Local Businesses have been doing this for years…. with Salespeople. The really great salespeople will let you know that he or she cares about what you are going through, the problem that has brought you to their store today, and how they will make sure they make your life easier before you leave their store. If at any point you felt that the store or sales person was untrustworthy or not sincere you would leave. So, his sincerity is extremely important.

The same applies to eCommerce and Online Businesses. But, How do we add empathy into an eCommerce or Online Business? After all, unlike an actual physical place of business an eCommerce business has no face-face contact. How the heck can you hold conversations…. let alone earn their trust through Empathy? How, as an Online Business, do we get customers to realize that we understand them…. that we can relate with what they are going through?

Build a Relationship through Social Media

Social Media is basically online Conversations. These conversations might happen on different mediums, but they happen online. As an Online Business you need to start participating in Social Media activities so that you can build relationships with your potential customers….. so you can build trust.

Let me give you an example of how Social Media can aid in offering Empathy Online…

I’m going to use an example of a desperate mom looking for a colic remedy for her child. If you ever had an infant that suffers from Colic you will know that not only is the baby very uncomfortable, but the baby will express their pain in the form of screaming… screaming that lasts hours. These parents are usually super tired and extremely desperate to find safe and effective help…. quickly!!

Photo by bbaunach

Now, let’s say that this Mom checks online and finds a static website that sells Baby Colic Remedies. If you ever had a baby with colic you know the desperation parents feel to find something that will work…. something that will offer relief to the baby and peace to the parents. But, they also need to trust the vendor to provide a product that they can trust not only to work, but also be safe for their baby. This particular static eCommerce site has very nice pictures of the product, very informative descriptions of what the product does, and a “easy to use” secure online shopping cart. But, the customer still feels unsure whether this particular product is the right one for her baby. She is tired, nervous and she needs to be reassured that this is what she should purchase. She searches for testimonials and she finds them easily on the site, but how does she know these are real testimonials and not false made up ones. She wishes she could speak to a real customer or another mother who went through what she was going through right now…. Someone that could empathize with her.

She remembers that she belongs to a Parent Support Group Online and decides to touch base with them and ask them their thoughts. They point her in the direction of a blog where a “real life mom” writes about her battles with Colic herself. She explains what works and what doesn’t. The Mom blogger shows pictures of her happy baby and tells tales of how horrible it can be to have an uncomfortable and colicky baby. Even though this Mom wasn’t trying to sell anything she earned this desperate woman’s trust. Almost as if they were at a “play group” sharing colic stories and the mom told her to go out and buy “gripe water”. But, they have never met. Instead through Social Media the desperate mommy felt the blogging mommy’s empathy towards what she was going through. And, the desperate mommy went out on a mission to purchase “gripe water” for her baby.

This blogger earns her trust. How? By communicating using Empathy. By being real and with sharing she earned the readers trust.

Now since the original colic website sells “gripe water” that the blogger raved about, I suppose it is possible that the Mom will go back to the original website to make that purchase. But, because the original website couldn’t build the Mom’s trust with empathy it is extremely possible the the first site lost this Mom’s order forever.

If Only the Static Website had a Blog

But, imagine if that original website had a blog. This blog could be written by mothers…. Mothers who have a baby battling colic. Or perhaps a mom that survived the months of her baby having colic and lived to tell her heroic story online. The desperate mom might not have ever left the first website in search of trust… she could have found it right there.

The thing that got the customer was not only “The Word of Mouth” from friends online, but it was the empathy. It was the feeling in the blog post she read… she felt the mom’s desperation from another “human being”. She could relate, she blelieved… She trusted!! It was the human conversation that got her. The relationship. The blogger earned her trust.

Things you can do to add Empathy to your Business

• Add a Blog - First things first… add a blog. Make sure
  to write with Emotion. Be passionate with your writing. If your readers feel your passion, your care, your concern they might become customers and probably will pass around your blog to other people with the same concerns.
• Comment on Blogs in your Niche - Offer advice, tips and answer questions.
• Knowledge-Sharing Communities - (like Yahoo Answers) By participating in these types of communities and answering questions and giving people helpful advice you could eventually come an known expert in your field.
• Forums and Message Boards - Answer people’s questions and offer advice…. this too can lead to becoming a known expert in your field.
• Set up a Twitter Account - Microblogging is a great way to communicate with others in your niche. Again, offer advice and tips. Twitter is also a great way to notify others of new blog posts.
• Set up Instant Messaging on your Website - This way customers can contact you if needed. This is a great way to build trust with potential customers. They can ask you questions and even if they don’t have any for you it lets the customers know that they could contact you if need be.
• Images - Images are great for products, but how about using them to show emotion. Do you sell swimming pool toys? Well instead of only using product pictures…. take pictures of children using the toys…. of laughing and playing with the toys. Create a Flickr account with your business name and post your pictures on there.
• Videos - This is an awesome way to show your readers/clients/customers that you care… that you are real…. that you empathize. Make video of your products being used. Or, produce how to videos on your website. You can even make a weekly video show where you perform a 15 how-to class on your products. The things you can do with video to aid with empathy for a Online Business is almost endless.

I feel that there is no beautiful advertisement in the World that will be as trustworthy as a family member, friend or passionate person who has lived through it. In my opinion Word-of-Mouth trumps regular advertising. If someone real and trustworthy says to me, “Try this Product… It Rocks!!”. Well, then I will probably will be trying that product. However, if an advertisement says, “Try this Product…. it Rocks!!” (this being a different product than what the “word of mouth” suggested) it’s only a possibility I might try the advertised product first.

Empathy is natural…. we’ve been doing it for as long as we realized that other people had emotions just like we do. And, as a business person you need to master this skill. To aid in this ask yourself a few questions:

• If I was the customer how would I be feeling?
• If I was the person arriving at my site… what would I be hoping to see?
• What kind of proof would I want to see to prove that the product I’m selling is the one I need?

Basically, you need to put yourself in your customer’s shoes. How would they be feeling when they come to you. You need to understand that before being able to offer empathy to them.

Bottom line as a Business Owner you need business. You want more business?? Be empathetic…… do you want a platform to be empathetic and add conversation to your business plan?? Add Social Media. And, most importantly…

Share your experiences, be real and honest, add emotion, be empathetic….. Make a Difference!!

Empathy & Social Media together…. This Combo could be an Online Business Secret Weapon.