I think I know the answer you are going to give. “I spent 8-10+ hours a day with these people, why would I want to connect with them on Facebook?”

I’d like to answer your question with a question. What are you really afraid of? Someone seeing a picture of your family–or worse–maybe you with a beer in your hand? I’ve got some advice for you; get over it!

Within the enterprise, there is no bigger asset in social media than involving employees. Tony Hsieh has built a culture of happiness at Zappos.com, and that is very evident on Twitter and other social sites. This is a rare example of a company culture manifesting itself in the social sphere.

When you first start any social media initiative, your first thought might be, “who will be my audience and share my content.” Answer, the people getting a paycheck, and the people that care about those getting a paycheck, will be some of your strongest advocates initially.

You may want to consider running a training for all your employees on Facebook. Show them how they can segment their family content from professional interests, and let the team know you want them to share your message. In fact, I’ve seen some enterprises directly prohibit the proactive of sharing and commenting of company messages within the social sphere. This is just backwards. Employees should be first. Then influencers, significant others, and the greater community.

If you start your social media efforts internally, by framing how you’d like employees to utilize these new tools professionally, you will be building value for the enterprise while simultaneously increasing personal development and education for your team. [win-win]

I find it rather odd that we spend the better portion of our days working for a company, but are scared to share photos of the people that show up at the Holiday parties. We are afraid to show our real selves to the people we spend the most time with. The largest social networks often exist within your enterprise. It is incumbent upon us as marketers to learn how to leverage social connections for productivity, and increasing the value each team member brings to the table.

You might start by writing a social media policy for your company. Then proceed with outlining realistic ways you plan to interact with the community. After that, have a regular trainings with employees who want to participate and guide them to professional productivity on the social web.

If you’ve had success getting larger businesses adopt social media into their enterprise, I’d love to hear your commentary.

Attributions: Photo by Little Pengiun

The first major announcement was Twitter Lists, which went live to all users on Friday. I agree with Scoble, Twitter Lists are the most significant upgrade to the Twitter platform since inception. Fresh on the heels of this announcement, Listorious created the first Twitter list directory site.

Twitter had a hot week. But they weren’t stopping there. Tweets from the Web 2.0 Summit were steadily quoting @Ev about the future of Twitter. My favorite quote from the show, “Twitter is an information network, not a social network.”

Another big move for Twitter last week was when they struck a deal with Bing and Google to populate relevant Tweets in search result pages. This was a clear warning shot across the bow of real time search startups like OneRiot.com.

In other big news last week, Google had their share of announcements.

Google Social Search is one of the more interesting developments from my perspective. Utilizing your Gmail contacts, Social Search finds results from your friend’s blogs, Twitter, and other social sites, and lets you filter out any results you don’t want included.

Google continued their string of announcements with the launch of Google Comparison engine which was released Thursday on the Adwords blog. This move, coupled with the Google maps redesign for Real Estate, is evidence Google is making a serious play in the Real Estate space.

And finally, Facebook:

Facebook made news with their homepage redesign last week. The move was prompted to give Facebook applications more exposure and relevancy moving forward. Users, as usual, reacted by forming groups that protested the new design.

Facebook also revamped it’s privacy policy, another move that sends shivers down the spine of their community.

Twitter made the most strides last week. Google was not far behind. And Facebook appeared to be mired by the diplomacy of their recent changes. It was a good week in tech news, with many substantial updates coming to fruition that will affect on the way we utilize these services.

These were the questions the panel at the ROI smack down attempted to answer.

There was a spirited debate over quantitate metrics versus qualitative metric measurement between Muhammad Saleem (marektingmaven.com) and Beth Harte (community manager of MarketingProfs.com). The consensus among the group was that companies need proof positive evidence of the quantitative growth in sales and revenue, if we as social media evangelists are seeking long term employment. No one disagrees that there isn’t an intangible benefit to social media, however, we must find creative ways to document and track these benefits or they will be lost on upper management.

If we talk in terms of followers and retweets, the traditional business community does not yet realize how to translate that to value in P&L environment. So Deborah Micek, of Quansite revolution, demonstrated how authors are driving more people to their book signing through social media, than almost any other avenue. I wanted to see more examples like this from the panel.

Another interesting point that the moderator Stephanie Agresta addressed was how do you measure the ROI of a PR disaster avoided. If you stop a tweet from turning into a blog, from turning into a movement, what is that worth to you company? What would Taco Bell pay to have that BellHedz crisis avoided?

I felt that this was a topic that could have been explored in devoted track. I would have love to seen cases studies, formulas, spreadsheets, and real life examples of ROI working to drive social media.

The cumulative affect of social media is such that, each month you continue a campaign it gets easier and easier to grow it. What that means is that social media campaigns will never cost as much to the organization as they do the first quarter or first year.

As you amass followers, build relationships, and reach out the community; you will experience rising retweets, shares, and exposure over time. Each month you continue with social media should become more profitable, and if documented appropriately, you can really impress the CFO of your organization.

Twitter and Facebook has enabled charities and causes to do some amazing work at healing and building spirits for those suffering. The folks and Alex’s Lemonade stand, and Spirit Jump really touched me with what they do.

Because the only investment necessary to grow a community on Twitter and Facebook is time, non profits are flocking to these free social tools to spread their message and build relationships.

Between Don Lemon and Blogworld, the hashtag #beatcancer was repeated more than 700,000 times and raised over $70,000 for charity thanks to matching donations from eBay and Paypal. For more information visit: Beatcancereverywhere.com

Led in part by a dedicated track for the Real Estate industry called REBlogWorld; the track of sessions marks a series of new media events making their way into the Real Estate industry domain.

Just recently we’ve seen the first ever Real Estate Barcamp (rebarcamp.com) in San Francisco, led by Andy Kaufman.

I began my career working with Real Estate agents and became very familiar with the industry. I saw the multiple listing service get packaged in the form of IDX, and watched while service providers got rich by brokering MLS data back to agents that provided it. As much as Realtors were taken aback by the web revolution, I think the current change in media is going to shape the future of the industry as much as it did 10 years ago with templatized websites and MLS data.

What’s more, the current change is slightly more confusing. It was fairly easy to justify to agents that people would look for homes online, however it is noticeably more difficult to explain to an Realtor why they need to build relationships of Facebook and Twitter. The innovative Realtors that really understand how to invest their time wisely in the proper use of social media, will have a decided advantage.

I predict that those who make the investment in social media today, will be rich in social capital tomorrow. The leadership positions in the future of your communities are being formed right now. Agents like Ginger Wilcox and Heather Elias provide great examples for what it means to be a community ambassador online and how that translates to success as an agent.

What are you doing to ensure you have a leadership position in your community? If you aren’t sure, you might want to talk to folks at RealEstateTomato.com, they provide social tools and training for real estate and mortgage professionals.

Facebook and Twitter are not services you can ignore, unless of course you don’t plan to be in the industry for more than 3 years.

A popular topic at Blogworld this year was the upcoming FTC regulations on sponsored conversations. Jeremiah Owyang led a passionate group of panelists discussing the repercussions of the FTC regulations.

For those of you who aren’t aware, the FTC issued very controversial guidelines for bloggers that forced them to disclose any sponsored conversation that happens under their direction, effective December 2009.

Primarily two issues have bloggers up in arms:

(1) The lack of clarity in defining a sponsored conversation

• a. This could included anything from tradeshow swag to free T-shirts. Every tweet, status update, and post ought to include a disclaimer of some sort that indicates a conversation was sponsored, regardless of whether or not you would have written about that product anyway.

• b. Literally, anything can be a sponsored conversation: a tweet, a status update, a comment, and most certainly a blog post.

(2) The double standard that exists when compared with how Traditional media operates

• a. pay to play has existed in Radio, Television, and Print for a very long time.

• b. celebrities endorse products all the time without disclosing whether or not they were paid to do so

Jeremiah asked the crowd to raise their hands if they were in support of sponsored conversations. To my surprise, over 60% of the room raised their hand; which is an evident switch from years passed. Bloggers have always maintained their unique value proposition was staying above the fray, and not muddying the waters of advertising and editorial. We are seeing the tides changing a bit; and bloggers seem to be comfortable with disclosing their monetary motivation for running a blog.

The increasing shift in bloggers making money from their work, certainly makes this conversation more pertinent.

The general consensus was that the FTC will never be able to police the use of sponsored conversations in blogging. The new law become more of a gesture, than an iron fist; yet pro-bloggers still need to think about what their disclaimer and disclosures read.

The IAB is not happy about the new regulations and plans to lead a movement to appeal the FTC decision.

Personally, I think this is a classic case of government overstepping their boundaries and sticking their nose where they don’t belong. But, what do you think? Are the FTC regulations good or bad for blogging? What do you plan to do differently in 2010 as a result of this?

While most of the sessions at Blogworld inspired me to *think*, there was one session in particular, led by Robert Scoble, that gave me a glimpse into Twitter’s crystal ball.

In the middle of a session dedicated to “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Social Media;” Scoble got sidetracked. Somehow the audience convinced him to pull up his ‘list-enabled’ Twitter account. ‘Lists’ are a new feature that Twitter is beta testing on selected accounts. I didn’t get the power of the lists feature by reading Mashable’s post; it took seeing the new feature in real life for me to clearly understand the value.

Robert was clearly excited.

He told us he spent the last 10 hours sorting the 5,000 people he follows into 20 separate lists, that people can then search and subscribe to. Moreover, lists are built right into Twitter’s platform. Users can clearly see how many lists they are included in, which acts as a credibility (or popularity) indicator for the entire community.

The theory goes, the more lists that link to you, the more credible and powerful your voice is.

One of the audience members in the session aptly pointed out in the Q&A that this new feature will completely replace groups. 3rd party apps like TweetDeck will simply support Twitter lists feature, and do away with groups altogether. This way your lists are completely in sync across mobile, web, and 3rd party apps.

Scoble predicted this will be the most significant change in Twitter since it’s inception 3 years ago. He predicts there will be a virtual land grab, and suggested user lists created by all of us will be the real estate we all get greedy for.

It’s time to start thinking about curating lists of influencers, if you haven’t already. Game on.

As a member of the blogging community, I wanted to go last year, but I was attending to the newest member of the Browne family at the time, @EmmaBrowne.

This is my first year at BlogWorld at I am really looking forward to see:
* State of the Blogosphere by @Jalichandra
* How to Work with Big Brands and Not Get Treated Like Just a “Mommy” by panel
* The Blog as a Community Spring Board by panel

The primary blogs I maintain are SDBloggers.com and MattBrowne.com. Although, I have my hand in as many as 100 blogs and subsequent strategies. As much as I will be going to keep my blogging skills sharp, I will be attending the show to network with all of the great personalities in New Media.

If you would like to meet up, text me 619.940.6262 or drop me a line on Twitter @sdMatt.

Hope to see you in Vegas!

Taco Bell spotted the emerging trend in urban vinyl toys, spawned by KidRobot, and decided to do something similar for their kids meals. The result was a creation called ‘Bellhedz’.

Bellhedz’ bare a strong resemblance to the Dunny that KidRobot popularized, largely led by Tristan Eaton. Eaton now leads an impassioned community of ‘art collectors’ that run rampant at shows like Comicon.

Lesson #1

When there is real community behind something like the Dunny, don’t ever rip them off, especially if you are corporate America

At the same time Taco Bell was launching their copycat toys, the urban vinyl enthusiast flooded the same location with a flash mob of their own. Their rally, aptly named Death to false vinyl rally, drew thousands of people and tons of free press.

If you search for Bell Hedz, 90% of the posts in Google are about Taco Bell ripping off the design community.

Lesson #2

When you’ve made a mistake, acknowledge it quickly, and involve the community in your resolution.

This is not the kind of press Taco Bell wants or needs. If they would have pulled their toys quicker, apologized publicly, and tried to involve the community in the resolution, they could have salvaged the situation.

Instead Taco Bell did the opposite. They called their lawyers, they pressed on with Bell Hedz anyway, and it culminated into a marketing disaster. One that will live with them for a while.

If you are a marketer in 2009, you need to be hyper aware of the marketplace conversations happening around your brand. You need to start marketplace conversations that advance your initiatives, address customer concerns, and build trust in you as a source of information for your industry.

Community matters. It’s an investment. But one that pays off in the most important circumstances.