The Swedish actress Greta Garbo was famous for her blonde hair, sultry eyes, and the saying” I want to be alone” – a statement that was attributed to her desire for personal privacy as a celebrity.  Today, thanks to our online engagement, we all seem to be celebrities of a sort, and our personal privacy has become more of an issue than ever before.

As part of our online activities, we commonly share, photos, locations, opinions, job information, trips and much more every day.  To most consumers, transparency means more than knowing what companies are doing as part of their business process – it also means providing personal information as the price for participation in many Web 2.0 sites.

As I speak and teach around the country, the  most common reason people give me for a reluctance to participate in sites like Facebook , LinkedIn, Foursquare and Twitter is a concern that their participation means an invasion of that privacy. Recent studies bear that out showing that 6 out of 10 consumers surveyed don’t trust online companies to protect their privacy, and 1 out of three don’t believe that they can protect their privacy when they participate in online activities.

Millennials, our digital natives, have less concern over privacy, which may speak to their ease of adoption and enthusiastic participation in the online world. They are willing to opt-in to location tracking or on-line tracking, and expecting to share private information, almost half of those surveyed expected some sort of reward for providing personal information to companies on their websites.

Interestingly enough, though privacy is a concern, 61% of social; users, say they would share even more personal information if they were given better and clearer controls over their privacy settings, allowing them to choose what they want to share and who they want to share it with.

If you operate a blog or web site, knowing what people want is crucial. To help you understand how consumers feel, and what they want , a great visual was created by our friends at MDG Advertising, summarizing studies performed by Anonymizer, Harris Interactive, The Ponemon Institute, and the Consumer Institute for Citizen research.

Music has a special place in social media.

Music may be one of the ultimate social objects. Our lives are influenced by music, from the first songs our parents sang us, to the learning songs we sang in school as little children, or the school anthems and fight songs that colored each sporting event so vividly that the memories stay with us for years. And as we grew, we chose our own music, songs that underscored our days and evenings, playing in the background through the turning points of our lives. Who among us didn’t think, at least once, that all of the sad songs that played on the radio right after we broke up were there for us and about us?
The methods of music distribution have grown and changed in the last 125 years or so. From the first Edison cylinders, to 45s or LP vinyl, then CDs, and finally digital file on dedicated players, computers, and our phones. But there has always been the question of cost, storage, and transportability to challenge the music lover. With a proliferation of devices, the new challenge was finding a way to listen to your music when you wanted to without consideration for the devices you had handy.  Using the internet to host music libraries was a simple, yet elegant solution, once bandwidth was no longer a problem.

Portable music devices went through a  similar evolution.  People went from huddling around portable radios or phonographs to buying highly portable devices with headsets and no speakers, though the Sony Walkman is with us no longer, the hipster with their headset moving to the unseen strains of their song of preference is with us yet, rocking a smartphone or a media player, focused and serene in their self-absorbed solitude. But music is, at its core,  social. We sing along, we share music, we talk about performers, we dance  , and we even do Karaoke when we have been sufficiently lubricated – so how do we reconcile our solo enjoyment with our social desires? By using services that allow us to share what we listen or experience it in common, while our listening preferences are utilized by the system to seek out new music we might enjoy.

The new music paradigm is subscription based systems like Pandora or Spotify or Rhapsody that allow us to access large music libraries at our own time with a variety of devices. Now, our one subscription can make our work day move faster at the office, play through our home media system, on our smartphone, or as the background to the party as it streams through our laptop.

Below is a great infographic from G+ (no, not Google Plus, G+) that details the way technology has changed our access to music, and its impact in our online communities. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. Is your musical source of choice here?

Everybody loves short cuts. Most social media tools are so easy to initiate that people don’t recognize the need for adequate training to use them in an ethical and effective manner. Of course I may be prejudiced since I spend so much time providing technology and social media training, but most people seem to have difficulty achieving business goals on their own.

For most, the challenge is making a paradigm shift to inbound marketing. Their old traditional marketing programs are shoved into new marketing channels, and though the company can claim to have a presence on social media channels, they are not building community, gaining business intelligence, or driving business in these new venues. But for others, the problem is simply that they are overwhelmed. They have difficulty adopting the appropriate channels for their communication because they are confused by the overwhelming choices, and the ever changing landscape of social media.

Our good friends at ColumnFive and Flowtown have rushed to the rescue with the infographic below. Though it is not a substitute for a knowledgeable consultant, or a live course or seminar, it can be a great tool for busy people that have no clue where to start. It will at least help you begin to differentiate the trees from the forest so you can begin to determine where your business might engage most effectively, or where your existing marketing resources might do further research  about expanding your online campaign.  So bookmark this, print it out, share it with your marketing team, or just use it as a cheat sheet for your next cocktail party but most of all use this as a tool  to help you determine  which channels to get more training on so you can deploy effectively.

Pinterest is ao online pinboard  share images that interest you. My favorite description of the site is “a place where women dress children they don’t have, furnish homes they don’t own, and save photos of vacations they haven’t taken” . But whatever it is, there is no question that the site is hot.  As of January 2012 Pinterest is driving more traffic than Google+, YouTube, Reddit, and LinkedIn — combined and is almost equal to Twitter.
In some respects Pinterest is a social bookmarking tool like delicious, but its graphic nature makes it visually appealing. And the impact of social proof – our herd instinct is amazing. Like may others, I got an account, and found myself being followed daily by lots of people, who it seems were waiting for me to do something interesting.

The applications for retail operations are obvious, and even businesses like real estate are struggling to find ways to use this newest and hottest social tool. Social referrals seem to have even more impact on how we find things than search – the holy grail of online marketing.

Our good friends at ColumnFive and Monetate are ahead of the game as usual, bringing us the latest numbers on the Pinterest craze. Enjoy, I’m going to be pinning this to my Pinterest page as soon as its published. What do you pin to yours?

In the past 5 years, I have watched the discussion of social media go from “What is it?” to “Do I need it?” to “How do I do it?”.

Now people who came late to the dance wonder if its not too late to create an effective online presence. It seems that no matter what their business, it there has already been a huge rush to stake out what has been perceived as valuable online territory. The fear of being just another tree in a forest filled to the edges is not a fantasy. Luckily, that’s not how social marketing works. Social marketing has never been (and I’m not sure it ever will be) a function of the tools we use. If you’ve ever heard me talk, you know that I am fond of quoting my son Hal Lublin who said, “three years ago , social media was Friendster and MySpace, now its Twitter and Facebook, and we don’t know what it will be next. ” In fact, I would expand on that to say that no one know what it will be next. Maybe Google+ and its integration in the basic search, maybe YouTube (since every year seems to be the year of video) or maybe FourSquare or Gowalla(since every year is also the year of location based services) But no matter what the tool, the basics will remain the same.

1. Identify your target or niche market. Through the glory of what we used to call the information superhighway, we are no longer tied to just geography, but are free to work  demographics to reach our intended community
2. Be a Joiner – Its better to be part of your community’s existing world than it is to try to create your own world and seek their participation. Why worry about competing for their attention when you can put yourself firmly in the middle of the place they’re already focused on? Join the existing conversations. Add to the comments in their community, respond to their statements and questions as a peer, and your acceptance will be almost immediate. People are finding that they get more traction by participating in Facebook Groups than they do trying to get people to engage on theior Facebook pages.
3. Get Through Giving  People become pre-disposed to like you when you contribute freely and without question.If you  contribute to the community on their terms, at their pace, through the channels they choose to populate, you become viewed in the most positive fashion, earning a position of trust that leads to referrals and direct business, when the members of the community have a need for your product or service – it is the very essence of inbound marketing.
4. Be Genuine At some point you’re going to be dealing directly with your consumer, and your interaction will have set some expectations in their mind about who you are and what you stand for. If you are not the person they expected to meet, their experience, and your ability to maintain their trust is severely limited.  You need to send a consistent message  and you need to make sure that your message has the right context. Context in terms of the ongoing conversation and in terms of the platform you’re sharing on. In the world of FourSquare, Yelp and Foodspotting, sharing what you’re having for dinner is not only acceptable, its crucial to the community – on LinkedIn, not so much…
5. Be Patient You need to understand that this takes some time and you need to have realistic expectations. Whatever your business goals, social media is a long term investment of time and resources. Your strategy needs to be considerate of that fact. Because of the nature of the relationship process, consistency and patience are key to success. If you blog once a week, at the end of the year, you have accumulated 52 posts that create a part of your permanent presence online. Each picture post, tweet and poke contributes to an overall structure that becomes your online persona – a place where people can see not only what you are discussing or sharing today, but what you have contributed to the community at large.

Bottom line, there is still outstanding opportunity for small businesses and professionals in the social media space. Used thoughtfully, properly, and with integrity, you can connect with a wonderful online community that will profit  your business and enhance your life.

New opportunities are being created everyday, Where will you stake your claim?