This book is meant to be a guide to building an optimized foundation in the Social Web for beginners and advanced users alike. So, while some of the chapters may seem basic to many of you, they are essential for those who are just starting out.

Chapter 1 of the book is about mapping a social media and Web 2.0 optimization strategy right out of the gate. A strong message throughout the entire book is to methodically build a solid and optimized presence in the Social Web that you can reasonably manage. Once that foundation is in place, adding and integrating new tools will be almost painless.

The following excerpts are from A Survival Guide to Social Media and Web 2.0 Optimization.

Chapter 1: Creating your social media strategy

There are three general areas to keep in mind when planning a strategy for optimizing your presence in the Social Web: interactivity, sharing, and collaboration. Interactivity can come in the form of writing blog posts, commenting on others’ posts, tweets, or participating in social networking communities. Sharing can be as easy as uploading images and video clips onto media communities. Collaboration can be achieved by contributing to social bookmarking sites or wikis…

It is easy to get overwhelmed with all of the new social media and Web 2.0 tools and technologies that pop up on the Internet on an almost daily basis. But a carefully planned and executed strategy can alleviate your stress and ensure your successful transition into the new Social Web. …

The one bit of technology essential to your Social Web success is an RSS feed, discussed in more detail in Chapter 3, “RSS Feeds & Blogs,” but, in short, you have two choices:

• Start a blog which has built-in RSS feed technology, or
• Create your own RSS feed using an XML file…

The next step in a successful strategy is to decide which tools make sense for you or your business to implement.

Here are some general areas to consider:

Social Networking (Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc.)
It is a good idea to have a healthy profile on one if not two of these social networking sites.

Micro Blogging (Twitter, Jaiku, etc.)
These sites have become as popular as blogging. We recommend a healthy presence in at least one of them.

Other Social Platforms (Tumblr, Squidoo, etc.)
If you have a lot of content, these platforms are a good addition to your strategic tool kit.

Social Bookmarking and Crowd-Sourcing (StumbleUpon, Digg, etc.)
Building a presence in several of these sites and contributing regularly is highly recommended for any strategy.

Blog Commenting
Becoming part of the conversation is a very important part in any social media strategy. As you are surfing the Web and/or searching for sites and blogs to share on social networking and crowd-sourcing sites, take the time to comment on others’ blog entries.

Media Communities (Flickr, YouTube, etc.)
Sharing your multimedia content is an important part of any strategy, even if you only have a few images.

Social Calendars
Consider these if you host or attend a lot of events.

Podcasting
Podcasts are not difficult to create. They can be particularly effective if you have plenty of instructional material or you conduct interviews.

Vidcasting or Webcasting
These can be powerful viral tools for people or companies who have the resources to create and maintain them.

Widgets and Badges
Placing widgets and badges from other social sites on your Website or blog can help make your site more interactive.

Virtual Worlds
This is one technology that should be given considerable forethought. The learning curve is steep and consultants are expensive. However, for the right product, it could serve as a powerful marketing tool.

Social Media Newsrooms
This tool is ideal for authors, publishers, or other companies who garner a good amount of media coverage or produce regular news releases.

Custom Widgets or Applications
These are your own custom-built widgets or applications that can virally carry your brand into the Social Web.

Hosting your own Blogs, Social Network, Wiki, etc.
These tools are best suited for companies with a large customer base or who have many active advocates for their brand or service…

Copyright 2009 by Deltina Hay. All rights reserved.

###

This chapter also features 5 real-world social media strategies for you to use as a basis for your own. The resource CD offers further reading, linkable resources, and a fillable PDF form called “Social Web Strategy Worksheet” that you can use to map your strategy.

Read more about this social media book at the publisher’s site.

As a special bonus to Socialmedia.biz readers, I have made the Social Web Strategy Worksheet (a fillable PDF form) available for download. You are welcome to use this for yourself or your clients – all I ask is that you do not remove the copyright information.

And, as always, Socialmedia.biz readers also get a special, shipping included price of $16 (retail $24.95) for this book – just click the buy now button.

Deltina Hay is the principal of Dalton Publishing and Social Media Power and founder of the new social media Website service Plumb Social. Ms. Hay’s graduate education in computer science, applied mathematics and psychology led her naturally to social media consulting. Contact her or leave a comment below.

For the past several months, while juggling the demands of client work, the conference circuit and writing projects, I’ve also been hard at work planning and building out an important new site.

So I’m happy to announce the launch of Socialbrite.org.

While Socialmedia.biz remains focused on exploring the fast-changing mediasphere and helping businesses successfully add social media to their internal and external communications, Socialbrite has a different mission:

To provide a learning hub and sharing community around all forms of social media, and to work with nonprofits and social change organizations to help them harness the power of the social Web.

Here are our key announcements about the launch:

• Introducing Socialbrite: Why we’re here
• Nonprofits get a social media mentor in Socialbrite.org
• And this is how we’re getting out the word: Tweet our launch!

Scott Butki of Newsvine just published a Q&A with me — J.D. Lasica on his new joint web venture Socialbrite.org — at Newsvine’s Good News Wednesday group, and because I haven’t given many interviews lately I thought I’d publish an excerpt from it here:

Scott: What niche is this filling?

JD: Look, it’s not about niches. The whole world seems to be hurling headlong into a world of nicheification and fragmentation. We’re saying something else.

Nonprofits, citizen journalists and cause organizations have a lot of things in common, but we’re not talking with each other. We’re hunkered down in our silos, our bunkers. But we’re in a new world now where we’re all making media, we’re all connecting with each other to share stories and ideas, and we need to get acquainted with this new landscape.

It’s happening slowly, but the evidence is clear: Traditional media is giving way to social media, and that has important ramifications for all kinds of organizations and private and public institutions.

What sites might be hurt by your site’s start?

Our goal is not to displace anyone. Our mission is to add to the media ecosystem, one Lego piece at a time, until we can stand back and say, Wow. Isn’t that something?

Netsquared and TechSoup are the big names in the nonprofit tech space, but we’re strictly focused more on social media and social tools. Right now Mashable is the site covering this area the best. I admire the hell out of them. Mashable rebranded itself earlier this year as “The Social Media Guide,” and that filled a gap in the market. We hope to work with them in sharing content and sponsoring fundraisers and events that support social causes.

When hundreds of more newspapers and print magazines go out of business, we think we’ll still be here, because we’re not counting on huge readership and advertising dollars to keep us afloat. We’re counting on our skills and relationships.

Is this site intended to help people, or groups or both?

Definitely both. While a lot of Socialbrite.org’s business will come from nonprofits and social change organizations that want to figure out how to navigate this new terrain, the fact is that we’re all in this together. And most of the really amazing advances in Web 2.0 and social media have come from individuals, not organizations.

Just taking your camera or video-enabled cell phone into a street scene, uploading to a media sharing site, reporting on what’s happening on the ground in Baghdad while armed goon squads descend on your friends and neighbors — damn, that’s where the next-gen Pulitzers should be given out.

I think nonprofits and foundations as a group tend to be conservative in nature, so we’re speaking to the thought leaders and early adopters who understand the dramatic changes we’re going through as a society and are willing to embrace the shift to a more democratic, decentralized, edges-based media reality.

That’s one reason we built the site on the open-source WordPress platform and all of our content is released under Creative Commons licenses. We trust the blogosphere and Twitterverse to make use of these educational resources as they see fit.

- End of excerpt. See the rest of the interview on the Newsvine site. -

A Twitter Sponsored Definition

There has been so much conjecture as to how Twitter will start monetizing.  Well, it looks like there have been a few baby steps in the form of “sponsored definitions” that cycle through right above the Home link on the navigation bar. It is very subtle and I didn’t notice it myself until today (Seth Simonds has been talking about this since June 23rd).

You won’t see these sponsored definitions every time as they’re interspersed with Twitter definitions that are not sponsored but simply informational or helpful, I guess.  An example of a sponsored definition is Exec Tweets and Cinema Tweets — essentially text ads in the guise of being factoids and links to useful apps and services.

According to a blog post I found on blog.twitter.com from back in March, it looks like Federated Media is handling the Twitter sponsored definitions, “It turns out the folks over at Federated Media have both the resources and the expertise. So if you’re a major brand and you want to sponsor a topic-focused social media experience with Twitter, we suggest Federated Media—they’ll fix you up right,” which could be a real score for Federated.

Twitter has done a very good job of working this is organically — I never noticed it, as I said, until this morning.

Doing a cursory search, nobody is freaking out and there hasn’t been any direct reference to advertising on Twitter short of a coy post on May 20 — Does Twitter Hate Advertising?, “Do we hate advertising? Of course not. It’s a huge industry filled with creativity and inspiration. There’s also room for new innovation in advertising, marketing, and public relations and Twitter is already part of that.”

Twitter Banner Ad Served in Japan

So, no direct mention of the “sponsored definition” campaign.  Very smooth and with zero blowback.

That said, if you have a Twitter app or service and want to get into the loop, I guess you should reach out to Federated Media, though I wonder if there might be a secret handshake or password to get yourself into an ad on Twitter.

And, to look at the Twitter-to-come, Seth Simonds also mentions that there are proper 185px ×185px image ads showing on Twitter Japan, which you can see for yourself, “You can see for yourself by visiting the account settings of your Twitter account and changing the language preference to Japanese.” — in this case, the ad is static and sells Windows 7 and Windows Vista from the Japanese Microsoft Store.

Very interesting.  What do you think?

Chris Abraham is co-founder and principal of Abraham Harrison LLC, an international consulting group with specialties in online word-of-mouth/conversation marketing and online business & technology strategy advising. See his profile, contact Chris or leave a comment below.

Here’s the comments through to today:

By jason_miletsky | totowa, NJ June 26, 2009 05:32:15 pm:

I’m not a fan of Second life by any means – I’ve written plenty of scathing blog posts on its demise myself (http://bit.ly/Qat0k), and I am absolutely a fan of Twitter. But I don’t think Second Life vs. Twitter is a fair comparison. Far from the cliched apples and oranges, this is more like apples and marshmallows.Twitter exists as a source of information, news, gossip, updates, conversation – it’s a platform for communication between friends, families or even brands and their consumers. But all it takes is a little effort to follow people who share your interest, and all of sudden every column of TweetDeck is filled with life – the empty room we’re all tweeting in at the start can get pretty crowded pretty quickly. Same with Facebook – maybe it’s a walled in environment, but anybody who makes the slightest effort to connect with people can log in and see some activity.

None of that is true with Second Life, which would have benefited from a few more boundaries (vitutally geographically speaking). Second Life offers so much space there simply aren’t enough people to occupy it, so it becomes very lonely very quickly. Really, there’s nothing more depressing than wandering around an enormous Second Life mall and being the only one there. It’s right about them when you look up and realize, huh…maybe my first life isn’t so bad after all. So once the joy of flying is over (usually after the first 5 minutes), there’s just not a lot more to do there.

However, I think both Facebook and Twitter face some of the same dangers that Second Life ultimately succumbed to, and that the increasingly visible presence of spammers, get-rich-quick schemes and sex pushers. More and more often I find myself unfollowing someone on Twitter who wants to show me how they made $5,000 posting Tweets, or how I can get thousands of new followers. Facebook is no different – I’m sure by now everyone on there has gotten a few suspicious e-mails from crooks trying to steal their name and password. If it happens enough, people will eventually stay away from these networks and look elsewhere for their networking. They’ll still be around, but they’ll be a shadow of their former selves – Second Life still exists, but it’s little more than a virtual Red Light District in some seedy part of town.

I’m sorry – did I say that there was nothing more depressing than wandering around an empty Second Life mall? That was wrong – watching a Second Life stripper grind against a virtual pole goes well beyond depressing, and border on simply pathetic.

Jason Miletsky
CEO, PFS Marketwyse
Author, ‘Perspectives on Marketing’ and ‘Perspectives on Branding’

http://www.pfsmarketwyse.com

http://twitter.com/jason_miletsky

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By chrisabraham | Berlin June 26, 2009 07:08:19 pm:

I agree with you. I don’t think you can compare them either, which is why I wrote this. People keep on saying, “Twitter hype is just like what happened with Second Life. Nope.

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By jason_miletsky | totowa, NJ June 26, 2009 07:24:17 pm:

Ah – Sorry, Chris, if I misunderstood your point there. Thanks for clarifying, and for bringing the topic to attention. Good piece.Jason

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By chrisabraham | Berlin June 26, 2009 08:39:58 pm:

Well, I am glad we’re on the same page. Actually, I am glad that you commented here — thanks!

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By valencio | Dubai June 27, 2009 03:26:38 am:

I will recommend using Email Charger for all bulk email marketing needs. Its the best bulk email marketing software I have used so far.

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By MarcoP123 | Philadelphia, PA June 27, 2009 09:26:48 am:

There’s really no comparison between Second Life and Twitter. Second Life is a vehicle for people to escape reality and create new ones. Twitter is a vehicle for people to share reality quickly and succinctly. I do strategic consulting work for a Philadelphia based full-service marketing communications agency (http://www.domusinc.com). I also have some musings on the Domus blog site (http://domusinc.blogspot.com). In those two capacities, I see and work with customers who immediately understand and want to be part of the Twitter community – a much faster adoption rate than so many previous technologies.

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By ASantiago23 | Lakeland, FL June 27, 2009 12:44:45 pm:

Thank you for this great article. I find it so interesting how Ad Age writing are so pro or against “social media.” Twitter is phenomenal. It has given me and my projects more real readers and followers than MySpace, Facebook, Live Journal, and Pure Volume together.I am really intrigued with what will come next from them. And yes, the Iran explosion via Twitter, I think, is the separating factor between Twitter and the rest.

But ultimately, I think that Google Wave will CRUSH everyone!

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By chrisabraham | Berlin June 27, 2009 12:54:58 pm:

“But ultimately, I think that Google Wave will CRUSH everyone!”I will believe it when I see it — and I sort of believe it already — however, Twitter has an amazing lead and might very well benefit from making itself more of a need than a want.

Seeing the State Department preempt a scheduled Twitter maintenance because of what was going on in Iran was huge. I don’t think any of us have realized how much of a change agent Twitter must really be if State is doing interventions.

I wonder if there may very well be Government and Homeland Security interest in the wellness and prosperity and success.

However, don’t even quote me as saying that Twitter is too big to fail, but I have never seen anything with this level of ubiquity.

Sure, Twitter could very well — surely — fly high and then crash. Who knows. I don’t think so. Thousands of companies have invested big bucks, big resources, and a lot of “face” into Twitter — and I have invested over 18,000 tweets into Twitter.

I personally have a lot invested in Twitter. How about you?

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By Spartanic | london, NY June 27, 2009 01:24:49 pm:

This is a short sighted and ill informed article. So you are saying twitter is a sucess? How on – what basis, that lots of people use it?Whats the usual measure of success? – the bottom line… How much money does twitter make? $0 – Second life is a monetised and profitable product.

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By chrisabraham | Berlin June 27, 2009 06:36:03 pm:

@Spartanic I would say that obsessing about “bottom line” is the kind of short-sightedness that got us (all — even the Brits) into this financial mess. Twitter is dominating a space that is actually a mad land-grab rush (you might not aware of it because Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter are so far about everyone else) and it is essential not to spook anyone off… especially the earlier adopters who are looking to diss anything that “sells out” — and, when it hearty competition with Facebook, it is essential to make certain that this “new” — 2007? — tool wins the race.

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By Spartanic | london, NY June 28, 2009 01:46:25 pm:

I’m a big fan of Twitter don’t get me wrong. I just think its a bit wrong to take pop shots at ‘unfashionable’ platforms such as SL because they are not the flavour of the month.The end of the day these services are a business model – and so far twitter only exists because someone is paying its bills (i’d hate to think about their hosting costs). If its trying to “win the race” as you say – when is the payout day for the investor? Twitter seems very reluctant to find a way to monetise – Either because they think it might put people off – or they cant think of an effective way to get people to pay.

“This financial mess” as you put it, I fear comes from the whole attitude of throwing money at something in the hope that some bigger fish will buy them off – rather than building a strategy that will profit enough to pay the running costs (at minimum). The bottom line isn’t short sightedness – its a reality.

If Twitter does have a strategy and is holding back – all well and good. But I wouldn’t start throwing around claims its a success over an already profitable company just yet.

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By chrisabraham | Berlin June 28, 2009 02:45:28 pm:

I don’t think I come across as anti-SL, I just wanted to explain why I believe Second Life failed (did it fail? I don’t hear much about it at all) — my only reason for writing this article is to say that Twitter will continue expanding because it is permanent and not ephemeral, it is free and not cost-dependent (you stop paying in SL, you lose your dream house), it is open system and not a proprietary walled village (Google is not allowed into Second Life and even if it were, there is really no there there to index), and finally, Twitter has gone a lot further down the road towards making Twitter into a household name — even if it doesn’t actually have as much registration penetration as does Facebook.Twitter knows — and their investors know — that the Twitterati will bail to FriendFeed, to Plurk, and to Laconi.ca the moment that Twitter start heavily monetization. Good timing is essential here and I think Twitter will focus, at first, on making money through B2B licensing, through Twitter PRO services (which might charge users money for extra API calls since we are only allotted 100 calls per/hour, which is a serious impairment when you follow tens of thousands of people — hell I would pay for more API calls — Twitter, hello?).

Anyway, I am coming from the assumption that Second Life is a wasteland, the only people who are really participating are academics who are researching and sharing and educating using Second Life’s virtual world and a small cadre of faithfuls. I am assuming that most brands have abandoned SecondLife, though I may be mistaken.

I may be wrong, please enlighten me.

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By Spartanic | london, NY June 28, 2009 07:19:16 pm:

Well this is where you contradict yourself. In your opening statement you are saying “ascent and crash of Second Life”An then in your previous comment you say “did it fail? & “I am coming from the assumption that Second Life is a wasteland” & I don’t hear much about it at all” – I suggest when making sweeping and provocative statements you do some research, otherwise someone might come along and challenge it ;)

You article talks of “Outlive[ing] the Hype Cycle” – Well second Life seems to be surviving without the hype cycle doesn’t it? Believe me I don’t think its perfect by any means. But its standing on its own two feet which a lot of web companies cannot claim.

You say that Twitter is open, free and you cant lose your content on it? really? Is this so? – Again – someone else is bankrolling your content here – if Twitter would fold over night – so would all of its content (unless you’ve read it into an external db of course, have you done that?).

In regard to Google, yes Google does index Second Life – Google is used for its search engine and also its mapping system. that content is just not shown on web search.

I think you are right to say that people will jump ship if Twitter were to start to heavily charge for its services. That’s why I think they may just be waiting for someone like Google to buy them out. Their competitors have much more functionality, all they don’t have is the brand recognition. That’s hardly a recipe for outlasting the Hype Cycle either is it? Twitter has trouble meeting the load as it is, let alone with more functionality.

I agree that the nature of Twitter would make it easier to survive in theory. Text messages are a lot simpler to deal with than a complex persistent 3d environment. But, like I was saying – if it can’t sustain itself then it its not really going to live much past the free lunch.

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By ProkofyNeva | Second Life, NY June 28, 2009 08:16:20 pm:

Chris, your over-exaggeration of Twitter and banging on Second Life is typical of what I would call a technocommunist world view that abhors free enterprise — except for yourself and your ideologically approved cronies of the left. You betray your hand by praising IRC. Twitter is proprietary software just as much as Second Life is — Twitter is a “walled garden” too. The presence of APIs have made it useful for power usages and automatic following and searching, but SL is a freemium service with very low barriers to entrepreneurism — and that’s a good thing (not just for you). Your strange belief that SL is marred by “greedyness and avarice” (I guess that’s what you call “capitalism” and “commerce” practiced by people other than the heads of new digital social media ad firms lol) while Twitter is sanctified by its APIness is just plain ridiculous.Most Twitter APIs are used by SEO and new media gurus in all kinds of money-making schemes of what many see as the most shoddy and greedy kind (just look on Twitter and who uses it for God’s sake), and the really major power usage of Twitter is by firms that want to scrape the data to sell ads or sell commercial information about users for commercial purposes. *And that’s ok*. Isn’t that what YOU do?

Why would somebody putting up a commercial island for a campaign or a long-time customer relations presence in SL be “greedy” and someone scraping all the data of tracking trends for commercial purposes be blessed as “cool”? Makes no sense. Different tools for different purposes and outcomes.

Trying to compare Twitter with its massive numbers of users and Second Life with its small number of users is like complaining that CNN has a lot of users and the New Yorker only has a small number of subscribers. They are different forms of media, used differently and one need not cancel out the other.

Your take on SL seems to have evolved mainly through its hyping by a few of the very ad agencies that prop up this very site here storming on the scene in 2007 and deciding, at a time when they were hugely nervous and scared over huge amounts of loss of ad revenue from dying newspapers, that perhaps virtual worlds and games were the “next big thing”. They were too early and too clueless with this, but that’s a function of their expectations. These same ad companies have gotten no more ROI from Twitter than they’ve gotten out of SL (Skittles, anyone?)SL is good for a deeper, more intensive purpose, for meetings and raising of awareness and support — really building communities; and also for small business inworld.

SL offers you that more intensive interaction that is essentially a replacement for f2f meetings because you are in an immersive environment and able to reach people at an intellectual and emotional level, with real-time interactive 3-D communication, that you just can’t reach with a 140 tweet. Serendipity rules in SL

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By ProkofyNeva | Second Life, NY June 28, 2009 08:24:29 pm:

The lease persuasive of your arguments is that there is something “ephemeral” about Second Life and not about Twitter. What, you save somewhere *inside* the service of Twitter which is, er, “eternal” all the thousands of updates you’ve made. I have 15,000 updates in two years of tweeting and some 1300 followers whose updates I follow — like…I access this somewhere? lol Please. I use search for *real-time* needs, not research as I would Google. In the same way, in five years of SL, I have 25,000 pieces of inventory, many of them notecards from meetings, tutorials, discussions, etc. all of which save within that system (unlike anything twitter offers). Even if SL were to go down tomorrow, I could still cut and paste out of that application — I’d be lucky to successfully page through all the Twitter updates past a few months given its lag and error messages.But the point of social media is not to keep communications in some big file — both SL and Twitter are on Google, and there are applications such as those your digital PR new media firm uses for clients.

Twitter is not a place where you can build relationships and collaborat — it’s a signal pusher with a lot of noise pushing against it, for life-casting or mind-casting, but little means of taking it beyond the cursory clipped expression except by going into Friendfeed or on Skype or into Second Life or Metaplace or some other venue for voice or text chat without Twitter restrictions.

You don’t need to defend Twitter by bashing on Second Life. Your assessment of SL’s hype cycle is based on superficial media reports and not research of the sort you wouldn’t accept as true if they were about Twitter. Twitter is overhyped and will undergo a crash in old media coverage, too, just like Second Life. You’re oblivious to the role that dying old media played in touting both Twitter and SL, and tone deaf to the possibilities for both Twitter and SL *after* the old media hype is over. In fact the two services are complementary and not contradictory.

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By ProkofyNeva | Second Life, NY June 28, 2009 08:43:29 pm:

Jason, how is it that you came to view SL through this cynical keyhole? Did you type “sex” or “mall” or “stripper” or “shopping” into a search engine? Is that how you use the Internet at large?Or are you saying you didn’t even bother to search that one time you came to Second Life, and just made a lazy click on the old “Popular Places”? By popular outcry, that list was removed because it was all gamed by bots and camping (SEO tricks) — there is a more curated and meaningful list of suggestions now under Showcase and at many resident-made infohubs like mine in Ross.

While SL can have a steep learning curve, the very basics — search on topics to go to events and places — are just like Google and just as easy to use. Talking to other people is as easy as it is on Twitter.

If you typed in words like Obama, Iran, non-profit, government, science, history, literature, etc. you might have a very different experience than visiting clubs with AFK dancers on sex poles — something that in fact really does make up a small portion of Second Life even if it gets inflated traffic from bots like the SEO gurus on Twitter now get seemingly enormous numbers of followers using automatic scripts).

You *do* put filters on your email to get rid of the Viagra ads, right? You can do the same in SL.

In the last few weeks, here are some of the things I’ve done in Second Life:

o hosted an event to talk to people around the world who came through serendipity — educators, journalists, human rights activists, etc. to talk about Iran and the “Twitter Revolution” and talk about ways to be supportive to democracy in Iran.

o followed a lecture by a U.S. government official about Obama’s technology programs and social media strategies

o visited the MacArthur Foundation’s island to learn about their programs funding all kinds of interesting projects around the world

o visited three amazing art installations and discussed with fellow visitors

o attended 3 live music concerts by artists with original music

o wrote a 3-D interactive science fiction story and interacted with other people in the story to discuss what new technology will bring to us — and take away from us in the future

o made US $200 from my rentals and content business above costs to use on real-life bills

What did I do on Twitter? I *talked* about the Iranian revolution but didn’t *do* anything about it. I spent an hour trying to weed out all the SEO goofs following me to get follow-backs using scripts. I learned about a few interesting articles — but often the same articles I get pasted to me in numerous groups and chats in SL on all different subjects.

I’m an early adapter of Twitter and it’s all good, but a time suck.

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By jason_miletsky | totowa, NJ June 29, 2009 12:02:15 am:

ProkofyNeva You asked me the following question: “How is it that you came to view SL through this cynical keyhole?…Are you saying you didn’t even bother to search that one time you came to Second Life, and just made a lazy click on the old “Popular Places”?Actually, I came to my conclusions based on pretty extensive research I did for the college textbook I’ve recently had published, “Principles of Internet Marketing” (http://bit.ly/63dB5). In the book, I dedicate a good part of one chapter to virtual worlds, with a specific focus on SL, including an interview with an organization that runs a fairly significant island there. While I didn’t editorialize in the book, I was able to come to some pretty sound conclusions. If I had any preconceived notions at all before I first went on SL, they were positive – I wanted to like it.

But neither my comment nor Chris’ original post were about whether or not we like SL. Like has nothing to do with it. It’s about SL’s place in the online universe as a widely used tool for social networking and/or marketing.

I always find it amusing, however, how people who are so crazed and passionate about Second Life are so incapable of seeing the reality behind the business of the Internet. I’m sure you generated $200 last week, and have had plenty of conversations with other people there. But the fact of the matter is that if it ever reached critical mass in terms of a being a viable marketing or social networking vehicle, it did so awhile ago and shows little chance of recapturing any former glory. If you’d like, I’d be more than happy to spend a few minutes finding links to charts showing the significant loss of media attention and brand usage over the past year or more.

Fanatics, whether their obsessions be for Star Wars, Star Trek, Second Life or something else, are welcomed to have their passion. But don’t let your love of something cloud your ability to see the reality behind it.

Jason Miletsky
CEO, PFS Marketwyse
Author, ‘Perspectives on Marketing’ and ‘Perspectives on Branding’

http://www.pfsmarketwyse.com

http://twitter.com/jason_miletsky

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By chrisabraham | Berlin June 30, 2009 08:45:38 am:

Wow, this is an awesome comment string! This is 100% why I blog. @ProkofyNeva — this article is 100% about the Hype surrounding Second Life back in 2006/2007 and the Hype surrounding Twitter in 2009 — and why *I* believe Twitter is more sustainable in its Hype than Second Life. That said, thank you Second Life denizens for making this true social media — I might download Second Life again if you’re willing, maybe, to give me a proper tour of Second Life.

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By GwynethLlewelyn | Lisbon June 30, 2009 06:20:17 pm:

Chris, I hardly understand why you bother to mention Second Life on your description of Twitter then — unless, of course, the whole point is to gather the attention of Second Life users, who are quite keen in following *all* news, bad or good, that mention it ;) (A very interesting effect known by so-called SEO experts who have noticed that anything Second Life-related will gather WAY more attention than… almost anything else).I totally agree with your description of Twitter vs. Facebook/Plurk/others, about the openness of Twitter and its myriad applications, about how it resembles IRC, about how people use it as an “intelligent RSS feed” (I’m certainly one of them!). There is nothing to disagree with :)

However, I completely fail to understand the relationship with Second Life. Twitter is owned by a company of geeks that just raised venture capital and burn it like crazy keeping the servers up, without a business plan, without a revenue model, and thriving on — numbers and hype. That, in itself, is nothing wrong — after all, all the others are *exactly like that* (when Facebook burned out all their money in 2007, they invented a fake number for their value and sold a share to Microsoft, which should be enough to keep them going on for a few years more — until they sell another share, and so on). Twitter is a cool idea which is simply impossible to monetise; like, unfortunately, almost all Web 2.0 applications out there. One day we’ll look back to them all, after the Web 2.0 bubble bursts, and think how we could have done the same mistake *twice*. But we did :)

Second Life has nothing to do with that. It’s probably one of the rarest cases where not only it turns a healthy profit but has already paid its return on investment. Since the “hype years” of 2006/7, Second Life has grown in all areas — number of users; stickiness (number of hours users spend in-world); and other metrics which are only relevant to Second Life users (landmass; internal economy; etc.) — up to three to four times *after* the “hype days”, it never grew so fast *after* the media lost interest in it. And it still grows — 12-15,000 new users every day. It’s not only a “playground for universities and research labs” — like the Internet overall, and the World-Wide Web, isn’t seen as a “playground for academics” any more. That doesn’t mean that universities aren’t doing incredible things with Second Life — but that’s just a very small chunk of what’s being done. Prokofy Neva above gave a lot of good examples. There are more. Far more. And most interestingly, more and more projects in Second Life are starting *now* with a development time of 2-3 years…

Too closed? Weird that you mention that. The Second Life client is *open source* and there is an open source server solution (think Apache vs. MS IIS). Second Life can fully communicate with the outside world using HTTP/XML-RPC and SMTP…

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By chrisabraham | Berlin June 30, 2009 09:05:51 pm:

@GwynethLlewelyn Unless you have not been following the news — or have not read my article at all — I am comparing hypes: the world was going nuts over Second Life 2-3-years ago and there are many people who have been comparing the fickle hype surrounding Second Life with what they’re anticipating is the writing on the wall for Twitter, too: how the mighty will have fallen. So, I wasn’t doing a “compare and contrast: Second Life and Twitter: a study,” I was just saying why Twitter’s ascension will not be as transient as Second Life’s. Does that make sense? Either way, I appreciate these comments something awful!

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How awesome is that? What a beautiful thing. I love blogging! I heart social media!
Chris Abraham is co-founder and principal of Abraham Harrison LLC, an international consulting group with specialties in online word-of-mouth/conversation marketing and online business & technology strategy advising. See his profile, contact Chris or leave a comment below.

Regular readers know that Socialmedia.biz covers not just social media but also citizen media — and it’s all melding together anyway into one giant conversational media ecosystem, right?

So I was gladdened to hear that Google and YouTube have taken another tentative step forward into the realm of citizen journalism with Monday’s launch of the YouTube Reporters’ Center. Above is one of the featured videos: NPR’s Scott Simon on How to Tell a Story.

YouTube has done some great work in the space with its pioneering Ask the presidential candidates a question in the CNN YouTube Debates and with its citizentube project currently documenting the turmoil in streets of Iraq.

While the pleas of some in the news profession for Google to step in and “save” the U.S. newspapers industry are downright silly, Google and YouTube are doing the smart thing by focusing on the journalism, not the underlying publishing platform, and by underscoring the need to uphold journalism values and standards instead of throwing it all on the scrapheap and starting from scratch, as all too many bloggers want to do.

Here’s a guest post by my friend Oliva Ma of YouTube’s News & Politics team announcing the new Center:

Helping you report the news

Ever captured a natural disaster or a crime on your cell-phone camera? Filmed a political rally or protest, and then interviewed the participants afterward? Produced a story about a local issue in your community? If you’ve done any of these things or aspire to, then you’re part of the enormous community of citizen reporters on YouTube — and now we’re launching a new resource to help you learn more about how to report the news.

It’s called The YouTube Reporters’ Center, and it features some of the nation’s top journalists sharing instructional videos with tips and advice for better reporting. Learn how to prepare for an interview from CBS News’ Katie Couric; how to be an investigative reporter from the legendary Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward, or why it’s important for citizens to participate in the news-gathering process from Arianna Huffington. And definitely don’t miss out on New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof’s video on how to report from a crisis area without getting shot.

In addition, you can also learn practical and ethical tips, like how to fact check your stories, avoid breaking the law while reporting, and adhere to journalistic principles. Check out the Reporters’ Center to see all the videos or sample a few in this playlist.

This isn’t meant to be a one-way conversation. For the first time on YouTube, these reporters are making themselves available to engage with you directly. If you have experiences on reporting the news yourself and would like to share your tips, you can submit them for inclusion in the center. Upload your “how-to” videos to youtube.com/reporterscenter and share your knowledge with citizen journalists around the world.

If you’re a news organization that would to become a YouTube news partner, please read more information on how to apply here.

Participating journalists and media organizations contributing videos to the YouTube
Reporters’ Center:

Bill Adair, Editor, Politifact
Nathalie Applewhite, Associate Director, The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting
Donna Cassata, Editor, Associated Press
Chris Cillizza, Political Reporter and Author of “The Fix” blog, The Washington Post
Kate Connolly, Reporter, Newsweek
Katie Couric, CBS Evening News
Jim Drinkard, Accountability Editor, Associated Press
Kwame Dawes, Journalist, The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting
Arianna Huffington, Co-founder and Editor-in-Chief, The Huffington Post
Michael Isikoff, Investigative Correspondent, Newsweek
Riz Khan, The Riz Khan Show, Al-Jazeera English
Nicholas Kristof, Columnist, The New York Times
Andre Lambertson, Journalist, The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting
Dana Milbank, Political Reporter and Author of the “Washington Sketch” column, The
Washington Post
Beth Murphy, journalist, The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting
Lizzie O’Leary, Washington Correspondent for Bloomberg TV, Bloomberg
Adam Pasick, Editor of Reuters.com, Reuters
Jon Resnick, Planning Editor, Associated Press
Jon Sawyer, Executive Director, The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting
Scott Simon, Weekend Edition, NPR
Tavis Smiley, The Tavis Smiley Show, PBS
Josh Tyrangiel, Managing Editor of Time.com, Time Magazine
Bob Woodward, journalist, The Washington Post
Dean Wright, Global Editor, Ethics, Innovation and News Standards, Reuters
Randi Zuckerberg, Facebook
The Citizen Media Law Project
HowCast
The UpTake
Witness

- End of Olivia’s dispatch -

There are now a handful of citizen journalism resources available to the public, including the Center for Citizen Media’s Principles of Journalism project that Dan Gillmor and I headed up two years ago, mirrored on the Knight Citizen News Network.

I’m glad to see the last five names on YouTube’s list, given that it’s currently titled a bit too much toward traditional news organizations when there’s a burgeoning ecosystem of citizen media publications and place blogs that are inventing the next generation of community news. But this is a great start, and in fact Olivia has invited me to take part.

Given a bit of free time, I certainly will.

The Intel Insiders program just marked its first anniversary, so it’s worth mentioning a few highlights over the past year. We advise Intel on social media matters. (I wrote about the program at its launch a year ago and posted this disclosure statement.)

I’m glad to see Intel taking out an even greater public presence this year, with its co-sponsorship of PBS’s NewsHour and its deepening commitment to educational and charitable efforts around the globe. Some highlights for me:

• Trading ideas and comparing notes with some of the other Insiders, including Tom Foremski and Sarah Austin (both of whom will be part of the Traveling Geeks trip to London July 4-11), Cathy Brooks, Justine Ezarik, Brian Solis, Frank Gruber, Adriana Gascoigne and others. Intel is the chief underwriter of the Traveling Geeks trip, and I hope to post a few dispatches on their site during the trip.

• Our interview with Intel chairman and former CEO Craig Barrett. Here’s our video interview with him at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year where he talks about corporate social repsonsibility. The following day he announced a wide-ranging new initiative by Intel to support the philanthropic micro-lending efforts of Kiva.org and the nonprofit charity Save the Children all across the globe.

• Here’s my one-minute Animoto remix of my photo gallery of CES, set to a wicked soundtrack. (Intel paid for my trip to CES.) Which reminds me … I need to use Animoto more often!

• Here’s my interview with Intel Senior VP Eric B. Kim about the coming convergence of television and the social Web — what Intel and Yahoo! are calling the Cinematic Internet (possible redubbed Widget Channel since then), conducted at the Intel Developers Forum.

• And here’s that pretty funny Intel commercial Our rock stars aren’t like your rock stars.

Ken E. Kaplan, our primary contact at Intel, shares stories from some of his favorite activities with the Insiders so far: And Christine Ngo, who’s been helping with the Traveling Geeks trip, also offers up her thoughts on the Ogilvy PR blog.

I just re-upped for another year, so looking forward to more enterprise adventures in the year ahead.

JD Lasica works with major companies and nonprofits on social media strategies. See his business profile, contact JD or leave a comment.

Case in point below:

In this particular case, the innovation is what I call a “Twitterish” innovation — stealing something directly from Twitter. A couple weeks ago, I stayed up until 12:01AM to secure another hype-drenched Twitterish innovation: vanity URLS: facebook.com/chrisabraham — I am such a sucker!

However, Facebook is an equal-opportunity thief and also quite creative as well. Next innovation inspired by Utterli, FriendFeed, or LinkedIn?  Who knows!

I hate to admit it but I am used to lazy web applications.  I am used to apps like Flickr, Delicious, Craigslist, Ebay, MySpace, Twitter, and YouTube — sites that are pretty much the same as they were when they were born. Facebook, on the other hand, innovates almost constantly. In fact, Facebook tends to innovate so aggressively that there are millions of members who constantly picket Facebook to revert itself to the way it was when it was a college-only service. The reason why most apps don’t innovate is because of this vocal minority — the change-averse.

Another thing I love about Facebook is that they’re not wed to their innovations.  When Facebook Beacon pissed off the world, they scaled it back. The developers at Facebook are smart — land grab with ten new innovations, throw them agains the Wall, and then see what people adopt and then, over time, remove the fails.

Facebook is willing to spitball, Facebook is willing to steal ideas shamelessly from other platforms, and Facebook is willing to fail fast and move on.  That’s what you’re supposed to do!  That’s why I love Facebook.

Chris Abraham is co-founder and principal of Abraham Harrison LLC, an international consulting group with specialties in online word-of-mouth/conversation marketing and online business & technology strategy advising. See his profile, contact Chris or leave a comment below.

I’m not going to lie. It’s hard to work in PR and branding these days. You are bombarded with all sorts of expert information and advice. People are constantly suggesting you try this strategy, platform, or network. Your brand is not only expected to sustain a stable presence on old media channels but reinvent itself and strive under new media expectations.

All day I read articles, blogs, case studies about brands that tried something — usually — missed the boat, and are now enjoying the not always positive feedback we are all so ready to give.

Murphy-Goode Winery

I thought it would be beneficial for other companies to read a bit of the backstory, and understand how a boutique winery in Northern California has the whole online world watching its every move.

The backstory: Murphy-Goode

I first stumbled upon A Really Goode Job after a conversation with applicant Maria Ogneva (@themaria). She pointed me to a Mashable post that covered the guidelines. Basically, Murphy-Goode is looking for a “Lifestyle Correspondent” to live on site at the Murphy Goode winery for 6 months, learning all about wine, wine making, wine tasting and surrounding Sonoma wine country. The daily activities will involve sharing these wine stories, adventures and experiences with the rest of us via multiple rich and new media channels — such as social networks, video sites, photo galleries, and more.

Not a bad gig, huh? Did I mention they are going to pay the lucky guy/gal’s travel expenses, a 10,000 a month stipend plus accommodations, and provide computer, internet, PDA, and digital and still camera access. Wowzers. I’m excited just blogging about this. OK, moving on …

Why this was successful

A clear goal: They had one — to hire the right person for the job. To even be considered the person had to demonstrate their knowledge in social media by producing a quick video, writing blog posts, pushing viral content, and gaining buzz. Murphy-Goode did just what every company tries to do (whether with traditional hiring methods or new age ones), they weeded out the bad applicants at no cost to them.

They are left with 912 strong candidates. It was a win-win. By carefully choosing the way they were going to promote the position, most of the work was done for them. Well done guys, well done.

Secondary successes

It doesn’t stop there. As we all know, social media enables companies and brands to capture long-term benefits from successful initiatives. It’s the beauty of a strong, viral message. If you Google “Murphy-Goode winery” right now, you will notice that 6 of the top 10 SERPS are actually covering the contest. They have dominated their brand name with positive listings. This is what we call great online reputation management. They created the right kind of buzz and let it run wild.

In addition to taking control of their brand, they are also gaining visibility to their services. Confession: I have never heard of the Murphy-Goode winery, and I am a wine lover. I mean seriously, I love love love it. OK, you get it. Anyway, I have now visited their site about a dozen times, shared their link on my Facebook page to my 1,000 plus friends, and tweeted about them to my over 3,500+ followers. All because @themaria vouched for them, sent a link my way, and applied for the job.

Now that is successful social media. Taking an idea, creating buzz on multiple platforms, letting people push your message around in a positive light, and reaping the rewards.

Lastly, not only did they get their name in front of people, but the right people. If you check WeFollow.com (a user-generated directory of Twitter users) there are 1,054,832 Twitter users that have tagged themselves with “wine.” These are wine-lovers, drinkers, enthusiasts, journalists, winery employees, and more … and for the past few weeks the top wine story on Twitter has surely been the Murphy-Goode hiring contest. As a company, it’s crucial to focus your social media efforts on the right platforms for you. No point yelling your message into a room of people who aren’t listening … right? Right? Bueller … Bueller?

So why bother with social media?

I meet with a lot of companies, and almost always I am asked to “give an example of how a company has increased their bottom-line with social media.” Well, now, in addition to my usual spiel of stats, graphs, etc., I can also hand out this case study. What it comes down to is any company can find success with a social media strategy; they just need to have the right goal in place. They need to understand where their audience is hanging out, and get in there with a good story … start passing it around. The rest usually takes care of itself.

I will surely be visiting Murphy-Goode on my next visit north, and since I find it bad luck to visit a winery without purchasing a few bottles, this social media strategy not only gained them 1,000 great applicants, a few pages of top-rated SERPS, media attention from top blogs like Mashable, thousands of site visits, BUT also a few actual wine bottle purchases from me. Yum. Yum. Talk about reaping the rewards of social media.

Side note: For anyone who would like to vote for Maria, and help her snag her dream job, you can view her video above, and vote here: Maria Ogneva.

Joanna Lord is a social marketing consultant and founder of TheOnlineBeat.com job resource board. See her profile, contact Joanna or leave a comment below.

NBC News’ Ann Curry on Twitter from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

Ann Curry, news anchor of NBC’s “Today” show, spoke animatedly at the 140 Character Conference in New York last Monday about the importance of news and journalism as a public service rather than a business and the growing impact of social media services like Twitter.

I caught up with her as she was leaving and did a 3-minute video interview before her handlers ushered her away.

“Journalism is an act of faith in the future, and it is a war,” she said. “Oftentimes I feel bloodied with a sword unsheathed. That’s because you’re fighting for stories that you want covered.”

Curry smartly uses Twitter as a sort of electronic newspaper to spread the word about stories that didn’t make it on air. (She tweets almost daily at @AnnCurry.) She points to the fact that many important stories don’t get a lot of attention — in both traditional media and on Twitter. Viewers and users “want to watch something more salacious and that makes me crazy,” and during the panel she bemoaned the items that often receive the most attention on sites like Twitter.

She says of Twitter: “I look at Twitter as my own two-way broadcasting. I put things out, I hear things back, I gain from people’s perspectives all over the world. … I don’t feel threatened [by Twitter and new forms of media], I feel excited.”

Curry is one of the most capable, smart and forward-looking journalists in broadcast news (see her Wikipedia entry), so it’s great news that she has embraced Twitter with such gusto. Here’s the New York Observer’s coverage of her public comments during last week’s conference.

Watch or embed video on Vimeo

Related posts:
• Connecting with your community through Twitter
• NPR’s experiments with social media
• Using Twitter at the Chicago Tribune

JD Lasica works with major companies and nonprofits on social media strategies. See his business profile, contact JD or leave a comment.

Obsessing about “what’s next” in online services and technology saps too much valuable attention away from what’s really important: connecting with people. We need to stop obsessing on what comes after Twitter and focus instead on how best to connect to, communicate with and relate to our clients, colleagues and consumers.

Here’s why: The internet, with all of those fun time-sync tools, is supposed to make connecting with people more efficient. Social networks, blogs, microblogs and forums destroy the previously prohibitive barriers to efficient communications: moving people physically around the planet and making sure they’re in the same place at the same time. But the downside of all of this efficiency is that too many of us lose track of the forest for the trees.

Imagine obsessing the way we do about cool tools in the ballroom at the local Marriott, where many a meeting is held. The physically convenient, affordable hotel with rooms for visitors and plenty of elbow room and resources is not the focus, but encouraging connection, communication, brainstorming, relationship-making and business is.

Hotels, conference centers, message boards, instant messengers, social networks and blogs are just communication aids — the journey, not the destination. Even Second Life, World of Warcraft, Xbox Live, MMOGs and MMORPGs are more about real people spending their real lives with each other than about wanton sex or video games.

So, why has asynchronous global communications reduced living, breathing people into user IDs and handles? At Blog Potomac, folks like Shel Holtz, Liz Strauss and Scott Monty all mentioned how persistently important to their practices the humble, hundred-year-old telephone is when it comes to connecting, especially during a crisis. I moved back from Berlin primarily because folks wanted to get me into the room, take a look into my eyes and see how firmly I shake hands — all things I believed didn’t matter as long as I did the work. Not true!

I had started thinking about these sort of things at the Social Media Camp NY in 2008 when I heard a talk by Howard Greenstein and Dean Landsman on “What Old Media can teach New Media: Media Convergence & Integration, Social Media, and Professionalism.” Long story short, Greenstein and Landsman posit there is a direct evolutionary link between the Lascaux cave drawings and the blogger. I agree with them.

The conclusion is that what makes digital PR and social media marketing challenging and new is not the technology or the tools, it is the unique culture of online conversation. If you focus too much on the tools, you might forget that virtual communities are not virtual. If you don’t learn to love, respect and appreciate virtual online communities as real homes to real people, as real as the village square, the parish hall, the Paris Tabac or the alumni group, then you’re underestimating the passion, loyalty and deep personal relationship found there.

This lack of understanding and appreciation will almost always result in a tragic faux pas, the likes of which may result in brand suicide. You can easily avoid this if you understand the operative word in the phrase Virtual Online Community is “community.”

(Via Chris Abraham is co-founder and principal of Abraham Harrison LLC, an international consulting group with specialties in online word-of-mouth/conversation marketing and online business & technology strategy advising. See his profile, contact Chris or leave a comment below.