Citizens! When I read the social media gurus' thoughts, many buzzwords are used. Some of them are widely confusing for clients. Let's go for a list of 10 key-words that need to be simplified - social media: well, newspapers don't speak, blogs don't speak, Facebook does not speak neither. So basically, if someone aks you what it's all about, I'd say it's "people talking to people" once they've logged in: it avoids to go deep into technical matters
- blogging: I had a little argument with a guy last week-end, who wanted to talk about servers' log etc. My parti-pris was to answer that now everybody's potentially a web-logger: when Mama logs in for her email account on Yahoo!, she now can publish contents through FlickR, interacts through MyBlogLog etc. So what's blogging? It's potentially anyone leaving a footprint online that can engage conversations with other internet users/bloggers
- Generation Y: I don't like this notion, as Mama can better use digital media than kids that have not been trained/who don't have any access to the web
- Life-Stream: it's linked to the former definition of blogging. Now your online & offline activities can be new life-stones shareable with your ...
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This August marks 10 years since I started my freshman year of college, and while it doesn’t seem as though I should be that far removed from today’s college freshmen, consider this list: - I did not own a cell phone and would not get one for two years.
- I did not have a laptop, nor did many of my classmates. My new desktop cost around $1,100.
- The most cutting-edge portable music player of the day involved CDs.
- Digital cameras were an expensive novelty that few of my classmates owned.
- Text messaging was not widely available on all mobile phones.
- “Google” was not a regular part of our vocabulary.
- Facebook would not even be dreamed up until well after I had graduated.
Today’s students are arriving at college with all manner of gadgetry and Web savvy. Most have had Facebook profile for a few years, are all but addicted to text messaging, regularly snap and share digital photos of their friends (often on their phones) and can’t think of a question that Google hasn’t been able to answer.  For students studying PR and communication, the key foundations of the curriculum haven’t changed (communicating an organization’s story in an engaging way) but the tactics are vastly ... read more >>
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The people we refer to as the Linkerati are those web users who not only own websites and blogs, and are not only prone to linking to compelling content, but whose sites carry strength and authority. They are the people whose accounts at social media sites are highly active, lending additional weight to that which they submit and vote on. They are web-savvy individuals who have seen a lot of linkbait and who often don’t want to link to direct marketing ploys. Upon visiting a social media site or reading a blog, the only reason why a member of the linkerati would take your bait and either vote for it or link to it is because it’s simply too good to ignore. The public at large may send links, chain letters and pictures in mass emails, but the Linkerati are a harder sell.
There are six types of people who regularly constitute the Linkerati. Sometimes, people fall into more than one category.
Social Media Participants
These are people who are actively involved in communities such as StumbleUpon, Reddit and Digg. They visit these sites every day, vote on content, submit content and add comments. They are powerful because their votes determine which content will become ... read more >>
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When someone talks about a social media strategy or a social media campaign; what are they talking about? Are they the same thing? Hopefully you said no. The two are definitely not the same thing. The terms social media campaign and social media strategy have been used interchangeably quite a bit so I wanted to clarify what the difference between the two of them in a clear bulleted list. Social media strategy - Comes before a social media campaign
- Is set to build the social media foundation for all other social media efforts
- what tools are going to be used and how are you going to use them?
- Is a long term umbrella approach for company social media
- Includes specific objectives, strategies, tactics, and metrics
- i.e. social media for pr/marketing/sales/product development
- Should integrate into existing marketing efforts
- i.e. the company social media plan
- Clear analysis of your audience
- Seeking to solve client/customer pain points
- Maps and plans out allocation of resources
- More about providing and creating content as opposed to looking for immediate results from a community
- Focused more on longer term ...
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Perhaps it was my Monday exploration of Google Reader trends. Perhaps I’m inspired by (nay, copy-catting) Amber Naslund’s recent post, What I’m Reading, Vol. 1. But I want to make sure Twitter isn’t the only place I tip a cap to some good bloggers I’ve been reading of late. Consider this a bit of an extension of Follow Friday on Twitter. In the era when industry watchers are declaring blogs dead, These are five blogs I enjoy reading and why. Louis Gray - louisgray.com | RSS Feed Louis’s blog is billed as a, “Silicon Valley Blog for early adopters, technology geeks, RSS addicts and Mac freaks.” And it delivers on those promises. Louis is very smart and takes gadget blogging well beyond just that. He’s quickly becoming a go-to commentator on social media, technology trends and tools. Louis’s latest posts include: Mark Schaefer - {grow} | RSS Feed I had the pleasure of meeting Mark in person recently and I’m glad I did. Not only is he a fellow West Virginia Mountaineer, but has some fantastic . ... read more >>
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 A week ago today I “graduated” from an entrepreneurship course called FastTrac® New Venture™, which is sponsored by the Kauffman Foundation (yes, the one that underwrites NPR & PBS). It was administered by the Michigan Small Business & Technology Development Center (MISBTDC).
It seems like a great program, and true to its name, it does move very quickly. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize until after I enrolled that I’d rather not work for myself. (Shameless plug: Professional Redheaded Geek Girl for hire!) I’m much happier going somewhere every day and dressing like a grownup, working around people in an office environment. At least I know that about myself–I know that I’m more creative, focused and motivated when I’m around others. Even though I didn’t have a particular business idea to be perusing in this class, I did get a lot out of it. But I also saw some areas that definitely need improvement, mainly with the lack of emphasis on the importance of marketing, PR, and leveraging new media to build their new business’ brands–the very stuff I immerse myself in constantly. (”Personal branding” wasn’t even mentioned in this course.) There was a day ... read more >>
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You might also adapt this list to marketing - everything a business does is marketing at the end of the day. The forms you ask your customers to fill out, the minutes they wait in line, the dizzying phone recoding systems are all part of your company's brand. Few organizations are starting to pay attention to those experiences and coming up with new solutions.In mind of the innovator: taming the traps of traditional thinking, Matt May writes about the seven sins of solutions. Traditional ways of thinking prevent us from divining the most accurate—and elegant—of solutions to any problem solving situation, he writes. How would those ideas play in customer service? (1.) Shortcutting - making a beeline for the solution without first analyzing the root cause of the problem could lead you to drawing the wrong conclusions. Our brain is trained to jump to conclusions, to take shortcuts, and experience compounds that trait. However, it is also experience that teaches us that root cause analysis is helpful to know which questions you're answering. Incidentally, when you start thinking about problems differently, you also come up with entirely new ways of doing things, which may lead to ... read more >>
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Last night, Firefox 3.5 crashed and I finally had enough …. didn’t even bother to start it again, today. I’m finding Firefox as a browser, for whatever reason, is so unstable, has crashed so often, no matter how much Firefox is updated, it’s become fundamentally unusable for me, and this has been the case of multiple computers and operating systems. Google Chrome, which I haven’t used much, performs much, much better and is far more stable - and boy, is it fast. Plus Google Chrome is now releasing extensions - see The First Google Chrome Extensions: Block Ads, Check PageRank, and Use IE8 Accelerators in Read/Write Web including Page Rank for Chrome and Cleeki, an extension that delivers the functionality of IE8’s Accelerators to other browsers, a list that now includes Chrome. Fast …. means a lot now. This week (I call it a task because it’s not the kind of activity one wants to do often) updating some Web Analytics site tracking code across 180 profiles in WebTrends was cut down to 1/8th the time to do and with much less effort and mental fatigue. That means a lot to me …. THANKS GOOGLE CHROME!!!! You want to know what I care about? I care about not ... read more >>
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A business model is the framework of how a business generates revenue and profits. While most proven business models can be profitable for a long time, it is just as important to realize that they evolve. And when they do things could fall apart quickly. If you’ve been keeping up with my Twitter tweets lately, you know I’ve been linking some statistics about how newspaper is going away and landline telephones are dying. Both are examples of an older business model getting obsolete in favor of newer models. Business models evolve for 3 reasons: - Technology Disruptions - Technology changes consumer behaviors and the perception of value. It is also the main driving force behind creating new technology.
- Commoditization - When a product or service lacks tangible value, it becomes a commodity that simply competes on price alone. When a business model is commoditized, it will be forced to sell on quantity to scale the business.
- Competition - While competitiveness is good for most industries, excessive competition or lack of competition can result in a changing business model.
The perfect example for technology disruptions is the impact of internet on ... read more >>
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