What knowledge does your organization have that can add value to the conversation?

What assets can you produce that are exciting and engaging to the groups gathering around a subject?

Approaching Social Media with a traditional online marketing mindset which is drive toward some conversion can be dangerous.

Too many companies look at the power and leverage of social media and start asking what can they get out of it, rather than considering what they can do to add value to it.

Finding The Right Approach

The idea is find the common interest threads that run through your audiences and then create content that appeals more on an emotional level then a product or service level.

What does this mean? It means losing the marketing speak about features, benefits and services and going to the places where the consumers have passion and providing support and input on those passions. I wrote a recent article on the theory of engaging in consumer "passion threads" and believe tremendously in the idea of getting out of the market segmentation business and getting into the passion business.

This is essentially taking the idea of sponsorship and social causes and creating an authentic social media conversation around the passions your potential consumers are pursuing.

To create a viral campaign, one needs to understand the emotional triggers, cool factor and belief behind a project or program.

Make The Assumption That All Employees Are Involved In Social Media

Now ask yourself, would the company's employees voluntarily reach out to their own networks to promote a cause, campaign or event the company has put marketing efforts behind? If not, then you need to ask yourself: Why not? Even better ask your employees why not. Find out what could the company do to motivate them to tell their friends, share an application, attend an event or promote a cause?

Be Creative

Consumers want original, authentic and entertaining content to engage with. By understanding what their passions are you will be more likely to create content that inspires and invokes action. This means you might be producing content that is not only about your product or services, but connects with your customers on an emotional level.

It could be as simple as a great Facebook application, a podcast series, man-on-the-street videos, or sponsorship of local ride naked events. Be careful with that last idea.

As of now, FeedFlix is still pretty basic in terms of social networking, but it really opened my eyes to fact that Netfix actually had personal and public RSS feeds. They are buried way down in the footer navigation of Netflix.com, which is not surprising as I would imagine the majority of users have yet to adopt the use of an RSS reader.
There are a variety of personal feeds such as Recommendations and Queue in addition to public feeds (new releases, top 25). Adding these feeds to my reader has really saved a bunch of time and streamlined my Netflix usage. I can quickly check out some recommendations and new releases and only if I see something I like do I need to go to Netflix.com. Hopefully this will increase/improve my movie watching make the most of my Netflix subscription.

It is great to see Netflix using RSS and it would be cool if they would highlight this feature more prominently. Perhaps similar to the recommendation engine challenge, they can have a RSS integration challenge to incorporate and explain their RSS technology and get more people using it.

• Blogging - keep a company blog updated with latest news and status updates
• Get Satisfaction - a place for your customers to express their opinion and help you identify bugs. A Suggestion Box 2.0
• Easy access to contact information - let customers know that they can always call, email or mail in their issues, never hide your number
• Respond to complains quickly - never go silent.
• Never deny the obvious - its much better PR to admit your mistakes than to actively deny they exist.
  

Read on as I touch on some of the points above.

Blogging - The Ultimate Tool to Connect With Your Users

A blog serves a million functions for your company from keeping the customers updated with the latest and greatest happenings to custom feeds for journalists, to engaging the conversation with your users. First thing to remember is to always keep posting, because a "dead" blog is sometimes indicative of the company losing interest in updating the users. If you suffer from planned or unplanned outages of your service - never host your blog on the same server farm as your current website. A lot of times if the site is down, the blog is the first place people look for an update and if you host your blog on the same server as your site which happens to be down, your blog will be down as well.

To start a blog you can take a look at one of our tutorials in the Video Tutorials section. There are two types of blogging platforms out there: a hosted solution such as WordPress.com, Typepad or Blogger and host-it-yourself packages. If you would rather have complete control over your content and not rely on anyone else for that service, you should check out WordPress.org, Movable Type or even our own blogging platform, Post Zinger (which, by the way, is a clear winner in blogging/podcasting space). Some hosting providers such as BlueHost (disclosure: it's our affiliate link) allow you to very quickly install these platforms.

In case you are still not sold on having a blog, keep in mind that they all come with some type of RSS Feed which helps high traffic blog authors to keep tabs on you, and when they see a new interesting feature or a sour customer turned happy they will cover, it bringing the ever important positive coverage of your service. Your blog also allows you to keep the conversation on the site, where you can control it, and while deleting comments and doing weird things will quickly get you very bad rep, you at least have a chance to respond quickly to issues.

If you think you need to be a technical person, that's not true, there are a ton of tutorials out there and it's generally a very low barrier of entry to get started. Pretty much anyone can get their own blog in a matter of minutes and have it customized with your website's look and feel in a matter of days, if not hours. There are always people that can set it for you, adding the benefit of their knowledge in the area.

Got Satisfaction?

Get Satisfaction is an up and coming social media feedback site. A lot of start ups use it as a de facto destination for getting positive and negative feedback about their services. It can be used as a tool to report bugs, suggest new features or complain about your product's usability. It is extremely useful as a feedback tool because the people who write are usually very passionate about your products. I have seen people write great suggestions, awesome bug reports and generally very articulate reviews. It can backfire however - if the company isn't responsive or has terrible customer service through general channels, it will have issues appealing to the social crowd. Case in point: Comcast. They try, they really do, and in 4 years of having the service I personally had no issues, no problems with customer service, always responsive, always helpful. Their corporate image, however, has suffered, from the lies about filtering, to terrible overcharging and deceitful pricing models, they leave a foul taste in customers' mouths. Also, someone over there really needs to fix their dot com site, probably eliminate it all together.

Setting up Satisfaction is pretty straight forward, first you create a company if it does not yet exist, then you claim it through ether email or phone confirmation. It takes a few days but once you are up and running, it is very simple to manage your company and products, add additional reps and moderate the conversations.

Denial is Not An Answer - Do Not Try to Fool Customers

If you have a problem with your service - be it an unfairly treated customer, a site that is constantly down, or shipping delays on a product launch - acknowledge them, do not let complaining customers escalate it and attract negative attention. People enjoy ganging up businesses to stand up for the little guy, be it vocal (through Internet or otherwise) or action driven protest (by unsubscribing, switching services, bad mouthing, etc). Blogs like The Consumerist enjoy writing about these incidents and sometimes whole communities dedicated to complaining spring up in protest. Timing is also everything, and in 9 out of 10 times you will have to make a public response to a lot of these complains, so it's better to be proactive and responsive before you generate enough bad press to fill a wall. Responding quickly and honestly is the key. This is where Brand Monitoring comes into play, where you are able to notice these incidents quickly, before they manifest themselves into PR disasters. From Twitter to Google Blog Search, companies that pay attention are the ones that end up benefiting from "Happy Customer" stories and positive word of mouth marketing.

Finally, have an easy way to contact you company, a number on every page or at least a clear link to the contact page, responsive service centers and acknowledging emails will go a long way. Zappos has their customer number on every page, they respond to emails extremely quickly and show care and compassion - clearly the reason for being so successful in online shoe selling business.

Try some of these out or, if you already use these methods successfully, let us know in the comments how they are working out for you!

Yesterday, Weezer posted the official video for "Pork and Beans", the first single from their new self-titled Red Album that gets released early next month. The video is already featured on the front page of Youtube, and as of yesterday at 5pm PDT, it has already garnered over 500,000 views.

The song is catchy and awesome in the way that you'd expect if you're a Weezer fan, and the video also delivers. Put quite simply, it's brilliant. I'm not sure who came up with the idea, but not only is the idea excellent, but it was executed flawlessly. The video incorporates dozens of characters and people that have been popular on Youtube--the Numa Numa guy (over 1 million views), the Star Wars Kid (over 7 million views), Chris Crocker (Leave Britney Alone has garnered more than 22 million hits), Tay Zonday of Chocolate Rain (viewed over 22 million times) fame, the Diet Coke and Mentos experiment, Miss Teen South Carolina's confusing answer, the dramatic groundhog, the evolution of dance, girls dancing to a Daft Punk song, and those are just some of the ones that have a prominent feature in the video! There are many many others that appear quickly or in the background such as the Will it Blend series, Charle the Unicorn, and peanut butter jelly time. These videos constitute millions of views, so Pork and Beans appeals to anyone who has seen even a few of these massively popular clips. The way Weezer incorporated the dozens of different popular videos is amazing, and I cant' even tell you how many times I've watched it today, to try and find all the little details I may have missed!

This video was masterfully done, which means that they had to take a lot of time, effort, and money to pull this off. They also had to reach out and contact the many Youtube artists who appear in the video, although I'm guessing that most of them jumped at the chance to appear on something that would gain such wide exposure, and a music video for a well-known band no less! The fact that I've watched this video not once, not twice, but many times is great for the marketers of this video. They've now ensured that I am very familiar with the song--by tapping into the most popular videos on Youtube, they've automatically gained a large target market of people who will love watching this video. Weezer is popular enough that they don't necessarily need to aggressively grow their market, but they are a prime example of how to capture what's popular and make it work for you. The key is to know what's popular and what's next when you see it and to use the right amount of resources to successfully produce a product that will catch on--if this video had been slapped together I don't think I would be nearly as impressed.

A good clergyman friend of mine is always saying, "you can't make community happen." Because it's about relationships, it's an organic growth that requires investment (in time) from all the participants. You can facilitate community with tools that help you to reach out, connect with others, foster conversations and organize people - but you can't grow meaningful relationships with just tools.

Any social media effort with a community that doesn't have invested time from people who are committed will eventually implode or fragment into nothing. With that in mind, keeping community practical becomes an important endeavor. And one of the most practical things you can do within a community is offer people something to do.

Simple examples include quick (interesting) surveys or poling where results are shared. Perhaps there are routine live events, scheduled chats, podcast participation opportunities, and other strategies to enable more user generated content, sharing, response, etc. Does this require work and creativity? Yes. Don't most meaningful relationships?

Understanding Why People Contribute
Perhaps one of the most common behavioral aspects we can gauge from social media marketing is that people will rally around that which helps them to belong and contribute.

People want to identify with others who share common passions and interests, especially if they are authoritative and accessible. They want to participate and contribute to efforts that are not only personally worthwhile, but validating of their own view points. People also want to tell others what they know - and the more they know, the more they seem to tell. How will you help them?

I know it's all a bit anecdotal -- but I'm of the thought that we as good marketing people need reminding of where our focus should lie. I say make it on people, and the money will follow.

Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee, or contractor and outsourcing it to an undefined generally large group of people, in the form of an open call.

crowdSPRING

Anyone seeking logo designs, marketing materials, websites or other creative can post their project into crowdSPRING, state when you need it and how much you'll pay for it.

The cool thing about this process is that it requires the buyer to put the full project cost into an escrow account until the a designer is selected.

Designers, illustrators, writers or photographers from anywhere in the world can submit their work for selection.

NO BID MANAGEMENT AND NEGOTIATIONS
So with the crowdSPRING model the buyer can actually review the final work presentations, not portfolio or bids. This is a huge barrier for buyers. Skipping the entire portfolio and bid negotiation is huge.

The seller, knows for fact that the money for the project is available and if selected will be delivered in a timely fashion.

moviebakery

Gotta say, this process is brilliant. If anyone has ventured into video production they can tell you how complex the process is, from script writing, to story boarding, etc. If the process is not scope and managed properly the costs and frustration go up on the buyer and seller sides.

moviebakery takes a professionally managed crowdsourcing approach. That is the moviebakery team acts as the executive producer and campaign manager of the video, and then leverages the crowdsourcing model of top video professionals to generate 10 concepts to bring back to you.



As you can see from the image, moviebakery takes the positive benefits of the agency model, and the positive benefits of the crowdsourcing model and efficiently drives production.

Two Things I Like Best About moviebakery

1. From a buyers perspective, what I like best about moviebakery's process is the clear 10-Step Process. So there are no hidden mysteries or confusion about the process moves forward, when payments need to be made, etc.

2. Simple pricing. $10K and you're all in. Again, like crowdSPRING, the pricing is set, no negotiations and bid management. Just pure project focus.

The challenge seems like a fun way to instill a sense of camaraderie among coworkers, as they face a rival team to secure honor and bragging rights. However, the fun came to an end when the legal and PR reps from Facebook refused to allow their employees to participate. I suppose it's understandable that having all of your employees get drunk while playing a frat game can evoke may horrific visions of PR backlash or DUIs, but at what cost? I've seen numerous articles appear recently that suggest that Generation Y, the younger generation on the brink of joining the workforce, values fun in a workplace. This is a generation that refuses to believe that work should define you, and should instead be a fun environment to earn enough money to do fun activities in their time off. To be a company based on a website that was initially only open to young people still in school, it would seem that refusing to allow a fun group activity is not the way to gain points with a large part of your target market.

Companies now more than ever must evaluate their image and decide if they want to market the "fun environment" or the "traditional environment". Time will tell if the word corporate will change to encompass a more laid-back atmosphere, but I can tell you that I personally prefer the former. I'm admittedly not much of a beer drinker, but it's great when you can create a team environment where your employees truly enjoy coming to work and collaborating with their coworkers. These types of bonds can often be strengthened by activities such as the forbidden beer pong. The answer doesn't have to be drinking based, but if the employees are excited at the prospect of battling another company (not unlike the company sponsored softball teams of yore), then perhaps the PR reps should more carefully weigh the risk vs. benefits. Your employees might not be driving while intoxicated now (which is of course always a good thing!), but the news that your company frowns on fun is now making the rounds all over the internet, and might be taken into consideration by people who might want to use your product or apply for a job in your company.

Here's a video of Ingrid at Room 214 managing at least seven different Twitter accounts in Twhirl.

With the introduction of Twhirl's Friendfeed support, which includes the ability to search, lookup users, write comments and bookmark items from the stream of content from your friend's Friendfeed.

To me the best feature is when you look up a Friendfeed user, you have two tabs to select from:

1. User's feed display: including stuff from all services they have shared

2. Discussions, which are the entries they commented or liked on Friendfeed.

I've been using Twhirl's Friendfeed support this weekend, and even though it seems like 90 percent of the content is coming from Twitter, but the ability to see friend's updates to other applications such as Digg, StumbleUpon, YouTube is a huge plus.

Here's the video from Seesmic, the creators of Twhirl:

In a nutshell, Google Friend Connect enables website owners to paste snippets of code into their website to leverage a wide and powerful variety of social networking applications supported by the OpenSocial development network.

The benefits are numerous when you consider the power of enabling people to include your website as part of their social networking activity. A key to effective community-based websites is actually giving people something to do… as opposed to just something to read. Google strikes at the heart of this issue by enabling people to participate, invite, share and upload all in the context of your web property. But before you think I'm singing Google's praises, just keep reading.

I thought I'd let the dust settle for a few days before dipping in myself to take a look. This morning, I spent about 30 minutes thoughtfully reviewing our web analytics and filling out the application that would hopefully qualify our early participation of this review.

Google wanted information about our daily page views, unique visitors, how we would use Friend Connect ("be very specific"). I wrote about our experience with social media and search marketing services through Room 214, our application development experience with Post Zinger for advanced blog, podcast and RSS management. Surely, we could be selected to take some first looks under the hood.

I hit the magic submit button. And now I will end this post with the same dose of reality that was served up to me. "Something bad happened. Don't worry, though." Happy Friday.

1. Simple ad copy split testing by having a control ad and coming up with a new ad to beat the control in terms of conversions. Don't forget to use ad text with limited time special offers, this will really set you apart from the set and forgetters.
   
   
2. Pause or delete keywords that drive a lot of clicks (cost) but do not convert, or keywords with a ton of impressions but no clicks. This will help improve your cost/conversion, drive more targeted traffic, and increase your quality score.
   
   
3. Bid price optimization to achieve your target ad positioning - increase the bid price on keywords with a good conversion rate and low cost per conversion and decrease the bid prices on keywords with a very high cost/conversion.
   
   
4. Add additional negative keywords (For example, if you sell bicycles but do not rent or have reviews/comparisons then it would be a good idea to add "rent", "review" and all variations to your negative keyword list).
   
   
5. Exclude web sites on the content network (adsense ads matched to a sites content) that are driving clicks but not converting. There can be a lot of worthless sites out there, but trust me, you will find some hidden gems with excellent ROI. (Google and Yahoo offer this feature).
   
   
6. Refine geo-targeting by adding or excluding certain regions. Use your site analytics and determine where the highest quality traffic is coming from and target that traffic with specific offers and regional ad copy.
   
   
7. Enable ad scheduling and choose what days of the week and what hours of the day you want your ads to run. For example, a company like Victoria Secrets may find their ROI decrease significantly after 10pm due to a different type of "visitor".

So pick a few items weekly from the above list and make it happen. Leave set and forget for cruise control, auto-pilot and cooking.

You've just spent the last week learning everything you can about building your Facebook page. Your last blog post generated 27 comments. You've spent hours reading competitor blogs and commenting on the personal blogs you follow. You have been Twittering like a pro. You have tried to immerse yourself in every pertinent online conversation you can find.

In the meantime, you've forgotten to send out your overdue email newsletter and implement the list building tactics you just read about. You haven't updated the survey on your site and your inbox has 42 new messages you haven't answered.

It's easy to lose yourself in Facebook applications or spend the day searching blogs to see who you can add on Twitter, but amidst all the new social media opportunities, don't forget about the tried and true tactics that worked to promote your business initially. More importantly, don't forget to leverage your new social media skills to continue building your business the old way.

Here are a few tips for a happy marriage between old internet marketing and new opportunities:

Old tactics promoting the new:

• Let your customers know that you can be found on Twitter by including it in your email signature or placing an icon with a link on your site.
  
• Ask them to become a fan of your Facebook page in the next email newsletter that you send out.
  
• Direct traffic to your blog via PPC ads and post sales, special tips, events and insider information frequently.
  
• Generate a personable, approachable feel by posting pictures of the staff and the office on Flickr for customers to browse through.

New tactics promoting the old:

• Alert people after a customer service call or have staff at your brick and mortar store tell customers that your business can be found on Twitter for fast, quick service.
  
• Include an email sign up form on your blog, or write posts occasionally encouraging visitors to sign up.
  
• Find your returning customers on Facebook and add them as a friend, asking them to become a fan of your page.
  
• Follow your target market through Google Blog Search and post comments (don't astroturf).
  
• Celebrate customers by posting photos of them using your product on your Flickr account.
  
• At the end of your survey, thank customers and let them know about your latest podcast.
  

Now, get out there and promote!

The concept of this site is pretty cool. While everyone by now is aware of how useful tagging can be in terms of organizing a blog or searching through del.icio.us or similar sites, Brand Tags takes the same concept but reverses it. Instead of posting entries and then tagging them and having them searched in multiple places, this site takes some of the most popular brands and asks you to apply one tag word or phrase to whatever brand it displays to you at random (though you have the option to skip a brand if you wish). You can browse by brand, guess what brand it is based on the tags, or search for brands that were tagged with a certain word.

Brand Tags still appears to be relatively small--you can't add a new brand without contacting the site creator, for instance. However, as a starting point, this is an interesting way to see how the big brands are perceived, as well as compare multiple brands that have similar offerings. Check out, for instance, the difference between Target and Walmart. Do the results on each page match up to your perceptions? As anyone in business knows, how the public perceives your company and its practices can often have a huge impact on whether they choose you or a competitor. Knowing these popular brand perceptions allows you to get in on the conversation and help address the negatives and possibly boost the positives (Jason Cormier just posted an entry the other day on staying in front of PR crises, which addresses some helpful tactics that should be used.)

If you are a savvy company, you are already tracking your brand reputation online through a variety of methods including Technorati, Twitter, Google, and of course myriad others. The downside to this method is that you are relying on many different arenas to help provide an overall picture. If a site based on something like Brand Tags caught on as more than just a fun experiment, just think of the possibilities when searching for smaller brands. Assuming rival companies are not maliciously tagging their competitors, the results would speak of what the masses think of your brand in general, which can help during times when you are not headline news and the talk of the town. The general impression gained by all of the tags inputted by hundreds or thousands of individuals will more than likely be a better reflection of long term perception of your brand by the public. Do you know how you will rank?

• Be who you are, be as transparent as possible.
• Don't play in your own playground, be active in communities that might find what you offer attractive.
• It is imperative to be involved in the social networks on the Internet and the real world
• We live in a world where every person's word of mouth reaches a lot more people.
  

Lets look at some examples of these at work.

Being Transparent , Diverse, and Active in Social Networks.

Companies that are talking back to their customers are becoming more transparent at it. They are the ones who openly acknowledge mistakes and quickly respond to complaints A lot of startups today are more and more engaged in the conversations of their customers. They are monitoring and answering questions on Twitter, getsatisfaction and responding to negative blog posts and comments. Craig Newmark posted a responce on our own very blog, and many other companies are aknowledging social networks.

While being transparent is a proven tool to get more attention and buzz, it is not a must have. There are a lot of successful companies out there that do not talk back. After all, the bigger the business, the harder it is for it to innovate. They talk in glamorous product announcements, commercials and press releases, they drink brand juice and spend millions covering up or downright denying their mistakes.

A World of Word of Mouth Marketing.

Word of Mouth is nothing new, NewEgg, Netflix, Apple, In-N-Out Burgers all had very strong growth partly due to word of mouth, but instead of talking back, they gained popularity through high quality of service, ease of use, competitive prices, elegance and tasty food - that's what makes good idea into a successful business. However, and this might sound crazy to some, talking back, fixing your mistakes and accepting your screw ups could be what brings quality of service up, makes product easier to use, lowers prices or create that absolutely amazing taste. Do not be afraid to try it.

Google Reader recently added ability to include a note with your shared items, and mentioned in their blog post that they monitor "Google Reader" on Twitter. Zappos has a special Twitter page set up and over 300 of their employees are encouraged to use Twitter, they host free parties, do contests and respond to peoples comments all through Twitter. John Fisher of Sticker Giant also tracks his and even his competitions name. All of those I have discovered through one of social networks, social events or at parties and gatherings, or simply put, due to word of mouth marketing.

While the question of "How do I talk back to my customers" is a subject for a whole different blog post, I would love to hear how you currently or plan to implement world of mouth into your business marketing plan? And if not, why not? Talk back and you can contribute to that post!

Yesterday, James Clark and I had the pleasure of giving an "Understanding Social Media" presentation to the Colorado Ski Country Association. Roughly 95% of the PR and marketing communications experts for every ski mountain in Colorado were attending, eager to learn more about how they could leverage this thing called social media.

The topics we covered varied from social media planning, understanding RSS, best practices for community participation and the use of new and emerging tools like Twitter. Despite the groovy buzz around social media, one of the main subjects of concern with our audience dealt with how and when to engage in online conversations.

The typical problem relates to negative activity that gets picked up by the press. Something happens on the ski slopes related to closures, injury, even death, and before you know it the cameras are rolling and the phone is ringing off the hook. As a matter of practice, a marketing communications person is often reactive - bracing for the media onslaught and how his response will ultimately reflect on the operation, competency, brand, etc.

One marketer brought up the fact that a few people will get an idea in their head about why a lift line or portion of the mountain is closed, and just commence to slam the people and organization running operations for the mountain. The bashing shows up on blog posts, forums, tweets, you name it.

Staying ahead of negativity and crisis is typically not about avoiding it all together. More realistically, it's about you and your organization not getting buried and completely swept down the mountain as the slide begins and gains momentum. Not much you can do to stop the slide once it starts, but your preparation and ability to quickly react makes all the difference.

Be a Participant in the Online Community Beforehand
Forum moderators, online influencers and bloggers recognize the people who regularly comment on their web properties. They are appreciative when the comments actually contribute to the substance of the conversations, especially when it's from an authoritative source or subject matter expert. This means internal PR and marketing communications people need to consider joining conversations just as important (if not more) than creating them.

What the mind doesn't know, it creates - and typically as a negative scenario. When the stuff starts to fly, people start looking for things to grasp. Remaining silent or inserting reactive, duplicate comments across blogs and other social networks (that you joined the day of the crisis) is usually going to make things worse (see Vonage astroturf post). Get your name and your voice out today so what you say holds weight and respect for tomorrow.

Anne Mitchell at Internet Patrol pulls Vonage's blog comment spamming punk card.

So yet again another company that can't resist the urge to go into blog comments without a thoughtful and authentic approach. Comment spamming is considered pure vile, so building on my "Resist The Temptation of Astroturfing Post", I'd like to offer some very straight forward ways to avoid this kind of mess that Mr. Kariolis has gotten Vonage into.

As you can see in Anne's links she points out Mr. Kariolis posted the exact same comments on Internet Patrol and DownloadSquad.

Mr. Kariolis Astroturf Trail:

1. Posting the Same Comment on Several Blogs. By definition and common sense, that's comment spamming.
2. No Link in Comment Name. When leaving the comment on Internet Patrol, Mr. Kariolis did not provide any link indentifying him with a company, blog, etc. Most comments allow you to put in your name, and then ask for an associated URL. If you don't have a blog or company website then link to your LinkedIn profile.
3. Disclosure. No where in his comments does he disclose that he is working for Vonage and can be a resource on this subject.
4. Newbie. Okay, here's the deal. Bloggers know who their regular commenters are. They know them intimately, and when someone new posts, like Mr. Kariolis and is clearly posting URLs in the comment to drive traffic to their own site - it's no brainer red flag for comment spam. Case in point, if you look at Mr. Kariolis' post on DownloadSquad you will see that the link from his name goes to his profile. He posted his comment on May 7th and look at what day he became a member:

Three Simple Ways to Be Transparent and Authentic and Avoid Astroturfing

1. Provide Full Disclosure in the Comment. Right up front Mr. Kariolis should state that he works for Vonage. This takes the edge off and let's you be transparent about what you're trying to communicate.
2. Contact the Blogger Directly Via Email Rather Than Leave a Comment Post. Mr. Kariolis could have emailed Anne directly stating clearly that he is with Vonage and appreciates her post, and provide a response. In the email state clearly that he is not a regular commenter, but does have a point of view on the story that he would like Anne to consider. Then it's up to Anne to update to her post with new insights, or she may even ask Mr. Kariolis to post his views in the comments area but to clearly call out that he is representing views from Vonage.
3. Be a Participant Before Hand. This takes planning, time and dedication. So if Vonage is serious about engaging in the online conversation about VOIP, they should have individuals that are active in the conversational community on an ongoing basis, so when an opportunity to discuss a competitor's news arises, they are not setting up new profiles on the same day they are commenting on it.

Embracing a consumer trend before the government demands it. Now that's the entrepreneurial spirit that Marc German, CEO of Spicy Pickle embraced when he paid to have an independent company provide a nutritional analysis of 30 of his top selling dishes.

It's a smart move not only from a regulatory perspective (many cities are now passing laws requiring chain restaurants to post nutritional information), but simply from a customer service and marketing approach.

As our level of awareness about the connection between our diet and our health becomes more ingrained, we begin consciously seeking healthy choices about what we eat.

More, More, More
The more information we have, the more active the conversation will be and consequently the more involved consumers become in embracing a brand.

So more is better in the food industry, because what the mind doesn't know it creates and it's more than likely to create a conspiracy theory than it is to create a reasonable discussion.

Because I love this customer-centrist approach so much, I'm offering some tips for Spicy Pickle to really take the lead and extend this customer centric approach online.

Three Simple Conversational Tactics

1. Become an active participate in Yelp. Spicy Pickle can go through the Yelp for Business Owners process to create a more robust and informational rich experience for Yelp visitors. By being a Yelp sponsor Spicy Pickle can enhance its business page on Yelp with a slide-show, a personalized message from Marc Geman, a featured favorite review and timely business news and announcements.

2. Create a video blog with Kevin Morrison, Chief Culinary Officer to show how each sandwich is made and discuss the nutritional values. Giving people insights to the kitchen is a great way to promote Spicy Pickle's commitment to quality and nutrition.

3. Set up a contest for customers to submit a healthy sandwich to add to the menu. This is a great opportunity for Foodies to get active in the process. Leveraging the Build Your Own option, really come through on the promise of "Our kitchen is your culinary playground".

Note to Spicy Pickle: Because we like you so much, we've gone ahead and secured the Twitter URL: http://www.twitter.com/spicypickle for you. We're not squatting on it, we'll just hand it over when you're ready.

Source CNN: Would you eat a 2,900-calorie cheese fries?

Facebook is still a great way to connect and share information. Not only does your profile inherently have a high "trust" rating in Google, but it can also serve as a highly custom landing page for you or your company. Here are a few tips to keep your profile professional and up to date without ever touching it. The hardest part of this process is keeping it personal enough to share your interests while keeping it interesting to the people that do not know you.

1. Have means to contact you easily accessible on the top. Out of Instant Messaging, Phone or Email or website URLs you should provide at least one. Listing multiple ways to contact you is obviously the best. The websites you list will be getting very tasty Facebook flavored link juice, which always helps. At the same time, do not use it purely for your corporate contacts, keep in mind that facebook is for connecting outside work, so listing interests and personal you-and-your-dog websites is very much encouraged.

2. Use apps that link into your other social profiles. Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Google Shared Feeds and even just rss blog feed all can be integrated without being too spammy, and will always keep the content on your page fresh and current. Most of the apps I linked for your convenience, to import your rss feed, just go to the official Notes application and click on "import your own blog" link at the bottom. If you do a lot of stumbling, tagging through delicious or sharing items in google reader make sure to disable them from updating mini feed otherwise they will overwhelm it and your friends would probably not be very happy with you.

3. Finally, use Facebook for its intended purpose. There are plenty of ways to deal with the never ending stream of "Just for Fun" app spam, and one of them is just to power through. Organize events, be active in groups, constantly be on lookout for people you know, and stay in touch with your current friends. You never know when or who will bring you a new client or provide a new business opportunity.

From target audience, to times, networks and programs -- a new level of access to TV advertising has just been born.

Google's Ad Creation Marketplace provides help with all aspects of the program, even assistance with hooking you up to video pros to produce your ad. Anyone with an Internet connection and credit card now has an opportunity to place television advertising, and even monitor the results.

Consider the opportunities that are being opened for marketing and advertising production people as a result of this. With the level of access being offered, I suspect more companies will be taking a serious look at budgeting for TV in the future. What do you think about this new offering? How will commercials change? How will pricing be effected?

1. ScriptLance - ScriptLance is probably the least organized out of the bunch, but as a result it is also the cheapest. Once in a while you will find a diamond in the rough and therefore pay very very little for his work. Its primary focus is flash, photoshop, html and programming services, so if you are looking for a redesign or a custom site on the cheap, this is the place to go.

2. Guru - We use Guru for copy writing, and I had pretty good luck with it on programming and flash projects. Guru has a huge population of Freelancers from the United States, and while it tends to be more expensive, there is an inherit security that the quality of their work will be higher.

3. oDesk - This site is by far the most professional Freelance management portal on the web. You can even run your entire company and hire full time people through it. The process of hiring somebody mimics the interviews in real life and once you actually do hire somebody, their work day is tracked through desktop screenshots and by them logging all their progress. There is also subversion and bugzilla to manage your source code.

Ultimately I find each one of those used for a different purpose. ScriptLance is great if you are looking for a quick customization of one of the open source platforms, Guru is great for US based freelancers of any type and oDesk helps me manage large projects with the help of great tools provided by the oDesk. What are your experiences with freelancer search tools and have I forgotten any? Let us know!

Two days ago, Chris Brogan asked his followers on Twitter to 'tweet' him "Hi Cross Tech?" as he was in a business meeting, and I assume was discussing the effectiveness of Twitter. I wonder just how many people responded @chrisbrogan "Hi Cross Tech?" (I don't think Quotably has included all responses) I did. If you're pitching to a potential client about the uses of Twitter - you just backed your excact theory and possibly wowed them while in the process. Chris Brogan has 7,140 followers - even if only half of them were online at that exact moment - that's an outreach to 3,570 people that most likely blog.

Here's a seperate example: TechCrunch just posted today about Project Vino, an Australian wine site focused on community recommendations that tested a Twitter wine tasting model today. The post states:

"This event is one of the earliest instances of using Twitter to transfer an event as social and active as a wine tasting, into online realms. The end result? A resounding success. When you have a social drink which is best enjoyed sharing experiences with friends, it works perfectly with online communication tools."

If you check out the comments, some people loved the idea, some people simply hated it. Some people hated that TechCrunch even wrote about it. Remind you of something? Yep, that translates directly to what the masses have to say about Twitter. You either love it or hate it, however, no one can deny the power of words or the buzz those words create.

Following are recommendations for the best sites for Creative Commons blog photos and another just awesome image site. The link provided will take you to Wikipedia to further explain the different levels of Creative Commons licenses. The key piece to remember is to always provide a photo credit and link below.

1. Flickr. By far the largest resource for photos. Note: make sure you use the advanced search options and select the "Only search within Creative Commons-licensed content "
2. EveryStockPhoto. This is a license-specific photo search engine.
3. Pixdaus. By far I think the most interesting of the three, but not reviewed for licensed content. The photos shown below are all from Pixdaus. I've linked to Pixdaus and to the user profile that has uploaded the photo. When using Pixdaus be sure to avoid photos with copyrights on them.
   

"Dubai" posted at Pixdaus by Jorge

"They Are Here" posted at Pixdaus by Luke

While there can be advantages to outsourcing your online persona in this manner, there can be possible disadvantages as well. As someone creating an online presence, you should be sure that you understand what you want to use your personal site for (if indeed you even choose to have one amid the sea of social networking sites). Social sites often let you create a profile where you provide links to personal sites--these can help drive traffic to your personal page. Likewise, providing links to these social sites on your personal page can drive traffic to these external representations of you.

Ultimately, these two types of sites--personal and social--can balance each other out and drive more traffic and attention to you than you might otherwise have experienced if you were to forgo one of the options. However, the more you outsource, the more potential for less traffic to your personal site, and if this is where you house the most important content, you might see smaller readership.

You might also want to consider the implications of giving up direct control of the hosting of your content and what it means if these external sites were to change their policies or suffer a major outage. The more sites you sign up for, the more you have to keep up with in terms of updating, which might be cumbersome depending on how many social sites you use.

A reader in the comments of this blog entry did make a good point though in stating that giving out a personal URL somehow doesn't have the same weight that it used to. In a time where virtually everyone has their own Myspace or Facebook account, people want like to respond with like. For the average person, these social sites are sufficient--there is no need to bother with HTML and creating a custom site. It's also that much more effort to remember a personal URL than it is to know that you can look someone up later on Facebook and friend them.

Is there a need for an average person to have a personal site anymore, or is it completely redundant when the info can be found on multiple social networking sites? Should one keep all content in-house, or outsource it to other sites such as Flickr, Del.icio.us, Myspace, Youtube, etc.? I for one have not formulated a definite answer to these questions, but I would love to hear any opinions on the matter!