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One of the most common fears I focus on defeating among executives and brand managers is that in new media brands lose control by publishing content and engaging in social networks. The general sentiment is that by sharing information and creating presences within public communities that they, by the nature of democratized participation, invite negative responses in addition to potentially positive and neutral interaction. By not fully embracing the social Web, many believe that they retain a semblance of control. The idea is that if brands abstain from providing a forum for hosting potentially disparaging commentary, it will prevent it from earning an audience – in this case, an audience that can impact the business and the reputation of the brand.However, retaining control, following the socialization of the Web, is nothing more than pure legend. While many companies retain control during the stages of defining and shaping messages, control is relinquished at the point of distribution. Once messages are published, they are at the mercy of consumers, peers, and influencers online and offline.So I continue to ask…If a conversation takes place online and you’re not there to hear it, did it actually happen?Without participation, perception and sentiment are free to wander and influence those with whom it touches.The truth is that in the era of new media, we are all brand managers, responsible for its stature, resonance, and direction. While we may not retain control, we now have the ability to shape and steer impressions, answer questions, solve problems, and engender appreciation. And in the social web, brands are now expected to humanize and connect directly with everyday denizens to convey purpose, establish goodwill, and reassure communities that their voices are heard. It’s not enough to simply give the brand a voice. People align with the people, prowess, and promises they can believe in. We are now expected to breath life and personality into our brand in order for it to earn the attention and interest of those we wish to reach.Proactive shepherding the brand in influential communities begets positive interaction and in many cases, it extinguishes unforeseen crises before they ignite. It’s the art and science of sculpting presence. As such, many organizations are establishing a role or augmenting existing responsibilities to encompass ORM (online reputation management). As Forbes recently alluded, perhaps it’s time for a Chief Reputation Officer.Econsultancy and BigMouthMedia published a report, Social Media and Online PR, to assist marketers embrace ORM.  The report is based on a survey of more than 1,100 companies carried out in September 2009. Respondents include client-side digital marketers and communications professionals, as well as digital and PR agencies.Methods Used by Companies Worldwide to Minimize the Impact of Online Negative Comments About Their Brand, Products, or Services47% – Directly engaged with publisher/blogger to rectify issues or address negative experience33% – Attempted to improve products and services in order to reduce or eradicate negativity24% – Encouraged others to speak more positively about us17% – Issued and distributed press releases or comment to address issue14% – Attempted to get offending content removed by publisher/blogger12% – Created content to push offending results down search engine rankings30% – None of the above5% – OtherThere are two stats that caught my attention in particular.First, over one-third, 35%, reported that they do not embrace any of the afore mentioned response strategies to steer negative towards neutral or positive.Second, another one-third of respondents vowed to improve products and services in order to invest in positive experiences and more effectively compete for the future.Not surprising however, most of the other tactics were aimed at either distracting people or burying content.Ways that Companies Worldwide use Twitter62% – Publicizing new content54% – Marketing channel47% – Brand monitoring27% – Reacting to customer service issues and inquiries25% – Gathering customer feedback23% – Market intelligence14% – Sales channel11% – Human resources4% – Other21% – None of the aboveI once asked whether Twitter was a broadcast or conversation channel or both? According to these numbers, they appear to portray Twitter as yet another broadcast mechanism similar to the wire services that catapulted press releases into a vastness of irrelevance. We earn the relationships and define the dedicated communities and ultimately the authority and trust we deserve.It’s encouraging, however, to see that almost half of those who participated in the survey monitor the state of their brands on Twitter. While low, 27% is a very promising representation of what will only grow in 2010, the integration of rapid response systems to issues and inquiries. Combined with the 25% currently focused on gathering customer feedback and 23% to garner market intelligence, brands will evolve and adapt from the inside out, creating more empathetic and in tune organizations that live and breathe based on the health of and emerging opportunities within their markets.Also, please be sure to embrace a proactive form of brand asset management, securing company, product, and service brand names as well as important executives responsible for steering and growing the company. Services such as Knowem.com (disclosure, I advise them on services) facilitate automated username and profile acquisition and establishment across hundreds of existing social networks as well as ensuring brands are actively protected with every new network that appears.Connect with Brian Solis: Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Plaxo, or Facebook — Get the new iPhone app! — Click the image below to buy the book/poster: — Image Source: Shutterstock

What follows is the unabridged version of my post on Mashable, “The 10 Stages of Social Media Business Integration.“An overnight success ten plus years in the making, Social Media is as transformative as it is evolutionary. With every day that passes, we are presented with increasing reports that showcase the impact of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and blogs within small and large businesses alike. As a result, we can now visualize the state of adoption, understanding, and implementation in different business ecosystems. What we realize as a result, is that individual examples vary based on the assorted stages of aptitude and proficiency in Social Media within each company.In writing the next book, I interviewed many executives and marketing and service professionals as well as reviewed piles of case studies. I noticed that the path towards new media enlightenment was directed by the conditions of their respective market places and the consumers who define them. Furthermore, the timetable for integration and permeation was dictated by the politics and support system within the business infrastructure.A pattern became very obvious. There are at least ten stages of Social Media adoption, strategy, and execution that determine their place in the attention economy of today and tomorrow.The Evolution of a Corporate Renaissance 2009 – 20102010 is designated as the year Social Media proliferates mainstream businesses. Indeed this year will showcase the transformation of business acumen while also shifting the culture and the communication that embraces an inward and outward flow for listening, interacting, learning, and adapting.Social Media Marketing is exhilarating to behold as it evolves “media” from a broadcast platform to a sophisticated network of connections and rewarding engagement. We learn that through participation, we ultimately eradicate the myths that initially fueled skeptics and prevented early experimentation. The perceived loss of control was in actuality, the ability to realize public sentiment and the gatekeepers who could help us actively steer perception. It is a chance to actually gain control rather than simply possessing the illusion of it.As 2009 raced to an end, Social Media marketers realized that listening to the proverbial conversation offered very little in terms of influence. In fact, it was the listening that would eventually set the stage for intelligent participation.It was the realization that listening would only engender empathy. But, in order to truly shape and guide market sentiment and hopefully one day empower advocacy and a new workflow, a supporting infrastructure would require construction.We are only as relevant as our ability to not only realize the state of affairs, but also have the prowess necessary to define and also adapt along with it.The next stage of Social Media Marketing will mature from one of listening and unguided participation to one of strategic observation, analysis and informed engagement. It is how we can shift from a state of awareness to one of intelligence, setting the stage for relevance and affinity. It is a new age of “unmarketing” inspired by purpose and vision.As Social Media evolves, behavior and intention modifies, mirroring the depth of learning and confidence that develops with experience. In New Media, we are always learning and as such, we are forever in pursuit of the next stage.The 10 Stages of New Media EvolutionStage 1 – Observe and ReportThis is the entry point for businesses to better understand the market behavior and interaction within their marketplaces. These initial tasks materialize the current state of affairs that defines share of voice and the potential for new opportunities to compete for attention.Listening: The employment of listening devices such as Google Alerts, Twitter Search, Radian6, and PR Newswire’s Social Media Metrics to track conversations and instances associated with key words.Reporting: Capturing related conversations tied to commentary into a report prepared for executives and managers. This early form of reporting is merely designed to provide decision makers with the information to demonstrate the need for continued exploration into social media and its potential impact on business.Stage 2 – Setting the Stage + Dress RehearsalUpon amassing an initial understanding of conversational dynamics and stature, businesses will build the framework that sets the stage for social media broadcasting and participation. This is an interesting phase as it, in many cases, actually joins Stage 1 as a more sweeping first step. Instead of researching current activity to answer an important question as to why engage in social media at all and as such, how should we engage, many businesses create accounts across multiple social networks and unfortunately publish content without a plan or purpose.However, those businesses that conduct research will find a rewarding array of options and opportunities of which to analyze and target.Presence: The creation of official presences across one or more social networks, usually Twitter and possibly Facebook (Fan Pages), YouTube, and Flickr. This stage is also reflective of initial experimentation through activity, with or without the following analysis. But, this is less about strategic engagement in this early stage, resembling either chatter or the traditional broadcasting of messages.Analysis: Reviewing activity for frequency (the rate of mentions), the state of sentiment allocation, traffic, as well as the size of connections (friends, followers, fans), etc., provides managers with a limited glimpse into the effects of presence and participation.Stage 3 – Socializing MediaThe next stage in the evolution of a new media business is the proverbial step towards “joining the conversation.”As companies take the stage, they will eventually pay attention to the reaction of the audience in order to respond and improve content, define future engagements, and humanize communication.Conversation: Representative of an early form of participation, this stage usually evokes reactive engagement based on the nature of existing dialogue or mentions and also incorporates the proactive broadcasting of activity, events and announcements.Rapid Response: Listening for potentially heated, viral, and emotional activity in order to extinguish a potential crisis or possibly to fan a flame of positive support.Metrics: The documentation of the aforementioned activity in order to demonstrate momentum in a particular direction – usually captured in the form of friends, fans, followers, conversations, sentiment, mentions, traffic, and reach.Stage 4 – Finding a Voice and a Sense of PurposeThis is a powerful milestone in the maturation of new media and business. By not only listening, but hearing and observing the responses and mannerisms of those who define our markets, we can surface pain points, source ideas, foster innovation, earn inspiration, learn, and feel a little empathy in order to integrate a sense of purpose into our socialized media programs. We open the door to new possibilities.Research: Reviewing activity for not only sentiment allocation, but to embrace negative and also neutral commentary to surface and observe trends in responses and ultimately behavior. This allows for a poignant understanding of where to concentrate activity, at what level, and with what voice across marketing, sales, service, and PR.Strategic Visibility: Introducing relevance and focus, we realize that we don’t have to be everywhere in order to create presence, just in the places where our presence is missed or unfelt. Understanding that the Social Web is far more extensive than Twitter, blogs, and Facebook, brand managers search across the entire Web using listening services or the methodologies rife within the Conversation Prism to locate where influential dialogue transpires.Relevance: The realization that “chatter” or aimless broadcasting is not as effective as strategic communications and engagement. This stage reflects the exploration of goals, objectives and the exploration and implementation of value. As we learn that interaction is based on exchange and the exchange is measured by loyalty and trust, our interaction is thus defined by benefits and significance.Stage 5 – Putting Words into ActionActions speak louder than words and therefore we are committed to putting our words into action. While we opened the door to the emotions that awoke social consciousness, they eventually permeate the spirit of the company and inspire us to set into motion a change in everything we do and say.Empathy: Social media personifies those with something to say, allowing us to see who it is we’re hoping to reach as well as what motivates them. Listening and observing is not enough. The ability to truly understand someone, their challenges, filters, objectives, options, and experiences allows us to truly become the people with whom we hope to connect.Purpose: The shift from response to strategic communications, purpose, powered by empathy and resolution, facilitates meaningful and mutually beneficial interaction. Affinity requires an emotional connection, a sense of purpose if you will. It is in this stage that we truly visualize the motivation necessary to captivate one’s attention. In order to hold it, we have to give them something to believe in, something that moves them in a way that they can connect as well as bond.Stage 6 – Humanizing the Brand and Defining the ExperienceAs Doc Searls says, “There is no market for messages.” Indeed. Through the internalization of sentiment, brands will relearn how to speak. No longer will we focus on the attempted control of the message from conception to documentation to distribution. We realize that we lose control as our messages are introduced into the real world. Virtual control migrates to the actual control of the shaping and protection of our story as it migrates from consumer to consumer. This chain forms a powerful connection that reveals true reactions, perception, and perspectives.The conversations that bind us form a Human Algorithm that serves as the pulse of awareness, trustworthiness, and emotion.Branding – The Humanization of the Brand: Once we truly understand the people who influence our markets, we need to establish a persona worthy of attention and affinity. The state of a brand in social media is largely tied to the awareness that a Socialized version of a branding style guide is necessary. It is during this step that brand managers assess the state of the brand persona, realizing that it is derivative of the actions, words and mannerisms associated with interaction. In this stage the persona of the brand and the personality of those who are representing it are calculated and defined by how it is they wish to be portrayed and perceived.Experience: Our experiences in dynamic social ecosystems teach us that our activity online must not only maintain a sense of purpose, it must also direct traffic and shape perceptions and experiences in the process. We question our current online properties, landing pages, processes, and messages. We usually find that existing architecture for civil engineering leads people from a very vibrant and interactive experience (social networks) to a static dead end (our Web sites). As we attempt to redefine the experience of new customers, prospects and influencers, we essentially induce a brand makeover.Stage 7 – CommunityCommunity is an investment in the cultivation and fusion of affinity, interaction, advocacy and loyalty. Learned earlier in the stages of new media adoption, community isn’t established with the creation of a Facebook Fan Page, Group, or any online profile for that matter. Community is earned and fortified through shared experiences. Hosting a community isn’t a prerequisite in the cookie-cutter templates of social media of which so many programs are patterned. Community is a commitment and must be done so without compromise. As Kathy Sierra once said, “Trying to replace ‘brand’ with ‘conversation’ does a disservice to both brands & conversations.”In this stage, businesses learn and visualize through experience, the nucleus of connections and the interests, pains, hopes, and benefits that bind us.Community Building/Recruitment: While essentially we are building community through engagement in each of the previous stages, as we now possess intimate knowledge of our stakeholders and influencers, we will proactively reach out to ideal participants and potential ambassadors to personally recruit them. We become social architects to build the roads necessary to escort them to a rich and rewarding network to help them receive valuable information and connections.Stage 8 – Social DarwinismBefore we can collaborate externally, we have to improve collaboration and communication within. Listening and responding is only as effective as its ability to inspire transformation, improvement, and adaptation from the inside out. Survival of the fittest is not in any way tied to whether or not a company engages in social media. Remember, social is but one part of an overall integrated strategy, all of which will point leaders in the direction to effectively compete for the future. It’s how we learn and adapt that ensures our place within the evolution of our markets.Social Media as embraced in the earlier stages is not scalable. The introduction of new roles will beget the restructuring of teams and workflow, which will ultimately necessitate organizational transformation to support effective engagement, production, and the ongoing evolution towards ensuring brand and product relevance.Adaptation: In order to truly compete for the future, the actions that govern genuine and artful listening, community building, and advocacy align, in parallel, with the ability of any organization to adapt and improve products, services, and policies according to the laws of the now Web. In order for any team to effectively collaborate externally, it must first foster collaboration within. It is this interdepartmental cooperative exchange that provides a means for which to pursue sincere engagement over time.Organizational Transformation: The internal renaissance and reorganization of teams and processes to eventually support a formal sCRM program becomes pervasive. As Social Media chases ubiquity, we learn that influence isn’t relegated to one department or function within the organization. Any department affected by external activity will eventually socialize. Therefore an integrated and interconnected network of brand ambassadors will collaborate internally to ensure that the brand is leading and responding to constructive instances, by department. However, at the departmental and brand level, successful social media marketing will require governance and accountability. Organizational transformation will gravitate towards a top-down hierarchy of policy, education, and empowerment across the entire organization.Stage 9 – The Socialization of Business ProcessesAs companies and brands learn through participation and analysis and transform teams and processes to support critical opportunities, the stage of organizational transformation surfaces the channels and themes that map accordingly to the internal structure of departments and divisions affected by outside influence and in turn, can also participate in the direction of said influence to benefit individual goals and objectives.Multiple disciplines and departments will socialize and therefore the assembly or adaptation of a technology and methodology infrastructure is required to streamline and manage social workflow.Social CRM (SRM): Once opportunities register, scalability, resources, and efficiencies quickly necessitate consideration and support resulting in a modified, or completely new, infrastructure that either augments or resembles a CRM-like workflow. Combining technology, principles, philosophies and processes, social CRM (sCRM) establishes a value chain that fosters relationships within traditional business dynamics. As an organization evolves through engagement, sCRM will transform into SRM – the recognition that all people, not just customers, are equal. It represents a wider scope of active listening and participation across the full spectrum of influence mapped to specific department representatives within the organization using various lenses for which to identify individuals where and how they interact.Stage 10 – Business Performance MetricsInevitably, we report to executives who don’t wish to quantify transparency or authenticity. Their goal, and job, is to steer the company towards greater profitability, relevance, growth, and new opportunities. In order to measure the true effects of social media and eventually guide people to desired locations and actions, we need insight to the numbers behind the activity – at every level.While many experts argue that there is no need to measure Social, much in the same way that some companies don’t explicitly define the ROI of Superbowl Ads or billboards, make no mistake, social is measurable and the process of mining data tied to our activity is unbelievably empowering. Our ambition to excel should be driven through the inclusion of business performance metrics with or without an executive asking us to do so. It’s the difference between visibility and presence. And in the attention economy, presence is felt.ROI: I place ROI in stage ten for several reasons. Without an understanding of the volume, locations, and nature of online interaction, the true impact of our digital footprint and its relationship to the bottom line of any business is impossible to assess. The embodiment of social influence and an immersed view of its path and effects combined with our goals and objectives and an intrinsic knowledge of the resources required to achieve them allow us to truly measure ROI. Stage 10 reveals the meaning and opportunity behind the numbers and allows us to identify ways to introduce opportunities for interaction, direction, and action. The “action” is defined by a desired result or outcome and serves as the beacon to reverse engineer activities that end with a point of capture and analysis.In The End…The distance between where we are today and where we need to be however is separated by the people who seek solutions and direction in the places where we’re not currently focused. Our work in 2010 is dedicated to narrowing the social chasm.The thing about new media is that it’s always new and as such, these stages represent a moment in time. They will continue to change, augment, and expand as new technologies, experiences, and innovations are introduced to those champions who can effectively integrate and learn from experimentation and assessment.In the end, Social media is privilege and with it, we learn just one more piece of how to run a more meaningful and relevant business.Connect with Brian Solis: Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, or Facebook — Get the new iPhone app! — Click the image below to buy the book/poster: — Image Source: Shutterstock

Trolls: Those creepy, hyperaggresive, hateful, mouth-breathing basement-dwellers. They were a feature of the Internet long before the social web, and most of us feel they're probably here to stay.

But one of the things most trolls rely on is anonymity, a wall behind which they hide any information that could be used against them, including their jobs, locations, appearances and real names. And anonymity is a not-so-slowly disappearing feature of the social web. What do you think: Will the rise of transparency and the fall of anonymity put trolls in the deadpool any time soon? Sponsor

Two things have brought this to mind.

First, there's this interesting post from The Next Web. Last week, Zee Kane wrote this piece about a typical flame thread that became a bit too personal.

Kane observes, absolutely correctly, "If you've spent more than ten minutes on any blog, YouTube video or any site that permits anonymous commenting, you will have noticed some of the filth that many commenters come out with. Often it's completely incomprehensible; other times it's pure bile and frankly a test of what a human will not reply to."

When an anonymous commenter attacked the subject of the original post in the comments thread, the subject, one Hermione Way, decided to find out who the troll really was. Email addresses, IP addresses and the social web being what they are, Way soon had her attacker pegged and found out that his "anonymous" persona had been trolling and attacking some of the people he'd called his friends in real life.

This chain of events left Kane editorializing, "Privacy truly is dead." This is a theme some think we've been beating over the head lately at ReadWriteWeb, but it's as timely as it is true.

Facebook's game of footsie with privacy and user data has led to a string of well-researched, thoughtful posts by our own Marshall Kirkpatrick. Kirkpatrick has very well justified his position that Facebook's original brand promise to conceal and protect user data has definitely changed to a promise to make the site - and user data - more "open" and accessible to other users and search engines.

Kirkpatrick sees this as a broken promise, which it is, to a point. I also see it as an overarching trend of sociological behavior online.

Think about the days of You've Got Mail, that god-awful, AOL-based Meg Ryan/Tom Hanks flick where two real-world rivals end up being anonymous penpals via email with no idea who the other person is or what he or she looks like. That could never happen today. Username conventions have drastically changed over the past 10 years; more and more online identities are tied to part or all of a user's real name rather than a "handle" for anonymous chatting and posting.

The same is true of avatars. However posed or candid, more of us are using real photographs of our own faces on the web rather than cultural icons, cartoons or some graphical represenation of our personality.

Today, anonymity represents the far, sketchy outposts of the web, much like the Reaver-filled edges of space in Firefly. Those who inhabit that space might be more likely to engage in account-cracking, cyberbullying, mob behavior and other activities that run the gamut from unkind to actually illegal. The illusion that their anonymity protects them from discovery and possible prosecution is often just that - an illusion.

Of course, anonymity can be great for freedom of speech purposes. Several of our favorite sites lately, such as Formspring.me and Quora, provide opportunities for the anonymous asking of questions in a safe environment. But I've already experienced a bit of trolling on those sites, as well.

What do you think: Is anonymity linked directly to trolling behaviors? Is the social web trending away from anonymous profiles and posts? Will less anonymity lead to fewer incidents of trollism? Let us know your opinion in the comments. Discuss

The other day I saw Chris Prillo sent out a message announcing that he was launching Lockergnome.net as a free Wordpress blog / Lifestream Archive. Of course I quickly had to go see what Chris was up to here. Here’s a post where Chris explains why you should sign up for the service.

After visiting the site I realized that Chris was using BuddyPress to power it. Buddypress is a way to add a social network layer on top of Wordpress MU. I then started to test the site out and later saw that Chris had left me a message on it. I asked him about the motivation for creating the service which he responded to in a follow up post where he stated the following:

Been wanting to try BuddyPress for quite some time. Been wanting to host WordPress blogs for quite some time. Been wanting to help people archive their Social Media Lifestream data in a non-proprietary, fully exportable system for quite some time.

Ok fair enough, I can dig those reasons. So with BuddyPress, users can sign up and create their own blogs on the service utilizing Wordpress. To enable the Lifestreaming functionality, every blog has an install of the very popular WP Lifestream plugin. Also, they’ve setup the microblog inspired P2 theme as the default and only selection available with the free service. Premium accounts are available for $12.77 a month and powered by Page.ly which presumably will allow you to gain complete control over the blog as you would have from a standard self-hosted deployment allowing tweaks and installation of additional plugins and themes. click image to see Lifestream settings page When I first heard about the release of BuddyPress I quickly thought about how this could be used as a tool to create your own private Lifestreaming community which is exactly what he’s done here. Unfortunately the actual Lifestream activity itself seems to be relegated to the individual user blogs themselves and doesn’t appear on the home page under the “Site Wide Activity” which I think would be a nicer implementation that would expose user activity to the whole community. As it stands that section displays blog posts by users, wire posts (think Facebook Wall posts), and inter-network activity such as friending notifications. I’d really like to see the Lifestreaming activity integrated more. Chris has created a pretty geeky and tech-centric community and connecting with that crowd on its own merit is a worthy reason for joining the service. Besides that you can also join to play around with a live BuddyPress implementation. Lastly, if you’ve heard about the WP Lifestream and always wanted to play with it but either don’t have a Wordpress site or didn’t yet feel comfortable installing it, you can now test it easily for free. Just remember you need to create a blog after you sign up to get access to Wordpress and the plugin. Finally if you’re interested in setting up your own multi-user Lifestreaming community I’ve compiled a list of several options that are available besides BuddyPress. I’ll continue to watch the community on Lockergnome and you can connect with me here if you decide to try it out.

Contrary to popular belief, Twitter wasn’t the only story of 2009. Facebook skyrocketed to over 350 millions users in 2009 and continued its rise to global pervasiveness becoming one of the top visited sites on the Web.As aspiring digital anthropologists and sociologists, we thoroughly enjoy and appreciate the trending topics readily available for review and analysis on Twitter. On Twitter, trends are defined and shaped by the shared interests published in the form of status updates that suddenly congregate and rally.To close 2009, Facebook assembled its top trends to give us insight into the posting and conversational trends connecting social graphs.Per Facebook’s year end post announcing the top status updates, we’re introduced to Memology, the study of how ideas, events, and information transform into memes and trends inside Facebook:Status updates on Facebook help people understand their friends and the people around them–how they’re feeling, what they’re doing and what they’re thinking. In the United States alone, people on Facebook are sharing hundreds of millions of words every day, thousands per second, in status updates. When taken as a whole, these words offer a unique barometer into the issues, world events and thoughts that are connecting people.In the tradition of year-end lists, we’re introducing Facebook Memology. “Memology” refers to the study of how “memes,” or new ideas and trends, are spreading on Facebook. For this year’s list, the Facebook Data Team mapped the top trending words and phrases in U.S. status updates for 2009.Trending analysis is extremely fascinating as it tells us a lot about, well, ourselves. It is this activity defining the statusphere that allows us to revisit exactly what captivated us as well as which events and trends captured our attention.To generate the list, Facebook examined the frequency of each phrase with length from one-to-four words. The team then analyzed important bursts in activity around words and series of words to find the key trends for the year. Because many words and phrases were correlated contextually, Facebook grouped some of them together to form the final list.Facebook Memology: Top Status Trends of 20091. Facebook Applications: Farmville, Farm Town, Social Living2. FML – A term used almost exclusively online and in text messages, FML usually expresses frustration, either playfully or seriously, where the “F” stands for exactly what you think with “M” and “L” representing My Life respectively. Facebook observed that many people expressed their exasperation in May and again in the Fall most likely representing the state of student dismay at either finals or school beginning again after summer. FML appeared most often on Mondays and Tuesdays.3. Swine Flu – Flu, Swine Flu, H1N14. Celebrity Deaths – Michael Jackson, Patrick Swayze, Billy Mays5. Family – Family, Mom, Dad, Son, Daughter, Kids6. Movies – New Moon, Transformers, Star Trek, The Hangover, Paranormal Activity, Harry Potter7. Sports – Steelers (Super Bowl), Yankees (World Series)8. Health Care – Health Care, No one should have to…9. FB, FB Friends, News Feed10. Twitter, RT11. Years: 2008, 2009, 201012. Lady Gaga: Gaga, Poker Face13. Yard: As Facebook observes, “Yard” seems fairly uncommon and a trend that nobody would have guessed. Their explanation, “Hipsters’ moms and dads are also on Facebook, and these folks have yards that require some tending.”14. Religion: Easter, Lord, God15. I, is: Until March of 2009, our names appeared next to the status update and as a result, we tended to update our activity starting with the word “is” to form a complete thought or sentence. Upon elimination of the name’s proximity to the status box, the usage of “is” dropped off dramatically and usage of “I” doubled almost overnight.Facebook’s definition of memology is interesting indeed. Perhaps most interesting however, is the comparison between Facebook and Twitter 2009 trends.To close out 2009, I thought I’d share a few other interesting Facebook stats, which should provide a bit of motivation to increase your focus on Facebook in 2010.Top 2009 Facebook StatisticsFacebook currently boasts over 350 million usersFacebook 50 percent of Facebook users log on in any given dayEach day, 35 million users update their status55 million status updates are posted each day2.5 billion photos are uploaded to the site each month3.5 million events are created each monthThere are more than 1.6 million active Pages on FacebookOver 700,000 local businesses maintain active Pages on FacebookUsers The average user has 130 friends on the siteOn average, users spend more than 55 minutes per day on FacebookThe Like button is used on 9 pieces of content on average each month25 comments are written by users on Facebook content each monthMost users are member of at least 12 groupsInternationalAbout 70% of Facebook users are outside the United StatesOver 300,000 users helped translate the site through the translations applicationPlatform Facebook currently hosts a developer network of more than one million entrepreneurs from more than 180 countriesEvery month, more than 70% of Facebook users engage with Platform applicationsOver 500,000 active applications are currently availableMore than 250 applications have more than one million monthly active users80,000 websites have implemented Facebook Connect since its general availability in December 2008Two-thirds of comScore’s U.S. Top 100 websites and half of comScore’s Global Top 100 websites have implemented Facebook ConnectMobile There are more than 65 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.Those who access Facebook on their mobile devices are almost 50% more active than non-mobile users.There are more than 180 mobile operators in 60 countries deploying and promoting Facebook mobile productsConnect with Brian Solis: Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Plaxo, or Facebook — Get the new iPhone app! — Click the image below to buy the book/poster: — Image Source: Shutterstock

Source: ShutterstockGuest post by Dan Zarella, author of “The Social Media Marketing Book,” published by O’Reilly.When you’re trying to find targets for a social media marketing campaign, you should be looking for two types of people, influencers and audience. Your audience is the people you’re trying to sell to, this is a wide swath of potential users, clients or customers. They may or may not be heavily involved in social media and they may or may not have large followings. Your influencers are the people your audience listens to. They are actively engaged in the social web and can communicate with lots of people. They are the vector for your contagious messages to spread through, to reach your audience you should seed your campaigns to your influencers.There are two ways of targeting influencers, you can either find the social media sites they frequent the most and attempt to reach them en masse, or you can identify especially influential individuals and engage them one by one. Both methods work well in concert.Fishing Where the Influential Fish Are The key to the first, en mass method is “fishing where the fish are.” That is understanding which behaviors typically indicate that someone is a savvy and frequent user of social media and placing your content in the path of those behaviors. I’ve done some research on these behaviors:The research I did on viral content sharing shows that frequent users of social web technologies like Twitter, blogs, and social news and networking sites tend to share online content with more people, more often than those that do not.An interesting detail of this data is that while frequent users of Facebook and web forums share content with more people and more often in some aspects, generally they’re not as virulent as the users of less-mainstream technologies (with the exception of blog readers).This means that if you can locate topic-specific social media sites (for example Sphinn, which is Digg for marketers) and get your content to go popular there you’ll be in front of large groups of relevant influentials. Tools like Alltop or Quantcast’s related sites features can be used to discover relevant sites for reaching influencers.Finding Individual InfluencersThe flipside of the influencer marketing coin is to identify individuals who stand out from the “influential fish” crowd as especially important and approaching them one-on-one to build relationships.Perhaps the easiest first step in this direction is to find the most influential Twitter users about your niche. Tools like Twitter Grader and Klout both offer very similar user search features which allow you to enter a keyword and find the most powerful users who are related to that topic. Of course my favorite metric for this is “ReTweetability.”There are also tools for identifying niche influencers on oher social media platforms like Facebook Grader, Technorati, and BoardReader. A number of tools also exist to search across many different platforms at once, like Who’s Talkin’, and Social Mention but these tend to be less effective at identifying who the most influential users are.

stylespion

first testshots using the leica x1 compact camera. shot in raw, b/w development in lightroom

Freedom You’re meeting someone at a party for the first time. He introduces himself to you. “Hi. I’m Tim Eastwood. I’m 29 years old, live in San Francisco. I’m married to Laura, have 3 children Joe, James, and Jenny.” During the conversation you have with Tim you learn that he votes Republican, that he isn’t a religious person, that his wife and him got into several near-break up fights in the past. That he got fired recently and is now looking for a job. Yesterday he was at the Starbucks at 1390 Market Street. He loved the cappuccino but didn’t like the sandwich. His best friend Joe is gay, Tim is ok with that. Tim’s e-mail address is tim.eastwood@gmail.com, he has a bank account with the Bank of America, and uses as Visa credit card which he happened to use yesterday when he bought the book “The Bush tragedy” at Amazon. You’ve seen ton’s of pictures of Tim, his wife, and their three children. You know what schools the children visit, and what movies they like to watch. That is just for starters. Before you know it, all of Tim’s friends pass by with descriptions, believes, quotes, photos, things they are doing right now. Triggered by his enthusiasm you tell  Tim a lot about yourself too. You are engaging in an open conversation and it feels great. While you are talking, you begin to notice that people surrounding you have stopped their conversations and are clearly listening in to your conversation with Tim. To make matters worse, you then realize that the host of the party is filming the entire conversation, projecting it on a big screen. Sounds crazy? It’s exactly what we are doing right now on the web. In real life we would never disclose so much about ourselves, family, friends, believes etc. to someone we just met.  In the real world repercussions of disclosing personal information tends to be contained within the group of people listening in and gossiping about it. Online things are different. Once recorded, it never disappears. And yet when we get online we disclose it all. It’s a topic that keeps fascinating me. It’s hard to understand why people tend to feel that their online lives somehow are disconnected from real-life. Almost to a point that their online profile or identity is an alter ego, it feels like someone else. While we may pretend that when we go online it isn’t really us, the reality is that our identity, interactions and data are collected, stored, and commercially exploited. Do we know? Do we care? Hard to say. All we know is that there are hundreds of millions of people joining in this ‘global conversation’ via social networks like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace etc. Facebook revenues There is a clear responsibility for a user to stay in control of his privacy, but at the same time we can safely say that most are lured into this conversation by companies that offer substantial benefits without disclosing what the user is giving up for it in return. Facebook takes privacy seriously, it provides the user complex and hard to use privacy settings. While this sounds great, it’s a hoax. When Facebook talks about privacy it means the privacy of the user towards other users. It doesn’t talk about the privacy of the user with respect to Facebook and it’s business model. Facebook doesn’t provide the user with a switch that prevents Facebook itself from exploiting the user commercially. And it provides 3rd parties simple means to extract your entire profile without consent. This schizophrenic behavior is caused by the underlying business model. Web 2.0 is driven by the network effect. Value is created by those that own the largest networks (social graphs) and hog the most data. Data is the currency on the web. Evangelists like Tim O’Reilly have been telling us this for a long time now. In my opinion the biggest tragedy of the success of web 2.0 is its failure to put the user in control of his identity and privacy. [update] TechCrunch writes about the latest Facebook plans. It’s consistent with their strategy of becoming the de facto social web. And the Next web talks about plans of Facebook to share your e-mail address with 3rd party developers. These are again not user-driven but network driven plans. Don’t get me wrong. I do not object by default to commercial exploitation of user data. I do object to the fact that a user isn’t opting in on it and that he really has no control over his privacy or identity whatsoever. Robert Scoble has said many times he doesn’t mind giving up privacy because he gets more value in return. The upside of talking in public about a disease might be that you will find others in the same position sharing their experiences with you. The downside may be that you won’t be hired for a next job because the company has access to your medical condition. How many of those hundreds of millions have made that same conscious choice? Do people really understand that when they join a service like Facebook they are exposing themselves, their children, their family and friends to a company that exploits their interactions? A new balancing act There is only one way out of this. We need to get out of this confining web 2.0 definition and build new business models. Business models that are not based upon network effects and hogging user data. We need user-centric business models. And with that we will see user-centric services appear. Services that have a clear and transparent business model. Services that generate revenue by delivering user value. Services that do not depend on customer lock-in but on user freedom. Services in which the balance of power has shifted from the company that exploits to the user that receives value. A new balancing act. In the ecology that is build around the user-value principle users can manage their online identity and privacy tools. And they can make a conscious decision to share relevant personal information in return for value. The big difference is that the user will be in control. And that may very well be the scariest thing for companies to get used to. If we want to be free, we need to break free of web 2.0 thinking. Posted in business model, Facebook, privacy Tagged: business models, Facebook, identity, privacy, web 2.0

Yes, we spell it “localisation” round ‘ere. * Quick addendum to the previous post about the difference between this blog and a fully bilingual website… It’s amazing how many people get localisation and language wrong. Even Amazon and so on. If I were creating a truly bilingual website then I would translate every single post, page, category and tag. I would have two user-selectable language interfaces, which would be served based on browser language selection where possible. The browser choice could be overriden by visible options for English and Cymraeg. There would be language-specific RSS feeds. If done correctly, the number of RSS feeds should be double that of one language. While I’m on it, there would not be any country flags on the interface. A massive bugbear of mine! A flag does not stand for a language. Never ever. ** If I were starting my own consumer-facing organisation or company in Wales, I would consider it important to offer both languages. (I would like to start doing this for work-related things where possible.) For large companies in particular, usually this is possible but we sometimes get excuses (about demand but usually about cost) which add up to zero really. It’s about people feeling – and being – welcomed in their own country! There is help and expertise available for this, with design, “best practice” and so on. If done well, it’s obviously a good PR move which can give an edge over competitors and boost your bottom line. Besides, language itself is wealth. * Or “lleoleiddiad”. But I couldn’t make a self-referential gag out of that. ** For example, I’ve seen the Union “Jack” flag stand for the English language. Can Jamaicans click this? Or is this some kind of joke on USA web visitors who might want English language, as if we’re now calling the Declaration of Independence into question? It’s hopeless to use the Welsh flag to stand for Cymraeg, it’s a country and not everyone living here uses it. Flags do have their uses though. Please join me in saluting the flag of the North Caucasian Emirate.

A challenge to journalism

tombeardshaw

tombeardshaw