Solis has been in technology public relations since 1991. He began working with message boards, communities and early blogs in the 90s and started his own firm, FutureWorks in 1999. In March 2011,  he joined Altimeter Group, a research-based advisory firm that says it offers “pragmatic strategies to help companies thrive with disruptive technologies.”

You can pop in on Solis blog, which includes a series discussing the concepts in his new book, The End of Business as Usual, or  catch his insightful TV series, Revolution, on YouTube.

Solis has written perhaps the best book on online marketing for beginners, Engage: The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate, and Measure Success in the New Web.  The End of Business as Usual is targeted toward emerging leaders, those change agents who want to revitalize the culture of business around customer experience.

The End of Business discusses traditional consumers, digital consumers and connected consumers, those experiential curators who feel it is their work to share their experiences. I’d say I’m one of them.

Solis has 109,000 followers on Twitter and was among the first to announce Google+ brand pages. Check out the “Ripples” to below see how influencers shared his initial blog post, which in a way embodies his view of how the connected consumer influences others.

I talked with Solis about how his work has evolved from the marketing department to the C-Suite [CEO level] and what the rise of the “connected consumer” could mean to the future of business.

Q: How do you see the principles outlined in The End of Business as Usual spinning forward in the future?

A. From years of working with my own agency, I realized that if I kept working with marketers and kept innovation within the marketing department I was never going to make an impact within the business.  I had aspirations of reaching the C-suite to say “Look at what is taking place here.  If you could lead the entire organization in this direction, you would not have to spend so much time reacting to markets but you could lead them.”

This was after the second revision of Engage, which was my homage and farewell to all of my private resources going to the marketing department and the customer service dept.

Then I started writing “The End of Business as Usual’ and joined Altimeter so I could get right into the C-suite.

Q. What’s the thrust of the book?

A. The idea is to take the principles of everything that we are learning from social media — authenticity, transparency, engagement, peer-to-peer interaction — and develop organizational empathy. This the ability to take insights away from customer activity and behavior and not just measure sentiment, but instead feel empathy, and inform business direction in a way that would be actually meaningful and relevant.

That was the idea.

After spending time with my agency over 13 years, I realized was getting sucked into the technology aspects of it. And I realized that with every new technology and  every new network I was applying the same types of principles.

In the end, I realized that these principles are less about the technology and more about the sociology. I realized that what was taking place was a new kind of customer emerging,

It is clear that this connected consumer shares real world experience. This is actually an important  inflection point for me personally.

I didn’t even realize that I was that new type of customer.

Q. What are the three types of customers?

The book breaks customers into three segments.

There’s the traditional customer. They read newspapers and magazines, watch television and go to real world events.

Then there is the digital or online consumer, This is is the person who begins all their searches on Google. They are very comfortable shopping from CraigsList . They are fine with eBay and fine with getting information from websites.

Finally, there is this idea of the connected consumer. This is what the first half of my new book really centers on.

And, no, connected consumers are not just millennials. And, no, they are not just the young person with a cell phone. The connected consumer is a person who realizes the benefits of connecting to other people like themselves. Over time, I saw that how the connected consumer finds and shares information, how they make decisions, is fundamentally different from the other two categories of consumers. Very little is shared in terms of similarities among the three.

So, it’s not because of social media. It’s not because of Facebook and Twitter.  It’s because the connected consumer has created an egosystem.

The egosystem is the result of interacting in these networks. Connected consumers have created their own egosystems where they’re creating this online experience based on who they are, what they know and what they value.

The fuel to egosystems — the thing that keeps them vibrant — is shared  experience.  What this means, what’s really profound, what really struck me is that if I am planning travel or have another decision to make, as a connected consumer I am not going to go to Google first.

I am going to go to my social networks and see what people are saying. I am going to read social review sites and see what people are experiencing and see if I can make a better decision that way.

There’s an example in the book of researching an airline. If I were the connected consumer, I am going to search it in Twitter and Facebook.

In this case as an experiment, I took the search results feeds from Twitter and Facebook, and put it into Wordle, which creates a word cloud of the most commonly used terms. The word cloud that came back based on these shared experiences was incredible. It was full of swear words. It was pretty unbelievable.

So then I did a funny thing. I went to the website and set the company’s website URL into Wordle to see the word cloud and I compared the two side by side.  What I saw was this: Here is what the company says about themselves. And here is what the connected consumer is experiencing.  The disconnect between the two is the future of business.

Q. But what about sample error, maybe the folks who complain are unusual or not representative of the customer experience?

A. I love that question!

There’s a multiple that was used before the Internet. If somebody hates an experience bad enough that they write a complaint letter they represent an X multiple of people who feel the same thing but just don’t write the letter.

With social networks, if I am asking the question [about sample error] I might not be able to get to the right answer. The right answer is not about what the customer  represents and whether or not they are the mass customer experience. Instead the question is about how important they are to the business based on who they are connected to. To the extent these businesses touch people that is what is important.

The digital native and the traditional native are actually decreasing in number and the connected consumer is increasing in number. So the connected consumer touches more people, and the more people that they touch become people who touch even more people. I call this the concept of the audience of audiences with audiences.

Solis uses this photo by Mollie Sterling of her class at the Missouri School of Journalism to illustrate the audience of audiences with audiences.

But what’s important to takeaway is that I’m not saying that we have to disengage with the traditional and the online consumers. They are important.  I am saying that we have to engage with different kinds of consumers differently. We have to augment our approach.

So for example, ATT has to recognize that unhappy customers are shaping people’s impressions. They might not be so willing to go in with the ATT iPhone next year. Maybe they will consider Verizon and Sprint because they want a better experience.

It forces companies to be a little bit more transparent, a little bit more honest to maybe say things like, “We hear you,” and “We are working on it, because we want you to enjoy the experience. “

Saying, “What problem? What are you talking about?” “We are the number one rated network” doesn’t help the company.  Empathy, however, does help the company. And so does creating a culture within the organization that can encourage empathy and employee engagement and honesty and then innovation based on that honesty, once the customer sees the company has kept its word.

All of these principles tend to humanize a business and the connected consumer is not the only who is going to benefit from that, everyone is going to benefit from that.

Q. What’s to stop an organization from pasting over the impression that it is changing when it is not.

A. Now that I am on the business side of things, working in the C-suite, I spend a lot of time in change management. I help the organization rethink its approach to the culture, the philosophy, down to the mission and the vision. And I ask how do we bring teams together that will lead change because it is really bigger than any one person.

This is where the Occupy movement took off.

It’s not about Facebook and Twitter getting credit for bringing about revolutions, the Egyptian revolution, the Libyan revolution and now the Occupy Wall St.  movement. Really these networks are one of many catalysts for change. They are just tools.

At the heart of change is any number of  things: repression, oppression, depression. The zest for change — that’s at the heart of the revolution.

It’s that change is facilitated much more quickly and easily because of social networks. People will share and get together and do something about it.

At any moment. the Occupy movement could fall in anyone’s lap. Whether change takes ten years or whether it takes five years doesn’t matter.  Because what has to happen is change, or at least a semblance of change, because change is what people want.

People will vote with their dollars and with their decisions. That’s why I call it Digital Darwinism because anybody who is going to wait it out is going to fall victim to natural selection.

Q. Change takes time ….

A. It is sand through an hour glass.  It is a matter of timing. This is why I believe we are at a crossroads.

This book is not for the social media champion, that person within the organization who is going to champion Facebook and Twitter internally. They will lead some great campaigns. But this book is not for them.

This book is for the change agent. This book is for the person willing to rile things up. It gives them fuel to do so, teaches them how to align the right people in the organization and how to make the case, how to bring about change because it is the right thing to do.

The last half of the book is about and for the change agent.

Q. What specific advice do you have for these leaders, these change agents.

A. You are at a crossroads.

You are on one of two kinds of people. First, you are really interested in new media and how it impacts them. Then, you are a person who really wants to bring about change.

These leaders have the  strength, the passion and the tenacity to make it happen.

This is where you see the new Brian Solis emerging.

I spent many years inside organizations and I was not satisfied seeing really important evolutions and revolutions taking place in the business world or in real life and having these insights and recognitions stuck in the silo of marketing, marketing communications and public relations and, to a lesser extent, customer service.

I just said, “Enough! You don’t need me to tell you social media is important.”

For those who want to keep growing and keep going on the path and see this through, then let’s bring about real change in the organization.  Here’s your book.

If not you can stop with Engage, which is still the best book out there to help people do online marketing the right way.

Q: What does all this mean for the local business world in neighborhoods?

This is an easier story to tell. In your neighborhood you will find three different type of people to come to your restaurant.

One is the traditional – the word of mouth. Then you will have the digital customer. They will find you from a Google search in the neighborhood.

Then you will have the connected consumer and they will ask their friends in FourSquare or their geolocal network Yelp . They will rely on their social network to tell them where to go.

What happens next? Someone goes to your restaurant and they have a horrible experience. Then the online customer will find some traditional review sites and say: “Don’t go there.”

They you get the connected consumer – they will leave something on Yelp, they will blog about it, they might even say something on YouTube.

Whatever the networks they use, the connected consumer will leave eggs there because that’s what they do.

They feel almost like an experiential curator. They feel it is important and up to them to make sure that their social graf understands their experience. This is true for good experiences as well.

All these customers are important to your business and you cannot reach them all one way.

So the question is how are you reaching and engaging the connected segment.  In an example in the book, I talk about a chocolate shop that decided to take out print ads.

Oddly enough the print ad brought in 1 person and it cost $200. Foursquare brought in 24 customers in the first week.

The traditional and digital customer will find us the way they have always found us. But if we are trying to grow our business, we need to reach people where they are.

To be honest with you, Facebook is the homepage for a local busienss social web. Now it’s the place for the traditional and the digital customer. You can design Facebook to be your website.

That why I don’t drink the kool aid anymore. I get the why. Now show me the how.

The post Brian Solis: What the C-suite can learn from connected consumers appeared first on 435 Digital.

NextDoor hopes to do this by tapping into the power of  “the neighborhood.”

“Neighborhoods are really one of the original social networks,” says Nirav Tolia, CEO. “ It seems like we have lost touch with the neighborhood. NextDoor  is a technology platform where neighbors can come together and create a private and bounded website, an individual website for their neighborhoods.”

NextDoor has incorporated several features into its platform that resemble its social network cohort. But it is designed to populate  itself very differently .

We use Facebook to make friends and connect with family. We use Yelp to rate restaurants and other services. And CraigsList helps us buy and sell, trade, giveaway and connect with opportunities. Of all of them only Everyblock was initially organized around rough geographic area, the almighty zip code.  But in each of these networks, users are filling in the very specific dots of our neighborhood map from the top down.

In NextDoor, neighbors fill in the dots from their addresses up.  So you talk about the restaurant on the corner.  You borrow the screwdriver from the guy two doors down [maybe you never knew his name before.] And you discuss Halloween plans and post photos to folks who live next door. As a social network Nextdoor’s identity emerges from the dots – specifically our addresses and proximity to one another: our neighborhood. And your activity is invisible to search engines and to those who are not your neighbors.

Nextdoor has licensed information that allows them to guess at a neighborhood’s boundary. They’ll provide that as a first draft to users who want to start a neighborhood site. From there neighbors can expand or contract boundaries based on their needs. NextDoor provides help along the way.

The company has found that good size for a neighborhood is between 75 and 2000 households.

“You need to have at least 75 households to feel there are enough people,” Tolia says. “More than 2000 is too big and no longer feels intimate.”

He said a homeowners association, a natural landmark, or a subdivision make an easy start to boundaries.

“When we thought about making the right environment, we felt that online privacy is essential,” Tolia said. “We did not want to have a website where neighbors felt what  they were posting was visible outside their neighborhoods.”

“We did what our users told us,” he said. “They said they did not want their posts searchable in Google.”

People using NextDoor want to be able to share the names and ages of their children and openly share when something does not look right.

Tolia showed me several  pages of existing neighborhoods that had given permission to be shown. It was Halloween, and parents were posting pictures of their kids and houses on their blocks, telling stories, much like you’d see on Facebook.

“The context is fine for that neighborhood,” Tolia said. “But it is not relevant for people outside the neighborhood.”

Every neighbor uses real name and none of it is available on search engines.

Here’s Tolia’s description of how NextDoor verifies name and address.

There are two paths to verification: Nextdoor Verification and neighbor verification.

Nextdoor Verification is how things get started. You cannot join unless you verify in one of the following ways:

1. Request a postcard sent directly to your home address with a unique code

2. Request a phone call to your home phone which must be directory-tied to your home address

3. Enter your credit card which must have a billing address that matches your home address

4. Get a previously verified neighbor to vouch for you directly through a special invitation

None of our 10k+ plus members have “gamed” this system, but in case they did, we would move to Neighbor Verification.

Neighbor Verification is where a neighbor reports a new member that looks suspicious or unknown. Every new member is announced to the community and can be easily found on the map and directory – so if someone entered the community and did not look legit, the other members would notice and report to us asap.

“We have been working on this a year,” Tolia said.  “We wanted to make sure that we had a ton of user feedback, “ Tolia said. “It’s been wonderful to see people tell us they want to take charge of bringing back a sense of neighborhood to the community.”

In the first year beta, 176 neighborhoods in 26 states set up sites on NextDoor.  The company plans to have 1000 neighborhoods signed on by the end of the year.

NextDoor has investors and I’ll bet a solid  revenue plan. Its sustainability is based on very local advertising within a neighborhood. At some point, a mechanism will be developed to share information across neighborhood boundaries.’

“Our members and neighbors want to support local business,” Tolia said.

But Tolia says the team is first concentrating on perfecting user experience.

“We just want to connect neighbors,”  he said.

As to what I see as its most  similar friend, Tolia says Everyblock is about news and information while NextDoor is about connection and community.“Everyblock is a great company,” Tolia said.

The possible government tie-in with a NextDoor is compelling, and in fact, Malcolm Smith, Communications Manager is lighting up all of Redwood City with Next Door.

I’m dreaming that NextDoor could become  a gigantic Kumbaya of a social media mashup. And Tolia talks that way, offering only praise for his brethren including  emerging independent online news publishers as well as other sites that are part of the ecosystem that serves neighborhoods

While Facebook has succeeded in getting nearly everyone online, the strategic intersection of local and social is still a coveted revenue frontier being aggressively pursued by Facebook, Google and other smaller players.

The mad rush into local advertising continues to build. In the past few days, Google street view went live inside businesses this week.  And Google announced that it is now indexing Facebook comments.

But Tolia says NextDoor won’t be rushing into local advertising. “It takes a long long time to get these local businesses  online,” Tolia said. “We will take our time and get it right.”

I’ve been watching for something like NextDoor to come along and integrate all the different players in the local space in a flexible and seamless way. I want to experience my neighborhood online in much the same way as I experience it on my daily walks. It will take a gamechanger to make that happen and we’ll see soon enough whether NextDoor can fit that bill.

As usual, I’d love to hear what you love and what you hate about NextDoor.

View a short video describing Nextdoor.

Here’s the front page of a NextDoor neighborhood page. Note the drop downs at the top.

Here’s the classified sharing page that resembles Craigslist, FreeCycle, OhSoWe.

Here is the directory of neighbors.

NextDoors’ initial list of recommended businesses as built by neighbors. 

The post Privacy, identity key to NextDoor’s good neighbors strategy appeared first on 435 Digital.

If you don’t get off Facebook much, you might want to meander around Kickstarter and see what’s playing front page. Your friends or your kids have probably sent you to this service that provides a great set of tools — from video to messaging to marketing advice — to help you fundraise for your project.  There’s one caveat. You have a deadline for raising your nut and if you don’t make it, you’re out.  A stroll around Kickstarter is always amazing , often moving and usually inspiring.  Seeing others creations might give you some ideas for your own.

This week, I stumbled upon a Kickstarter project: Good Ol’ Freda.  Freda Kelly was the secretary for The Beatles from the early days at the Cavern Club until 1970.  She’s still a secretary and until now has been mum about her life with the fab four. Now she’s opened up her scrapbooks to a filmmaker and they are looking to raise $50,000 by Nov. 12 for their film project.  Shes offering all kinds of goodies in exchange for your donation.

Another place to easily get lost in a wonderland is YouTube. And not just in the old music video section.  There’s real talent at work here making excellent niche TV shows that are better than the best of Hollywood, precisely because they are so deeply engaging with their audiences.  A fan girl friend recently pointed me toward Issa Rae’s “The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl,” which Rae creates and stars in.  The production values and acting are very good. But the writing is superb and funny.

Or if you are feeling geeky, you can head on over to the Twit netcast network, “Netcasts you love from people you trust.” Here you’ll  find some inspiration for that underused conference room, that yoga studio that’s empty during the day or the slow time at the café in the afternoon. Set up a stage and some talkative folks and you have a TV show. OK.  The folks on This Week in Google aren’t every day people — they are some of the  Internet’s most prominent thinkers —  but you never know what talent lives in your building or up the block.

I was bungling around on Facebook and found actor friend Don Bender  is involved in a new online theaterical production by Jamil Khoury, Silk Road Rising, which he says is engaging theater onstage and online around important issues.  His play, Mosque Alert, is about  ”Two suburban American families living in Naperville, IL -one Christian, the other Muslim- find their lives torn apart by a proposal to build a new mosque in their community.”

Khoury says:

In the hopes of generating deeper engagement around this issue, I have designed a ten-step, interactive, on-line, new play development process that will assist me in developing and writing my play “Mosque Alert.” Viewers are encouraged to both influence and assist me as I pen this new play.

My ten step artistic process allows each participant to act as co-creator throughout the entire development cycle. I like to think of it as a spiritual convening of the individual with the art.

Each of these is a narrowcast co-creation with a passionate audience. It’s the way the future of the Internet is rolling out. There are millions of  ideas blossoming. Yours could be one of them. If you know who your people are, you can find your idea. It can be as simple to execute [the writing wasn't simple] as a humorous tweetalogue  like Dan Sinker’s Mayor Emanuel, which started as an anonymous satire of then Chicago Mayoral candidate Rahm Emanuel and ended up as a book. Or it can be as elaborate as a traveling global round robin musical like Playing for Change, which made its name with Stand by Me.  Take some time to stroll around and fire your imagination. Let us know what you find and most important what you and your colleagues dream up for yourselves.  We’d love to hear about it.

The post Narrowcasts showcase creativity on social Web appeared first on 435 Digital.

With tools like WordPress, Joomla and Drupal, a nonprofit  can update their sites with a few clicks. In my experience, I’ve found many nonprofit executives think their website and social media presence has to be expensive and complicated, and they don’t take advantage of the passion of their  fans to populate their YouTube,  Flickr and other channels. I suspect that the reason large size and budget is not necessarily an indicator of  effective use of social media has more to do with internal politics than anything else.  Internal politics is also likely the reason for relatively scant use of Twitter by  the surveyed nonprofits.

After looking through the results, I had additional questions, which Craig and  collaborator  Allyson Kapin of RAD Campaign answered for me.

Q. When you were doing this study, how were you measuring effectiveness?
A. We wanted to know if the top nonprofits, ranked by net income, were the ones actually being the most effective with social media. We looked at how active they were on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, how many followers they had, how often they engaged with “their people” on these social platforms and to some extent, where we could see the data, if their followers/likers were being engaged by “Liking” and commenting on their Facebook posts, and retweeting  them on Twitter.

Q. Give the simplicity of adding SM media, why are so many NPOs NOT using all the buttons? Is it because of the complexity of their website build outs?
A. Nonprofits are strapped for resources. Many don’t have the budget to have web developers and social media staff to manage their website and social media presence. However, in this day and age, it’s very important that nonprofits carve out some time and resources to address this.  This is where their supporters are and spend a chunk of their time.

Q. Did this research provide any insights into what the challenges are for NPOs in using social media?
A. While our data did not look this per say, we do feel that the biggest challenge here is staffing and resources, which I mentioned above.

Q. Did this research help you understand ways that would be cost-effective and easy for NPOs to improve their social media presence? And will you be sharing those understandings?
A. We recommend that nonprofits utilize 5 key strategies to improve their social media presence.
1.      Provide engaging and relevant content about some of the great work you are doing.
2.      Don’t be wonky. Social media is about being “social”.
3.      Foster conversations. Ask your followers/likers for their opinions.
4.      Be responsive. This is about building a community.
5.      Practice dipping in and out of social media in 10- to 15-minute increments.

Q. It seems that those NPOs — like the Red Cross — that have a critical mission seemed better able to develop a critical mass and a conversation in all channels. Did you get any feedback relevant to that?
A. The Red Cross has at least 2 social media staffers who do a great job engaging people on social networks. They understand the space and how to connect with people, particularly in natural disasters — as we all witnessed during the earthquake in Haiti.  They are also incredibly responsive to the community, which is so important.

Q. What about fundraising? Did you look at those tools and their effectiveness?
A. No this study did not look at that.

Q. This survey seemed like the first step in a deeper analysis, ie. it did not really draw any conclusions. Will there be a second round in this research?
A. The biggest take-away from the study was that income doesn’t necessarily increase a nonprofit’s interactions on social media. Some of the most engaged organizations on social media are not the one’s with the highest income on the list, yet they are doing a good job with their social media. Why? Because they are fostering engaging conversations and interactions.

We are releasing another infographic in early November that looks at nonprofit verticals ranging from Veterans to Environmental organizations and how they do social media.

————————————————————————————————————————————————————

Among the survey’s findings:

• 92% of the top 50 nonprofits have at least 1 social media presence on their homepage.
• The most followers that an organization has on Twitter is 840,653 (PBS).
• On the other hand, the organization following the most people is following 200,522 (The American Cancer Society)!
• The American Red Cross was the first organization on the list to create a Twitter account.
• Food for the Poor is the most talkative organization on Facebook, and has posted 220 posts over the course of 2 months.
• The organization with the highest net income, the YMCA, only posted 19 times to Facebook in 2 months, but has over 24,000 Fans.

The post Biggest nonprofits aren’t necessarily best at social media appeared first on 435 Digital.

Cmp.ly makes it easy for a brand to signal the presence of a material connection — payment of any sort— between itself, bloggers and other digital producers through a system called iconic compliance. Using Cmp.ly,  a brand sets up an iconic tag  at the beginning of a social media campaign and then invites its influencers to participate. All social media elements materially connected to the brand running that campaign — from Tweets to blogs — clearly signal the degree of their relationship — from promo to sponsorship — by using the appropriate icon. Consumers will see immediately whether a blog post, Tweet or video is materially connected.

Cmp.ly was created as a solution when the FTC updated  its guidelines related to testimonials and endorsements Oct. 5, 2009, extending them to the digital sphere.

Industry observers say the FTC update  was past due.

“The FTC has not done a terrific job of protecting consumers,” said Joe Cappo, who was a publisher for 20 years at Crain Communications, and who now consults and teaches at DePaul University, Chicago. “There are no rules to govern all this stuff. “

“When a media becomes as important as network television, I think someone needs to step in and set up the ground rules. “

“I believe that a lot of bad information creates the demand for good information,” Cappo said. “There are too many bloggers who don’t care, who are just doing it to make money or to make trouble. Can we regulate it? It would be very difficult.“

The FTC update caused an uproar among bloggers at the time. Some felt the Internet rules  stomped on their rights to free speech and they criticized the rules for being impossible to implement.

Internet marketer and social media guru Chris Brogan responded  to the FTC by calling out to bloggers to provide voluntary full disclosure.  Brogan’s marketing company specializes in developing social media marketing campaigns for brands. At the same time, a blog disclosurepolicy.org was launched to help bloggers  develop their own full disclosure rules – the site has not been updated recently.

“Traditionally journalists had certain ethical standards to abide by, while Joe Shmo on the street — did not necessarily,” said Daliah Saper, a Chicago-based attorney at a recent session on the FTC rules at Social Media Week Chicago. “The traditional definition of journalists does not exist necessarily any more and that is why the new media guidelines were added,” she added.

But brands, not blogs, are the focus of FTC scrutiny and the solutions developed by Cmp.ly meet FTC regulations exactly, said Ruth Wagner, VP Sales/Shareholder for the company who was also present at the Social Media Week session.

Wagner says cmp.ly is the only commercial solution available and that it is at the vanguard of a move toward transparency and full disclosure.

“The adaption of social media transparency and cmp.ly are identical. “ she said.

The FTC has indicated it will be increasing its watch for brands that are engaging in deceptive practices. In one recent case, Legacy Learning Systems was required to pay the FTC a $250,000 penalty and is subject to monthly audits for 20 years. Other cases include Reverb Communications.

On its website, Cmp.ly says it has three goals:

Simplify and standardize regulatory compliance and disclosures so businesses can contribute to an open, transparent marketplace and build trust with consumers

Enable companies of any size to meet regulatory and disclosure challenges in an efficient, cost-effective manner

Provide consumers with a simple way to recognize and understand business relationships, affiliations, and marketing practices

For brands, the first two goals ease operations under FTC guidelines.

From my perspective as an individual who uses the Internet to research products, the third is music to my ears. The lack of transparency on the Web has undermined the ethical fabric of all our transactions there. I simply don’t know who to trust and I’m not alone in that. Free blogging tools have been around for only ten years, but I shudder to think what the blogosphere will look like in another ten without some oversight.

Using the Cmp.ly solution are LinkedIn, EBay, Hewlett Packard, Infinity, Ford, JC Penny and Ugg Australia, among others, Wagner said. Cmp.ly is also developing solutions for the highly regulated financial and health industries.

While brands must pay to use Cmp.ly, individuals can use the cmp.ly system for free. In addition, Cmp.ly links provide appropriate social media analytics to measure the success of a campaign.

Although brands have found an exciting new marketing channel in social media, it’s time to slow down and refine  practices used in word of mouse marketing.

To my mind, tools like Cmp.ly could significantly quiet the marketing stream for consumers.

It’s getting very loud out there on the virtual continent that is the Internet. Some days I’d just as soon listen to a jackhammer as look at my email so clogged is it with email newsletters reciting the charms of something I don’t want. In its outermost public circle, Twitter is blatting out marketing messages that pollute my stream of must see information. Google+ is great for my more thoughtful friends – thankfully a little quieter than Facebook, where a feed now calls out at every tiny touch between entities – brands, friends, causes, colleagues and family. Give me some earplugs and a blindfold or better yet it’s time to turn off the Macbook and go outside.

This would be shortsighted, however, because the social web is here to stay. If we can all hold on, the next wave of disruption promises to offer some help for ordering this chattering assault into something resembling harmony.

I am on the lookout for tools that will help with this transition.  I think one such tool could be Cmp.ly.

If you know of others, please let me know.

The post Is squeaky clean for FTC next wave in social media branding? Hope so. appeared first on 435 Digital.

Either way, the Facebook changes don’t phase me because I know that I will go play around with the interface, peer into the drop downs and snap around a few buttons to figure out how to do what I want to do. I’m also checking in every day with the leagues of tactical bloggers reporting full-time on Facebook’s new freckles whose job is to make them clear.

Still, I have a few impressions. I’m liking the upper right hand ticker that shows the comments and actions of my friends on each other’s pages. I’m nosy so I like the way I can see an ongoing conversation and pop in if I like. Facebook is also reporting who’s listening to what on Spotify. There’s no accounting for taste in music. I’ll just have to forgive. And some will think listening to my yoga music is like chewing glass, so the feeling will be mutual.

All of this feels very social in the same way that Google+ sharing does, very immediate and more seamless than anything Facebook has done in the past. It feels like they are getting closer to a more user-centric interface.

In this column, Mashable describes some of the privacy issues with the new Facebook Timeline.

These issues include all the sharing that could lead to share overload. We’ll now know everything our friends are listening to, watching and reading. We’ll have to be very careful when adding apps as the default settings could bring automatic sharing we don’t want. And finally, when your page is updated to the new Timeline design, some private aspects of your life could be displayed more publicly than they were on your previous settings. You’ll have to go in manually and close the drapes.

All in all Facebook has made a strong return volley to the Google+ project – which is open to the public now. We’ll just have to see how all this plays out for business.

If you’d like to see how close we are to the technological singularity, watch this TED talk by Ray Kurzweil. He sees it here in 25 years.

You can learn more about the major new features coming up by watching Facebook’s movie introducing Timeline.

The post Facebook is not the singularity – darn! appeared first on 435 Digital.

Here in Chicago, Social Media Week kicked off last week when Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel joined Foursquare as ChicagosMayor. Chicago is honored to have the first official City Badge, the “Windy City Badge.” The badge is your prize for checking into Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, the Oriental Institute Museum and the Garfield Park Conservatory and two other lesser known Chicago destinations. This idea of highlighting lesser known points of interest would work really well on the hyperlocal level – ie. in your neighborhood.

We still have two-and-a-half days left so go sign up!

p.s. if you are looking for direction on how to figure out all the Facebook changes (Panic! Panic! Google+ is open to the public!), here’s a video from WGN with the Chicago Tribune’s Scott Kleinberg and Amy Guth telling you what you need to know.

The post Social Media Week — there’s still time! appeared first on 435 Digital.

Google’s direct response, according to Google spokesperson Rob Shilkin, is this:

Google will study the clicks on +1 buttons as a signal that influences the ranking and appearance of websites in search results. The purpose of any ranking signal is to improve overall search quality. For +1’s and other social ranking signals, as with any new ranking signal, we’ll be starting carefully and learning how those signals are related to quality.

To figure out what this means, I talked with someone who knows a lot more about Google and its algorithm, Greg Brewster, Director of Center for Advanced Network Studies of the College of Computing and Digital Media at DePaul University, Chicago.

“”It looks like the number of +1 clicks may influence the ranking of the search results,” Brewster said. “I would object if the Google ranking were based only on “+1″ s. If they are using it to sway things a few percentage points one way or another, it seems reasonable as an addition to their page ranking system.”

Public web pages already feel they are disadvantaged if they don’t have a Facebook, Linked In or Twitter. Eventually the +1 is just going to be one of those things that everybody’s got to have.

“Yes admittedly that means if +1  is used it will push you up in the search rank,” Bewster said. “If you don’t have one of those on your page then you are disadvantaged. “

I can chose to turn off the “+1” recommendations when I do a Google search by signing out of Google+, but as I wrote on Wednesday if I’m not a member of Google+ I won’t see the “+1”  at all.

But how does Google work? Basically Google has a program — webwalkers —  software that begins on a web page and walks through all the web pages on the internet. It keeps track of how many times each page gets referred to, how many links point back to each pages.

And it also indexes key words on each page so that when you type something into Google it uses the index words to match the words you’ve typed.

Brewster said Google  uses a page rank system where it is supposed to give you back the pages that have the highest relevancy (that is, the pages that contain the most matches with your search terms) and that have the most links to them first. If more people refer to your page then it pushes your page up higher in the rankings.

“Google also wanted a system that is hard to spoof,” Brewster said. For instance gaming the Google+ system would be clicking plus ones repeatedly.

But Google’s traditional page rank system has been hard to manipulate that way, Brewster said. “Google doesn’t just count links, it counts how important the pages are that the links come from.”

That would thwart a hacker or gamer who just kept clicking.

“It is a well known technology challenge to be able do search and ranking in a perfect way,” Brewster said.  “How you can get it done technologically and how you can do it fairly are big questions.”

“Google is just kind of the heavy weight champ of search engines,“ he said.

Others have told me that whatever Google does with Google+,  it will keep its basic algorithm pure.

“That makes sense to me,” Brewster said.

“The whole system comes up with an order which may not conform to a system that people want,” he said, “But they have to do it somehow. It’s just part of the problem of being a search engine provider. “

To me, the addition of the Google+ feature makes sense from a marketing point of view.

When you’ve signed up for Google+ and the social sharing system is in place, what you have is a kind of personal search engine that shows you the purchasing behavior of your friends and family.  I like that.

If you are more private, you might not want to share this information. It goes without saying that we all have different levels of privacy needs.  Most local businesses will have plenty of customers who enjoy sharing their experiences.

The post How Google+ might affect Google search results appeared first on 435 Digital.

Here’s what the Hangout YouTube dashboard looks like. Everybody was having dinner when I was experimenting so I haven’t actively had a hangout on YouTube with my Google+ friends yet.

These developments all bode well for Google and its Google+ fledgling social network. Now that I can hangout on YouTube,  Google+ has almost won me over — it’s something I love to do. If it were not for my recalcitrant  FaceBook friends I’d be spending way more time at Google+.

The post How to hangout on YouTube with Google+ friends appeared first on 435 Digital.

Firms providing this service include North Social, Public Deals, Pageable, and Buckaroo.

Groupon itself is offering a self-serve deal named Groupon Stores, but it’s had problems getting started. Here’s an interesting conversation about local merchant self-serve from Quora, the online Q and A site.

Given the smashing success of Groupon, we’ve seen lots of start ups in this space.

Buckaroo, which just launched a month ago and is free while in beta, gives users full control over promotional terms, transactions and list management. Buckaroo just added Facebook and Twitter features.

All of the self-serve providers listed above work within Facebook rules. Merchants that run their own promotions on Facebook without using an approved deal application are violating Facebook rules and will be shut down.

The goal of daily deal advertising is to get people in the door. It’s proven popular with retailers, restaurants and special services – from photographers to personal trainers to spas and others  mostly in the high end.

A daily deal gives a customer an incentive to come into your business at a particular time, said Jeremy Caplan, Director of Education, Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.

Daily deals address the two major reasons why a customer might not be frequenting a business.

The first is: “I don’t have that kind of money.”

The second is: “Well, I will do that some other time.”

“The daily deal gives people a nudge to try a product or service at a specific time,” Caplan says. “It increases the likelihood that the advertising will lead to a conversion, i.e. a customer.”

This can work great for some businesses. For others, it can be a costly way of attracting a certain kind of customer — deal hunters, who aren’t necessarily going to return and build your customer base.

Another interesting option, Caplan says, is to use a WordPress template called DailyDeal.

To me, this portal looks like it would be useful embedded in sites for communities, neighborhoods and local chambers of commerce.

Although these self-service deals can be attractive   to businesses for several reasons, Caplan says, they present their challenges.

1) The business might not have the time to manage the deal.

2) They don’t have the marketing skill to do it themselves ‘

3) They might not have the capacity to follow through.

So even with  all this opportunity to self-serve deals,  a local business might decide to use a news organization’s online services like the Chicago Tribune’s daily deal service.

“Newspapers have a special relationship with their readers,” Caplan says. “Readers already spend time with their newspapers. With a daily deal, a news organization has an opportunity to provide real time ads that are more timely and relevant and to provide local deals that consumers can act on immediately.

The post How local merchants can self-serve daily deals appeared first on 435 Digital.