Now more than ever, lead generation for the complex sale is a long process of developing relationships with your prospects. Gone are the days of just getting names and making calls. Since Twitter is a fantastic way to build new relationships, it makes sense that B2B adoption continues to grow. However, because it’s still a relatively new channel, many B2B marketers struggle with how to use it and aren’t harnessing its full potential. With that in mind, here are 6 ways to generate and nurture more leads on Twitter.

1. Interact with People

This may sound obvious, but it’s easy for B2B marketers to fall into the trap of simply tweeting thought leadership content and promotions. Content is important, to be sure, but the real benefit of Twitter is the ability to develop relationships. So interact with people, reply to their tweets, ask questions, and start building new relationships.

2. Don’t Tweet in a Silo

Depending on the structure of your sales and marketing department(s), you’ll want to keep tabs on who is a real prospect and who isn’t (yet). After all, you may look silly suggesting to a seemingly new lead that they check out your product or white paper when they’re already in the last stages of the buying process. However you do it, try to set up some form of communication between your sales and marketing team(s) so you: i) hand off good Twitter leads to sales ii) follow and engage with current prospects and iii) are aware of who is in the buying process and who isn’t.

3. Provide Value and Advice in Your Tweets

So you’re interacting with people and probably promoting your own thought leadership content. Fantastic! You’re off to a great start. Now it’s time to provide real value in your tweets and become a trusted advisor. So provide solutions. Offer advice. Help your followers solve their pain points. Say “A great way to increase ABC is by doing XYZ”.

4. Monitor Relevant Keywords

Monitoring keywords is a great (and easy!) way to find targeted people to follow, offer timely advice, and stay on top of industry trends. Let’s say you market dedicated server hosting. Make a list of relevant keywords that your prospects may use to describe their pain points, like “server downtime” or “network reliability”. You can use an RSS feed to receive a notification when someone tweets with those keywords, or you can use the built-in functionality with a tool like Tweetdeck. However you do it, you’ll be able to stay on top of what’s happening on Twitter, and swoop in when someone complains about their current solution’s reliability or downtime.

5. Monitor Your Competitors’ Brands

The great thing about Twitter is that everything is out in the open. You can easily see who is tweeting to your competitors and what they’re tweeting about. By monitoring your competitors’ products and brand names, you can: i) offer advice to a competitor’s customer who is having technical issues ii) engage with anyone who is considering a competitors’ product iii) follow anyone who tweets about a competitor iv) follow people that your competitors follow v) stay on top of trends in the industry vi) engage with the people your competitors tweet to. Just don’t do it all at once. That would be creepy and weird. And you don’t want them to call you out on it.

6. Offer Lead Gen Opportunities

Finally, offer direct lead generation opportunities. Tweet webinars, reports, white papers, and content. Just make sure you’re associating those lead capture pages with your Twitter marketing, so you can track the stellar ROI of your efforts.

Want to learn more about social media marketing for the high-tech industry? Join us October 26, 2010 in San Jose for SocialTech 2010 — the only conference that’s all about social media for B2B high-tech professionals.

Chris Treadaway is founder and CEO of Lasso, a hyper-local advertising platform for media outlets and small businesses. He is also the author of the book Facebook Marketing: An Hour a Day. He blogs at treadaway.typepad.com.

It is never comfortable to play the role of wet blanket. Yet that’s exactly how I felt as I sat on a Rice Alliance panel in Austin earlier this month with Gowalla CEO Josh Williams and others. The panel was titled “The Business of Location: Making Money with Geo-Aware Services,” and moderated by Mashable’s Josh Catone.

Most people were clearly there to hear Williams, who has become an industry leader, and I couldn’t help but feel a little unpopular in offering a reality check to a room full of innovators.  In fact, when I suggested that our not-so-sexy platform was about to monetize with a major media partner, the whole room erupted in laughter.  And yet there was also a point of vindication in my contrariness to everyone’s focus on location and not on revenue and important business metrics, when even Williams admitted that checkins are destined to fade away as a user motivation.
 
It isn’t that I’m bearish on location services.  Far from it.  Real-time and location-based marketing in all its forms are, in my opinion, the final big gold rush of Web 2.0.  A lot of money will be made here. I’m just wondering what appropriate success metrics we should expect from the LBS industry.
 
Having lived through the last industry bubble, the current hype over LBS seems oddly familiar.  In the late 1990s, everything became a focus on how many eyeballs came to a website — big deals with big name brands, and the promise of a brighter future powered by the web.  Fast forward to today, and the metric du jour is the number of users of an app, and all the major LBS players are fighting over case studies with big brands.

This is the same fight for mindshare that occurred with major software companies ten years ago.  It wasn’t a focus on profitability or real business value — it was a PR scrum where everyone was out to make a name for themselves. And we all remember how that ended.  All of a sudden, investors started asking tough questions about those nasty terms — business value, profitability, and sustainability.  Huge valuations were followed by a huge crash. Investments were ultimately judged by how well the capital was used to make money and build lasting businesses.

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Checking In on the Mainstream

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Let’s back up a minute and investigate the value proposition for location services.  They give people the ability to share where they are with friends and businesses near them.  We’re told that this is so compelling for people that it will create a new market where products and services are sold in new ways.  I suppose it’s possible for LBS to be the next wave of social networking, as well.
 
All of that might make sense.  But in practical terms, what will LBS providers need to achieve to make this a mainstream reality that justifies current valuations?

• A huge audience of users far bigger than exists today, because even a few million users translates into only a very small number for an average locality;
• Repeated and ongoing “checking in” or automated exposure of a user’s location;
• Repeated and ongoing participation from businesses, large and small, who will see this as a necessary component of mobile marketing over and above everything else that is out there; and
• Acceptance of LBS as a reasonable way for everyday people to express themselves despite obvious privacy and safety issues that go along with sharing one’s location.

 
Let’s face it: This is a pretty high bar for mainstream audiences who are not in the tech community’s echo chamber of tweeting, social media, blogging, and the like.  Add to this the fact that these mainstream audiences already use Facebook.  They buy Android and Apple phones.  And especially in large cities, some use Yelp to determine where they are going to eat, entertain themselves, and socialize.  Any of these existing players who have proven themselves in other areas can become a major or even dominant LBS competitor almost overnight.

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The LBS Metrics We Should Really Be Following

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So what does the data tell us about the health and utility of location-based services today? Unfortunately not much. Foursquare has been most forthright about usage of their system.  The app has grown tremendously in 15 months, and now has 1.2 million users, who have checked in 40 million times, we’re told.  Doing the rough math, that’s about 30 checkins per user for the ~450 day life of the application.  If you assume that the average user has been on the system for half that time, that’s one check in per week per user.  Impressive progress, yes.  But that is hardly mass adoption or evidence of repeated, habitual use.  It is proof of satisfying a need in the innovator crowd, but nothing more so far.  It does not give us an indication of long-term LBS value and whether or not we’re looking at the next big thing.
 
I really like what Foursquare has done with Starbucks.  It makes sense.  Jeremiah Owyang even called it innovative.  MyTown has done interesting things with The Travel Channel and Gowalla with the National Geographic Passport.  But what’s novelty today will become the norm tomorrow as more brands pile on with other LBS providers.  It probably makes even more sense for these brands to offer deals across a variety of LBS providers — all they really want is customers/users, right?  Who cares where they reside?

And as for local business utility, the usage numbers are way too low when brought down to a local level to impact the bottom-line of most businesses. A million worldwide users of an LBS application translates to a very, very small share of any local market. Sure, a case study here or there may indicate success in a specialized situation, but by and large, most local businesses can’t consider access to a small, occasionally interested local audience via LBS to truly move the needle on revenue and profit.
 
Proof of true success for LBS will come in the form of the metrics that aren’t being shared today. I’m talking about time-trending numbers on the actual use of location-based applications. Here are a few suggestions:

• Percent of Active Users: What is the percentage of users who have checked in during the last day?  The last week?  This will give us an indication of utility and/or fatigue.
• Revenue: Exactly how is all of this translating into revenue? For the LBS app companies? For brands that advertise? For local businesses?
• Average Number of Checkins Per Day: How often do people check in?  Is this derivative metric improving or declining?  This will tell us about the value proposition of checking in for the average consumer.
• Time Spent in Application: What is the average time spent per day inside the application per user?  This informs the market about the experience consumers have with the application and how well it captures users’ attention.
• Percent of Users Who Have Been Inactive Over the Last Month: How many people installed a location-based app but got tired of it and now no longer effectively use it?

Sharing stats on your total user base or total number of checkins only tells part of the story –- and a rather uninteresting part at that.  What really matters to marketers is how engaging the app is.  If it is another icon on an iPhone that hasn’t been clicked in a while, it’s useless to a marketer.  If a user isn’t updating location regularly, it has limited utility for ongoing proximity marketing.

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Conclusion

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Many brands are trying to get into the craze right now because it is novel, and that’s great.  But the real test is whether or not location-based services indeed create business value.  Put another way — it isn’t an achievement for a major consumer brand to run a pilot with an LBS provider.  It is a major achievement if true business value, and not just PR value, was driven by the relationship. Nobody seems to be asking these tough questions.
 
I respect the job that all the founders of the major LBS companies have done to popularize the applications.  But the numbers that have been shared so far don’t warrant all the hype.  The next step for major LBS players is to drive real business value to companies while keeping the consumer experience engaging for more than just the early adopter crowd.  That’s a tough, tough task that goes well beyond where any are today.

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For more mobile coverage, follow Mashable Mobile on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook

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More location resources from Mashable:

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- Why Hasn’t Location Reached the Mainstream Yet?
- Gowalla CEO Talks About the Future of Social Media [INTERVIEW]
- 9 Killer Tips for Location-Based Marketing
- The Local Advertising War Will Be a Clash of the Internet Titans
- 7 Ways Journalists Can Use Foursquare

[img credit: Ed Yourdon]

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Reviews: Android, Facebook, Foursquare, Gowalla, Mashable, Twitter, Yelp, iPhone

Tags: analysis, business, foursquare, geo-location, gowalla, location, location-based, Mobile 2.0, social media, yelp

Twitter once again pulled a fast one on app developers when it announced today that third-party ads will be banned from the service.

Such behavior tends to leave one’s developer community feeling more than a little alienated, but this isn’t an open source lovefest, after all. This is big business, and it’s apparent that Twitter intends to make sure the most lucrative aspects of that business remain internal.

Jason Goldman, Twitter’s product VP, told developers at Chirp that the company was looking increasingly at business and analytics services. “As Twitter gets ready to ramp up promoted tweets,” we wrote at the time, “be aware that the company is fully cognizant of the money-making potential of ad platforms and measurement tools.” In other words, don’t expect the company to give away a potentially lucrative revenue stream.

In many ways, this move is reminiscent of the company’s acquisition of Tweetie about a month ago. Then, too, third-party developers and investors who had built startups on top of the Twitter platform were blindsided because Twitter wasn’t transparent about its roadmap.

“The problem is that business have been created, received funding and developed over the past year, with the full knowledge of Twitter, and this just undercuts & destroys them,” writes WhatTheTrend analyst Liz Pullen. “This is a policy decision that should have been made over a year ago.”

Then again, all’s fair in capitalism, or so we must believe if we’re to build technology on increasingly competitive platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.

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Developer Reactions Around the Web

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In a Google group for third-party devs working on Twitter’s APIs, several devs chimed in to express displeasure with the announcement.

“This isn’t a surprise,” wrote Moluv director/editor Maurice Wright. “It’s the fact that I’ve been participating in events, developing, networking, and building a team all year AFTER getting affirmations from individuals at Twitter that I had nothing to worry about in building a Twitter advertising platform… I understand the need to tidy up from time to time. But this was more like sand-blasting the living room in order to do some dusting.”

“It is clear that Twitter is going to take everything for themselves,” wrote Twitter client Nambu founder Eric Woodward, echoing the sentiments of many developers we’ve spoken with about the issue. “I don’t understand why anyone would continue to develop on Twitter’s platform as anything more than a hobby. First it was us (Twitter clients), and now it is the ad platforms’ turn. Next it will be somebody else.”

Some devs wonder why anyone would be surprised at this turn of events. In a Hacker News thread, MySpace engineer-turned-startup founder Cheolho Minale wrote, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. By now we should realize the pattern with Twitter is that any company that adds real value to Twitter, they are more than willing to take the idea, and build a competing service… They fooled us all when they said they just wanted to be the pipe.”

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A Matter of Trust

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Developer Adrian Duyzer cautions hackers that, although all technology is dependent on the innovations of others, “We’re all vulnerable to the whims of the people who build the operating systems, the browsers, heck, even the protocols. The important question probably comes down to ability and motive: Can this platform be turned against me, and do those who control it gain some advantage from doing so?”

Ultimately, building apps on someone else’s platform requires a certain amount of trust. That trust should be proportional to the effort, funding and expectations one has pumped into one’s app — i.e., if you raise millions of dollars and spend a year working full-time and then some to build a Twitter ad platform, you have to really trust that Twitter isn’t going to undermine your business by releasing an ad platform of its own.

But in the land of third-party apps, there are no such guarantees, and where money and corporations are concerned, there should be no such trust.

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For more technology coverage, follow Mashable Tech on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook

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Reviews: Facebook, MySpace, Twitter

Tags: ads, ban, developers, hacker news, twitter

In my last post, I talked about making sure we Use LinkedIn Effectively. Here’s something else to think about: stop importing your Twitter feed into LinkedIn indiscriminately. If LinkedIn is meant for business networking, what do you think these updates (pulled at random) are doing to help your business?

Let’s see, we have:
A quote – shows you can copy and paste (okay, and a little bit of where your head is).
A link – this one’s actually pretty good, as it leads me somewhere, but it’s a request for help with a contest. (still okay)
News talk
Sports talk
Location talk – which is good for finding potential business meetings.
Software talk (?)
Another quote
Um… wtf?
And a retweet of a retweet of a quote.

Business Value

There’s nearly no business value in any of those items listed above (I’ll give Lewis a pass for his location quote). As someone using LinkedIn for business networking, what do you think others see when they read those bits of information? Do you think they’re at the desk, thinking, “Wow. Now THIS is actionable. I’m going to get a little deeper with this person right now.”

I’m going with no.

Use LinkedIn for Business Status

Now, what does that mean? Advertise? No. Maybe it’s a mix of uses. Here are a few I put out there over the last few days:

In one, I ask a question about using LinkedIn for networking. It gets 27 comments (which isn’t bad, but also tells me that people certainly had some thoughts about the topic, so I make a note to blog more about this). In the one before that, I make a direct request for folks to subscribe to my blog. This is partially because I just added a bunch of new connections on LinkedIn, so I want to be sure to invite them into my primary property (my home base).

But in all cases, anything I put across that status message is something that pertains to my business interests in one way or another.

Keep The Stream Valuable

Frankly, what I can see happening in short notice is that people might choose to unlink from you to clean up their status stream. So, you might even be risking network connections by threading Twitter into LinkedIn.

Just because you can doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.

Thoughts?

Suaad Sait is co-founder of Workstreamer, a business listening platform that delivers actionable, real-time information to business professionals.

As businesspeople, we now have an unlimited amount of constantly updating information at our fingertips. It holds the promise of great value (and more importantly, profit), but it is also voluminous and fleeting.  Powerful new search engines, newfangled social CRM systems, and a preponderance of social sites and services leave us sitting at desks, feverishly fetching news and updates throughout the day in an attempt to stay up-to-date.

The trick, of course, is making sense of all that data, and putting it in context of what companies — and who exactly at those companies — matter most. Increasingly, we have the palpable desire to turn good data into good decisions and profitable relationships. But how can you take advantage of that tsunami of information without risking death by data? How can everyday businesspeople get value out of these data-heavy services and sources? 

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Relationships Still Rule

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The answer to these questions starts by first acknowledging that it’s the same as it ever was: Business is still all about relationships.  This should be soothing to many for whom the data web is a brave new world. 

The business world still runs on relationships, and data is as much at home at a cocktail hour or on a conference call as it is in a slide deck. The game has not changed much at all. The difference is that today’s business data has put everything in stark relief, at very high resolution. Opportunities and risks have been amplified.

For example, if I notice a partner’s company’s stock surge at the opening of the market and tie it to a news item on quarterly earnings, I can now send a timely congratulatory note and schedule a follow-up meeting to discuss leveraging that momentum for a proposed joint venture.

Or, say I am alerted to an old college friend changing his contact info on a social network, and as a result, track down a few details on his role at a new company. I might subsequently notice via a status update that he is departing for my home city in a few days, and now I can initiate a reconnection and invite him to participate on a panel I’m organizing.

Today’s most actionable business data comes from living and very human sources like social networks, wikis, microblogs, crowdsourced contact directories, collaboratively filtered finance communities, real-time search engines, hyperlocal news sites and more. Managing that data can involve a lot of mixing and matching, comparing and contrasting.

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Relationships Run on Data

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Strategic relationships with colleagues and contacts both create and consume data. In fact, data isn’t cold and impersonal at all — that’s an important misconception to put to rest. Many of your most successful and trusted business relationships now likely run on data.

“Networking” in the traditional sense used to take a lot of time and effort.  But in truth, all networking has ever been is the act of information-gathering — of scouting and collating.  We used to start with an idea of a person we were trying to do business with, without nearly enough relevant information about them. That has changed as a result of the personal data now available via social media sources.

Now, when you finally meet someone in person, or run into them at a conference, the interaction can be immediately more rich and productive precisely because of data — you can get right to the heart of the matter because you’re having a more informed, in-depth conversation that matters.

From crunching data and doing your homework, to finding a path through your existing relationships, to setting up that first meeting with a timely and well-researched missive, the new data-driven way of doing business can be infinitely more productive.

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Conclusion

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Remember the under-the-table note sharing going on in high school? 

Well, imagine having the smartest kid in school organize, prioritize and collect notes for you, no strings attached. That’s the kind of information advantage that is now available to us, through an ever-growing array of new social business tools. And it’s not considered cheating, either.

But even despite all this new data and these new tools, relationships are still the beginning and the end of every business decision. 

There is little doubt that there will be a fundamental overhaul in the skill-set of the average businessperson in the next five years as companies grapple with, and realize the upside of making better use of data, both internally and externally.

Today, the technologies and techniques that were once the exclusive domain of Wall Street analysts and Silicon Valley engineers are finally trickling down to everyday businesspeople.   But no matter how the world has changed, listening is still paramount -– listening to customers, listening to prospects, listening to colleagues, and listening to entire companies –- indeed, listening to data.

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For more business coverage, follow Mashable Business on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook

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More business resources from Mashable:

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- How Data Will Impact the Way We Do Business
- HOW TO: Make Sure You’re Tracking the Right Data
- 4 Tips for B2B Marketing on Facebook
- What Facebook’s Open Graph Means for Your Business
- HOW TO: Cultivate Your Brand’s Super Users

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Sportstock, stevecoleccs

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Reviews: Facebook, Twitter, iStockphoto

Tags: business, data, small business, social media, social networking

Google announced today that it is extending its SSL offerings to Google search. Google has long provided SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) support for its Gmail and Google Docs products but this is the first time basic search has received SSL support.

Most users recognize SSL connections by the “https” distinction in the address or the “protected” flag that appears in your web browser. These types of protection encrypt and protect the information you transmit to those sites, meaning that the data you are sending out is protected from people or bots that may be monitoring traffic on your network.

While it is common for e-mail or e-commerce sites to use SSL connections, search connections can benefit from being secure too. For instance, if you’re at Starbucks or another locale that has Wi-Fi access, you might not want interlopers to have the ability to see that you are Googling for “****** ****** tour” or “Twilight pics.”

Now you can get basic SSL protection for your Google searches by visiting https://www.google.com. At the time of this writing, Google is still redirecting all HTTPS requests to the regular Google homepage, but this should change over the course of the day.

As Google notes in its blog post, SSL support is still in beta — hence the new logo. Also, while Google will be encrypting your connection, it will still maintain the same search data that it always maintains. In other words, don’t think that SSL support means you can keep Google from retaining info about your searches.

Additionally, Google’s SSL support is only for basic search for now. Image Search and Maps, for instance, don’t support SSL yet. Also keep in mind that if you click on an unsupported service, like Images, you could be taken out of SSL mode. Google hopes to add broader SSL support to more of its search products in the future.

What do you think of SSL support coming to Google search? Let us know.

[img credit:Darwin Bell]

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For more technology coverage, follow Mashable Tech on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook

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Reviews: Facebook, Google, Twitter, twilight

Tags: Google, google search, ssl

A friend of mine is quitting her job to go teach in Rwanda. I wished her well, and was very happy for her, but then immediately, I had a question: do you have a network in place? This question, it turns out, is quite a core piece of what Julien and I think matters to the way business is done these days (and honestly, the way life is done). And it’s a bit evolutionary, so let’s talk a moment more about it.

Our Old Networks

In the old days, our network was a little easier to understand: relatives, neighbors, coworkers, schoolmates. It was weighted heavily on genetics, geography, and our job. It made a lot of sense. The downside was that, if a region got hit hard by lack of work, then we were all in the same boat. The downside was, everyone knew us for what we were, so they had trouble seeing us for what we wanted to become. The downside was, sometimes, we wanted to shift radically, and we didn’t have a sense of what to do.

Keith Ferrazzi wrote the classic book, Never Eat Alone, back before we had little digital networks in our pockets at all times. He wrote it for the people who hadn’t yet found the new networks.

Our New Networks

We have new tools, new opportunities, new ways of gathering people to us. With tools like Facebook, we can connect with people from our past and in related fields. With tools like Twitter, we can connect with anyone in the world. Our new networks are based more about thinking, mindsets, ideals, passions, and future visions. We can be who we want to be, or who we’re growing into being. Our past is there, but it’s not often the focal point. It’s our ideas and our ideals that drive things forward.

ABN: Always Be Networking

Danger: I don’t mean “always be networking” in the smarmy, business card ninja way. I mean it in the “let’s connect with wonderful, thoughtful people all over the world” kind of way.

In my network are people from every continent (though not as many in Africa). In my network are many walks of life, from preachers to millionaires, from teachers to artists to real estate types. They range in age from the early teens up into the 70s and 80s.

That’s on purpose. I love the diversity. I love being able to reach out and help others connect because of the larger and larger web I’m weaving. A healthy, thriving network is a beautiful thing. It’s also why I encourage people to connect with me on LinkedIn (my email: linkedin @ chrisbrogan . com). I love the connections because I use them to be as helpful as possible.

Feed the Network

There’s no value in your contact list if you don’t reach out to them when you can, and if you can’t offer them value long before you have a request of your own. It goes that way. You have to try and offer what you have. Then, when the time comes, and not in a “quid pro quo” kind of way, there will be some sense that a relationship existed long before you needed it. “Be there before the sale,” Julien and I called it in Trust Agents.

Feed your network often. Connect with them. Touch them in whatever ways you can.

Never Jump Without a Network

So many people are trying to reach escape velocity. They’ve had enough of their job, or they’re aching to try something new. They want to leap out into the nothingness.

But to me, there are two things you need before you jump: money and a network. Of the two, I think the network is more important. With a network, you might have people who’ll cover some of your needs until the money flows in. A lot of people were kind to me along the way, and so I do my best to be kind to others who are on their path. So to me, the network might be more important, and yet, you’ll need both.

Never jump into the nothingness without a network. You can always benefit from having contacts in other places, with other disciplines, and who offer something new to the story.

And You?

How are you nurturing your network? How diverse do you keep it? Do you think beyond your current job role and your current needs, or is your network a homogenous reflection of you?

I’m glad to know you. You’re my network. You make me feel stronger every day.

Photo credit faster panda kill kill

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.

A few weeks ago, we discussed some digital tools to help reduce paper use within the office. But there are still more services and apps that focus on reducing your paper consumption (and subsequently your costs) when it comes to external systems, like postal mail, invoicing, and in-person networking.

To continue in this eco- and budget-friendly vein, read on for five more paper saving services.

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1. ShoeBoxed

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When it comes to running a small business, it’s hard to avoid that ever-growing pile of miscellaneous paper. Not only does it quickly become office clutter, but it’s a good way to lose track of important items.

One solution is the digitization service ShoeBoxed. If you’ve collected 25 expensable receipts on your last visit to the West Coast office, stuffing them into a pre-paid envelope would likely be more efficient than manually entering the data into a spreadsheet.

ShoeBoxed will scan the papers and index them in your account. From there, you can generate highly detailed, sortable reports, and integrate them into your existing database systems, including Excel, Quicken, Outlook, Gmail, Freshbooks (see below), and many others. Essentially, the service can turn a pile of disorganized paper into an expense report or contact database without you ever touching a keyboard.

Pricing starts at $9.95 per month for up to 50 item scans, which could be a good fit for a small operation or freelancer looking to save time on bookkeeping. More comprehensive plans are available for businesses with more to keep track of.

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2. CloudContacts

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It’s time to turn that business card collection or Rolodex into a searchable database. While ShoeBoxed is focused mainly on digitizing receipts, CloudContacts is all about your business network.

Send them your pile of 2 x 3 inch card stock, and get back standardized data that you can import into nearly any contact, e-mail, or CRM system, including Outlook, Gmail, SalesForce and 37Signals’ Highrise.

Another nice feature is the one-click connection to social media. When a business card cites a social profile, a link will be incorporated in your data, allowing you to easily connect on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter.

And for those businesses located in New York City, in-person pickup is available.

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3. Freshbooks

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Generating paper invoices can be extremely inefficient. Freshbooks not only takes the paper out of your billing system, but can give it a complete organizational overhaul.

The web-based software can be accessed from any computer with your account login and password, eliminating the need for proprietary installations. Once logged in, you’ll have access to a complete online overview of your billing system, which you can use to track expenses, generate reports, and most importantly, invoice your clients.

Invoices are sent via e-mail with secure links where customers can review their bill and related information (e.g. estimates, quotes, etc.). Clients can even make direct payments from their invoice page via a number of intermediate services including PayPal, Verisign, and Authorize.net. If your clients prefer PDF invoices, you can always utilize a PDF printer driver.

Billing can be automated within Freshbooks (eliminating the need to follow-up manually with “Past Due” reminders), can be done in any currency, and there’s even an iPhone app for tracking on the go.

The service is $39.95 per month, plus $10 for each additional user, for unlimited client entries and invoices.

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4. Earth Class Mail

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Businesses receive tons of paper mail. Much of it is junk; some of it is vital to operations. All of it is cumbersome and unsearchable.

Earth Class Mail seeks to remedy this with their snail mail digitization services. Sign up, and you’ll be assigned a special code (like a suite number) to add to your business’s existing street address. For example:

My Business
123 Broadway, #4567
New York, NY 10011

Then, securely re-route all the mail coming to this address via the U.S. Postal Service. Incoming paper will be scanned and stored in your Earth Class Mail account, and you’ll be notified by e-mail of new arrivals.

Now your paper mail is searchable, easily archived, and won’t be piling up on your desk any time soon. Digital storage of your mail is unlimited, and the paper will be kept for 30 days before it’s securely shredded and recycled.

Because your new digital “suite number” is tied to the re-routing designation with the USPS, you can control what type of mail goes to ECM (lower priority items, junk mail, etc.), and what still comes to your door.

If you’re aiming to go fully digital, additional features like integrated check cashing through your bank account, and package forwarding are also available, meaning that once the system is set up and in full swing, you may never need to touch a piece of paper mail again.

Currently, the service is only available in 19 U.S. cities, and it seems there’s a lot to keep track of when setting up an account, especially if you plan to split your mail between two destinations. But if you’re committed to a green solution, or focused on de-cluttering your office, Earth Class Mail might be a good option.

Pricing starts at $19.95 per month for scans of 100 mail items.

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5. Zumbox

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Zumbox is another paperless mail solution with a different approach. They’ve created a digital mailbox for every physical address in the U.S. Companies and other organizations that send paper materials to physical addresses can opt-in to Zumbox and send them digitally instead.

Recipients (at either personal or business addresses) can enable their Zumbox account by inputting their street address. Zumbox sends a piece of physical mail with a pin number that enables users to activate their addresses.

Essentially, the service lets businesses and individuals send digital communications to physical locations, without the need for e-mail addresses.

It may be hard to see the immediate practicality of Zumbox, as both the recipients and the senders would have to opt-in to accounts, and getting all of the people you do business with to do so is unlikely.

However, because the service is built on the massive existing infrastructure of the U.S. Postal Service, the potential here is enormous, and certainly worth exploring, even from a marketing angle.

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For more business coverage, follow Mashable Business on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook

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More business resources from Mashable:

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- 5 Simple Tools for a Paperless Office
- HOW TO: Market Your Small Business With No Budget
- Growing Your Business: 5 Tips From the Founder of Foursquare
- 5 Essential Apps for Your Business’s Facebook Fan Page
- Why Co-Working Makes Sense for Small Businesses

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, wragg

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Reviews: Facebook, Gmail, LinkedIn, Shoeboxed.com, Twitter, iStockphoto

Tags: business, List, Lists, small business, web apps

As business owners, managers, operators, and marketers, we understand why things may not go as planned.

Business can be unpredictable. Teams are large. There are a slew of moving parts involved in getting something done.

• The delivery didn’t come in.
• The version that was shipped had a typo.
• The gal who knows that answer is out sick today.
• Our location doesn’t have a ladder tall enough.
• The district manager has been out of town.
• Our mop handle broke.
• We didn’t expect this much demand.

Those of us running the business consider these legitimate reasons “why” something is the way it is or why something wasn’t done. We accept the situation. “Someone dropped the ball. It’s a bummer, but what are ya gonna do?”

When a business doesn’t deliver what it promised you,  you don’t care why. You just want them to follow through and fix it a.s.a.p. So, why do we think our customers care about our excuses?

Over-promising and under-delivering to your customers today will make them someone else’s customer tomorrow. Your customers don’t care about the delivery, the typo, employee illness, the short ladder, the vacation schedule, the condition of your cleaning supplies, or your inability to forecast.

Yours is not the first company to experience these problems, and they will happen again in the future. So, why aren’t you prepared with a “Plan B” or a quick fix?  And why do you pass the consequences onto your customer? They shouldn’t know the difference.

A lesson I learned early in my career is that all businesses have problems. A company’s ability to shield the customer from behind-the-scenes glitches—and maintain a high-quality, consistent experience—that makes it great.

Customers just want:

• the product you promised
• easy-to-read signage
• enough knowledgeable staff available
• a well-lit store
• someone responsible to complain to
• a clean location
• the advertised product that they drove to your shop for to be in stock

Stop accepting and caring about the excuses—because your customers don’t want to hear them—and focus on fixing the problem.

Related posts:

1. Do Companies Care About Customer Insight?
2. We Hear You! Why and How to Hire a Social Media Responder
3. Can You Hear Me Now?

In March 2010, Facebook emerged as the top search term at Google, Bing, and Yahoo according to Experian Hitwise. Bing reported that 2.6% of all searches were dedicated to Facebook with Google at 1.17%.

To say that Facebook is capturing the minds and search boxes of people in the U.S. and around the world would be a gross understatement.

Facebook wasn’t only the top search term in America, again, according to Experian Hitwise, it was also the most visited website for a week in the days ending 2009 and beginning 2010. With an increase of 185% in the last year, Facebook accomplished something truly remarkable, if for only but a moment, it beat Google Search as the top destination online. It should also not go unsaid, that combined, Facebook and Google accounted for 14% of all US Internet visits during the week of March 8th, 2010.

However, as a denizen of a global online society, it would be prudent to examine how Facebook performs as a province in the worldwide Web.

In the State of Social Media Around the World published earlier this year, we learned that Facebook emerged as the dominant social network in 100 out of 127 countries measured. Italian new media observer Vincenzo Cosenza created the following graphic to offer a visual representation of Facebook’s rise to global prominence.

Facebook’s stature around the world is indeed remarkable. It is the first truly social media property to garner this prestigious status. Understanding its performance online as a destination rather than as a social network however, offers clearer perspective. With Facebook traffic soaring in the U.S., Pingdom recently analyzed how Facebook performs against other sites around the world using data from Alexa.

Of the top 20 countries sorted by the number of Internet users, Facebook.com earned the top spot in the Philippines and Indonesia, which equates to roughly 5%. Google, in its various flavors, surfaced on top in 14 countries, equaling 70%.

Facebook’s meteoric rise as a social network with over 400 million users has also proven to become a force in the Web overall. In the United States, Facebook is the number 2 site of course. Around the world, Facebook is also gaining ground within the UK (currently #2), Germany (#3), France, (#2), Italy (#2), Spain (#2) and Canada (#2). It’s worthy to note, in China, Facebook is absent from the top 500. With over 300 million users, QQ sits in the top spot as the prime social/mobile network and Baidu ranks number one as the top destination in the country.

Facebook is far from reaching its potential and as its new “Like” architecture hits the WWW with over 50,000 publishers already in place, its 400 million strong army of social curators will only increase its relevance around the world.

Connect with Brian Solis on Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Google Buzz, Facebook
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Please consider reading my new book, Engage!, I think you might like it…

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Get Putting the Public Back in Public Relations and The Conversation Prism:

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Image Credit: Shutterstock

Third party apps are on a roll with Google. Earlier this month, they added apps for Google Analytics, and this week at Google I/O, the search giant’s developer conference, Google announced an app store for the Google Chrome web browser.

Says Google:

Google Chrome users who find web apps in the store will be able to create convenient shortcuts in Chrome for easy access. Also, developers will have the option to easily sell their apps through the store using a convenient and secure payment system.

Although the store has yet to launch, you can see a sample of the offerings:

Meanwhile, Mozilla may be considering jumping on the bandwagon, too (via). Right now, they’re just reviewing the underlying principles of an “open web app store,” rather than making plans.

An Open Web App Store should:

• exclusively host web applications based upon HTML5, CSS, Javascript and other widely-implemented open standards in modern web browsers — to avoid interoperability, portability and lock-in issues
• ensure that discovery, distribution and fulfillment works across all modern browsers, wherever they run (including on mobile devices)
• set forth editorial, security and quality review guidelines and processes that are transparent and provide for a level playing field
• respect individual privacy by not profiling and tracking individual user behavior beyond what’s strictly necessary for distribution and fulfillment
• be open and accessible to all app producers and app consumers

These principles—and the timing—seem like an attack on Google’s announced store. Yet these principles all seem to be Google’s goals as well.

What do you think? Is Mozilla a copy cat? Will either web app store take off?

Pilgrim’s Partners: SponsoredReviews.com – Bloggers earn cash, Advertisers build buzz!

A few years ago, I wrote a controversial post suggesting corporate websites were irrelevant.  Why?  Decisions were being made off-domain by customers and peers.  Secondly, many marketers were trying to get customers to go to their corporate website versus joining where they already are, “Fish where the fish are.”

Today, I’m pleased to see that the thinking –and technology, has emerged, where we’re finding a variety of companies that are integrating social technologies right into the corporate website, bringing the trusted discussions closer to the corporate site.  In fact, I’m kicking off the Gilbane CMS conference in SF as the keynote, and will be sharing this deck live on stage.

Although the highest state of nirvana (seamless integration) doesn’t yet exist, we should expect there to be very little difference between social technologies and corporate websites as content will assemble on the fly.  I predict URLs won’t matter, as content will be dynamically assembled around the buyer and their context in a variety of devices.  Sure, that’s far out thinking now, but that’s why we have several other stage gates that companies must first go through.

In fact, use this presentation (loosely modeled after a post of the same topic) as a roadmap for brands, web strategists, and the vendors that serve them.  Feel free to use these slides with attribution.

Thanks to our head of Research, Christine Tran for her assistance.

Related Resources

• CMS wire covered my keynote
• Sue live blogged the speech

If we had to choose one word to sum up this week’s essential resources, it would have to be “business.” If you own a business, work for a business, or even give money to businesses in exchange for goods and services, you’ll want to scroll on down and take a look at how even one week’s worth of social media news has shaped your industry.

Additionally, we we still have some good old fashioned mobile app reviews, some important Facebook privacy tips, and an interesting look at the way governments and agencies are using social media to better engage. So what exactly are you waiting for? Get started!

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Social Media

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• In Defense of Facebook
  With all the vitriol surrounding Facebook’s latest privacy gaffs, this post takes a moment to look at the people most responsible for our online privacy — ourselves.
• How Facebook Makes Edgy Concepts Mainstream
  Two years ago, the thought of sharing your location or credit card purchase history online would have seemed ridiculous. Today, it grows ever more mainstream thanks to major social networks like Facebook that make these early-adopter trends more comfortable for the average user.
• Why Twitter Needs to Do More to Save Trending Topics
  Twitter recently amended its trending topics algorithm in the hopes of producing more relevant and newsworthy results. But is this an interference in the natural development of popular topics? And is Twitter doing enough to remain a relevant source of real-time news? This post takes a hard look.
• How the U.S. Engages the World with Social Media
  You might be surprised to learn that the U.S. Department of State and many of its embassies around the world are having great success shaping America’s image abroad through social media. We spoke with some of the diplomats and officials who are making a difference through Twitter and Facebook.
• 21 Rules for Social Media Engagement
  If you’re creating a social media policy for your business, or even your personal brand, these 21 points are a surefire way to stay on track and on message in an online world full of noise.
• 5 Innovative Websites That Could Reshape the News
  While traditional journalism remains in upheaval, a handful of startups have provided a glimpse at what the future of news gathering might look like on the social web. Whether these models are sustainable remains to be seen. Check out this post for look at some of these innovators.
• 5 Essential Facebook Privacy Tips
  If you’re not cognizant of your Facebook privacy settings, you may be broadcasting things to the world (or even certain groups of friends or family) that you may not have intended. Note these important settings to ensure you stay in control of your social data.
• How Social Media is Changing Government Agencies
  Agencies around the world are finding that social media is more than a broadcast medium. Active engagement can serve the public in important ways. Here are some examples.
• EXCLUSIVE: Behind the Scenes at the “Married on MySpace” Wedding [VIDEO]
  We got an exclusive chance to go behind the scenes at the actual wedding of winning couple Dehlia and Graeham Ford-Feliz.
• TwitPic Founder Talks About the Future of Twitter Photo Sharing [VIDEO]
  TwitPic has become one of the most popular ways to share photos on Twitter. With a recent facelift and a lot of attention from prospective buyers, the company has some big plans in the works. We spoke to the founder, Noah Everett, to get his take on TwitPic’s rapid growth and future.

For more social media news and resources, you can follow Mashable’s social media channel on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook.

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Tech & Mobile

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• 8 Best Android Apps for Photo Editing
  Looking to add a few tricks to your Android’s photography bag? Check out these eight apps that will have you cropping, filtering, and snazzing up those mobile snaps in no time.
• 10 Awesome Vintage Video Games You Can Play Online
  We dare you not to kill some time with these fabulous classics from gaming’s golden yesteryears. Strap in and click through to start reliving your former 8-bit glory.
• 5 Tools For Integrating HTML5 Video in Your Website
  HTML5 is coming, and with it the coded potential to displace Flash as a viable medium for web video. These tools will get you rolling with the new format.
• Five Amazing App and Gadget Demos from Google I/O [VIDEO]
  Google and its partners are rolling out some amazing new products and toys in the near future. We were on the ground at the I/O conference to get a hands-on video look at some of these developments.
• How the Next iPhone Will Improve Your Productivity
  The upcoming release of the new iPhone and its accompanying OS upgrade means a lot of important changes for power users. Here’s a breakdown of the key features.

For more tech news and resources, you can follow Mashable’s tech channel on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook.

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Business

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• 5 Ways Small Businesses Can Use Tech to Save Money
  If you’re looking to trim a few dollars from this quarter’s budget, the resources you need may be starting back at you from you from this very screen. Check out these penny-pinching tech tips.
• How Venture Capitalists are Using Social Media for Real Results
  While you probably won’t learn the nitty-gritty details of a deal on Twitter, VCs and angels use social media extensively for research, promotion and other purposes. This post explores some of their strategies.
• Which Department Owns Social Media?
  Does a company’s social media presence belong to the marketing department? Customer service? Legal? We asked the experts how they categorize the versatile medium for business.
• 13 Essential Tips for Landing a Job on LinkedIn
  Are you effectively managing your LinkedIn profile? Here are 13 tips for making yourself visible and presentable on the business network.
• HOW TO: Market Your Small Business With No Budget
  The social web makes it more cost-effective than ever to get the word out about your business, no matter what industry you’re in. We spoke to the experts for their cost-cutting tips.
• 4 Tips for B2B Marketing on Facebook
  Even if you sell to other businesses, Facebook can still be a great place to engage customers and drive sales. Check out these four strategies.
• Why Your Company Needs to Embrace Social CRM
  Social media is changing the rules of customer engagement. Your company needs to understand and embrace Social CRM to meet the needs of the new social customer. This post discusses how.
• 5 Surprising Social Media Business Success Stories
  When most think of social media for business, fun, consumer-facing brands come to mind. But what about B2B and niche products? These five success stories may surprise you.
• 5 More Simple Tools for a Paperless Office
  Looking for ways to reduce your small business’ carbon footprint and operating costs? Cut your paper consumption with these five web-based services.

For more business news and resources, you can follow Mashable’s business channel on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, IlexImage

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For more social media coverage, follow Mashable Social Media on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook

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Reviews: Android, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Mashable, Twitpic, Twitter, iStockphoto

Tags: business, facebook, Features Week In Review, List, Lists, Mobile 2.0, small business, social media, tech, trending, twitter, youtube

Written by Jeremiah Owyang (Customer Strategy) and Ray Wang (Enterprise Strategy), Industry Analysts at the Altimeter Group.

We’re tasked with a difficult job as industry analyst in one of the fastest emerging markets. Part of our role is to find new trends, identify their impact, and rate and rank who offers them. In the past, I did this for this list community platform marketing, and the Social Media Management System market (SSMS). Despite the influx of new entrants, even a new set of features is now emerging on the industry, and I’m here to identify it now.

Situation: More social data causes a cacophony of noise
Soon your fridge, car, and house will tweet. (plants already do, and I ordered this “puppy tweets” collar so my dog can too). At work, your server, business applications, and eventually your powerpoints will emit signals as your colleagues make changes to it. The challenge is, all of this information is in different channels, and may not be aggregating to one location. To combat this deluge of information, we should expect a new feature to emerge that will aggregate all content into one locaiton and make sense of it.

[The Social Inbox Aggregator (SIA) will aggregate multiple social streams and derive signal out of noise. This will be a key feature set for Social CRM Suites]

Definition: Social Inbox Aggregator (SIA) is part of the Social CRM Suite
The primary purpose of the Social Inbox Aggregator (SIA) will be to derive signal out of social noise. This is one of the key features in the Social CRM Suite (see Altimeter’s report on Social CRM) and focus on 5Ms to see how this feature fits into mapping, management, middleware and metrics. This feature has the following functional requirements 1) It will aggregate social signals from a variety of sources into one location, 2) Allow users to organize, and view multiple sources 3) Derive signal through looking at previous behavior and predictive analytics. 4) Offer analytics and metrics to the user (optional)

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List of Social Inbox Aggregators
Usually when I start these lists, it starts with just a handful (there’s just 5 listed below) in the case of the community platform space, it grew to be over 100 vendors.

Consumer

• Windows Live*: Windows Live (including hotmail) offers features that let you know “What’s new with your network”, while they don’t make it easy to add in social signals from other locations, this could be accomplished with partners like Gigya* or Janrain.
• Gmail/Buzz:  Gmail’s recent addition to their social networking feature “Buzz” launched with fanfare, then great concern about privacy.  Despite the rough start, they allow users to connect with their friends and aggregate in other signals, such as flickr feed, tweets, and beyond.
• Friendfeed/Facebook:  Friendfeeed was the early forerunner in this space, they aggregate streams from a variety of sources (including straight RSS feeds) and allow for users to organize and derive signal.  They were recently acquired by Facebook, and we should expect many of these features to surface directly into the newsfeed in future iterations.  Also, there’s market rumors that Facebook will develop a web based email client, that will likely integrate private emails with social signals.
• My 6th Sense: This application (primarily on an iPhone) offers a “digital intuition” by allowing users to aggregate data streams into one location. I’ve met the CEO and he showed me how it looks at your previous behavior in order to suggest content to you.
• LinkedIn: Pulls in tweet stream, blog posts, Amazon reviews, and a variety of other data sources to generate signal.

Enterprise

• Chatter by Salesforce*: Salesforce has made nods to launch an enterprise system that will “monitor everything that matters most to you in one spot.” Expect this system to be one of the first enterprise SIA systems and will pull in feeds from AppExchange data, external signals, and derive intelligence.
• Socialcast.  This lightweight tool allows any company to have an internal Facebook. They recently launched a ‘recommended’ feature on the left nav that can prioritize signal based on the gestures of your network. While they have integration with sharepoint, they’ve yet to offer ability to pipe in other streams.
• Yammer. Yammer has the ability to offer enterprise microblogging features, as well as important RSS feeds. It doesn’t appear to have signal finding features, it’s currently just pulling in updates based on chronology.

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Takeaway: Most Systems are Immature
Looking at these vendors, some of them have 2-4 of the required features, but none have all four. We expect this space to evolve rapidly and will conduct continued analysis and rankings. Since we’re early, we’ll hold off on detailed analysis till the feature set standardizes. Remember, in the future, there’s no difference between email systems and social networks.  Expect a new feature to emerge that combines both of these data types into a new interface.  Expect a SIA for your personal life, and a separate one provided by your employer at work.

If you know of others, please leave a comment below, and give justifications, we’ll link and credit you for your submission.

*Altimeter discloses our client relationships whenever possible, as a result, we hope you’ll trust us more.

Despite the fact that consumers are spending record amounts of time “connected” and shopping research is primarily done online, purchases are still being made offline – the main deterrent in making online purchases is the lack of tactile experience in online shopping.* I have to wonder if this is even something that is possible.

I can’t deny it – I love the feeling of being in a brick and mortar store, holding a product that I want to buy in my hands, turning it around, maybe reading the side of the box of pressing on the buttons, looking it over as though I still am not sure I am going to buy it (even though I know I am, I have already researched it online). Or maybe I feel the material between my fingers, or smell the fragrance of the perfume, or sit on it to see if it is comfortable. I did some searching around and I found a few seemingly defunct projects aimed at making a “touch-like” interface for online shoppers but these are animations and no different than videos essentially. And color swatches are helpful too. But in the end, people like to see and possibly try a product before buying it. That is…

Unless you’re Apple. Apple products, pre-ordered online in large numbers, often selling out before shipping date. Just some videos and pictures to go on. (I can’t do it, I will bide my time until they are in-store) Somehow Apple has found a secret recipe for e-commerce success without the need for a tactile shopping experience, which begs the questions how did they do that and how can retailers scale this to their much larger number of products.

Well – I think the idea is, “the cool kids” buy Apple products and anticipate them and everyone wants want “the cool kids” want, these are the influencers and enthusiasts. Retailers can scale by finding the influencers and enthusiasts within their niche to listen, learn and engage to hear what they have to say about their brand and products already, and to give them something to talk about too. These “cool kids” within your consumer niche are the people most likely to shop more, most likely to share recommendations, most likely to voice their opinion.

* North American Technographics Retail Online Survey, Q1 2008-2009

So we have an estimate of how many Canadians are on Twitter but what we all want to know is who are the Canadians on Twitter and why are they using it.

I have put together a short survey to learn more about how Canadians are using Twitter – so if you have a Twitter account and currently reside in Canada please respond to the following survey and definitely tweet the link.

Survey: Canadians on Twitter

I will be releasing the data to be used freely so please be honest and candid in your responses.

Want new business?

1. Serve your existing customers well. (Referrals rock.)
2. Learn from all your prior mistakes, and offer stronger choices.
3. Look for marketplaces that aren’t very well tapped or discovered.
4. Stay attuned to the wishes of your buyers/prospects.
5. Focus on what you do best, and do that even better.
6. Make “what you do best” = “what your buyers need most.”
7. Create new ways to do things even better/easier/faster than others.

And what do we do instead?

I had the good luck to spend a little time with Tony Robbins, who you’d think of as a motivational speaker, but who I know to be an inspirational thinker and accomplished business man. But, after doing a project with him (can’t talk about that yet), I know another secret: he’s a buffalo content maker.

All Parts of the Buffalo

Here’s how Tony sees things: “I need to know more about this online marketing world.” (Sure, we all do.) “I think I’ll contact a whole bunch of people who have been successful with online marketing.” (Still the way we’d do it.) “I think I’ll invite them to my place and record the conversation and turn it into learning for more than just me.” (There. That’s the difference.)

Tony needed the information. He knew who to call. He made media out of it so he could do something with the information more than once.

Leverage. He used “all parts of the buffalo” instead of wasting the opportunity to make good content. (This expression means that he uses everything and wastes nothing, in homage to Native American treatment of animals as sacred providers of many goods.)

Be a Buffalo Content Maker

This isn’t rocket surgery. Instead, just keep in mind what makes content. Think about this post. It’s me reacting to an observation I had while visiting with Tony. I made something that I could then share with you out of a brief interaction. And yet, there’s some value in thinking like this.

Now, take it further.

The book Social Media 101 is a collection of tidied up blog posts from [chrisbrogan.com]. It was a way to reuse my content.

In future projects, I’m going to make content that spans from a blog post into a longer ebook into a course, into a presentation, into a surrounding community. How do you do it? A bit at a time, but with the idea that you’re going to make something bigger from the project. Make sense?

Can you build content the same way? Can you find opportunities to create media when others might just absorb the information and move on? How are you doing this today?

Photo credit Pink Sherbet Photography

As much as Facebook may not be kind to businesses, it’s still a tremendously valuable business tool. After all, Facebook could eat the web. In fact, you’re likely spotting the shift; instead of companies posting their URLs on television commercials, they’re asking their followers to join them on Facebook. Therefore, it’s a force to be reckoned with. Let’s just take a look at the potential of Facebook for business for a moment here and review the various options business owners have in order to be effective with Facebook business marketing.

Profile Page versus Fan Page

The average Facebook user uses Facebook not for business but for personal communications. I am one of those users. In fact, I explain my Facebook usage by stating that if you want to follow me in a professional capacity, you can use one of my two fan pages. Simply stated, for a business, you should create a Fan Page. Want one? Go here. If you are officially representing your company, you’d want to create an Official Page.

Don’t use a Facebook Group. They are outdated (from Facebook’s early days) and do not support Facebook Markup Language (FBML) or Facebook Apps, so they are not as interactive and thus do not make as strong of an impact. Additionally, don’t create a personal account (a regular Facebook profile page) for your business. You’re supposed to use your real name and you’re also only supposed to have one account. Your Facebook Page should be created under your primary Facebook login. If you elect not to have one, you can still create a Facebook page by following the steps after you fill out the relevant data for your business Facebook Page.

Identification

For your page, consider using a title that’s memorable here because you won’t be able to change it later. It’s preferable to reflect your business and use a business name, not a funny character or other business persona that nobody can relate to. People will be looking for your business on Facebook, so make it easy for them to find you.

Once you get 25 fans, you can set up a username which makes accessing your profile a lot easier. Make sure you apply the username to your Facebook Page, not your personal profile, and be sure to use something memorable that people can find by plugging in the URL. I have a hard time believing that Facebook will address errors like these without an intellectual property complaint.

Customizing Your Profile Page

Great! Now that you have opted to create a Fan Page, you need to customize it. Simply stated, you can upload a profile picture (180 by 540 pixels maximum) and start filling out the relevant details about your business. Tell people how to find you and give them a history. They’re there because they want to learn! Depending on what type of page you are creating (for a business, publication, celebrity, etc.) the text fields differ, but utilize what’s available to you to your advantage. Don’t shy away from giving your community the information needed to find you elsewhere both online and offline.

If you want to be more creative, start thinking about building upon your profile with the aforementioned Facebook Markup Language (FBML). Here’s how to create a memorable Facebook Fan Page via FBML. In short, you’ll need to install the Static FBML app, add a custom tab, and learn the language, which is very similar to HTML, to create content that is appealing to your customers and prospects. Need some inspiration? Check out the screenshots for some current implementations below.

Reese’s uses its Facebook page to welcome users and compels them to join. It also reminds you that Facebook is one of their social destinations on the web, but that you might be interested in their YouTube page. (Their YouTube page, ironically, only features a playlist of videos that they love but does not show any videos made by themselves, such as the process of making a Peanut Butter Cup. Wouldn’t you love to see how they’re made? I know I would.)

Promotional products company rushIMPRINT features on its Facebook page a tab of products for sale. These tabs take the visitor back to their website where they can complete the purchase. This method is smart because it helps build interest on another platform and drives conversions directly on their home base. (Disclosure: I helped plant the social media seeds for rushIMPRINT.)

Offer Deals

Lisa Barone calls this specialized content, and that’s exactly how you should see it. Give people a reason for telling the entire world that they like you.

The big question of return on investment comes up often. How do I know if there’s ROI in Facebook? One way is to see is by giving exclusive deals to Facebook fans. You can elect to do this one of two ways. You can offer deals exclusively to Facebook followers only. Don’t cross promote to Twitter (offer a different incentive on Twitter). Don’t post it on your blog. Don’t share it on your email newsletter. This is a good way of checking specifically if your Facebook efforts are working when you see that the Facebook coupon codes have been redeemed.

On the other hand, you can also share the same discount code across all social platforms. What if you want to offer 10% off? Share the 10OFF discount code for everyone, for example. Let it be posted on every social platform of choice and then watch as it seeds through other communities (which is likely to happen and shows that your marketing is viral).

Of course, you can also just use a Facebook application for that.

Buy something, get something. That’s how Baskin Robbins is doing it besides making an interactive page that visitors might be interested in exploring further.

People interact with brands online because they want deals. Try to offer some every so often.

And while you may not be able to easily run contests within its rules, you have some flexibility with the Wildfire App platform, so consider that as well if you’d like to offer incentives of some kind.

Encourage Community Interaction

In the simplest form, have a Facebook wall and ask your fans questions or share cool company or even personal insights with them. Give them a reason to want to communicate. Better yet, to show that the page is active, give the users control by letting their Fan posts show up on the front page. (Not all companies will be comfortable with this option as it will require frequent moderation.)

Instead of using your updates as the default view, let your fans take over. In the screenshot above, control is shifted to everyone and empowers your community members. As a result, engagement goes up as the page appears very active.

There’s a cost to this, though. The page should appear active but it should also appear like you’re not neglecting your community. Therefore, beyond letting them have control, grab the mic regularly (a few times per week and daily if possible) and engage your community.

The more you engage your community, which could be as simple as asking your followers how they are going to be spending Mother’s Day or sharing a link of interest to your followers, the more visible your page is to your Fan’s friends. After all, every interaction shows up on the Fan’s news feed. And that translates to more visits, which you’ll start seeing when you receive a weekly email from Facebook entitled “Your Weekly Facebook Page Update” that features fun statistics like these:

+41 Fans this week (3,284 total Fans)
31 Wall Posts, Comments, and Likes this week (68 last week)
1,477 visits to your page this week(1,869 visits last week)

You might also be interested in learning more about EdgeRank, Facebook’s own algorithm to determine visibility on a user’s home page. This algorithm takes hold from three main components: (1) the affinity score between two users: how often do they interact?, (2) the type of interaction (is it a like? a comment?, etc.), and (3) the length of time since the action was done. Based on this information, fresh content with actively engaged brand adopters are is key. Give them a reason to be actively engaged. This is basic News Feed Optimization.

Engagement is not limited to wall posts. Post photos of your service and product offerings and invite your fans to do the same. A tremendously wonderful execution of this is on Graco’s photos tab. You’ll learn about their products but you’ll also see a plethora of user-submitted images — complete with cute babies.

And that’s not the only thing you can do to encourage online interaction. Why not solicit reviews from your community to see what they think about you? If you offer great value and have firm believers amongst your midst, you have nothing to fear. Online retailer Newegg isn’t afraid and proudly displays its Facebook reviews for all to see.

Another great way to do this is to host polls where you can get customer feedback. That’s how Ben & Jerry’s is doing it.

Of course, there’s also the potential to encourage community interaction within Facebook using the Facebook page as that home base. The EA Mobile Human Tetris project takes you to a Facebook application where everyone participates in a game of Tetris.

Such games require expertise of a Facebook Application developer but could have lots of potential as long as your Facebook Apps resonate with your audience and compel users to install them.

Aggregate Your Other Social Streams

If you’re only on Facebook, this step isn’t for you. Hopefully, though, you’re considering other social networks to broaden your social media reach. If so, you should show your Facebook fans what you’re up to elsewhere! Hootsuite, for example, has multiple tabs that highlight their social involvement elsewhere on the web.

There are takeaways from this. Offer different content to your different audiences. Don’t just broadcast the same messages to your Twitter and Facebook followers.

Be Creative

Facebook confines you to its site and its feature set, but clearly we can see that they do have a pretty rich feature offering. You can do many things to market your business, add value, and empower your customers. It might be a good opportunity to build upon that to further your mark in the online space.

You’ll find that as your page grows, you’ll likely be tasked with handling customer service issues. People don’t care who is running the social media presence online; if it’s the marketing department, they’ll still demand technical support. Help them where you can or redirect them to the phone number, email address, or contact link that gives them direct contact with your support representatives. Be on your best behavior — after all, good customer service is good social media marketing.

Growth can be a good thing. You may find opportunities to host real life events, be them at conferences or whatever else. This is especially true of businesses who have a brick and mortar location and even better for businesses. Why not invite your Facebook fans to a special event at your venue? Let them connect with each other and build bonds.

There are a lot of different opportunities here, and with such a tremendous penetration, it’s silly to ignore Facebook altogether.

Your Facebook page might be a great opportunity to market your business, but it’s earned media, so keep in mind that it’s a community too. Give your Fans a reason to want to come back.

Evaluate Your Needs and Tread Carefully

Ask yourself what you want to use Facebook for. Is it to communicate with friends and family or is it to drive prospects? Are you joining Facebook’s social network with the intention of spamming your friends with marketing messaging? If so, don’t. Brent Csutoras ruffled my feathers when he said that he doesn’t use Facebook for marketing and “maybe that is why I still have so many friends.” The truth of the matter is that to an extent, he’s right. Of over 1500 friends that I have, I’m constantly being pitched to join groups I have no interest in. What I didn’t like about Brent’s statement is that most savvy marketers do understand the fragile nature of online (and even offline) relationships and that smart ones do not abuse those relationships at all.

If you’re a business, ask your customers to follow you — don’t force it out of those people you are already connected with for other reasons.

Facebook is One Piece of the Pie

With more than 400 million members, if you want to go where your customers are, you’ll probably find most of them on Facebook. That said, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. You should still consider your blog or website as a viable way to build community and/or to drive sales and conversions. If nothing else, that’s the official channel to communicate your business objectives, and you have total control over the process there without risks or usability concerns.

Use Facebook, but use it wisely. It should be considered a subset of your overall online marketing efforts.

What other tips would you add to this list? Share your thoughts in the comments.

[ How to Use Facebook for Business and Marketing is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

Read more about The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web, a primer to social media marketing. Or you can subscribe to the Techipedia RSS feed.

I haven’t done a Kitchen Table Talk in a while. Here’s a post about helping everyone else around you, which I think is what’s next for businesses who want to grow using social media.

Oh, and the tee shirt I’m wearing in the video is one I bought from @mickgaluski, who runs Toy Soldier, a business that gets it.

People always ask which camera I used to shoot my video. I use the Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3 (that’s a review of the camera).

The influence and promise of Twitter is only now starting to materialize. Everything that occurred prior to Chirp has lead us to this moment and as such, is almost worthy of categorization as BC (Before Chirp). Everything that happens now, is almost symbolic of a new movement (AC, After Chirp) and as such, it essentially starts a new chapter in the evolution of Twitter.

To truly capture the State and Future of Twitter and all that was revealed during its first official conference, requires additional time and space. In Part One, we examined the sociological impact of Twitter on society, the true size of the network, as well as equally exploring its challenges and opportunities. In Part Two, we’ll review and interpret streams, interest graphs, and Twitters new advertising platform.

Streams Define the New Web

At the focal point of the entire event wasn’t just the developer community; the real beneficiary of all that was introduced, was us, as users as well as individuals soon to be introduced to Twitter. We took center stage as information and details of the “new” Twitter visualized new realities and brought the future of our experiences to life, today.

As Chris Messina, Kevin Marks, Stowe Boyd and others have long signaled, the Web is becoming less about pages and more about streams. Our behavior on the Web today places the power of content discovery and consumption firmly in our grasp. We decide who we follow. We choose which links are worthy of clicking. We determine the information that’s worth reading and more important, worthy of sharing.

The feeds to which we subscribe, channel activities of those we follow in our social graph funnel into the streams that flow through attention dashboards, TweetDeck, Seesmic, HootSuite, PeopleBrowsr, et al. The attention dashboard is how we learn. It introduces us to new discoveries. We’re gifted the insight to see what moves and inspires those we follow. It is also where we earn relevance and hopefully prominence, as what we share in turn, determines its visibility, engagement, and reaction within the attention dashboards and ultimately the streams of those who follow us and who follow them.

The Ties that Bind: Interest Graphs

Social networking is evolving beyond the mere connections to other individuals. We are forming contextual networks by linking to those we know as well as the people we’d like to know. These direct and indirect connections introduce value to our routines, aspirations, and missions from a distance. The most fascinating aspects of contextual relationships is that they mirror our patterns of behavior in real life, however, the interactions we form and cultivate online cast traceable imprints and they define our actions, interests, and alliances more effectively than we may realize.

As we are complex creatures, we are captivated by an incalculable amount of pursuits. While we may follow and are in turn followed by many, the inbound and outbound relevant networks we consciously and unknowingly cultivate expand, contract and reshape based on keywords of interest.

In the era of the real-time social Web, there are already tools in existence with many more to appear that can immediately analyze online activity to summarize your interests and the social graphs formed as a result.

As we learned at Chirp, Twitter’s COO Dick Costolo refers to the idea of themed connections as an interest graph, the linkages of Twitter users who form connections and host conversations around common subjects. It is these inbound and outbound relevant networks that lay the foundation for Twitter’s monetization strategies.

Twitter’s Business Model: Relevance

Prior to the dawn of Chirp, Twitter introduced Promoted Tweets. Much like the ads that appear in Google Search, Promoted Tweets will appear at the top of Twitter search results and the company promises that they will be “useful to you.”

Among the first to adopt Promoted Tweets include Best Buy, Bravo, Red Bull, Sony Pictures, Starbucks, and Virgin America—with more to come.

Promoted Tweets are clearly labeled as such, but their promise lies in the ability to look and act similar to regular Tweets, meaning that they retain all the functionality of a regular Tweet including replying, Retweeting, and favoriting.

Perhaps the greatest value in Promoted Tweets is their ability to remain atop the stream of relevance. While each of the initial companies experimenting with Promoted Tweets maintain Twitter accounts, the volume of content flying through the attention dashboards of followers inherently buries the most attractive of offers posted by any business.

According to Twitter, Promoted Tweets will also be timely. As much of Twitter’s activity takes places outside of the dotcom, developers can choose whether or not Promoted Tweets are integrated in their apps.

As the company defines, the connection between Promoted Tweets and individual interests provides a powerful means of delivering information relevant to you at the moment, in real-time.

Brands aspire to earn attention and reactions in the streams of both social and interest graphs. If consumers share information related to the brand, earned media then becomes the word of mouth catalyst that then spreads the information across the Web.  Organic Tweets that mention companies and their services, offers, value, etc., are considered earned media. Promoted Tweets create a hybrid of paid and earned media, something I refer to as sponsored media. Promoted Tweets begin as paid media and transform into earned media with every ReTweet.

Costolo shared the love, positioning the new revenue model as helping “the entire ecosystem making money.” Therefore, the company is splitting promoted tweets revenue 50-50 with distribution partners.

Relevance and Resonance

Promoted Tweets are perhaps less controversial than what the immediate future beholds. Today, Promoted Tweets will appear only in search results. Once the system and the culture of the community is tested and immersed, paid Tweets will then enter the streams that connect interest graphs to topics of interest. Again, the value to the advertiser is that these Tweets will appear in the streams of individuals who have repeatedly demonstrated and communicated their interests through their actions and reactions as representative in the Tweet history.

However, with opportunity, new challenges face advertisers. Promoted Tweets force relevance into their campaigns in order to trigger positive responses and ultimately word of mouth and measurable activity. Twitter is not only changing communications between users, it also represents the impetus for contextualizing and humanizing advertising, in real-time. Without the ability to connect to and inspire people, campaigns will fail miserably. Those that appeal to the emotions and interests of consumers will spark a social effect that reverberates across the social graph online and eventually into the real world.

Dick Costolo shared a tangible example, “If I tweet a lot about coffee, I could be a great target for Starbucks ads, for example.” And, it is Starbucks that appears to fully embrace the notion of the real-time interest graph.

Not only is Starbucks among the initial adopters of Promoted Tweets, the company is also running an innovative outreach program with influence measurement startup Klout. Klout provides everyday marketers with the ability to identify influencers who actively tweet about related topics and also maintain a level of measurable stature with Twitter. These influencers were recently offered a free sample of Starbucks Pike Place Roast because of their earned authority on the subject of coffee.

In many ways, Twitter’s Promoted Tweets mirrors this strategy, but now extends it from individual influencers to anyone interested in coffee, not necessary influential on the subject.

Two words that were repeated throughout the conference, resonance and relevance, underscored Twitter’s commitment to creating an advertising platform that would earn the support of the community.

As Costolo noted, “Tweets that don’t resonate with users will disappear.”

Resonance is the reinforcement or prolongation of social objects. A Tweet, whether it’s paid or earned, represents a social object as its introduction and exposure possesses the ability to spark conversations. The extent and volume however, are determined by relevance and the shareability of the social object however.

Twitter is using resonance as a metric as it measures all the different ways people engage with Tweets and as such, produces a resonance score that determines the effectiveness and overall lifespan of Promoted Tweets. Resonance examines the visibility of a Tweet and actions surrounding them including how often they’re retweeted, favorited, etc.

In addition to developers, Twitter seems to truly believe that the user experience is the source of Twitter’s past and future. As such, it is the experience that is also the inspiration behind Promoted Tweets. Initially these paid opportunities will be based on a CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions or 1,000 qualified individuals exposed to the Tweet). What caught my attention however, is that as Twitter learns about the performance, accuracy, and possibilities orbiting resonance as a metric, the cost model will migrate from CPM to a ROI model…yes, Return on Investment.  Details on the ROI model weren’t discussed, but I can assure you, anything that is introduced into the real-time Web triggers a response, even if that response is nothing. Advertisers will need to not only get creative, but also ensure that Promoted Tweets are both actionable, Retweetable, and, let me say that again, AND, advantageous.

Twitter’s metric could be applied to all forms of social media, from Twitter advertising to Tweets produced by its users to updates and postings across the entire social Web. Without relevance, we cannot trigger resonance, and without resonance, we cannot establish significance.

In social media, we earn the relationships, responses, and trust we deserve.

Connect with Brian Solis on Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Google Buzz, Facebook
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Get Putting the Public Back in Public Relations and The Conversation Prism:

The State and Future of Twitter was revealed to the world at the Chirp Conference. Developers, futurists, reporters, investors, stakeholders, and businesses convened at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, making the journey from all over the world to witness history in the making.

My experience at Chirp was in a word, profound.  I sit here, right here, right now, attempting to distill all that I heard and learned and its true effect on the general public.  The volume of ideas and insight is implausible to capture, analyze, and share in one post. Hence, what follows is Part One of The State and Future of Twitter, beginning with an answer to the question that Twitter never asked of us, “What moves you?” While some of what you’ll read addresses the initial question, “what are you doing” and also the current question, “what’s happening?”

Prior to the opening of the show, tensions arose between Twitter and the developer community following the news of Twitter’s acquisition of Tweetie to become the official iPhone app for the company. Suddenly developers felt abandoned or threatened by an ominous competitor, Twitter itself.

On the eve of the conference, Twitter was faced with one additional objective for its monumental event. In addition to illustrating its future, Twitter now desperately needed to win back the support and dedication of its developer community.

“Twitter has always been about developers,” asserted Twitter co-founder Evan Williams.

Williams continued, “Twitter is the ecosystem much more than any other Web service that exists. You guys have not only made Twitter better, you’ve helped shape it, you’ve helped define what it is for us and millions of users.”

In truth, the stories and events that played out paint a brighter future for all involved, including consumers. What was clear, however, is that the days of straightforward and spiritless applications would no longer command the value and attention they once boasted. It was clear that Twitter is rapidly emerging as a sophisticated social operating system (OS) and its prospective is governed by the applications and the users who adopt them.

Follow Me on Twitter!

Since 2006, I’ve explored the promise and impact of Twitter on media, marketing and popular culture. At times I’ve openly questioned decisions or the lack thereof to diagnose complications with Twitter’s market position as compared to its promise. Reality eventually proved blinding. Consumers were and are unabashedly exposed to Twitter at almost unprecedented and incalculable conditions.

Follow us on Twitter…it’s suddenly everywhere. Whether you’re watching the evening news, your favorite program or the commercials that support them, the request is clear. However, what was unclear, especially for the everyday consumer, were the steps necessary to find meaning in the Twitter experience and direction in its personal application in a world where Facebook and other social networks offered far more definitive and self explaining advantages.

As Evan Wlliams demonstrated through a live Google search, it’s clear that they’re listening. Mainstream consumers do not understand Twitter.

“Getting users from awareness to engagement–this is something that we weren’t doing very well. This is a really tough problem because Twitter is different things for different people.”

Indeed.

Most importantly however, what it isn’t for most people, is clear in its day-to-day application and benefits for the investment one makes in learning, contributing, and overall engagement.

Twitter has tried, albeit incrementally as well as restricted and perhaps without clarity, to improve the experience.

In the last year, the company has…

1. Re-designed its home page twice to more effectively depict the value that lies beyond registration.

2. Created a series of guides designed to help businesses understand the potential rife within its ecosystem

3. Analyzed and published data to humanize the trends beyond the tweets

4. Continually spotlight the clever accounts finding success

At 175 employees, Twitter might now finally realize the strength in its own numbers.

Tweet by Numbers

It would take almost four years for me to witness the day that Twitter would convincingly recognize its calling in life and as a result, take the wheel of destiny to steer a historic, yet seemingly meandering movement toward relevance and prevalence.

On April 14th 2010, Twitter made history…again.

The news, ideas, and conversations erupting from the conference was positively overwhelming and promising, almost as if the team at Twitter suddenly awoke in the middle of the night to seize the revelation that presented its destiny, mission, and the course towards pervasiveness.

On the first day of its first official conference, Twitter intentionally positioned Chirp as its shot across the bow of skeptics and critics while simultaneously rekindling the flame of loyalists and luminaries.

A community once plagued by user acquisition and retention challenges, Twitter disclosed information absent since its debut in 2006, numbers.

It turns out, Twitter is much larger than many predicted. According to co-founder Biz Stone, Twitter maintains a user base of over 105 million. To be clear, registered and active users are two very different things. But even speculating at a 50% retention estimate, just over 50 million active accounts would warrant significant respect and attention.

Biz also shared that Twitter.com receives over 180 million monthly unique visitors with 75% of Twitter traffic sourcing from outside applications. Currently, Twitter is adding 300,000 new users daily, experiencing 1,500% growth over last year.

Twitter search is also becoming a contender in the overall market. While still far behind Google and even YouTube, Twitter is fielding over 600 million search queries with 3 billion calls to its application program interface (API) per day.

Snapshot:
- 105 million registered users
- 180 million monthly unique visitors
- 75% of traffic sourcing from outside applications
- Adding 300,000 new users daily

Twitter: A Cultural Catalyst

Over the last few years, Twitter users publicly explored and defined the role of the fledgling platform as a technology, a communications medium, and ultimately as a catalyst for societal evolution. At a minimum, Twitter has represented a collective collaboration that manifests our ability to unconsciously connect kindred voices through the experiences that move us.  While Twitter both spawned and symbolized the pulse of the real-time Web, Twitter itself emerged as a human seismograph, providing us with a window into the reverberating events, themes, and trends that captivate digital civilizations.

In March 2007, Twitter tasted mainstream attention when it earned the spotlight at SXSW.

In 2008, a journalist was arrested in Egypt and his Tweets that alerted followers to the event and broadcast his cry for help would ultimately serve as the key to his freedom.

Just over a year ago, Ashton Kutcher challenged CNN to a Twitter race to become the first person to reach 1,000,000 followers.

In June 2009, the Iran election and the following political unrest were globalized through Twitter.

From its inception to its current state is entwined through countless human experiences and events ranging from earthquakes to plane crashes to triumphs, losses, and everything in between.

The Twitterverse represents much more than a social network. It personified our aspirations, giving millions of people a stage for which to earn untapped recognition. Whereas YouTube inspired so many individuals willing to brave the lens of a Web cam and the resulting activities that ensured from friends and strangers online and in the real world, Twitter gifted a microphone, a stage, and a captive audience to those who could enchant our heats, minds, and attention in 140 character proclamations.

Twitter did not invent social networking. Nor did it create the @ or # signs that have become pervasive not only in Twitter and other social networks, but also in real life. What Twitter did however, seems to have a much more profound effect on humanity.  As a noun and a verb, Tweets unlocked and emancipated our inner extrovert and social commentator, easing our concerns over privacy and consequence, instilling confidence through our participation and contribution with followers, responses, retweets, favorites, and ultimately a network of contacts that would prove invaluable in all things we do online and offline.

#Hashtags

I’ve spent countless hours analyzing how the “me” in Social Media affects us individually. And while many have criticized blogs, Twitter, Facebook and other social networks for fanning the flames of egotism and narcissism, I truly believe that Twitter empowered a new generation of individuals to listen, learn, and communicate with vigor, consciousness, and passion. And every time we update our status, we earn status at varying levels that reflects the caliber and breadth of our investment and intention. As such, we are encouraged and rewarded by the deliberate unfastening of”self” from self interest to play a part in producing a vibrant and enriching civilization that transcends its populace from denizens to bona fide benefactor and stakeholder.

Twitter is what it is because of us. And, where it is going and its true impact will too, be defined by us, the very people who form the democracy of Twitter. As good friend and digital raconteur Stowe Boyd observed, “It is our dancing the makes the house rock, not the planks and pipes. It is us that makes Twitter alive, not the code.”

Twitter has flourished into a living and breathing organism whose characteristics are dictated and personified through our Tweets and the Tweets of those we follow. Its soul however, is defined by who we are and who we want to be. Twitter is becoming a part of our society and it is changing how we form relationships and introducing new patterns of communication that link us to one other.

It is no longer a question of “to Tweet or not to Tweet.” Tweets are now artifacts of our culture and as such, they symbolize a chapter in societal evolution.

Next: Part Two – A review of Twitter’s new monetization strategies.

Connect with Brian Solis on Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Google Buzz, Facebook
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Please consider reading my brand new book, Engage!

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Get Putting the Public Back in Public Relations and The Conversation Prism:

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