Social Media is Evolving

I'm in love with my 250,000 online friends.

Here is an edited version of Ravit Lichtenberg blog on this subject.
Please go here for the original post.

Meaning and connection are corroding by the day as people's ability to organize their experiences and find the relevance of their networks declines. Social Media is Evolving into a holistic experience that speaks to people's social needs in new ways.

1. It's About People We're moving away from "users," "customers," and "shoppers": social media is bringing back the human element to all digital interaction. People now deliberately seek meaningful connection, self-expression, and a relevant and receptive community.

2. Creating Meaning and Value "Social media online is no different from social media offline," said Brent Csutoras at a recent Social Media Club event. People will be looking for ways to keep their networks going regardless of device or platform. They will connect around meaningful topics and have live and simultaneous conversations within parameters they themselves define, which will bring relevance back to their interaction with others.

3. Enabling Convergence FriendFeed is growing rapidly because people are at a loss when it comes to pulling their conversations together from various sources and assigning meaning to them. Companies that deliver beautifully designed, easy-to-use, searchable, flexible, aggregating platforms will become more important than any social media tool by itself. Deb Schultz, a San Francisco-based web strategist, compares social media to an art exhibit and says people will "curate their live presence through the web ecosystem as needed."

4. Building a Truly Cross-Platform Experience The iPhone experience has changed the playing field for users, companies, and developers. In the new landscape of social media, people are seeking solutions that seamlessly cut across mobile, web, and live interaction, hopping on and off them like double-decker buses, all with the same pass.

5. Creating Relevant Social Networks People will create, join, and seek social networks that enable them to have meaningful and relevant experiences with each other. They will measure their return on investment in replies, comments, their ability to influence, and the value of their learning. Social network that grew a massive 388% in 2008... why... because it allows people to connect around the things they love making which makes social networks a very addictive way of communicating.

6. Innovating in the Advertising Space Ad publishers and the attached ecosystem will continue to lose revenue until they realign their understanding of what appeals to people who are conversing, connecting, and expressing. The next phase of social media is a gold mine of targeted niche demographics. Ad agencies and publishers that are able to quickly realign their thinking and create an innovative and relevant product discovery experience will gain significant competitive advantage.

7. Helping People Organize Their "Old" Social Media Ecosystem As aggregating platforms enter the field, people will seek to bring order to the endless bits of information available to them. Video tagging, conversation archiving, taking cloud computing to the next stage, and making search more relevant are some of the new baseline requirements. These represent a significant opportunity for companies willing to undertake this massive endeavor.

8. Connecting with the Rest of the US and the World In the next one to two years, the benefits of social media will cross the chasm and reach the mainstream, not only in the US but around the world. Companies will need to understand the explicit and implicit differences between adoption patterns in different countries and adjust their products to meet these different needs.

9. Preparing for New Social Media Jobs Companies are looking to divert marketing dollars to more targeted social media destinations. David Spark, founder of Spark Media Solutions, says that businesses will need to go beyond paying people to Tweet or put up a Facebook page. Social media's new job descriptions will call on subject-matter experts who can plan for relevant interaction within networks and aggregating platforms and bring together products, services, and people.

10. Making Money With the rise of aggregating platforms, social networks, and new mobile and location-based features, we're bound to see an increase in targeted and personalized ads, "freemium" packaging, revenue sharing between strategic partners, and a flow from the offline world to online social engagement. The new form of social media will be about creating "whole products" and complete experiences, all in real time, across the web, mobile, and live. Each user will be able to create his or her own experience using tools, features, and apps that magically coalesce. Innovative companies that are able to listen to these needs and deliver products based on them will not only survive but thrive in the coming months and years.

Twitter tools that can help

Hello out there is anyone twittering me?

Twitter is a great personal and social communications platform.
But that's not all you can use it for. Here are some interesting, loopy, and just plain cool tools that allow you to do more than talk to friends.

PIMPY3WASH OK, so maybe you can't use this and it's only designed for one person, but PIMPY3WASH is the neatest washing machine hack I've seen, so I had to include it. Ryan Rose, a programmer for TiVo, had trouble remembering when his clothes were ready to come out of the washing machine.

To fix that problem, he hacked it to alert him via text message on Twitter when his clothes were ready for the dryer. So far, his hack isn't available for other users, although you can subscribe to the feed to learn more about Rose's washing schedule than you probably wanted to know. But I hope it's just a matter of time until Whirlpool finds a way to let you use Twitter to track when your load of laundry is ready to be taken out.

Trackthis TrackThis is a neat Twitter tool that tracks shipments to you from FedEx, UPS, USPS, or DHL, and tweets you back whenever there's an update from the courier. To use TrackThis, all you need to do is surf to the site and input the courier and tracking number.

After you've started following TrackThis on Twitter, it will send you a tweet each time there's an update. I've used it three times in the past week and within just a few minutes, it informed me that my package was getting closer. This tool is a keeper. (Previous review.)

Botanicalls Botanicalls is probably one of the most outrageous products I've ever heard of. I want it.

Botanicalls is a gadget that you assemble (soldering irons and knowledge of electronics is required) and place into the soil a plant is in. It measures moisture in the soil and connects to an Ethernet port on your router to transmit data to Twitter or your mobile phone. In order to use the tool's Twitter feature, you'll need to create a new Twitter account with the name of your Botanicalls unit and follow that account.

Once complete, Botanicalls will send you tweets each time the plant needs watering. It costs $99.99, though, and as we said, assembly is required. London's Tubes I've seen London's tubes. They're not pretty during rush hour and sometimes, they get clogged. That's why developer Tom Morris, has created a series of Twitter accounts that users can follow to get updates on London's metropolitan transit system.

Twitter accounts like @Tubebakerloo and @tubecircle update at different times throughout the day to give Londoners all the information they need to find out if where they're going is crowded. Update: Rafe just tried this, and the first update he saw was frightening.

Twitddict Twitddict provides a useful service when Twitter cannot. It lets you continue tweeting when Twitter is down. If you're the kind of person who just can't get enough of Twitter, and the Fail Whale throws you into fits of rage, Twitddict allows you to keep tweeting.

Once the service is back up, Twitddict places all the tweets you made during the downtime in your timeline almost immediately. Neat. Twitsay Text is so 2008. Why not update your Twitter stream with some audio? Twitsay allows you to do just that. After signing up for the service and providing it with your Twitter username and password, you can call the designated Twitsay number for your country and place a voice message.

Once complete, that voice message will be placed in your Twitter stream for all your followers to enjoy. Can you say, audio RickRoll? FuelFrog FuelFrog lets you use Twitter to track your car's fuel use. After signing up with FuelFrog, it asks you to input your Twitter username, type of car, miles driven, price of gas, and amount of gas you put into your car to fill it up. Once complete, FuelFrog will begin tracking what kind of mileage your car gets. You can input all that information on the FuelFrog site, but it's much easier to do it through Twitter.

After following FuelFrog, you only need to send a tweet to the service with all the aforementioned information about your car. From there, FuelFrog will calculate your real miles per gallon and provide you with trend information on its site.

Remember The Milk Remember The Milk helps you keep track of things you need to do.

Once you sign up for the service, you can send a direct message to @RTM on Twitter. Once received, the service will compare your username to what it has on file and send your request to your in-box.

For example, if you want to remember to pick up dog food on the way home, you can log on to your Twitter account and send a direct message to @RTM, saying "remember the dog food." It will then send a message to your in-box reminding you of your responsibility. It works well, it's free, and it's worth trying out.

Winning Customers with Great Content

Testing one, two, three...

Edited version of a Brent Leary blog report

Content is key to making sure people come back to your social locations again and again.

With social media it’s no longer a question whether you should embrace it. Now it's a question of identifying the business opportunities in doing so. It’s about identifying the different ways you should do so.

It’s critical for us to find ways to keep our cash outlays to a minimum while keeping our customers happy, and find more customers like them. This is precisely why businesses are turning to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other social tools and networks, as they are able to meaningfully connect with customers and prospects at a very low price point. This reinforces findings from a recent study conducted by Coleman-Parkes Research that found 84 percent of companies headquartered in North America feel they need to find new ways to communicate with customers.

Because it has become so easy to create and distribute content, it’s also more difficult to capture people’s attention long enough to really connect with them. But the difficulties involved in attracting attention for your blogs, podcasts, and videos should not discourage you from using these valuable communication tools. It is too important. In fact the 2008 Cone Business in Social Media Study finds that 93 percent of North American social media users feel companies should have a social media presence -- with 56 percent saying they feel a stronger connection with companies that do.

The good news is top notch content should eventually stand out from the marginal stuff. And the vast majority of Web content would probably fall into the marginal category, if that. So it’s important to put some extra time and effort into consistently creating good stuff -- the kind of content that will turn heads, lead to conversations, and eventually build long lasting relationships.

On the Web, people really appreciate information that provides them with solutions to their challenges. They also love blogs and videos that make them, think, laugh, cry, and experience all kinds of emotions humans can feel. And when they do find content that stirs them in these ways, they share it with friends and colleagues. They leave comments on blogs, “tweet” about it on Twitter and promote on sites like Digg and StumbleUpon. This is the beautiful thing about the Web -- people promoting the good works of others just because they feel the work is worthy of acknowledgement, and the creator deserving of a “shout-out”.

Frugal advice for a down economy

What should I do? What should I do?

With the economy being in an "official" downturn here are some thoughts to keep everything in perspective. Based on an article by by Mark Tewart

1 - Don’t read too much into the news reports
Things are rarely as good as they seem and things are rarely as bad as they seem. If you allow yourself to give in to the news you will determine your destiny. When people tell me about the bad economy I tell them I have chosen not to participate.


2 - You can’t cut your way to a profit
Expense management is done at all times not just in bad markets. Cutting expenses in bad times is a misnomer. You set your good and bad habits in good markets not bad. Be selectively extravagant and prudently frugal. I have never seen a business survive and thrive a down market by trying to cut expenses as their long term strategy.


3 - Don’t cut your life line
Some of the easiest variable expenses to cut out are advertising and marketing. That also takes a bad situation and makes it worse. When your business drops and you take action to stop the flow even more, you are doomed. Be smarter with your marketing budgets, rely on a more planned out approach and save where you can.


4 - Spoil your existing customers
The past and present customers are the life blood of any business. These customers are also the most over looked and underutilized asset in ALL businesses. Do you have a relationship building program that creates over fifty positive customer contacts per year? The people who have done business with you already like and trust you and will most likely do business again and bring others if they are appreciated, rewarded and yes asked. There is gold in them thar hills.


5 - Spin the bad news into something good
Use all the bad news and the fear and negative emotions associated with it to your advantage. Use the headlines in your marketing and advertising and become the solution provider in a bad economy.


6 - Stop Boring Me to Death
Be creative and use trash can mailers, wallet mailers and other dimensional mail. Stop trying to get the lowest cost per piece and concentrate on the highest ROI for your mailings and other marketing. Boring does not sell in any media format.


7 - Go back to the basics
Instead of cutting your education, double your education efforts. If the market is really that bad then you should have tons of time to educate yourself and your team. If your opportunities are fewer then you must maximize each customer contact. Think like a customer. Examine your process from a customer’s point of view and ask yourself what creates heartburn for those customers.


8 - Super-size it
You can impact your bottom line immediately by increasing either transaction size or the gross margin. You can do this through add-ons, bundling, value-added presentations and better process for asking for and negotiating money. Do want fries with that and do you want the large popcorn for 25 cents more are not accidental questions.


9 - Create Multiple Campaigns
If your customers buy one product or service from you then they will buy more. Sending a one time mailing for a discount oil change does not constitute a continuity program. When you create a continuity program you will insulate your business from bad economies in the future because you will be less dependent on conquest customers.


10 - Attitude of the Boss with effect the Crew
As the leader thinks and acts, the team shall too. If the leaders of your business talk bad economies and bad markets the team will believe it. What are your leaders doing right now? Spend every minute of the day in the pursuit of things that will create customers and incomes now and in the future. If the leader does not believe, don’t expect the troops to.

Taking your green to the bank

turn it off for profits sake...

Here is a very interesting mini-report regarding return on investment (ROI) for green products. I have edited it down a bit from the original.

Saving energy makes sense any time, but particularly now, given our short supplies of oil and the pollution and climate change we create when we burn any fossil fuel. Many consumers are under the generally false impression that adopting "green" (energy efficient) technologies is beyond their financial reach. And especially during these economic hard times, even the suspicion that something will cost more is enough to deter its purchase.

That's why the concept of Green ROI is so important. Green ROI offers a way to calculate what the purchase of a green product is worth both in the short term and a longer way down the road. In other words, if you spend X dollars on a green product today, how long will it take you to realize a gain — in real dollars — and make the purchase worthwhile? Well, consider a few of these Green ROI calculations, courtesy of GreenandSave.com, and based on a ten-year performance period:

1. Programmable Thermostat save money going green Automatically adjust indoor air temperatures to reduce the amount of gas or electricity you use with a programmable thermostat. Cost: $115 Annual savings: $180 ROI: 156.5%

2. Power Strips Use energy-saving power strips on office electronics and home appliances to reduce energy use when in "standby" mode. Cost: $20 for two strips Annual savings: $24 ROI: 120%

3. Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs Replace 20 incandescent bulbs that are 60 watts and have a life expectancy of 1,500 hours with CFLs that use only 14 watts and last 10,000 hours. Cost: $3 - $6 per bulb Annual savings: Each bulb saves on average $4 to $7 per year in electricity ROI: 133.3% See how saving energy saves money — a lot of money — over the long term?

But what about climate change, you ask?
Take programmable thermostats. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which administers the federal Energy Star program, calculates that in 2006, consumers using programmable thermostats not only saved a total of $14 billion on their utility bills, they also saved enough energy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to taking 25 million cars off the road. Want to know how additional investments will create Green ROI?
Go to GreenandSave.com.