So how you can you tap into the purchasing power of blogs? Implement a blogger outreach program for your brand! Below are 3 tips for successfully marketing to bloggers.

1. Be authentic. I can't stress this point enough. Always disclose that you work for the company/brand/product before you start your pitch. Full discloser helps build trust between you and the blogger and provides an open environment for feedback. Check out Fired for Astroturfing: A Social Media Don't for an example of what can go wrong if you don't disclose your affiliation up-front.

2. Do your homework. There are literally millions of blogs covering endless topics, so it is important to target only blogs that are highly relevant for your product or service. To start identifying appropriate blogs, select 2-3 keywords that best describe the industry for your product or service. (For example, 'candy' and 'chocolate' would be good keywords for M&Ms). Next do a Google Blog Search using these keywords to find blogs that have these keywords in the title or have a high concentration of content including these keywords.

3. Customize your pitch. I have received feedback from numerous bloggers applauding our company for 'getting it right' when it comes to outreach. The reason? Customization. Do not send out impersonal, mass emails to the bloggers you identified in Step 2. Instead, use the blogger's name at the beginning of your pitch and let him know you read his blog (identified by name) or a specific blog post (again identified by name). Tailor your pre-written pitch to make it as relevant as possible for this blogger. The more personal your communication seems, the more likely a blogger will respond positively to it.

Fostering blogger relationships can help you build brand credibility and provide a forum for online conversation about your product or service. I would love to hear about other blogger outreach tips and success stories, so be sure to leave comments!

Oh, just saw Brogan's latest tweet on the Brian Solis post on Twitter tools. How are you using Twitter for your business?

Following is the email I sent (sans the names and companies, plus some spelling fixes).

Wanted to give you a brief recap of what we have seen to be successful with running events online.

1. Find Your Audience Online
This is basic and practical I know, but many companies don't really get a good lay of the land far enough in front of the event to be successful. The idea is NOT to be a total new comer to the conversation and expect people to ride in and support the effort.

Part of this effort should be around ad support and potential sponsorships in those key communities months before the event.

As part of monitoring the online audience, look for themes that arise as part of the conversation. This gives you content fodder for mini-events (#3 below).

So getting some brand visibility is key. The visibility needs to be focused on the influencers.

2. Set Up Your Online Presence
Social media is fueled by reciprocation, be it tagging, friending, commenting or viral applications. But, there's got to be some place for people to see who you are what you're doing. Options (among others) could be a blog or microsite, Facebook group or page. Somewhere that gives you the ability to post content, notices and updates about upcoming events.

3. Create Mini-Events
Trying to get large audiences online is dependent on either: (a) celebrity draw, or (b) unique, interesting and relevant content. In front of the event itself create mini-events such as online chats using UStream or Kyte player. So you can take some people involved with the main show and start creating content and events that would be of interest to your crowd. During these mini-events your always throwing messaging forward to the main event.

4. Cause Marketing
This one has potential to work extremely well. Through cause marketing you can tie the event to a charitable cause. You can leverage the non-profit network to promote the event, and you can do something around say attendance numbers. So for each online viewer we will donate $1 up to 100,000 dollars. Obviously this costs money, and we only recommend this strategy if the organization itself is building a sustainable online community. With cause marketing you're driving lots of visibility and traffic and if the idea is to sustain a community beyond the event then it's an effective and comparatively inexpesnive way of doing it.

5. Main Event
In the online world, we have found promoting an event by communications outreach too far in advance is a waste of time. For exposure use brand advertising or site sponsorships as mentioned in point #1 above. For the event itself use the mini-events as a way to keep people interested then do your outreach online max four days in advance. Have something interesting and exciting to talk about for the outreach (see point #6 below) is critical.

6. Post Main Event
Another great tactic we have used is a post-event community program. That is a live call or online chat after the event where people who just watched the telecast can then get on and talk about it. This gives great reason to do outreach: "Don't forget to tune into the Telecast at 9 p.m., and then join in the Live Chat/Audioconference/Blog Radio Show with XXX immediately after."

7. Create Calendar Items that Can Go Viral
Calendaring for events is one of the main reasons we like Facebook. Events are one of the most viral applications in Facebook. So if I'm interested in the event, I'll click on attending the event, and all of my contacts will see: "James is attending the XXX event at 9 p.m. on Thursday". So if my circle of friends on Facebook are also passionate about the topic, they now see it.

Now, one point not raised is e-mail. This discussion was based on the assumption the client didn't have an active email list.

BTW, most people stumble and fail miserably at Step 1, never giving the following six steps a chance.

This discussion can quickly get more involved than how a company might use Facebook, because now we are talking about the use of intentional business tools. One local company and customer of ours that provides the kind of tools I'm referring to is HiveLive.

With the goal of better understanding a target audience, one of the advantages of using a virtual (online) community platform comes in leveraging multiple audiences. The audiences I'm referring to specifically are employees, customers and partners.

If you can effectively create the space through which these audiences can participate - you are fostering a new means of sharing, exploring and learning. The results? Better communication, marketing, innovation and loyalty.

If you would like to dig into this deeper, Jeremiah Owyang did a comprehensive report on community platforms for Forrester only a couple of months ago.

1. Greater knowledge of what's online: More than 1/3 revealed they are not confident their current agency is well positioned to successfully take their brand online.
2. Using "pull interactions:" 90% want their agencies to use pull interactions such as social media and communities rather than only traditional "push" campaigns.
3. Leveraging of virtual communities: 94% expressed interest in leveraging virtual communities to understand more about their target audience.
4. Agency executives using the technology: 92% said it was important the agencies use what they recommend.
   
5. Agencies that have "Chief Digital Officers."

Additional noteworthy items desired (actually included as a broader top 10 list) pertain to what many of us would intuitively expect - like an agency's ability to demonstrate an understanding of social media, the ability to demonstrate strategic thinking and analytic measurement for success.

This goes back to the root of any social media program. LISTEN first and learn what your group is thinking, what motivates them, where they spend their time and then and only then can an organization plan its engagement strategy.

The role Craig is talking about is going from founder and growing Craigslist, to being the public face of the company, working with the media and being part of a team of customer service reps.

I personally find this role fascinating and refreshing. What better way to serve your company than to be directly involved in helping solve customer issues or responding to customer inquiries.

Imagine the insights and knowledge he gains from personally interacting with the customer.

Which begs the question: Why do so many companies look at customer service as a necessary evil?

Answer: EGO

The people best suited to handle the vast array of customer service issues are not people manning phone banks in India. It's high-level management with a true and deep understanding of the products and service offerings. But these individuals would need to check their ego at the door to start manning the gates.

I do think there is an opportunity in elevating conversational customer reps, those individuals responsible for the Twitter and GetSatisfaction pages to be more senior as these individuals will most certainly become a public figure in the company.

Although this conversation is nothing new, it's good to see it continuing to bubble up beyond the uber-tech meetups and podcast conferences. As the topic gains momentum, it presses organizations like Comscore to the reality of how they must change to meaningfully address metrics for advertisers in social media. By the way, Comscore's message at OMMA was that advertisers must see metrics they are familiar with. Are you surprised?

Margret Clerkin, CEO of Mindshare Interaction, said yesterday, "it's wrong to do media placement on social networking because it's about conversations." I can't speak for Margret -- but if I'm giving her the benefit of the doubt, I'm guessing what she really means is that media placement within social networking shouldn't be measured by the normal standards.

If you think it's simply wrong, you should listen to our recent podcast with Bill Flitter, CEO of Pheedo. Bottom line: the creation of distributed media (content outside the website) is dramatically increasing. It would be irresponsible for marketers to wait for the perfect metric before engaging in this new world.

More to the point, it's something you don't do as a responsible marketer. The thing is, the rules are easily bendable, the tactics are highly tempting and the ethics are typically questioned. After all, what "harm" can it really do? Well, actually a lot -- and I have a fresh and unfortunate story to share with you about it.
To give some background: One of the main activities we do as a social media company is key influencer identification and blogger outreach. Our outreach efforts are always about approaching people on a personal level. In other words, asking for permission, being short and sweet about our agenda, and even apologizing up-front in the event our outreach is perceived as irrelevant to a blogger's interests and audience.

Recently, we came across an influential blog that posted about our client's product. But before we could start slapping high fives, the blogger made an additional post that specifically called out one of the commenters. Although the commenter in question had good intentions, clarifying some false statements made about the product, his enthusiasm took things to the point of spewing marketing jargon in his comment. Dead giveaway.

As one of the shark commenters clued into the chum, the blogger was inspired to do a little investigation. You know where it goes from here. What he easily found was the commenter in question was using a fake name with a standard email address. From there, the blogger not only identified the commenter as a marketer, but even discovered when he was hired.

So of course, he owed his readers a juicy post about this discovery. Today, that marketer was fired. And as many might agree to that being an over reaction, the reality is the marketer's company and client was dragged into a search engine index-able conversation among far more than a normal room full of people.

Could it quickly smolder out and go nowhere? Absolutely. Could it be dragged to other blogs, becoming the latest meat puppet case study in social marketing? Absolutely. So the harm, aside from possibly losing your job, is not only the potential of short-term brand damage - but also long-term search engine results associated with the brand, its' products, services, etc.

From my position, I understand how someone could be reasonably fired for this. At the same time, I believe this particular person simply made a naive mistake that blew up like a firecracker in a child's hand.

If he would have disclosed who he worked for up front, this all could have been avoided. In all fairness, the most obvious things are sometimes the hardest to see - and in the world of internet marketing, learning on the job is commonplace.

This just in (this post has been evolving throughout the day as I've written it): the marketer wrote an apology to the blogger today. The blogger responded by emailing an apology regarding the job loss, removing his original post about the client's product, and the post that called out the marketer as deceptive. Wow.

What is your take on this? How would you have respond as the blogger? How about the employer or client?

The new iphone was its replacement, happening the same week of giving my Dell to Stepan as part of forcing my use of the new MacBook Pro that had been sitting on my desk unopened for two weeks. BTW, Stepan has his own MacBook Pro, and is only keeping the Dell until somebody here needs a better PC.

Supposedly, I have been thrust into "the brave new world." Each day is getting easier, but there is still pain (enough for me to blog about it here). I'd like to think I'm somebody who embraces change. But as I look at this ultra small type on my new higher screen resolution, and consider how my old cell reception in my house was better than I have now -- I'm not so sure.

I can't help but wonder if anyone who converts from PC to Mac looks back... or more importantly, actually goes back. All comments graciously welcomed.

Most interactive media planners would agree that having a free planning tool would benefit our industry tremendously. Google has already released updates for Ad Planner, so I have hope that they will continue to improve the product to compete with larger, subscription-based tools. Until then, below are three reasons Ad Planner will not put Nielsen or ComScore out of business any time soon.

Why Google Ad Planner Can't Compete

1. Target audience definition is limited.

Media planners love to define niche audiences for their targeted marketing messages. These target definitions usually contain a mix of both demographic and psychographic qualities (such as age and specific purchasing behavior/interests).

Currently, Google's Ad Planner only allows you to define a target based on a very limited number of demographics. Both @plan and Media Metrix allow planners to mix and match hundreds of characteristics to create a targeted audience, and thus a more targeted list of sites.

2. Sites can only be filtered by inclusion in Google's content network.
When I am planning an online campaign for a client, I am only interested in reviewing sites that accept advertising. Ad planner does not have a good way to filter these sites out of the master list. The current filter does allow you to exclude sites that are not included in their content network, but this filter gets rid of sites that may be a good fit for sponsorship or banner ad placement.

@plan and Media Metrix offer filters that show any site that accepts advertising, whether or not they are included in a specific network. This type of filter is more ideal than sifting through hundreds of site names to determine which ones accept advertising.

3. Site metrics are not target specific.
With the exception of Comp Index, all of the site metrics shown are based on total traffic, not the specific target audience defined in Ad Planner. While Comp Index gives planners a general comparison of which sites have a higher composition of the defined target, I am more interested in the actual percentage of site visitors that meet the target audience I defined.

@plan and Media Metrix both provide these target specific numbers, such as composition. Hopefully by now you get my drift. These two tools provide a more detailed analysis of which sites are best for a specific target audience.

Despite being somewhat disappointed by the initial beta of Google Ad Planner, the tool does provide an easy way for any online marketers to compare traffic for multiple sites. Hopefully, with enough feedback, Google will turn Ad Planner into a more competitive interactive planning tool.

Twitter announce today that they have acquired Twitter search application Summize, (you'll notice the Summize.com link redirects to search.twitter.com).

The juice is in the Advance Twitter Search, where you can find Tweets based on: Words, People, Places, Dates, Attitudes and Posts Containing Links.

For anyone tracking reputation monitoring on Twitter knows an Advanced Search functionality is critical to having any kind of success in being able to respond quickly and maintain a open and current dialogue. Too much leads to communication paralysis.

Connecting Connected People

The coolest function that Twitter brings on the integration of Summize is the ability to search Places.

Now this is a real community builder function that goes beyond online communities.

Here's a view into all Twits being posted about Travel Channel's Anthony Bourdain No Reservation show from New York City.

With the idea of organizations pushing into real community interaction, great ideas start percolating about what can be done by using online communities to create real offline relationships, or in-depth niche online communities.

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

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

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

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

Finding The Right Approach

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

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

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

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

Make The Assumption That All Employees Are Involved In Social Media

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

Be Creative

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blogging - The Ultimate Tool to Connect With Your Users

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

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

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

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

Got Satisfaction?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

crowdSPRING

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

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

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

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

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

moviebakery

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

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



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

Two Things I Like Best About moviebakery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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