In this podcast, we discuss:

1. Quick Advice for what's working best in blogging these days (unique analysis, being first to release the news, posting out to others and broader participation in new social networks).

2. What's exciting in terms of new social media tools? Friendfeed's new instant messaging integration, enabling people to be more consistently engaged in online conversations.

3. ReadWriteWeb and their latest project, Jobwire.

4. How the state of the economy is effecting social media. The importance of Community Managers in social media: Do startups need Community Mangers?

5. The need for a Community Manager as it relates to drawing out the highlights of conversations, team building and response.

Note: Talking with Marshall is always a treat because he is so effectively tracking with what matters most in practical applications of social media. We had the pleasure of using him as a consultant last year to review our blog and podcasting application, Post Zinger - and he was able to provide some great insight within minutes of our first conversation.

Be sure to check out his new Jobwire project with ReadWriteWeb, and follow his personal MarshallK blog or via twitter at http://twitter.com/marshallk

In this podcast, we discuss:

1. Mainstream media's need to adopt social media, and Daniel Honigman's recognition of the touch points missing from traditional media and news organizations.

2. The Chicago Tribune's successful use of "Colonel Tribune" as the social media persona used to better reach people in the online social space.

3. The need for reporters to think of themselves as publishers as bloggers do, why news organizations who blog need to link to other bloggers and show thanks for links.

4. Success and strategy considerations with Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit and social bookmarking in general (reference made to Brett Boarders from Copy Brighter.com)

5. A brief mention of top tools used to build reputation, including Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin (reference The Conversation diagram created by Brian Solis)

6. Daniel Honigman's new blog, OldMediaNewTricks.com

Note: Kudos to Tribune Interactive for employing a forward thinker in the social media space like Daniel Honigman. Check out Daniel's new blog or follow him on Twitter at dan360man

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.

In this podcast, we discuss:

1. The value of Collective Intellect for social media monitoring

2. The specific values of online conversational monitoring in terms of base-lining share of voice among competitive brands, identification of themes, identification of influencers and what the sentiment is around a brand.

3. The maturity and differentiation of Collective Intellect's ability to track online sentiment, and approach online monitoring from a "topic net" approach as opposed to a simple keyword approach.

4. Tim's reaction to Google's potential patent-pending technology for identifying key influencers in Facebook, MySpace and others.

5. Tim's advice for getting started in social media (start monitoring with free tools).

Note: This subject matter has become extremely relevant to Room 214's social media agency services over the last two years. On that note, let us know if you are interested in hearing more about strategy, planning and/or tactical outreach efforts used in conjunction with these kinds of tools and data.

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.

In this podcast, we discuss:

1. What is Docmetrics, and why should a marketer take a look at this product?

2. The limitations of using standard web forms as a resource to collect sales leads.

3. Statistics of engagement on forms within PDFs vs. standard web forms.

4. The new opportunity considering ROI and measurement: the ability to know who is reading your PDFs, who they are being passed along to, which pages are being read the most (applicable to newsletters, white papers, case studies, media kits, PDFs handed out on USB drives, CD's, etc.)

5. Docmetrics costs and use case

Note: Peter said if you go to Docmetrics.com and mention my name, you'll get a free USB device. There is a free trial on the website. I'd love to hear anyone's feedback on their experience with it.

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?

We talk about:

1. What a community platform provides

2. Potential trends in community websites (community sites with typical website attributes vs. websites with bolted on community attributes)

3. Challenges with the technology

4. Businesses now focusing beyond the technology, and at the real business value of online communities

Final Note: Thanks to John and Tracey at HiveLive for allowing me to pick up a discussion directly after John's interview with Jeremiah Owyang.

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.