Supporters of Conan O'Brien have joined forces to (loosely) create Team COCO. This team has some major traction, and it's all because Conan O'Brien's core audience is a group of Facebooking, Youtubing, non-traditional TV watching 20-somethings like myself. What I find most interesting is that the online conversation, one large enough to effect a sea-change in the world of late-night, is being held almost entirely outside of the reach of Conan O'Brien, Jay Leno and NBC.

There's also an online store where you can buy a tshirt and print of this now well-known image. In case you're too broke and/or busy to buy a t-shirt and attend a rally, you can simply download and print out an image of Conan's hair and either wear or display it. He's also had tremendous celebrity support (catch this great video of Jimmy Kimmel on Leno).

Even google search appears to be on Team COCO.

So what?

Conan's ratings, which have consistently been lower than his CBS counterpart David Letterman, have been up dramatically this week. Last night he beat out Letterman's 1.0 rating with a 1.9, a number which represented Conan O'Brien's all-time high. And, regardless of all the negative press, NBC has enjoyed a huge increase in viewership for The Late Show with Conan O'Brien.

Does this mean NBC will reverse its decision? No. The timing and fate of both NBC shows remains undecided. But it is without a doubt that NBC, any other network shopping a Conan show, and Conan O'Brien himself will take this extremely vocal audience into account as they move forward with decisions. It's a tough debate with this group; you've got an audience who doesn't affect a traditional metric (live viewership) but still will take the time to speak in a collective voice loud enough to make headlines.

So if you've got a group who is going to talk, it's important prepare for their reaction. I'd venture to guess NBC had no clue the effect of their conversations regarding late night. It looks like it's had both positive and negative effect thus far. I'm interested in the outcome.

What's Next
Tomorrow, I'll be posting an introduction to what we at Room 214 refer to as the Conversation Maturity Model - a simple point of reference illustrating the path from listening to leading. I'll also offer some top line consideration on the value of starting a conversation.

1. Basic but scalable for more advanced monitoring once comfort levels grew
2. Easily shared with other individuals in the organization and easy to learn
3. Affordable - no budget for an advanced social media monitoring tool such as Radian6.
4. Ability to monitor real time conversations across multiple social media platforms including blogs, forums and twitter

To accomplish this list of asks "on the cheap", a one tool solution wasn't an option and a strategy that integrated several tactics was needed. There are dozens of monitoring tools available and selecting the right tools often adds to the complexity of starting a monitoring program. Below is a mix of tools that we have recently proposed and implemented to better monitor relevant online conversations and help companies get started in the first phase of a social media marketing campaign: Listening.

1. Filtrbox
For: Blog, Forum, Mainstream News Monitoring
Filtrbox analyzes online content and uses keywords to filter results. We set up Filtrs with keywords based on themes and included negative keywords to exclude irrelevant traffic. After several days of monitoring and adjusting the keywords we were able to receive a consistently relevant stream of blog, forum and news posts/comments. We then configured daily email alerts for all posts that met our filtr criteria (forwarded to the entire internal team). As an added level of reducing volume of posts, you can raise the FiltrRank to exclude lower quality sources. As a next level of reducing volume, we recommend identifying who the top influencers are for you company/industry and enter their RSS feeds to monitor them specifically.

2. Hootsuite
For: Twitter Monitoring
When it comes to Twitter monitoring it's gotta be real time. While Filtrbox does have real-time Twitter alerts, for up-to-the-second monitoring and particularly engaging we recommend a Twitter client such as Hootsuite. In Hootsuite, we set up multiple tabs each containing multiple columns to better organize relevant conversations by brand, industry, co-workers, Twitter keyword searches etc... We also compiled a list of all known online influencer Twitter handles and created a group on TweepML so the internal team could easily follow known influencers and organize them into a column in Hootsuite to track them. Another benefit of Hootsuite is that you can login from any computer and multiple users can access the same account.

3. Google Reader
For: Discovering and Monitoring Influential Blogs
Google is our RSS reader of choice for its ease of use and many options for starring/sharing. For this project we had a list of known influential industry blogs and competitor blogs that our client wanted to track. We simply compiled all of the RSS feeds from the blogs and entered them into an OPML file generator. We then had each team member import the OPML file which automatically adds the blog subscriptions to your reader, versus having to add them one at a time. Google Reader also helps you indentify new blogs to subscribe to via the Browse for Stuff link. This is a great tool for searching via keywords and identifying blogs with the most subscribers.

4. Delicious
For: Additional Monitoring, Tagging, Sharing and Collaboration
Delicious is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing and discovering web bookmarks. We set up a new Delicious account and recommended the internal team sign up for individual accounts and install the Delicious tool in their browser. We then set up specific tags and trained team members on how to tag relevant posts. Team members could either subscribe to the specific tags in their own Delicious account or subscribe to the feed in their Google Reader to see all tagged content.

The combination of the above 4 tactics was key to a successful, comprehensive monitoring program, i.e. the sum was greater than the parts. After implementation and training on each system, companies were better able to integrate social media monitoring into their busy daily schedules because for the most part, the content was coming to them. This greatly improved awareness for internal teams and identifying opportunities for engagement became much easier.

It's important to note that the stream of content you receive is rarely perfect right off the bat and some tweaking is required. However, a little diligence in the first few days really pays off in delivering an efficient monitoring system with less noise.

Do you have a favorite mix of monitoring tools? Let me know.

The Task
Take our existing Facebook pages for Travel Channel and make them more viral, more informative, more interactive, and more targeted.

How We Did It
In order to make the Travel Channel pages more viral, we took advantage of the sharing functionality accessible through Facebook's API. We built a unique left-hand sidebar for every featured tab, which enables visitors to share specific content with their friends. We also included share buttons on video and blog posts to allow users more flexibility when suggesting content.

We made these pages more informative by featuring content frequently requested by fans. In this case, that content was episode information for each show. We created a custom tab with information on when an episode would air and provided links back to TravelChannel.com for pictures, travel guides, and episode descriptions.

The pages became more interactive through our custom polling application. If you use Facebook, you know how popular polling is within the system. We took this concept and created a tab where users can tell us what they think about recent episodes. This application also provides Travel Channel with a way to gather feedback quickly from viewers.

Finally, we strategized to make Travel Channel's pages more targeted. Brands are all about gaining new fans on Facebook, but they often neglect to tell users why to become a fan. We solved this problem by creating a landing page where all non-fans would land. This tab includes a welcome message, an overview with information about the show, and a call-to-action suggesting they become a fan of the page.

The Results
It's all about meeting business objectives, so here are the results of the re-design. In addition to the four objectives I listed above, our goal was to increase traffic back to TravelChannel.com. Within one month after re-designing their show pages, traffic has increased significantly and Facebook has become a top-referring source for the site.

Do you have a Facebook success story? I'd love to hear about it!

So you've got 10,000 Twitter followers. Your Facebook page is blowing up. You have a huge following and you are feeling pretty good about yourself. You have built up a great community and you have spread your message, but you are also sitting on the power to create some real positive change.

I am inspired by Mashable's latest effort, Summer of Social Good. They have made it quick and easy to donate to some great organizations and they have harnessed the power of their influence to encourage their readers to do some good.

Honestly, this is something we should all be doing as marketers in the social media realm. You may not have the cash on hand to donate, but you can easily use your influence to inspire some of your followers to donate their time and money.

I thought up a few quick and simple ideas on how any business can do some good through social media:

1) Run contests that encourage people to volunteer. (ex: We are giving away a Macbook Pro. The first person to volunteer 30 hours at the Denver Rescue Mission gets the prize.) Twitter contests are getting pretty popular. If your followers are willing to re-tweet a message or leave their house for a scavenger hunt, certainly you can get them to volunteer for a nice prize.

2) Get involved with sites like http://www.snapimpact.org or http://www.globalgiving.com and find something that inspires you. Encourage your online communities to go and check out their content and possibly donate to a cause.

3) Build relationships with local non profits in your area (only a google search away). You can help them by simply tweeting a link to their site every day, or giving them space on your wicked cool Twitter background.

Your followers are donating their time to read your updates, interact with you, and support your efforts. It is just as simple to donate some time to do some good in the world.

I tend to let vanity get the best of me when it comes to my social networks. This has earned me a respectable amount of Facebook friends (about 550 or so).

What do I get in return for clicking accept on those friend requests? A Facebook feed full of pure un-adulterated garbage. Every day I get annoyed with the rubbish that continues to appear in my Facebook feed. I may even venture to say I get upset.

Why? Because I have to spend 10 minutes a day blocking ridiculous quizes, un-tagging myself in chain letters, or declining invites to apps that I don't want spamming up my feed.

So today, out of frustration, I asked myself, "what are these people doing?"

Why do they not find all of this irritating? Why must I constantly be blocking "Which Sex in the City character are you" quizes?

Then I came upon the answer: They are bored. Purely and simply, they have nothing better to do with their time. They come to Facebook because they are bored and they want to be entertained. I, therefore, should not be getting worked up about my Facebook feed.

While working in social media it is easy to get too serious. At least twice a day I see a link to a blog post about "The 7 Deadly Sins in Social Media," or "57 No-No's on Twitter." In our world, it is important to come off as professional and ahead of the curve.

However, we need to keep our audience in mind. While Facebook is a great place to network and re-connect, most people go there everyday because they are bored and Facebook is entertaining.

Before you get completely caught up in following all the rules, keep in mind that most people use social sites to be entertained. If you are not engaging or entertaining, most people won't pay much attention.

• 25% of posts through Deicious are pages that have yet to be indexed by search engines.
• 35% of URLs submitted are first-time submissions (roughly 120,00 URLs submitted per day).
• Tags are considered 93% relative to associated content.

What does it all mean? People, not search engines, are assigning relevance to content. Whether they know it or not, it's their keywords, their descriptions and their opinions that are making the impact.

Now consider how your opinion is shaped to people you are actually connected (networked) to online. Granted, some connections are stronger than others (Peter refers to three kinds of online connections in his Ad Age post) - but all are still highly relevant because they are ultimately chosen by you.

Bottom line: Marketing and PR folks need to get what this is about - and if you are a "social media expert", then you really need to be on it.

In this podcast, we discuss:

1. To follow or not to follow: Acceptable twitter manners - great people in person doesn't always transfer to great people on Twitter.

2. Advantages of Facebook vs Twitter: Facebook throttles down notifications, meaning you won't receive constant updates from a person on Facebook, even if they are posting 20 items an hour.

3. A day in the life of Jeremy Tanner: It starts with his iphone (of course)

4. Bridging the gap between online and offline communications: It's about keeping two-way conversations. Also, don't forget or be afraid to pick up the phone.

Be sure to check out Jeremy at http://www.jeremytanner.com, and follow him via twitter at http://twitter.com/penguin

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

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.

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?

• 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!

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.

You've just spent the last week learning everything you can about building your Facebook page. Your last blog post generated 27 comments. You've spent hours reading competitor blogs and commenting on the personal blogs you follow. You have been Twittering like a pro. You have tried to immerse yourself in every pertinent online conversation you can find.

In the meantime, you've forgotten to send out your overdue email newsletter and implement the list building tactics you just read about. You haven't updated the survey on your site and your inbox has 42 new messages you haven't answered.

It's easy to lose yourself in Facebook applications or spend the day searching blogs to see who you can add on Twitter, but amidst all the new social media opportunities, don't forget about the tried and true tactics that worked to promote your business initially. More importantly, don't forget to leverage your new social media skills to continue building your business the old way.

Here are a few tips for a happy marriage between old internet marketing and new opportunities:

Old tactics promoting the new:

• Let your customers know that you can be found on Twitter by including it in your email signature or placing an icon with a link on your site.
  
• Ask them to become a fan of your Facebook page in the next email newsletter that you send out.
  
• Direct traffic to your blog via PPC ads and post sales, special tips, events and insider information frequently.
  
• Generate a personable, approachable feel by posting pictures of the staff and the office on Flickr for customers to browse through.

New tactics promoting the old:

• Alert people after a customer service call or have staff at your brick and mortar store tell customers that your business can be found on Twitter for fast, quick service.
  
• Include an email sign up form on your blog, or write posts occasionally encouraging visitors to sign up.
  
• Find your returning customers on Facebook and add them as a friend, asking them to become a fan of your page.
  
• Follow your target market through Google Blog Search and post comments (don't astroturf).
  
• Celebrate customers by posting photos of them using your product on your Flickr account.
  
• At the end of your survey, thank customers and let them know about your latest podcast.
  

Now, get out there and promote!

• Be who you are, be as transparent as possible.
• Don't play in your own playground, be active in communities that might find what you offer attractive.
• It is imperative to be involved in the social networks on the Internet and the real world
• We live in a world where every person's word of mouth reaches a lot more people.
  

Lets look at some examples of these at work.

Being Transparent , Diverse, and Active in Social Networks.

Companies that are talking back to their customers are becoming more transparent at it. They are the ones who openly acknowledge mistakes and quickly respond to complaints A lot of startups today are more and more engaged in the conversations of their customers. They are monitoring and answering questions on Twitter, getsatisfaction and responding to negative blog posts and comments. Craig Newmark posted a responce on our own very blog, and many other companies are aknowledging social networks.

While being transparent is a proven tool to get more attention and buzz, it is not a must have. There are a lot of successful companies out there that do not talk back. After all, the bigger the business, the harder it is for it to innovate. They talk in glamorous product announcements, commercials and press releases, they drink brand juice and spend millions covering up or downright denying their mistakes.

A World of Word of Mouth Marketing.

Word of Mouth is nothing new, NewEgg, Netflix, Apple, In-N-Out Burgers all had very strong growth partly due to word of mouth, but instead of talking back, they gained popularity through high quality of service, ease of use, competitive prices, elegance and tasty food - that's what makes good idea into a successful business. However, and this might sound crazy to some, talking back, fixing your mistakes and accepting your screw ups could be what brings quality of service up, makes product easier to use, lowers prices or create that absolutely amazing taste. Do not be afraid to try it.

Google Reader recently added ability to include a note with your shared items, and mentioned in their blog post that they monitor "Google Reader" on Twitter. Zappos has a special Twitter page set up and over 300 of their employees are encouraged to use Twitter, they host free parties, do contests and respond to peoples comments all through Twitter. John Fisher of Sticker Giant also tracks his and even his competitions name. All of those I have discovered through one of social networks, social events or at parties and gatherings, or simply put, due to word of mouth marketing.

While the question of "How do I talk back to my customers" is a subject for a whole different blog post, I would love to hear how you currently or plan to implement world of mouth into your business marketing plan? And if not, why not? Talk back and you can contribute to that post!

While there can be advantages to outsourcing your online persona in this manner, there can be possible disadvantages as well. As someone creating an online presence, you should be sure that you understand what you want to use your personal site for (if indeed you even choose to have one amid the sea of social networking sites). Social sites often let you create a profile where you provide links to personal sites--these can help drive traffic to your personal page. Likewise, providing links to these social sites on your personal page can drive traffic to these external representations of you.

Ultimately, these two types of sites--personal and social--can balance each other out and drive more traffic and attention to you than you might otherwise have experienced if you were to forgo one of the options. However, the more you outsource, the more potential for less traffic to your personal site, and if this is where you house the most important content, you might see smaller readership.

You might also want to consider the implications of giving up direct control of the hosting of your content and what it means if these external sites were to change their policies or suffer a major outage. The more sites you sign up for, the more you have to keep up with in terms of updating, which might be cumbersome depending on how many social sites you use.

A reader in the comments of this blog entry did make a good point though in stating that giving out a personal URL somehow doesn't have the same weight that it used to. In a time where virtually everyone has their own Myspace or Facebook account, people want like to respond with like. For the average person, these social sites are sufficient--there is no need to bother with HTML and creating a custom site. It's also that much more effort to remember a personal URL than it is to know that you can look someone up later on Facebook and friend them.

Is there a need for an average person to have a personal site anymore, or is it completely redundant when the info can be found on multiple social networking sites? Should one keep all content in-house, or outsource it to other sites such as Flickr, Del.icio.us, Myspace, Youtube, etc.? I for one have not formulated a definite answer to these questions, but I would love to hear any opinions on the matter!

The top two questions I think this research addresses are: 1.) is UGC a fad?, and 2.) Can it be monetized (what every good marketer wants to know)?

The answer to the first question is no. As the executive summary of the report suggests, any notion of UGC being a passing fad should be put to rest.

I remember in the late 90's, leading web developers and UI strategists knew there were great reasons to push for "interactive experiences" on the web. What many had no clue about was that so much of the experience would actually be created and driven by the users themselves.

Knowing where we are today with this should seriously prompt organizations to look at how they might use UGC as part of their marketing and customer service loop.

In terms of monetization, the research is in the context of you guessed it, advertising. The main thing I get from the report are that advertisers are hesitant to enthusiastically push advertising next to UGC. Or, as Andrew Keen was quoted in Newsweek last month, "nobody wants to advertise next to crap."

Still, there are reports of organizations that plainly state they are having success selling ads next to UGC. Video sharing site, Veoh, is one of them -- selling banners as well as video advertising for approximately $8 - $20 per thousand impressions (CPM).

What's your opinion of UGC? Do you think advertising will continue to find its way into the mix?

John Speck (aka Frymaster) had one of my favorite responses to this on his own blog: "This is Your Brain. This is Your Brain on a Server." In his "not so humble opinion" he talks about how the Internet is still a toddler, about a three-year old to be exact.

His point: don't put too much stock into all the social media apps (facebook, twitter, etc) because they are all transitional. "The Internet has a lot to learn about communicating with the society around it."

We are the Internet... we are the children, we are the ones to make a brighter day, so let's start living. Oh, sorry, got distracted there. I'm wondering what will eventually qualify the Internet as teen-aged. Because it is the collective of society, won't it always be childish?

I'm finding the phrase "social media" is more of a fad than the phenomenon that actually encompasses it. EMarketer's report on User Generated Content, released this week, shows that social media (for lack of a better term) is here to stay.

To Frymaster's and Chris Brogan's point, I say the "experts" are the children who can behave older than the rest:

They are the ones that actually help pick up (it's messy out there), know when to obey (some laws of marketing should never be broken), and get invited to more play dates (client gigs).

Uh, yeah! I'm not shocked at all by the recent report from Pollara that garnered data stating:

"Of more than 1,100 adults polled in December, nearly 80% said they were very or somewhat more likely to consider buying products recommended by real-world friends and family, while only 23% reported being very or somewhat likely to consider a product pushed by "well-known bloggers."

Marc Macalua, had a great post referencing this study and how prevalent WOMM initiatives laser focus on A-List bloggers, forum veterans and senior Diggers to spread the message.

It's a strategy that if done right and the content is compelling, the story had a differentiation edge, there's good emotional content and it's simple to understand - you've got something that can go viral. So that equates to about 1% of all the stories out there that WOMM agencies are trying to work with.

Litmus Test

The true litmus test for an organization is to see if it's employees believe in the product, service or program enough to tell their "real-world" friends - many of which by the way they are connected to, and communicate with via social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and MySpace.

This of course would require that your employees are maintaining social media profiles, but even more importantly, would require that your employees are proud enough of the company, their role in the company and its achievements to tell their friends and family.

Swallow Your Pride And Do The Following:

1. Ask your employees if they would be willing to discuss your company's product with their friends and family on their social networking sites.
2. Find out how many of them actually do it.
3. If people are not willing to do it, ask them why.

The answers might just be the solution to the problems that are plaguing your organization.

A few posts back, I did a video post on Social Media Starting Points, where I recommend that individuals start participating in social media via LinkedIn. The reason as I stated in that post:

"Because on LinkedIn you can quickly connect with individuals you have had personal relationships with through previous employers, universities, groups, etc. It's human nature to be more comfortable around the people we already know."

With the adoption of aggregation services like FriendFeed where in one place we can now see blog posts, family photos, articles they liked, restaurants they loved and music they are listening to - it's becoming easier for us to maintain communications and stay up to date with what our "real-world" friends are doing out there in the wild and wacky world.

More of a Reason to Encourage Social Media

So this report that states real world friends and family are more influential to purchasing decisions only strengthens the case for companies to actively support and encourage it's employees to participate in social media programs.

Now, you would think in my line of work I would be a Twitter junkie, but that's not the case. I've had a love/hate relationship with Twitter and still do. First I was indifferent, then slightly interested, then just plain annoyed. Now I'm intrigued. It's entertaining to be let into a little window of someone else's psyche. However, I still don't want to know the mundane details of everyone's day - but then it hit me. I don't have to. I can cater Twitter to work for me - and that's what it's all about. I finally get it.

Twitter isn't just a form of entertainment - a recent project for a client taught me that. I am now seeing Twitter in a new light, changing my contentious opinion of why it's so popular. I'm well aware that within a couple weeks, I'll most likely have Twhril installed and will be following all of my friends on a minute by minute basis - keeping up on the mundane details of the day. That's just how powerful, entertaining, addicting and effective social media is.