I have always found that being humble in mind and spirit has worked well for me in life.

As I was gong through my normal pre-bedtime routines of checking emails, Twitter and Facebook, I was alerted of a video post by Kevin Rose, yes that Kevin Rose, on Seesmic about Twitter ID naming rights that was referencing a situation with Room 214 and Colin Davitt, the owner of the Twitter ID @room214. If you click on the Seesmic above link you will see Kevin's reasoning and position on the subject of Twitter IDs.

But first things first - Humility:

To Colin Davitt, my most sincere apologies in regards to the Twitter ID issue. You can rest assured that we are not interested in your Twitter ID, and wish you only the best in using it.

And to keep it - Simple:

As a company, and I can say this as one of its co-founders, we have never sought legal counsel or even discussed attempting to obtain the Twitter ID right to twitter.com/room214. Yes, about a year ago we did seek to secure the name, but it was one of those - "Awe shucks, someone already has it moments" and we moved on. Colin got there first - and that is that.

There were mistakes made in communications from one of our employees in their own conversations with Colin. We are all human, and from my discussions with this individual I can honestly say that there was never any bad intent in the situation, and now only heartfelt regret.

Twitter ID Rights

So, Kevin brings up a great conversation about naming rights in social media - one that we will most certainly take an interest in following.

Truth be told, I look forward to participating in the process and hope this situation only helps all of us in the long run.

Sincerely,

James Clark

co-founder, Room 214

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

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

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.

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.

• 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!

• 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!

Two days ago, Chris Brogan asked his followers on Twitter to 'tweet' him "Hi Cross Tech?" as he was in a business meeting, and I assume was discussing the effectiveness of Twitter. I wonder just how many people responded @chrisbrogan "Hi Cross Tech?" (I don't think Quotably has included all responses) I did. If you're pitching to a potential client about the uses of Twitter - you just backed your excact theory and possibly wowed them while in the process. Chris Brogan has 7,140 followers - even if only half of them were online at that exact moment - that's an outreach to 3,570 people that most likely blog.

Here's a seperate example: TechCrunch just posted today about Project Vino, an Australian wine site focused on community recommendations that tested a Twitter wine tasting model today. The post states:

"This event is one of the earliest instances of using Twitter to transfer an event as social and active as a wine tasting, into online realms. The end result? A resounding success. When you have a social drink which is best enjoyed sharing experiences with friends, it works perfectly with online communication tools."

If you check out the comments, some people loved the idea, some people simply hated it. Some people hated that TechCrunch even wrote about it. Remind you of something? Yep, that translates directly to what the masses have to say about Twitter. You either love it or hate it, however, no one can deny the power of words or the buzz those words create.

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!

One of the problems with twitter is that once you follow around 50-100+ people you get overwhelmed with the conversations going on, and the slow, manually refreshing web interface hinders your ability to participate. Here are 3 tools to help you be on top of the discussions happening on twitter.

1. Quotably. This is a web service that takes the linear twitter timelines and converts them into meaningful conversation threads. It's a great way to see a ton of replies to questions asked by some more popular twitter-ers. Its really cool to see a solution, or how you stack up against some of the other replies. Check out Chris Brogan's, Scoble's Quotably page to see some examples. As an icing on the cake, you can talk to the people you do not follow directly from quotably website. The downside is, since it has to figure out how to structure the threads, pretty often it gets it wrong and while they have a system set up that fixes threading, its still a manual process.

2. Twhirl. Twhirl is a huge time saver as it brings every twitter feature to the desktop as well as include some juicy extra features. You can lookup users, view their timelines, follow them, quickly reply and direct message with just 1 or 2 clicks. The app also has pretty good keyboard shortcuts so most of the time you don't even need to use the mouse. It has a great support for multiple accounts, so if you constantly have to switch between accounts this app is a godsend. Its built on Adobe AIR and can be used on both Windows and Mac, so 98% of us are covered. Check out this great Twhirl review post by Derek from derekville.net which covers installation and basic usage. It also lists some alternative applications, in case Twhirl isn't to your liking.

3. Twinkle or Hahlo. A lot of times you are nowhere near your computer, but if you have a Jailbroken iPhone (step by step instructions how to do it can be seen here, and even computer-illiterate James was able to do it successfully), I strongly recommend app called Twinkle. Every tweet you do comes with your geo-location (if you choose to include it) and you can easily snap a pic and attach it to your tweet, bringing photo-twittering to a whole new level of simplicity. If you do want want to or cannot jailbreak your iPhone, there are a few mobile safari apps that work pretty well. My favorite is Hahlo, it has ability to add friends, view their tweets, quickly reply and of course send your own updates. If you do not own an iPhone or if you just want to send a quick update, you can always use the built-in texting support by sending a SMS message to 40404 after you set it up under device settings in your twitter account.

There has been a lot of development in the 3rd party app space for twitter lately, and some of these might change over time, but for now I believe the 3 ways above will greatly improve your participation levels as well as ability to keep on top of your twitter addictions. If you have any other essential tools that you use with twitter, let us know in the comments!

While people with more common names will have a harder time ranking for your own name as the first result, the tips below are helpful to everyone. First and foremost it is important to not be afraid to use your name on social websites. As Gary Vaynerchuk pointed out, your legacy, which starts with the name, is more important than money (currency) you currently make. You are your own brand in Social Media and New Media Marketing, so to rank high for your name on search engines you must not be afraid to use your name.

There is 2 main ways to get this accomplished. First goal is to get your profile and your name on as many high trust sites as possible, here is a list of must-haves:

• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Pownce
• Flickr
• Digg

The big thing about these sites is they all allow you to link 1 or more sites, Pownce, Digg and LinkedIn being the best about cross linking your websites.

Second way to get the site ranked for your name is to simply comment on blog posts you find interesting. Best way to provide an insightful comment is to ask a question related to the post to initiate conversation. Check our our tutorial on how to post a blog comment. If you have troubles finding interesting blog posts, I suggest you check out reddit, digg or stumbleUpon, across those 3 sites, you have unlimited amount of fresh interesting content to read and ultimately comment on.

Keeping those 2 tips in mind, you should have no problem getting even the toughest names ranked well on search engines. If you have any other suggestions, please let us know in the comments. We would love to hear how those tips help you rank well for your own name.

I've been curious regarding the primary demographic that continues to drive twitter to increased popularity. Owyang had four questions for Shel Israel recently, one of which pertained to the one trend he is recognizing from his SAP Global Survey work.

For Shel, the question was a softball lob. "In every country, youth is driving social media adoption." Marketers who want to use social media need to understand what the most effective tools are: How they work, and why.

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.

• Search Bar on the top
• Invitation to take a survey (courtesy of very awesome wufoo)
  
• Easier-to-find link that helps add twitter to your blog.

The one I'm mostly excited is the search, while there are 3rd party tools available that do a lot more, its great that twitter team is filling much needed holes there.

Many of us observed back in 2006 when a man proposed to his girlfriend by utilizing the time lapse webcam set up in front of the Apple Store that opened in New York City. While public proposals are nothing new, the use of a 3rd party webcam in the middle of the night was a novelty.

With the rise of social media, it seemed inevitable that someone would eventually use one of the many tools to do exactly the same thing. And as it turns out, this is exactly what happened. Last week, the Wired blog reported that a San Francisco web designer proposed to his coworker via Twitter. It was conjectured that this was the first public proposal delivered over Twitter, but the blog was soon updated to report that earlier in the month, on March 2, another couple had already successfully become engaged. This couple lives in different cities and travels often, so the use of Twitter to seal the deal made the most sense to the husband to be.

While people certainly can and will propose any way they choose, is it more or less romantic to have these traditional rites of passage delivered in a very untraditional media? Would you be offended that it didn't happen the way it happened for your parents and grandparents, or would you just be too happy by what it symbolized to care how it happened?

It does take a certain amount of guts to publicly display your proposal, as a negative reply would be that much more devastating when it's visible to the whole world. While this does reflect a certain amount of commitment, and I do love social media, I have to say I think I'd still prefer the old-fashioned way. Though, I guess if you've waited 15 years to hear the question as was the case with the SF woman last week, getting that Tweet may have been the best thing she'd ever read. Perhaps her fiancee was just waiting for the right social media to come along to do the job??

He noticed that Twitter allowed conversations to continue outside of class, and not only led to topics directly associated to the "real world" but also allowed classmates to form a sort of community. More than just seeing these classmates twice a week, Twitter allowed the students to get a better sense of who their peers were.

The ability to track a keyword or topic and allow for instant feedback is another plus that Professor Parry discovered when using Twitter for the class. If there was a topic of interest, the student could easily follow it, and if they had problems with an assignment, they could send out a tweet and have their fellow classmates respond with suggestions.

Twitter also serves as a public record of the thoughts that were sent out during the semester, which can be helpful to sort through later. The Professor also noted that Twitter was surprisingly good at aiding in the teaching of grammar. One might think that because of the character limit that grammar would be horrible, but he discovered that the limitations forced students to be concise and to use proper punctuation, in order to avoid having the thought come across unreadable.

I find it interesting that not only has a professor implemented this still somewhat new social media tool in their curriculum, but that he found it to be an unequivocal success. Finding new and unexpected uses for a media tool is exciting--especially when it helps to facilitate and enhance communication in ways that were previously not possible.

What really caught my interest lately about Twitter is when I saw it being used in a smart and useful way, and by a public service agency no less! Being Room 214's West Coast representation, it recently came to my attention that the Los Angeles Fire Department has a Twitter account (http://twitter.com/LAFD). In their postings, they list all of the calls they receive and respond to. These posts cover the usual range of activity you'd expect--fires, accidents, etc. Whoever thought to post these events in Twitter should seriously receive a raise or a bonus, because this is a pretty ingenious (not to mention, practical!) way to use Twitter.

As you probably know from reading this blog, we are huge advocates of RSS and anything that allows you to easily disseminate information to an unlimited number of people on demand. The value of Twitter comes from its roots in social media--its ability to instantly share information in multiple ways. In addition to the RSS feed that you can subscribe to without being a member of Twitter, you can sign up and follow the updates via an instant messaging program or mobile phone. Just think of the possibilities if you live in the LA area! The LAFD Twitter page lists all of the fires and accidents and where they are located. Knowing whether a particular location affects your commute, you can plan a way to avoid the inevitable traffic jam that will occur as a result. Having the updates sent to you via mobile phone ensures that you are instantly alerted--probably learning about the traffic before you hear it on those radio news updates.

Since Twitter makes it easy to not only receive messages from anywhere but also to send them, the LAFD is able to post these events as soon as they happen. In a world that is becoming more and more dependent on technology and the instant gratification it helps to provide, finding a non-conventional use for a social media application that facilitates this need means that, not only does Twitter indeed have a valid place in the online world, but it is also probably here to stay.