Join me for an early evening of conversation as we discuss the launch of Seattle Social Media, a hub of connecting minds looking to share information and help build each others understanding. All attendees will be invited to fully partake on this new group and will benefit from free promotion as a participating member, in addition to reviewing tips and secrets presented by Barry Hurd regarding how to use social media for business.

The event will be held in North Seattle December 11th from 4:00 to 8:00 @ Third Place Book, Lake Forest Park Towne Centre, 17171 Bothell Way NE, Seattle, WA. You can also join in on the action via Twitter.

We will be having the first event informally at 3rd place books in Lake Forest Park. The area has several coffee and food options surrounding the main commons area. Those of you who are interested in learning more about social media can contact me, everyone is welcome to reach out and connect.

The entire four hour session (you don’t have to attend the whole thing!) is open to anyone interested in social media / new media. A great opportunity to network with like-minded professionals, discuss education with talented speakers, plan upcoming evening seminars, casual workshops, continuing education, pub nights, and the ability to communicate with people who want to help each other.

The groups main focus will be to coordinate and promote events that assemble professionals dealing with the evolution of communication- from information privacy concerns, search engine optimization, online branding, professional reputation, to the business side of the industry dealing with sales, marketing, and business development.

I urge every client at here at 123SocialMedia to educate themselves and listen to the conversation. It is far more effective to spend some educational time so that you know enough to ask the right questions. It is also far more effective to understand what types of like-minded campaigns have succeeded or failed in the social media space (while your thought may sound original, it may have lived and died a hundred times already.)

• The first author: Peter Kim, has an amazing resource of over 300 brand examples to look at. He has the most comprehensive collection I have found to date (I highly suggest you visit!) In addition to that piece, Peter Kim also has an article at Mashable covering the 22 steps to Social Media Marketing. One of the most valuable pieces of that article is his mention of the username check tool (one of my favorite free services) that tells you if a username is available on 75 different networking sites.

• 110 Ways Retailers are using Social Media is a good breakdown by Linda Bustos provides a platform breakdown of businesses using Facebook, Myspace, Flickr, and other applications.

There are many other resources for finding specific examples on platforms: here are a few that I have found useful.

What is all the Twitter about?

SocialBrandIndex has a useful breakdown of brands using Twitter.

Want to share your images?

Geoff Northcott covers brands using Flickr.

Want to understand Facebook?

Inside Facebook talks about improved SEO with Brand Pages.

Are there any other platforms and campaigns that you are specifically interested in hearing about? If so, leave a comment and I will point you in the right direction.

Looking at the real world:

As individuals, we may not have a lot of strength. As a group, we have untold might. Here in America, our forefathers understood this with the statement of “United We Stand”

This is an amazing lesson to teach our children.

Many people, both here and abroad are having rough and difficult times. Many have lost jobs or are working late hours to earn a few extra dollars to afford a memorable holiday season. Some of them are quietly standing behind the counter of check-out isle as we plan our own day of thanks.

There are those of us doing the most difficult of jobs: our soldiers, doctors, emergency workers, police, construction workers, cell tower workers, fishermen, customer service reps…the list goes on and on. They do jobs that we do not want to perform ourselves, but that make our lives possible.

Are we giving thanks? Have you taken the action to give back? Have you thought about how you can impact your community and the world around you?

• I have my son: a wonderful little boy who proves to me on a daily basis that you can change the world and we each have a spot in it.
• I have my outlook on life: we (us, you, them, I) have truly wonderful gifts that we often ignore. I cherish them, and often find them to be of great comfort.
• I have my friends and family: people I know love me, regardless of the distance between us or the amount of time that has gone by without us realizing it.

Being thankful, being grateful, requires both thought and action: the mindset of being thankful for what we have in our lives is essential to sharing wealth.

• Don’t focus on what you don’t have. Focus on what you do have.
• Don’t focus on people who have helped you. Focus on people you can help.
• Don’t focus on what you haven’t done. Focus on what you have done.
• Don’t focus on “me”. Focus on “we”

Take a look at helping out someone in need this holiday season. Focus your efforts on someone around the world or across the nation. There is probably someone you can help today, right across the street, or even in your very own home. It is a matter of reaching out to those less fortunate than us and sharing our prosperity.

If you are a reader of the 123SocialMedia.com blog and have ever found any of our information useful I am going to ask you to do three things:

1. Let everyone else know about it. If you want a quick link use: http://twurl.nl/4yqm8p
2. If you are local to the Seattle/Puget Sound area, volunteer some time and effort to a good cause. I am especially fond of www.mammashands.org: a group that helps the homeless in Seattle find hope and self-respect to get back on their feet. (You can contribute directly to them here) If you are somewhere else in the world, take a look at www.justgive.org and they will help you find a local group that you can help using your own prosperity.
3. In the next twenty-four hours, do something purposely kind for a stranger. Take a few moments of your time to talk with them, buy them a meal, give a child a gift, and make them smile.

In all of the above requests, have a wonderful and happy Thanksgiving.

~Barry Hurd

Jessica LD over at SocialMedia.biz sparked the project back into action with her post on social media training breaking down into segments, and her further detail over at the center for social media on “Who is doing the social media training?”

She breaks down a huge problem, that social media is being trained and evolved by a lot different industry personalities with different wants and needs. In addition to the three she detailed, another category is the “first timer” who doesn’t have much experience at all, but who is accidentally thrust into leading the charge “into the gates of hell” or who simply misrepresents themselves as an expert.

This has been a continuing problem in the marketing and public relations sphere, where big agencies are failing to adopt social media at a proper speed (often months or even years behind the curve), while smaller more nimble agencies like 123 focus on our niche and don’t get distracting by big collateral campaigns.

As part of this project, I am hoping that some agencies will come clean and learn without false pretense or competition. If the online media space continues to be subjected to companies doing things the wrong way, with little checks and balances, many industries, professionals, and families relying on the web to connect people in a good way will be subject to wandering around in the dark without a light to shine expertise on the path. I think we will be seeing a fairly significant transformation over the next few years as healthy certifications and processes are adopted for better business practices.

With that idea front of mind, I wanted to point our readers to the official “Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide” from GOOGLE. It is only 22 pages long. I clipped the following statement from Brandon Falls, a Search Quality Team member at Google on the official Google Blog:

Webmasters often ask us at conferences or in the Webmaster Help Group, “What are some simple ways that I can improve my website’s performance in Google?” There are lots of possible answers to this question, and a wealth of search engine optimization information on the web, so much that it can be intimidating for newer webmasters or those unfamiliar with the topic. We thought it’d be useful to create a compact guide that lists some best practices that teams within Google and external webmasters alike can follow that could improve their sites’ crawlability and indexing.

Our Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide covers around a dozen common areas that webmasters might consider optimizing. We felt that these areas (like improving title and description meta tags, URL structure, site navigation, content creation, anchor text, and more) would apply to webmasters of all experience levels and sites of all sizes and types. Throughout the guide, we also worked in many illustrations, pitfalls to avoid, and links to other resources that help expand our explanation of the topics. We plan on updating the guide at regular intervals with new optimization suggestions and to keep the technical advice current.

So, the next time we get the question, “I’m new to SEO, how do I improve my site?”, we can say, “Well, here’s a list of best practices that we use inside Google that you might want to check out.”

The above information is critical to launching a succesful online promotional effort and being discovered by searchers on the world wide web. If you have questions, please let me know. I would also love to hear from anyone if the would like more off-site materials to read (I tend to have huge volumes of data sitting on my desktop.)

A lot of professionals do not give second thought to the amount of information available (or not available) that is online about them. If you realize that 70% of recruiters admit to using a search engine to check a candidate’s background prior to an offer, you may never have a good job again. A member of the audience asked about identify theft online (which is a growing trend) when someone else shows up on Google with your name (perhaps they share a common name) or they simply put up an account with your name.

The easiest way to monitor this fraudulent activity is to monitor your name. You can very easily do this by setting up a Google Alert or using a service like Alerts.com

If you want to establish a healthy and professional online presence, check out these four articles:

• Professional Social Media Profiles
• 123 Guide to Linkedin
• Social Media Networking Testimonials and Professional Referrals
• Online Reputation Management- Google Alerts

To understand the significance that information technology plays in your online security, I also wanted to point out this amazing (and honestly scary) technology called “Sneaky”

Sneaky is an image based filter that has the ability to take a picture of your house keys from a photo and recreate the actual key for machining purposes (I.E. - it takes a picture and allows you to make physical keys.)   “In one experiment, the Sneakey team installed a camera on their four story department building (77 feet above the ground) at an acute angle to a key sitting on a café table 195 feet away. The image captured was correctly decoded.”

You can read a more in-depth article with images over at ReadWriteWeb. If you are interested in having me come and speak with your group, you can see a variety of social media workshops ideas or contact me to suggest one.

At the end of the day, does all this new technology scare you? What thoughts do you have on individuals protecting themselves online?

Enter the embrace of Social media politics. Four years ago I would have been hard forced to convince most decision makers how powerful online promotion will become. With this election however, we saw it in action.

As a social media adopter, I am biased in how professionals use this technology. However my opinion and expert conclusion is not alone: even the losers of this campaign are touting the reason they lost.

In a very interesting turn, RebuildtheParty.com launched with a call to arms for Republicans everywhere. It details a serious lack of effort on the Republican effort to reach into the technological minds of the under 40 audience and that the Internet needs to be the #1 priority for the next four years.

The RebuildtheParty effort is being led by an impressive collection of supporters who were unfortunately “a dollar short and a day late” to this election. The contributor coalition for RebuildtheParty includes:

• Rick Erickson, managing editor, RedState.com (Macon, GA)
• Mindy Finn, former eStrategy Director, Romney for President
• Patrick Ruffini, former Republican National Committee eCampaign Director
• Phil Musser, former executive director, Republican Governors Association
• Michael Turk, former Republican National Committee eCampaign Director
• Justin Sayfie, former spokesman for Gov. Jeb Bush (Ft. Lauderdale, FL)

Looking at the list above, I wonder and question “why now?” If they had began working together with such a strong message four years ago, perhaps we would have someone else moving into the Presidency. Would there have been a stronger online battle or would it have simply magnified the landslide? To realize that the entire Republican party was behind online adoption trends KILLED a nationwide effort that included billions of dollars in business being done every year. In essence, we just watched the largest business vs business, party vs. party war decided by one team accepting changes in our technology world, and who learned to embrace the mindset of the internet age (not young or old, but those who wanted information and involvement.)

On other sites like Mashable.com, we are seeing interesting questions about social media:

“How will President Obama use his massive Social Media influence?”

Hundreds if not thousands of observers have already noted the key role that the Internet and social media played in the successful campaign of Barack Obama. But when he’s President, how will he utilize the hundreds of thousands of MySpace friends, Facebook fans, Twitter followers, My.BarackObama.com members, and SMS opt-ins (just to name a few points of presence) to advance his policies and politics?

InformationWeek has this article:

“Obama Election Ushering in First Internet Presidency”

Pioneering use of Web 2.0 and social networking technologies by the president-elect’s campaign has seemingly transformed politics, and could influence government as well. The 2008 presidential election marked two great changes of the guard. The biggest immediate change, of course, was the election of an African-American Democrat as the next president of the United States.

But perhaps a bigger change over the long term was the crowning of the Internet as the king of all political media. It was the end of the era of television presidency that started with JFK, and the beginning of the Internet presidency.

Another article from Mashable helps compare the online numbers that draw a very hard and tactical indicator to why Obama won, weeks before election day.

“The Final Online Push”

Two weeks remain in the biggest online-enabled United States presidential race ever. The majority of the polls have Barack Obama leading in most states. However, nothing is final. The “swing states” are the final opportunity for either candidate to gain traction and solidify their candidacy as the future President of the United States of America.

Did this Presidential election open your eyes to the way online networking, word of mouth marketing, and social media is connecting like-minded groups of people? I would suggest you look long and hard at what just happened and begin to apply some of the lessons learned by political campaigns to your own model of business.

As a social media consulting group, the fourth quarter of 2008 is showing to be the best one ever.

The simple fact is very brutal for more traditional marketing and promotional channels: decision makers are forcing themselves to examine metrics that have gone unchecked for years in many traditional categories.

When things work, most companies do not keep a focus on them. When things don’t work, everyone looks for options and ways of stopping the loss.

As many companies pull-back on traditional marketing (some clients as far as 50%), a percentage of that budget is often being allocated to new options. Social Media falls into that “new option” category. That 1% to 10% budget float is entirely new money in social media category. The more effective social media companies like 123socialmedia are focusing more and more on connecting the metrics and provided ROI analysis, competitive analysis, marketing strategy, and the ability to increase margins on other online efforts is huge.

Ask questions: Businesses looking to explore “social media” need to really educate themselves on how integrated it is to other channel efforts. One of the most significant facts of the social media category is that it is rarely (if ever) a stand alone channel it is usually a secondary or tertiary landing and collaboration point for larger campaigns. This may mean it ties into tradeshow efforts, print media projects, or works in tandem to bolster search engine efforts. If you want a quick 20-30 minute education: read through these slides on social media measurement.

Michael’s article also asks the question: Is social media a threat to productivity?

As far as being a threat to productivity? Yes. A unplanned and non-existent plan regarding social media is an absolute threat to productivity. With a strategic plan, you are simply allowing the prospect and employee base to make business decisions for the company. Even if the choice is to not be involved in social media, companies need to closely examine the policy and ramifications of those decisions instead of ignoring them. I wrote an introductory article regarding corporate social media policy yesterday.

• The conclusion: social media is not a “end all, be all” It is a highly effective and worthwhile tool if it is used in conjunction with other marketing channel efforts. It has the very significant ability of “tying it all together” to provide results measurement on other print, radio, television, and online marketing, while also bringing in word of mouth and buzz marketing components. Understanding that there is a bigger social media strategy is essential to growing a business in the online world.

What types of budgetary concerns and questions do you have with where things are going? Do you feel a trend either way? Is your budget in the social media space going to increase or decrease for 2009?

To that end: Linkedin launched a new application section that brings several new tools to your professional network. They are not “gee whiz” features, but more robust and business minded applications that can help save you time and money (if you only use them!)

Before jumping into the detail of actual applications, there is one thing we have to keep in mind: using a tool like Linkedin is about reaching out to people. This applies to professionals who are not online.

As you learn about these new tools keep in mind who is in your network. Think about the individuals who are one or two connections away, the people you have not seen for a few months, the people you want to know: but haven’t had something worthwhile to make a sincere connection.

This information is worthwhile. In fact, it is priceless. Teaching someone to connect with other professionals and help their business online is life-changing.

Step One: If you haven’t done it lately, login and complete your profile. Upload a photo. Spruce it up a bit. Add a few connections, a bullet point here and there, and make sure to get rid of those useless items that do not reflect who you really are.

Step Two: Give a few recommendations to people in your network. Give some honest and sincere testimonials for the professionals that have helped you in the past. As a goodwill gesture, write an unsolicited recommendation to someone: it is sure to leave a lasting impression and improve their day.

Step Three: Look at the new applications on Linkedin. Right now there are nine different applications. I am only going to focus on a few to start you off: the ones that can make an impact for you today.

Google Presentations & Slideshare Presentations: if you have ever put effort into creating a presentation, wouldn’t you like to think that someone has actually seen it? By having these applications on your profile, you can share your presentations across your network: increasing the chance that the “right set of eyes” sees your information and picks up the phone to do business with you or give you feedback. Sharing expert insight and information is critical to defining yourself as an expert.

Company Buzz: this is a useful Twitter application that allows you to be notified when someone is talking about you or your company on Twitter. This is wildly useful if you add a few keywords to the application so that you are notified about competitor names, industry terms, and helpful information. It will keep you up-to-speed on things happening in your industry, and most importantly keep you knowledgable about conversations around your name.

Blog Link & Wordpress Syndicator: if you have a blog somewhere else, you can now syndicate that blog to the Linkedin community. That allows your profile to be updated with dynamic content from your main blog and keeps you from having a lackluster profile on Linkedin.

While the above applications may seem to some like trivial items: the primary idea is to locate the business benefit for your needs, and to share that same out-of-the-box thinking with your network. Every person using a social network will have a different requirement of the platform, and every professional will find a very worthwhile benefit if they put a thinking cap on.

If there are some specific insights you have to using Linkedin for business, or know of some useful applications to help our with online networking: please share them below!

Social media policy is very much like buying a used car for the first time. For your protection: it is not about the car, it is about the questions you ask during the process. If you don’t know enough about used cars; asking something as basic as when it had its last oil change may be completely beyond your realm of understanding. This lack of knowledge around fundamental basics means that you may be facing a decision process that you are completely unprepared for.

As a helpful hand to this process I have collected some articles that you should give some thought to. If you are a decision maker with corporate communication policy, I greatly suggest you spend the thirty minutes and read through all the articles: IT WILL SAVE YOU TWELVE MONTHS FROM NOW.

The first point (Made by Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester Research): “2/3rds of US online Youth (ages 12-17) use social networks at least monthly, and 20% of teens use them daily. (Q4, 2007) There’s no indication that I’ve seen that the adoption will decrease as they enter the workforce.”

If a social media policy is not in place today, it SHOULD BE. The workforce at large is slowly and surely being absorbed by younger generations that use online communication daily.

For some companies, a completely open policy works. According to Rohit Bhargava: Frank Eliason (the Comcast manager behind Comcast Cares) says that Comcast has had a completely open social media policy for years. “Their official point of view is that their employees are allowed to participate authentically, as long as they disclose their affiliations, don’t divulge secret or proprietary information and don’t act as though they are an official spokesperson or allowed to speak on behalf of the brand.”

In a more detailed breakdown- Lorelle VanFossen from BlogHerald brings up a list of questions and points around the topic of “Do you need a social media policy?”

Susan Heathfield from About.com has a sample social media policy framework. It lists a dozen bullet points and has some good follow-up article links.

You may want to check out the Blog Council, they have a fairly decent document on disclosure policy.

What are the top questions you are finding in the policy space at your company?