Hey Everybody,

This morning as I checked my favorite nooks and crannies of the Web, I found this:

Brian Solis and Jesse Thomas created this image (the Conversation Prizm) to update Scoble’s Social Media Starfish from last year. It does a great job of sorting all of the social media services out there into categories.

I have been reading a lot of articles and posts lately from others in the PR/Marketing/Advertising industries about social media confusion and how it is actually hurting them. Many have cited that the overwhelming number of services offered has made it difficult to sell any of them to clients. In response to that, I would say that we need to stop being lazy. More choices are not hurting the sale, your lack of knowledge about this field is. More choices, the greater chance that the right niche service is out there for your specific need.

If you don’t know anything about this area, but want to sell in it, hire a social media person at your firm or a freelancer to consult on that project. If you want to learn, but the task seems to daunting, just pick out one or two from the Prizm that you might wanna try or have heard about and just start using them. That is how everyone else who is in the know got to know.

And if you are really stuck on something and need advice, just ask! All of these offerings are social, which means you are free to just ask questions in most of them. Or you can check and see if someone else has already asked. When I have a question, I use LinkedIn Questions or Ehow.com. But there are many more.

Good luck in your learning, If you want to ask me a question. Hit the comments or @ me on Twitter. My handle is swept14.

Best Wishes,

Will Flavell

Hey Everybody,

I am sure that many of you know about the DEMO conference. If not, it is like the superbowl of emerging technology. They have a couple a year. The next one is They are doing a great job right now of maintaining a strong Facebook Group with all kinds of apps, videos, photos, and much more. They also have a really interesting Twitter presence. Their name is DEMOtweets (we really need to do something about that name: tweets). And they have a 500+ user LinkedIn DEMO group.

So, DEMO has a lot of presence online and they have a lot of great groups and great stories. So, what you might ask is a missing strategy. Well, the missed opportunity is for the technologies. With DEMO being the superbowl of emerging technologies, and all the tech news media and VC (venture capitol) groups world-wide watching, you would think that every new tech company in the world would be putting out info. Well, they are not. Very few are, in fact there is not one fan video up yet on the DEMO facebook group, which has 545 members so far. This is a great opportunity for one of those presenting companies to engage a highly interested audience.

Here are some of my recommendations for applying this strategy:
The strongest social media opportunity for DEMO right now is the DEMO Facebook group. It has 545 members and currently hosts no fan videos. The right tech company could be the first group member to put up a product demonstration video in the fan section. It would also be a good platform to post up your videos of DEMO or the DEMO training process. This way you can be contributing content and writing updates that are DEMO themed and that will also showcase your idea or product. Every update that you make to the group will automatically show up in the feeds of all the Facebook DEMO group members’ pages. This involvement with the Facebook Group will be used to build relationships with others in the tech community and to spread your name.

In addition to the DEMO Facebook group, DEMO also sponsors a Twitter account named DEMOtweets that provides DEMO stories to everyone following. It currently has 75 followers. We can join Twitter with a DEMO-themed account, follow the DEMOtweets account and send them messages. We can also use this platform to promote whatever product or idea at the DEMO conference. The tech press also regularly does Twitter searches on subjects or events of interest. The more DEMO posts that we have the higher the chance that we will get noticed and picked up by this press group.
DEMO also runs a LinkedIn group with more than 500 members. LinkedIn only offers one-to-one communication between its group members. It does not allow for multimedia posting either. But, this will be final stage in the social media communication strategy for DEMO. You can use LinkedIn to make business connections with those users that comment on our Twitter tweets or Facebook group additions.

Enjoy,

Will Flavell

LinkedIn Announcement: The Good News and The Bad

Written by Marshall Kirkpatrick / December 10, 2007 / 3 comments LinkedIn, the holy grail for widget developers seeking to prove their software is serious, has taken some interesting steps towards a more social future in the release of some new features and discussion of their forthcoming API this morning. While some of what was announced is very cool, I’m not sure how ready the business world is for widgets. I’ve still got my fingers crossed for the future, but today’s news hasn’t gotten me very excited yet.

First, the Good News

This is something we’ve really been looking forward to, there’s so much potential here. The best thing that LinkedIn announced today is a cool new partnership with BusinessWeek. You’ll now be able to hover over peoples’ names in stories on the BW site and see how you’re connected to them via LinkedIn. That’s awesome. The news site will also offer a social bookmarking button to share an article just with your network of contacts. That’s mildly interesting. Both of these features have some real potential and should be rolled out to more sites soon.

LinkedIn also announced its newsfeed today and a new reading list that will highlight the most popular articles around the web among your contacts. There’s no Beacon action here, it’s just for articles visited by clicking through links in LinkedIn. In other words, it’s not worth much yet. Add the ability to import your APML profile and get recommendations and then we’re really talking.

Finally, modules on the newly designed home page can be moved around by drag and drop. As Allen Stern at CenterNetworks pointed out, if LinkedIn partnered with an existing startpage, embraced this paradigm whole-hog and became a destination site – then things might really change.

For now, I find all of the above (except the Business Week pop-up profiles) rather uninspiring. If that’s the good news, let’s talk about the bad news, shall we?

Hey Suits – You Ready to Get Funky?

Unlike Facebook, to which the as yet unavailable LinkedIn API is inevitably being compared, this platform will be a closed one. The whole thing so far has an awfully closed feel to it. The company put up two blog posts last night about the announcements and has not allowed a single comment to pass through moderation on either yet. Is this the glorious new open social future? Compare the small consumer social network Multiply, where Friday’s upgrade announcement now has 264 text, video and audio comments left in response. Business-focused readers don’t leave comments and business sites are slow to embrace discussion and other social interaction meaningfully. It’s part of a larger pattern for businesses to be grounded in a posture of protection more than risk taking. LinkedIn doesn’t seem aimed to change this. See Anne Zeleneka’s excellent post on the announcement for good thinking along similar lines.

The Platform Will Be Wonderful, We Promise

Beyond just being closed in the selection of 3rd party partners, the LinkedIn API still isn’t available. It will be based on the Google-led OpenSocial, in theory cutting short the 18 months LinkedIn said it was take to unveil its platform when Facebook was launching its. An increasing number of voices are criticizing OpenSocial – see for example Lee Lorenzen’s “OpenSocial Half-Baked and Google Execs Don’t Seem to Care.” I’ve gone from thinking that OpenSocial would be a frightening step towards a final Google omniscience to being surprised by its incredible limitations (“it should be called OpenWidget” some people said at launch) to not knowing what to think.

Summary of the Bad News

To summarize: today LinkedIn announced some cool new features and made more promises about what will be a closed platform for select 3rd party partners, built on top of an API of questionable worth and targeted at business users with a history of disinterest in social applications. It’s not ready yet. Did we mention that the users will be people with money, though? I imagine that for that reason if nothing else, widget developers will remain very interested. I’d like to see LinkedIn do something better than this, though. For more discussion, see extensive coverage via Techmeme