The 2011 National Business Ethics Survey is the seventh such report published periodically by the Ethics Resource Center, but this year’s edition turned up something unexpected. According ERC, “active social networkers,” which the organization defines as those who spend at least 30 percent of their workdays on social networking activities and who make up about 11 percent of employees who engage in social networking,

are much more likely than non-networking colleagues to accept behaviors that have traditionally been considered to be “questionable” or marginal behaviors (e.g., keeping copies of confidential work documents for use in a future job, personal use of the company credit card, taking home company software).

The survey also found that active users are also far more likely to experience pressure to compromise ethical standards (42 percent versus 11 percent of less-active networkers). On the ethical upside, these same active networkers also expressed a greater willingness to share unflattering information about their organizations and co-workers, which one would guess is logically linked to another quality of this group identified by the research: an increased likelihood to report lapses in ethics. These extreme social networkers may be more-frequent whistleblowers, but they also suffer for their outspokenness, being far more likely to experience retaliation for reporting misconduct than co-workers who are less involved with social networking (56 percent versus 18 percent).

The greater likelihood of social networking power users to learn of ethical lapses (or even opportunities to cut corners), as well as their increased likelihood to report violations, makes sense: After all, these are people who are probably receiving and sharing far more information than less-frequent users. But the greater propensity of active networkers to break the rules has no obvious explanation. Perhaps those choosing to utilize social networks to such a degree are naturally inclined to use whatever tools are at hand to get their jobs done rather than stick to the letter of the law (or strictly within the policies of IT) and this correlates with a greater willingness to bend the rules, but that is pure speculation.

What do you make of these findings?  

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1. Lack of a social culture. Mandating the use of social media tools such as social network-style collaboration and sharing applications like SocialText or Twitter-style messaging such as Yammer won’t create social interaction. Your company needs to start with a fundamentally communicative culture, one where open sharing and collaborating is encouraged. Just plugging in a new collaborations or communications tool won’t change the culture of your company. If people are hesitant — or even afraid — to draw attention to themselves within your company, they won’t welcome tools that force them into being more visible. While social tools can help expand and reinforce an open and collaborative environment, without mass adoption, they could potentially create deeper and darker silos within an organization. Examine your corporate culture first and create a more receptive environment for internal social tools.
2. Lack of public participation If your team members aren’t already comfortable with using social media tools in their non-work life, chances are they won’t gravitate eagerly to the new social tools you’ve set up for inter-company inter-relating. The flip side of this is that you may see more immediate adoption from team members who are already social media enthusiasts. Identify team members who use s social tools to communicate outside of work and enlist them to help kickstart the use of the new tools. They will often be more comfortable with adopting such tools, and can help champion them to their colleagues.
3. Lack of training. You may have some early adopters to champion your new internal company social media tools, but what about the rest of your team? Without proper training, those who aren’t as familiar with social networking and tweeting may feel left out or even overwhelmed. Even those who take to these tools like the proverbial fish to water will need some guidance as to how, when and why to use the tools in ways that fit into your company’s work processes. Before you install the software, re-examine how your team works, how they communicate and how to appropriately use the new social tools to enhance work and communications, not distract or hinder it. Provide written guidelines and training across the board, regardless of social media skills, to ensure everyone knows what is expected of them, in addition to how to use the tools properly.
4. Lack of access. Has your firewall blocked team access to public social networks? You’re sending mixed messages if you are asking everyone to be more social, to share, to collaborate, to communicate more frequently internally and yet shut off access to public social tools. Before you open the floodgates, however, develop your internal “rules of the road” for interacting in public social media spaces.
5. Lack of willingness. Not everyone will understand the benefit of using social tools internally, particularly for the workers who prefer to remain low-profile, nose-to-the-grindstone, and are content not being noticed. Using team-based social tools within a company can be taxing and can push some people beyond their comfort levels. Make sure the parameters you set up for internal use of social media tools are based on encouraging professional exchanges, expanding internal knowledge bases, increasing collaboration, and helping to improve communications. Be respectful of individuals who may not want to be so personal in a professional setting. Don’t force team members to share their personal interests, for example — make those features optional. While there is something to be said about knowing a little more about someone’s hobbies or interests to engender more human connections within an organization, it may be extremely off-putting to some.

What challenges do you foresee or are you working to overcome as you implement social media tools into your internal company processes?

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Recently, a recruiter asked me how I found great people to recommend for jobs, and I told him that it was because they were all people I had met somewhere that I had kept in touch with online. When the right opportunity came up, I had people that I could reach out to that I knew were likely to be a good fit because of my past experience with them in some other context. Because there are so many ways to keep in touch with people, I can maintain connections with them for longer periods of time and know how their lives and careers have evolved since the last time I saw them in person. The end result of these maintained connections is that my company can use me as a resource to help find great talent.

Gathering information also becomes much easier with these social connections. I remember doing market research before we had so much data in online databases, and to get information I went to libraries to find the data I needed. Now, I can get most basic information with a simple search query in a browser, but for certain types of information, the social networks are the best resource available. I often reach out to my Twitter followers for answers to questions such as, “what is your favorite tool to analyze x?” or “I need a device that does y, what should I get?” Sometimes I just need to talk to someone who works at a particular company, so I often use LinkedIn to find friends who work at that company or who know someone who does. Without an online network like LinkedIn, it would have been harder to find the right person to contact for information.

I can rely on my network of contacts because I’ve spent some time over the years building and maintaining the right kinds of social connections with  people. But this is where things get a little tricky: you need to spend time building those connections now to get the benefits later, and you don’t get the benefits without giving as much as you take. This means that you need to spend time answering questions and pointing people in the right direction when they ask something from you. You don’t want to be “that friend” who only comes around when she needs something. The way you build these relationships over time is by being there for people when they need you now; hopefully, someone will be there in the future when you need help. Like all relationships, it involves a balance between give and take.

This doesn’t mean that businesses should let their employees spend all day on Twitter, but it does mean that everyone needs to build time into their work for relationship building. As a community manager, keeping in touch with people is part of my job, so I spend some time using social tools, like IRC and Twitter, to keep in touch with people. But, I also know when to turn it off and focus on other work. As long as you take a balanced approach to relationship building as part of your jobs, you can still get all of your real work done today, while setting yourself and your team up to be even more productive over the long-term.

This is why I am sad to see organizations blocking access to social networks for employees. This is a short-sighted move made out of fear that a few employees will abuse it without any thought to the long-term benefits. Educating employees about productive uses of social networks and measuring employees based on what they deliver and accomplish is how you make sure that people are doing real work and not goofing off. You could block most of the Internet, and the people who want to goof off will still find a way to avoid doing work. However, if you stay focused on measuring output, you can deal with poor performers and figure out which employees are doing great work without preventing them from building longer-term business relationships that will make your organization more successful over time.

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A few months back, I wrote about 6 Ways to Revive a Dead Social Media Channel. I wanted to revisit that and provide a few other takes on what to do when a social network account is languishing or gathering cobwebs. In that post, I assumed you wanted to bring a dead channel back to life and were ready to make a commitment to it. But what if you don’t even think you want to have the account any more?

In order to do a proper assessment of your social network accounts, you first have to find them. A quick and dirty way to do this is to use Namechk, a site that is also helpful to see if your preferred username is already taken. If you’re like me, you are probably using the same username or similar name for each profile you set up bar it being unavailable to you. You can also check your preferred username or names at How Sociable and get back a basic “ranking” to show how sociable you’re being in various popular networks.

How Are You Using Your Networks?

Create a grid with your networks and order them based on how frequently you use them. I don’t know about you, but I use three networks daily and maybe refer to another three occasionally, but I have way more than six accounts out there in the social mediasphere. Here is a very rough example of my social network account grid:

While embarrassing to admit, I also have accounts on: Bebo, hi5, virb, digg, kirtsy, Biz Sugar, Sphinn, Friendfeed, Vimeo, Viddler, Blip.tv, 12seconds.tv, Upcoming, Eventful, Xing, Photobucket, Ning, Mixx, Reddit, Tripit, blippr, Plancast, eCademy, Stumble Upon, Kwippy, Audioboo, Squidoo, last.fm, NetVibes, Gather, Jumo and GiveBac, just to name a few. I also warn you now: Do as I am about to say but not as I do. I’m currently carrying out my assessment process and will begin the clean sweep over the holidays.

Determining Your Next Steps

So now here is the tough part. Once you’ve listed them all — or at least the ones you can find or remember — you need to make some decisions about each of the networks you only visit infrequently. I’ve boiled the choices down to four:

1. Revive it. If you really have the time to make a commitment to keeping those networks alive — or if you haven’t gone overboard so only have a handful a networks to maintain — you can get some helpful tips here: 6 Ways to Revive a Dead Social Media Channel.
2. Kill it. I’ve been on the fence for a long time about whether or not to kill many of my old, tired social network presences and my feeling right now is that I won’t kill them. If the network is really dead, it won’t be an issue. If it is just barely alive, you may want to try #3 or #4 below to keep your presence going with minimal upkeep. If for nothing else, I want to keep accounts with my preferred username even on a network I don’t use; that way nobody else can take my username and create confusion.
3. Refresh it and make it a “gateway.” I like this idea because if you’re going to have presences in multiple sites, they could attract a certain (even if only small) crowd that you could then drive to the key places where you want them to be, such as your blog or your Facebook Page. I’d go for consistency and use the same or similar bio across all of these ancillary networks. After replacing your old and outdated bio with a new, concise one, you may also want to update your image to one that is the same across the board. Then make sure you can enter key links just to the core networks where you want to drive traffic. While many of these networks let you link out to dozens of other networks, resist that urge and stay focused on concentrating on driving traffic to your key presences.
4. Refresh it and feed into it. Another approach is to turn some of these minor networks into satellite presences instead of gateways; not full destinations, but sites where people can get a good feeling for who you are and what you have to say. These are the sites where you can easily import RSS feeds from other sources, like MySpace and Tumblr. For these, I’d recommend focusing on only a few feeds: my blog, Twitter feed and Facebook status updates would be what I’d bring in. The key is to make sure you provide the right balance of messaging as a “package” and then look to place that branded package of key content in the sites where you can. In your bio, you may want to identify the account as containing feeds from your main sites and encourage people to visit — and connect with you — at those.

Trying to wrangle your social network identities and accounts into some semblance of consistency will most likely take a lot of time so be prepared to tackle the process a few accounts at a time.

How many accounts do you think you have, and what are you doing to manage them?

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Canadian company Swix offers solutions that can help businesses and agencies track and analyze social media community growth, as well as the results of campaigns or offers.

Swix can answer questions such as:

• How are my social media communities growing?
• How many people are clicking on my offers in social media, on my site or blog, and via email?
• Of those who click, how many take an action (purchase, provide data, etc.)?
• If there are sales tied to my actions or offers, how much money are my social media channels generating, and which ones are generating the most money?
• What’s my ROI based on money generated versus money spent on my campaign?

Swix offers two products: Swix Analytics and the new Swix Social Marketer, currently in beta. The analytics tool lets you track audience sizes for all of your social media properties in one unified dashboard so you can check the health of your community. You can generate analytics reports easily by clicking on the metrics you want to publish — audience growth or engagement numbers — and they are added to a report that appears on a password-protected web page to share with your team, client or other stakeholders.

Social media campaigns usually consist of a landing page or microsite where actions (a purchase or sign-up, for example) can take place. Swix Social Marketer generates unique URLs to help measure the traffic that various social media properties or tools are sending to the landing page and converting the most people per campaign. You can broadcast your offer out to your social network communities using the unique URLs generated by the Swix system for Facebook, websites, RSS feeds, Twitter and email. When people click on the specific link, the system tracks  what they do using cookies, so you know how many people clicked and who converted or took the prescribed action.

While neither of these offerings sounds particularly groundbreaking, they provide the kind of reports that you usually get by cobbling together data, mostly by hand. The cost of Swix Analytics is $9 per month, per brand. So you could start tracking all of a brand’s social media channels including Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, as well as its blog’s RSS, and see all the data on one page versus having to go into each channel every week and lifting the numbers for $9 a month. The next brand you want to track would be an additional $9 per month. Swix Social Marketer is currently in beta and free.

Is social media really the future of marketing? Join me as I talk about how the power of social media is grossly exaggerated. Social media is a powerful tool, but it is just one of many gears that you need to make up your marketing machine.

I agree with this statement, and it got me thinking about all the hype we’ve seen recently over social media. Where is this thing going?

History Repeats Itself

As happened in the early days of the Web in the mid-1990s, social media has its nay-sayers, doers, exaggerators and believers — that’s all par for the course in the cycle of a technology as it goes from introduction to mass adoption. If you started riding the social media wave early on, you have probably gone from curiosity to interest to avid enthusiasm to evangelizing. Then as the landscape began to change and others swooped into what felt like “your territory,” you may have experienced some irritation, nervousness, competitiveness, even fear. Then perhaps you regrouped and shifted your focus to carve out your space in an ever-increasingly crowded marketplace. Some of you may already be curious about something newer on the horizon, something shinier and more interesting than blogs, microblogs and social networks, like mobile and augmented reality.

No matter where you are in this cycle, one thing is clear: Social media is not just hype, in the same way that the Web was not just hype, or the Internet or the cell phone or the personal computer. HubSpot’s promotional email got it right that social media is a powerful tool (or perhaps more accurately, a “set of tools.”) But like any tool in your marketing, communications and customer relations toolkit, it is not the be-all and end-all.

The Masses Are Here

Two things happened to me in the last week that made me realize that this is the “big moment” for social media, right before the hype starts to die down, and we begin to take for granted that these tools exist because they will be assimilated into most people’s work and lives:

1. My dad told me he watched a segment on CNN about Facebook and social media for small businesses. My dad is a civil engineer and would admit to only being moderately active on the Internet. The fact that he took the time to watch the segment was significant. Social media, Facebook and Twitter are all becoming a recognized part of his world, although he still scratches his head about them. He’s “getting it” more, although he may still tell you he just doesn’t “get it.” Yet the information has reached him and has sunk in.
2. A friend asked if I knew how she could get a Facebook Page for her church’s youth group. She’s an accountant and other than having a personal Facebook profile is not a techie, unless you count financial and Quicken skills, of course. Her budget was about $200. And I knew she could get a suitable page for that amount of money because someone out there is proficient enough to build it for her for a few hours pay.

Basic Facebook Pages and Twitter accounts are fast becoming commoditized. The more challenging and critical aspects of using social media — the aspects that we need to pay attention to — are being strategic about how we enhance our social media properties; how to incorporate them into our processes, including our communications and marketing mix; and how to manage our social media properties and the people who connect with us through them.

Do you feel that social media is about to become something we take for granted, like the web?

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But what if that dead channel belongs to your company or organization, and for whatever reason, you now want to bring your neglected social media presence  back to life. Can that channel be saved?

Trying to bring a stagnant social media channel back from the dead requires more than just posting to it again and hoping that your connections didn’t notice your absence. Each channel that you’ve neglected will require different resuscitation techniques. For example, if you are trying to revive a YouTube channel, you need a strategy for producing compelling video and video production will need to be part of your overall content generation strategy.

Trying to revive a Facebook Page can be a little easier because once you begin interacting with your fans again and re-establish trust, they may be willing to suggest your Page to their friends. Once new people start “liking” your Page, even more people will see that action and hopefully build some momentum. But if you’re not participating on your Page with thoughtful interactions and compelling content, you’re not going to get far with bringing your channel back to life.

Before I talk about what you should do to revive a dead social media channel, let me be clear about the wrong way to go about it:

• Don’t post for the sake of it. There is a real temptation to just start posting frantically just to fill the void. Without some thought behind what you are trying to achieve with your social media channels, your efforts will either sound forced or empty.
• Don’t “fishbowl” post. “Fishbowl” posting is when you post something to a channel then use a different account to make a comment, “like” the post, or retweet it or perhaps get someone else from your organization (or friends or family) to do the same so it looks like you’ve got some activity happening on your once-dead channel. While there is a community technique called “seeding,” it doesn’t mean setting up fake exchanges to look like spontaneous participation. Planning for a conversation is one thing. Faking it with people in your fishbowl is misleading at best, lying at worst.

Here are some steps to take to breathe some life back into your social media channels and to make them thrive:

1. Map out a plan. Every good social media marketing campaign starts with a plan. Reviving a stagnant channel requires a plan for ongoing messaging, monitoring, management and maintenance. Your plan should include a social media calendar that incorporates all of your your content assets across channels as appropriate.
2. Address your absence. Make a brief statement about what you’ve been up to and why you haven’t been participating in your social media channels. You have to regain the trust of your connections, and an open and honest statement will make a good start. Even saying something like, “Due to resource constraints, we had to step away from this page for awhile. However, we’re now back on track and looking forward to interacting with you” can go far.
3. Start afresh. Treat your efforts to revive your social media channels the way you would if they were brand new, and you were starting at zero. Just because you have a few hundred followers or fans, it doesn’t mean they are paying attention or that they’ll do so just because you start posting again. You’re essentially starting from scratch so you need to work at it.
4. Acknowledge fans and followers. Look back at the history of conversations within each channel, and identify individuals who were actively participating in the past. Without being spammy, reach out to some of them to invite them back for conversation and information.
5. Post consistently and relevantly. Another aspect of gaining back the trust of your connections is to show a commitment to engaging in and updating your channels. Jumping in once every few months appears haphazard and careless. If you don’t show you care, why should anyone else?
6. Respond promptly. If someone acknowledges something you’ve posted through a comment or question, make sure you’re monitoring your channels to be able to respond in a reasonably quick manner. If someone is going to take the time to reach out to you or reconnect, the least you can do is be present.

Before you start reviving dead social media channels, make sure you have the time and resources to make a commitment to them. You don’t always get second chances, but even more rarely will you get a third. Don’t blow it.

How have you revived dead social media channels?

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As you are looking to fill in the blanks in your social media calendar? Here are some ideas you can use to develop the content for your blog posts, tweets and status updates.

Start with some “Marketing 101″ questions:

Next, you want to think in terms of “big picture,” longer-term items, then narrow your view to the more immediate and daily. Here are some questions you can answer to start filling in those blanks:

Annual, Quarterly and/or Seasonal

Start by thinking of “big picture” umbrella events and messaging:

• What events are taking place six months to a year out that inform your marketing efforts?
• What other marketing efforts do you have scheduled — or do you need to schedule — including press releases and social media releases?
• What are touchstone issues for your company that can inform messaging that expresses your company’s values?

Monthly

Concentrate on you want to achieve each month, including date-specific events that you can use to anchor your messages:

• What are you promoting?
• What actions do you want your audience to take (particularly ones that are measurable)?
• What’s happening with your company this month?
• What’s happening in your industry this month?
• What’s a hot, current or trending topic this month you can comment on?

Daily

Here are some ancillary ways to keep conversations moving and draw out the lurkers in your social networking communities:

• What are you reading?
• What are you thinking about?
• What are you doing?
• What do you want to know about your audience (i.e what questions you can ask them)?
• What’s happening with your company today?
• What’s happening in your industry today?
• What’s a hot, current or trending topic you can comment on?
• What are your friends, fans and followers saying that you can repeat?
• What are your friends, fans and followers doing that you can acknowledge publicly?
• What calls-to-action can you announce to attract attention and stimulate conversations and participation?

Also think of the types of conversation starters you can use to achieve particular goals while taking your community’s needs into consideration. Here are some ideas for posts, tweets and updates:

• Brand-related: Something about your company or brand to establish values, tone and “personality”
• Fun facts about your company or industry
• Press releases with specific company news announcements
• Coverage of real-world events
• Creation of online events
• Hybrid online/offline events
• Customer service oriented
• Crowdsource a FAQ for your company
• Ask for feedback
• Respond to feedback
• Ancillary but relevant or related topics
• Current news (relevant but not too controversial)
• Twitter trending topics
• Customer recognition (birthdays, accomplishments, etc.)
• Quizzes, polls and surveys
• Quotes (but make sure they are relevant and don’t overuse them)

An important thing to remember when you are filling in your social media calendar is to stay focused on useful messaging, but even more important is to be present and genuine. No amount of planning can ever take the place of those spontaneous moments in your social networks when you act or react in the moment and your friends, fans and followers respond in kind.

How are you planning for the content you produce and messaging you publish in your social media channels?

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Here are 10 ways to really connect with others through social media:

1. Focus, focus, focus. It is so easy to get sucked into the social media vortex, flitting from shiny object to tweet to update to post with a panicky feeling that if you don’t see everything, you might miss something important. Sound familiar? Stop the madness, set strict parameters designating time to review your social media channels, and stick to them. You may miss something, but you will find just what you need to find, especially if you heed the next point.
2. Listen attentively. Set up alerts through services such as Google Alerts, SocialMention and Tweetbeep, or one of the many fee-based monitoring services. Go through your alerts to take care of more pressing conversations where you should be paying attention. Then spend time really listening by reading your streams on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and the like. You don’t have to read everything but what you do read, give it real consideration and look for ways to move to #3.
3. Respond meaningfully. If you want to make an impact in these channels, make sure your responses to others are thoughtful. The occasional “ditto” or “uh huh” aside, every response you make — especially if out in the public stream- – is an opportunity for greater connection. Ask yourself: Is what I’m saying relevant? Will it resonate with my friends, fans and followers? If not, then why bother?
4. Retweet or share. One of the funny things about us humans is that we love to be recognized. In social media channels, recognition comes in the form of retweets, likes, comments and shares. When any of us publishes something, we want to be noticed. By taking notice and sharing what others have posted, we are giving them kudos. Keep in mind that who you recognize is also a reflection of you.
5. Provide value. In your own quest to be noticed and heard, are you giving people a reason to follow you or otherwise connect with you? So many people try to build their Twitter accounts by following a lot of people thinking “oh, they’ll just follow me back” but they haven’t even thought about why someone would want to follow them back. They aren’t yet tweeting or if they are, it is inconsistent and unfocused. The more value you put out there, the more followers you attract.
6. Ask questions. I find that some of my best connections happen when I ask questions. People love to help. And then once I receive good answers, I share those with my followers as well because I know others out there may be asking the same questions I am.
7. Be transparent. There is always a lot of talk about “transparency in social media,” but what does that really mean? I believe it means starting with honesty and being open; handling even difficult conversations in public as long as the only thing at risk is your own reputation. If you are doing good things, honesty and transparency are not a problem. If not, beware.
8. Take your time. We all seem to be in a rush, rush, rush wanting things now, now, now. Calm down. Slow down. You don’t have to hit 500 Twitter followers in your first month out of the gate. You don’t have to have 1,000 or 10,000 people liking your Facebook Page in three months. Sure, it might happen, but you’ll gain more friends, fans, and followers who really care about you by taking your time to care about them. Success in social media is not about accumulation; it’s about meaningful interactions.
9. Make connections. We have a job to do. We have something to sell. We are keenly focused on our own goals and objectives in business. But when you enter social media channels, the focus needs to be on everyone you’re trying to reach. While some people will tolerate your broadcasts of news, articles and information — and a few may even welcome them — most people are using Twitter, Facebook, and other networks to make connections with people as well as discover useful information. Embrace those connections.
10. Smile. What attracts people? A positive attitude. Even when something goes awry in your Twitterstream or you come across dialogue that feels like a backlash, be positive, thoughtful and look at the situation as an opportunity to showcase your honesty, transparency and caring. Everyone makes mistakes and people are more forgiving of those who own up to their mistakes and to be open to conversations about how to remedy the mistakes. Feel criticized in social media channels? Smile, thank others for their feedback, and think long and hard about what is being said about you or your company. There are lessons to be learned.

Social media channels and tools merely provide us more ways we can connect — they aren’t leading us to entirely new and different things that we’ve never seen before, but they are doing it in interesting, new ways.

How are you really connecting with others through social media?

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Your websites are probably on servers owned by a hosting company that guarantees you “no downtime” because they have (ostensibly) an intricate system of backups to keep your site up 24/7. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the rest have zero contractual obligation to you to stay online. Yes, they have good reasons to not go down. But what will we do if they do? It isn’t as if we have many other major choices of social networks where we can disseminate our messages on a massive scale.

Sure we can hop from Twitter to Facebook, but what if Facebook also goes down? I don’t see a mass exodus to MySpace happening. Maybe we’ll hunker down in our niche networks or micronetworks like Sprouter or BizNik or a Ning community waiting out the storm. Maybe we’ll check in furiously on Foursquare, Gowalla, Whrrl and the like, hoping someone notices that we’re still alive. Maybe we’ll sit in our blog and send out an email blast inviting people to join us for some conversation in the comments.

What Are We to Do?

If you’ve ever used Second Life for business, you’ve probably faced chronic downtime on a network where you’ve have put creative energies and efforts into building up a storefront or holding a major event, only for the Linden Lab servers to go wonky and you’ve lost sales or had your event ruined. With Second Life, those of us who were entrenched in making it a viable marketing and commerce play for our companies would curse the company that we loved for creating the platform but hated for putting our ventures at risk. Then again, it has never been Linden Lab’s fault that we’ve decided to depend on the servers of a single company for major business transactions.

We Are at Fault

What are we thinking? We wouldn’t build our company headquarters on somebody else’s land that they owned without a contract, some guidelines, guarantees and stipulations. And yet we spend hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of dollars creating assets and putting them on somebody else’s servers — and not even companies that are in the business of keeping things their servers up 24/7. They are in the business of getting you to be on their networks, because the more numbers they gain, the more powerful they become.

Our tolerance for their outages just goes to show how dependent we are on them. We think of these moments as par for the course because we are on the “cutting edge” and dealing with “new technologies.”  We’ve been mesmerized by the promise of exponential reach. We’ve been hypnotized by the potential numbers. We’ve been sold a bill of goods and come out of these moments of outage when some of our marketing and customer service efforts come to a screeching halt, wipe the sweat from our brows, smile feebly, put out our hands and say “Please sir, may I have some more?”

Can We Stop this Madness?

Unfortunately, no. We’re too far gone. We’re in this thing too deep. We’re intoxicated by those moments when we get some genuinely impressive results with our Twitter outreach or our Facebook engagement, and we salivate at the possibility of more of that good stuff. We’re hooked.

So if we can’t stop it, what can we do? Here’s my advice:

• Don’t replace your stable marketing tactics. Look at social networks and social media marketing as an augmentation of your traditional marketing, not a replacement. Don’t give up the rest of your outreach and marketing efforts.
• Have a contingency plan. Downtime on the big networks is inevitable. If you can’t be real-time on Twitter or Facebook, where will you go and where can your customers find you?
• Support niche networks. Yes, Twitter and Facebook are huge, but they’re not the only places offering the same kind of messaging capabilities. Set up shop in a smaller network and support their efforts to be the next Twitter or Facebook. They’ll love you for it and give you the best darned customer service, because they want and need you.

And keep in mind this mantra: Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. It’s an oldie, but a goodie.

What are you doing to better distribute your social media presence to safeguard against the Fail Whale?

Fail Whale screenshot from twitter.com

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This brings up a really great point that my business partner made to me today as we watched our Twitter followers and our client’s followers disappear: We don’t pay Twitter — or Facebook or most other social networks for that matter — to manage our social assets. We are getting this “stuff” for free. And this “stuff” is becoming more and more valuable to us.

This “stuff” is friends, fans and followers (or FFFs, as we refer to them in my company). The power of our friends, fans and followers eclipses the power of most people’s email lists because of their inherent ability for conversation and engaging interactions.

So what do you do when you lose followers on Twitter, or fans or friends on Facebook, or contacts on LinkedIn? Do you stop doing business? Do you stop communicating with your FFFs? Have you even considered a backup plan for times when the volatile free services we are relying on suddenly erase our assets? I’ve been using Backupify to archive my tweets, but if it isn’t archiving my Twitter settings including followers, then I’m still potentially losing assets.

Are we all suckers on the social web relying on the grace, generosity and skills of other companies to maintain the integrity of our company’s assets with the same kind of diligence and care that we would do for ourselves if we had the means? We control our web sites, but we certainly don’t control Twitter or Facebook and yet we entrust these companies — who we are not paying — to hold our assets dear.

I’m sure Twitter will restore our “lost” followers. During this time, it doesn’t appear as if we are speaking into a vacuum. I still see the stream of tweets from people I’m following. We just seem to be missing that magic “Followers” number on our Twitter pages. And this makes us uncomfortable, sad — even angry.

How dependent are you on your Twitter following to get things done? What are you doing to back things up so if a social network you’re using goes down, you haven’t lost your assets?

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5050biz calls itself a “virtual office,” and includes the following components.

• A social network, with features similar to LinkedIn and other networks.
• 1 GB of redundant, multi-hosted cloud storage for documents, with systems for sharing files. There are no online editing options, though, as Google Docs and Zoho Docs have.
• Online text chat with members you have connected to, rather like Facebook Chat. This is web-only, not Jabber-based, so it can only be accessed at the 5050biz.com web site, not through any third-party chat client.
• User-created networks, similar to LinkedIn Groups.
• A system for managing shared and personal contacts. It only has a few editable fields, though, so its usefulness is limited.
• A GoToMeeting-style screen-sharing and conference room system.
• Business consulting services from 5050biz, like a calendar of workshops and a ‘Pro Team’ page, where professionals selected by 5050biz are available for consultation.

5050biz contends that its site can be used as an intranet, project management and/or CRM system. According to the folks I talked to at the site, it was designed for businesspeople who are perhaps less computer-savvy than most web workers. They think that such people will be willing to spend money for the convenience of an integrated experience.

This would be a stronger argument if the site was better organized. 5050biz suffers from an inconsistent interface between its various sections, and some parts of the site didn’t display correctly in certain browsers. Granted, the navigation in sites like LinkedIn could use some work, too, but its free version is much more feature-rich, and it has the major advantage of a huge user base.

I didn’t find any of the 5050biz site’s tools that compelling. Like a lot of “all-in-one” services, it tries to do many things, and ends up doing none of them very well. We’ve covered many of the types of tools 5050biz provides, a lot of them at little or no charge. Most web workers are already using tools in these categories, so most of us can easily assemble a suite of tools we like. 5050biz.com charges individuals $24.95 per month or $249 per year. Business groups of 5-100 people can join for $49.95 per month or $499 per year. There is a free version of the service, but its features are very limited. There is a 30-day free trial to anyone who wishes to try the service.

To be honest, I don’t know many web workers who would benefit from 5050biz. It’s possible that it might be of interest to some of our less technically-sophisticated clients. Yes, it’s nice to have several tools in one place, but for us, I don’t think that the minimal convenience is worth the cost.

What do you think of 5050biz?

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In my quest to better understand why and how we use the term “social media,” I began at Wikipedia:

Social media is media designed to be disseminated through social interaction, created using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. Social media uses Internet and web-based technologies to transform broadcast media monologues (one to many) into social media dialogues (many to many). It supports the democratization of knowledge and information, transforming people from content consumers into content producers.

I can’t say the above definition is wrong, but it seems too narrow to me. The first questions that come to my head when I read that social media is just about publishing and broadcasting is “But what about Web 2.0 technologies? Where do they fit in? Aren’t they a part of social media?”

The Wikipedia definition of social media continues with:

Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein define social media as “a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content.”

The definition continues to focus on content production, and I say that the narrowness of that definition is wrong. I see social media as being more than just publishing and broadcasting, and I think that the word “media” in social media may be misunderstood or misused.

What is Media?

In our haste to label things — in this case the tools we are using for communication and interaction — someone forgot that “media” has multiple meanings, so some of us took the term “social media” to mean one thing, while the rest of us understood it to mean something completely different.

For consistency’s sake, I went back to Wikipedia to check how it defined “media.” Of the multiple definitions, here are the ones that I thought applied to the word “media” in the term “social media”:

In communications: In communication, media (singular medium) are the storage and transmission channels or tools used to store and deliver information or data. It is often referred to as synonymous with mass media or news media, but may refer to a single medium used to communicate any data for any purpose.

A medium (plural media) is a carrier of something. Common things carried by media include information, art, or physical objects. A medium may provide transmission or storage of information or both. The industries which produce news and entertainment content for the mass media are often called “the media” (in much the same way the newspaper industry is called “the press”).

In this light, the limitation of the definition of “social media” to publishing and broadcasting falls apart.

A few years ago, I began using the following diagram to encapsulate the many media — or tools, platforms, channels — that made up social media:

The diagram above reflects the more expansive view of social media; using “media” to mean “the storage and transmission channels or tools used to store and deliver information or data.“

So is this wrong? If you are going by the narrow publishing and broadcast definition, then it might be incorrect to say that Cloud Working (by that I mean producing work using cloud-based SaaS tools), for example, is social media. But then again, to work in the cloud, one must publish something on the web that is consumed — or collaborated on — by others, often producing new forms of the original content, right?

And what about widgets and RSS feeds? These are tools for distributing content produced elsewhere, but they aren’t tools for actually producing new content. One could argue that these tools aren’t social. However, they are the conduits of content from social sources such as social networks and blogs. So are they social media tools or not?

How about a content rating site or bookmarking site? While Digg and Delicious aren’t exactly content production sites, they allow users to rate, comment on and aggregate content in a more “social” interactive environment so, in a sense, they are social media tools because there is “social” and “publishing” involved.

The Evolution of the Term “Social Media”

How did the term “social media” evolve, and how can there be different understandings of this globally-used term? I think part of the problem is that some people believe that social media “replaced” Web 2.0 as a term while others believe that social media is a “subset” of Web 2.0.

For clarification, Wikipedia’s definition of Web 2.0 is:

…web applications that facilitate interactive information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design, and collaboration on the World Wide Web.

If one believes that social media is a subset of Web 2.0, like this:

Then social media would be the social tools and channels that fall under the broader Web 2.0 landscape of tools. That would mean that we should probably still be using the term Web 2.0 (annoying as it is) to refer to the “not exactly social” tools we’re using on the web.

Alternatively, one could see social media as an evolution of Web 2.0 tools, like this:

But if social media is an evolution of Web 2.0, then what do we call the “less than social” tools we’re using?

So, which is it?

1. Social media is a subset of Web 2.0, so anything “not very social” are still Web 2.0 tools.
2. Social media is an evolution of Web 2.0, so its definition includes peripherally social tools or tools ancillary to social tools.

I continue to gravitate away from the definition that social media tools must involve publishing or broadcasting because it is too narrow.

Who Coined the Term “Social Media?”

In 2007, danah m. boyd of the School of Information at the University of California-Berkeley and Nicole B. Ellison of the Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies, and Media at Michigan State University, published the paper “Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship.” In it, the first mention of “social media” was in this sentence:

Furthermore, as the social media and user-generated content phenomena grew, websites focused on media sharing began implementing SNS features and becoming SNSs themselves. Examples include Flickr (photo sharing), Last.FM (music listening habits), and YouTube (video sharing).

By their definition in this paper, social media was focused initially and primarily on social networks.

In a February 2009 speech, boyd goes on to say this about social media :

Social media is the latest buzzword in a long line of buzzwords. It is often used to describe the collection of software that enables individuals and communities to gather, communicate, share, and in some cases collaborate or play. In tech circles, social media has replaced the earlier fave “social software.” Academics still tend to prefer terms like “computer-mediated communication” or “computer-supported cooperative work” to describe the practices that emerge from these tools and the old skool academics might even categorize these tools as “groupwork” tools. Social media is driven by another buzzword: “user-generated content” or content that is contributed by participants rather than editors.

What is really telling is when boyd explains how we got from “Web 2.0″ to “social media:”

But for the last few years, everyone’s been a-buzz with the idea of “social media.” Right now, those who want VC backing need to bake the “social” into any Web2.0 app they create. There are many new genres of social media that have gained traction here: blogs, wikis, media-sharing sites, social network sites, social bookmarking, virtual worlds, microblogging sites, etc. These tools are part of a broader notion of “Web2.0.” Yet-another-buzzword, Web2.0 means different things to different people.

So perhaps we can blame — or credit — those who wanted VC backing on the convoluted use of “social” in everything that was formerly known as Web 2.0. At least we have an explanation for the (over)use of “social” in social media.

What do you think? How do you define “social media” and what tools do we use that are not social media tools?

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Photo by stock.xchng user kindhelper

I’ve added social networking features with BuddyPress 1.2 to a couple of my WordPress blogs without any problems. I can safely state that this new version is going to be very popular with bloggers all over the globe. Within minutes your blog will have Twitter-like status updates for your blog readers and writers (called the “activity stream”), who all now become members of your new social network. Also included out of the box are easy to use message boards and groups. Members can either join existing forums and groups or create new ones about any subject matter they’re interested in. They can communicate in the public stream or via private messaging with one another or via their own groups they establish on your social network. There’s also a useful Member Directory that allows members to communicate with other other. Every member has an extended profile they can fill out any way they want.

Here’s a sample of what a BuddyPress install looks like:

One of the things that I like is the option to make your home page either your blog posts or the activity stream. The choice is up to you: do you want to keep your blog as the focal point of your site or do you want the social network to take center stage? If you choose to make the activity stream your home page, then a new tab called “Blog” is added, which is where all blog posts will be available.

Also worth mentioning is the fact that BuddyPress — like WordPress itself — is extensible, which means you can add many new features and functionality via plugins and widgets.You can also change the look and feel of your new social network with themes customized for BuddyPress features.

I’ve been a BuddyPress user since its early beta and release candidate releases. While those early iterations had some minor bugs as you might expect, the BuddyPress support community was extremely helpful and swift with suggestions for fixes or workarounds. I expect the community to continue to be so supportive with this official release of BuddyPress 1.2.

Important: Just in case, it’s always smart to perform a full backup of your WordPress blog and database before experimenting with anything that integrates with your infrastructure, as BuddyPress does. There are many excellent backup plugins you can use. It’s better safe than sorry.

Disclosure: Automattic, maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

The organizers approached me to develop a web site to aggregate these posts in real-time before, during and after the event. In the process, I learned how such a site can reinforce the development of community.

I’m sure that you’ve been to events where good ideas are hatched and projects are planned, but often, despite the best of intentions, activity loses steam after the event is over, and nothing much gets done. It’s too early yet to judge the long-term effectiveness of this particular event, but I’m optimistic that it will make more of a difference than many such gatherings.

The electronic component of the event was relatively simple. We created a content-managed web site that would act as the hub for the many places that participants would post their contributions and reflections. We didn’t require participants to use a specific CMS tool (although they were welcome to use ours). Instead, before, during and after the conference, participants were encouraged to use existing technologies with which they were familiar to document their thoughts, and we then created links to their contributions.

Before the Event

The web site went live a couple of weeks before the event began. By that time, event announcements and registration had already been posted to a section on the sponsoring organization’s web site. Participants had been asked to interview another attendee as a “get-to-know-you” exercise. The results were to have been posted, but very few did so — I suspect because the CMS used by the sponsoring organization has a significant learning curve.

In the future, I would recommend creating the event-specific web site much sooner, and using a simpler CMS-, group-blog, social-network or wiki-based system for posting pre-event discussions and comments.

During the Event

The venue at our local university had limited wired connectivity, but it was sufficient for a video stream, an audio stream, and the web updates that I was doing. The video stream worked fine; the audio stream was less successful because the university had blocked the ports we needed. For the same reason, we had to use a MiFi connection to use FTP. Thankfully, this did not affect access to our CMS.

Participants were able to connect using Wi-Fi, which worked well, aside from some issues with entering passwords. I’m guessing that perhaps fifty people were connected at any one time.

The event web site included the following, all of which was updated frequently:

• An attendee list, with links to participants’ web sites and Twitter feeds.
• The event agenda. Since the event was an “un-conference” using the “open space” approach, much of the agenda was developed on the spot by attendees.
• A Twitter statuses JavaScript badge showing posts from the event. These tweets were mostly done by me on behalf of event organizers, but other committee members also tweeted through the conference account.
• A Twitter search widget showing a real-time feed of all posts using the conference hashtag. A full-screen version of this widget was projected in the room where most discussions took place, and it proved very popular.
• A link to a Twapperkeeper archive of the Twitter hashtag feed.
• A Facebook fan box linking to the event’s Facebook page.
• A Flickr badge and links to tagged photos and videos. Flipcharts and graphs were scanned or photographed, then posted to Flickr and to the web site as JPGs and PDFs. We also put up a Picasa link at the request of attendees, but it didn’t get used.
• A Ustream video feed. Video of many sessions was fed live into the site, then archived.
• A link to YouTube search results tagged with the event’s tag.
• An audio feed. Podcasts of many sessions were made available later.
• Links to blogs of those attendees who were writing about the event.
• A wiki for allowing attendees to post notes from event sessions. We chose to use a wiki rather than giving all users access to the CMS, although I think that in future we might go the other way, as some found editing the wiki difficult.
• An RSS feed for tracking changes to all of the above.

After the Event

We had not created a LinkedIn group before the event. However, participants indicated that they wanted to have an electronic venue for continuing the discussion after the conference. We surveyed the room, and discovered that almost everyone was already a LinkedIn user. Since LinkedIn groups and subgroups can be created immediately, we chose to use that service. We could have selected another group conversation service, though, and participants may move to more sophisticated collaborative tools as their discussions continue.

Planning and Setup

If you are ever called upon to provide this sort of support to an event, it can be fun and educational. Here are some tips to make things go smoothly.

• Get involved with the planning committee as soon as possible, and get an event-specific web site posted early.
• Agree on the hashtag for the event, and publicize it.
• Coordinate with the meeting venue to make sure that it has adequate power and bandwidth (both wired and Wi-Fi), and that it does not block ports.
• Plan to bring your own equipment if possible, or make sure that you have everything you’ll need.
• Set up a “tech table” in a convenient location.
• Have a group of volunteers who can cover the full event.
• Give yourself lots of time for setup and breakdown.
• Have a dedicated laptop and projector for displaying the Twitter hashtag feed — participants will love it.
• Consider what you’ll need in the way of cameras, scanners and printers. We had them all, and they were handy to have, but we could probably have done without them.

I found that attendees’ blogging, tweeting, recording and instant posting about the event reinforced what they were thinking and learning. Thus, the effectiveness of the event was increased, along with the potential for new learning and insights to cause change in the wider world.

How do you use social media and the web for events?

Images by Flickr users Choconancy1 and hajush

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A good bio shares your experience, builds your credibility, makes a first impression and displays your personality. Having a great Twitter bio is important as it can make or break a person’s decision whether to follow you or not.

Not only do you need to pay attention to what your bio says about you, but also the other fields in your profile including “Web” and “Location.” The Twitter bio may be small, but it’s powerful. Here is a checklist to ensure you your bio passes muster.

Does your bio include relevant keywords? Do you want people to find you by your career, company, industry, location? Why are you using Twitter? Who are the people you want to connect with? Use these to figure out what keywords to use.

The keywords for me include “writer,” “editor” and “games” (I do game reviews.) I built my bio around those and added a personal touch at the end: “Content maven aka writer, editor and bookwormette who plays with words and games (www.thegamezen.com) in between PTA work and refereeing the kids.” Yes, I snuck in a URL, even though it’s not clickable.

Does your bio cover what you do? People who use Twitter for networking and business tend to follow people based on what they do and their topics of interest. The “what you do” part can also get you on people’s lists. For instance, I have lists for writers, marketers, PR peeps and so on; and it’s the bios that helped me with building my Twitter lists.

What do you have under “Location”? While many of us can work with people all over the world, our locations can lead to surprising opportunities. In fact, I had lunch with someone I met in Twitter. Within just a few tweets, we found out that we live within a mile of each other! Again, this can get you on location-based Twitter lists like mine, which covers Dallas-Fort Worth.

Have you seen nonsense numbers for location such as UT: 12.345678, -234.5678? This comes from Twitter applications like Ubertwitter, but these mean nothing to most people. (FYI: you can enter these coordinates in Google Maps to find the person’s location.) Originally, I had “Plano, Texas” and changed it to “Plano, Texas, north of Dallas” so those searching for “Dallas” will find me.

What does your web link look like? This might seem like a strange question, but some people put in short URLs (tinyurl, bit.ly, ow.ly, is.gd, etc.) in this field. Most of us have learned the hard way not to trust this. Twitter doesn’t shorten the links in this field, so don’t use a shortened URL link. It reeks of spam. “Hidden URLs are usually spam sites or MLM marketing,” tweets Suzanne (aka ZeroCattle.)

Where does your web link go? There’s no one single obvious answer. Often I want to go straight to a person’s blog, if they have one. Sometimes I just want to read more about the person. Some people create a landing page specifically for Twitter, which is where my link goes. However, I wonder if pointing to my blog would be a better idea.

Suzanne suggests linking to your business’ web site or to a profile on a social network site, if you don’t have your own site. While it’s easy to set up your own site, not everyone has the need for one especially those in corporate careers. Peggy Dolane (aka FreeRangeMom) likes to see a person’s web link take her where she can learn more about them or their passions.

Don’t worry too much about having the perfect bio. Many of us have tweaked our bios over time while becoming more comfortable and familiar with Twitter. Even my own is probably version 3.3. Remember, be yourself. That’s what makes you stand out.

What do you look for in a Twitter profile?

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