I’ve got to admit that I’m not yet a big fan of Bing, but I really did enjoy these solid tips on video from Bing’s Scott Prevost.

The video topic is focused on search engine startups, but these basic principles can be applied in any software or website development project, (i.e. user experience testing, identify problems and make quick iterations, relevance, etc.). Very useful tips for your next project or startup:

Image via CrunchBase

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What does this mean for your business?

If you have an offline business, you stand to immediately benefit from location-based services. Here’s a few of the most popular mobile location-based apps you’ll want to leverage:

• Businesses using the mobile app foursquare engage in friendly competition to get locals back to their venue more often.
• Gowalla is a popular mobile app that allows customers to share their comings and goings with their friends, and every time they check in somewhere, their “passport” gets stamped, and they can win more prizes. Every city has featured Featured Spots and Recommended trips that your small business can become a part of.
• Every month, millions of customers turn to the mobile location-based app Yelp to share their experiences with local business. Small businesses can get a wealth of market information with the tools Yelp provides. The customer review power of this service is 26 million users strong.
• Another similar service is Loopt, which according to it’s website, “helps friends connect on the fly and navigate their social lives by orienting them to people, places and events.” You’d be smart to get your business and events listed on Loopt.
• Google Buzz is one of the newest mobile location-based apps to keep your eyes on. The site says that Buzz for mobile lets you “See what’s going on nearby, post a message tagged with your location, and follow your friends on the go.” Since it’s from Google, you can bet that Google maps is baked right in. Businesses promoting upcoming events have a huge opportunity for traffic with Buzz.

There are new mobile location-based services springing up all the time, but the most important thing you need to know to leverage these services is the power they have to fuel your business. Location-based apps increase traffic and sales to your business through the power of word-of-mouth. A customer is much more likely to come through your door if he knows her friends are there and love the place. A customer is more likely to impulse buy if the reviews about your business rock. An event venue is much more likely to be packed if people in a user’s geographic location are checking in with their mobile app. Businesses who ignore this inexpensive way to connect with their customers will leave millions of dollars of revenue on the table. Don’t be one of them.

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Image by Choconancy1 via Flickr

You hear kind & loving voices on the boutique stereo speakers. Video from the CEO is playing telling you about the boutique, and all the wonderful things you’ll find there. You listen, and you’re entranced.

The visuals are heavenly and soothing, too…and just look! As you walk around, you see products from other women you recognize, or would like to get to know better, at least.

You’re so engaged, so impelled by the magnitude and quality of products at this boutique, you feel compelled to give kudos to management. So you search around a bit to find someone who works at the boutique.

No one yet.

You search a bit more.

Maybe if you open this door…Nothing.

Then it hits you. You’re there all by yourself in this huge boutique! Why aren’t there any sales people here, you wonder? You’d like to buy something here.

But wait! Did someone call your name? Yes! But it sounds very distant. You walk toward the sound and you find that it’s the owner. She’s calling to you from outside the store. She wants to talk to you. You tell her you were just inside enjoying the boutique, but she insists on talking to you outside of her lovely boutique. In fact, she prefers to talk to you from a competitor’s store!

Can you feel the frustration of this potential customer?

This may seem like the beginning to a short fiction story, but it’s a scenario I see carried out all to often with new social networks and online communities. The community manager of a new or recently updated social network community oftentimes prefers to chat with community members outside of the community entirely. Any contact with customers take place at other communities like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn…all great networks, but competitors for your customer’s time. If your community manager is spending more time on these networks than your own, then your community is suffering.

In a recent Online Community Culture Survey, one of the top 5 most influential factors listed in a community’s culture was participation by the Host. And as women in social networks, this study agrees wholeheartedly with our viewpoints about the kind of networks we feel connected to. Network execs that instruct their community managers to pump out editorial information, then leave the brand community and convene elsewhere, yet expect community users to somehow feel connected with them have their heads buried in the sand.

1. It hijacked my pages and redirected my US visitors to a China sex site (NSFW but not really porn)
2. Some of the ads on the redirected site featured pictures of people like Chris Pirillo and Darren Rowse who seemed to be celebrity sponsors (I really doubt they were!)
3. Ironically, there was even 1 video ad for Lysol disinfecting wipes at the redirected site!
4. My web host, 1&1 (in the Philippines) could not see the redirect when I phoned them for customer support — or else lied because they didn’t want to help

This was definitely unexpected and no bueno, but I had backups to fall back on in the case of something nasty like this happening. What about your business? Do you have a disaster plan in place?

Please consider running a virus/malware scan if you were redirected to some random site from ghennipher.net. I’d hate to be viral in a bad way.

Did any of you have other experiences with my hijacked site?

Image by Ludwig Gatzke via Flickr

Do you have social network profiles that you just can’t seem to keep up with? If so, I’ve got a little story to tell you. A recent client of mine, a small corporation, once had an employee who created social network profiles all over the internet. This employee finally moved on to other things after 2 years, but left the CEO with no idea exactly where the company’s social network profiles were registered, or how to manage them.

Here’s how it all started. This corporation is very humanistic and communicative, but since it’s also a startup, funds are tight and they hired interns to take care of the ‘non-critical’ social media marketing. They definitely had a lot on their plate and didn’t really know where to start, so they took the scattergraph approach and created profiles at as many social networks as they could find. I know some of you are already starting to feel the pain…

After a couple of years of this, they were seeing no results and brought me in to work with their team. I started by looking at all of their social network profiles. I used a social media monitoring and analysis tool to find out exactly what was happening with their brand, and the kind of communiques their employee had put on social networks.

What I found is that in almost 2 years, most of their social network profiles were abandoned. There was some spotty engagement in Facebook and a business community, but for the most part, as far as these social networks could tell, the company might as well be out of business for all the interaction it had with the communities it was a member of.

But what’s the real cost to a company of keeping these social profiles active? Or more specifically, what’s the cost of allowing them to go dormant?

In working with this client, we identified 3 specific difficulties abandoned social network profiles caused for this company:

1. Missed Opportunities: This company was proactive in their marketing materials, and included their Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter profiles on their business cards. But they didn’t include social media in their communications strategy, and therefore lost business due to their lack of engagement. In a very uncomfortable meeting one day, we read the comments customers left for them in various social networks when they first registered. When these questions went unanswered, there was a quick drop in interest, and as expected, no additional customer communication.
2. Sullied Reputation: As much as the CEO thought the company was doing business the Web 2.0 way, the employee in charge of social media was really unclear about his role. Corporate social media is more about customer service and communication than it is about sharing news articles in Digg and Reddit.  2 years after the initial social network profile creation, we found that this employee thought social media marketing meant that he should spend his time favoriting funny articles in Reddit and Digg than providing solid customer service in social networks and community building through the blog.
3. Expense: This small corporation couldn’t handle their social media management in-house because they weren’t sure if all of the company-branded profiles out there were really theirs or not. They had a lot of cleanup to do and realized that hiring a pro to work with their team was the only way to fix it. As we worked through the mess, we found even more issues that were a bit easier to deal with, but their loss in productivity and money was significant.

In my experience of working with companies ready to develop and implement social media, social media literacy is critical to success. This list defines the ABCs of social media literacy:

• Assessment: Always start with an assessment of your company’s social media readiness before you jump in. An assessment should build on the foundation of your business objectives and company culture. You’ll want to assess your strengths and weaknesses in Leadership, Innovation, Engagement. You’ll need to ascertain the competitive landscape and learn if other companies in your industry are successfully using social media in their corporate communications and marketing.
• Buzz: Do your research. Find out what people are saying about your business or products, and find out what they’re also saying about your competitors. It’s easy to let this project engulf you, so break it down with tools. Some popular ones are Google Alerts, Techrigy, and Radian6.
• Communication: The real value in social media for business lies in how it’s broken down communication barriers between customers and companies. The latest tools and trends, the latest apps, and everything that people are talking about indicates how people’s preferences for how they want to communicate is shifting. It’s your job to stay fairly updated on these things. You’ll notice that a “social media campaign” is not at all similar to a traditional media campaign. You can’t just give it to the agency and forget about it. Don’t stay current, stay ahead.

If you’re not familiar with Blogalicious, it’s the first conference of it’s kind for women of color. It was last month (October ’09) and gave women of color who are bloggers an opportunity to be recognized for their contributions to social media. Unfortunately, women and particularly women of color are overlooked in lists of Social Media Leaders, so Blogalicious gave us an opportunity to truly be recognized. Blogalicious was pivotal in educating marketers on the importance of women of color in today’s marketplace, and helped us build relationships, was very inspiring and motivated us all to create successful blogs.

I’ll be talking about my experience at Blogalicious, and I’d love you to join me tonight and ask me some questions about my work in social media. The call is at 9PM (EST), and here’s the link: http://www.talkshoe.com/tc/42015

See you there!

The internet witnessed tremors of excitement when 100,000 exclusive invites to Wave were sought after by surfers who were curious, passionate, and addicted to Google.

A sense of Déjà vu is hard to avoid. Google sent out similar invites when it launched Gmail in 2007, to build hype. Privileged invites led marketing has been a potent weapon that Google has learned to wield well, and with Google Wave, it intends to go for a big kill…

Read the rest of the article at http://www.trendsspotting.com/blog/?p=1631

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In it, I share some of the best secrets I’ve learned about how bands are using social media to promote their tours and music.

If you have a band, or work in music promotion, get started using social media by using these secrets:

1. Your artist or band website: This is really your home base, the hub around which all of the other social media tools can revolve. If we were in the brick and mortar world, your own website might be the equivalent of your company’s main office. Some points you may want to consider for your site include:

• The site should be, among other things, user-friendly, creative in a way that is reflective of your band image, yet still as clear and uncluttered as possible.
• You want people who come to your site to easily find all of the vital information about your act (i.e. your bio, electronic press kit, show/tour schedule, email list sign-up, booking info, management contact, music, and merchandise, etc.). It needs to be a place for fans, yes, but also for the professionals to come for information access (for example, the press, booking agents, club and venue owners, labels, etc.).
• While you might create a blog or a conversation corner where fans can comment about your shows or whatever artist-related topic they’re up for, you might also direct them to your MySpace site instead and invite them to participate in your blog there. This will help create differentiation between those two sites.
• Your website can also be a great location for your band store. It can enable you to make your highest margins on your merchandise (T-shirts, posters, caps, etc.) and your CDs (you may want to consider having a third party handle the actual fulfillment of your CDs and merchandise, unless you have friends or fans who…continue reading here:

More about the article author, Christopher Harding: “Christopher Harding has spent 20 years as a songwriter, author, filmmaker, producer, and executive of film, TV, and music.”

How wideband social media is changing the world’s cognitive structure

People working together is like a large brain performing a computation, but in which each neuron has legs and tends to wander off at random moments. Hutchins coined the phrase distributed cognition for when people work together to achieve an outcome (see the book “Cognition in the Wild”), but for my taste, “neurons with legs” paints a sharper picture.

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If you can imagine that people working toward a common outcome – whether a play, a business initiative, a software release – are like neurons with legs, then it is clear why working in a war room with project maps on the wall has always been the preferred mode of intense collaboration.

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Working in different locations is comparatively unattractive, even if it is the “way of the world.” Communication wasn’t really free to start with, and the cost shoots up dramatically as soon as the neurons can’t see or hear each other, or notice when the others have wandered off.

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Software teams are getting practiced at working intensely across distances. The best teams use phone, voice– or video–Skype or equivalent, voice conferencing, online chat, online document collaborative and code synchronization tools to keep up with each other as much as they can … and of course, plane trips when they really want to communcate heavily.

(Why is it business people so often set up all the contract details by internet, but then fly to be in the same room when it comes time to close the deal?)

So far, pretty standard.

However, those communication mechanisms are deliberate, operating with the directed intention of transferring information from one wandering neuron to another. “Directed” is the key word.

Wideband social media adds a twist. By “wideband” social media, I mean broadcast media such as Twitter, Facebook, and geographic location revealing apps.

With wideband social media, the group of wandering neurons contribute to an emerging picture, which none of them could paint alone. The data that arrives is spontaneous, unpredictable, and informative in surprising ways.

“I’m going to lunch at the Mac.”

What information could this possibly hold? Well, if sent on Twitter or group-linked geopraphic locators, it produces a spontaneous get-together of friends and not-yet-friends, which produces a conversation, a company, a manifesto or a new friendship, all with long-term unexpected effects.

We’re only seeing the beginning of the story here.

Like any new technology, there is a dark side as well as a light. You can follow, but you can also be followed. Police can take steps to increase safety, or to oppress. The new GIS (geographic information systems) frankly scare me. I wonder how long before we forget who’s watching our movements and what they’re doing with it. However, that scary scenario is not part of this particular blog entry.

What is part of this entry is the question about what this means in a commercial context ( beneficent, let’s pretend, just for now .

Wideband social media extends a company’s ears.

• A person doesn’t like (or does like!) your product – you get to hear about it in a casual online complaint. You can move to take care of it immediately, long before it would hit a customer service rep.
• You get to see trends in the marketplace early, through gossip, long before the retailers publish the trend in their public reports – or even before it hits their cash registers.

And getting back to the start of the story, how does this impact commercial cognition?

I don’t have the answer to that yet, but I see an outline. The outline is real and current, just not yet tagged with words. Competitive companies will work it out long before we writers have words around it.

What I see, though, is a corporate idea with millions of remote dendritic connections, remote cognitors that live inside a picture that changes as rapidly as whitewater rapids. The people help paint, recognize, understand, and further change the picture, all at the same time.

(End note: Teilhard de Chardin coined the term “noosphere” (no-o-sphere) in “The Phenomenon of Man” in the early-mid 20th century to describe what he saw as the natural evolution from atoms to multi-cellular organisms (us) to a cognitive entity in which we would be only contributors. Scientific meetings, then the www were considered to be early versions of the noosphere, but from what I’m seeing, both of those pale in comparison to what’s about to happen with broadband social media as enterprising groups realize the power of so many dendritic connections wandering around acting with wideband social media attachments.)

Alistair

Short URL: http://Alistair.Cockburn.us/neurons+with+legs