My Sunday Morning and the Boston Globe

Adam Here:

On Sunday morning I woke up before the kids, grabbed my cup of coffee, sat at the kitchen table and read the Boston Globe section by section, folding and flipping while the tips of my fingers slowly turned gray… Wait wait wait, that isn’t exactly how it went. With mug in hand, I booted up my laptop, went to my favorites and clicked on www.boston.com.

Question # 1: How many other people do this?

 I frequent the site and noticed that Boston.com has both a Facebook page and Twitter account. As of Monday, they had 8,000+ fans and 10,835 Twitter followers. As everyone has seen lately, newspaper circulation has been dropping — to borrow from the eloquent Snoop Dog — “like it’s hot” and the Boston Globe is no exception and yes I read that online. See a related post I wrote about Boston.com possibly charging to read news.

Question #2: If you are a Facebook Fan of Boston.com and they start charging you to read or become a subscriber, will you still be a Fan?

For now, I’ll enjoy my coffee, Boston Globe and become your FB Fan. But it might be short lived!

the coveted google wave invite

I finally got my Google wave invite! For some reason, my husband is on the list to try out all of Google coolest newest stuff and I’ve been after him for weeks to invite me to Google wave. I guess he was bored today.

I will play and update you all soon!

Organizing via Twitter Lists

 

Scoops Here.

Twitter Lists are novel concept to most socialmedialites out there, however many organizations can use this tool to help simplify its collective voice as well as provide a slew of other benefits.  In essence, Twitter Lists is now what we would call groups so you can assemble the types of people you are following as well as get the opportunity to follow new people.

Below are some great ideas in which Twitter Lists can streamline and organize your organization’s Twitter presence.

Staff Directories

Within Twitter Lists, you can compile those within your organization so you can not only manage what is going on but also track the overall tone of those you are working with. This is also a great function fo which you can bounce ideas and policies.

Maintaining Thought Leadership and Staying Informed

Organizations can create lists with their most referenced news outlets, publications, news stations or possibly their favorite bloggers. This is a great way to keep up on current industry news, ideas and trends.

Information Flow

Monitoring the flow of information and ideas can be easily regulated with within your groups. All Twitter lists can be made public so that it can be seen by anyone, for example this is great for creating lists of recommended followers. Controls can also be set to private so that only the creator of private lists will be able to see or subscribe to them, not even those on the list can see private lists. This would be a great feature for counter intelligence for competition.

Building Your Follow Base

Twitter lists are a great way to find large and more targeted lists of people. There are also directories for these lists as well. Below are some ways to find lists:

People You Follow – When you visit the profile page of anyone on Twitter, you’ll be able to see any of the public lists they have created, or any of the lists they follow. (NOTE: you may have to click “View all” to see every list if the person has created or is following a large number of lists.) You can also see any of the lists that person appears on. If you have a particular target in mind, you can follow their lists.

Listorious – Listorious is a third-party site that maintains a categorized directory of Twitter lists. You can search or browse through lists by category, and find the most popular lists.

TweetMeme Lists –TweetMeme exposes the most tweeted links on Twitter. Just like it does for links, TweetMeme also finds the most tweeted about Twitter Lists.

For more how-tos with Twitter lists, check this out.

Social Media–Phase II???

ADAM here:

On Tuesday, I had the opportunity to speak about the importance of Social Media and Web Presence at the South Shore Chamber of Commerce Expo with Lisa Morrissey.

We shook things up a bit — instead of sharing my usual pearls of wisdom for an hour, we broke into a Town Hall format. We wanted to create an interactive discussion and field questions on social networking, blogging and anything else that came to mind. Having a few of these events under my belt, I was prepared for the usual questions:

∙ How much time does it take? A: Depends what your purpose is.

∙ Where do you get ideas? A: Everywhere.

∙ How do you start? A: Just jump right in.

∙ Is physical networking dead? A: No, we’re all here aren’t we??

Those are just a few of the FAQs, and I apologize for the short answers (come to an event for the longer version or shoot me an email), and we received a few of those, but not many. I discovered that this audience was ready for Phase II… the Phase I of tips and encouragement may be coming to an end. Social media is no longer the next thing for a business, it IS the thing and this audience had already embraced it.

To my surprise, the most popular questions were about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and Blogs. I welcome Phase II!

Does this mean more people/companies are adopting and incorporating Social Media into their businesses? Also, what questions do you have about Social Media? Are we entering Phase II and no longer need advice on entering the web world? Am I sooo 2000 and late? I think I have to update my event talking-points to Phase II standards!

WWYGGD?

What would your Great Grandma do if she heard this from NPR’s Morning Edition. (Don’t worry folks, it’s only 1 min 40 sec)

Sure, it’s a little on the corny side, but I was thoroughly entertained while listen to NPR this morning on the way into the office. As a tribute to the internet on what some would consider to be its 40th birthday, this campy yet perceptive snippet immediately made me think that if I had a great grandmother alive to hear it, she’d surely think Earth was invaded by Martians.

The internet has completely infiltrated how we think and this brief audio play highlights the fast-paced, acronym-laden, hyper-technical nature of our everyday conversations. Not that we’d noticed – but I imagine what your great grandma would think…

Here’s an experiment - play this for your grandma and ask her to translate.

Google Labs Launch Social Search.

Scoops Here.

Google’s development team has done it again, and this time it is personal. No really, it is. Just a few short days ago Google Labs released Social Search.

Social Search taps into a user’s social network profiles and displays relevant links and status updates that members of a user’s own social network have shared at the bottom of the default search results page. Now social medialites will have a customized and tailored search experience. So as you search for your local fast food chain you can see what you can see what offers are going on through their Twitter feed.

To get started, you first have to head over to Google Labs’s experimental section and activate this feature. For now, Social Search will only be available in the US and in English. You will also need at least one of the three Google sources to access Social Search: Gmail Contacts, Google Reader Subscriptions and Your Google Profile.

Although you don’t need to have a Google Profile at the moment this service is a hub for social networking profiles on Social Search. Based on the information in your Google Profile, Google can auto-detect your social networking profiles and your friends on services like Flickr, FriendFeed, YouTube, Reddit, Digg, del.icio.us, BrightKite, and many others.

I know the pitchforks are being raised already for those who see the potential privacy issues…but at this moment I am not caring.

Dear Brand Manager,

Two words evoke the essence of your responsibility: Trust Agent. Not because Chris Brogan and Julien Smith say so, but rather from your customers calling for it.

Here’s the dirty little secret so-called social networking “experts” don’t want you to know: “US consumers are most interested in brands that keep them up to date and improve their knowledge. And they do not want brands to act like their friends.”

That admonition, “Americans Want Brands that Inform”, delivered by eMarketer Digital Intelligence, comes out of data provided by Lightspeed research. It’s telling. And there’s more:

Helping consumers keep up to date on topics that were important to them was also key, followed by being entertaining, becoming part of a daily routine, and informing consumers about the product and the company. Consumers were relatively uninterested in brands that tried to act like their friends.

Let me ask you, does your strategic communications plan provide your business ways to improve your customers’ knowledge? Keep up to date on topics important to your customers? Be entertaining? Become part of a daily routine? Inform consumers?

Be informing, build trust. Be trustworthy, build a market. Your customers demand information, shine a light.

[Strategis thanks guest blogger Critt Jarvis for this post; @crittjarvis]

Facebook you tricked me, again

Now I have the live feed back, but when I logged into FB this afternoon I saw newsfeeds from yesterday. I was just about to start slamming my keyboard and mouse around, cursing the social network for not working when I needed (wanted)  it to and realized that Facebook was just updating its home page again. This time with the intention of making things easier.

The new Facebook home page is designed to show you first what it believes is most interesting, and weed out what it apparently thinks is boring. If you want to see what everyone has to say, click the new “live feed’ button above your update prompt. Relevancy… hmm… where have I heard this before?

Besides your boring friend’s posts, what else is eliminated? The highlights section on the right side of your home page. More room for birthdays and events – which Facebook says we wanted.  The previously named highlights items will now be integrated into the live / news feed sections (if it is interesting enough).

Facebook has also brought back newsfeed posts that pertain to what and who your friends become fans of.

Now if Facebook could really determine relevancy, they would just ban all the quiz results from my feed…

…especially from those “friends” who take them all day long…

Great tool – Alltop

I stumbled across this site and thought it had a great point of difference. Instead of just answering a question like “How many Twitter accounts are there?” they drill deeper and answer the question, “What are the profile of Twitter users?” They do this by collecting the headlines of the latest stories from the best sites and blogs that cover a topic. Give it a try. http://alltop.com/

Oh Google, you’ve done it again!

When it comes to online money making opportunities, Google tends to be the first with its hand in the cookie jar. Leading the way as a search engine icon, Google has just announced its newest endeavourer—tapping in to the music industry and launching an online music search service.

As in-store sales continue to plunge and online downloading (free- i.e. LimeWire or with cost- i.e. iTunes) continues to soar, major record companies pitched the music search idea to Google a year ago. A joint venture between Vivendi SA’s Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group Corporation, EMI Group PLC, and MySpace Music has emerged and the music moguls want to promote an alternative to Apple’s iTunes. Call it keeping up with the changing times, or a last ditch effort. Either way, consumers are moving online to preview, play, and purchase their music.

For those of you looking to check out the new Music Search site when it launches, here’s what you can expect—package images of musicians and bands, album artwork, links to news, lyrics, videos, and song previews, as well as a search results page that allows you to buy songs. This is expected to be a success for all parties in the development. The music companies benefit from sharing revenue of purchased songs, and Google will collect revenue from the advertising shown within search results.

Let’s see if it’s as win-win as they claim. I, personally, can’t wait to see how it turns out!