Open The Dialogue

Some can’t-miss stuff from the past month (as always, we’re sharing these on our FriendFeed & Twitter):

• Mack gets serious about community building and lays out why no one is paying attention to yours.

• The FTC is reviewing the mommy-blogger & brand relationship this summer, trying to guidelines for endorsements & testimonials.

• CubeTree launched yesterday.  The internal comms. sector is heating up.  We’re keeping an eye out for early returns on how it stacks up against services like ClearSpace & SocialText.

• Geoff Livingston has a great post over on The Buzz Bin about what’s really valuable to a community.  He highlights a week where he didn’t have any great blog posts but the photos he put on Flickr for SOBcon ended up being super-popular.  Great lessons:  don’t always “follow the herd,” do what you do best and – most importantly – make sure other people find it useful.

• David Armano talks about developing trust & attention.  Information overload makes you dedicate more attention to people and sources that you trust.  As a marketer, it’s important to focus on this relationship.

• Journalists on Twitter (via Rex).

• Chris Brogan somehow opened up my head and did a post on social media and the sales cycle.  He argues that social media is most valuable during the awareness process.  I disagree.

• Facebook introduces “Post Quality Score” for Pages.  It measures “how engaging your content is to Facebook users.”  This is definitely a step in the right direction for analytics on Pages which have been notoriously weak.  Although, it also seems like a trend.  Tumblr is trying to leverage all the content in their community by providing their own version of analytics.  While pretty-looking, at this point in time, it’s a bit self-serving.

• PBS ups its video game and puts all of its shows on the web (note:  PBS is an MWW client).

• Like podcasts?  Like social media?  Here are a few to subscribe to.

The day after April Fools on the web always seems like a bad hangover. Everyone is struggling to right themselves and get back to work after a day full of bad jokes and tip-toeing around the web unsure if all the tweets they’re reading are actually true or not. The few that caught my eye:

• HarperStudio promised free eBooks to anyone who wrote a “Twitter review.”
• Josh Hallett came into the office and was greeted with an early Christmas present:  all his stuff.  Thinking about the noise his chair made with all that wrapping paper still on it just cracks me up.
• CW11 actually fell for Improv Everywhere’s funeral spoof (hat tip Alex).
• Retribution for CollegeHumor’s Ricky Van Veen.  After he convinced his staff that MTV picked up a second season, they got him over a thousand followers on a fake Twitter account.

Moving on…

The fun ‘n games are over.  Here are some posts that we’ve been tracking.  Pardon the volume, there has been a lot of good stuff bouncing around:

• Matt Haughey gives a great snapshot on how the web works for most people vs. how most marketers are approaching it.
• Facebook is looking to lock-in the older demographics who are flooding onto the social network.  They’ve created a private groups for families wizard that helps anyone easily get their family in one, private place on Facebook.
• Not watching home base – Seth Godin talks about the value of searching for more vs. the value of catering to those whom already pay attention to you.
• Peter Kim points to a solid debate about the value of Twittering during conferences and how it might affect our memory.
• Merlin Mann on why people matter.
• Ryan Carson nails it – building communities from scratch on the web is hard work and it takes time.  Plain and simple.
• A quick & dirty comparison of Twitter vs. a Facebook ad – take a wild guess at who wins (via Neal).
• Convinced writing something isn’t the best way to get your point across and help people understand something?  You’re probably right.
• Mark Cuban is pretty curious about where all the time comes from that lets people sit on Twitter all day.
• Valeria Maltoni writes up a very thorough guide to micro interactions in PR.  The big power of PR, when using social media, is the ability to hone in on single interactions that often translate to strong relationships.
• Gina Trapani takes a look at what crowdsourcing really means on her excellent new blog, Smarterware.

Miss LOTD?  Want More?  We’re always sharing stuff on FriendFeed and Twitter.

Since March came in like a lion and left the East Coast with some snow overnight, we’re catching up on some notable reading here at OTD.  What about the meta?  Well, two new features:  FriendFeed & Skribit.  We’re trying out FriendFeed to not only aggregate all of our content around the web but give you an easier way to keep track of the stuff we find noteworthy (usually, in the past, what would make up these daily LOTD posts).  Not to worry, when the time is right, we’ll still call out important items but always keep an eye out in the sidebar for everything hot off the presses.

We’re also testing out Skribit.  Ever want to suggest that we write about something here on OTD?  See something we missed?  Now you can suggest it!  Check it out here or in the sidebar.  On to the links…

• Gearing up for SXSW?  Check-out Jake’s awesome survival guide.

• Gary Vaynerchuk launched a new show:  Obsessed TV.  Shooting for a different demo that is pretty un-touched by focused web video endeavors. 

• Skittles jumped off the deep-end over the weekend.  Their homepage is now Twitter’s search function, bringing up whatever people are saying that involves the word “skittles.”  A big step, yes, but it’ll be more important to see what happens from here on out after the novelty wears off.  I bet this experiment, for Skittles, is more about a correlation between other brand activity they do and how people talk about them.  Capturing the love and the ephemera conversation is a biproduct.  The real test is the tone of these responses up against how Skittles markets themselves elsewhere.

• Media 2.0 Best Practices:  we’ll keep an eye on how this evolves.  Trying to standardize the ethics of participation is equally important as trying to figure out how to measure it.  I hope by this time next year, these big questions are a lot closer to being answered.

• News as a hook for context:  the media industry is knocking down doors trying to figure out ways to make news, itself, the vehicle that brings in gobs of traffic.  If we’re dealing with empowering the community as a goal (which it should be in almost every execution on the web) – think about context.  That is where the long-term value lies.

• Facebook & tribes:  proof positive that broadcasting isn’t the same as engaging.  These usage stats confirm that social media might be expanding our reach but, at the same time, it’s not expanding our actual circles of interaction.  For example, an average female on Facebook who might be friends with at least 500 people?  Usually only messages and chats with 16 people while commenting on content for only 26 of her friends.

Photo credit, hamed.

• The pretty cool Obamameter has been making it’s way around the web for all the right reasons and, believe it or not, actually strikes a pretty strong chord about the future of journalism.  Matt Waite, one of its creators, talks about how they’re viewing content as data and how the process of organizing it all actually makes up the story.

• A very sound process:  how the Air Force responds to blog posts.

• 1,000 true fans:  Matt Thompson makes a solid case for this approach to a viable business models on the web.  Especially in relation to how the news industry can pick up the slack.

• If you’re into this kinda thing:  NPR now lets you roll your own podcast feed.

• Reviewing new media sure can be stressful, Virginia Heffernan recaps her adventures with a one Mr. Fallon.  Choice quote:  ”There’s no way to maintain an ex cathedra advantage when you’re cavorting in a circus ring.”

• The world’s first daily newspaper comprised entirely of blogs and other user-generated content.  Coming to a newsstand near you soon, hopefully.

• Lessons and learnings from the pros – George Oates talks about how Flickr has grown into the consummate community it is today. As Jake mentioned, a must-read.

• Can’t wait for the new season of Mad Men to start up again? Calm your nerves with this great report on the characters coming to life on Twitter.

• Not the first and certainly not the last (but maybe the one w/ the most promise so far?):  snaps to MTV for picking up/developing a show w/ the crew from CollegeHumor.