Before starting the new cycleof posts discussing the startups’ which may affect the lives of SocialMedia Citizens, I decided to share this “Must-have” list of social media tools which have already found their place in our daily routines.

Blogging tools – Desktop publishers for quicker and easier Blogging

Word2007.com/blogging

Windows Live Writer

Zoundry Raven

Blog It! – a Facebook application

Scribefire – Firefox add-on

Promo tools – Help to promote your content on social webs and submit your stories to multiple... 

I’m going to make a bold statement which is in essence in the title of this post, if it weren’t for negative experiences and feedback then new customer engagement models would NOT exist (or perhaps would take MUCH longer to adopt).  So what does this mean?  It means that the organizations that you see joining the social media space are doing so because they are getting trashed online.  I actually had an interesting discussion with Olivier Blanchard on Twitter which went a bit like this:

If you are unhappy about your internet connection, your flight, your computer, a place you ate at or any product you purchased or service you received, what do you do?  Tweet about it, blog about it, go on yelp, etc.  This is why most of the companies are getting involved in social media, because of negative customer experiences and feedback that FORCE them to get online.  If Dell Hell didn’t happen do you think they would have adopted such a leadership role in social media?  Absolutely not.  If people weren’t always complaining about Comcast’s service on twitter do you think they would be on there?  No.  This is the process that we are taking ... read more >>
 

You can’t monitor the whole Internet. Nobody can, not even Google. So what do you do? It’s obvious that you can’t ignore it? You need to be monitoring something.

“But I don’t have budget for fancy monitoring tools.” You don’t need any budget. There are dozens of free or nearly free tools to use but you could probably just monitor Twitter if you had to.The easiest and cheapest way is set up your team with TweetDeck, let it run in the background at work and run a search for your keywords.

I’m not advocating that you only monitor Twitter (and the above solution only works while TweetDeck is running) but I think if you only did one thing, it would be to monitor Twitter? Why? Why not blogs or set up alerts?

Twitter is the water cooler of the Internet. One could argue that it’s becoming the World’s Water Cooler. But they’d be wrong. The World has many Internet Water Coolers.

Facebook is the World’s Largest Water cooler.

The Facebook Water Cooler started off as a brand of water bottles exclusively sold at college. It quickly became the favorite water cooler brand in the US and is quickly become the favorite at all of the Internet’s international offices as well. ...

I just read a post titles The Week the Media Crashed on the Communication and Leadership Policy blog from the Annenberg School of Communication at USC.  It’s one of the best posts I’ve seen about the shifts in media consumption and what this means for mainstream media news outlets.

This is a ‘must read’ for anyone in PR or marketing.  Since there are no comments on the post, and only one trackback, it seems to have gone largely unnoticed.

The author Adam Clayton Powell III is the Vice Provost of USC for Globalization and he lays out how the Internet has changed our listening and viewing patters.

He cites figures and strategy changes that every PR person should know.

Read it and pass it on.

This is a theme I've been meaning to post about for a while. The tendency of more and more sites (especially agency ones) to be social media based - either blogs, or mirrors of online chat (like Twitter feeds).

The most recent example - Ad agency CP&B giving a lot of its site over to news, blog and twitter mentions.

Is a lot of this a publicity stunt, a way to get people to people to coo about something they'd never otherwise, a website? Hell yes, but in the long run, who cares?

That's because long term the principle is I think sound - a realisation that especially online you are what people say about you, and that people don't visit run of the mill brand sites for fun.

Anyway, a presentation that looks at some agency examples and what some smart people are saying about it, is above.

Twitter users who checked their Followers today were treated to an on-again/off-again look at a very nice new interface for managing followers. Here’s a screen shot:

You can toggle between a “List” view which is similar to the old interface, and an “Expanded” view. In the Expanded view, in a single glance, you can see the person’s avatar, screen name, “real” name, location, and, get this, their latest tweet! In either view, there are two drop down menus within each profile. The left-hand menu allows you to follow the person back if you have not already done so. The right-hand has several features, including the ability to send the person a Direct Message (DM), Follow, Block, and a new one, to “Mention” them in a tweet. It’s strange that “Follow” is in both menus which defies conventional wisdom regarding user interface design.

Let’s hope the new design is here to stay. I like it!

Tags: Twitter, Followers, new user interface