Image Credit: Chiara Marra

Mitch Joel’s post about the Death of Social Media suggests that when we treat social media like a traditional marketing channel we’re killing the medium.  I agree.

“The minute we (as a community) allow and accept traditional mass media tactics to pollute Social Media, is the minute that all is lost.”

He refers to the article about Ghost Blogging in the February issue of Entrepreneur magazine.  They interviewed a few professional blogger/tweeters who service several clients. 

For the last 100 years, ghost writing has been an acceptable PR activity. But we were in an era of one-way, mass communication...

The Next Economic Paradigm is arriving and the first entries include Foursquare. Few people understand the significance of this new class of social media applications. Foursquare contains many (but not yet all) of the components of the Innovation Economy that we have been discussing for several years at Ingenesist.com, Conversationalcurreny.com, and Relationship-economy.com.

Here is what Foursquare does have:

Geolocation: Sure, social media has been great sport for chatting with your buddies across the world, but nothing really happens until the rubber meets the road. people need to be in the same location in order to “build something” together...

One of the most suggested means of getting traffic to a site is to get involved in forum discussions (or bulletin boards as they are also called) on your topic of choice.  You can find highly targeted forums that are organized and structured around just about any niche or industry you can think of, such as Internet marketing, web design, and search engine optimization.  You’ll also find that forum users are generally pretty Internet savvy and are open to making online purchases.

Internet Forums

Forums are places where people with similar interests can meet, exchange information and chat online. To become a member of an Internet forum you usually have to sign up on a membership site. This doesn’t involve any money...

Social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter have attracted a lot of celebrity attention, and the aftermath has been a mixed bag of wins and fails, when it comes to their use of the medium. Here are a few recent incidents. You’ll note that ‘Hole’ singer Courtney Love could be part of a list all on her own.

1. Win: Demi Moore and Mia Vardalos (My Big Fat Greek Wedding) help stop a suicide by responding to a distress message.
2. Fail: Ryan Seacrest announces American Idol contestant Lacey Brown’s elimination… before West Coast viewers see the episode, potentially being the reason for the worst per-episode ratings this season.
3. Win: Director Kevin Smith gets thrown off a Southwest Air flight for which he was already seated. Why? Because he was apparently “too fat”. He tweets about it to his 1.6M Twitter followers and creates a PR nightmare for the airline, causing them to issue an apology
4. Fail: Courtney Love, whose mouth just won’t quit, has had public spats with several celebs and...

We’ve heard about the social media success stories of large companies all across the news. Best Buy’s Twelpforce. Zappo’s amazing customer service. The millions of revenue from Dell’s twitter accounts. And that’s all great. But what about the thousands of small businesses hurting after the economic dip in 2009? Can social media affect their bottom line? YES, when businesses engage in social media with strategy and put real resources into the infrastructure and implementation.

To prove social media can work for small business, The Kreisler Group (TKG) performed a 10-week case study with Alegria Cocina, a local restaurant in Long Beach, California...