I asked a question of the Social Media: Engage panel at Internet Summit ‘09 about 30 minutes ago and since that moment I’ve been thinking about online anonymity. People seem to hate it. When I blogged about the upside and relevance of anonymous comments as they relate to news stories, some people balked. Jason Falls said at Social Media Business Forum last month that he wishes newspaper sites would stop allowing anonymous comments altogether. I get that. I know the drama that ensues when people hide behind the cloak of anonymity. Heck, I live it as part of my job and I don’t always like it. But I still maintain that there is a place for it. You shouldn’t always have to be who you are just to communicate across the web, whether you’re on a social site or otherwise.And not everyone has awful intentions. So, I am going to take this to the extreme. If anonymity is no longer needed in society, let’s just get rid of the Witness Protection Program. Let the people who snitch on the mafia boss and turn in the mass murderer come forward publicly and deal with the consequences that may come their way because they decided to speak up. It’s all about transparency and openness right? ... read more >>
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Social Media practitioners use the word “transparency” frequently, but it seems to mean different things to different people. To me, transparency isn’t something organizations bring to their Social Media efforts but instead is a fundamental change in corporate mindset being accelerated by Social Media’s growth and adoption. It isn’t a choice made on Twitter but the way an organization may choose to live. In short, transparency is a principle, not a strategy or tactic. Some recent experiences with Fullhouse and Forrester, my current and future employers, have helped me to recognize the meaning, value, and importance of transparency. Over the past two months, I’ve had the very good fortune to be part of the intensive recruiting process of market research firm, Forrester. As readers of Experience: The Blog know, I will start with Forrester in the San Francisco Bay area in mid-November. I feel very lucky and excited to be joining a firm I hold in high regard. There are many reasons that I respect Forrester, but one is quite personal: the smart and respectful way their analysts responded to a blog post in which I critiqued their guidance on Sponsored Conversations (AKA Paid ... read more >>
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 If there’s one word that’s tossed around with abandon when it comes to social media, it’s “transparency”. But like any word that gets overused as a shortcut to describing a concept, I think we need to back up the truck a bit and discuss what we really mean by that. Because this is one of the words that scares companies into thinking they have to bare all in order to use social media. And it prevents them from moving forward.
Inherent or Taught? In this excellent post on the broken bits of social media strategy, Tom Webster talks about how telling people to “be human” isn’t very effective. Directing someone to behave in a manner that’s not part of company culture, or in a way that conflicts with their sense of self-preservation, is counter-intuitive and it’s backwards. In other words, telling someone to be human and empowering and allowing them to be are often two different things. Same deal with transparency. When we say we want companies to be transparent, what we want is for them to be honest with us. Paul Gillin put that rather eloquently at the recent Inbound Marketing Summit in Boston, and mentioned (I think rightly) that if a business truly has an honesty issue, that ... read more >>
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Just about everyone I speak to in marketing and PR these days is talking about using blogs and social networking services to engage directly with consumers and other audiences, with many actually doing it - blogging or tweeting for the brands they support. However, before you go down this route, or try to enlist bloggers and social networkers to do it for you, there are several little known laws and regulations you should be aware of: In the EU, the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive, passed in 2007 and brought into force in the UK in 2008, makes the practice of astro-turfing - "companies posing as consumers on fake blogs, providing fake testimonies on consumer rating websites such as TripAdvisor, or writing fake book reviews on Amazon" illegal, with those caught risking criminal or civil liability. In the USA, the Federal Trade Commission issued new rules on Monday which require bloggers to disclose that they've been paid for endorsements or reviews. "The revised guides specify that while decisions will be reached on a case-by-case basis, the post of a blogger who receives cash or in-kind payment to review a product is considered an endorsement," the FTC said in a release. ... read more >>
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As more and more people turn to the social web for news and opinions they can trust, the need for a strong commitment to ethical practices grows more urgent. The true power of social media lies in how it can amplify word of mouth. Social Media Today partnered with the Social Media Group to present a webcast called "The Ethics of Blogging." If we can judge it by the number of questions we received and the chatter on our Twitter hashtag, #smtwebcast, it was a big hit. Many thanks to our fantastic moderator, Maggie Fox, and our knowledgable and vocal panel of experts, Augie Ray, Daniel Tunkelang, and John Jantsch. Listen to the webcast audio read more >>
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 I have been hearing more concerns lately from small business owners new to Facebook about privacy and confusion over what’s visible to others. They are often unsure how to balance being found for business purposes with their own comfort levels regarding privacy. (Facebook Fan Pages offer a great solution to this–but that is for another post.)
Many times users do not realize they have full control over exactly what they share with others, or forget to check or adjust their privacy settings. The site allfacebook.com did a post about this a few months back which was really comprehensive. In the short tutorial below I walk through a few of the most important settings for business owners and professionals. Let me know what you think. (You can open the video in full screen.) Photo Credit: rpongsaj Post from: communicate value 5 Crucial Facebook Privacy Settings  Link to original post... read more >>
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I know enough about SEO to be dangerous to people like Brian Chappell, who is our expert, but this is sort of an SEO 101 post anyway. When I started Ignite Social Media in July of 2007, I could see pretty clearly that I didn’t rank very well for my name. While I’m no “John Smith,” I do have some competition for the term “Jim Tobin”. Battling me for first page results on Google are: 
All of these folks are far more notable than I, so in a fair SEO battle, they should crush me. There is no silver bullet to competing with any keyword or phrase, including your own name. The secret to being competitive is having lots of sites linking to you for that phrase, combined with producing content regularly with those keywords.You can fairly ... read more >>
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ShortTask, launched in late February, has the potential to be an interesting service, but has, in my opinion, become one of a number of clearinghouses for third-party astroturfing schemes of somewhat questionable ethical intent. ShortTask, according to the company, is: “based on the idea that there are still many online jobs that cannot be fully replaced by technology and require human input. ShortTask has subdivided its working into two categories — solvers and seekers. Seekers are companies or individuals who need various tasks accomplished without hiring in-house staff, while solvers are workers who can complete these jobs virtually and get paid.” In other words, if a company regularly has short tasks that cannot be done by a computer, it can post those tasks on ShortTask for Solvers to perform on a per task basis. ShortTask is very similar to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (which I wrote about here.) Anyone can sign up for either service. ShortTask refers to Seekers (people contracting out small tasks) and Solvers (people who perform the tasks.) Though not the point of this post, the impact of this on the American worker is clear. So many in-house salaried positions have been ... read more >>
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Editor's Note: An edited and condensed version of this post appeared on SEOmoz in January. Here's the original, uncut article.If your company is thinking about hiring an outside firm for search engine optimization (SEO), please read this post. If you work for one of the many reputable SEO agencies in the market, please have your prospective clients read this post. If, however, you offer the type of SEO "services" described below...then in the immortal words of Obi-Wan Kenobi, you may want to go home and rethink your life. Search optimizing your website has become an essential part of doing business. In both B2B and consumer markets, most prospective customers will use a search engine at some point in their buying decision process. And most of those searchers will click on at least one of the top organic search results. Smart business people know that SEO is increasingly critical to the success of their businesses. But most such people aren't SEO experts; they're experts at pizza or plumbing or building gadgets or selling insurance or whatever their business is. So they turn to SEO firms for help.  Unfortunately, legions of scammers and spammers know all of this as well, and prey on ma ... read more >>
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