ION Digital

The news that BusinessWeek is now up for sale puts to rest any doubt that traditional publications are in a death spiral. This may  be old news to my counterparts in Silicon Valley, who have been writing off “traditional publications” for years. But I always felt there would always be a handful of business publication stalwarts—BW, the Wall Street Journal, Fortune, etc—that would resist the tide, somehow survive, even thrive again one day.

Now I’m not so sure, and the future of another big name publication–and the lives of 190 BW editors–is in limbo.  (more…)

Twitter is a great tool for companies seeking to connect with key audiences, build their brands and much more.Once you  get the swing of Twitter (last blog) , you’re ready to get fully immersed and start growing. The goal is to attract followers, and eventually build your own community.

Twitter communities are generally loosely organized at best; that’s the beauty of it but it’s also the challenge. Connecting with so many different people is like herding cats.

My approach is this: rather than thinking about hundreds (or in some people’s case, thousands) of followers, I’ll choose two or three representative followers to focus on at a time; that’s my “audience.” This is based on techniques I use in public speaking. Rather than scanning a big audience, I’ll find 2 or 3 audience members  in the front row and focus eye contact on them, providing me a chance to focus my energy and thoughts. When I’m answering a question or corresponding with someone on Twitter, they have my full attention.

I’m trying to build a  community one contact at a time–slow, yes, but steady and (I’m hoping) enduring. I’m really focused on quality of community vs pure quantity, so Guy Kawasaki (100k plus followers) has nothing to worry about with me.

Below are a few tips to get you started. (more…)

1) The Yelp “extortion” debacle (also note the responses: “Yelp Extortion: True or False?”  and “PR 2.0: Yelp Gets a Bad Review: Embracing a Crisis to Shape Perception”)

2) Top 100 Social Media and Internet Marketing Bloggers

3) “25 Most Shocking Crimes in Social Media History | Masters in Criminal Justice” 

4) Demystifying social media for companies–some good tips, steps

5) NY Times, Wash Post lead top 10 newspaper sites

(more…)

Several people at last week’s Cisco Partner Velocity 09 conference in Miami (the Web 2.0 skills training sessions) asked us how they could separate their online personal and professional activities. They worry that the two worlds would overlap as they moved deeper into social media, with embarrassing results.

Others worry they’ll just say something that will backfire;
either way it hurts their reputations.
This is a growing issue, thanks to the way social media is evolving. Facebook is a crazy quilt of personal and business
interests and activities, which all flow through the personal news-streams. And on Twitter, rapid fire observations and comments may seem honest—that’s the idea, right?—but come back to haunt you (see Ketchum example below). It’s the dark side of the transparent web.

The good news is there are actions you can take to manage your online identity, while keeping your  business and personal presences separate (for the most part). This post will look at what you post, your content. (more…)

Every day I marvel at the tidal wave of postings, news, comments and observations about social media. Out of this stream I handpicked a few samples of blogs this month I thought were particularly good, either because they provided useful tips, insights, or understanding—or I just liked them for other reasons. So this is far from a scientific sampling but a great array of postings by any measure.  I also threw in some misc favorite articles and blogs, such as one looking at Apple in a post-Jobs world.

My next piece will focus on my favorite postings about Twitter, a platform that is exploding in popularity. 

Social Media

• Obama’s social media toolkit and strategy (Edelman)
• Why companies should embrace social media, the good, the bad and the ugly (w/ an example of the ugly) (more…)