image: sxc.hu

On Monday morning, bright and early, I will be heading off to my first office job in almost nine years, which means that I will no longer be able to write for b5media. I’m amazingly excited to have been offered, and accepting, the position of Director of Marketing and PR for an incredibly interesting start up in Vancouver. I’ll be able to tell everyone more about it soon, but I have to get my messaging down first!

I’ve really enjoyed sharing news, my opinions and best practices in social media with you all. It was you who helped make BuzzNetworker the best technology site in Vancouver. Through this site, I have met some of the most fantastic people and have learned so much.

Thank you to everyone who read, commented, re-tweeted my posts, and came back again and again. Quite honestly, this site would never had become what it was without you all.

I’ll miss writing here, but keep an eye out on my main site, MissManifesto, where I’ll be writing again soon!  The blogging and writing bug has bitten me, I won’t be able to stay away!

Post from: EveryJoe

Upwards and Onwards

We don’t have a description written for this yet, but the job is to be a “high touch” point of contact at Twitter for the burgeoning number of celebrities on the service. We want to make sure they’re happy, using the product effectively, etc. This person is probably pretty junior (it won’t pay a lot) but hopefully familiar with working with “Hollywood types.” They should be tech savvy enough to answer questions and solve basic problems (though they can fall back on our tech support). And they should definitely present themselves (and the company) well on the phone and in person. They should be proactive but not pushy. It might make sense for them to be in L.A. but to come up to SF often. Obviously this is a very sweet gig for someone. The challenge will be finding someone who is good at the schmoozing but also humble and a fit with our culture. [source]

Image: PRPhotos

So, let me get this straight. The growing empire that is Twitter, the one still living off the VC funds stashed in the bank and that interest (because, come on now, 50M has got to be generating some good income, even in this economy), is looking to hire someone who, for all intents and purposes, is a community manager, yet not one for the “army of passionate users”, but for the Ashton Kutchers, Demi Moores and Britneys using the site?

Does anyone else see what’s wrong with this picture or is it just me?

I can’t help but wonder if this is truly real, or if it’s a bad April Fool’s joke that got leaked by TechCrunch two days early. I can only hope that’s the case – the job “has been placed on hold” according to JobScore – especially considering the fact that Ev Williams and I have spoken several times regarding the company’s need for a community manager , (my desire to fulfill that role, of course) and his continuing reluctance to hire for that role. I’m sure the HR process would be intesely overwhelming when they finally get around to hiring for that role, but I would certainly hope Twitter would consider a real community manager before they hire for this “VIP Concierge”.

Post from: EveryJoe

Twitter Hiring “VIP Concierge”

Image: Sxc.hu

I do have to rememeber to rein in my skepticism when I read things like the Gartner report and remember that I’m considered one of those early adopter types. I’ve been preaching the need for companies to use social networking for CRM, and brand building for approximately two years now.

The Gartner report predicts that more than 60% of Fortune 1000 companies will have a form of online community that can be used for CRM purposes, but also thinks that more than half of the companies who do will fail to manage them properly which will ultimately backfire on them.

Read any of the particularly good social media blogs out there, and you’ll see what we’ve all been warning companies about this for years and have been trying to help educate them as to the best way to go about this. Every social media strategist or evangelist out there wants companies to be successful using the tools we know and love for all the things we know they can do.

“Social applications offer a great opportunity for CRM practitioners to improve customer experience and influence the customer, particularly in an economic downturn when companies are trying to keep customers and increase wallet share,” said Adam Sarner, research director at Gartner. “Investments should focus primarily on the customer online buying process where it can offer a direct return on investment (ROI) in terms of sales, awareness and customer loyalty.” [source]

I guess it takes an official report to make some of those Fortune 1000 companies stand up and realize what power they have available to them. I just hope they get it right and don’t run headlong, full speed into communities and muck it all up.

Post from: EveryJoe

Gartner States the Obvious

Face.com is launching Photo Finder in Facebook, which will find and tag pictures of you and your friends with face recognition.

Photo Finder (Face.com)

We’re about helping people find photos, and as a first service we’re releasing a Facebook app called Photo Finder, which scans public photos in your social network and suggests tags for untagged faces. It’s a great way to find photos of yourself (or your friends) that you never knew existed, and stay up to date with your friends latest pics. [source ]

There are, of course, some privacy concerns around this application, and while they’ve been addressed by Face.com, I’m personally still not completely at ease.

The images themselves are not tagged in Facebook, they’re tagged only in the Photo Finder application. This means that unless others have the application installed, they can’t see the tags. That seems all well and good, but I can’t imagine people not wanting to see the tags and find the “lost” images of themselves, making the fact that only those with the application seeing your tags kind of moot.

I’m a bit surprised at my reaction to Photo Finder – I tend to have few concerns around privacy, and don’t publish anything on the internet that I don’t want to be found or seen. There’s just something bordering on creepy about this, but I also can’t quite put my finger on what it is.

Sarah Perez over at Read Write Web has a great overview of the service , complete with screenshots and explinations of how it all works. Go take a peek and see what you think. Am I making too much of a fuss over this?

Post from: EveryJoe

Face Recognition Comes to Facebook

Across the board, for me at least, social networks have almost entirely replaced my google searches. When I have a question, instead of googling the answer, I ask Twitter.

Image: sxc.hu

Pali Research analyst Richard Greenfield has issued a report, primarily about Google and MySpace. In the report, Greenfield reiterated a contention he made last July that the underperformance of search ads in MySpace is not simply a product of the non-responsive nature of these sites’ users. Rather, according to Greenfield, Google’s algorithm isn’t well-suited to social-networking sites — and that’s something Google isn’t necessarily concerned with. [source ]

It got me thinking, because while the report was about MySpace in particular, I think this is bigger than one social network. If the Google Algorithm isn’t playing nicely with MySpace, and we hear about how much trouble Facebook is having with monteization, not to mention Twitter’s issues around that, can we expect the algorithm to work with other sites?

The remainder of the article is here . I wasn’t able to find the actual report Greenfield produced, so I’m at a loss for more information. I’ll do some more digging later and see what I can find. (Maybe Google’s algorithm doesn’t play well with Greenfield either! Or, it might just be Pali Research’s walled garden stopping me.)

Post from: EveryJoe

Google Doesn’t Care About Social Networks

Email: sxc.hu

While the growth in such services is heralded as the start of the “real-time, pervasive web”, I see it as more of communications 2.0 rather than just email 2.0.

Social media and social networks are changing the way we communicate across the board, but they’re not replacing the way we send information, the way we connect, at least not 100%.

Sacks’ platform, Yammer, is an enterprise social network, designed to work as an internal communications tool, but it’s unlikely to replace email, phone calls, or the department newsletters and bulletin boards. Micro-updates, no matter what platform they’re on, be it Facebook’s “Colleen is…”, LinkedIn’s “What are you working on now?”, Twitter’s “What are you doing?”, Plinky’s inspiration questions or Yammer’s “What are you working on?”, will never replace the required meetings, full emails, or really, anything longer than 140 or 160 characters. Nothing longer than a quick request or a fast kudos on something.

In addition to all of those problems, there are frequently confidential messages that need to be kept within a select group, or even simply things that the entire company doesn’t need to be privvy to, for whatever reason.

While services like FriendFeed and Flickr allow users to share photos, video, or even comment in real time, the lifestreaming services have their place, but even when added to micro-sharing services, will still not replace email.

One of the major hurdles to doing away with email all together, is that all of the features of the lifestreaming and micro-sharing services don’t fit together in the way that users need them too. Whereas users can be on any platform for email, there is no one common micro-sharing, lifestreaming system that ties it all together in a pretty bow. For example, Twitter can be push a status update to Facebook, but not vice versa. There is no one system that can do it all, and send any information longer than a set number of characters. When was the last time you wrote an email with any kind of character limit?

It’s entirely possible that there may be a company out there working on a way to integrate all of this together, and if there’s not, then I really need to go and talk to my tech team. It’s been rumoured that Microsoft is working on a set of standard protocols which will allow people to share all of this information, regardless of what service or platform they’re using.

No matter what the “next big thing” is, I don’t think email is going to go away anytime soon.

Post from: EveryJoe

Will Social Network Sites Kill Email?

Chess - image: sxc.hu

Think about some of the factors that illustrate that more and more, society is developing into a hive mind. The Mumbai Attacks were twittered, and attacker movements tracked. Despite the police scolding people for revealing their positions, the fact remains, the people were connected in a way never seen before and they were able to assist, coordinate and even direct movement for emergency services.

The Hudson River crash was not only announced on Twitter, the citizen journalists beat out mainstream news by at least an hour, which, in social media time, stretched to several hours. That was also the event that took out the TwitPic servers completely, because one of those citizen journalists put their shots of the downed plane onto the service.

In a social nervous system there will be increasing pressure to be connected 24/7 to the hive mind that is Facebook, Twitter and so on. Those who do not connect, share and collaborate will have a hard time in business and in social life. [source]

I may be repeating myself here, but if the corporate world doesn’t shake off their traditional shackles and start looking in earnest at social media – not just dipping one toe in with a blog rarely updated, a cloaked twitter stream, or a facebook page for the sake of having a facebook page – they run the risk that they’ll be left in the dust, especially in light of the current recession.

The world is moving forward at a startling pace; the hive mind, (which sounds much creepier than it actually is) shares information faster than ever before, and traditional companies and news organizations don’t need to catch up – but they do need to just jump in, with a solid strategy, or find themselves completely out of the loop.

Post from: EveryJoe

The Hive Mind

The tool allows Twitter users to associate themselves with up to three tags which identify their expertise. Twitter will then index

WeFollow.com

the account under the appropriate category on WeFollow.com. It’s all very cool.

Kevin is an investor in Twitter, (which goes to prove the deep ties among all of the Silicon Valley/San Francisco boys go), does what he can to help Twitter according to a Digg spokesperson.

WeFollow.com has searchers index themselves as experts in a specific topic. For example, I’ve tagged myself “Journalist”, “SocialMedia” and “Alcohol”. The directory will help users identify themselves, but will also be able to connect like-minded individuals and provide valuable data for marketers looking to target certain verticals and specific influencers through word of mouth marketing.

MediaPost spoke with Forrester Research Senior Analyst Jeremiah Owyang who makes an extremely valid point – at the moment, there is no way to judge the authority of a self-tagged user because it’s based solely on followers. He suggests that WeFollow needs to rely on historical data that matches the person with specific topics mentioned in tweets, as well as retweets on previous posts. [source ]

There are a few ways that marketers can best use these user powered directories like WeFollow and one launched about three weeks ago, TweeplePages.com. At this point in time, marketers can search for people by interest, sports or whatever their specific product is and reach out to the key influencers in their specific categories. They can list themselves in their appropriate category  as well and label themselves as “MarketingPR” and, for example “alcohol”. They’d then find me listed under “journalist” and “alcohol” and voila – they pitch me (appropriately, I’d hope).  Eventually, the speculation is that WeFollow will create sponsored listings and advertising opportunities for people.

I’m going to be very interested in seeing where this site goes. I do think it’s rather brilliant however.

Post from: EveryJoe

WeFollow – A People Powered Directory

Tomorrow, the “online magazine rack”, (one which all of my sites are on!) launches MyAlltop , allowing people to create custom collections of Alltop feeds. For me, it’s basically going to be replacing Google reader – at least for the sites I read regularly for news for the sites. I also suspect I’ll discover a whole ton of new sites as well.

Alltop

Every custom MyAlltop collection is a public page which can be shared with friends and fans.

One of the things that you know i s going to happen (and what I did right away) is that people are going to grab their vanity accounts, and the floodgates open tomorrow (Tuesday).

The good news is, you can create as many accounts as you’d like – one for personal use and one for your site. I don’t think you can embed anything on your site yet, but knowing Guy, I’m sure that’s coming.

Once you’ve gotten your account set up, you’ll have a personalized URL . The sign up process is uber fast, so go now – run, don’t walk – to  My Alltop and register your name before your user name gets scooped!

Post from: EveryJoe

MyAlltop: Version 3

That meant all of the traditional promotional methods were completely out of the question. So, instead, organizer Lorraine Murphy turned to Twitter to arrange everything. Crime Pays takes place Monday, March 16th at the Vancouver Police Museum.

“We had to do it on twitter because it all literally happened over two weeks, from getting the idea to holding the event.” said Lorraine.  “Papers need more notice than that; we didn’t even get in the event listings at the Straight! So [traditional] press releases were of limited use.”

Lorraine managed to find a free venue, “guys and dolls” to auction off and promoted the event through Twitter and Facebook. In addition, several bloggers have written about the event to assist in promotion, and arranged to have the Executive Director of the Writer’s Federation send the event out to his 2,000 strong newsletter.

Come help the Fed celebrate 32 years of getting away with murder. Whether infiltrating schools, divvying up swag, or distributing subversive publications, the Federation of BC Writers has been operating unchecked in our province for decades.

Do you enjoy the vicarious thrill of rubbing shoulder pads with the Lost Literati of the Wild West, surrounded by instruments of murder and mayhem in the cozy confines of the police museum? Do you have what it takes to make your bones as a Fed member? There’s only one way to find out! Come out to the party and make us an offer we can’t refuse. [source]

When: Monday, March 16th, 6:00pm – 9:00pm
Where: The Vancouver Police Museum, 240 East Cordova Street, Vancouver
Info: Tickets are $20, there will be refreshments, and prizes galore. Register here.

And for a little gratuitous eye candy, here are some of the guys and dolls being auctioned off.

Irwin

Terra aka Zoey Jane

Kris Krug & Raul (aka Hummingbird604)

Caroline

All these fine folk and more are being auctioned off – including a real live fictional character! (How perfect could that be? A date with a fictional character, for a writer?!)

It’s very cool to know that social media made this entire event possible. Without the ability to connect immediately, this never would have come together.

[all images provided by Lorraine Murphy]

Post from: EveryJoe

Crime Pays Through Social Media