Communities have a lot of value outside of support. They can be used to test new product ideas, generate feedback, spread a message and enlist new customers. I’ve recently spoken to people who administer such successful b-to-b social networks as Spiceworks, element 14, AuntMinnie, the SAP Developer Network and others to learn what works with business professionals. In the process, I’ve learned to understand the difference between consumer and business communities. Here are some highlights.

B-to-b customers are motivated by professional, rather than personal interests. This may seem obvious, but when you think about it, there are big implications for the way you approach a community. The essence of many consumer social networks is playfulness, chitchat and commentary on popular topics in the news. Much of this content doesn’t play well in a b-to-b environment. While some community administrators report that political and even sports topics spur conversation, by and large the membership has problems to solve and little time to waste. Keep the navigation simple and the gimmickry to a minimum. I’ve always liked LinkedIn’s look and feel because it reflects its utility so well. LinkedIn’s look is almost aggressively boring, but the message is that it’s a place to get work done, not to mess around.

Engagement is difficult. The term “engagement” has become almost cliché in its role as the Holy Grail of social media marketing. Facebook is an engagement machine.  The company claims the average user spends more than 55 minutes per day on the site. That’s great for Facebook, but most businesses would fire an employee who did that.

Business professionals are focused on solving problems, and that makes their social network behavior quite different from consumers’. In its “Social Technographics of Business Buyers” study published about a year ago, Forrester Research observed that “buyers will participate socially when they need to solve problems or evaluate progress; otherwise they are off running their  companies.” In other words, a network that has a high “time spent on site” number may be attracting the wrong people (or may just be difficult to navigate). When building a b-to-b community, accept the fact that a lot of people may register once and never come back. Factors such as search engine performance and unique visitor growth may be more important than time spent reading because they indicate that your community is providing content that other people are discovering and finding valuable.

It’s all about the job. Back in my tech publishing days, I used to joke that when a CIO approached us offering to author an article, it almost invariably meant he was looking for a job. That observation was later validated by prominent business magazine (I think it was Fortune) that suggested that the acronym CIO actually stood for “Career Is Over.” I would later learn that CIOs were in almost constant job search mode. They were in visible and pressurized situations and frequently took the fall when things went wrong.

Today, a lot more people are in that boat. Layoffs are everyday occurrences and unforgiving markets have made job security a joke. Forget allegiance to one’s employer. Business professionals today are constantly on the lookout for opportunities to network, showcase their stuff and be ready when the ax falls. Keep this in mind and give people ample opportunity to connect with each other. Which is one of the reasons you should…

Enable people to build personal brands. Nearly every successful professional social network I’ve encountered has some kind of a points system or other tool for elevating the status of individual members. In extreme cases, such as that of TopCoder, the most innovative and productive members of the community can win cash prizes. However, it’s remarkable how much people will contribute to the collective simply for the visibility.  As Tabrez Syed, director of products at the 800,000-member Spiceworks community said, “It’s amazing how much people are willing to give back.”

Part of this is human nature, I suppose, but there’s a practical element as well. Visible contributors gain status that leads to jobs and consulting assignments. A few years ago, it was almost impossible to build one’s reputation this way, but social networks have created a way to build status based solely on a person’s contributions. SAP, which has one of the most impressive communities programs I’ve seen, recognizes its most valuable members at annual conferences. These people are rock stars, which has all kinds of benefits to them.

In the coming weeks, I’ll be talking to owners of successful communities aimed at doctors, human resources professionals and food service managers. I’m sure there’ll be more to report.

Upcoming and Ongoing

My new 65-slide mega-presentation entitled “B-to-B Social Media: A Quiet Giant” is now available on SlideShare. Feel free to borrow from it. I only ask for attribution. This presentation was briefly the most tweeted slide deck on SlideShare early this week, but fell off the home page a couple of hours later. Fame is so fleeting .

If you’re a member of the Public Relations Society of America, consider tuning in for my March 2 webcast on Consumer-Generated Advertising. This is an interesting topic that I’ve enjoyed researching. A lot of brands are experimenting with CGA these days and many are experiencing disappointment. I think you have to go in with your eyes wide open and be ready to kiss a lot of frogs before finding your prince.

Tip of the Week: Giveaway of the Day

Everyone likes something for nothing, right? It turns out giveaways can be good business, too. Software companies are increasingly promoting their products through limited-time giveaways in which visitors can download full-featured versions absolutely free. Promotions typically last anywhere from 24 hours to a couple of weeks. The idea is that paid upgrades and word-of-mouth marketing will spread the word better than expensive advertising. Giveaway of the Day is my new discovery. Subscribe to its newsletter or RSS feed to get a daily notification of a new limited-time download. There’s a parallel site for games. And don’t forget to bookmark my favorite free software site, Gizmo’s Freeware. Started by a retired IT manager in Australia, it offers a massive collection of full-function freeware that can address about 95% of the average PC user’s needs. A volunteer staff of reviewers provides guidance and insight.

Just For Fun: Ruminations

“There is nothing more frustrating than having a perfect comment for a conversation the two strangers in front of you are having.”

“It’s never more important to me to look my best than when I’m gonna be around someone I can’t stand.”

“I don’t understand the purpose of the line, ‘I don’t need to drink to have fun.’ No one does. But why start a fire with flint and sticks when they’ve invented the lighter?”

Those are just three of the gems from Ruminations, a website that accepts short, funny, original observations or anecdotes and then encourages its members to vote them up or down the popularity scale. Reading Ruminations is like listening to a nonstop Steven Wright standup routine. Many of the contributions are hilarious, but some of them make you ponder the odd, illogical and bizarre things that humans do. “How many times is it appropriate to say ‘What?’ before you just nod and smile because you still didn’t hear what they said?” asks one contributor. The site was started by author and comedian Aaron Karo (above), who has a newsletter by the same name.

These are the first ripples in a wave of new technology that will make the Internet effectively site-less. By that I mean that the metaphor of the Web as we’ve known it for the last 15 years is breaking down. The Internet is increasingly not about sites, but about content and people. As technology makes it possible for our online scribblings to appear wherever we may choose, the task of assessing influence will become considerably more complex.

The big change in the landscape is that information no longer needs to have a homepage in order to reach an audience. Facebook kicked off this trend when it created a service that was so popular that some brands found it was more desirable to use Facebook as a homepage than their branded websites. Honda is a notable example of this. The auto maker has started listing a Facebook fan page as the destination URL in its TV ads. The tactic is a bit of a gimmick, but it’s also indicative of a shift in marketer perceptions. As Coca-Cola’s Digital Communications Director Adam Brown told me recently, “Our philosophy is to fish where the fish are.”

Only it’s becoming more difficult to figure out where the fish are. As social networks integrate their content, the contributions of individuals will become detached from discrete websites. On Twitter, for example, conversations exist in a stateless form that finds a home on Twitter.com, TweetDeck, Seesmic, blog widgets or any other listening device that catches them. How do we assess influence in this environment?

In the early days of social media (and by that I mean 2006!), online influencers used their blogs as a home base and relied upon word-of-mouth, inbound links and search engines to deliver an audience. Today, the blog is almost irrelevant. With Posterous, a blog entry can be created as an e-mail message and posted automatically to a couple of dozen social outposts, formatted for the unique capabilities of each destination. Some of these services publish fan and follower counts, but others don’t. Determining an influencer’s “share of market” is a matter of picking through search results and the metrics provided by various channels to measure a person’s total footprint.

In time, services will emerge that make sense of this chaos, but for now this is a classic case of technology outpacing people’s ability to understand it. For marketers, the key point is that the website as we have known it is diminishing in importance, influencers are magnifying their voices, and the rules of engagement are being reset. The good news is that everyone can use these tools, so if you’re currently limiting your publishing activities to a blog or Twitter, consider expanding your scope. The bad news is that the influencer you thought you had identified and corralled is now blasting messages to a whole lot of different audiences. Only time will tell what the impact of that new reality will be.

Tip of the Week: Google’s Keyword Tool

We all know how we want people to find our website, but we don’t always know how they actually find it. Google has a new tool to address that. It’s called the Search-based Keyword Tool and if you enter your URL,it shows you a list of keywords that match the content of your site. It also shows the approximate number of monthly searches conducted on that term as well as the price you’ll have to pay to buy the term using Google AdWords. It costs nothing to try, and you just might find that the search phrases that are really finding you aren’t the ones you thought.

Just For Fun: Japanese Rice Art

I’m not a detail person, so the annual endeavors of the people of Inakadate, Japan baffle and amaze me. Each year, the rice growers in this town create elaborate works of art by mixing red and regular rice in special patterns. But to call these images merely “special patterns” doesn’t do them justice. They are remarkable in their detail and scope, and they must require months of planning, not to mention elaborate orchestration at planting time. All for artwork that can only be appreciated from the air. Visit this website for photos, including time-lapse images.

Social media is cheap but it isn’t easy. With millions of bloggers and Facebook pages online, building visibility is a challenge that demands time. More importantly, it demands a strategy, and that’s where businesses usually don’t go far enough. There’s nothing wrong with diving in and using the tools. In fact, I encourage experimentation. But before you invest significant time in social media, you need a plan.

Here’s the four-stage process I walk then through.

Define the Objective – Social media tools are only tools. Without an underlying strategy, they have about as much benefit as a plumber’s wrench has to fixing a hole in the wall. Most business objectives demand a mix of online and offline tools, and social media may have little or no value. Start with the objective and work backwards. Common business objectives range from building thought leadership to generating leads, cutting customer service costs and recruiting quality employees. Each demands different strategies and tools. If you start with the objective, the rest of the process is easier.

Identify Metrics – Here I steal shamelessly from measurement queen Katie Paine, who believes that any goal can be measured. In many cases, relevant metrics have nothing to do with the Internet. They can include yardsticks such as:

• Positive mentions in mainstream media outlets;
• Quantity of new job applicants;
• Speaking invitations;
• Reduction in help desk calls;
• Improvements in Net Promoter Scores; and, of course
• Increased sales.

Note that many of these examples have nothing to do with Web analytics. Friends, followers and fans have little value if they don’t achieve the business goal. Don’t go overboard on metrics. Choose three or four that are meaningful to your goal and define standards of success, like a doubling of Facebook fans in a six-month period. Then revisit your progress every three months and adjust (or choose new metrics).

Define Tactics – How are you going to use online and offline channels to reach your goals? Consider all the options. For example, thought leadership may be enhanced by blogging and tweeting, but an equally effective strategy may be growing the quantity of speaking engagements or starting a local professional group. Consider location. The Internet provides a great way to increase international exposure but it may be of little help in growing visibility within your local geography. That goal may be better addressed by increasing activity in local trade associations or advertising on radio. Tactics are enabled by tools, so you need these plans in place before you start blogging or tweeting

Choose Tools – This is where many companies start their social media journey, but it really is where they should end it. Different tools are good for different purposes. For example, Twitter is an excellent news delivery vehicle while Facebook is better for creating a feedback loop. My book, Secrets Of Social Media Marketing, has a more complete selection grid. Also, many businesses are now learning how to use multiple tools in concert to magnify their impact.

Appropriate tools also may have nothing to do with the Internet. For example, starting a local chapter of a professional trade association or submitting speaking proposals to conference organizers can be a great way to network or build visibility. You can also combine offline and online tactics, such as promoting an upcoming speech through the media while seeking interviews with prominent bloggers.

This is the basic framework I use for discussion, and I find that the structured approach helps focus my clients. When you really think about your business goals, it’s surprising to discover how many of the tactics come down to good old-fashioned person-to-person relationships. Online tools can certainly help there, but sometimes a phone call or a lunch meeting is worth 1,000 tweets.

First Reviews

Book authors endure several months of agony between the time they submit a manuscript for publication and the arrival of the first reviews. So Dana and I were pleased to read these words from the influential Library Journal about our new book, The Joy of Geocaching, which arrives in April:

Longtime tech writer Gillin and his wife, Dana, an editor, are the perfect ambassadors for geocaching. Their book imparts all the how-to that a budding enthusiast needs to get started while also including lots of funny and interesting anecdotes that will communicate to the completely unfamiliar reader just why the sport is exploding in popularity.

Read the complete review here.

Tip of the Week: Posterous

If you have accounts with more than one social media service these days (and who doesn’t?), then Posterous can save you time and increase your online footprint. I got interested in Posterous, which is one of a expanding category of so-called “lifestreaming” services, after I read that PR super blogger Steve Rubel had mothballed his popular Micro Persuasion blog last June and shifted all his activities to Posterous. Lifestreaming tools radiate your messages out to all the social networking services you use. Instead of sending a message as a tweet, I can e-mail it to post@posterous.com and it will appear almost instantly on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, FriendFeed, Flickr and Delicious. No added work on my end. The service supports dozens of other destinations, including YouTube and blogs.

Posterous does some clever things in interpreting the messages you send. For example, if you include a link to a photo, it automatically reformats and resizes the image for the selected destination. It also knows not to attempt to post an entire blog entry to a social bookmarking site but rather to publish a headline and link. There are many other dials and switches that I haven’t investigated yet, but the service is already saving me time and drudgery. Another popular lifestreaming service is ping.fm and others are on the way. In addition, many social networks and bookmark sites are incorporating cross-posting as a basic feature.

The downside of lifestreaming is that it multiplies the amount of noise in an already cacophonous Internet. But it also multiplies your opportunity to be heard. There are big implications to this, which I explore in my column in BtoB magazine next week and will expand upon in future editions of this newsletter.

Just For Fun: Funny Street View Photos

Google is in the process of photographing as much of the habitable world as it can for its Street View service. As its camera-equipped vehicles methodically troll the streets capturing images, they occasionally come across some funny and bizarre scenes. A blogger has captured some of the weirder ones at the Top 100 Funniest Google Street View Pictures, such as this one showing a man apparently trying to break into a house. They’re presented along with links to the image on the original map. I’m sure there are plenty of others that didn’t make this list, but it’s a good start.

Google and Apple are diametrically opposed in many respects. Apple creates delightful experiences. Its products are proprietary, closed and self-contained, but people love using them because they not only work but seem to function the way humans expect. Apple is a
technology company whose vision is rooted in human-friendly design.

Google’s vision is rooted in the potential of technology. The company produces an amazing array of products, ranging from mapping software to CAD design to medical records organizers. Google shares its ideas quite openly in public “labs” and is also prone to ending public experiments with little notice or explanation. Even its self-deprecating error messages are emblematic of the corporate culture, as if to say “So it didn’t work; we’ll make it better.”

The public-facing strategies these companies employ also couldn’t be more different. Apple holds its new product plans close to the vest and reveals them with fanfare at elaborate press conferences that generate months of media speculation. The company may only hold a couple of press conferences a year, but you can be sure they’re memorable.

Apple not only doesn’t use social media, it has actively litigated against bloggers who have revealed sensitive information. The strategy works well for Apple because its rabid base of fans is more than happy to indulge in speculative frenzy and drive awareness that no amount of advertising could buy.

In contrast, Google rarely holds press conferences. Most of its products are announced in a low-key style via blogs. Its developers and product managers work the long tail through one-on-one interviews and frequent speaking engagements. The company uses every social media outlet it can, but shuns the media spotlight.

So Which Are You?

Is your company Apple or Google? Most businesses model their public personae on the Apple example. Their plans are shrouded in secrecy, access to executives is granted only to the top media and leaks are dealt with harshly out of fear that they could compromise the goal of being first to market. The theory is that the market is hungry for information, so it’s best to withhold news until it can have the greatest impact.

That strategy works for Apple, but not for most businesses. Today, customers are swimming in information and if they don’t get insight about where you’re going, they simply move to someone else. Companies that build products behind closed doors risk becoming irrelevant because no one talks about them. What’s more, they lose the advantage of involving customers in a process that can not only make their products better, but form the basis for a word-of-mouth marketing force.

How about being first to market? That benefit is vastly overrated. History has demonstrated that the only advantage of being an early mover is that it gives you the opportunity to make mistakes that others learn from. Apple’s sole first-to-market experience — the Newton — was also its most notable failure. The history of technology markets in particular is littered with businesses that created innovations that others later made successful.

In a world of plentiful information, the winners are those that do the best job of talking about their innovations before they reach the market. Prospective customers want to be involved in the process, and they punish those businesses that don’t indulge them. Look at the companies that are making headlines today and you’ll find nearly all of them have adopted an open and inclusive path to the market.

The Apples of the world are few and far between. Nearly everyone would like to be an Apple, but few will ever get the chance.

A New Online Community Just For Us

The Society for New Communications Research has been providing valuable perspective and advice on new media for over five years, but it has always done so from the precarious position of a nonprofit organization. So I was very excited to learn late last year that Redwood Collaborative, a b-to-b media company specializing in technology, has stepped in to fund some of SNCR’s programs and build on its ideas.

The first fruit of that investment is NewComm Collaborative, a knowledge-sharing community for professionals who are “passionate about learning how to harness the new communications technologies that are transforming media and business models.” The beta site just launched with hundreds of articles from contributors and the SNCR archives. I was pleased to be asked to guest-edit the category of New Media and Journalism for January. We’ve got material from Jeff Jarvis, Martin Langeveld, Mark Potts, Gina Chen and other smart journalists as well as a forum topic entitled “Is Media Devastation a Good Thing?” Click on over and sign up.

While you’re there, also sign up for the annual New Comm Forum, April 20-23 in San Mateo, CA. In my view, this is the best lineup of speakers the Forum has had in the four years I’ve been attending. I can’t wait to meet these people!

Tip of the Week: Xmarks

If you, like me, regularly use more than one computer to access the Web, you know how frustrating it can be that all browsers are local. You know the drill: You bookmark a website on your home computer and then can’t find the same site when you’re looking for it at work two days later. Or if you use the saved password function in the browser, you learn the hard way that passwords saved on one computer don’t show up on any others unless you copy them through a laborious backup and restore process.

Xmarks is for you. This simple but super-useful little plug-in for Firefox, Internet Explorer and Apple Safari synchronizes all your local bookmarks and passwords so the stuff you choose to remember on one computer will be available to you on all the others you use. In recent months, Xmarks has added other cool features like search-result commentary from its community users, but I find it enormously useful simply because the items I bookmark on the laptop in my bedroom at 7 a.m. are available in my office two hours later. Thank goodness for simple pleasures!

Are You Doing B-to-B Social Marketing? Contact Me

Eric Schwartzman and I are hard at work on the new book we’re co-authoring on the subject of business-to-business social media marketing. We’re looking for companies that are using the tools to reach business customers, channel partners and other non-consumer constituents. We want this book to be full of success stories and anecdotes, so if you have an interesting experience to share, please contact me. And don’t forget to visit the draft outline and give us your suggestions.

Just For Fun: Not Just Another State Of The Union

State of the Union addresses aren’t known for their excitement. Especially in an economy like this one. But we found a great idea to spice things up this year: a drinking game you can play as President Obama is talking tonight. Granted — it won’t get you as drunk as, say, a shot for every missed verb in a Palin speech, but even if you play by only one of the rules, you’ll still be happy enough at the end of the event tonight to say you paid attention to this historic SOTU. For extra credit, continue playing during the pundit commentary afterward.

So I was a little surprised recently when Scott told me, “Most of the mainstream still relies on e-mail. Newsletters will be a big part of our strategy for 2010.”

Newsletters? E-mail? Isn’t that stuff so last millennium? In fact, e-mail continues to be the killer app of social media.

E-marketer reported last month that “e-mail was the top channel for distributing content to friends, with 46.4% of all shares. About one-third of shares went to Facebook and less than 6% were tweeted.” The Pew Internet & American Life Project reported last fall that more people use the Internet for e-mail than for any other activity, including search.

So allow me to sing the praises of e-mail as an engagement medium. Note I didn’t say “marketing medium.” Every marketer I’ve spoken to for the last two years has told me that e-mail blasts are delivering fewer and fewer quality results. E-mail newsletters, on the other hand, continue to be core to their strategies. Here’s why.

Social media provides a great opportunity to create awareness among groups of people you don’t know, but they pale next to e-mail’s capacity to sustain relationships. My newsletter consumes about four hours of my time each week, which is not a small investment. However, it’s an invaluable way to sustain important relationships and a pretty steady source of new business. About 30% of my subscribers open each issue and I invariably get at least four or five direct responses as well as several comments to my blog. The newsletter also generates at least a couple of new business leads every month.

Permission to Speak

E-mail has one critical advantage over all social media: It’s permission-based. By subscribing to my newsletter, you give me the okay to periodically intrude upon your inbox with a message that I hope is of interest to you. Your inbox is hallowed ground to me. While I don’t take unsubscribes personally, I do monitor them for evidence that my topics are going off-base. I respond to every reply I receive to a newsletter and I take those comments seriously. Anyone who takes the time to subscribe deserves my attention.

So let’s abstract this back to a business newsletter. I believe every company should have one. The subscription form on your site creates the opportunity to convert casual visits into conversations. It’s a chance to enhance visitors’ understanding of what you do, update them on new initiatives and demonstrate your value. A static website should catch attention; a newsletter should create a dialogue.

Think Different (As Apple Would Say)

Newsletters are different from other forms of communication. For one thing, you should make the message more personal. Your newsletter subscribers have a deeper interest in what you do than casual Web visitors. Give them your best stuff.

Subscribers should get value from a newsletter that they don’t get from a website or e-mail blast. That may be insight, an offer, an advance peek at something new or an invitation. If subscribers don’t get something special, why should they bother subscribing?

Newsletters are an excellent place to pull together your recent activities and show how your business is moving forward. Speak personally; this is a conversation, not an advertisement. Ask someone in your company to share a bit of expertise. Preview some new research before sharing it with the world. Give subscribers an exclusive discount. Share a behind-the-scenes look at a product or service that the rest of the world doesn’t get to see.

Always invite response. The “Reply” button is the fastest way to establish a dialogue. You might also give people the option to post their comments publicly on your blog or via a Twitter hash tag.

When people respond, return the favor. I can’t emphasize this enough. Your newsletter is a way to convert an impression into a relationship. Why would you fumble away an opportunity for interaction? A response doesn’t mean an insulting boilerplate message. It means a message from a human. Better not to reply at all than to leave the task to a robot.

I subscribe to a lot of newsletters just to keep an eye on what others are doing. I’m often amazed at how little attention businesses pay to optimizing the potential of their newsletters. Airlines, for example, fill my inbox with discounts and package deals. I can’t remember the last time one of them invited my feedback or tried to help me be a better traveler. Perhaps that’s why I don’t subscribe to many airline newsletters anymore.

What ideas have worked for your newsletters? Let’s keep the dialogue going by sharing some successes on the blogged version of this article. Or use the Twitter hash tag #PGCNL.

Social Media: Small Business’ Unfair Advantage

You’re competing against a billion-dollar company. It’s armed with a $10 million advertising budget and a battalion of marketing professionals. All you’ve got is your little blog.

What an unfair advantage for you.

Social media is the best thing ever to happen to small business. In my recent guest entry on the ShopTab blog, I present five reasons why that’s true.

Free Webcast for My Subscribers

Traditional marketing was all about delivering a message from the top and spreading it through as many channels as possible. That worked well in an age when mass media dominated the communications landscape, but the world has changed. Today, messages begin at the bottom and percolate up.

At 1 p.m. EST this afternoon, I’ll present a webinar entitled The New World of Bottom-Up Marketing presented by the Best Practice Institute. The event is available only to paid members of Institute, but subscribers to my newsletter can participate for *free* by registering with the code PAULBPI. Stop by and let me know what you think!

New Seminar: Twitter Demystified

A lot of people are asking about Twitter these days, so I’ve come up with a new seminar that helps explain it all. This course takes about two to three hours, depending on the detail desired, and can be delivered live or via the Web. Contact me if you’re interested. Here’s a description:

Twitter Demystified

Why do some Twitter users have 10,000 followers after one year and others only 500? It isn’t just the volume of tweets that make someone a Twitter superstar; it’s also content, focus and constructive participation in this vast and growing community.

Three years after it was introduced, Twitter still remains a mystery to many people. To newcomers it appears to be a cacophony of disjointed information, yet many businesses are finding that it is the single most valuable tool they can use to magnify a message. What’s their secret?

Twitter’s endless stream of commentary actually sits atop a sophisticated structure of technology and cultural protocols that dictate how a message can be communicated and amplified. Once you understand how the system works, the service is amazingly powerful. Success on Twitter is a matter of delivering value, interacting constructively with a community and supporting other members. It’s also a matter of knowing what behaviors are appropriate in a community that makes up its own rules.

This seminar teaches participants how Twitter works, how to become quickly productive and how to grow influence and derive value from the community. Participants will learn the following:

• The basic constructs of the Twitter service
• Important terms and concepts
• Dos and don’ts for community engagement
• How to enlist other members to amplify a message
• How to work with a follower base
• How to measure results and adjust strategies
• How to make Twitter a part of your daily routine
• Useful third-party services that complement the Twitter experience

Tip of the Week: Office 2010 for Free

The Microsoft Office 2007 suite costs a minimum of $150 for the student edition at Best Buy, but you can download the full version of the next generation of Office for free. Microsoft is making Office 2010 available at no charge through its beta program with a license that runs at least through October. The company doesn’t say if the product will stop working on Halloween, but I hope it doesn’t because I’m enjoying this new version a lot. I particularly like the OneNote organizer. Plan on going to lunch after you start the download because it takes a while. Get it here.

Just For Fun: 10 Places You’re Probably Not Cool Enough To Get Into

Although I realize that subscribers to this newsletter are among the most keyed-in people on the planet, I doubt more than a handful of you have been to any of the places on this list of restricted-access facilities, both government- and non-government-related. Virtually visit the Ise Grand Shrine in Japan, rebuilt every 20 years and accessible only by the Japanese imperial family and its high priests and priestesses. Or come imagine what is stored inside the Vatican’s Secret Archives (maybe Dan Brown was right!). Or sit down with a world-class wine list at Club 33 in Disneyland. If you’re one of the lucky few who can get into any of these spots, send me a couple of all-access passes, will you?

In January, 2000, few people had heard of Google. Online advertising was banners and e-mails. Big media brands dominated the Web. U.S. newspaper ad revenue would hit record high levels in 2000. Newsroom employment would peak in 2001 as newsstand sales of the top 100 magazines approached 30 million. No one had heard of blogs. People used mobile phones to talk.

Fast forward to 2009. Last year, people spent six billion minutes on Facebook, downloaded one billion YouTube videos and logged over 1.4 million blog entries every day. The iPhone became the first mobile phone to be used more for data than for voice. The Internet became the second most popular news medium behind television. Wikipedia posted its three millionth article.

Meanwhile, U.S. newsroom employment fell to a 25-year low and magazine newsstand sales dropped to 63% of their 2001 peaks. Reader’s Digest declared bankruptcy. Comcast said it would buy NBC.

The statistics go on and on. In just 10 years, our century-old mass-market media model has given way to a new structure dominated by the economics of the individual. Customers now take their opinions directly to the market. Woe to organizations that don’t listen.

The contraction of mass-market media has brought plenty of pain. Tens of thousands of media professionals have lost their jobs in the past two years, crowdsourcing has sent some professional fees into a tailspin and veteran marketers are under threat if they don’t “get” social media. But this pain is necessary, even beneficial in the long run.

New Efficiency

Media has historically been one of the least efficient industries on the planet. It’s a business that declares success if only 97% of its audience ignores an ad or tosses a mailer into the trash. It gains one customer at the expense of annoying 50 bystanders.

When department store magnate John Wanamaker said half his ad dollars were wasted, but he didn’t know which half, he was being generous.

The new Internet has flipped the economics. As media control has passed from institutions to individuals, waste has begun to work out of the system. The cost of reaching a targeted customer will only decline in the years to come. Sadly, these changes will also devastate those industries and professions that thrived on media’s historical inefficiency.

While mourning the loss of comfort and security that old media once provided, we shouldn’t get caught up looking backward. More competitive markets will bring new options for reaching customers. The marketers who survive will be those who put the past behind them and move quickly to take advantage of these new efficiencies.

Let’s start the year not by regretting the losses of the last decade, but by learning the skills we’ll need to survive the next.

What changes will we be looking back upon a decade from now? Post your comments on the blogged version of this article.

My Next Book Will Be For B2B Marketers

More than 50 books about social media were published in 2009, but not a single one targeted business-to-business marketers. It’s hard to believe, but Amazon doesn’t lie.

Eric Schwartzman and I intend to fill that gap. We’ve teamed up to write a new book under the working title of Social Media Marketing to the Business Customer for publication late this year or early next.The book will focus on issues that are unique to the B2B: disclosure, regulation, internal resistance, policies, legal issues and more.

Eric (pictured here) is the innovator behind the iPressroom service that many large companies use for their online media destinations. He’s also host of the On the Record…Online podcast series. Over nearly six years, he’s recorded audio interviews with almost 200 marketers and journalists about how the Internet has affected their work. It’s an amazing archive.
Eric and I will spend the next six months researching this book, and we welcome your guidance and expertise. The draft outline has been posted online and we invite you to share your thoughts. We’ll also be looking for good case studies of B2B marketers who have implemented successful social media programs. And if you’re willing to bare your soul and tell us about a campaign that DIDN’T go well, we’re particularly interested in talking to you. We’ll be gentle, I promise.

Just reply to this e-mail if you want to reach me. I will be posting updates on the research on my blog as we move forward. Forwards and retweets are more than welcome as we steam toward the June 30 manuscript deadline.

One More Plea to Take My Survey

Just before the holidays, I wrote you about a research report I’m preparing on multi-platform social media strategies. Marketers are beginning to expand beyond using point tools such as blogs and Facebook fan pages in favor of multi-platform programs that incorporate elements like video, podcasts, social networks, Twitter and branded customer communities all working together. I’m finding that combining several tools can greatly enhance the reach and impact of a program.

I’ve posted a survey to try to identify the most valuable scenarios and tools for multi-platform campaigns. If you can spare 10 minutes, please fill it out. I’m also lining up one-on-one interviews with marketers at mid-sized and large companies who can speak on the record about their experiences using multiple platforms. Please contact me if you’re willing to speak.

Tip of the Week: HandBrake Video Transcoder

I don’t know who first said, “The great thing about standards is that there are so many of them,” but he or she must have been talking about online video. If you’re trying to convert a video taken with a digital camera and post it on a couple of different websites, you may need to reformat — it’s called “transcoding” — two or three times in the process. And, of course, Apple doesn’t read Microsoft and vice versa.

Until recently, the only way to do this was with software that was either expensive, limited in functionality or insanely difficult to use. So I was grateful recently to find HandBrake, an open-source software program that accepts just about any video format you throw at it and spits out a file in almost any other format. HandBrake is fast and the default settings are easy to use. If you want to geek out, there are about a thousand dials and knobs you can play with. And since it’s open source, HandBrake will improve over time. Try it!

Just For Fun: Tweeting Greyhounds

Those of you who follow my Twitter stream may know that my wife, Dana, and I recently adopted a greyhound named Jacoby (right). It was Jacoby’s second day home when Dana thought of creating a Twitter account for our new dog. He now has 64 followers and is listed on 8 Twitter lists. There are several dozen dogs on Twitter, who share the daily adventures of their lives, and Jacoby is no exception. If you think this is silly, check out some of the other lists that people have made on Listorious. And go follow Jacoby.

I always ask them the same question: How many of you subscribe to a daily newspaper? The response from this group was pretty typical: three students out of a class of 34. With that as a backdrop, I talked about the momentous changes going on in marketing and media. Here are some of the things I told them:

• Much of what you’ve learned about marketing over the last four years will be irrelevant five years from now. The field is changing too quickly. You’ve been learning about how to tell a story and position a brand, but in the future your job will be much more about listening to customers and working collaboratively on brand definition.

• You should discard much of what your teachers have been telling you about the media. Traditional media is collapsing and what emerges from the rubble will look very different than the institutions we now know.

• The best skills you can bring into the marketing field today are resourcefulness and curiosity. You must be willing to reinvent your skills constantly because the playing field is in a constant state of turmoil. This is very exciting for you and it’s very scary for the people you will be working for. Be sympathetic, but don’t get stuck doing things the old way.

• Traditional media was built upon a foundation of inefficiency. The clothing retailer who wanted to reach the .01% of the population who want to buy a wedding gown at any given time has had to pay for the 99.99% who don’t. That’s crazy, but it’s the only way we could get a message across in the past.

• The worlds of media and marketing are undergoing enormous improvements in efficiency right now. Unfortunately, efficiency is usually painful because it destroys institutions that were built upon inefficiency – institutions like newspapers and magazines. In the end, we’ll be better off, but we’re still in the ugly destruction phase right now.

• In the last decade, Americans have shifted from browsing to searching for information. This has huge implications for the way decisions of all kinds will be made in the future. Search engine marketing and search engine optimization should be part of any core university marketing curriculum today.

• The shriveling of traditional media creates new opportunities for organizations — and that includes businesses — to fill the trust gap that’s been left behind. Businesses can become media if they so choose. Most of them haven’t accommodated themselves to that fact.

• Trust is complex in the new world because we are losing our traditional trusted brands. I trust Wikipedia to tell me the date the Yalta Treaty was signed, but not necessarily to interpret the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe. Trust is also situational. We are learning to trust some sources for certain kinds of information but not for others. It will take time for us to sort this out.

• Today, individuals can choose to be celebrities all by themselves. They need to have something interesting to say and the knowledge to use new channels to say it. This is very cool. We no longer have to depend on others to decide if we can be important or not.

• Today, individuals can choose to be celebrities all by themselves. They need to have something interesting to say and the knowledge to use new channels to say it. This is very cool. We no longer have to depend on others to decide if we can be important or not.

• This is a great time to be a college student getting into marketing. The old guard is struggling to learn the new tools that this generation intuitively understands. Companies like Edelman are going so far as to create reverse mentoring programs in which younger employees train senior executives. This doesn’t mean you young people know it all. Be open-minded about learning from the experience of others and be generous about sharing what you know.

• In the old days, the marketer’s job was to media-train a few key executives. In the future, the marketer’s job will be to media-train the entire company. This will be enormously empowering for marketers.

• Marketing’s traditional role has been to talk. Its future role will be to listen. Branding and positioning will be defined as much by a company’s constituents as by its employees. If you choose simply to talk, people will choose simply not to hear you. Marketers have an unprecedented opportunity to increase their importance in the organization by becoming listeners.

• Messages spread from the bottom up much faster than they spread from the top down. Cindy Gordon’s story at Universal Studios is just one example. She told seven people the news and within a couple of days, 250 million others knew.

• By the time you graduate, have a LinkedIn profile. And for goodness sake, clean up your Facebook profile!

What words of wisdom would you give to today’s graduates? Share you advice as a comment below.

Tip of the Week: Picasa3

One of the lesser-known free goodies from Google’s treasure trove is this photo editor that delivers the features of a paid product for free. Picasa is intended to be used as a companion to Google’s namesake photo album service, but it also works splendidly as a stand-alone editor.

You can quickly import and organize your photos, tag them and save the results for upload to any service. I personally use Flickr, but Picasa is my editor of choice. One of the nicest features of this program is geotagging, which enables you to categorize images by their geographic coordinates. You can then use Google Earth to focus in on photos of, say, a Caribbean resort, and see pictures others have uploaded from that area. The features for cropping and adjusting color balance and contrast are also outstanding. I particularly like the “I’m Feeling Lucky” option, which can take a photo shot in poor light conditions and instantly fix the contrast and highlight problems. Download Picasa here.

Just For Fun: Urban Legends Explained

• Does the number of hooves lifted into the air on equestrian statues reveal how the rider died? (No)
• Was a baby strapped in a car seat really left on the roof of a car? (Yes)
• Is it true that no one is ever declared dead while on Disney theme park property because Disney has the bodies removed before the declaration is made? (No)
• Can a baseball be hit farther with a heavy bat than a light one? (Yes)
• If you fell from a height of 10,000 feet, would you die? (Not necessarily)

These are just a few of the trivia gems from my two favorite sites for unconventional wisdom, Snopes.com and The Straight Dope. Snopes specializes in telling the truth about urban legends. Founded in 1995, it is the product of two indefatigable researchers named Barbara and David Mikkelson who have exhaustively documented the true facts about thousands of items of conventional wisdom. Are there really alligators in the New York City sewer system? Nope. And after you read the Mikkelsons’ dissection of this popular myth, you’ll agree with their conclusions.

The Straight Dope has been published by Cecil Adams since 1973. The column has appeared in more than 30 newspapers throughout the US and Canada and has been published in five collections of his work. Unlike Snopes, The Straight Dope presents detailed responses to questions in which a yes/no response is not always appropriate. For example: “What do the mysterious letters ‘YKK’ mean on zippers?” You’ll have to go here to find out.

Some people say that the Internet is a font of misinformation, but these two sites prove them wrong. They’re a great way to get clarity on myths that have persisted, in some cases, for generations.

Defy conventional wisdom. This is an old newspaper columnist trick, but it works well. Think of a topic that most people agree upon and argue the exact opposite point of view. For example, try to build a case for why social networks are a passing fad or the New York Jets are the team to beat in the NFL this year (okay, that last one’s a stretch). You have to think creatively to argue your point, and the result may be more satire than opinion, but just let the idea take you where it wants to go. Going against conventional wisdom is one of the best ways to fuel creativity.

Get Angry. The best writing is driven by emotion. Think about something you’ve heard or seen recently that really made you mad. Are there lessons you can share? Or can you abstract the issue into a more general commentary ? Maybe you got cut off by a driver talking on a cell phone. That could lead to a bigger essay on distraction. Let your passion guide you, but be careful not to push the “publish” button till you’ve calmed down.

Aggregate other opinions. Go to a news/blog aggregation site like Alltop.com and browse a category that interests you. Find a topic that several people are commenting upon, summarize their comments and add your own. For an extra twist, try the tactic mentioned in the first item above and arguing the opposite case.

Tell a story. It’s the most powerful form of human communication. Reach back to an experience that was meaningful to you and start writing it down. What did you learn from that experience? How can those lessons help others?

Revisit. The simple act of scrolling through your past blog entries can yield ideas about new topics or new angles on old topics. If your predictions were wrong, tell why. If they were right, build on them.

Conduct a small research project. Two of my most well-received blog entries of the last year were quick experiments, each of which took less than an hour to conduct:

• Last year, I visited 15 corporate blogs shortly after the financial meltdown and looked at what they were saying about the economy. The lack of attention to this hugely important story was stunning. It made me angry, and that’s a good formula for writing.
• Last month I picked a stream of 100 tweets at random and analyzed them for content and value. The results surprised me and my essay generated quite a few tweets from others.

Make a list. This is the most popular organizational tools in the blogosphere. Pick a topic about which you have some expertise and offer quick hits of advice. For example: “10 Ways to Research a Company on the Web,” or “Seven software utilities I couldn’t live without.” Or you can skip the numbers and just organize your thoughts in modules, like I’m doing here. I get tired of all the numbered lists after a while, but I have to admit, readers love ‘em.

Predict. Predictions are hugely popular at the end of the year, but you can make them any time. To add variety, limit your time frame or endpoint. Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz did this effectively with the 500th edition of their “For Immediate Release” podcast by asking their listeners to predict what topics the two will be discussing during their next 500 shows. Pick a topic, make a prediction and argue your case. Then revisit later and write about how you did.

Recommend. Are there blogs, discussion forums, podcasts or how-to websites that you love? Write them down, tell what you like about each and share them with your readers.

Explore everyday things. This is an offbeat approach, but it’s a great way to satisfy your curiosity while delving into little-known corners of the Web. Pick a topic about which you know very little and research it. For example, learn why golf balls have dimples or find the origin of the phrase “the whole 9 yards.” This work may have limited relevance to your business, but it’ll probably yield a fascinating tidbit of information and help you learn new ways to find things online.

Serialize. Take any of the ideas above and publish it as short thematic entries. Few people read long articles anymore, anyway, so break out those ideas and sprinkle them around. Just be sure to tag and categorize them appropriately so you can reassemble later.

I could go on. There are dozens of other ways to generate ideas. But let’s hear from you. Comment below on some tactics that you use to unblock those creative juices.

All About Social Media ROI

I’ve devoted quite a bit of time recently to researching the topic of social media ROI, which is probably one of the hottest issues in marketing today. I developed a new 90-minute slide presentation on this subject, which can be expanded to a half-day workshop if you’re interested. Bottom-line: not only can you measure ROI, but you can unearth some fantastic insights about your prospects and customers in the process. View and download my slide presentation here. I also borrowed liberally from two other experts on the topic: Katie Paine and Olivier Blanchard. I recommend following them both.

Tip of the Week: Google’s Similar Pages

Here’s a Google treasure that will save you loads of time, particularly when researching products. One little noticed feature of Google search results is the “Similar” link that appears at the end of the result summary. Click on this link and you kick off a rather sophisticated Google search that looks for pages that have the same characteristics as the search result you chose.

Here’s an example. Suppose you’re interested in conversation monitoring tools. Within the top 10 results you’ll find Radian6, a popular (and very good) product in that category. Click on the “similar” link and you get search results that list dozens of other conversation monitoring tools. The results are more focused than those you would get from a standard search query because Google can infer from the document that you’re probably looking for a technology vendor. Try this next time you’re researching options in a market.

Just For Fun: Old Computer Ads

If you think the idea of using sex to sell technology originated with GoDaddy.com, then you should check out this collection of old computer ads assembled by CIO magazine. The journal, which is put out by venerable publisher International Data Group, dug back into the archives of sister publications like Computerworld and InfoWorld to find some of the funniest ads from the early days of the industry. In addition to the classic bits-and-babes promotion like the one shown at right, they include standouts like Bill Gates’ endorsement of RadioShack computers. I’m old enough to remember when some of these promotions originally ran, and can attest to the fact that these are not exceptions to the rule. Just think of how far we’ve come. Or have we?

But writing is hard for most people. Just coming up with a topic to write about and something new to say is often the biggest struggle.

I’ve learned a few tricks about how to overcome Web 2.0 writer’s block that I thought I’d share with you over the next couple of issues. I also hope you’ll come to the blog version of this article and add your own. We’ll start at the beginning.

Choose a Topic.The first step is to write about things that inspire you and about which you have strong opinions. If the subject doesn’t move you, it’s hard to get motivated and create ideas.

Use Feeds. All blogs and most news sites support RSS feeds. In some cases, the feed delivers the entire content of the site. In other cases, they’re organized by topic. You assemble feeds in RSS reader.

RSS readers are basically mini newspapers you create out of information streams from online sources. I use Google Reader to set up topical feeds from bloggers and publishers I like who cover these topics. Here’s an example of one I set up about journalism and news. It’s usually a two-click process to add a feed to Google Reader, and another couple of steps to organize the feed into a folder. You can even republish the collection of feeds as a single feed of its own.

Topical feeds inspire great ideas. You can easily see if a topic is trending by the amount of attention it’s getting. Feed collections also give you a quick idea of whether a topic is controversial, since you can easily see if a lot of people are writing about it.

Tweet and be Tweeted. I’ll admit to not being very good at jotting down ideas when I have them. My teachers always told me to carry around a notebook for this purpose, but I’d either forgot the notebook, the pen or both.

Twitter has helped me surmount this disability. Now when I see something interesting, or have an idea, I tweet it. I can then go through my own tweet stream later and look for ideas that have since slipped my mind.

Twitter is also an endless source of ideas. If you carefully manage the list of people you follow, the stream of tweets is a great source of inspiration. With the new Twitter Lists feature, I can now read tweets from people who share interests or affiliations. It’s like the topical RSS feeds described above, only shorter and less predictable.

Bookmark. When you see an interesting article or video, bookmark it and write a comment. Services like Delicious, Reddit and Clipmarks make this easy. My personal favorite is Diigo, because it allows me to highlight and annotate the items I bookmark. Here’s my personal list of the most interesting articles I’ve bookmarked recently. Choose a tag you’ll remember, like “ideas.”

Listen to Your Audience. Conferences, meetings and consulting work are good sources of material because they tap into what’s on people’s minds right now. Find an article that interests you and look at the comments to see what questions people are asking. Maybe you can be the one to answer them.

Refresh old material. If you’ve been writing for more than a year, chances are there’s some material in your archives that could use a fresh look. Revisit an old prediction and see if it came true. Or discuss new ideas on an old subject. Be sure to link to the original article to drive a little more traffic to it.

I’ll continue with more ideas next week. Also, as I was writing this piece, I came upon an article by Steve Aitchison on the very same topic. He suggests 100 ways to generate ideas, and many of his suggestions are very good.   What are you tips for overcoming blogger’s block? Share them here.

Hear from the Word of Mouth Supergeniuses!

Andy Sernovitz is arguably the father of word-of-mouth marketing. He founded the association that goes by that name, authored a book on the topic and runs a lively and entertaining blog. I was delighted to be asked by Andy to participate in his new “Word-Of-Mouth Supergenius” one-day conference in Chicago on Dec. 16. Only Andy Sernovitz would come up with a title like that! It actually looks like a great program, with lots of small group interaction and several brands that have had notable social media success. Register here and use the discount code “Paulismyhero” (another Andy original!) to get a $101 discount.

Tip of the Week: Twitter Times

One of the reasons the newspaper industry is in disarray is because people are turning to their friends for the advice they used to get from professional editors. Twitter Times takes this trend to the logical next step. Enter your Twitter account credentials, and Twitter Times generates a customized newspaper based upon the articles your friends are talking about. You can then share your newspaper with others. It’s a simple idea that delivers a strikingly good product. If you’re easily overwhelmed by the volume of tweets that course through your reader, this site makes sense of them all.

Just For Fun: Maybe Google’s Not So Smart After All

We’ve all thought Google may just be the Second Coming of the Internet Genius Companies for many years now. It not only brought the word algorithm back into our vernacular, it’s also done things for our lives we never knew we needed. But it is, at its core, a search engine. That search engine is what we’re here to talk to you about today, folks. It’s boring, we know. It doesn’t stand up to the sexy Google Voice or even Gmail. But maybe we can bring back the search engine, just for one day, and make it cool again.   Go to Google and start typing a question. See what the Genius Google, in its near-infinite wisdom, thinks you’re asking when it provides all those “helpful” suggestions. Type in “Is there any” (sans quotation marks) and see what Google suggests you really mean. (Okay, so we stole that from TheNextWeb.com.) Let’s get creative… Type in “why will” or “how come” or even “why is it that” and see what you come up with. Let us know if you enter a question to which Google offers some more really bizarre suggestions. We’ll publish your results in a future Just For Fun.

Google Social Search is an experimental program that integrates content from a user’s social network into search results. When enabled, the first page of Google search results includes a few links at the bottom to related content from a member’s social network. Google derives this information from the profiles people build when creating a Google account. It also taps into other Google tools to make assumptions about what’s important to a member. For example, if you subscribe to blogs in Google Reader, the search engine now presumes that that content is important to you and elevates it in search results.

Social Search continues Google’s efforts – which began with a year ago with SearchWiki – to customize the search process. SearchWiki enables logged-in users to shuffle their own search results, promoting some and demoting or eliminating others. Users can also annotate their search results.

Social Search goes one step further, and it’s a big step. The search engine now makes assumptions about your interests based upon your friends network. This has tremendous utility. If I want to find a steakhouse in Dallas, I can now see recommendations from my friends directly in my search results. Google already annotates some commercial results with reviews it gathers from online review sites. It’s a small step to expect that I’ll soon be able to promote my friends’ reviews to the top of the heap.

Social Web

Last week, I had the chance to discuss these developments with Mike Moran, whose book, Search Engine Marketing, Inc., remains one of my favorite texts for understanding the Internet. I proposed to Mike that Google’s ambition was to make the entire Internet a social network. His response was that they’re already mostly there.

In his analysis, Google is extending the customization features of SearchWiki to now include input from trusted third parties. We’re already at the point where no two registered Google users see the same results for most of their queries. And this is just the beginning. For better or for worse, Google knows a lot more about our online behavior than it uses. For people like myself who regularly use Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Documents, the company is now in a position to capture a great deal of information about what I do online because it can peek inside most of the written content I create.

The obvious privacy issues aside (and I’m not a believer in Big Brother), this puts Google in a position to evolve its search strategy in a much more customized direction. Google can only go so far before the “creepiness” factor sets in, but there’s still plenty of runway to experiment in making the search experience more personal.

Search Party

For marketers, this has interesting implications. Many of us are now comfortable with the basics of search engine optimization (SEO) but what will we do when every user’s search results are unique? We could be looking at a future in which search engine performance is determined as much by opinions from people online as it is by page titles and domain names. Although inbound links already factor into Google’s search results, the relationship of the people doing the linking to the person doing the searching will be a new variable. SEO itself may become a social pursuit.

Don’t underestimate the value of social search. Compete.com estimates that search.twitter.com attracted nearly 3,000,000 unique visitors in September. That’s a drop in the bucket compared to Google, but it’s up 550% year-over-year. Now that Twitter has a deal with Microsoft to deliver its search results over Bing (and speculation is that a deal with Google will follow) we likely to see more creative efforts to integrate social content.

Three years from now, the SEO tactics we’ve work so hard to learn may seem quaint indeed.

When PR and Marketing Collide

I know it’s late notice, but there’s a webinar this afternoon that should be of interest to public relations and marketing people alike. Social Media Today is hosting “When PR and Interactive Marketing Collide,” which takes a new and novel look at social media from within the context of corporate governance. The premise is that neither marketing or PR has seized ownership of social media strategies. Will one group emerged dominant over the other, or will they need to redraw the lines of influence? Maggie Fox moderates, and I’ll be on the panel along with Peter Kim and Cathy Brooks.

Tip of the Week: Twitter Lists

Google wasn’t the only one rolling out innovative features this past week. Twitter had the blogosphere buzzing with the announcement of Twitter Lists, a powerful new way to group people together by topic, relationship or whatever criteria you care to use.

The feature provides a customized view of a collection of Twitter users, enabling you to see what they are collectively saying at any given time. Anyone can create lists and share them with others. Twitter currently caps the number of lists a member can create at 20 and the number of names on any one list at 500, but those limitations appear arbitrary and could change.

You can choose to follow an entire list instead of searching out and following each member. Your personal profile on Twitter also now keeps a record of what lists you’re on.

To see how useful this is, check out the National Hockey League’s collection of hockey fans organized by team. The NHL has done the heavy lifting in identifying who tweets about the Detroit Red Wings, for example, and Red Wings fans can see all the comments by subscribing to the list. Or if you’re a New York Times reader, you can follow tweets from all the Times staff writers in one place. Not surprisingly, websites have already sprung up to aggregate lists created by others. We can only imagine the innovation that will emerge from this feature once developers start playing with it.

Just for Fun: My First Dictionary

Ross Horsley describes himself as “Timid librarian by day… Frenzied fan of gory slasher movies by night!” If this is what librarians do in their spare time, we have new respect for the profession.

Horsley publishes a blog called My First Dictionary. It consists of charming, childlike illustrations of acts that range from weird to unspeakable. His juxtaposition of the Highlights for Children-like images with disturbing adult issues is what makes the content so weirdly funny. We felt guilty laughing at some of the material, but had to admit it’s funny as hell. We debated whether to include this site as a “Just for Fun,” but concluded that our readers are mature enough to take it. Warning: some of these situations are a little disturbing. If you’re easily offended, try Awkward Family Photos instead.