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The launch of Google Buzz is just the latest piece of the social networking puzzle the search giant is assembling. But just what is Google up to?

With the much-hyped launch of Google Wave in 2009, it appeared Google was poised to turn online communication on its head with a whole different type of interface, but now it appears that Google has moved on to something more similar to Twitter and Facebook.

This is about taking advantage of social media adoption and defending its supremacy from encroachment of social networks. The jury is still out on just how successful Google has been in emulating Twitter and Facebook’s functionality.

First, a little bit about the new features: Buzz allows users of Gmail to update their status, have conversations, share photos and links, and sync up with Twitter and Facebook. It also enables them to follow others users, either from their contact list or by discovery through a search of all Buzz mentions.

While Google Buzz adoption may not challenge the behemoth of Facebook or the increasingly popular Twitter on their own terms, it may prove to be a helpful tool for businesses which have “gone Google.” Google has been increasing its marketing efforts for businesses to adopt its applications, including mail, documents and collaborative calendars.

So Buzz could be the next step in collaborative, in-the-cloud work as more of a competitor for in-house microblogging and conversation sites like Yammer.

“We designed Buzz to make it easy to connect with others and have conversations about things that interest you, and it’s great to see millions of you doing this already,” Google wrote in its blog. “It’s still early, and we have a long list of improvements on the way. We look forward to hearing more suggestions and will continue to improve the Buzz experience with user transparency and control top of mind.”

What Google could be doing is floating Buzz to the public right now and then, like it has with its Gmail and Google Calendar functions, offering a secured functionality to business customers which makes Ning an indirect target. The open format of Buzz at this point is helping Google sort out some of its issues, with tweaks already happening only days after its launch. One positive for Google is the speed Buzz is already being used.

“According to Google, its Buzz service already has more than nine million posts and comments. Remember, this is a service that launched on Tuesday, meaning that it’s getting more than 160,000 comments and posts per hour. That’s a staggering, staggering number,” wrote Ben Parr on Mashable.com.

Where is Google going with all of this? Maybe it will build up Buzz to be a threat to Facebook, Twitter, or Ning. Or maybe it is simply a slight of hand to take the public focus off Wave as it builds it up. Then again maybe Buzz will simply just wind up being another Orkut.

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Jeff Molander wrote a post on his blog about social media. I decided to write a response at ReveNews instead of my own blog because, frankly, it is more provocative here. Plus, this is the community that introduced us. And that is the point Jeff misses about social media: it’s about the community.

Mary, Mary, quite contrary

In his post Jeff wrote about Mary, a woman who chose not to hire Jeff or attend one of his speaking engagements. Jeff humbly accepted that Mary was right to reject Jeff based on her logic. Mary thought that Jeff did not tweet enough and, therefore, could not provide value to her on the topic of social media.

Jeff called out Mary for looking at the quantity of tweets which is a statistic and does not denote value. On this, I think that Mary is more correct than Jeff, even if she cannot or did not express why.

Well, there’s this Guy

Jeff gave a little detail on Guy Kawasaki’s use of Twitter. What he left out is that @guykawasaki is really just @alltop with each item tweeted and retweeted at least 3 times (often and unfortunately more). Guy added the @alltop account after I asked about his self-retweeting and started a heated debate that continues today.

@guykawasaki is widely followed. While it started out with stories that Guy himself probably found interesting, it now appears to be operated by the Alltop staff. It links to Alltop articles that give an inferior summary and often make it difficult to find the link to the information that sounded interesting in the tweet that got a follower to the page. Which begs the question if/when Guy leaves Alltop, who keeps @guykawasaki?

Guy’s third Twitter account is @guysreplies. This is the account that Guy tweets from. If you reply to @guykawasaki, oddly the reply back to you is from @guysreplies.

The problem here is that Guy isn’t present. He is not a part of his own community. His blog post that is the heated debate is a debate in the community but Guy is not a part of it. This is what Jeff should be talking about. Regardless of the amount of tweet volume, Guy is absent from his own twitter account, in his own community, on his own article.

It’s in the conversation

So why was Mary right and Jeff wrong about the quantity of Jeff’s tweets? Jeff lectures on social media but he is not a member of the community. He does not take part in the conversation. If Jeff finds articles that others have written, he rarely tells his Twitter followers about them. If Jeff is active in commenting on a blog post he thinks is provocative, he doesn’t tweet about it. To me (and I think to Mary), that shows that Jeff doesn’t get social media.

Jeff tweeted a link to an article about what 1-800-Flowers has done wrong on Facebook. That post criticizes 1-800-Flowers for not taking an active role in its community. The author writes that 1-800-Flowers has little more than Facebook posts of Monday, Wednesday and Friday contests and a stock answer to anyone who has a complaint. That is not showing your community that you care. That is not taking leading the conversation, let alone even taking part in it.

We can discuss metrics to measure success of a retailer’s social media campaign another time. The real issue Jeff should be looking at in order to counsel retailers is how a retailer can be an active member of its own community whether on its own pages or that of others.

The beginning & end

The tweet that got me going on this was your ability to create meaningful biz outcomes w/ social media rests in your ability to act on this single realization. The single realization that I think you need is that to succeed in social media, you need to be active, proactive and a leader in your community. Hey, that’s no different than how people used to succeed in the brick-and-mortar world of days past.

[Author's note: I found Jeff's article via a tweet as I follow him on Twitter and then I read the article on his blog with a domain I used to own.]

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Taking an Active Role in Social Media for Your Business

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Black Friday and Cyber Monday are behind us, but they were just the beginning of the holiday shopping season. Now is a crucial time for companies to book sales during an otherwise lackluster year. And this is the time of year when it pays to watch what major advertisers are doing.

There’s a marked increase in advertisers using a well-coordinated combination of print, television, and all forms of online media to get the biggest bang for their buck and to reach consumers in the media of their choice.

One example worth looking at is MasterCard’s current campaign. MasterCard is a different kind of advertiser because it is essentially a generic brand. There is no such thing as a pure MasterCard credit card – it must be paired up with a bank that provides the financial mechanism for providing credit and completing the credit transaction.

Still, MasterCard is in a perennial battle with its direct rival, Visa, and with American Express, for credit card supremacy. That’s why MasterCard has been running the “Priceless” campaign for years – to reinforce the brand image and encourage consumers to use MasterCard credit cards over others.

Now MasterCard is putting a new twist on the “Priceless” campaign by adding an interesting online app, the “MasterCard Priceless Gift Finder”.

A few weeks ago, MasterCard launched television and online ads that will run through Christmas, featuring football quarterback Peyton Manning and “How I Met Your Mother” actress Alyson Hannigan. The ads humorously address the importance of giving the right gifts and promote the MasterCard Priceless Gift Finder application as the way to do it.

The Gift Finder website is slick in its execution. Peyton and Alyson act as video guides, helping consumers find a perfect gift for a Facebook friend, or “for a friend who isn’t on Facebook.” The application connects directly with Facebook, so a user can bring their friends from Facebook to the Gift Finder, and use the Gift Finder to publish content to a user’s wall.

The application leads a user through a gift selection process by asking questions about the user’s gift recipient and then suggesting gifts to purchase via Amazon.com, the Gift Finder’s “featured” online store. Peyton and Alyson appear at various intervals during the selection process to liven things up. The application can be shared through a Facebook page, Twitter account, or via MySpace, Delicious, Digg, or StumbleUpon.

MasterCard takes this a giant step further with its “Priceless Picks” application for the iPhone. This free application lets iPhone users find “priceless things” – thousands of user-recommended priceless experiences, shops, and restaurants – share them with friends, and add their own “priceless picks.” This app perfectly integrates another channel, mobile, into the Gift Finder campaign.

Cheryl Guerin, a senior vice president with MasterCard Worldwide, told Brandweek magazine that the Gift Finder is designed to leverage the way a consumer shops: “The utility of the tool makes it easy to select these perfect gifts, while tracking a budget and managing a holiday shopping list using social media applications that are already a part of many shoppers lives.”

Expect to see more advertisers put media integration to effective use this holiday season.

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A Lesson in Media Integration

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Last weekend, I flew Southwest Airlines for the first time. What really struck me about the trip, aside from the several hour delay,  was the tone of the Southwest staff. Here’s a quick sample from the flight attendant’s safety presentation:

“At this time, please pretend to pay attention as we go over the safety features of this plane. In case you haven’t been in an automobile since 1964, the seat belt is fastened by inserting the flat end into the buckle until it latches. If cabin pressure is lost, a yellow oxygen mask will drop from the ceiling. Affix the mask over your face and breathe normally (yeah right…you’ve seen Fight Club haven’t you?). In the case that this flight becomes a cruise, we will provide fashionable yellow life jackets. Pull the tabs to inflate automatically. For overachievers, inflate the life jacket by blowing into the tubes located on either side of the jacket.”

The FAA requires flight attendants to go through this spiel. They know that we know the routine, and we know that they know, so most of us tune it out. Most airlines have their attendants go through the motions as quickly and generically as possible, dutifully fulfilling their obligations to their captive audience. But Southwest at least takes this opportunity to entertain their passengers and lighten the mood, which is much appreciated, especially after a long delay like mine.

A quick YouTube search of “funny Southwest attendants” reveals that my experience with Southwest is not unique. Undoubtedly, this novel approach to the mundane drag of regulatory compliance was part of the staff’s training. The practice turns out to be very astute for two reasons: it gets people to listen and it makes a memorable impression.

Like flight attendants, Web writers are representatives of a company and whether drafting a sales letter, providing copy for a website, or addressing customers through a newsletter, we  speak  with the voice of the company. While the safe route is to adopt mind-numbingly innocuous corporate language – “Moving forward, our company’s vision is to add value to the paradigm that we have pioneered through our excellent service and award-winning innovation” -  in many cases, it can be more successful to connect with readers in your target audience by adopting a more relaxed tone. After all, on the Web something more interesting is always a click away, and if the medium doesn’t hook the message will never be delivered.

We see the benefits of a friendlier, sometimes irreverent tone in such phenomenon as Woot.com. The main idea of the website which features one product a day seems unimpressive at first. But the light-hearted yet still informative product descriptions and the self-referential humor in its blogs help build a sense of community and enthusiasm about the website where a staid, rote delivery would not. Web readers see dry, standard phrasing and “safe” language and assume, often correctly, that it’s something that they’ve read before and skip over it.

Apple’s humble hands-in-the-pockets, “It just works,” attitude versus Microsoft’s  eager shedding of its businessman appeal shows that a more down-to-earth presence can effectively translate to larger operations, but there is a fine line between connecting with your audience and sounding like an out-of-touch dad trying to level with his teenage kid.

For example, Virgin Mobile’s automated customer support line greets you with a youthful “’Sup, it’s Virgin Mobile” and the holding music is some kind of cheesy rap-rock. Granted, I was never a Limp Bizkit fan, but it’s been almost a decade since I’ve seen any rappers gone rock (or rockers gone rap) climb the charts and I don’t think I’ve greeted a friend with “’Sup” un-ironically.

In essence, the goal of any company communication is to establish professionalism and show genuine concern for your customers. Traditionally, the white-washed, buzz-word stuffed, chiseled and polished corporate phrasing exuded a stern and steady image that comforted those who sought solace in reliable institutions. But on the Web, where scams, marketing ploys and misleading content are scattered indiscriminately amongst the trustworthy gems, a position of transparency and unpretentiousness is more valuable. Corporate gibberish is far more imitable than a playful, fresh-voiced outlook. Whereas a standard mission statement evokes a company merely going through the motions, a humorous take belies a smart, self-awareness that promises an operation that runs on human reason, rather than corporate policy.

Today, many customers would rather do business with a person, rather than a faceless corporation. Because of this, showing your human side in your communication is more vital than ever. Consider this the next time you are writing a company blog or a company announcement.

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Skip Dry Corporate Language if You Want to Instill Confidence in Your Readers

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Recently I discussed “CPSA” (Cost Per Social Action), a potential pricing model that recognizes the growing importance of measuring a “social action”. This model is a variation of CPA (Cost Per Action). Both CPSA and CPA are far superior to basic CPM, which measures the cost of impressions, or even CPC, which relies on the cost of clicks.

In the final analysis, all online advertisers should be adopting, at the very least, a CPL (Cost Per Lead) model. After all, what every advertiser really wants from an online ad is a qualified lead – a prospect who has a demonstrated proclivity to buy. That’s the type of lead worthy of an advertising investment.

The problem is that lately, the price of ad impressions on websites has fallen. It’s largely because ad networks have lowered the barrier to advertising by spreading costs across many sites. So advertisers can get tantalizingly more impressions, and maybe even more clicks, for less money.

But is that a good thing? The metrics of more impressions can be deceiving – the pricing may look attractive, but ads with minimal targeting produce unqualified responses. What’s the value of lots of responses if they do not turn into the right leads?

The answer to the dilemma is for website publishers to sell, and advertisers to demand, ad space that works harder. In short, ads need to help qualify the respondent.

An article in Forbes references a recent report that suggests “marketers will pay publishers an average price of $2.27 for each reader they can convince to fill out a form with their real name and e-mail address, along with a few bits of personal data such as their Twitter handle, phone number or answers to questions about their shopping habits.”

While over $2 CPL may seem like a lot of money, the advertiser is, in effect, paying for valuable data about an individual prospect. This data can then be used to do a better job of communicating product benefits and, hopefully, convincing the prospect to buy. Forbes says the “hefty price [of CPL] suggests publishers should consider abandoning cheap ads sold for guaranteed prices and should instead try to use space on their Web pages to convince readers to turn over their personal information.”

The implications of this are significant, however. Ads need to engage prospects, and prospects must want to ante up details about themselves. In an age of privacy concerns, this could be a tall order.

Still, if online advertisers want to make the smartest advertising investment, they’ll soon recognize that it makes sense to pay a higher CPL to get higher quality leads. In the long run, they’re likely to see a higher conversion rate, and therefore a higher rate of return. That’s why CPM and CPC are being questioned more and more – and why the online world could be in for a big change in perspective.

See the rest here:
Is CPL the Real Deal?

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What is an acceptable payoff in terms of time investment put IN and the return taken OUT (actual sales) of social marketing?  What’s reasonable to expect and how soon?  I’ve begun to crack the nut that is this question by talking with people who have direct experience. 

Let’s be honest — when people start talking about marketers becoming publishers in a ’social marketing’ context it can quickly begin to smell like Web marketing snake oil or ‘branded entertainment’ hogwash.  One way of fighting this is to get, as Sam Decker of Bazaarvoice said to me, “operational, not conceptual” — consider less and do more.  But before we start doing it’s critical to justify and plan investments in what amounts to online publishing-with-a-purpose.

Picking up from my prior story, Rok Hrastnik of Direct TV marketer, Studio Moderna (and speaker at the next eComxpo) believes that “the content is your way in … your bargaining chip to win consumers’ attention.”

He says it’s the first step in a relationship (with prospective customers) that, someday, may result in profitable sales.

“The emphasis being on ’some day.”

To me this was beginning to sound a lot like branded entertainment.  Someday?  Yet these are big questions and I knew Rok to be an experienced guy so I pressed him for more.  In fact, I’ll share a couple of examples — focusing on Studio Moderna’s Dormeo.com brand (mattresses and bedding) and Wisconsin pet goods purveyor, DrsFosterSmith.com.  Both companies report steady sales streaming in as a direct result of publishing efforts.

Setting Expectations

How fast have each of these companies managed to track back sales to efforts?  In a matter of months — and make no mistake these are direct response marketing companies that have been around for a good while.  They know how to get things done on the Web (built for direct response).

Ok — so I’ll make quick work of how this gets done. First, this “marketing as publishing” model is not a short-term vehicle as evidenced by companies like Drs. Foster Smith who’s PetEducation.com site produces audio-visual content internally (they don’t outsource).  That takes time to build and get good at (production value) yet Drs Foster Smith have decades of content creation to lean on (they pioneered “magalogs” — content-heavy magazines).

On the other side, the Dormeo brand leverages outside writers to create e-mail newsletter content that establishes continuous, often viral relationships with ’someday customers.’  When I say ‘viral’ (another voodoo word) I’m referring to customers who love to pass Dormeo’s content to family and friends under promotional incentive.

“Content creation and publishing is the long term thing you do to gradually convert your prospects into customers in ways they may actually welcome,” says Hrastnik who’s busy selling products that consumers don’t exactly purchase frequently or on impluse — mattresses!

Yes, “It Depends”

Sure how fast you’ll see results and what those results look like will vary… but be assured the metrics are not “videos viewed” and/or “e-mail open rates.”  They’re far more serious — metrics that please CFOs and CEOs.  No, they’re not always focused on the immediate sales transaction.  Think “actions taken” that involve interaction with the brand itself (sign-ups, registrations, downloads etc.).  Things you’re doing that help prospects move forward along their “chronology of purchase intent” — toward purchase.

Nobody expects immediate results these days.  They just expect you to have a plan that can be measured and adjusted as you execute it.

Don’t forget the most important aspect — making *occasional* calls to action.  Pitching content-lovin’ prospects what you’ve got to sell.  What’s the proper mix of content + sales pitching?  Again, that depends on what you’re pitching to a degree and Hrastnik only tends to talk about it “offline”

Talk Talk

What to talk about?  Stated plainly, Hrastnik suggests if you’re selling things like mattresses, don’t limit yourself to talking with customers about sleeping or your brand — “talk about sex, relationships, health, productivity, motivation, success and other things that people actually care about.”

How do you say it?

Although Bazaarvoices’ Decker is invested in the concept of customer-generated content, he admits, “Customers won’t create content in all the places you need to reach the market and at the times you need to hit your goals.”

“The key is to leverage their voices, either in the creation of your marketing or by using their words directly, to make your ‘talking-at-them’ more authentic, credible and relevant,” says Decker who recommends a listen-and-react model to creating content that could be published as text/email or video.

Aagin, Hrastnik outsources to a team of external writers and graphic artists to get the job done but holds on to the promotional and database marketing aspects.

Just Do It

“Get operational, not conceptual,” says Decker who worries that too many marketers invest time planning and not executing.

He also suggests creating an internal “council” focused on forward-thinking ideas — working to drive them forward across multiple functions and make them happen.  This, he says, fosters the required cultural shift that crosses multiple departments.  Essentially, “it takes a company” to plan and execute a content-driven lead or sales generation strategy.

In the end all of this can be a little scary.  Yet by tying even the smallest of “baby step” trials to their impact on sales — and ultimately profit and loss — progress can be made.  Marketers simply must take a little risk and definately take a note from the book of direct response marketing.

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Justifying Social Marketing: From Publishing to Sales

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This is the slogan of a regional coffee company, Dutch Bros.  This article isn’t about their great coffee, instead it is about how Dutch Bros.’ innovative marketing strategy has helped them thrive in a slow economy.

As people struggle to make their monthly bills, sacrifices in their daily routine must be made. The day of the $4 coffee is quickly vanishing as evident by Starbucks recent announcement of the closure of 100 stores nationwide.

Dutch Bros. has succeeded in this struggling economy for a couple of reasons:

•    Word of mouth marketing
•    Viral campaigns
•    Community involvement
•    Outstanding customer service

Dutch Bros. understands the value of word of mouth marketing. For example, the owner of a local franchise frequently shares daily specials with close friends and loyal customers who in turn spread the word to their friends. On several occasions my wife has been surprised to discover several of her friends arrive almost simultaneously to take advantage of offers they had heard about separately via word of mouth.

A canned food drive on Valentine’s Day was promoted exclusively on Twitter.  Followers of @dutchbros were notified of a promotion to donate 3 cans of food and enjoy a free cup of coffee. This year’s canned food drive set a record number of donations and I am sure the use of Twitter impacted that. Utilizing Twitter to announce this year’s can drive is one example of their successful viral marketing campaigns. It was also an excellent way to increase visibility and involvement within the communities they are in.

I spoke with Dave Morris, VP Marketing/Advertising at Dutch Bros. and this is what he had to say about their overall marketing strategy,

“Instead of spending resources on big flashy advertising campaigns we’ve always liked to give it back to the people through free coffee days, give back to the community days and other Dutch Luv events such as Buck 4 kids Day, Cans 4 coffee, Relay For Life and MDA Day. We donated nearly a million dollars to local communities last year…that feels great and is what spreading Dutch Luv is all about!”

Consistently delivering outstanding customer service, regardless of services rendered, is another solid way to build your customers trust and loyalty. Franchise owners are often seen talking with their customers while in line, thanking them for their business and getting to know them personally. This type of service builds strong relationships and increases customer loyalty. I’ve been in this industry as an affiliate manager for nearly 4 years and building relationships with my merchants and affiliate partners has been crucial to successful partnerships.

While many companies, large and small are struggling in this economy, I wanted to take time to highlight a small company with a passion for their customers that is continuing to pay off.

What are you doing to add value to your customers while remaining profitable?  How are you sharing the passion for your product and brand?

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Keep It Real, Keep It Fresh

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According to a Pew Research Center’s 2006-2008 Internet and American Life Project Surveys, there are increased numbers of seniors becoming Internet users.  While half of all adults online are between the ages of 18 and 44, in 2008, 45% of seniors between the ages of 70 and 75 were online.  Conversely in 2005, this total was only 26%.  An impressive increase!

Further, a 2006 study from eMarketer discovered that 17.7 million Internet users aged 62 and over were also using the Internet.

It’s no surprise that email appears to be the favorite means of communication for 70 to 75 year olds.  Specifically reports find, almost 75% of people aged 64 and over use email.

Besides communicating via email, seniors are likely to use the Internet for research purposes.  Some of the topics that interest them include travel, health and fitness information, financial information, online news, religious information, and general hobby information.

Why is this information important to you?

Well, according to the Pew Research Center surveys 47% of all seniors online make purchases on the Internet. Perhaps more importantly, this group of people is quite financially affluent.  For instance, in a 2008 Focalyst and Dynamic Logic report (pdf), it was discovered that Internet users 62 years of age and up report an annual income  almost double that of their non-Internet user counterparts.  Moreover, the online users spent approximately $700 more than individuals who were not online.

How Then Should You Market to Seniors?

If you want to reach this niche and potentially lucrative audience, you should strive to keep things simple on your website. Here are some tips that will help you appeal to seniors:

• Ensure that the font on your website and emails are easy to read.  For instance, you should always use a dark font on a light background.
• Keep jargon and slang to a minimum.
• Trust is crucial. Make sure that you gain the trust of seniors by providing a well-written “About Us” section on your website and third party testimonials about your product or services.
• Link to other websites so that people who desire more information can easily find what they are looking for.
• Make the checkout process as simple and straightforward as possible.
• Consider creating a niche site for an older audience if you are worried about the problems involved with catering to both young people and older people.

Overall, while there may not be as many seniors online as younger people, the lucrative online senior market is relativelly untapped and growing at a fast pace.

Source:
Should You Market to Seniors Online?

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With peer-to-peer marketing and advertising now ubiquitous online, new platforms designed to create sociable widgets and embeddable media rich content are propagating across the web. Widgetbox, SpringWidgets, and Sprout are among countless new applications empowering users to create personalized widgets, social networking badges, RSS feed readers and living content. With even the smallest modicum of tech know-how, these types of platforms allow brands of any size to create free, portable content for their website, blog, and social media profiles.

As brand managers and online marketers, a quick way to proliferate brand awareness is to create a way for people to socialize with and for your business. I like to think of these embeddable widgets like takeout food or a way for people to grab your valuable content and share it with their friends and online communities. The portable content that you create, be it a collection of your latest blog posts, a daily tip or an aggregation of news clips, literally gives people a portable piece of your brand that they can then socialize with.

Creating these widgets is the easy part. With an RSS feed address and a few graphics culled from my new WordPress blog, GroceryLove.com, I recently produced a “Daily Food Tip” sprout. Visitors to the site can grab this widget and embed it on their own blog or post it to their own social networking profile. The “Daily Food Tip” widget shares daily food news and daily food tips for grocery store connoisseurs. As a new site owner on a tight budget, this was a quick and easy way to build value-rich portable content for my budding online community.

Sprout is the quick and easy way for individuals and businesses to create, publish, and manage interactive rich media widgets. Below is an example of Sprout as used in the GroceryLove blog.

Sprout provides but one way to build, publish, and manage widgets and other rich media web content. I fell in love with Sprout’s platform but they are by no means the only game in town. Even doing a quick search on Google with the search term “creating widgets” will yield hundreds of results. The trick is to generate a widget that gets people socializing with a piece of your brand and the portability of sociable widgets is an inexpensive and time-saving solution.

So what are you doing? Get out there and start making some takeout food!

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Socializing Your Brand

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In an era when we’re all interacting with the world through our gadgets, be they mobile devices or GPS systems, our relationship with information and each another is drastically changing. The old media model of one-way broadcast communication has morphed into an intergalactic web of cross pollinating ideas, opinions, and information. The ubiquitous availability of peer-based information and the socialization of media have paved the way for a new kind of connectivity between businesses and their community .

Brian Solis of PR 2.0 recently introduced an exciting model for optimizing the rampant availability for online connectivity called MicroPR, a PR resource for journalists, bloggers, and analysts on Twitter. The passion behind the project conspires to create new communities and communication channels that will ultimately change the information ecosystem.

Below is an example of the MicroPR information flow that uses Twitter, (a free social networking and micro-blogging service allowing users to send and read other users’ updates,) to share PR questions, resources, news, and feedback with all those interested in connecting with the PR community:

The MicroPR project is an exciting project to participate in and as with any innovative application of social tools, I believe it’s a powerful model for new media marketing strategists. There’s no reason why the same equation can’t be applied to your business or brand.

Community + Business + Twitter = Brand Ambassadors

I liken the MicroPR profile, as a basecamp for all the people and professionals associated with your business; a place to mingle, and a place to share and swap ideas, resources, news, feedback, and questions. The key is to give people a reason to mingle.

Think of exploiting a unique aspect of your brand and something that provokes either conversation or encourages people to get online and grab it: offer product specials, design an online treasure hunt, create a multi-media contest using Flickr or YouTube, or give way insider tips. Think of your basecamp as platform for listening and response, a platform to get valuable and instant feedback, and not a one-way broadcast channel. Think mingle!

The MicroPR project is but one inspiration in a seemingly limitless list of online opportunities for community building, branding, and marketing. Twitter now boasts over six million registered users and continues to grow exponentially. Twitter’s phenomenal growth and ability to keep us all hyper-connected is nothing short of awesome but also proves people’s desire to stay connected. It’s a huge tip for new media marketers and should encourage your business or brand to find their own unique way to get in on the action. continue reading…

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With so much focus on “building” and “adding” friends, karma, votes, points, followers, kudos et al, we may tend to lose sight of the quality of our online connections and friendships. Does size really matter when it comes to building your online community? In short, more could equal less.

I have this imperfect habit of adding most people who add or follow me. It seems the polite thing to do. Unless they are hocking something unsavory or obviously trolling the online waters with some free, downloadable spamware and clearly not really interested in me as a person but rather my keyword profile, then I’m game to be pals. But we all might be diluting our online cup of wonderful by falling prey to the numbers game.

Colloquially speaking, “It ain’t about quantity; it is about quality.”

And now I step upon my cardboard box to share a bit of unsolicited advice. Determine the goals of your community first, be they profit for not, and be strategic about building your community in whatever venue: Facebook, Ning, Twitter, Friendfeed (insert ad nauseam list of social media sites.) Building an online presence is all about personality. And with your online persona comes the responsibility of the company and the conversations that you keep.

Things for brands and marketers to remember when community building:

1. Lose the obsession with adding people for the sake of numbers but rather take the time to befriend people specific to your niche and engage in and provoke quality conversations.

2. Define your voice and build a trusted and consistent body of work before you begin shot gunning every social network; remember it’s not a race.

3. Let the community know you’re listening by inviting them to a conversation thread, sending out a welcome post listing all your newcomers, and inviting people to list their own social networking profiles to expand their own networks.

4. Don’t be afraid to hold the mirror up and ask the community what they see. Don’t be afraid to ask people how they perceive your brand and see if that matches up with your brand’s vision.

5. With your community building strategy in mind, create a physical map of your social network. Check out Mind Manager as a resource for online flow charting software. Seeing is believing.

Thoughtfulness need not lose its footing when mining for quality community members be they in the form of friends on third-party social media platforms or on your own company-owned website. Slow down, take your time and remember, “It ain’t about quantity; it is about quality.”

Here is the original:
Community Building: Does Size Really Matter?

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OK–as a recent Boulder transplant, now here 3 months by way of Seattle, Washington, it has come to my attention that there are not just a couple of start ups scattered around, here and there, willy-nilly– there are in fact start ups a plenty here in Boulder, Colorado!

When I worked at Microsoft, we were always getting tipped into new up and comers around the Seattle area and I thought in my gray Seattle haze that Seattle was the Tech Mecca, oh, but after living here in Boulder I find I was indeed wrong in that assumption!

I have bumped into many techies in the local coffee houses and as well have discovered other networking opportunities by way of TechCocktail.com and the very well renowned Boulder start up kings TechStars – who with their 10,000 sq foot office (The Bunker) on Pearl street in the heart of Boulder help new technology start ups get funded, get off the ground, and learn from the best mentors in the industry! The impressive list of mentors at TechStars includes team members from Foundry Group a venture capital firm that focuses on investing in early stage information technology companies, which also happens to be located in Boulder. TechStars was founded by David Cohen, Brad Feld, David Brown, and Jared Polis in 2006. In the Tech Stars mentor spotlight they have tech giants such as: Matt Mullenweg Founder, Automattic (Wordpress.com, Akismet), Jeff Clavier Founder, SoftTech VC, and Eric Marcoullier Founder, MyBlogLog. TechStars takes only ten companies each summer. If you have an amazing web-based or software idea, applications for the next round open on January 20th. Details here.

A few of my favorite tech start ups and tech companies I know of, or have run into here in Boulder/ Denver area include the following:

Brightkite – Location-based social networking (Folks ya gotta see this!) See where your friends are and what they’re up to, in real time.
Eventvue – The best conferences include great networking. EventVue helps your attendee’s network and find their next business partner, customer, or employee at your conference.
Filtrbox.com – Filtrbox is the media monitoring service of choice for savvy professionals.
foodzie.com – an online marketplace where consumers can buy food directly from small artisan producers.
GNIP (guh – nip)– in fact one block away from me, is this up and coming start up that will have you all banging on their doors – they make data portability suck less.
ignighter.com – Incredible idea! Group dating, safer, less awkward and more fun!
Lijit.com – Lijit allows you to easily create your own search engine. One that searches your blog, bookmarks, photos, blogroll, and more. By offering the Lijit Search Wijit on your blog.
Rally Software – From small pilot projects to distributed, multi-team programs, Rally’s family of Agile lifecycle management solutions give teams the visibility and collaboration needed to formalize and scale agile development practices that deliver high-value software in rapid iterations.
Socialthing.com – Socialthing was acquired by AOL in August, 2008.! Congrats! – Socialthing! Makes it easy to see all the things your friends are doing. It’s a news feed for every site that you use in one place.
SurveyGizmo – SurveyGizmo is a creative platform for your marketing, lead generation and research projects. Create surveys, landing pages, polls, quizzes, contact forms, ticketing queues and mobile marketing campaigns.
Syntryx.com – Often called “a deal flow engine,” Syntryx provides powerful research tools, internet asset valuations and publisher acquisition solutions for every major online market. Syntryx.com is the advanced competitive analysis tool extraordinaire.

“The Western frontier is open, and geeks are populating the range.” A quip from Ben Casnocha in his latest article “Start-Up Town” posted on Sept 10th on the Amercian.com. “Start – Up Town” is an infectiously exorbitant article written for The American with the candor and splendor of amazing author Ben Casnocha . Ben also authored the bestselling business book My Start-Up Life: What a (Very) Young CEO Learned on His Journey Through Silicon Valley, which the New York Times called “precocious, informative, and entertaining. This amazing article highlighted my suspicions that I am not alone here (as far as geeks go) and tackles the fair rundown of the last 15 years of how Boulder managed to accomplish its place as a leading tech start up town.

A few great resources for technology companies in Colorado are as follows:

CSIA Colorados Technology Association

Next Event for CSIA – COLORADO SOFTWARE AND TECHNOLOGY SHOW – DEMOGala 2008, October 2nd The event runs all day long. More than 100 speakers from 100+ companies.

http://csiaonline.com/Events/DEMOgala/tabid/192/Default.aspx

Colorado Start Ups

W3W3 – Colorado’s Voice of the Technology Community

Blog Post Written by: Heather Paulson, President of www.PaulsonManagementGroup.com

Boulder Colorado Tech Startups Spotlight

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Man has always been fascinated with space. In terms of public sentiment NASA has fallen a long way from the heights it enjoyed during the Apollo era. Private projects like the X-Prize Foundation have won media coverage and public following through open competition with the ultimate goal to create a commercial space program. Despite a decrease in public sentiment NASA has had major success stories like the Mars Rover project. The question facing NASA is how to better engage and involve the public in exploration.

I sat down with NASA scientist Scott Maxwell who is the Mars Rover Drive Team Lead to discuss ways NASA can engage the public, a subject he is speaking on at Gnomedex.

How did you get involved with the Mars Exploration Rover project?

I was getting my masters degree in computer science at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign when I was recruited to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). I had always wanted to work in space exploration but it seemed to me that type of work was something other people got to do. In my head there was this wall and I was on one side and the people on the other side of the wall were the ones who got to work in space exploration. It wasn’t until I actually had the job at JPL that I realized there wasn’t any wall at all. What separates you and completing that goal you have isn’t an imaginary wall but simply the strength of your desire to go after that goal.

Once I arrived at JPL, I was hired in to work on the software we use to analyze data that comes back from a number of different spacecrafts. I then got involved in a project that was basically a replay of the Mars Pathfinder mission with the Sojourner rover. I was referred by a colleague to be part of the project which ended up ultimately getting canceled but evolved into the Mars Exploration Rover mission. I sort of went along for the ride.

What was the mission goal for the Mars Rover project?

The overarching goal of the mission was to continue the exploration for signs of life on Mars. Specifically the rovers Spirit and Opportunity went to Mars to attempt to find evidence of past liquid water on the Martian surface, the idea coming from the one example we know of, life on Earth, where water is always necessary for life. We are trying to put together a series of planks that hopefully lead up to a story of past life on Mars. Answering the question, yes or no, was there life on Mars. Of course, either way we answer that question has profound implications. If there was life on Mars that is very exciting because the idea of other life out there would have significant implications. If there wasn’t life on Mars that would also be exciting because we could better answer the question of why not, why did form on Earth but not on Mars?

Both rovers have found signs that there was indeed liquid water for extended periods on the Martian surface. Today, 4 1/2 years into their 90 day mission, they are continuing to explore Mars and to add to the scientific treasure trove of information they have been collecting since the day they arrived.

It must be nerve-racking to work on a project that you send into space with the hope that the equipment will still work when the craft gets to its destination despite the numerous things that could go wrong.

That’s certainly true. If you’ve seen any of the news coverage when we get data back from any spacecraft which has landed successfully and is transmitting data; well, people are just jumping in the air and cheering and clapping each other on the back. There’s good reason for that. For instance, someone in my role can invest 4-5 years of their life in rover mission working on it day and night; skipping vacations at times; making all kinds of personal sacrifices in order to complete a project. There comes a point where literally in one minute you will know whether all of those years of work are going to be successful or are going down the tube.

Certainly one characteristic of working in the space program in general is that it does have the same kind of downsides as any other job but the upside is tremendous. We have a saying in this business, “When we have a product launch, we really have a product launch”.

Being there to see the spacecraft you worked on put into a rocket and blasted up into space towards another planet is mind blowing. It’s the kind of stuff I used to fantasize about as a little kid. I never thought it would be my life and now the fact I’m getting paid for it is just unbelievable.

With all of today’s science fiction, how do you deal with people’s sometimes unreasonable expectations when it comes to the type of life they expect you to find?

In some sense finding any sign of life anywhere in the solar system other than on Earth would be tremendously exciting. We don’t have any kind of measure how common life is throughout the universe. The only thing we really know for sure is there is one place, one little planet where there is life and it’s ours.

When you look at the numbers and you kind of have some understanding of how life works it seems certain that it must be elsewhere. But we don’t know when or if we will ever find other life. Even if we found just one example, anywhere. Even if all we found was one tiny little microbe on Mars we would know so much more than we know now. We would learn so much about what kinds of life are possible, where life can be found, what it takes to sustain it. It would completely revolutionize our understanding of the universe that we live in.

What steps does NASA take to ensure that spacecraft we send don’t carry microbes from Earth on it?

Well we would like to find life on Mars but we don’t want it to be life we accidently sent there on our own spacecraft. We don’t want to contaminate another planet.

NASA has very stringent planetary protection requirements about the degree to which spacecraft have to be cleansed of earthly life and contaminants before they can be sent out into space. Both rovers had to be very thoroughly cleansed to get rid of any possible microbes that might be sent there.

One of the philosophical concerns we have is that suppose life on Mars existed and we sent the rovers carrying bacteria that somehow managed to take root on Mars and wipe out that native life. As a scientific matter that would be horrible but even more so as a philosophical matter that would be horrible. We don’t want to inadvertently commit genocide against the only other life we might find in a universe. For all those reasons we have very strict requirements to prevent contaminants from being on anything we send to the surface of another planet.

Obviously one of the appeals of other planets is resources. What about the concept of terraforming Mars?

Terraforming would present enormous engineering challenges for us that we don’t know how to solve. It is certainly a very exciting possibility because having other planets to live on at least increases the chances of humanity surviving in the long-term. There would be a lot of advantages to it but we really don’t know how to do it yet. Our very best bet is to take better care of the planet that we are on.

There is some work going on in direction of putting people on Mars. NASA is undertaking a project called Constellation which will return us to the Moon and may eventually put people on Mars. But even with that project NASA is not thinking about terraforming or colonizing Mars any more than in the 1960s they were thinking about colonizing the Moon. At this point the focus is on simply getting people there.

So now that you’ve gotten the rover to Mars what do you do for an encore?

Right now I’m going to try to see Mars Rover project all the way to the end. I have however been working on other projects including Phoenix and doing work on the Mars Science Laboratory which is the next rover-like mission to Mars.

I’m also working on project called ATHLETE which is a very exciting lunar proposal where we would basically be taking a 12 foot tall, six legged, metal robotic spider on roller skates and putting it on the moon. The purpose is to help astronauts get around and build habitats and complete work that requires mobility. So I am still living my dream by getting work on projects with some amazing people.

How have the explosion of social media and the rapid exchange of ideas impacted what NASA is doing?

Well that is actually what I’m going to Gnomedex to talk about. So far NASA’s communication with the public in terms of space exploration has really all been one-way. NASA has been sending information out to the public but there hasn’t really been any way in which we’ve tried to make it a two-way conversation. Social media could make it possible for a member of the public who wants to communicate with exploration team instance to find some way to do so.

My goal is to find methods for people who have a high level of interest to actually ask questions and participate in the mission. Of course they will need to be able to pass through certain gates and they have certain levels of skill. I think there is a tremendous untapped possibility where we can make space exploration work so much better by bringing the conversation to people who would otherwise never have direct access to it.

Personally I’m very excited about this possibility. I remember myself as a kid watching little black-and-white TV reports about the Voyager mission and what if I had been able been to look at some of the science from the Voyager mission and maybe discover something that no one had ever discovered thereby contributing to the mission in that way.

As a government entity can NASA be agile enough to take advantage of those types of recommendations?

It certainly will be a challenge. I don’t think that NASA institutionally really understands how to do this. But I do think that the rewards from that type of collaboration would be tremendous.

Part of NASA’s responsibility is to engage the public in space exploration, to communicate back to the public what it is we found and what we have been able to do. I think it is a natural extension and generalization of that mandate to bring the public in and enabled them to actually be part of the mission itself. To go along for the ride in a brand new way.

I know that there will be problems: the volume of suggestions we would get, the fact that there would be plenty of kooks, and the challenge being how to keep the noise from drowning out the signal. How do we make it a useful experience and not discourage people who might be interested in participating but are unable to get through. I think there are some definite management problems involved but that’s the kind of thing we hope to get feedback on from conferences like Gnomedex.

How realistic is it that NASA will listen to the information they get with the inherent institutional bureaucracy?

NASA justifiably thinks of itself as engineering elite. While that is true, there are still people outside of NASA who might be able to contribute and see possibilities that we haven’t seen. Maybe they can help solve problems that can only be solved by throwing a lot of time and manpower at the problem but NASA doesn’t have the time and manpower to take on. Why not create some kind of forum where we can post that type of problem and receive feedback. Maybe some random kid in Virginia with spare time on his hands will put his head down take a few weeks and solve it for us. Why can’t we do stuff like that? There is no particular reason why we can’t do it, it is simply that we aren’t thinking in those terms yet because the possibilities that social media brings to the table are so new. But if there is any organization in the world that should be taking advantage of such new technologies to fulfill its mission, it is NASA.

Is there pressure to better reach out to the public because of the success of XPrize?

It’s not because of pressure that we are looking to do this. NASA as an institution is just waking up to the possibilities of social media. The way XPrize will help is that they create ways to engage new parties to contribute towards exploration. Xprize is about building up a commercial space exploration capability that doesn’t exist yet.

While it’s very valuable and could contribute to the NASA mission it’s still not the kind of thing that the normal person can get involved. For instance Jane Smith who lives in Alabama, who is an extremely bright person and is brilliant in math still doesn’t have a way to fulfill her passion and participate in space exploration. The amateur astronomer in the backyard who has the time and interest to contribute still can’t contribute to something like Xprize even, because there is a financial and resource barrier. The kind of thing I have in mind is to truly allow the public to be part of space exploration.

What would your ideal feedback system look like?

In the case of the Mars Rover operation we have two kinds of timelines that go on.

We have the tactical timeline where every day we are putting together the next day’s worth of planning for the rover. That’s very intense, focused and time driven. I don’t think that there is a real way to engage the public in that portion of the operation.

We also have this other timeline going which is the strategic timeline. It is planning for events weeks and months down the road while looking back at data we have gathered to better understand the challenges we are facing. For example, let’s say a rover is heading over to a crater and when we get there we need to decide whether to try exploring in a clockwise or counterclockwise direction taking into account the slope. It’s answering that kind of question that is part of the strategic timeline.

Sometimes it’s answering questions like: let’s look back over the lifetime of the mission and see how the rover has handled traveling over soil as opposed to on rock because we know we will be going over this mixture of soil and rock coming up and we don’t really have a good prediction for its performance but we’re going to need to know that in a few weeks. So let’s take some time to mine data we have so we can make the right decisions.

One way this vision of mine might work is something like Yahoo Answers. NASA could post questions explaining that we have this item here and we would like to be able to do this with it over there, how do we do it? And users could pick up this problem and help us find answers. It allows us to find people to work on tasks they happen to be good at or have the time and knowledge to tackle. Tasks that would benefit from having more people working on them.

What about international contribution?

What is important is that the analysis is done and done well. If it happens to be done by somebody Australia who wants to contribute it makes little difference.

Exploring space isn’t something just America does anymore. It is something that the world does. The rovers themselves have scientific instruments on them they were contributed by other countries. There are very few space exploration projects anymore that are purely American. We had to seek out a level of international cooperation.

Why not reach out to a country that doesn’t have a space program but whose people still have the enthusiasm for exploration and allow them to participate?

With NASA’s budgetary issues why not corporate sponsorship of NASA’s programs?

As an institution NASA is allergic to that.

My personal feeling is that we should be more open to it but I do understand where the concerns come from and I don’t see a good solution to concerns around corporate sponsorship. Obviously the question is one of ethics and of tainting scientific results.

I remember a story in the Onion where the title was something like “Coke sponsored Rover finds evidence of Dasani on Mars”. Although funny that’s exactly the kind of thing we would like to avoid.

The nature of science is to tackle uncertainty. How do you deal with questions where people do not have content scientific hypotheses and are seeking absolutes?

I have people in my family, for example, that ask me whether or not there is life on other planets. I tell them that nobody knows. We haven’t found any yet, but that doesn’t necessarily mean there isn’t any. It’d be very exciting if we found some and it’d be disappointing but still very interesting if we didn’t find any. Sometimes the best answer is that I don’t know and in fact nobody knows. That’s what’s exciting about exploration.

With a foray into social media maybe we can go a step further and say here is how you can help answer that question. Today nobody knows but maybe tomorrow we will know. Thanks in part to you.

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NASA Invites You Along for the Ride

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Photos have power. They can entertain, document, convey emotion, and form opinion. Without context the person looking at the photo may come away with emotions unintended by the photographer. Thus the beauty of art. Given context, photos can put a face to a tragedy that might otherwise simply be a distant statistic. That’s the power of the medium. Seattle photographer Amanda Koster believes in the transformative ability of photos. It is that belief that fuels the business of her company with a quirky name: Salaam Garage.

Amanda represents the kind of grass roots type content that Gnomedex likes to showcase. I sat down with her to learn more about Salaam Garage.

How did you get started in photography?

I ended up in photography while studying anthropology. I thought that developing strong photo essays would enhance my anthropology research projects. As I took the courses I found myself falling completely and madly in love with photography. I did finish my anthropology degree but I had decided that photography was where I really wanted to get involved because I wanted to have hands-on direct interaction with people.

I remember when I was little I saw a commercial of a photojournalist on TV. What’s funny is that it was a Tide commercial where the actor was purposefully crouching on the side of the street taking pictures when a car drove by and drenched her in mud. Of course Tide got all the mud out. But I thought to myself, wow that looks like a really cool job.

What helped shape the tone of your photography?

Immediately after I graduated I took a trip to eastern Africa, heading to Tanzania, Eritrea, and Ethiopia. I took a bunch of pictures while I was there. It was really early in my photo career and I wasn’t very good since I was still learning the craft. When I returned home I showed people my photos. There was one specifically I keep thinking about, of an Ethiopian kid on the side of the road selling bananas. People kept looking at the picture and asking me if I was sure I was really in Ethiopia. Because the kid wasn’t starving to death and in the background there wasn’t a desert.

And I thought to myself, wow, how powerful photography can be and how powerful telling a story along with photography can be. What would’ve happened if I didn’t have those pictures when I tell a person about my trip? Maybe the only pictures they’ve seen to that point were those made famous by Sebastião Salgad of starving kids being weighed on grain scales in the desert during the famine in Ethiopia in the 80s. Are those the kids they would imagine I had seen on my trip? It was then I realized this is what I’m going to do, take pictures of what the world is really like versus all the pictures you see in various magazines.

Caxton Odhiambo. Photo by Amanda Koster.

How did dealing with cultural stereotypes impact your work?

I had a friend who is Ethiopian and I worked at her family’s Ethiopian restaurant as a waitress. The dumb joke I heard over and over again was, “Oh, Ethiopian restaurant? Better go there full.”

Those attitudes frustrated me. In my photography I want to show what the real place is like. I’ve never had much of an interest in bringing back pictures solely of horror stories, the kind people have seen over and over again. Because I feel that no one sees that anymore. We’ve grown immune to it. Numb to it. I mean with those stereotypes what good would it do to bring back photos of starving kids in Ethiopia? Let me bring back something that people haven’t seen before.

Why did you start Salaam Garage?

The reason I started Salaam Garage is because I had been doing photography work with NGOs for about a decade on different kinds of human rights and women’s rights projects. People kept asking me when they heard about my international projects, “Can I come with you?” Eventually I decided to put together a tour as a total experiment.

I identified an NGO called Vatsalya, who was doing work getting kids off the streets in India. These efforts involve child prostitutes or those at high risk for HIV infection. Vatsalya helps by placing them into an orphanage where they can learn various vocational skills in a safe environment. Vatsalya is Indian run and Indian founded, which was very important to me because I wanted to support a local group that understood the culture. I contacted the founder, Jaimala, who thought it was a great idea and helped organize things.

What I didn’t want was to be the tour guide with the visor and the whistle and the white sneakers. Instead we just quietly worked around Rajasthan India, a small group of people traveling the neighborhoods and back alleys. That’s what I want to see and that’s the way I work as a photographer. I don’t want to just see the market. I want to see the farm where they grow food; I want to see the alleys where they make stuff. I want to see where the people live.

What do you hope to accomplish with the content generated by Salaam Garage?

People are creating content all the time, literally vomiting content everywhere online in the form of blogs, podcasts, and viral video. What would happen if all that content creation was harnessed? What would happen if some of that content is actually out there to help make a positive impact in this world?

What if instead of some viral video of someone dancing in their underwear, people were posting interviews from the streets in India. Show a kid who is making it; an orphan who is now learning spelling and has a new outlook on life. There are people out there surviving homelessness, HIV-AIDS, child prostitution. Why not let some of those positive survival stories slide into all the content creation you see in places like Myspace.

What about people who want to create content but are concerned they are not professionals?

I see it as a mystic, but I don’t think being a professional makes any difference. Lots of people read magazines like National Geographic that are so over produced that people don’t find any kind of personal connection to the stories. The highly over produced content traditional media creates is so many layers removed from reality that it makes people feel they are unable to do anything about the subjects covered. And it’s simply not true.

Much like that first picture of the Ethiopian boy I mentioned earlier, anybody can go take a picture, show it and have it have a huge impact on the audience. When I took that picture I was not a good photographer. At that point like 80% of my pictures did not come out. Yet that photo still made an impact on my family and community.

Are viewers interested in news or socially conscious pieces in a setting like MySpace?

I think people are interested in personal connections. People are really hungry for an unedited personal connection and raw content. There might be a lot of problems with the grammar, and spelling may be wrong, but if it’s real and it’s raw it’s what people are hungry for.

How does the kind of content you want to create differ from mainstream media?

If you search mainstream media and try to find out information on India, aside from tourism you will find two main topics: articles about the booming economy focusing on the IT and a growing middle-class; or articles about the poverty, disease, and the homeless children. Rarely will you find stories about people overcoming these challenges facing them.

For example I went to Kenya and I did a project called AIDS is Knocking. It was conceived as a documentary about AIDS orphans and widows. I worked with a NGO in a community with a 38% infection rate, one highest infection rates of AIDS in the world. The problem with statistics is that they don’t have a face. During my work on AIDS is Knocking I kept hearing the statistic that 11 million children were orphaned due to the AIDS epidemic. What do 11 million orphans look like? Statistics don’t help people wrap their heads around the reality of a problem. I thought to myself let me find just one of those 11 million orphans, get to know them and tell their story.

In my case I found Caxton (pictured above) who was the oldest person in his family at 15 years old. Every day he worked on the farm growing his maze and his millet and he went to school. The next day he goes out and does it again. And you know, he is making it. For me the goal is to get to know one person, one story, hear the real story of their life, where they live, what they dream about, what they look like. These orphans do normal things in their daily life. They play, go to school and do their freakin’ homework. A life profile has far more of an impact on the audience than just saying the statistics of 11 million orphans over and over again.

Once I was asked to speak at Harborview Medical Center for this big conference on infectious disease. When I was first asked to present AIDS is Knocking, my first thought was I don’t know anything about infectious disease, I am a photographer. The conference featured PowerPoint after PowerPoint with lines going up and lines going down, numbers everywhere. When at last it was my turn everybody in the room was totally exhausted, hungry, and eager to go to the bar. I played the video to audience of Caxton and everybody was really quiet. Then I showed some photo slides when suddenly the conference organizer interrupted me, stood up and said to everybody, “Do you realize this is the first picture of a person we’ve seen all weekend?” There was dead silence. I mean, this is an infectious disease conference and all they were looking at were numbers and pictures of the disease but not of the people. They were that far removed. I thought that was a powerful lesson.

Do you ever have the desire to follow up with people you’ve profiled to see how they’re doing?

Oh yeah. I personally do want to go back and see Caxton. And there’s others, like some of the kids I worked with in Brazil when I worked with Doctors without Borders. So absolutely I have that desire.

What is the future Salaam Garage?

I’m taking my time setting up more trips. I want to do it right. I’m not in any hurry for rapid growth. What I would like to see happen is for us to coordinate with schools in order to provide scholarships for people to go on these trips who otherwise couldn’t afford to participate. I would like to get some kind of corporate responsibility sponsorship as well.

I am also releasing a new book about my experiences called Can I Come with You? It will be released on September 18 of this year.

The various photography geeks who read Revenews would never forgive me if I didn’t ask about the equipment. What equipment do you use?

For my digital work I have a Canon GL-1 video camera, a Canon 1-d Mark III digital camera that’s my hi-end, and a Cannon Powershot G9 which is my point and shoot. I always struggle over what gear to take, especially now with all the baggage restraints on airlines. And of course, with digital work, I always take backups for the cameras including backup hard drives.

What advice would you give travelers who are thinking about doing this on their own?

I would say do as much preproduction as you can. In essence that is a big component of what Salaam Garage takes care of. Connect with people in the country you are visiting and try to let them know your intentions.

That’s the most important thing to me is to be absolutely transparent with your intentions. Do not go in there with ulterior motives. Do exactly what you said you were going to do. Be honest and realistic with yourself. Don’t think you’ll have an exhibit that’s going to travel the world the next day after you return. Expect when you show up things not to happen way you thought they were going to go. Be patient. In this country we’re used to having an Internet connection 24/7 and used to being in constant communication. There may be places where it might take a week to get information you really need. So well be prepared.

If you’re really there to make a difference, listen to what the people tell you, to what they need and to what will make a difference in their lives. Don’t make the trip about yourself; just be the medium for their story.

See the original post here:
Altered Vision: Salaam Garage gives voice to positive content on developing nations

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To a bookworm a bookmark is simply a method of not losing your place. For social entrepreneurs like Larry Halff they are the building blocks of online communities. Coming from a cultural anthropology and sociology background Larry was always interested in how people communicate, get together, form groups, and interact. It was partially this interest that led him to launch Ma.gnolia, a human-organized bookmark collective. Recently I sat down with Larry to learn more about how Ma.gnolia changes the way people connect.

Why start a business based around bookmarks?

When we started Ma.gnolia, about three years ago, it was with the intention to create a more community oriented and sharing-enabled take on social bookmarking. Just saving bookmarks on your own desktop is an implicit reference of your interests are and the things you care about. Then Delicious came along: it exposed that bookmark collection publicly and sort of created an emergent community. However there really weren’t tools for people to actually build topically focused communities and share with each other. So at Ma.gnolia we wanted to sort of extend that model and look at ways you can reference something that you may want to not just save for yourself but to share it with friends or with a group of people interested in the same topic. You may want to contribute that information source to a pool where people of similar interests are all sharing the stuff they find on that topic.

For instance if you are interested in the Coen brothers and you want to start finding other people who are also interested in the Coen brothers you could add some bookmarks related to them into Ma.gnolia. You could start a group; put the sites that you discovered about the Coen’s in that group and start to look at who else has bookmarked the same sites you found interesting then invite them to join the group. You would all be able to share all the information you find about the Cohen brothers collectively.

I think what we were trying to do was explicitly acknowledge and encourage the people interacting with each other in building communities rather than just sort of passively letting people see each other’s lists. We want to build applications that encourage positive interactions and people coming together around common interests.

Why the funky spelling of Ma.gnolia?

We were inspired by the movie Magnolia, the one with Tom Cruise, which is about how people’s lives are interrelated and in exposing the common threads that may not be apparent. As you know it is difficult to get good names online these days. Magnolia.com is owned by Exxon which bought it when they bought Magnolia Gas and Electric Company. I doubt we will be purchasing that form them anytime soon.

How do you keep the references organic and keep out the threat of marketing spam?

Ma.gnolia is actually community white listed. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with the way Flickr designates people to monitor public search areas. Well, we kind of have the reverse. The community on Ma.gnolia has to say that you are a member in good standing before your bookmarks appear in public search areas. So that basically keeps out the spammers. We have what we call the “Gardeners Program”, where trusted community members can review and flag new members as either being a spambot or a real person.

When it comes to how things are labeled how does the fallibility of the humans who are categorizing the bookmarks impact things? Or is that part of the joy of browsing?

Humans are fallible and Ma.gnolia is not trying to be an authoritative reference on any subject. Rather we are providing content organization tools that allow people who trust each other or people who are in communities with a marked commonality to federate and say, “These are our trusted sources.” It allows people to designate sources they trust whether it is their circle of friends or business associates and gives them the flexibility to decide how they want to organize around those things. It is less about dealing with the fire hose of information from the entire Internet and more about developing specific trusted resources and cultivating communities around those sources.

How did the explosion of social media impact Ma.gnolia?

I think it is been two-sided; we’ve received a lot more interest in general. Overall there has been a lot of interest in the way people can express themselves online. I think that focus is sort of the biggest impact. We have become more than just social bookmarking or simply the sharing of bookmarks in that people see us as another publishing platform, like a blog. Ma.gnolia has become a way for people to represent themselves in a content specific micro-publishing platform. That change in perception has been the biggest impact.

What about the possibility of lash back against the glut of different social platforms?

There is backlash but I think it’s part of an evolution process. One of the reasons we are speaking at Gnomedex is we want to talk about the direction of Ma.gnolia. The trend we see has social media and social networking going in a direction where people have more control of the ways they represent themselves online and on what places they are represented. Building out tools and services in ways that are useful to allow people to maintain control of their content and representation is key.

What about Ma.gnolia’s evolution?

What we are working towards is giving people more tools to provide them better control over who and how they interact with others in their communities. I think that’s sort of the big push. We are looking at the work that Chris Messina is doing with the DiSo project and seeing how we can learn from it.

I think the social media space is going to start seeing technology developed around ways people and groups can be represented across various social sites. Rather than all of these various individual groups being spread out, like having one on the Facebook, one on MySpace and one on Ma.gnolia; people will be able to say this is their group across all the different social spaces. These are the topics I am interested in regardless of what site it is on. I don’t think we are close to that now, but I think it is something we are working toward.

Does OpenID play into that?

I think that OpenID is a key part of it. It is the method in which you can identify who you are across the different sites. One of the ways that you can link yourself to your various group memberships is of course through your open ID.

How do you see this impacting privacy policy and privacy policy concerns?

I’m not a legal expert but I believe that many sites will still have to do their part to enforce current privacy standards. In terms of contact information, I think people will be given more say and new standards will be formed around how and when people want to be contacted. This can be built around people’s OpenIDs allowing them to state “this is how you can contact me and this is when you can contact me”.

How does Magnolia monetize currently?

We sell ads. We are still essentially an R&D type outfit.

Are there ideal partnerships that Magnolia is looking for?

Yeah. We are based in San Francisco and we are in constant contact with people in the same space and are definitely interested in participating in standards development processes. As these messaging, group and content syndication standards are pushed out we are looking to work with others taking on those challenges.

The biggest standard development that we are involved in is in developing OAuth. The sort of tagline is that OAuth is, “Your valet key for the Web”. When you want to give a site or application access to do things with different account of yours OAuth can provide the authentication protocol. For example, let’s say you are on Flickr and want to grab photos to bring into Facebook; you don’t have to give Facebook your username and password. Through OAuth you just undergo this process where you give them permission without having to give them your login credentials. It is a security protocol that is literally like a valet key giving you the ability to control how other sites access your account.

When you give a site your username and password to a different site you trust them to securely store that information. Essentially the problem is that they can now do anything with the account once they have that information. With something like OAuth, you can just give them temporary access. You are in control of how they access your account and you don’t have to undergo this big security risk.

From a culture anthropology perspective how has the internet changed us?

I think the way we’ve organized information has changed a lot. Our brains are more focused around holding and remembering references to things rather than holding and remembering things themselves. I think our communication and capacity to communicate is a lot broader. Without the geographical constraints or the temporal limits we can keep a lot more connections open on a much larger scale. Whereas before to keep the connection open you would need to sit down and write a long letter or be in the same place at the same time.

What about the old idea of everybody being raised by the village? Can online communities fulfill the role of the village?

Yeah I think that they already do. People do form more distributed communities and probably more ad hoc ones around actual interests rather than geographic proximity. I think it’s a different kind of relationship than you have with the people who live around you but I think that people are definitely forming those communities and they are no less valuable.

See the rest here:
Distributed Communities and the Social Village: How Ma.gnolia creates foundations from Bookmarks

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