We’re all pretty much experts at something. Since social media is all the rage, why no become an expert in that? So many of the world’s trends in technology, business, marketing, entertainment and overall communication are heavily tied in with online social media. It’s an important area in which to be well-versed.

I’ve been knee-deep in social media since I was a friend-deprived middle schooler (not to give away my age here, but that’s 15 years and counting). So I’ve learned a few things about social media trends, etiquette, expectations and implementation. Having been a blogger and a “pundit” for nearly five years now, I’d like to share with you a few things I’ve learned about becoming an expert in social media. Except with my help, you can jump start things in just a week instead of what often feels like a lifetime.
(more…)

Yep. Celebrities have completely taken over Twitter. It’s helped Twitter gain traffic, and it’s also helped Twitter become sickeningly mainstream (thanks Ashton and Oprah). But what will the next fad be? Below are some sites that aren’t Twitter, or even Twitter apps, that celebrities could find useful but haven’t overrun just yet.

Many are updates services, because this format seems to be highly useful for celebrities looking to engage their loyal fans. But a few other sites include travel and search features, which could ultimately help celebrities continually build their online brand and persona as well.
(more…)

This morning Mark Drapeau, the D.C. based Government 2.0 expert who is also an active “Twitterer”, wrote a post on his new blog about the most influential Tweeple (pardon the Twingo (Twitter lingo)) in D.C. I was fortunate to be included on the list this time around, but wasn’t on the highly circulated list from Politico yesterday which was titled “The 10 Most Influential D.C. Twitters”.

In reality it wasn’t necessarily the most influential D.C. Twitter users but instead the “most influential people in D.C.” that are on Twitter. Ultimately it was an arbitrary list which was highly effective linkbait. Mark Drapeau makes a valid point though that I immediately began exploring yesterday after that article: many large Twitter users aren’t joining the conversation.
(more…)

This afternoon I was reading an article by Julian Sanchez which describes the scene yesterday as Republicans debated the future Republican National Committee Chair. One of the most memorable segments of the debate is highlighted by the Washington Post:

“We have to do it in the Facebook, with the Twittering, the different technology that young people are using today,” Duncan ventured.

“Let me just say that I have 4,000 friends on Facebook,” contributed Blackwell, putting his hand on Dawson’s and Anuzis’s knees. “That’s probably more than these two guys put together, but who’s counting, you know?” Acknowledged Saltsman: “I’m not sure all of us combined Twitter as much as Saul.”

Anuzis claimed he had “somewhere between 2- and 3,000″ Facebook friends, which prompted Blackwell to remind the audience that he has 4,000 friends on the social networking site by waving four fingers behind Anuzis’s head.

What was interesting is how some of the leading members of the Republican party could not help but exchange in a friendly debate over who has the most friends on Facebook and Twitter. It’s amazing the power that the number of our friends in social networks has in the general perception of our social status. Many of the top Facebook users boast proudly of their “whale” status (users with 5,000 friends on Facebook are also called “whales”) and I regularly find myself engaged in a conversation about the number of friends I have on Facebook.
(more…)

Israel is going for a more informative tactic with its coverage of the war its fighting against Hamas militants in Gaza, and its using social media as one of its main forms of increasing its transparency, reports Times Online. After receiving a great deal of flack from not doing so during the 2006 attack on Hezbollah strongholds in Southern Lebanon, Israel realized that the Internet too can be a powerful weapon.
(more…)

I wanted to write about social media’s impact on innovation weeks ago, but got sidetracked. Herein we quote the Post: “The real problem [with the Detroit automakers] is failing to stay competitive with global rivals in the realm of advanced principles of design and manufacturing – principles that exploit global, peer-to-peer information platforms to increase the variety of smash hits a firm might produce.”

So wrote Bernard Avishai in the Washington Post on November 23rd, in “Why Detroit Can’t Keep Up”. Avishai was identified in the Post as the former technology editor of the Harvard Business Review and a former international director of intellectual capital at KPMG.
(more…)

Obama was one of the first politicians to really leverage online social media to its full potential during his campaign for the presidential election, so you’ve got to admit that he knows a thing or two about maintaining an online reputation.  And now that Obama is the president elect, he expects the rest of his administration to disclose some of their online information, according to an article in the New York Times. 

In a 7-page questionnaire, prospective White House employees will need to list their aliases and handles used to communicate on the Internet, among other expected questions pertaining to government new hires.  Now, communicate is a broad term, especially when it comes to the Internet.  For the questionnaire’s purpose, it even includes names used for comments posted on blogs and websites.  Not only is that a daunting task, depending on your level of online activity, but it also crosses a privacy line that has not yet been addressed on this political level. 
(more…)

If you are like me, there’s a good chance you are frequently looking for a great place to eat but don’t want to spend much time searching. You may also want to have an easy way to review sites in a simple manner right after you finish eating at a restaurant. If you are knowledgeable of all things web then you are probably aware of other services offering similar services.

Numerous Competitors

Yelp, for example offers a robust iPhone application for finding restaurants, bars, banks, drugstores, and more. You can then filter each of the stores or restaurants based on their rating, price, and distance from you. It’s a pretty useful application aside from one thing: you can’t review restaurants after you’ve visited them from the application.

A couple weeks ago I also wrote about the LivingSocial iPhone application. One of the many features that the application is the ability to write reviews on the go. This was immediately an open void in the market as Yelp has yet to fix reviews on the go. The additional benefit of LivingSocial is their integration into all the existing social networks which offer developer platforms.

The social recommendation space is rapidly getting crowded and as we rush to fill data into the system, there are going to be some serious challenges. One of those challenges includes consistency of recommendation engines within your personal networks. If half your friends are on one network and half on another, it’s difficult to determine which one to use.

Thummit and Simplicity

While numerous competitors exist in the mobile food recommendation space, Thummit is attempting to simplify things by limiting users to 140 characters, the same way Twitter does. The focus is to build out a robust SMS service and then extend the service to support as many communication platforms as possible. You can tweet your Thummit recommendation, text it to text it to the service, or update it from the Thummit website.

While the initial beta test is focused on the D.C. area, you can currently use the service anywhere in the country. For example I just ate at “The House” in San Francisco for lunch and was able to post a review directly to the site. The service then pulls in other reviews from around the web so that no sites appear to have a lack of content.

When I saw the demo at the LaunchBox Digital offices in D.C. last week, Sean Greene, the brain behind this new product, emphasized that the company is working to integrate many more features that make it easier to review restaurants. That includes automatically determining whether or not someone likes a place automatically via sentiment analysis.

It also appears that they want to take recommendations and simple voting beyond just restaurants. Food is simply the first place to test it out. For now the service is limited to restaurants but they may expand beyond that in the near future. I think keeping the service as simple as possible will be their key to success. What services to you use for social recommendations and social voting?

Also, if you’d like to register for the site, visit the Thummit site and use the invite code “hamburger”. Let us know what you think!

I’ve been taking a look at the usage of many Twitter users over the past few weeks and I’ve also noticed that a lot more of my friends have been joining recently. While Twitter can be an extremely valuable tool, there is a serious hurdle for it. I’ve seen many users join the site, add 10 or 20 friends and start tweeting. Within a matter of weeks their tweeting frequency dies down and eventually they stop using it.

The biggest problem for these individuals? The 10 or 20 people that they follow need to be interesting enough for them to return to the site regularly. While a small segment of these individuals enjoy getting text message updates from their close friends, at a certain point receiving mundane updates from the average Joe simply fails to excite.

Then again, perhaps following the average Joe (or should I say “Joe the plumber”?) will not provide a lot of value. The real value comes out of following those individuals that can create the most engaging media within 140 characters. Many of my friends don’t understand why I tweet and they don’t have the same virtual friends that I do.

There’s an extremely engaging group of individuals on the site that understand its power and take advantage of it. Maybe I’m simply over analyzing the act of engaging with other people on Twitter. Any individual who isn’t “hyperconnected” is not going to benefit equally and I would argue is much more likely to eventually leave the site. Do you think the average person gets the same benefit from Twitter as the hyperconnected social media people do?

Is there a simple way to explain the benefits of Twitter to someone who doesn’t understand what the purpose is? Personally, I didn’t get a huge benefit until I travelled around and began to witness the benefit of following the behind the scenes chatter.

Yesterday, D.C. Based SB Nation announced a “mid-seven-figure” funding round. The round was led by Accel Partners and included Allen & Co., Ted Leonsis, Brent Jones, who previously played for the San Francisco 49ers, Dan Rosenweig and Jeff Winer who were previous Yahoo! execs, and a few others. What is SB Nation? Ultimately, it’s a sports blog network.

The company is run by Jim Bankoff, who used to be the programming chief at AOL. The network includes a group of high quality sports blogs, each of which uses a similar design across the network. The company provides equity in SB Nation in exchange for full ownership of “the content, URLs, and related assets”. Bloggers also receive a portion of the ad revenue.

It’s great to see another D.C. based digital media company generate substantial buzz, but one has to wonder how the company will justify what can only be assumed as a sizable valuation. Then again, if we run the numbers, the company could easily come up with a nice exit. With 2 million unique visitors a month, and the average blog receiving less than 2 page views per visit, at a $20 CPM, that would result in monthly revenues of $68,000 per network ad spot.

With 4 ads on each site, the company could easily surpass $3 million in revenue per year. If a high traffic blogger received 1 percent of the company and it eventually is sold for around $30 million, each blogger might walk away with $300,000. Not exactly a large sum if you’ve been slaving away at your blog for a few years. Conversely, that’s at the company’s current size. If they can grow (as most networks do) significantly, there could theoretically be a much larger exit.

I don’t know any of the details though on how equity was swapped but networks tend to favor the owners of the networks and not the bloggers. In this complex new media landscape, it is pretty challenging to figure out a successful business model where the bloggers benefit. Creating a network definitely adds a lot of value for a potential acquirer though so at least it’s nice to see the creation of a valuable company.

The real question is when will we start seeing a large number of blog network acquisitions? As newspapers continue to decline, one can only assume that each company will expand their digital media presence. I’d guess that the next 12 to 24 months will be ripe for acquisitions in this space.