Share

By Peter Bowman & Aaron Friedman

As the end of the first decade of the new millennia approaches, Internet developers and strategists are predicting both the timing and impact Web 3.0 will have on the digital landscape. Analysts have proven that the Internet is much larger than most people even comprehend - some 500 times larger than all the content indexed on sites like Google and Yahoo. This “invisible web” is comprised of hidden databases and protected data which are deployed online but only shared in private network environments. As with life itself, the Internet has a way of evolving progressively and sometimes at great speeds. As the adoption of this technical evolution increases - so does related connectivity, community and a new era of personal empowerment online.

The question remains will Web 3.0 and all of its proposed promises become more of a technical milestone or an Internet user expectation?

In the 1980’s, the world saw the adoption of the PC and desktop computing. This phenomenon of personal computing really took hold in the 1990’s with the introduction of the Internet, the World Wide Web and basic applications which took data from file systems and expanded them into file servers for global sharing. This period of the Internet introduction era or Web 1.0 was a major time of transition as many industries were caught off guard in their adoption to a new way of dealing with both communications and business operations. The speculative financial markets in the Y2K years brought with it an investment correction online. The results of the meltdown proved that not everything built online with a business model in mind would find financial success – let alone user adoption.

As the difficult market correction forced a new and more quietly focused period of development online, the power of people online and their social communications began to emerge as a new way to conduct commerce and foster a new level of online community. Web 2.0 has proven that users of the Internet dictate the Web’s progress more than business models and money. The social networking and personal publishing growth of the Internet has empowered a new era of peer to peer sharing – as once static websites have turned rapidly into platforms that engage conversation and commerce.

Today, entrepreneurs and online speculators are envisioning what the next generation Internet means as Web 3.0 and Web 4.0 push for their time. The new generation Internet is not so much a replacement of the old but an extension of what has already been developed to date. As online users become more comfortable with digital and even mobile interaction, the logical, next step Internet will begin to seamlessly understand each user and learn meaning behind both language and user personality. This “semantic Web” will turn the current document driven Internet into a database driven Internet where every information search, online conversation and every movement online is a learned and stored behavior and experience – one that understands, compounds and even learns about knowledge. This cognitive Internet ultimately will create a platform where information and applications are delivered at the right time and at the right place.

With a new, intelligent design in delivering content and community, many thought leaders and institutional online players are discovering just how to move to this new generation Internet. The question is will users have to learn how to interact with this new, self-learning Internet or will this intelligent extension simply fall into place as the Web begins to mirror the needs and personality habits of the individual user? Either way, this new, intelligent and thought-driven Internet will quickly move us to a whole new level of information and marketing delivery.

There are two major shifts that will occur in the Web 3.0 environment. The first is that the abundance of information today will evolve to more controlled information tomorrow. The second is that any and all user movements and activities online become stored and learned behaviors which ultimately benefit both the source and the individual. For the source, understanding user needs on an individual basis changes the entire Internet from a delivery mentality of “this is what we have” to a new thought-platform of “this is what we believe you are looking for.”

For years, the driving force for search and aggregation of user tools has been industry leaders like Google, Yahoo and even newer ventures like BING that are starting to position themselves as next generation engines. To date, these institutional players have been the catalysts to global search content, leaving a “vertical hole” in the semantic search space. Most of the development around semantic search is stemming at the University level and in micro-oriented niche markets and vertical online communities. It will be the predictive thinkers like WebMD (which Microsoft currently has an ownership stake in); that can deliver a large scale, vertical market site based on a cognitive platform.

Leading experts believe it is the micro-niche markets that will ultimately serve as the new catalysts to the semantic and cognitive Web. These focused communities have the ability to not only harness their intellectual and market assets quicker, but they also are in far better positions to leverage their development resources with more accuracy. Additionally, vertical market communities can come to market more rapidly with a captive audience. In the end, these smaller initiatives will become the leaders in the next generation “Intelligent Web”. This trend may validate the reasoning why so many of these vertical market sliver sites and channels are currently under development.

From a marketing perspective, the semantic web offers a truly exciting value as dynamic communication programs become seamlessly integrated with user search and individual behavior. Through learned behavior tracking online, marketing programs can be delivered intelligently to the individual needs supplying the most strategic message at the right time to the right location and in the most compelling media format based on user, device and connectivity platform.

One of the greatest challenges in this evolution of the semantic and intelligent web is for already existing online properties to determine just how to migrate to this new database-driven environment. Although a handful of sites are developing semantic engines, most are burdened with the process of even understanding how to migrate their existing platform to the newer cognitive design. For the user, a semantic engine is merely a seamless progression to being understood and being served. Older online users have already been through so many transitions online from E-commerce, site personalization and even social networking. Younger users seem to have the “built-in” gene code where the latest technology is automatically adopted. The fact is, all users will begin to expect smarter engines as topology and one-dimensional search engines and databases move into the semantic and cognitive space.

In the end, there are three colliding forces that will drive us quickly to a Web 3.0 environment. First, users understand that they have many control options online and the more the web can mirror their needs and wants, the more efficiently they can leverage online resources. Secondly, marketers will continue to invest and move to more intelligent campaigns that target and deliver “smarter messages.” Lastly, institutional leaders in connectivity, search engines, vertical markets and even device manufacturing will continue to foster new technologies while spending countless marketing resources that inform and engage online users to understand and even expect this new, intelligent web.

Share

By Aaron Friedman

First, a step back in time… I remember it being the summer of 2000 when my colleagues and I stood and watched as the tech bubble burst. The ideas and investments of most were on the rapid decline as anxiety levels in the air could be cut with a butter knife!

Leadership and Management

There is little doubt of what caused tech stock prices to drop in 2000. Some point out, Technological Revolutions imply an Increase in Risk. If so, Why? Is it because the productivity of new technologies is uncertain? I feel it is a strong combination of two things… 1.) Productivity of new technologies is uncertain. 2.) Too much leadership, not enough management. During the dot com era, any company that put an e- in the front of their name or a dot com at the end would watch their stock prices rally. This alone should have been the wake up call. If we have learned anything we have learned this: great leadership without great management doesn’t hold a lot of water. You can be a great innovator, but without the discipline or management structure needed to execute and deliver, your vision is bound to fall short.

Paraphrased from Fast Company (April 2009): It was during their summer break of 2004, when Facebook founders Mark Zuckerberg, Chris Hughes and Dustin Moskovitz hit the road for Palo Alto, CA in search of venture capital. Two years later, in fall of 2006, midterm elections approached. Facebook took what must have then been a bold step of allowing political candidates to set up modified profile pages, well before celebrities and products could have fan pages of their own. When a freshman senator from Illinois came knocking, it was Chris Hughes who provided the customer service. Barack Obama wasn’t a midterm candidate, but he wanted a Facebook profile anyway. The approach came from Reggie Love, Obama’s now famous body man. “I liked the Facebook idea,” says Jim Brayton, then the senator’s Internet director, “but Reggie really got it immediately.” After Love set up the profile, Brayton says, they realized its potential for an Obama presidential campaign. “We quickly wanted to be able to do more with it. Chris got it right away.”

Facebook and other Social Media moguls today have demonstrated the two key ingredients needed to execute and deliver a successful online medium: Leadership and Management. The question is: what can Social Media do for you and how can you benefit?

Adaptation in Challenging Times

During these difficult economic times one must adapt to their environment in order to grow and ultimately survive. The results prove that Social Media is coming to the business world at a faster rate than many had anticipated. Inc. Magazine’s Inc. 500, features(?) a list of the U.S.’s fastest-growing private companies. The report surveyed marketers’ familiarity with six prominent Social Media platforms (message boards, blogging, podcasting, online video, social networking, wikis), and the importance each placed when incorporated in their marketing strategy, in addition to what they were currently using. Of the 121 Inc. 500 respondents, 66 percent felt that Social Media was “somewhat important” or “very important”. What this data tells us is that if your competition is using a Social Media platform, then you’d better know how to use it too!

Friend and colleague Autom Tagsa @autom8 published an article on his blog this month titled, “Resistance 101”. Autom illustrates for us in this article how certain business practitioners prefer (and would only practice) networking face-to-face over networking virtually, and examining why some claim that Social Media is not really an effective networking tool.

Let’s generate some additional insight to something both Autom and I strongly agree on and converse about often. How can an individual or company truly benefit from the uses of Social Media? To answer this question let’s use two examples that plague us today:1 .) The job market; 4.4 million plus Americans currently unemployed. 2.) The struggling small to mid-sized business. Today’s financial crisis challenges all of us to find innovative ways to promote brand awareness, build brand loyalty, and get our message out. How do we this effectively?

Efficient Self-Marketing

Let’s tackle the job market first. There once was a time when one only had to be qualified and submit their resume in writing via fax, email, and snail-mail or as those famous Super Bowl commercials tell us Monster.com. If submitted via all avenues your chances would be increasingly in your favor. Today, you’re lucky if that gets you a phone call. The job market today is so saturated with incredible talent that you practically need your own PR firm to get noticed. So, how does one get noticed? Through the power of Social Media. Social Media is viral, gives your resume a personality (unique brand) and best of all its “FREE”. With the ability to easily leverage Social Networks like Facebook and LinkedIn, Blogs, and the ever growing micro-blogging services of Twitter, any individual can quickly layer [a visual bubble of personality] [a more appealing visual and content-enhanced brand] to their flat, text-based resume, which today so easily get blurred among thousands of others that look just like it. As a technologist, entrepreneur, and leader I have the pleasure of networking with some of the finest talent in many different industries. I have the privilege to hear many different views; what works well for one and what doesn’t work for another. My in-depth experience can tell you this, “Those who leverage Social Media while in career transition, will have a distinctive advantage over those who do not.” You can either take this experience and make use of it, or sit on the sidelines and watch opportunity fly by.

Social Media and Your Business

Leveraging Social Media for your business in a downward economy; what does it mean for you? Don’t just take my word for it. A look at some early adopters practically self-promotes Social Media’s staggering success to date: Zappos (offers incredible customer support to their online customers), Team Barack Obama (he won the presidency! Need I say more), Wells Fargo (first U.S. bank with a blog, first bank on MySpace, first bank with a VP of Social Media who also appears to be proactively reaching out to the blogging community), Southwest Airlines (building customer relationships as of first quarter 2009 to cope with recession), ComcastCares on Twitter (provides real-time support to Comcast customers). The list goes on.

Many entrepreneurs make the common mistake of isolating a dollar figure on Social Media to prove ROI. In fact, they continue to have a hard time showing what the revenue increases were from blogging or other Social Media efforts. The medium has not advanced far enough for ROI metrics to be secured in a meaningful way; however, the practice of the medium itself has advanced far enough (and continues to do so) to the extent that you need to be part of it. With that said, Social Media is indeed a very viable form of corporate marketing, and there are a number of ways the medium can be sold up the chain and measured during the course of business:

·         Don’t Isolate Social Media: Position Social Media as a component of your overall marketing plan. If you engage in print advertising, you’re used to making the case that print advertising is a branding component that is used to support your overall marketing messaging. Like Social Media, the ROI from print advertising is very hard to measure. Social Media should be one medium you’re using among many in your communication with your audience and customers.

·         Sales Tool: When was the last time you created a brochure and were asked to measure the ROI from that effort? You created the brochure to support the overall success of a product or service. The brochure helped to position and describe your product development effort. Blogging as a Social Media medium could be considered along the same lines. With every piece of content you create for your company blog, make sure your sales people are aware they can share that content with interested customers. It essentially becomes a unique and innovative tool they can use to spread the word. As long as you’re providing useful content for your audience, they’ll appreciate your effort and most likely visit again.

·         Feedback: Blogging has found great success as a method for gathering customer feedback through surveys, new product ideas and product feedback forms. Social Media engenders conversation. This is a valuable mode of communication which allows you to understand your clients. Take advantage of it and let your audience participate in shaping the future of your products.

·         Promote Realistic Expectations: I think many marketers who are just getting their feet wet in Social Media and blogging are a bit misguided as to the effect blogging will have on overall marketing efforts. In the marketing blog community, you can quickly start a blog, link out to 50 other bloggers in your first week and pick up traffic and subscribers, and then appear to easily measure your success based on your “accumulated audience”. Not all niches have that opportunity. Many communities lack a large enough niche in which to socialize. What then? I encourage people in less sociable niches not to pump the benefits of thousands of subscribers, millions of page views, or hundreds of comments. It could take years to develop that following in some online communities as the medium matures. Focus less on expected statistics and more on how Social Media will be integrated with the rest of your product marketing efforts.

·         Multipurpose Content: It’s always music to my ears when someone says that I can use content I’ve created for multiple purposes. If you’re blogging, you should be creating valuable content. Have you thought about using portions of that content for an eNewsletter creation or the beginning of a white paper? Make sure you have a plan to have multiple purposes for your efforts.

·         Search Engine Relevance: Most website traffic originates from how well a site is optimized for search engines like Google, so it only makes sense to continue efforts to get in their search results. Blogging platforms are very solid ways to optimize content for search engines - especially if you’re updating often and using the right methods (increase your relevance and watch your overall traffic increase).

·         Stats: While cold statistics do provide a certain traditional comfort level that allows us to quantify and measure, not all Social Media efforts can be effectively measured with stats-based analytics. Believe me, I do follow stats, but I pay more attention to subscribers, comments, and from where the visits originate. At this point, your analysis should focus on how well your audience is receiving and disseminating your content.

How Can You Benefit in the Social Media Revolution? Are You Kidding; How Can You Not?

BY Maki @ DOSH DOSH
(original post - click here)

Social media marketing is the process of promoting your site or business through social media channels and it is a powerful strategy that will get you links, attention and massive amounts of traffic.

There is no other low-cost promotional method out there that will easily give you large numbers of visitors, some of whom may come back to your website again and again.

If you are selling products/services or just publishing content for ad revenue, social media marketing is a potent method that will make your site profitable over time.

Those who ignore the efficacy of social media usually fall into three categories; the ones who don’t know much or anything about social media, the ones who are interested but don’t know how to use it and those who don’t believe in the value that a social media strategy can bring to any site or business.

The Value of Marketing Through Social News Websites

Image Credit: Poster Web 2.0

For those who don’t understand or see the value of social media websites, let’s take a look at the benefits of creating viral content and effectively promoting them through social media channels.

Developing link baits and successfully getting it popular on various social media websites like Digg and StumbleUpon will lead to multiple benefits for any website:

• Primary and Secondary Traffic. Primary traffic is the large amount of visitors who come directly from social media websites. Secondary traffic is referral traffic from websites which link to and send you visitors, after they come across your content through the social sites.
• High Quality Links. Becoming popular on social news websites like Digg or Reddit will get you a large number of links, some of which may be topically relevant, some not. A good story can realistically acquire a large number of high quality editorial links, most of which cannot be easily bought.

Now let’s translate this into tangible benefits for your website:

1. Links = Better Search Engine Rankings.

When a website receives a large number of natural, permanent links from trusted domains, it develops authority. Search engines trust it. If you optimize your linkbait and website structure properly, you can easily start ranking for competitive keywords, which will in turn bring in search engine visitors.

Do this often enough and your search traffic will undoubtedly increase. In a sense, you are obtaining these quality links through borrowed trust. Many bloggers and webmaster still think that if an article is on the Digg or del.icio.us homepage, then it’s probably worth checking out and referencing through a citation link.

A new website may find it difficult to gain links from a critical mass that is not familiar with it but a trusted social news resource makes it easier for links to come in, because the community and buzz has somewhat ‘certified‘ the value of the site. Note that the actual strength of the article is still of utmost importance for all.

2. Primary + Secondary Traffic = Community/Supporters.

Some people claim that social news websites only send useless traffic, visitors that will often just view a specific webpage and click away. Yes, that’s usually the case. Sites like Digg are notorious for their poor bounce rates: many visitors drop in for the article and then leave after reading it. StumbleUpon is much better in this aspect.

But don’t mistake this with a lack of interest. Your subscriber figures will often take big jump up and then stabilize after a few days. If your entire site is relevant to the general interests of the social media website, there will always be a handful of social users who will start to track your site in order to submit future content.

Detractors also ignore the power of ultra targeted secondary traffic. General sites or blogs in the same niche will link to a story that’s popular on social sites, because it adds value for their readers or users. This is done naturally on a daily basis for many.

While primary traffic usually comes in a larger volume, I would argue that secondary traffic is more valuable. Why? Because links from other websites bring visitors who are very likely to be interested in your content. These citation links demonstrate recognition of your site in the eyes of others. It builds your brand.

Think of the social news site as a platform or a soapbox. As something that gives you a chance to be heard or read, even for a brief moment of a few hours. The people who are drawn to your message will visit your site and recommend it to others.

Four Reasons to Practice Social Media Marketing

Image Credit: Poster Web 2.0

Why bother exploring social media as a marketing channel for your website or business? After all, you could stick to link exchanges, search advertising or the purchase of banner and editorial ads on relevant sites.

Here are some reasons why you should consider using social media:

1. It’s natural. Not only do you get natural links without any discernible pattern, your website is exposed to large groups of people in a spontaneous fashion. This differs from paid advertising which has overt commercial overtones.
2. It’s defensible. Once successfully mastered, social communities can be a great source of web traffic on top of any traffic you are already receiving from search engines. While you can’t easily increase your search engine traffic, social media traffic can be very easily controlled through strategic marketing.
3. It’s low-cost/high returns. If done by yourself, costs are limited to only time and perhaps the expenses involved in hiring a freelance programmer/designer. The benefits will often exceed the cost. It would take you thousands of dollars to buy many links; social media has the ability to give you that for free.
4. It complements other efforts. Social media optimization and marketing is usually community-specific. It doesn’t interfere with any other methods of getting traffic to your website. It can and will fit perfectly with an advertising campaign targeting other websites or search engines.

So How Does Social Media Help Me to Make Money?

It doesn’t. At least not directly. Every site or business that wants to expand and become profitable, needs a core group of supporters who will be willing to make purchases or recommend the site to others. Your site needs to perpetuate itself.

The more supporters you have, the faster word spreads about your site. Social media marketing is an excellent way to get people to come into your site to take a look at at what you have to offer. You will grow when there are a group of loyal visitors ready to always act upon what you have to offer.

Because social media websites can be leveraged for links and better search rankings, they can greatly increase your site’s income potential. For example, you will be able to price ads higher or generate revenue from any paid business models.

Why Bloggers Should Learn How to Use Social Media

Image Credit: Climate Change Protest

There are many ways to build a popular blog and many methods to promote your website. For example, you can start leaving comments regularly on many high traffic blogs in your niche or perhaps, consider guest posting on other bigger blogs.

My marketing strategy for blogs is very simple. I don’t comment actively, hold contests or write guest posts. I’ve never done any of that for any blog I’ve ever set up. Some people might enjoy doing it but its just a little too tedious for me.

What I do instead is strategic. I focus on creating just one excellent blog post, which I will then push through social media sites and email pitches to other bloggers. This is straightforward and I don’t have to run around many blogs putting up my URL and thinking of something insightful to say.

Think about it. Why write 50 guest posts for 50 different blogs when you can easily just write one article and get an equal amount of links and greater traffic through the use of social media? Guest posting builds relationships but I reckon there are many more powerful ways to network with others.

It isn’t just about creating articles and then promoting them on social sites as an afterthought. It’s about putting social media in the center of your marketing strategy, optimizing your site or content and making it an attention magnet.

Social Media and It’s Potential for Your Site: An Example

I recently launched a new blog a months ago and took around 20 hours to create a feature article. I subsequently promoted it on various social websites through my own influencer profiles. I also sent out emails to large sites in the same niche.

The article eventually got to the Digg, del.icio.us and Reddit frontpage and received over 140+ reviews on StumbleUpon. It accumulated well over 800 unique links, including some from very heavily trafficked websites. Some of them alone sent more traffic than the frontpage of del.icio.us.

The article is more than a month old and it is still receiving incoming links. Subscribers are up by over 800% and I received around 12K pageviews everyday for the first month. Bear in mind this is only a one month old site.

While not every article in every niche will receive the same amount of attention or success, this illustrates the great potential of social media. I’ve become a firm believer in having a solid social media strategy for every website I develop. It is important for success on every level, even for sites that are already popular.

BY Sergio Balegno (Senior Analyst with the MarketingSherpa Research Group)

On average, about 80% of marketers are integrating social media with other communications tactics. But clients and their agencies disagree on whether social media is being integrated into the mix with both online and offline tactics.

This chart shows the response we received from 1886 agencies and client-side marketers when asked if they integrate social media with other communications tactics.

We found that, while agencies and their clients are aligned on the integration of social media with other online tactics, marketing and PR professionals who work at an agency or consultancy are far more likely than those who work at a client-side company to integrate social media with both online and offline tactics – 38% to 22%, respectively.

It’s no surprise that nearly half of all marketers combine social media with other online tactics because integration is often accomplished simply by adding a link. Integration can initiate the movement of a vast community of prospects through the pipeline from initial social-media engagement to lead capture and qualification to sales conversion.

Tracking these prospects through each stage of the buying cycle and reporting on performance metrics may also be automated, making social media integration very appealing to agencies and client-side marketers that are being required to be more accountable for marketing programs than ever before.

Client-side marketers are more than twice as likely not to integrate social media into the marketing mix. This may be directly related to the most common barrier to social media adoption mentioned by client-side companies – the “lack of knowledgeable staff”.

The percentage of marketers who do not integrate social media (20%) is likely to decrease further as they become more proficient in online tactics, and the ease of social media integration becomes more apparent.

@aaron116 - Twitter is a micro-blogging platform. It lets you update your status and lets the whole world know what you are up to. There are millions of Twitter-addicts all over the world, and the number of active users has increased by 900% in the past year. Companies can also use it to promote themselves.

On Twitter you will have people “following” you, and you will be “following” others. “Following” is being updated every time a new post is added to one of your contacts’ profiles. Being followed is the same; every time you have something to add, all your “followers” will be updated. The more people that follow you, the more exposure your business will get. But it’s not about adding as many people as you can to your friends list. You need to be smart about building your follower base.

The problem is that many companies that try to market using Twitter don’t understand how this community works, and consequently their Twitter Marketing efforts don’t pay off.

To help you avert this fate, the following steps will guide you in understanding what to do and what not to do to give your company huge exposure using Twitter.

Twitter beginners need to understand the rules of etiquette for the service. So before you stick a foot measuring 140-characters-or-less in your mouth, check out our advice on how to follow and un-follow, share politely, direct message appropriately, and more.

By C.G. Lynch @ CIO.com

In our beginner's guide about how to get started on Twitter, we examined the basics of the social networking service that allows you to share short messages (140 characters or less) with friends, family and colleagues. But like any social network, the Twitter community has its own set of unwritten guidelines — or etiquette — that dictates good (or bad) behavior on the service. Some people call it Twittequette.

We call our tips guidelines, instead of rules, because Twitter was designed to be a very open forum. Some people might feel differently about what constitutes good Twitter behavior, depending on what they hope to get out of the service or their networking philosophies in general.

But based on interviews we did with social media and career experts who have seen people try to balance their personal and business lives on Twitter, we worked up five dos and don'ts for the average Twitter user, from deciding whose Twitter messages (known as "tweets") to follow or what content to share without jeopardizing what matters most in your professional and personal lives.

1. How to Follow and Un-Follow People

Even social networking experts share different philosophies on how to deal with "followers" — the people on Twitter who subscribe to your tweets. Some people believe that if someone follows you, it's impolite not to follow that person back. (Under Twitter's default settings, you'll generally be notified by e-mail when someone decides to follow you, and you'll be provided with a link to the person's Twitter profile, where you can choose to follow the person back and receive his or her tweets.)

But especially if you're just starting off on Twitter, you shouldn't feel obligated to follow all people back, even if you worry they'll think it's rude of you, our experts say. Instead, you should follow people who share your interests or whose tweets you find meaningful or compelling.

"You should only follow people who you trust, you think are interesting, or that you learn from," says Jeremiah Owyang (@jowyang), a senior Forrester analyst who researches social technologies and keeps a blog on Web strategy.

It's possible you'll offend some people, but ultimately it's harder to maximize the value of Twitter early on if you're Twitter homepage is flooded with tweets unrelated to your field or tweets that don't make any sense to you, Owyang says.

At the same time, don't be afraid to take some risks and follow someone outside your immediate circle, says Stowe Boyd (@stoweboyd), a social media consultant who writes the /message blog.

"It's like wandering around at a cocktail party," Boyd says. "You don't just want to hang out with people you only know well. Pick ten of your friends who are using Twitter, follow them, and then pick ten of their friends and follow them. You can always drop people and add new ones."

Similarly, don't be offended if someone un-follows you or chooses not to follow you back. Boyd says he'll stop following someone, for instance, who keeps tweeting things for a few days (such as from a conference) that don't capture his interest. He'll begin following the person again after that event is over.

Unlike a cocktail party, however, where the attendees aren't journalists with recorders and notepads, Twitter is a publishing medium where your messages will ring with finality to a lot of people. Because a tweet must be 140 characters or less, context can be easily misunderstood. Also, don't assume that people who are your immediate followers will only see your tweets. A tweet can be picked up publicly by Google or Twitter's search tool.

"It's open social discourse," Boyd says. "As a result, to some extent, some of what you say is going to be available for the public to see."

One complaint often voiced in the Twitter community concerns people who tweet too frequently, dominating users' homepages with their messages. Again, you can avoid this by examining a person's profile page before you sign up to follow him. If you don't want to follow the person, don't get mad at them for tweeting in volume .

Also, if you're just getting started, it's not recommended that you start following the more celebrity accounts or power Twitter users who tweet a lot, says says Laura Fitton (@pistachio), who runs Pistachio Consulting, which advices businesses on how to utilize Twitter. "They'll dominate your stream," Fitton says, whose Pistachio account has more than 18,000 followers. "I say follow me on RSS instead, which is an option on Twitter."

2. Be Up Front About Your Twitter Aspirations

As the divide between our consumer and professional lives blurs at the hands of social technologies, the content of your tweets can take on a whole new meaning, especially if you work at a traditional corporation that doesn't acknowledge this reality.

As such, you might want to make it clear who you represent and why you're on Twitter. Some people put messages on their Twitter background (which can be customized under the "settings" tab), noting that the opinions expressed in their tweets don't necessarily reflect those of their employers. They also might provide a link that explains with greater detail why they're on Twitter. While this can allow you some leeway, it doesn't necessarily mean your employer or your followers won't call you out on some tweets.

"There's a real difficulty there," Boyd says. "For people who are employed by companies, to some extent, they're always a representative of the company. It's almost impossible to divorce yourself from that. They need to figure out where they can draw line, and for some people where that line is is different."

In the end, the more up front you are in your profile description about who you represent and what you plan to talk about, the more you'll allow yourself some cover, says Kirsten Dixson ( @kirstendixson ), a reputation management and online identity expert. But that also means you shouldn't get upset with people if they tweet something that's in line with their stated Twitter goals.

"They might have things that are off-putting, that are overtly religious or political and not in your own views," she says. "But if they're up front about that, they've been fair."

3. Be Personal (to a point)

While you should heed the advice of the aforementioned section, you also shouldn't be afraid to be personal in your Twitter account. Most people wouldn't join Twitter to be spun by your corporate boilerplate statement or marketed to in traditional fashions. For individuals, Twitter can be a very personal medium, and that's not a bad thing for business people.

Twitter can humanize you in the eyes of your followers (who might want to do business with you in the future as a result of that human interaction).

"Work relationships have always been infused with some aspects of the personal, and Twitter is no different," Fitton says. "If you walked around the office and talked to people sitting in the cubes, people have different personality styles and quirks."

Your personal tweets should have meaning to your audience. Tweet about issues that are fairly universal to your list of followers and that will make them feel welcome to reply to with their own comments.

"People's Twitter streams are uninteresting if they're just declarative sentences like 'I'm going to the movies' or 'it's gray outside,'" Boyd says. "It's better if it's something that people might feel interested in replying to."

4. Reciprocate Gracefully

Advice on using social media outlets is often served up with a slew of jargony slogans like "engage with the community" or "build your social capital." But sometimes what that means can be unclear, especially on a service like Twitter, which is still relatively young.

So more to the point: how do you become respected by the community and benefit from the give-and-take that happens between users on Twitter?

It's not all that complicated.

"Be honest, interesting and unselfish," says Laura Fitton, @pistachio), who runs Pistachio Consulting, which advices businesses on how to utilize Twitter.

That means not just tweeting links to your own company or website. It also means when you tweet other people's work or news, you shouldn't make it look like a chore. Add some feeling or commentary, or people will see through you.

"You can't just pretend the unselfish part and phone it in," she says. "You either are or you aren't."

One way to show how unselfish you are: contribute to topics of interest to you by replying to tweets on that subject. But just replying isn't necessarily enough to convey that you care. Don't be afraid to stir debate and define your views.

Individuals should avoid making their personal account an RSS-like stream of their own content, unless they explicitly say that's their intention. Organizations have more leeway to make a Twitter feed of that nature because it's implicit in their name. If, for instance, you follow @nytimes, expect to get an stream of New York Times content, not the Washington Post's. If you follow @jetblue, expect deals on Jetblue flights.

5. Use The Direct Message Correctly

Although Twitter generally operates as a one-to-many medium, the direct message allows you to reach out to a follower privately. (In order to direct message someone, they must follow you.). But direct messages can be misused, too.

Direct messages, in their best form, should be used as a Web-based version of the text message. Message someone private information such as when you plan to meet up for an appointment or share your cell phone number. You can use this option for any message that doesn't concern the rest of your followers.

However, direct messages are not just a way to e-mail spam people. Some marketing and PR professionals have been criticized for sending direct messages that say "thanks for following me" accompanied by a blatant product pitch.

"That annoys me to no end," Dixson says. "Sometimes, people have told me they get so annoyed with those that they'll un-follow a person."

Remember, many people have direct messages sent to their e-mail inboxes. In this case, you could increase their e-mail overload problem.

Also, remember what someone sends you via a direct message isn't for public consumption.

"There's an implied confidentiality there," Boyd says. "It wouldn't be good etiquette to post a direct message with someone's name on it unless you got permission."

By Mike Scheuerman @ CIO Update

The future of IT is not in building and maintaining technology, but in the application of technology in solving business problems. This new IT organization should not be focused on maintaining a technology infrastructure, but in using IT as a value-added tool to enhance the operation of the business.

Making the switch to concentrating on the "information" in Information Technology will be challenging for many of today’s IT managers. They have always worried about the "speeds and feeds" and less about how the equipment under their control provides good support and value to the people who use that equipment to do their jobs. Infrastructure management is necessary but not sufficient to provide business users and managers with the information that they need to make critical business decisions each and every day.

A better approach is to organize the IT department to emphasize the information and downplay the technology. To that end, the new face of IT becomes the business analyst and project manager. The role of infrastructure management falls to outside vendors and someone(s) in IT will have the role of vendor relationship management. Managing SLAs becomes the primary goal for this group.

Within the business analysis function, there are three major components: project management, business unit expertise, and business intelligence. Project management provides the methodology for getting things done in a timely, cost effective way. Business unit expertise is used to provide knowledgeable individuals who know the business processes within a particular department. This expertise allows them to provide sound advice on how technology can be used within that business unit. Since this group falls within the overall business analysis function, they can also provide the cross-functional view that is missing so many times in projects. Helping to avoid the unintended consequences of system changes is a side benefit of this cross-function view of the world.

The third component of business analysis is that of business intelligence. This group is focused on the information that is needed to make timely and well-informed decisions by business management. This group is the keeper of the key performance indicators (KPIs). These KPIs make up the dashboard every manager uses daily to determine if the business is running the way they expect. Business intelligence provides the controls that keep the ship of business afloat and on an even keel.

The challenge to implementing this model is developing a true cost model of the current IT services so a reasonable comparison of costs and goals can be achieved. Today, the cost of IT is calculated largely on personnel and capital costs. In truth, the opportunity costs of not providing more effective utilization of people in the business is unaccounted for. The cost of not being able to determine the state of the business in a more timely way is also left out of the equation. And the cost of decisions being made with incomplete information is missed. Putting real dollar figures to many of these missing items is difficult, but the risk to the business is too high to not make an educated estimate.

Most business managers never think about the technology they use every day and how lost they would be without that technology. They also are concerned about the cost of the technology and how it is not providing them with what they need to run the business.

These are real concerns. If management can step back and think about IT as a utility they will begin to see that trying to keep the IT infrastructure running is like buying and maintaining your own power plant. You wouldn’t do that because you can’t justify the cost. You use the power to run your business and focus on the things that make your business successful. You don’t worry about buying coal to keep the power plant running. IT should be viewed the same way. It is an information utility. The real value comes from the information that is generated by the plant, not in the electricity flowing through the wires.

BY Kit Eaton @ Fast Company

While there's a lot of work to push nanotechnology as the future of computer chips, good old-fashioned semiconductors still have a lot of life in them yet: and they've recently been given a boost with a radical new type of circuit element that incorporates both semiconductor and nanotechnology.

Its called the memristor, and if you haven't heard of it that's not much of surprise--they were only manufactured for the first time last year. Memristors are tiny electronic devices that change their electrical resistance proportionally to the current running through them--in contrast transistors "turn on" current when a small input voltage is applied. Unlike transistors, memristors don't forget their state when they're turned off, making them useful as non-volatile memory for example.

Now a team from Hewlett-Packard labs in Palo-Alto has demonstrated a hybrid transistor-memristor circuit for the first time, using a nanowire grid and titanium dioxide as a semiconductor. The resulting device had memristors at the nanowire junctions and was surrounded by transistors.

Why should you get excited about this? For one reason--a transistor/memristor paired assembly can be programmed to either behave like a traditional logic circuit, route signals across it or behave as a memory storage unit. And these are all tasks that require specially-engineered circuitry in existing chips. In other words, a memristor-chip could pack in much more processing power in the same area--and that's the trend that our increasingly-powerful chips have been following for decades.

Yet more interestingly, since the memristor "remembers" what state its in, by doing a calculation with a group of the circuits and feeding back the output of a calculation to the same memristors, the device could effectively "self-program." As HP spokesman Tim Williams puts it: "self-programming is a form of learning. Thus, circuits with memristors may have the capacity to learn how to perform a task, rather than have to be programmed to do it."

And that's one long-predicted goal of computing technology that may even enable synaptic-like responses. Your computer in ten years time may do some of your thinking for you.

BY Noah Robischon @ FastCompany

Of all the demos at TechFest 2009, the one I'd pick to include in a future Microsoft product is the Social Views of E-Mail application. It looks like a basic e-mail tool, but it organizes and clusters messages based on social groupings instead of just time and importance. This video with Andrzej Turski gives you a quick overview of all the features.

Say you're part of a jogging club with a colleague at work, the social inbox would group different messages into your jogging club folder and your work folder based on the other names cc'd on the e-mail. That's just one simple example of how this app uses your friend network to organize information.

The creators of this social inbox have also re-worked the basic display and user interface for mail. Along with showing profile photos, when you open and read a message it gets displayed in columns similar to a newspaper or magazine layout. And you can reply to a message from directly underneath the original message, much like you do in Web-based comments or forums.

There are already a few tools that enhance other devices or software, like Fonebook, which syncs your Facebook contacts with Outlook. But most of your social information is still hidden from the other aspects of your daily routine. The next stage of social media's evolution will come when it scales the walled garden of existing social network destinations and becomes integrated with the rest of the devices and applications in your daily life.

By Aaron Friedman

By request, I have posted a copy of a presentation I did for a local networking group in Cherry Hill, NJ. The focus of the presentation is how to leverage social networking for your personal brand. The social media outlet concentration here is mostly around LinkedIn, but does touch on Social Media as a whole. Enjoy!