This post originally published August 10, 2008.

I continue to explore Social Media using the structure provided by Charles Heflin (see my post "Top Industries with Social Media Potential" on July 29th, 2008). Charles separates social networks into four categories:

This post originally published August 9, 2008.

I've been reading and enjoying a new book called Groundswell. It's about adapting your company/organization to the new world of social media (Web 2.0). In the book, there are countless examples of companies fighting to maintain control of their brand and corporate messaging. All ultimately reaching the conclusion that it is no longer possible today. Your brand is what people say it is, not what you say it is. Well, I've related to a number of thes...

This post originally published July 29, 2008.

In Charles Heflin's "The Social Marketing Blueprint Formula", he talks about Type 1 and Type 2 markets. He defines them as follows:

1. TYPE 1: Markets where people socialize (internet marketing, movies, music, sports, medical, weddings, reunions, politics, religion, spirituality, etc, etc, etc.)

2. TYPE 2: Markets where socializing is limited or non existent (cardboard boxes, socks, desks, office chairs, satellite tv, shoes, poker chips, etc, etc, e...

This post was originally published on June 6, 2008.

I attended the American Marketing Association meeting this afternoon in Phoenix. A friend of mine, Matthew O'Brien, was presenting social media marketing, in particular the use of video. You can find him on Twitter: @Blogster or by visiting his new Social Media Marketing company: Mint Social. Anyway, one of the side notes was that creating identities on social networks with your company name may not be the best choice, for a number of reasons...

This post was originally posted on April 18, 2008.

I really started Tweeting about two weeks ago, even though my account has been active for awhile. My early thoughts about it were probably not too dissimilar from yours. It felt like a very juvenile, time-wasting activity. So, I quickly dismissed it and moved on. Then, I decided to attend a Social Media Club meeting in Phoenix where everyone seemed to be on Twitter and loving it! It took some time for that to settle in on my mind, but it made ...

This past week I've been trying to identify blogs that are frequented by one of our target markets: Advertising Agencies. So, I tried Google Blog Search using the term "Advertising". It returned 76,922,165 entries. Among them were the following:

• Pronet Advertising
• AdAge
• Advertising Lab
• The Business Marketing Blog

Then, I tried the IceRocket Blog search engine for the same keyword. It returned 580,233 entries. I examined the first page and only found references to small marketing oriented...

I have been struggling to determine where to focus my energy across all of the social media applications available. I have categorized them as follows: Content Aggregators, Social Media Aggregators, Micro Blog, Bookmarks, Community: Visual Media, Community, Community: Business and Discovery. There are a few others like Community: Software - Wakoopa, Community: Books - Shelfari and Marketplace - Kiva.

In each bubble, the participating applications are in order of type size. The clear winner i...

Over the last couple of months, I have immersed myself in Social Media. I blog a few times a week, I Twitter , today I tried Twitxr (Twitter with photos), I belong to groups, content aggregators, community bookmarking, etc. Here are the top 5 things I have learned from the experience thus far:

1. Having a blog is key, but not mandatory. While I have a blog on our company website, having one hosted differently  (a separate IP range)  than your company website is important for Search Engine love!...