This post was written by Rob Reed. He is the founder of MomentFeed, a location-based marketing, strategy, and technology firm.

Location technologies are transforming how we experience, navigate, and ultimately better our world. From the global to the local, here are #10Ways geolocation is a positive force for good.

Social media has changed the world. It has revolutionized communications on a global scale, and the transformation continues with every status update, blog post, and video stream. The global citizenry has become a global network.

Since becoming widely adopted just a couple years ago, social media has supercharged social action, cause marketing, and social entrepreneurship. Indeed, the true value hasn’t been the technology itself but how we’ve used it. Today, a second wave of innovation is defining a new era and setting the stage for change over the coming decade.

Mobile technologies will extend the global online network to anyone with a mobile device while enabling countless local networks to form in the real world. We’ve decentralized media production and distribution. We’re doing the same for energy. And we’ll continue this trend for social networking, social action, and commerce.

The combined forces of smartphones, mobile broadband, and location-aware applications will connect us in more meaningful ways to the people, organizations, events, information, and companies that matter most to us—namely, those within a physical proximity of where we live and where we are. Can location-based services (LBS) change the world? Here are #10Ways:

1. Checking in for Good: If Gowalla and Foursquare have taught us anything, it’s that people respond to simple incentives. By offering badges, mayorships, and other intangible rewards, millions of people are checking in to the places they go. Apps like Whrrl take this a step further and enable like-minded “societies” to form on a local basis. The next step is for these apps to add greater purpose by encouraging more meaningful checkins and offering corresponding badges and stamps, thus mapping the cause universe. Or for a dedicated app to be developed that rewards conscious consumption, social responsibility, and civic engagement. Yes, the CauseWorld app features a cause element, but it’s not about cause-worthy places.

2. Eating Locally: Sustainability demands that we source our food as close to its point of production as possible. Many so-called locavores subscribe to the 100-mile diet, which requires that one “eat nothing—or almost nothing—but sustenance drawn from within 100 miles of their home.” Given the difficulty of accessing and verifying this information in order to live by this standard, there’s a geo-powered Locavore app. It gives you info on in-season foods, those coming in-season, farmer’s markets, and links to recipes. This rather simple app is clearly just the start. In time, location-aware apps will guide us not only to the grocery store or farmer’s market but through them. All the while identifying foods based on our particular diet or sensibility.

3. Political Organizing: In the next presidential election, politics will not only be local but location-enabled. We saw the power of social media in Obama’s 2008 landslide victory. In 2012, location-based apps and technologies will play a central role in how campaigns are organized, managed, and ultimately won. Much of this will be visible through mobile apps and location-aware browsers. Activists and volunteers will be more empowered. Voters will be more engaged in the moment, right down to casting their votes. Behind the scenes, though, we’ll see massive new sets of data available to campaigns for targeting, empowerment, and optimization. The party, candidate, and/or cause that has the best handle on geolocation will have a measurable advantage. (The Elections app will soon be updated for 2010.)

4. Finding Green Businesses: The web has effectively replaced the paper Yellow Pages as a way to find local businesses and services. However, this “stationary web” experience is quickly being supplanted by the mobile web and mobile applications, which give us access to this information when we most need it. The Yelp and Around Me apps are popular ways to find restaurants, coffee shops, or hotels wherever you are, but what about green-rated businesses? Greenopia has transformed its printed, local guides into a dynamic, nationwide mobile application that lets you find local, green-rated businesses in any category. No more paper and a much better experience. The Green Map app is another that facilitates discovery and connects us to local green environments.

5. Traveling More Efficiently: We’ve had access to GPS navigation systems and static traffic information for some time, but only now are we seeing the full potential of these technologies. With access to more detailed traffic information that is specific to your route and updated in real time, we can minimize congestion and maximize traffic flow (as much as physically possible). The new turn-by-turn MapQuest 4 Mobile app is a good start, as you can get traffic alerts specific to the route you program. However, user-generated information from apps like Trapster and Waze can crowdsource more specific details, such as whether to avoid an intersection due to a toxic chemical spill. Or, if you want to avoid automobiles altogether, Google Maps makes it easy to use public transportation and take a bike.

6. Scanning for Ethical Products: With online shopping, we’ve become accustomed to reading reviews and making comparisons before we buy. This can now be done in the physical world through games like MyTown and services like Stikybits. By scanning a product barcode using a smartphone camera, you can unlock a treasure of additional information (not to mention deals) that can help with your purchase. This might include where it was produced, how far it traveled, the reputation of the manufacturer, chemical contents, carbon footprint, or the full lifecycle analysis. Location-aware applications can also transform commerce itself by giving us better access to local inventories and locally-produced goods. Whether it’s fruits and vegetables or books and electronics, if something can be found within blocks of your current location, it makes no sense to ship it from afar.

7. Networking Neighborhoods: One of the hottest categories in geolocation is neighborhood networking. The vision for many of these apps is to strengthen the very fabric of our communities. With DeHood, you can keep track of what’s happening in your neighborhood, share your favorite places, and grease the wheels for actually meeting people. After all, if you’ve made contact through the app, it’s a lot easier to say “Hello” in the real world. Blasterous is another that lets you share information locally, whereas BlockChalk does this on an anonymous basis. Finally, NeighborGoods uses your street address to facilitate one-to-one borrowing and trading of useful stuff. In the end, making connections with your neighbors can lead to safer, more productive, and more sustainable communities.

8. Tracking Environmental Disasters: The size and scope of environmental disasters appears to be growing. In 2008, we had the Tennessee coal ash spill, which was billed as “the largest environmental disaster of its kind in the United States.” And that was before we realized it was three times bigger than originally estimated. More recently, the BP oil spill set daily records for “largest environmental disaster in the U.S. ever.” In each case, geolocation technologies can be used by engaged citizens to monitor and track the effects. They can be used by response teams to coordinate containment and cleanup efforts. Ultimately, these technologies can be used to accurately measure the size and impact of a disaster in order to better understand its damages and costs.

9. Viewing the World Through an Eco Lens: Augmented reality (AR) follows geolocation as one of the hot trends in mobile technology. It enables you to view the world through a smartphone camera (or similar device) and see layers of geo-specific content or information. One of the most popular apps is Layar, an augmented reality browser/platform that lets you choose specific data layers or experiences. The potential for green- and cause-related content is tremendous. You might view green-rated businesses, LEED-certified buildings, or virtual GHG emissions as they enter the atmosphere. Combined with smart meter technology, you could see the most efficient and inefficient homes around you in real time. And for the cynics among us, you could view our mountains, forests, rivers, and oceans as they once were…before the effects of climate change and so many environmental disasters.

10. Capturing the Moment: Better access to information about what’s happening around us—right now—can dramatically improve quality of life. This sense of “geospatial awareness” is possible through today’s smartphones, whereby a piece of content or information—a moment—is captured and preserved based on the unique time and place in which it occurred. It is essentially to document spacetime. Protests, natural disasters, sporting events, parties, political crises…real-time information about anything happening anywhere at any time, as well as the history of what happened. This will take several years and a number of different applications to realize. In the end, though, it will revolutionize how we access and consume content. It will complete the democratization and decentralization of news and information…based on time and location.

Cautionary note: Privacy is the single biggest issue in the LBS industry. It’s important to understand what information you are sharing with regard to your location and with whom.

Author’s note: We’ll be hosting geolocation events for Social Media Week in Los Angeles this September. This is the third in Max Gladwell’s #10Ways series of distributed blog posts. It was published simultaneously on as many as 300 blogs.

Credit: Conversation Marketing – good post, Ian

Years before I started my own firm, I clearly remember a great question designed to trip me up at a job interview:

“So Brian…how many hours of experience do you have on Visio?”
After a chuckle, I regained composure and replied:
“About 4-5 years. Do you catch a lot of people on that one?”
“Yes, I do,” he said with a smirk.

Which brings us to the point of expertise. Lots of people throw around needlessly unqualified labels about how so and so is a guru, maven, or expert. Question is, how do you know someone truly is an expert? Especially in social media – a field so near and dear to our hearts?

The answer? Experience.

I’ve recently read (and re-read several times – ask my wife, she can attest   a book called Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell. You have probably heard of another one of his works – The Tipping Point – but this is also a must read.

Mr. Gladwell does a wonderful job of challenging the conventional way of thought on the coveted “self-made man,” rags to riches stories, and innate geniuses (they get help along the way too, read the book for more on this point). Without giving away all there is in the book, he talks about how people don’t come from nothing to success. Even if they are geniuses. Rather, it comes from opportunity and experience.

So, How Much Experience is Enough?

This may sound weird to you, but if you look across all sorts of fields of knowledge, they all converge around a single number. 10,000 hours.

Here’s the kicker. Social media is such a new field, that people could not have been expert practitioners until recently.

Let’s say you started 3 years ago and consistently work your butt off to the tune of 70 hours per week:

• 70 x 50 (give yourself some vacation and sick time) = 3,500 hours
• 3,500 hours per year x 3 years = 10,500 hours

Got that? Testimonials from customers aren’t enough.  News mentions.  Interviews.  Even past performance on a client – you could have just got lucky.  The true measure of expertise is this 10,000 hours rule.

Conclusion, and a Bit More

And here is what I have to add to Malcolm Gladwell’s argument – it isn’t just the 10,000 hour rule, but rather how quickly you got to the 10,000 hours.  Total immersion, i.e. getting 10,000 hours as quickly as possible is an even greater predictor of success.  Keeping in mind that social media is such a new field, many so-called “experts” are eliminated right from the start.

If you’re a business that’s just starting out then chances are you’re not going to have a particularly large budget for your marketing and public relations efforts. A dedicated PR team and advertising campaigns for TV, radio and print are more than likely going to be outside of your reach.

Thanks to the wonders of Web 2.0, though, a small budget is no longer a barrier to promoting your business worldwide, if you know how to harness the power of online marketing and social media.

There are a number of benefits to using an online marketing campaign, and chief among these is lower costs – for starters, it’ll cost you absolutely nothing to set up an account with Facebook/Twitter/MySpace/Bebo and start communicating directly with consumers.

For Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising campaigns you can set a nominal budget each month, say $10, and then review the results at the end of each month and dedicate more or less money to different search engines and keywords, depending on which ones are bringing you the best click-through rates.
Furthermore, with social media you can get directly to your target market. With a traditional advertising campaign you’re basically throwing your money and message into the air in the hope that it will land on the heads of a few interested parties. With social media, though, you can narrow your efforts down to the specific group of people who are interested in your product and then speak directly to them, one-on-one, which humanises your brand, engenders a sense of trust and community between the brand and the consumers, and provides you with direct feedback from the people who know best – your customers.

A common misconception is that a social media marketing campaign is only going to reach a narrow demographic of tech-savvy Gen X and Gen Y web geeks – yet nothing could be further from the truth. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the number of web users aged 40 and above who use social media is growing constantly, and research backs this up – a 2009 survey by Insidefacebook.com shows that 22% of registered users of Facebook were aged between 35 and 65, with the fastest growing demographic being women over 55.

It’s important, though, to make sure you’re targeting the right social media, especially when it comes to international campaigns. If you’re interested in reaching consumers in Japan, for instance, then it’s no good concentrating your efforts on Facebook because 80% of Japanese social media users are signed up with Mixi.jp, just as Xanga rules the roost in Hong Kong and Orkut in Brazil.

‘Crowdsourcing’ is another great development of Web 2.0 that can be used to commercial advantage. The concept basically does what it says on the tin – for those not in the know, it means to put out an open call to the lumpen mass of internet users to come together and assist with the completion of a project; think of Wikipedia as an archetypal crowdsourcing project. Crowdsourcing can be an extremely effective way to achieve a business goal or to increase your brand awareness – not to mention being cheap – and it’s a great way to get consumers directly involved with your brand.

For instance, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe – the world’s largest open-access arts festival – recently ran a crowdsourcing project via Twitter to design their 2010 programme cover. Fans were encouraged to tweet their suggestions for illustrations to adorn the cover and selected suggestions were then drawn by a professional illustrator, whose work was streamed live online. The project was a great success in terms of both building hype about the 2010 Fringe and for strengthening the sense of community and crowd participation that is an essential ingredient of the Fringe’s success.

Lost in Translation?

In another example, Facebook crowdsourced the translation of their localized sites – over 300,000 users helped to translate content into 70 languages using the Facebook translation applications. However, crowdsourcing for technical work such as translation can have its pitfalls – by relying on anonymous internet users to provide and compile data, there is no quality assurance, and languages are particularly tricky beasts; they change constantly, evolving and morphing between regions and dialects, and the potential for error is great.

Getting the amorphous masses to translate your content for a web page or campaign may seem like a cheap and easy way to step over the language-hurdle, but how will you know precisely what your translated text is really saying? You don’t want to end up like Pepsi, whose Taiwanese translation of ‘Come alive with the Pepsi Generation’ came back as ‘Pepsi will bring your ancestors back from the dead’, or chicken entrepreneur Frank Purdue, whose slogan ‘It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken’ turned up on Mexican billboards in translated into Spanish as ‘It takes a tough man to make a chicken aroused.’ Probably best to get a professional translator to either do your translation work from the start, or look over it before it goes out to the world, then.

For the savvy entrepreneur, the online realm has a wealth of ways to get your brand out there and to start connecting with the punters for minimal expense, and when used in combination with more traditional public relations strategies – such as press releases targeted at media sources – your company will be impossible to stop.

Christian Arno is the founder and managing director of global translation provider Lingo24, which works across four continents. Follow Christian on Twitter.

The Olympic television viewing activity, recorded by Nielsen, finds people are online while global events are broadcasted. Marketers may find it lucrative to engage their user base on social media networks during event broadcasts. I engaged communities prior and during the Super Bowl with a client microsite and had fantastic results.

You could see Neal interview some of the brightest minds on cyberspace including thought-leaders in social media marketing and search engine optimization on nealrodriguez.com where he offers his own social media and blog training program.

I am one of the few people who didn’t throw a huge fit when the new version of Stumbleupon left beta. I admired the simplicity of the new interface and, as with most new things, decided to give the overhaul a fair shot before voicing my concerns about its limitations. In many respects, it’s much changed from the Stumbleupon the community had grown to love.

The developers at Stumbleupon attempted to make the site more social, adding in a bit of Facebook, a  bit of Twitter, and some minor changes to the navigation options of your home page. The most important of these new navigation options, the Discover tab, takes users to a page with even more tabbed options: Recent Activity, Top Rated, Shares and Topics.

Now, if you’re anything like me, you don’t nearly have enough time to keep up with all of your subscriptions’ discoveries and stumbles. These options, taking you to popular websites as rated by the community, seemed the answer. Users without the benefit of extra time could now discover the most popular content as selected by their subscriptions, bypassing the time-consuming default Stumble! button and getting straight to the highest rated content. While this may have been a great idea, providing Stumbleupon users with a dynamic and unique page of popular content (it is based on your subscriptions, right?), it really just exposed the fallacies inherent to Stumbleupon. Take a look at your Top Rated tab and maybe you’ll understand where it is I’m going with all of this.

Here are some of the links I’m greeted with when hitting the aforementioned tab:

• d-e-s-i-g-n.ru
• sharenator.org
• acidcow.com
• frozenly.com

All of those pages equate to what we call blogspam. Unfamiliar with the term and what it applies to? Allow me to explain.

Image Attribution

This is a very simple lesson in content creation that we all should understand and start adhering to if we wish to rid the Internet of stolen content and, well, stolen content.

Every image on every site should have attributions for their photos. If a stumble is primarily text and utilizes one image that simply relates to the post, that is fine (though it should technically still have a credit unless the blog owner bought it on istockphoto — or a similar site — or there’s no doubt they own it by some other means).

Here’s what every image should have otherwise (image source links are usually found beneath the image but sometimes a single link will be found in a post’s introduction paragraph):

(Source: Collective Thoughts)

Now, if you actually took the time to visit the links I listed above, you may have noticed the insane amount of traffic each one of the uncredited posts have accumulated. Thanks to Stumbleupon’s update, these numbers are made available to anyone with the desire to do some investigating. The cumulative traffic count for the four URLs is just about 600,000 pageviews. Not too shabby for blog / site owners who create none of their own content and fail to credit other people’s content every time they steal it. I don’t know about you, but I preferred the days when I was ignorant to the amount of traffic these undeserved thumbs generated for these bogus, lazily updated sites.

So, if you’re a site owner, credit your content. And, if like most of us, you’re simply a Stumbleupon user, try to demand more from the sites populating your precious community. Without policing, it’ll just get worse.

Internet radio has been around for some time now–at least since the mid nineties actually (earlier, if you count it’s infancy)–and it has most certainly evolved from those early days of streaming into the smooth and ubiquitous service that we take for granted today. Odds are you have used, or use, streaming audio and/or video and haven’t really given it a second thought. That’s good, and once again we have social media to thank for changing the nature of the game even here. Enter social music. Internet radio with a healthy social networking aspect thrown in. A great way to listen to a giant, 64 oz. variety gulp of music and share it with your friends, and family, or the world. All this and no commercials to boot, what more can you ask for?

Lack of choice never seems to be an issue with the internet and this is no exception if you’re looking to get your music fix online. We’re going to talk about an  exemplar in the field and try to give you a rundown of the features, functions, and what there is to like or dislike about them. So, without further delay, let’s take a close look at Last.fm, one of the more popular social music sites  out there and quite possibly the only social music source you’ll ever need.

I love Last.fm! However, one of the primary complaints about the site’s homepage is it’s busyness.  This may be my only issue with the site, but wow, there’s is definitely an excess of information to digest here. Sure, this may be because there’s so much available music to listen to—which is in no way a bad thing—but there’s a screaming background that users are force-fed as well. You can’t miss it, trust me; it’s a vert for one of those reality cooking shows. It gets on my nerves. Perhaps I’m just sensitive and my distaste for reality shows is getting in the way. Who knows?

Social music sites like Last.fm allow you listen to ‘radio stations’ based on your favorite artists. Search for an artist, song, or album and Last.fm will create a station for you which will only feature music by, or similar, to the artist you were interested in. It’s a great way to expand your music vocabulary by finding music that matches your listening preferences. If you hear something you really love, you can favorite it and it will automatically be sent to your own personal music library; one which you can return to again and again. Tagging is also supported, which is helpful for locating a particular type of sound or music. Tagging also sends items to your library.

Last.fm seems to have quite an extensive music catalog and bio’s are available for many of the artists. I found the bio sections on a few of my favorite bands to be chock-full of information. There’s plenty more information to be had as well, on practically any artist you can think of. Last.fm sports a similar artists list which, as you can surmise, provides you with a list of artists that are in some way similar to whatever artist you were checking out to begin with; another way, aside from just sitting back and listening, to find music you’re sure to like.

You can even create playlists of your favorite songs (assuming the tracks are available in full length of course, and not every track is). While playing around—bad pun intended—I created a very short playlist of songs from a handful of my favorite artists, all of which I’ve saved in my library. I can go back and fire up my playlist anytime I’m not in the mood for the more wide-ranging music selection of a standard artist station.

Now let’s talk about the social aspect of Last.fm. Create a station and you can share it with your friends by emailing directly to their inboxes, post it directly to Facebook or Twitter, bookmark it on Delicious, or you can Digg it. Can you dig it? (Zing!) You can easily tell all your friends about the great band you just discovered, and in turn they might be able to direct you to another that Last.fm just might have missed. There are also groups you can join where you can interact with other users who share your music tastes by joining in on discussions and checking out the group lists. This is, in particular, yet another way to find even more music you’ll love by tapping into the crowd. I love Guster and there’s an active discussion going on in the group right now that asks, ‘If you like Guster, you’ll like…‘. It’s word of mouth times a gabillion.

Another particularly nice feature, and one that’s incredibly easy to use on Last.fm, is the option to purchase very nearly any track you hear. This process is so easy it hurts. Hear a song you like, click the Buy Track dropdown and then choose where to buy the track from: Amazon MP3, 7Digital, or iTunes. Prices are around the 99 cent mark, which is about what we’ve come to expect from other music sources.

That pretty much covers the basics. But, fair warning, Last.fm can be addicting–the more you use it, the better able it is to recommend music to you. Couple this with the fact that you can take your music tastes with you anywhere you can access the internets and you might just grow a third ear for music (I kill me, I really do).

Ncomment is back with his second installment of his WAR series. Reddit has invaded the world of Digg and sent Diggers into hiding to plan a revolution against the alien and robotic army of Reddit invaders. With division of Diggers at an all time high, the Reddit army was able to invade the Digg city and bring it to its knees in a single day.

Ncomment has been able to perfectly capture the political and social issues surrounding social media in his comics since the time they were first introduced. Somehow, he’s hit the nail on the head each time. If you look carefully at his comics, some things are subtle and others not-so-much. Not only does he capture social media issues, he also  includes avatars and logos of well-known publications and social media users.

From TechCrunch Candy Bars, BuzzEdition Beer, The Drill Down Bilboards, Nowsourcing street signage, and The Huffington Post Copy Center, Ncomment has been spot-on. WAR part 2 is packed with social media references and well known sites. Mixx.com has become a refugee camp where Lt. General Panda has begun work on his ultimate weapon (powered by bacon) while the Social Blend news van is parked out front. We even get a look at the Holy Grail itself — the Digg algorithm.

So how does he do it? Ncomment applies one of the best known rules of the Internet, #32, “Lurk Moar.” And boy does he lurk.  Only by doing so has he been able to capture the essence of social media so perfectly — its users. He engages them, gets to know them and then folds them perfectly into his comics. He even takes a stab at Ashton Kutcher and his Twitpics. No one is safe.

WAR Part 2 hit the Digg Front Page and was met by rave reviews of Diggers and Redditors alike.

“Best thing I have seen on Digg all week! LMAO!” says Digger Sexualwasabi.

“Best fffing comic evar” writes glucoseboy.

“I saw this headline and I honestly thought, ‘please God let this be ncomment’ – very well done!” says Jaybol.

WAR Part 2 has been eagerly awaited by social media enthusiasts, more so than the New Moon movie by teenage girls.  Ncomment delivers, and we can’t wait for Part 3.

In my last post here on CT, I spoke of not being afraid to jump right into the social media pool and start paddling, not worrying about whether you really knew what was going on or what’s what. So I thought I’d continue that trend and talk (briefly) about that beacon of social media possibilities, lighting the way for all others, that pinnacle of Web 2.0 achievement, the place to be on the Net, because if you’re not–and we’re just being honest here, right?–you’re a nobody, a boob, and a general failure as a 21st century human being. Alright, a bit too far with that last one.

I’m talking about Twitter, my friends, and while I may have put the shine on a bit too thick just now, one might be remiss in underestimating the value and power of Twitter. Now I’m not going to tell you what Twitter is; everybody probably has at least a general idea of it, except perhaps David Letterman.

This isn’t a guide by the way, I figure that’s been done already, and more skillfully than I could probably manage. Also I realize that many of our readers will be familiar with all this, but maybe, just maybe, some of you don’t know. Maybe some of you are like Dave there, afraid of  Twitter or anything social media-like. Let us not forget the beginner’s mind; it never hurts to review the basics right?

One of the complaints I’ve encountered when people talk about trying Twitter, or not as the case may be, is that they simply don’t know what to say. Or having said something, they fear they will look the fool for throwing it out there into the great Twittersphere. I understand; know that you are not alone friends, Twitter can be a little intimidating for some, and there is a non-trivial learning curve. I know after creating my Twitter account that I felt a bit overwhelmed and not a little confused by it all. Pile on top of that the fact that it’s kind of hard to follow conversations that you encounter with people you follow because they’re talking to someone else(this is less of a problem now, especially given the plethora of high quality Twitter clients available).

I introduced a close friend of mine to Twitter a while back, and noticed she wasn’t really tweeting much—OK, not at all really aside from her introductory, ‘Hey world!’—and since we communicate regularly through other means, like the primitive phone, I asked her why that was. She told me she wanted to tweet, but every time she brought up the update box, she just froze. She couldn’t think of anything important enough to say, and didn’t think anyone would be interested in what she was doing every minute of the day.

Behold, two common misconceptions regarding Twitter! You don’t have tweet about everything you do, and if you did,  you would be right that no one would want to know what you’re doing every minute, and you would end up alone and followerless. But, if some of your friends were following you they might want to know that you are, (a) under the weather, (b) dying, or (c) just having a crappy day in general. Your tweets don’t have to be earth shattering revelations, or hot breaking news, unless perhaps you are @MSNBC (in that case carry on). You don’t have to sit and wait for the muse to hit you on top of the head with profound and pithy attestations (I looked at my word-a-day calendar this morning). Think of Twitter as a community of potential friends. I mean they don’t call it social networking for nothing right? Instead of worrying about being important or popular, why not share a link to a site or video you thought was interesting; if you thought it was interesting, somebody else just might as well. See an article that made you so angry you wanted to scream? Link it in a tweet, make others aware of it.

Keep in mind that we’ve been coming at Twitter from a more or less personal angle. More and more businesses are hopping on the social media wagon; maybe your company already has. It would behoove anyone in today’s market to familiarize themselves—at least somewhat—with the flexibility and power of Twitter, and other social media outlets. Earlier this year, Business Week put together a special report which speaks directly to executives on the wonders and possibilities of social media for their companies and/or brands.

And it’s not just larger corporations that are slowly realizing the benefits of social media involvement; small businesses are picking up on the vibes and possibilities well. Again from Business Week, this article discusses some advantages for business owners and tips on how to get started, and why. And if you check out that article you might notice the advice uncannily echoes a running theme in this post, and my last one: Don’t worry about the small stuff, jump on in and get wet.

Here are links to a couple of guides for Twitter. There are a gabillion of them on the Net, but these were most helpful to me. Good luck!

1. Squidoo’s Twitter Tutorial. It even has a video!
2. Mashable’s Awesome Twitter Guide Book.

Jamie slogs through cyberspace in his free time, learning whatever he can, writes short stories, and tends his own blog www.residuetiger.com. You can follow him on Twitter as well: @residuetiger.

We’ve all seen it. What once worked in social media six months ago doesn’t work now. Why, for instance, does a large following on Twitter no longer indicate influence? Or why is blogging no longer as impressive as it was in 2003? Both these examples follow a predictable economic formula:

As “x” social behaviour multiplies, its social value approaches zero.

Let me break that down for you. The more you do the same thing, people’s appreciation of it lessens. The more you do the same song and dance, don’t be surprised if your audience dwindles. This should be obvious, but it’s not.

LiveJournal: An Example

Most of us think of LiveJournal as the walking corpse of the social media world, but it wasn’t always so. It was one of the first platforms to combine blogging with social networking. More fascinatingly, people who had a LiveJournal felt it gave them status: in order to have one, you had to be invited.

Then it happened. Danga Interactive, LiveJournal’s parent company, removed the invite requirement. Soon everyone who wanted one could have one. This was the beginning of the end.

The problem was everyone wrote about the same things: breakfast, cute kittens, and favourite movies. LiveJournal succeeded in the task of being a journal, but as the novelty of public journalling wore off, so did its perceived value. Soon, users left LiveJournal for the unique feature set of MySpace — and we all know what happened to MySpace.

State of the Social Media Union

Most popular social media tools have their time in the sun then go through a slow rigor mortis. Usenet was once the reason people paid for Internet. Chatrooms were how people dated online. MySpace was a “place for friends”. What happened?

Everyone was doing it, and everyone was behaving the same way. Usenet became so burnt out over flame wars, the term “troll” was coined and “Godwin’s Law” became a law. The acronym “ASL” became such an overused greeting in chatrooms, their very purpose became sexual gratification. As for MySpace, “making friends” became the basis of many a Catch a Predator episode.

We are seeing the same pattern of behavior happen on Twitter, Digg, and Facebook — and if people keep doing the same things, those social networks will soon have less social value than they currently have now.

How Can We Add Value?

The social media slide into rigor mortis is not inevitable. The only way to reverse the lessening of social value is to give your audience value. That is to say, behave in a different way from everyone else. If a platform is flexible enough for innovative forms of communication, and if communities are courageous enough to move beyond their own cliches, social media can thrive.

Want to remain relevant in social media? Behave differently.

Social media gives us the ability to practice in public more than ever before.  Is this a good thing or a bad thing?

If you’ve ever read The Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen (I just finished reading it), you get a pretty clear read on what he thinks of most user-generated content:  very little.  His concerns range from the welfare of professional content creators (who are losing out to massive quantities of amateur content)  to the disintegration of Western civilization by narcissistic neophytes who post amateur videos and pictures on Facebook, YouTube and MySpace whilst reducing their (and our?) collective IQs.  If you buy his arguments, there are some pretty serious problems that Web 2.0 and social media have to be held accountable for.

But the rise of the amateur isn’t one of them.  Amateurs have always been around.  They’re just more visible now.

There’s no doubt that modern Web technologies have made it monumentally easier to create content in a fraction of the time that it used to take to create audio programs, short movies, or magazine articles.  There’s definitely a plethora of user-generated content (the term often used to described all of the comments, articles, videos, posts, etc. made available on ostensibly free websites) on the Web and yes, some of it stinks.  Some of it is excellent and there’s probably a big pile of stuff in the middle that’s mediocre at best. 

A lot of crap was made prior to Web 2.0 as well.  Tons and tons of it.  There may have been less amateur content in years past than there is now because the enabling technologies that make it a snap to publish photos, videos, blogs, and podcasts didn’t exist or weren’t affordable a decade ago.  But it was certainly around.

Amateur video.  Homemade comedy cassettes.  Fanzines.  APAzines.  Community theatre.  Community-access TV.  College radio.  Open mike nights at comedy clubs.

There have always been places for the unpaid creator to practice their avocation.  There have always been people who slave over these hobbies because, well, they’re fun things to do.  Funny thing:  many of them went on to become bona fide professionals, earning a living using the skills that they developed during their hobbies.  The production of dreck is an accepted side-effect of practicing and honing your skills as you try to become better.

The only major change is that people can now practice in public on a much larger scale than the previous generation could ever have done.  They do stuff for free because they love to and because they see it as a means to an end, the next step on a long, daring journey to mastery.

Alternatives to mainstream media have always existed but social media, Web 2.0, and high speed Internet have made it easier than before to publish. 

I don’t deny that social media has allowed some content to come to light that might have been better buried in a locked drawer somewhere out of reach.  But I don’t think that giving the amateur a chance to air his or her work in public is, at heart, a bad thing.  I think it’s a great opportunity for people who have dreamed of a chance to reach a larger audience.  It may make for a noisier world and it may force professionals to turn things up a notch to compete, but the enabling technologies are here to stay.  The genie’s out of the bottle; might as well enjoy the ride.

Image by rhurtubia

While practicing in public, Mark Dykeman writes at Broadcasting Brain and other fine blogs.  You can find him on Twitter when he least expects it.

In the grand scheme of things I am but a babe when it comes to social media. A rookie. A noob, if you will, though to spare my fragile feelings I’d just as soon you didn’t, really. Nope, no expert opinions here folks, just me stumbling along, trying to learn what I can. Like some great person of yore once said, “I’m just a worm crawling through the dirt of life.”(Actually that was me, I used it as a tag line on one of the many social media outlets I’ve tried, and may perhaps still use, I’m not really sure, but feel free to use it for your own purposes if you like.)  But this is a good thing actually. In Zen Buddhism there is a concept known as beginner’s mind, and it means, basically, that the mind of someone who is new to something (a beginner), is free of the rigidity and ‘old-hat’ mentality of the expert who has seen and knows much. They are open to new things and new ways, and the ever-changing sea of social media is inherently new. Isn’t it?

The metaphor of the sea is particularly fitting because not only is social media, and with it the Internet, constantly changing and growing, it also implies a flow. A constant flow of information: emails, images, blurbs, and yes… tweets. We often find ourselves buried beneath a relentless tide of information. Will it ever stop, or do we even want it to really? More importantly, how do you handle it all?

If you’re anything like me, the Internet has reduced your attention span to that of a gnat; there’s just so much to look at. Sometimes I feel like a cat in a room full of laser pointers. No, really! Even when I sit down at the keyboard with a plan, fully intent of looking up one thing –  just one thing! — if I’m not careful, I end up clicking 57 links, only snapping out of the trance once done digesting  the Evolution of Toilets (via lovetoknow.com).

This isn’t a new idea though, is it? The Internet has been driving us mad with choice from day one. But now we have social media thrown into the mix; Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace just some of the names which come to mind. Naming all of them would be another post altogether (actually that would be another venture-funded web project and a lifetime of work—venture capitalists, feel free to email me, we’ll talk). It’s a wonder we get any work done today at all.

It can be done, and trust me, there are greater minds than this one working on it. David Allen, bestselling author of Getting Things Done, advises that one must be judicious in choosing who and what we interact with online, and even he acknowledges that it’s a slippery slope.

The most obvious issue about social media: Is this a useful way to spend your time, or is it a sinkhole of attractive distraction? It could very easily be one of those one minute, and the other the next! It all depends on why you’re doing it, and this must be evaluated moment to moment. It’s an important distinction to make for yourself, because focus is probably your greatest asset that you can control. You must be judicious about where you place it and what you let grab it, thus reducing your effectiveness.

credit: AFP

I’d like to thank you all for your patience through the times that this site has been quiet. Many of the original authors have gone on and are quite busy, but I didn’t see why that had to be the end of our community.

After about 2 years of reflection, we’ve seen where our strengths and weaknesses were, and wanted to give you a list of what the new Collective Thoughts will be about:

1 – Updates. Things slowed to the point where we were updating only monthly. Look for many more frequent posts in our new organization.

2 – Focus. While the post focus is still going to be revolving around social media, what’s meant by focus is the authors and their perspectives. I feel that we had the SEO / Social contingent, but this time around, we have a more rounded model across the realm of social – including more that are new to the game, PR types and the like.

3 – Bells and Whistles. We’ll be making some changes and tweaks to the overall UI as well as adding in some of the latest new fangled fun gadgets.

4 – Authors. In the past, we have not had guest posts. We’re changing things up a bit adding more regular and guest authors, though at this point it is by invite only. If you’re interested in contributing, contact us.

Looking forward to coming back into the fold with you!

What is a #blogchat?

The idea of group learning has fascinated me since high school when I realized how much faster and better I could prepare for a test if I studied with friends.

Maybe that’s why when I happened upon the first Plurkshop last spring, I was hooked. And then when I heard Mack Collier (of The Viral Garden and the new MackCollier.com) was leading a weekly workshop on blogging, I knew I had to check it out.

Perhaps, like me, you’ve been to workshops where someone “leads” (ie has complete control of the conversation) and the only real communication that happens is when the leader asks a question and allows the participants to answer it.

When you attend a blogchat, forget that idea. Instead, picture a giant round table discussion, limited only by the number of people who are interested in the subject.

To enter, all you have to have is twitter, although it’s handy to use a chat program such as Tweetchat to make the tweets easier to read. Tweetchat will also append #blogchat to the end of every comment you send from their page, so you won’t forget to add it.

I also recommend bookmarking What The Hashtag to easily be able to read the transcript from previous blogchats and even subscribe via RSS.

Categorizing and Tagging Blog Content

Sunday’s night’s blogchat was one of my favorites of the ones I’ve attended so far. Not just because the topic is one I’ve wondered about before, but also because it seemed to have a more relaxed feeling (or perhaps I’m starting to feel more comfortable and “among friends” at them so I’m relaxing).

Sunday night was also the first chat that I really noticed splitting in several directions at times. Last year when we were having Plurkshops, that would often happen, with one person wanting more info on a subject while someone else had an entirely new question.

As a result though, I’m only going to share some of the discussion on the original subject. If you’d like to read all of the chat, you can find the transcript here.

As usual, Mack started us out by announcing the topic and who suggested it. “Tonight’s #blogchat topic is from shannonrenee, we’ll be discussing categorizing and tagging your content. Strategies and tips.”

As a blog reader, how important are tags & categories to you?

Shanan_S: Pretty darn important. If I’m a new reader chances are I came to your blog for info about something specific.

ad_web: Sometimes a quick look at categories and tags on a blog tells me what the blog is about or what is normally posted there.

Eric_Urbane: I tend to follow bloggers, not tags or categories.

hacool: I find it easier to find older entries on blogs with categories for broad topics and tags for more detailed topics.

GrantGriffiths: Consumers don’t use RSS, bloggers do and that is why categories will continue to be important.

Mandy_Vavrinak: I start with categories to browse new blog, tags for finding specific content.

GrantGriffiths: Very important when you look at the big picture. Easier for reader to find content.

GrantGriffiths: Categories are and should be used as the index to your blog. Much more important than archives for that purpose.

markalves: When reading a blog for 1st time, you get a quick sense of scope (types of categories) and depth (# per category)

What’s the difference between categories and tags?

Teeg: I haven’t quite figured out the purpose of tags, it seems a repeat of categories often.

3keyscoach: What makes best presentation so tags are useful to people?

markalves: Categories are table of contents, tags are the index.

30lines: I tend to agree with that approach. Categories= more general, tags = more specific.

Teeg: Why not use nested categories for that? I guess that’s why I get confused by having both.

hacool: I’d think of categories as broad topics: produce, meat, canned goods and tags as detailed: lettuce, bacon, chicken soup

Teeg: So tags can be things I might only use once, while categories are topics I’ll cover again and again? Okay, I can see that.

hacool: I might have unique subcategories that could pull a unique menu, but use tags across multiple categories.

MackCollier: So then we should go for fewer categories, and be liberal on tagging?

AngEngland: If you cover several food categories but wanted $5 dinners in several “Chicken, Beef” categories, use tags.

hacool: The categories are like topic funnels and tags can connect across channels.

How important are categories and tags in terms of SEO?

FreshPeel: Categories and tags definitely add to SEO. Indirect benefit to readers?

AngEngland: If tags/keyword lists don’t match content Google can penalize u.

FreshPeel: In my blog, tags are only visible in the code and used for SEO and recommending similar posts to readers.

Eric_Urbane: Our blog, NOT related to our company and our tags have now brought us to page one, number one to three on Google search

MackCollier: Which has more SEO punch on a blog, tags or categories?

FreshPeel: I’d say Google gives more value to content, but as with all things SEO, it’s not an either or.

GrantGriffiths: Content written for the human reader and not the search engines is most important for the SEO. If human likes, Google likes.

hacool: I think it depends on how one codes the tags and categories. (IE semantic markup, H1, H2, H3, p, etc.)

Eric_Urbane: So should Blog Content have keywords and phrases laced within the body of the blog post?

MackCollier: Eric, my view is when you start trying to place keywords in a blog, you dilute the content’s impact. Not worth it, IMO.

Eric_Urbane: So should categories align with keywords?

hacool: If keywords and categories align naturally I think it makes sense, but I think we must write for humans 1st bots 2nd.

How many categories and tags?

Eric_Urbane: So how many categories should each blog post have for optimal SEO?

GrantGriffiths: Use 1 category and try to limit tags or keywords to around 5 for SEO.

FreshPeel: Too many categories can make it seem like your blog has no focus.

MackCollier: So each post should only have ONE category for maximum SEO benefit?

FreshPeel: I think 8 is a good number. AT 17 categories, I need to slim mine down.

markalves: Make blog categories list fit on 1 screen

Resources

I always come away from blogchats with a new list of links to check out. Here are some that were mentioned Sunday:

Organize your categories: 5 practical tips

Tags and Categories – SEO and Usability

Five Essential Elements of Good SEO

Are Your Stumbled Pages Sticky?

Everything I Need to Know About Twitter I Learned in J School

List of Twitter Chats

In closing, let me apologize for anyone who was at Sunday’s chat that I left out. Even after all the times I’ve reread the transcript, I’m still noticing new items.

By the way, if you’re free Sunday evening, we’d love to see you there.

Teeg is a Social Media Explorer who has been exploring the social part of the web since 1996, when she first discovered chat rooms. She details her exploration of various social media sites on SU Comments and Social Media Mom.

“I think women put more emphasis, focus and time into their social media browsing than men. Men seem to be very ADHD with social media, jumping from news story to story, whereas I’ve noticed women take slow time and incorporate what they read more into their daily life and lifestyle planning.”

Loren Baker, Search Engine Journal

A great thing about social media marketing is that you literally get a first-rate, hands-on education in human anthropology. You learn what moves people. You learn what people want. You learn how to tug at heartstrings and drive emotions to their limit. You learn how different groups of people respond to different types of content. It’s simultaneously liberating and disillusioning to discover how predictable groups of people behave.

[Note: for the rest of this article, I err on the side of gross generalization. This is necessary to make a general point. There are definitely exceptions to the rules and it's your duty to identify them;-)]

One of the more interesting observations I’ve made over the years as a participant in social media is how differently males and females participate. It is easy to see a strong analogy between the playing field of social media and the playground from elementary school. On the one hand, you have the males who are driven by aggressive competition, accomplishment and the highs of “victory” (football at recess/24 hour digg voting marathon). Sure, there are some females who join in, but for the most part, the aggressive side of social media is dominated by men. Just like how dodgeball games during gym class were usually dominated by the boys. Females, on the other hand, tend towards activities that are cooperative, non-aggressive and friendship building. As I recall, during recess in elementary school, the girls would teach other things like hand-clapping rhymes or sit around in a circle making bracelets (or each others hair). Not all the girls, but most of them. I think the same holds true in social media. Women are looking for like minded people to learn from, to share with, and to build lasting friendships.

Men use social media as a means to some other end. Men want success. Men want traffic. Men want money. Men want to be the best. Men compete to be the best at social media like athletes compete to be the best at their sport. Just like there are superstars in sports, social media sites like Digg and Reddit also have clearly identifiable superstars (and their fanboys).

Now, it would be silly to say that women don’t want things like traffic, money, success, etc. But the point is just that most men are using social media for something other than the social interaction. Women seem to actually use social media as an end in itself: they use it for socializing.

So whereas men use social media to accomplish things and gain status, women seem to use it for “deeper” stuff like building genuine relationships, solidarity and discussions about life (which men might call gossip;-) In my experience, women are much less likely to hit you with a dozen social media vote requests in a single day. I have half a dozen guys bombard me everyday via AIM with non-stop vote requests without even stopping to say hi. Women, in my experience, like to drive real conversation. They actually take the time to read stories and then tell me what they thought rather than just skimming headlines and voting blindly. Women are energized by compliments and pats on the back and affirmation. In other words, women are more social with their social media because in reality, women are more fundamentally social beings.

Women also tend to be more principled in their social media voting. This can be good and bad. The good is that if I send a story to a woman and ask for a thumbs up on StumbleUpon, if she actually likes the story she is more inclined to take the initiative and submit it to other social media sites she is active on (Twitter, Kirsty, etc.) The bad is that women are much, much, much more likely to secretly downvote a request if they don’t like the story (or the person who wrote it). As an example, I’ve stopped sending any “Hot Women” articles to my female social media friends because I have strong empirical evidence that the majority of them end up downvoting. This is not surprising at all and I should have figured it out much earlier given what I know about my wife;-)

Observations

So before getting to a list of some observations and a handful of insightful quotes from my social media friends, let’s draw a conclusion. I believe that the social media professional will be much more successful at his or her craft when taking gender differences seriously. The key, really, is to understand the needs of each person you interact with. Offer them something in return. But don’t assume that everyone wants the same thing. Take the time to understand what motivates each of your social media friends and go above and beyond the call of duty to interact with them so that when it comes time that you need something, they are eager to help. And remember that it’s very easy to wear out a social relationship of any kind (marriage, friendship, business) if one party is not having his or her needs met or if one person is carrying too much of the burden.

Before ending this article I’ve included a few more general observations that come from various social media friends who chose to be anonymous. We’d love for you to add your thoughts in the comments.

• Men often make accounts that look like attractive females for pragmatic purposes (to motivate more action by other social media participants)
• Women tend to use Twitter more for chatting and real conversations
• Men tend to use Twitter more for marketing
• Women are more likely to forward chain emails
• Men are more comfortable with manipulative behavior so long as it helps them acheive their goals
• Women like sites that facilitate discussions about life and offer a peek into others’ lives
• With men, social cooperation comes down to swapping favors
• With women, you have to earn social cooperation through relationship

Quotes from Social Media Users

More men are using it for networking and establishing authority/credibility. More women are using it to share their lives and to connect with other women who share the same values or similar experiences. Women are using it more for solidarity. They’re social beings, and social media has given them the amazing capability to find like-minded women instead of feeling judged and misunderstood by the women in their immediate families/geographic regions.

- Daniel Dessinger

Social media is a lot like relationships in real life – men tend to want information and to give out info if it will help them get ahead or achieve a goal. Women tend to take it a step further and are more willing to connect on a deeper level.

- Charlene Polanosky, Essential Keystrokes

Men seem to promote more, it’s more “about me,” whereas women are natural networkers and seek cooperation and participation. Don’t throw tomatoes at me, I’m just making a generalization in what I’ve obserrved.

- Brian Wallace, NowSourcing

I think women socialize more, but they both use it too boost careers and brands.

- Deb Ng, Freelance Writing Jobs

Women want to be popular or communicate, men want to make money or be considered cool.

- David Peralty, BrandingDavid.com

The biggest difference is that women are actually more naturally atuned to the whole social aspect, and tend to spend more time interacting and consuming the content, whereas men tend to be more fly by visitors and less interactive.

- Elise from Cell Phones .org

I’d say women are more drawn to social services like facebook and twitter, where communication is the feature as opposed to something like digg where there’s a competition like atmosphere.

- JD Arney

I think men want success from their participation on the social media. I think women mostly want to be social and have fun.

- HART, http://twitter.com/PetLvr

We are all used to “Sound Bites” – a short few seconds of words which are normally taken out of context to create sensational headlines. Few people realise that speech writers have for years worked on developing speeches to include a couple perfect “sound bites” for use by others.

Of course while some social media is audio based we are much more likely to rely on humble text to create a “social bite”.

What Is A Social Bite?

A social bite is a short piece of text to describe an article, post or idea which is easy to understand and easy to distribute through viral networks. A social bite must still carry the post’s message and goal but in a way that quickly impacts with users in essence:

A “social bite” is a short, concise and engaging message to gain traffic on social networks

The Perfect Social Bite

So what makes the perfect social bite, well it has two parts the hook and the line.

The hook are the words within the message – the thing to grab attention. This is doubly important as the hook will have no context once it has left the site. For example a hook is unlikely to reference the site so must be compelling, so that someone would visit the page without knowing where they were going.
The line is simply the url, sometimes this will be the page url but more likely to conserve space a url shortening service would be used. This compounds the need for a good hook as the only other potential reference to the site will be hidden.

The Twit Effect

Most social bites these days will have to pass through twitter at some point therefore a bite needs to be suitable otherwise people might change it. A normal tweet has a limited number of characters but while it may be tempting to use all 140 possible chars, this would severely limit the maximum potential of the social bite as it fails to take in retweets therefore the maximum number of characters is much more limited.

Twitter does not allow usernames longer then 20 characters and only shows usernames of 15 characters this means in practice to cope with every possible twitter name we would need to save at least 25 characters for retweets (20 for the name plus RT and two spaces one between rt and one after name and an ampersand before the name) even assuming 15 character names thats still 20 characters out of our 140.
With characters at a premium is it reasonable to expect usernames of 15 characters?

Taking a list of 1000 twitter usernames revealed the mean average length is 9 characters:

• 0-6 – 13%
• 6-9 – 58%
• 9-12 – 27%
• 12+ – 2%

taking these results its possible to assume the space needed for a retweet is 17 characters

Line Length

Assuming use of shortening service allows us to roughly determine how much room the line is going to take up. Its worth remembering users often swap out the url in favour of their own shortening service so as to gather statisitcs for themselves therefore even if your URL is shorter then the average it could be worth including a buffer.
Looking at various shortening services the average length is 18 characters including the http:// therefore the line length should be at least 18 characters plus a space making a line length total reserve of 19 characters.

Final Social Bite Anatomy

A hook within a social bite can potentially be longer than a page title, which in turn is not necessarily the same as a page headline.
It may also be important to allow for additional commentary to support the predetermined social bite, or to allow for SEO friendly URL shortening which can also boost response.
A single article can have multiple social bites that will attract different audiences.

Propagating a social bite

There are three routes to start a social bite on its move

1. Inject the hook without the line into your post article in much the same way as a sound bite works
2. Add the sound bite into the social networks yourself
3. Get someone else to do it for you

Of course you can always do all 3.

Many people reading this article may be thinking its very much twitter based but social bites have a tendency to cross social networks indeed that is the very point, and with social aggregators like Friendfeed and to a less extent Facebook something which starts on Twitter could well end up anywhere even getting to the ears of non twitter users such as myself

Do you use social bites? What other things should people think about?

Editor’s Notes (Andy)

Tim popped out to a bloggers meetup of Northern Gits Geeks, thus just adding a few additional references.

Dan Zarella recently took a scientific look at reteets over on Mashable
Louise wrote a similar article over on Twitip, but that was mainly aimed at retweeting tweets that originate on Twitter, where you know the length of your own Twitter usename.
Guy Kawasaki went into the psychological side of retweeting over on the open forum.

Many of you have heard of the 3 P’s of marketing: pills, porn, and poker.  They are the bane of most people’s online existence, as we are constantly bombarded with seeing these kinds of “offers” being sent to our spam filter.

Enter Twitter.

As you know me by now, I like to look at the positive things in life.  And after navigating through Twitter for some time, I’ve found that Twitter has the 3 C’s:

1 – Cats:

Sometimes a good lolcat can put you in the right mood. We can work endlessly on a killer blog post and a funny cat pic and caption will beat the post 9 times out of 10, though though Mr. Nielsen may disagree.

2 – Coffee:

I’ve put out breaking news and useful links, but tend to have more conversation when it’s around coffee time talk.  @DunkinDonuts has achieved its twitter fame.  Coffee Groundz, a local Houston, TX coffee shop, literally doubled their clientele through twitter by being the first company on record to accept orders through Twitter.

3 – Comedy:

Everyone needs a good laugh once in a while.  Sometimes particular accounts aren’t what is funny, but rather what you find via Twitter.  @Octane pointed out that he found this great piece from the Onion.  The Twitter song is rather amusing as well:

Let’s add in a 4th C, just for fun!

4 – Common Sense.

As always, common sense still applies to the Twitterverse as well.  Don’t have a public meltdown, feel free to post news on latest and greatest apps, and by all means, be careful what you say.

You may have noticed a few small social changes that we’ve instituted for 2009:

Twitter.  We’ve been quiet on this front for far too long.

While it won’t be all of us running the account, expect some solid updates from @nowsourcing and @thegypsy.  Why follow? Well, we have some interesting things to say and will also be sharing great links collectively.

Google Friend Connect. You might call us Collective Forgetfulness if we didn’t have the latest and greatest blog widget from our friends at Google.  So we’ve added Google Friend Connect.  It’s an interesting concept, and will be fun to see what people make of it beyond the simple “here are the friends that like my site.”

MyBlogLog.  You might say that this is old news, but we updated the MBL widget to the more sleek, iPhone looking UI.  What’s really interesting about MBL is the community/site itself beyond the widget.  Personally, I’ve liked the service for a long time because it allows you to visually see who your recent visitors are – a different crack at the data vs. a more 1’s and 0’s Google Analytics approach.

What about you – what have you done to make your blog more social for 2009?

Image by gem fountain

It seems that now-a-days we can do most things online… clothes shopping, looking for Colleges, buying Holiday gifts, doing our banking… pretty much anything.

But there is something else we can do online….. something much more personal and sacred. We can even work on mending our inside pain and turmoil.

Before I get deeper into this topic I want to show why finding support groups online can make a lot of sense.

The Definition of a Support Group

Support Group – A support Group is a group of people who support each other over a problem they all share.

The Definition of an Online Community

Online Community – A group of people online who share a common interest.

Wow, both of those definitions sound very similar, don’t they?

An online community and support group are on the same type of idea. They have a common ground…. a common interest. And, the group builds from there. Because of this it makes sense that support groups would work online…. that they not only work, but they thrive.

A support group is usually a group centered around a very specific issue. This group of people usually come together to give and receive both emotional and practical support. When people come to a support group it is because they need to be with people…. to surround themselves with people that understand, have been through or are going through the same thing and can offer help, suggestions or just a shoulder to cry on. Most people aren’t looking for anything to be solved, but just to be with others in a similar situation can offer a sense of belonging and get them through the difficult time they are going through. Knowing that everyone who is part of this support group share the same problem and that they are not alone can be extremely helpful.

Social Media and online communities can be so helpful when it comes to support. I have shared issues of mine on my blog and the community has lent their support. I have on many occasions mentioned an issue I was having while communicating on Twitter and my friends their didn’t let me down.

But, what if you needed more? What if you need more specific help?

I love that my friends and colleagues want to lend their support. They want me to know that they care. But, what if i wanted to communicate with someone with my same problem…. a non-judgmental person that I can freely say what’s on my mind about our shared problem? Could that happen?

Sure, that’s where online support groups come in. Your friends and family are wonderful support, but when you need more specific help such as support on a specific topic…. support groups offer a safe environment for mutual support and encouragement. In order for a support group to work, online or in reality, you must feel safe.

What to look for in an Online Support Group / Community

• Needs to be User Friendly
• Easy Navigation – No confusion
• Clean and bright

  This Online Support Group / Community is The Virtual Wellness Community. It is a great website that provides free support,
  education and hope to people with cancer and their loved ones. It is beautiful, easy to navigate, completely user-friendly even for the casual computer users. Their Online Community has plenty of articles to educate yourself on Cancer as well as inspiration and hope. It is a great place to meet other people with Cancer as well as loved ones who are dealing with the pain of someone they love having Cancer. People coming to this community are looking for support, friendship and strength. It truly looks like a safe place to be….. exactly how a support group / community should.
  
  
  

• Clear Guidelines on how to use the support group.
• Easy to follow as well as easy to find online support group rules.

  This Online Lupus Support Group is a perfect example of how to make sure make sure the online support group guidelines are right out in the open so that there is no question as to what the rules are. This way all support group community members are following the rules and not making any members feel unwelcome or unsafe.
  
  

• Message Boards / Forums and Chats – This is a very important part of support groups. Forums and message boards are where community members can ask questions, get advice and others can offer suggestions and help. Even though the conversation is not real time, forums and message boards can be extremely beneficial. And, for many Online Communities the only conversation that can happen on the website are via message boards and forums. Chats are real time and also a great benefit. Make sure there is some kind of moderator in the chat…. sometimes sensitive and difficult conversations can get out of hand. It is helpful (and safer) to have a non-judgmental third-party moderator on hand.

  
  
  Look for a message board that have plenty of activity….. like this Eating Disorder Forum above. The more activity there is then you know it is an established forum and that the community enjoys it.

• Links to important information and Websites. Forums and discussions are wonderful. But, you also need to understand the issues you are having…. why you are having them, what are the symptoms, when will they go away, etc. Good Support Groups and Communities should have plenty of information for you at your fingertips. Or, at least point you in the right direction.
• Find a Doctor - These online support groups should also offer you the resources you need to help you find a Support Group in your area and a Doctor if need be. Online Support Groups are great, but sometimes you need a real person, real hug, real conversation…. reality.

  

These are just three examples of great Online Support Groups. But, there are so many more. And, most that I have found are doing an awesome job at combining Social Media and Community Support.

Twitter as a Support Group

Twitter has yet to add a group function to their Microblogging site. It’s coming…. at least that is what we are promised. But, as of yet…. nothing. There are an amazing amount of people on Twitter….. many with issues. This would be a great place to have groups. And, with Twitter the groups can have conversations real-time. As close to reality conversation with many people as it gets.

People use 3rd-party Twitter tools to create groups…. such as TwittGroups, GroupTweet, Hashtags (Hashtags website wasn’t working during the time of this post), TweetParty, Twitter Groups, TwittBot . Nothing that looked like it would be worthy of a support group….. except TwittGroups. Not spectacular, but it is as close as it gets as far as Support Group worthy on Twitter.

Searching for support groups on Twitter was not easy. I assume it will get much easier once Twitter finally adds group capability to the Twitter website. But, until then it is going to continue to be a struggle. I understand that these 3rd party Twitter Groups that I mentioned above have the ability to create Twitter groups, but why can’t I search the groups to find one that will match with my needs? Maybe I was doing something wrong or it wasn’t clearly visible on their sites, but I couldn’t find it. However, TwittGroups was the only place I could search the Twitter Groups easily. You can choose to either look through all their Twitter Groups , look through all the popular Twitter Groups, or do a search of Twitter Groups to see what is a good fit.

Once you find a group that you find interesting…. click on the link. You will find something that looks like this:

This is the Homeschool Twitter Group. They have a nice group going on, I must say. If you scroll down on this page you will see all the members. I’m not going to put an image of that here….. they have a lot of members. But, if you click on the link that says, "Show Members" it shows you all the members of this Homeschool Twitter Group.

Now go back to the main page again that looks like the above screen…. the main page of the Twitter Group you picked. Click on "TweetGrid"
and you will get the tweets having to do with your support group. Here is what the TweetGrid of what the homeschool support group looks like….

This is where you can see all the conversations having to do with your support group and the tweets done by the members of the support group.

Now, go back to the home Support Group page again and click on "Post Tweet" This is where you will post a tweet to the group. Doing it this way will label your tweet perfectly so that it appears in the TweetGrid.

Well, there ya go. Support groups can be a wonderful and helpful thing. I’ve used them several times to help with issues…. I totally agree with support groups. With Social Media it opens up the mediums that you can get support from… take advantage of that. It can be a wonderful thing.

Note: Please keep in mind that online support should not take the place of medical attention that you should receive from a doctor or professional.

Hey hey and a ho ho ho to all (or any other festive feeling that may apply:0)… just a quick post to highlight the winners of the Mashable Web Awards from today. There are likely a few new sites for you to check out as I’ve found a few nuggets already. Of interest YouTube came second for video, how wierd is that? My personal fav, iGoogle, did a respectable second in the best start page category (behind parent papa Google). From dating and gossip to politics, there is plenty to keep you busy.

Congrats to all the winners from the gang here at Collective Thoughts and to you my fine reader, get festive and surf some new finds. And now the final winners (and runners up) for the Mashable Web Awards for 2008;

Mainstream & Large Scale Social Networks

Embeddable Widgets

Blog Plugins

Social News

Social Networking Applications

Social Bookmarking

Search & Social Search

Sports & Fitness

Photo Sharing

Video Sharing

Start Pages

Places & Events

Travel

Music

Social Shopping

Fashion

Celebrity & Gossip

Mobile Applications

Dating & Romance

Wiki

Politics

How-to

Environmental

Non-Profit Causes

Online Games

Niche Social Networks

And there’s the list for this year… for more see the Mashable Web Awards for 2008

We decided to skip the perfunctory  “Happy 1st Birthday, Collective Thoughts” year in review and turn it on its edge.  We were all talking and wondered the last time you saw a birthday post that you’d refer to later on.

Birthday post are formulaic and predictable.  You can usually expect:

• contests and giveaways
• highlights of best posts
• goals for the future

With aggregation and bookmarking tools, it’s pretty easy to find out the best posts on your own.  This is web 2.0, so we need to give you more.  Let’s delve further into the social experiment.  What’s a birthday for? Aside from celebrating your first day out in the world in your birthday suit, it’s a day for people to focus on you.

We are nothing without you, our community.  You help make us great, spreading the word, retweeting, and the like.  We’re also aware of the uncertainty of the financial markets these days.  We’d like to use our birthday to cast some light on you, and develop community here.

We want our readers to “give” us their best posts of the last year, so we can publish them in the next post.

Readers should aim for the post they most want highlighted, the one that is aimed to show their expertise in the best possible light, possibly the one they wished had got more attention.