I am the co-host of a weekly podcast called The Bella Buzz with the CEO of Bella Web Design, Desiree Scales.  We have good conversations about topics related to online marketing.  Thought I would also post the programs here for the Overflow audience.  This is episode 55.

There are a few services that have withstood the changes taking place on the web that deserve a little scrutiny on The Bella Buzz podcast.  These services can almost be identified as early players in the Social Media space as they attempt to connect people with common interests and invite them to share interesting articles and web sites.  As the newer, more noteworthy, services have evolved such as Twitter and Facebook, the question has to be asked whether or not there is value in spending the time and resources necessary to cultivate these aggregator sites.

During the course of our hiatus from the podcast there were two events that put this on the radar as something to discuss.  The first was a post that was Stumbled by some users at StumbleUpon, that generated a welcome spike in traffic to one of our web sites. StumbleUpon lets content creators submit links to the site so that others who are interested in that category, or are following the links from a particular submitter, can see the content and pass it along to others.

The second event was the release of the new Digg version 4.  Digg is the brainchild of founder Kevin Rose, who was looking for a site that would help uncover the most relevant blog posts that were being written on the web.  Before the advent of social sharing, sites like Technorati and TechMeme were curated sites, leaving the decision about what was good in the hands of editors. Rose wanted to let the mass audience make that decision themselves.

What was good about Digg was also its downfall.  More and more the site was controlled by a band of “power users” who were able to influence the appearance of blog posts on the home page of Digg by voting up some articles and burying others.  Articles that were voted to the home page of Digg could expect such an influx of traffic that servers could get overloaded and crash.  Unfortunately, many started to find that the volume of traffic was not necessarily converting traffic in regards to overall business objectives.

In time many users felt that the articles that they were being exposed to were not relevant.  This fact, combined with the increased adoption of social networks like Twitter, which made it much easier to find good content as recommended by someone you have developed a trust relationship with made the situation for Digg’s long term potential tenuous.

Digg’s hierarchy decided it was time to take a chance on upsetting the powerful user base and completely re-vamped the format of how the service worked.  The most important feature in the new version of Digg is the ability to follow someone, in fact it is very easy to transfer the social graph from one platform to another, making the Digg experience more relevant for each user.  The other new functionality that is great from a marketers perspective, is that the system accepts RSS feeds from blogs. This eliminates the need for manual submissions from a content creator.

Are these sites important for a small business? Do marketers need to pay attention to them as part of their service responsibilities?  Driving links and traffic, and generating buzz from any possible platform is important to growing a successful web site and cultivating a social network is the job of a good web marketer.

Do you use these sites?  If you are on Digg or StumbleUpon let’s connect!

On a final note, the founders of Typepad announced that they are forming a new company called Say Media in conjunction with VideoEgg.

Theme music for The Bella Buzz is Fallen by Digital Chemistry, available for download at the Podsafe Music Network.

You can subscribe to The Bella Buzz directly from ITunes by following this link, and we would be happy to receive listener feedback and ratings at The ITunes Store.

It gets a little deep during this week’s Overflow podcast.  We end up touching upon the metaphysical aspects of putting our lives out there on social networks, and whether or not that is a “good thing”.

The impetus for this discussion was the funeral this week of my younger cousin Elizabeth, after we lost her to breast cancer. The funeral brought my family together from around the country with the shocking revelation that life has gone on and we have not done a very good job of keeping in touch.  Children have been born and aged without all of us having a sense of what is happening in the family on a consistent basis.

I shared my belief that had everyone participated in social networks to a greater degree, we could have had a more connected life experience.  More importantly, I felt guilt and remorse upon finding out that Elizabeth had attempted to write a blog and I had not been aware nor shared in her experiences through reading and commenting.

Taking this thought to another level, I am starting to envision the “science fiction” concept of a mind meld between the brain and the network happening. Here is our life on these networks in a chronological order, with all of the various interconnected mediums carrying our personal histories.

Although you may not be touching the true essence of the person, these social platforms may be the closest we have to living forever.

To attempt a bit of a connection to business in this heady discussion, it must be considered that as we all start to live our lives constantly connected, there will be times where an uneven balance may occur regarding how much information is known.  It may be a disadvantage from a negotiation perspective if this imbalance occurs.  Ethically there will be challenges in terms of right and wrong uses of this personal information.

Businesses will have to understand that their employees will be sharing the good and the bad of everyday life within the walls of the organization, so they better be buttoned up and provide a quality work environment or they will find more difficulties with customers as well as recruits.

Is this all a good thing?

From a personal privacy perspective, living with a totally connected stream available, searchable and viewable forever will have ramifications that generations will have to adopt and live with.

The benefits however outweigh this privacy issue as we are able to maintain more information about ancestry, heritage and personal relationships that are currently hindered by distance.

Relationships will no longer be masked and guarded as everyone’s life trajectory will be accessible, so those skeletons will no longer have much weight and we can get right down to connectedness based upon the true nature of the individual.

The opening and closing theme for the Overflow Podcast is called The Information Age, by Anthony Fiumano and you can find it at the Podsafe Music Network.

You can subscribe to The Overflow Podcast directly from ITunes by following this link, and we would be happy to receive listener feedback and ratings at The ITunes Store.

Our Overflow podcast for the week is a reminder to make the Offline Ask a key element of your marketing strategy, even in a growing online world.  Cameron returns from his vacation with key insights from professionals in the tourism community who made it a point to remind guests to frequent the social networking sites like Facebook and Trip Advisor to leave comments and ratings about their services.

At times we focus so hard to driving traffic to the social networks trying to form users into a community, that we forget to encourage that behavior when having face to face interactions with our audience.  Using the social media tools at our disposal we build out these vibrant blogs and Facebook Fan pages,  we try out new locations like Ning and encourage clients to leave reviews at Kudzu, Trip Advisor, Yelp, Angie’s List or the myriad of other review sites out there growing feedback. However, as Cameron observed first hand, having a strategy in place for driving your customers to those sites must include the “Offline Ask”.

A bed and breakfast where Cameron and Leigh stayed on Key West was called The Grand GuestHouse. The Ask strategy that they use is to stamp the back of a business card handed to the guest with a request to go to Trip Advisor, and in a personal way asking for “5 stars”.

On Danger Charters the ship’s crew made the Offline Ask as the ship was pulling into port at the end of the night. They used humor in their personal request “speech” to visit Facebook and Trip Advisor to review the experience.  This is most likely a training element that is instilled into the staff by management as part of the marketing strategy that they are using to marry the social networks with the offline activities.

This is indicative of the new form of marketing, that it’s no longer just a push or a broadcast of a message, rather it is a two way communication in which the audience or customer participates in a significant way.

Using social networks to maintain a strong relationship may replace B2C email campaigns simply because the overwhelming amount of spam has limited the effectiveness of email.

The Offline Ask has changed from “sign up for our email newsletter” to “become a fan of our Facebook Page & leave us a rating on Trip Advisor”.

Another point to consider is whether or not there should be some type of incentive or deeper instructions from the property to the guests regarding how to actually execute the placement of feedback.  How do you feel about giving exact directions or should you just gently nudge and let the customer figure out what to do?

Finally, encouraging photography and suggesting uploads to Flickr, SmugMug or Facebook with proper tagging is an excellent way for a destination to grow a community and gain some brand exposure. Having a Flickr Group set up would be a great way to encourage the posting process plus gathering assets that help promote the property.

Are you closing the loop performing an Offline Ask to encourage online feedback?

You can subscribe to The Overflow Podcast directly from ITunes by following this link, and we would be happy to receive listener feedback and ratings at The ITunes Store.

We start out today’s podcast with a shout out and sincere thank you from Cameron and I for the encouragement and input that we received as a result of our previous episode entitled Listener Feedback Welcome. Keep those cards and letters coming!

That lead us into the first half of our conversation about the fact that mainstream media outlets including CNN, Fox, PBS, ABC, NBC, CBS .. and MSNBC have all recently run stories about Twitter.

This topic came about after Cameron noticed a couple of my tweets while I was watching the Morning Joe host Willie Geist interview a reporter from CNBC named Dennis Kneale, who said things like “Twitter is the next Facebook” and “Twitter was invented to make me feel unhip and old” and “it’s like a new restaurant, everyone goes there because everyone goes there”.

Clearly there is a problem when CNBC’s Media and Technology Editor is oblivious to the power that the Twitter platform provides to the user base. My tweets were to show disgust that he said “it’s to make fun of people” and a reply to @hardaway that mainstream media is showing their ignorance and eventual obsolescence when they do segments showing a complete lack of understanding of the service.  Then to top it all off, Dennis Kneale admits that he doesn’t even have a twitter account himself! He is certainly a big fan boy of Facebook though as he keeps trying to compare the two.

Watch the segment for yourself here.

Comedy Central and Jon Stewart have taken on the platform for a skit which is a bit more tongue in cheek so we’ll give him credit. We also discuss an interesting interview on The Charlie Rose Show, which put Evan Williams, Co-Founder of Twitter at the table to discuss the business.

An enlightening moment arrives near the end when Williams says to Charlie Rose discussing his joining Twitter, and he says “we’ll point you out and you’ll get hundreds of thousands of followers” … which is certainly a strategy that Twitter has started to initiate where they are trying to drive up follower numbers for high profile users in a less than organic way via the suggested user list.

How do you feel about this? Is this a service that undermines the organic discovery process at the heart of what the platform does, or is it simply a good way to get new users kickstarted on their way to using it?

We next turn our attention to the social networking platform called Flickr, that has been built to compete against the photo sharing sites such as Snapfish, Smug Mug, Photobucket, etc.

I have a photostream and here is  Cameron’s photostream.

As with all social networking, there are ways to subscribe to other users photos, make comments on the photos, and even purchase the photos through Flickr.

An example of a brand strategy can be seen by what the podcasters at CoffeeCast.fm are doing with Flickr, trying to develop a social network of coffee drinkers who post photos of their experiences, and tagging them with the term CoffeeCast. Each tagged photo will appear in the Group and on the Coffeecast.fm site via a Flickr widget.  This is a great way to encourage user generated content and brand loyalty from the audience.

Cameron loves to check out the inspiration from the “interesting today” category on FlickRiver.  Other apps that we use include Flickup for the IPhone and My Flickr as a Facebook app.

(Update: I mentioned in the podcast that Flickup is a free app, but I just happened to check the App Store and it is listed as $2.99.  Not sure if I got an early free version or not, but I don’t recall paying for it. JM)

There are some great terms regarding the protections that contributors are provided when uploading to Flickr.  As you load photos you are able to decide what type of copyright protection you wish to assign to the image including the multiple variations of the widely used Creative Commons licensing. CC attributions could be a topic of multiple episodes, but we suggest looking at the development of the project and the extraordinary impact it has had on the burgeoning creative community online.

Also, keep us in mind as you post photos to Flickr. We’d love to get a link from you with your photostream .. we’ll post them here on Overflow.

Fluid Media had the privilege last Thursday of participating in a class at the Art Institute of Atlanta.  We were invited by Dr. Larry Stultz to speak to his students about social media marketing and how the tools are changing the way that brands are able to interact with their target audience.

We applaud Dr Larry for reaching out to many different professionals to speak to his class, since things are changing so rapidly in online marketing. We are sure that the class will gain significant insights into marketing tactics by hearing directly from the source.  For reference materials, the class also uses  Life After the 30 Second Spot by Joseph Jaffe as well as listening to the JaffeJuice podcast.

Facebook was a major segment of the conversation particularly as the students discussed the migration away from My Space for various reasons, most notably the intrusive nature of the advertising on My Space.

The main point that we tried to make during the conversation is that there are different types of influencers who have impact on consumers, depending upon the social network being discussed .. from anonymous influencers on Amazon to friendly influencers on Facebook, with follower/following influencers in between.  Marketers need to understand how all types of influencers can have an impact on consumers and the most successful will initiate brand conversations on every social network, according to the type of relationships that are established there.

We should also point out that the class had a definite understanding of online privacy concerns and in particular how it could impact their job search should inappropriate things end up where they can be found.

A suggestion for Dr. Larry’s class is to invite a legal expert in to discuss privacy in the digital age. The class could be geared towards the responsibilities of a marketer who might be developing apps or Facebook games to promote a brand, that simultaneously gathers market research and personal information. How is a marketer obligated to handle this information without causing harm to the user?

Meanwhile, Facebook announced and then retracted their changes to the Terms of Service. The flap seems to be a big stink about something that was percieved as reality in the general public anyway .. anything that is put online is generally no longer in your control.  It does however, point out a general mistrust of Facebook’s overall intentions, particularly among power users who have seen services like Beacon get launched and then withdrawn due to privacy concerns.

Facebook has to consider how their reputation is percieved, most notably among influential bloggers who criticize the company.  From the initial complaints recently settled by the founders of ConnectU who claim the concept was stolen from them .. all the way through to Beacon and now TOS fiascoes, Facebook has been battered many times over. While another behemoth online, Google continues to advance apps that could directly impact a person’s privacy while setting up a major marketing windfall without too much complaint.

What do you think, should privacy become a central part of the curriculum for a marketing class?

In the second, first edition of the Overflow Podcast for 2009 we have to cop to a “do over” for the first edition of Overflow recorded last week.

In an attempt to demonstrate our thinking regarding the use of social media tools, we thought that it would be clever to take a look at a specific organization and bring to light our recommendations. The idea seemed to fall into the category of killing two birds with one stone … record a weekly podcast for our listeners and then re-purposing that podcast as a new business pitch. We would send a link for Overflow to that potential client that we targeted, outlining our rationale.

Upon second thought, we decided that it wasn’t fair to the subscribers and listeners of Overflow to subject you to that type of blatant pitch. Your time is too valuable and we are humbled that you choose to spend some time each week with us, and we would have felt extremely guilty if we had proceeded with our idea.

So here is our first Overflow of 2009:

We have come to appreciate Facebook as a potential network for brands to gain exposure to a potential of 150 million users and counting. Facebook seemed to be a hangout for college socialites planning the next keg party in the early days so we were not heavy supporters, however we have come around to believe that it can be a destination to build a secondary brand community complimenting the original web site/ blog.

There are still elements in Facebook that aren’t all to clear from a real business standpoint – throwing sheep, sending flair, sending drinks .. although Cameron postulates that the branding of such “features” could help promote a product.

The older demographic is starting to adopt Facebook as a great way to regain contact with long lost high school and college friends, while the growth of the younger adopters has flattened out, simply because they have saturated the space. It really is starting to hit the mainstream.

Our experience with clients advertising on Facebook has not yielded any results in terms of click throughs or conversions on the banner ads throughout the site, so there is still an entire business model to be executed for the company. However, brands who are able to interject their message directly into the news feed of users we believe will witness significant results.

That’s why Facebook Connect as an application should be immediately deployed by brands. Having consumer interactions with a brand’s blog appear directly in the news feed of Facebook users is a sure fire way to expose a message (important!!) in an actual consumer’s voice to their social group. From there it becomes exponential message reinforcement and growth as others within that friends list interact with the brand.

Also keep in mind the opportunity to post video and photography as a way to create brand awareness.

A secondary conversation to the Facebook social network is the use of LinkedIn as a complimentary way to expand your social graph. A great feature to use if you are looking to demonstrate knowledge or expertise in a category is to participate in LinkedIn Answer to gain credibility.

Have you found Facebook to be beneficial for your brand marketing efforts? Let us know in the comments.

To friend us on Facebook you can connect with Joe and Cameron

To connect on LinkedIn you can find Joe’s profile or Cameron’s profile.

It is about time that we write a quick post just to say Thank You.

As the saying goes, any long journey starts with a few small steps .. and we really are humbled that you have chosen to come along while we embark on this adventure.

Cameron and I would just like to say that we appreciate all of you early adopters of the Overflow podcast and the Fluid Media Group members. Your visible endorsement feeds our enthusiasm for producing better and better content, and we hope that we can make a contribution in some meaningful way.

So here’s to Sam Harrelson, Vlad Zablotskyy, Lord Matt B, Frank, and all of the subscribers to the Overflow Podcast. We won’t let you down.

We have a special guest on the Overflow podcast during the holiday break.  Randi Shapiro is the Founder and President of Recruiting Specialists, located in Atlanta, Georgia. Randi specializes in advertising, marketing and public relations placements for client companies ranging from creative shops to Fortune 500 companies.

Randi has been actively involved in the direct hire staffing business for many years, as a second generation recruiter.

The online world has allowed Randi to mine sites such as LinkedIn and Monster.com to get introduced to people who she might not have previously encountered, while simultaneously gaining insights into companies who she can help find candidates. As a relationship business, using all of these tools helps maintain contact with people and growing the extended network.

Randi stills sees hiring taking place even in this challenging economy, particularly with people who have interactive marketing experience.  She cautions candidates not to jump at the first offer simply because the need to find is job is so strong …. rather she tries to counsel that candidates should not settle on a salary unless absolutely necessary.

It truly is a collaborative effort among recruiters, candidates, and client companies so that the best placements are made for a win win scenario for everyone.

Randi’s Rules for successfully finding a position:

• Be proactive, work to establish a relationship with the recruiter so they may best represent you.

• No matter the circumstance, always put on a happy face. You can’t complain about the situation that you find yourself in.

• Have a great resume that demonstrates successes in the previous position. It is also vital to have good recommendations who will vouch for your work.

For those of you just entering the work force, Randi cautions about posting things online that may impact your ability to locate a position in the future. It may be cute and funny now, but there are employers who are constantly using Google search to find more information about a candidate than appears on a resume.

If you would like to contact Randi to see if she can help you to locate that new position, she can be reached through her web site at www.recrutingspec.com, via email she is at Randi @ RecrutingSpec (dot) com, or phone 770.392.4255

Today’s guest on the Overflow podcast is Jaq Baldwin who is the publisher of The Launching Pad blog with daily posts about the Atlanta Braves and all things baseball.  Jaq provides us some insights into his strategies for using the social networking tools such as Digg, Stumbleupon and bookmarking sites like Delicious and Magnolia.

The first topic takes us to Digg where Jaq has been able to generate enormous amounts of traffic to his site, however he cautions that it might not be the type of traffic that will convert on a site within a niche community.  He has developed a group of followers in his baseball niche at Digg who have helped to elevate the presence of his posts while he returns the favor by supporting theirs.

Jaq has sort of a stated motto; “If it’s something I like, I’ll Digg it. If I really really like it I’ll shout it .. and if I hate it, I’ll bury it and you are not a friend any more.” Using this criteria he has been able to weed out the people that are not contributing to the dialogue by simply pushing their own sites and stories … and in essence spamming other Diggers like Jaq.

Bookmarking sites like Delicious and Magnolia operate a bit differently than the networking sites like Digg and Stumbleupon in that they become a utility for accessing saved site links remotely.  However, Jaq likes the Magnolia aspects of community that has developed, and mentions that there is the ability to subscribe to other Magnolia users streams to see what they are bookmarking.

For baseball related sites specifically there is YardBarker and BallHype .. and some of the smaller submission sites like Reddit have added a Baseball specific section.

The task of working these sites to their greatest potential tends to absorb huge amounts of time and effort, and a take away from the podcast might be to focus on finding the best place for your niche, and developing relationships within that particular social network. It’s a common theme in all of the social media marketing tactics.

Jaq sums it all up best through with the statement “content really is king” … Having quality headlines, categorizing submissions properly and putting some thought into how you intend to get people to click on your post is the fundamental to making sure that the post is promoted.

Thanks to Jaq Baldwin for joining us on the Overflow podcast.  Read his blog at The Launching Pad and follow him on Twitter.

How do you use the Social Networks to promote your sites?  Let us know in the comments what has worked best for you.

Fluid Media is pleased to announce the official launch of a web site for King Custom Cycles.  We are excited about the opportunity to assist our good friends Laura & Phil King in expanding their community base of motorcycle enthusiasts via Web 2.0 tools, and to help them generate business for their parts and repair business.

Let’s share with you some of our initiatives:

First, to touch on the logo design for the brand.  We were brought in on the tail end of the design process and Cameron was able to salvage some of the elements that had been developed, but immediately the concern regarding the “distressed” look revolves around replication issues on merchandise and smaller collateral.

So to avoid losing the little K in custom and other smaller bits, a non-distressed application is being created for certain usage.

We also added a secondary color palette and font styles for use on the web site and collateral materials.

The intention of the web site is to ultimately act as an online community where friends of King Kustom Cycles can interact, exchange tips on great places to ride, discuss new gear for their bikes … or just pass the time during the intervals when not on the road.  In order to achieve this objective we are integrating some exciting new applications and are waiting for others to be released from beta testing!

We set up shop owner Laura King with a Facebook account so early on we can take advantage of the Fotobook plugin allowing her to upload pictures from the Shop, shots from sponsored rides and all the cool events they have planned … and they can be ported over to the site from Facebook.  More importantly the photos and her activity stream are distributed directly to her growing circle of friends (her social graph) in the Facebook community.  Short term marketing objective is to promote the benefit of joining Facebook to her customer base, and to encourage the millions of Facebook users to “friend” her & become a fan of the King Kustom Page.  This direct form of communication is the future of internet marketing strategies.

We’re also waiting for the ultimate rollout of Facebook Connect from beta and the development of a WordPress Plugin that provides for the portability of a user’s web presence. What this means is that as a Facebook user you can log into your Facebook account and via OpenID have a single login point for any site that has integrated Facebook Connect.  Instead of having to login to comment and participate in numerous communities (and my how we hate to keep track of all those User Ids) your Facebook Connect ID provides you a solution.

Beyond the login aspect of Connect you are also gaining the integration of commenting and posting appearing in your Facebook activity stream so that your network of friends are aware of your activity.  Using Facebook Connect on King Kustom Cycles we will be able to deliver marketing messages, event updates, and activity streams to our exponentially large friends network.

We also determined that it would be beneficial to set up a weekly podcast for Laura and Phil.  This rich media content is an easy way to communicate all of the exciting activities happening at the shop while eliminating the grind of trying to write a weekly post.  We’re in the process of trying to name the podcast so that we can develop a brand around the weekly shows. You can check it out at the bottom of the post.

These are the early stages of this site, and we could ramble on about long range micro-blogging communities and the setup of the Disqus commenting system distributed content, but we’ll save those topics for another day.