This morning i read that Dell Sold $3 Million in sales through Twitter an accomplishment that should be acknowledged and is import for other B2C businesses to admire and try to replicate. $3 million is a small amount to Dell but still relevant (about .5% of their annual revenue of $61M )- since they are just getting started with the medium . {CORRECTION-thanks to Sandro: revenues 61B not $61M, and thus this is only 0.005% (one part in 20,000) of their revenue.] They use other social media channels as well so based on the viral nature of Twitter into other channels (Facebook, blogs, Youtube etc.) it probably is a combination of the originating points of the promotion codes on Twitter spreading out.

But let's say that the average PC purchase is $800 bucks. Using that average (i made that up) through Twitter they acquired ~ 3,750 customers. Depending on their retention and loyalty rates, long term these consumer acquisitions can be even worth more.

So i checked out their Dell Twitter accounts, and there are multiple Twitter channels- 34 of them on the Dell on Twitter page and that is not counting other Dell 'employees', 'fans' and 'followers' that are not listed that retweet. Just looking at the 'Dell Offers on Twitter' category, there are 10 separate accounts. Between theses 10 twitter accounts as of this morning about a total of 2,081 tweets had been published across those 10 accounts- so if my math is correct, Dell netted about $1,441.62 per tweet. Not bad for 140 characters.


Image|Flickr|striatic

Yesterday afternoon i had the privilege to moderate a panel discussion with David Meerman Scott, Marketing Strategist, Keynote Speaker, and Author of World Wide Rave; Shel Israel, Best selling author of Naked Conversations and the upcoming book Twitterville and David Spark, Tech Journalist and Founder of Spark Media Solutions as well as about 15 attendees from different verticals, job roles and levels of participation in the use of social media.

David Libby, one of the attendees has a detailed posted based on the notes he took that provides an excellent overview of the discussions that took place. We also recorded the session via Ustream.tv, which i have embedded below.

The Roundtable discussion was a chance to learn from the attendees and the panelists what companies need to think about and how they need to approach being a 'Coversational Corporation'. The title comes from a recent ebook that i published with Shel Israel (one of the panelists), Robert Scoble and Greg Merkle called the The Conversational Corporation: How Social Media is Changing the Enterprise'.

I started off the discussion with introductions, asking the participants to tell us what they would like to get out of the discussion, the list was diverse and included:

• How invested do we want to be from the start?
• How do we work with our legal departments? (we had a good conversation about legal being very good at focusing on 'risk' and that we still have issues going to trial)
• What are some of the non-traditional ways to do business using social networking
• How do you bring it all together? (tools, messages, initiatives)
• How do you stay ahead of your clients? (especially important for professional services providers)
• Transcending Time-zones with social media for global companies and clients
• Non-profit use of social media
• Social Media-> how different is it from PR?
• Using Social Media to coordinate and promote events
• How to get your Salesforce into the conversation?
  
• Things to keep in mind when thinking about using social media in a regulated industry
• Focusing on the Story.....instead of the Tools!
  

I think we covered most of the questions that initially were put on the board and was pleased with both the pace and the participation of all the attendees.

To watch the video of the roundtable discussion, make sure you turn up the volume both on your PC as well as on the player below because some of the people in the back are sometimes hard to hear.



After the roundtable discussion and some drinks and appetizers out on the lovely sunny patio we got to take the participants on a tour of the Palo Alto Wall Street Journal printing plant which is always a treat!

A big thank you to all the attendees, panelists and internal Dow Jones people that made this event happen!
More photos from the event can be found here.

This evening i attended the Social Media Club San Francisco meeting on the subject of "Who Owns Social Media?". Andrew Mager over at ZDNet was live blogging from the room and also has posted some photos (darn somehow i missed the skittles!).

It was a lively conversation in the room but unfortunately the panel discussion was a bit too short- but i already hear rumblings on the internets that this conversation is continuing.

The main question that the panel tried to address was 'who is responsible for social media in the enterprise?'. As Chris Heuer posted on his introduction post to the event "Most social media ‘insiders’ would naturally say, everyone is responsible, but this is just not the reality for most businesses. Someone needs to allocate budget, someone needs decision making authority over infrastructure and major programs, someone needs to rewrite job descriptions upon which employees are measured and many more people need to understand why, where and how to engage."

I have been involved in the Social Media conversation for a while and it feels good to have these conversations- the practice of using social medial across the enterprise (internally and externally) is maturing and these issues are coming to a head with many companies and the good folks that belong to the Social Media Club around the world are the right people to be guiding these conversations.

One of the questions that i wanted to ask but did not get a chance to address with the panel but did chat with @MeHeatherD and @jacobm afterwards- is who owns the 'brand' of the Social Media leaders in your company. When they leave- how much of the Social Media they have created do they get to take and own (defining 'own' as Intellectual Property (IP)) and even if they don't take the 'content' what is the brand value that they can essentially never truly transfer and that there is no way you can write into their job description or company rules? Or can you?

Image|Seattle City Light Brochures, Seattle Municipal Archives. |via Flickr

PRWeek has a front page story on LinkedIn in their February 4th issue (sorry subscription only) about how their marketing and communications professionals work together to 'spread' the message about LinkedIn. I know their Community Evangelist Mario Sundar, but i am also a big fan of what they are doing with new features and how they promote their services including how they communicate with their community, so i was glad to see a major publication for PR professionals in big companies in the U.S. highlighting their work.

The article highlights the way that LinkedIn uses Social Media, like their blog, their Answers feature, their YouTube channel and their Twittering (by multiple LinkedIn employees).

A lot of what is covered in the article is not new to the social media savy PR department, but what i thought was an important part of the article was the way that PRWeek author Aarti Shah highlights the shift of communications- moving from corporate PR and even to 'assigned' community managers, to their engineering community. From the article:

"For example, last month data portability was a hot topic in the blogosphere. Though the company did not plan to address the issue in its PR strategy, two of its engineers were able to insert LinkedIn into the dialogue by adding a post that addressed the topic from the company's perspective.
As most savvy tech companies have discovered, bloggers don't like PR pitches, but may listen when an engineer suggests an idea. So the company's blog is a way for engineers, working on projects they are passionate about, to communicate their excitement to bloggers, without watering the message down with corporate-speak from the communications department, Luo notes. 'A challenge with a blog is, it's not something your PR department can create,' Luo notes. 'It's a totally different psyche than I have as a PR professional.'

Many companies allow their engineers/developers to be a part of their public voice, take a look at for example the Microsoft and Sun Microsystems blogging communities to see how their engineering communities are huge evangelists for their products. Some use their corporate 'sanctioned' blog but many blog, twitter, etc. under their own domains and i have no doubt that for major issues there is back and forth communication between the bloggers and their executive and PR departments- for example when they come out to support initiatives like the decision to joined the DataPortability Workgroup.

What i find to be the most fascinating thing that this article highlights, is that it is not only senior executives in technology positions that are making important decisions on where their platforms are going- many decisions are being pushed bottom up- sure not new you might say but more and more with the support and ear of their PR/Corporate Communications groups.

My friend and one of my favorite Silicon Valley rock stars Jeremiah Owyang a Senior Analyst at Forrester Research will be presenting a Webinar on the Topic of Social Media this Thursday (9:30PST/12:30EST) with Glenn Fannick, Product Development Manager for Factiva Insight at Dow Jones.

Jeremiah and I worked very closely in late 2006 to put together a social media roundtable event in Palo Alto, CA with influential early social media Evangelists including many social media enthusiasts, corporate practitioners and PR/Corporate Communication attendees. In the tradition of Social Media the event was well documented and the community continued to discuss the topics addressed after the roundtable. After the event Jeremiah also worked with us to co-author a white paper based on some of the findings and outstanding questions.

I have seen both Jeremiah and Glenn speak quite often and they are always dynamic speakers so they promise not to disappoint. I look forward to listening in this week to see how the conversation has matured over the last year and i have no doubt that I will learn quite a bit.

There are over 800 registered attendees already and if you are interested you can still registered.

For years i tried to correct my friends when they said things like 'my friend at work said' or 'my friend on the team said' with questions like 'are they really friends or co-workers, teammates, acquaintances or someone you know?'. They probably thought i was annoying when i asked, well actually i know they do sometimes find me annoying but that is a story for another blog.

Fast forward a couple of years after most of them were well 'trained' to use the term as i deemed appropriate and now a days everyone seems to be every one's friend. Today's New York Times has an article 'Myspacebook. past. Friending, Ancient or Otherwise' (found via Techmeme) which is about how some Academic researchers are starting to explore the parallels between online social networks and tribal societies and how they are seeing a resurgence of ancient patterns of oral communication. Aside from picking up another new word to use safely in describing social media, 'orality' - the article does make some interesting points on the emergence of oral culture online. “Orality is participatory, interactive, communal and focused on the present. The Web is all of these things.”

So i just grabbed our beautiful 1982 edition of America Heritage Dictionary (you know the one with the small pictures on the margin), that was given to my husband for his 8th grade graduation - spent a good simple 15 minutes of pleasure looking at words like exacerbate- and got to the definition of friend:

friend n. 1. A person whom one knows, likes, and trusts. 2. An acquaintance. 3. A person with whom one is allied in a struggle or cause; comrade 4.One who supports, sympathizes with, or patronizes a group, cause, or movement.

So maybe my friends where right- if i kinda like my coworker i may be able to use the phrase 'my friend at work' when describing them in a casual conversation. So folks, yes the word 'friend' can be used to describe different levels of friendship but going forward i insist that we only reserve BFF for the truest of friends of course...

So this morning, i logged into Facebook to see what my 'friends' are up to today and noticed that my friend Mario Sundar who is the Community Evangelist at LinkedIn just posted a link to a 2006 article from the Columbia Business School How Well Do Your Friends Know You? . With all the controversy around the recent Facebook Ad Beacon advertising program it is an interesting read because it questions how much we really know about the people we call our 'friends' and that most people want specific, personalized suggestions from friends whom they believe, correctly or not, know them well.

The key however is that i want to be able to call on the different levels of 'friendships' i have both online and off across multiple networks when i look for recommendations. You might be my friend because we like the same type of music so i might be interested in what new albums you are buying, but i might really have no desire whatsoever to trust your purchasing decision around cars or tech gadgets. But most importantly i want to control and own that data about who and why people are my friends and be able to use it where and when i want to. At this point, although there are some initiatives on their way to solve this starting with the ability to port my data, that knowledge of who i trust when is only in my brain.

Want to be my friend? Well then just 'friend me' already! (but please don't make it a random request- if you tell me where you found me and how we are connected (even owing up to being a random find) it might increase the chances of me wanting to be your friend.

yes i use the root word 'friend' over 25 times in this post- so get over it my friends.

This is great. Who says this stuff is just for the kids?

Found on the iclicknation blog- a viral campaign for Bob Dylan's upcoming CD release. You can personalize the classic Subterranean Homesick Blues video and send it to a friend or post it on your blog or MySpace. It also allows people to respond to your message and there is a Facebook app to go along with it. A very well done viral campaign by Ten4 design. My attempt is embedded below.

I would love to see the demographics of the folks who create and send out the personalized message. Also, i wasn't able to find a way to see public creations only by searching on google blogs for posts.

Apologies to Bob on the subject title of this post.

At the end of last year, I worked very hard alongside some colleagues at Factiva (Dow Jones) to coordinate a roundtable event to discuss Social Media with thought leaders in the Bay Area. The thought to have the roundtable came to me after speaking with Jeremiah Owyang and sharing my frustrations with the fact that every time i met up with people who were talking about Social Media, I always wanted my Factiva Insight product folks in the room- to listen and participate in those conversations. So what i managed to do was bring them West using a combination of social media itself (i blogged, reached out to other bloggers via comments etc) and good old fashion networking (i went from pub to pub in San Francisco- seriously i am not kidding) to engage members of the community that i knew would make great participants. We also reached out to a handful of local clients that we knew where dealing with these issues internally.

The location was a wonderful place called Zibibbo's in Palo Alto, CA where the food was incredible and the wine nicely poured...and what a great crowd we managed to get.


What were some of the questions we were/are trying to answer during this roundtable ?

- Do you believe Consumer Generated Media is important and should be measured?
- Who is creating Social Media? What are they creating? And is the who more important then the what?
- If you are producing Social Media as part of your PR/Marketing plan, how will you measure ROI?
- Do you think that Social Media needs a structured, mutually agreed upon measurement techniques and metrics (e.g. MSM's ad value equivalence and article impressions) to make monitoring a more serious practice?
- So what should be measured, and how do you want it delivered?


One of the agreed outcomes of the roundtable was that we would produce a white paper of the information that we gathered along with our co-author Jeremiah Owyang. Well for months and months i have been bugging (read harassing) Marketing about this white paper and when it would be finalized. Well as you know, Factiva has gone through a lot of corporate changes- we officially became Dow Jones in January and then five months later the news about the News Corp acquisition- well i guess they have all been busy. I am sure i have made more then one enemy being a pestering little bug- oh well i hope we can make up soon.

So the final outcome is this report authored by Matt Toll of our Marketing group and Jeremiah Owyang. You can Download the Report here: “Tracking the Influence” (PDF).

Since the event- many of the participants have continued to talk and address issues of social media measurement- some of the companies that participated have implemented strategies that they continue to refine. The white paper has some good thoughts and ideas by the participants and we hope that their voices are heard. As Jeremiah describes it, the white paper serves as a good primer for those that are new to the concept, or for those who need to start deploying a program but also provides a good insight into what was going through on minds on that day in December of 2006.

Additional information about the roundtable is available on the Factiva Roundtable wiki that was used to coordinate the event and provide a place for reflection afterwards. More pictures from the event here and shortly if i ever get to re-re-encode my video files i will post video clips of the participants.

and some final words?

Lot's of chatter today around Google's new feature that will allow only 'the people in the news article' to add comments to articles that are aggregated in Google News. Here are two examples that the Google Blogoscoped blog pointed out.

When i saw it this morning i thought it was an interesting use of social media and still believe so-but as i think about it and read a bit further about exactly how it will work there certainly seems to be some potential issues. Things like what Gabe Rivera left as a comment on TechCrunch that Google doesn't allow other aggregators to crawl their site although now they are now hosting original content and probably should. Since Google gets its content by aggregating across thousands of online news sites and there is constant battles about the right to do that- they should probably open up this orginal content back- but who knows maybe the content will be useless in the long run?

i think that it is interesting that Google is going to try to be some sort of 'editor' of the global online news. Thinking about traditional media there are usually two types of ways that someone 'associated' with the article can respond and let the audience hear their voice. The first is to contact the media outlet and request a correction or clarification. I tend to browse these section of the papers and there always seems to be something that needs correction sometimes important information. The second is to write a letter to the editor. Both of these however become physically separated from the original source- either printed in the next day publication (for newspapers but could be months for other types of publications) and essentially the editor of that publication who is ultimately responsible for what they printed has the last word on what they choose to publish on behalf of the person responding.

So will it be scalable - and will Google have to open it up to let the original sources get to that content? Either way- kudos to Google for pushing the envelope and looking a user generated content differently then what other news sites are doing.

Shel Israel, co-author of Naked Conversations points to the voice of the future employee with his post on 'Let me Blog." I completely agree with both Shel and Kyle who is currently doing an internship at our local NBC station (did you know that NBC11 now has chat with the 5pm news? cool stuff). Kyle is a journalism student at San Jose State University. A couple weeks back, I was at the San Jose Social Media club event and met Kyle briefly when we took a tour of the studio- he cracked me up when he said that he was hoping an earthquake or something would happen so he could see the 'action' buzz of the newsroom (i personally can live without that buzz).

Future employees (and many suffering current ones) want to be able to participate and innovate in the ways they are used to outside of the corporation. It could be blogging, tagging, video creation, mashups- whatever just let them be. Enterprises that create environments that allow for this within their confine (there has to be some based on business laws etc.) will not only get the best new future employees out there but will inspire their current ones .

I have handed out 10 copies of Naked Conversations to customers and colleagues- it is a powerful book with a great title for conversation. I have one copy left from the last batch i bought which i am saving to give to a financial services customer who is itching to blog about his business but is getting the squinty eyes from PR. I am hoping to see Shel and Robert over the next few days so they can perhaps add some personal thoughts to inspire and give him courage.

(Photo by Scott Beale from the book launch party- February 2006)

I have been blogging since i made made my trek across the country when i moved to the Bay Area in February 2005- it started out as a way to keep in touch with family and friends and then i found myself blogging to keep in touch with my former East coast clients to share with them the things i was seeing on the West coast. Quickly my blog turned into a good way to communicate with my new clients on the West coast, the tech community, my company co-workers around the world and a way to completely bore the hell out of my friends and family who were expecting pictures of me surfing and living the San Francisco lifestyle but instead have to read about Web 2.0, social media and general grumblings about information delivery in the enterprise.

There are certainly other work colleagues of mine that are 'business' bloggers but none of us are currently under a Dow Jones domain- they are personal blogs that address business issues and trends that we are all interested in. When i started blogging, i was part of Factiva which at the time was a Dow Jones & Reuters company and had a blogging policy and even a CEO blogger.

At the end of last year, we became fully owned by Dow Jones and one of the first things i asked our PR department was about the DJ blogging policy. I am still waiting for an official Dow Jones blogging policy but was told to follow the employee code of conduct as a rule (honestly i think that all companies should have an official blogging policy and have been ancy about not having one over the last 8 months). If you are a regular reader of my blog, then you know that i try not to talk much about the Dow Jones corporate business or try to be overtly pushing products that we sell- for example i have hardly touched this News Corp situation on this blog (i have however Twittered about it but that is a closed network of those i consider my trusted friends some which are also clients).

The other day i was talking to my friend Jeremiah Owyang as we were coming out of a Social Media club event in which he had just been on a panel on business blogging in the enterprise. I told Jeremiah that our Client Solutions marketing group was producing a new quarterly newsletter and they had informed me that they wanted to highlight my blog. It has also been featured on the InfoPro Alliance newsletter that Factiva produces mostly for their information professional audience. Jeremiah thought it was great that Dow Jones trusted me enough to publish my site to their customers, but since he has been following my blog he can understand why the content i produce is valuable to the organization- i think it is pretty cool as well that they trust me.

Just today at the New Tech Meetup in San Francisco- where the topic was Women in Tech- Lorna Li asked me what i blog about- my standard response is that i blog about information delivery in the enterprise and it is a way for me to be part of the community that discusses issues important to that market segment while connecting with customers.

i don't get paid extra to blog about things that might bring revenue to the company or induce engagement with communities of importance to us, i do it because i truly enjoy it and it brings me immense pleasure when a customer or colleagues say to me- yeah i want to talk to you about that post about bla bla bla or i have been looking forward to meeting you- your blog is very interesting especially that post about bla bla bla.

I like think of myself as a corporate blogger that is trying to fit the Community/Evangelist Role that Jeremiah commonly speaks about- but i certainly feel that i could be doing much more. Part of it is time constraints and being overworked- i can't tell you how many times i come home with a great idea post that i start to write and then get wrapped up with some work project or simply run out of steam to continue thinking about work- so i try to pay myself and tell myself that i am blogging here for daniela not for Dow Jones- they are just one of the beneficiaries.

But the bottom line is that i am proud that my blog gets highlighted in a corporate newsletters from Dow Jones- it is through Social Media (my blog) that as an employee that is not at the executive levels that typically gets the public ear through mainstream media- I am able to communicate with the marketplace- i just wish i had more time to do it because it seems that almost everyday i say to myself 'if only i had the time to blog about this...'.

Oh yeah and something else to worry about-let's see if News Corp has a corporate blogging policy....if not maybe i will just convert this blog to focus on delivering information to enterprising cats.

Just got back from the Social Media Club event in San Jose- the theme was Blogging 101 and Mike McGrath did a great job at moderating the panel. Although i admit i was a bit late (but soooo happy there was still pizza when i go there!) some of the topics discussed where indeed on the 101 level but as usual i managed to get the brain going- but that left me with some questions.

One things that one of the panel members Tony Bove talked about at the end of the panel was blog software in the enterprise- giving the audience an example of a team using a blog to work on a group document. i believe he was advocating stand-alone blog platforms separate from other enterprise systems which lead me to think about Blog content and the silos that that blog content may sit in....all the way home up the 101.

Creating and managing enterprise content through enterprise content management (ECM) tools typically includes structuring, organizing, searching on, filtering, and easily modifying that content. But are enterprise content management and search tools capable of managing participatory content like blogs effectively?

But does it really make sense to have a blogging platform that is detached from the ECM system that already manages things like workflow, compliance, security, and integration into other systems?

Is it the content or the software that is the issue?

Is blog content stuck in one format- blob text post, comments and tags?

- what other structure is there in a blog post that is explicit in the blogging software data store?

Look at these two examples- is there a standalone blogging software that can achieve the level of structure that the text on the right hypothetically has?

I don't have ads on my blog-yet- but i was an early supporter of Ad placement on blog sites. Perhaps with a bit of my convincing our marketing department was even brave enough to join up with Federated Media (FM) to place ads on some sites that would hopefully drive business my way.

When i first heard about Federated Media, i was immediately impressed with the model- the blog authors (many that i already read) would have some sort of guidelines to follow and the hope would be that FM would monitor and make the recommendation on which blogs to place ads on based on the best fit- of content and audience. On the topic of Disclosure- i just had faith that the authors would disclose (once again most of the bloggers i read already do) and that the audience would know an Ad- is used to advertise products and services.

Of course in the last few days there has been a flurry of talk about FM's Microsoft People Ready campaign so wouldn't you believe it but today was the day i logged onto TechCrunch and saw the "Inform Collaborate and be Competitive with Dow Jones Solutions" Ad. Fun. i actually thought that TechCrunch was 'sold-out' for the next few months (at least that is what i was told) but maybe a slot opened up suddenly.....

Our campaign is fairly new (only started couple weeks ago) and i haven't gotten any leads yet. But I spoke to my excellent marketing contact back in Princeton last week and we are testing the copy and reworking it (i of course have some ideas- but it is all a matter of finding time to give them)

Oh yeah- DISCLOSURE- i currently work for Dow Jones Client Solutions and this post is to:
1) try to get me more business by having you click through on an Ad so you can contact me because
2) if you read those blogs that our Ads are appearing on and you are interested in information delivery in the enterprise or financial B2C sites i might enjoy talking to you ;-)

Of course- you can always just leave me a comment here if you want to talk-

Nathan Gilliatt author of The Net-Savy Executive Blog, a business blog focusing on social media, online reputation management, and market intelligence for business leaders just posted a good packaged OPML of Bloggers associated with social media analysis companies. I along with a couple of my Factiva/Dow Jones colleagues managed to make the list due to one of the Dow Jones products that does media analysis. i also post often on Social Media topics.

Thanks Nathan- this is very useful for those of us that like to keep an eye on what all the media analysis companies are discussing and the OPML saves us all from multiple subscriptions and searches to find them all.

Nathan also recently published a Guide to Social Media Analysis after 5 months of gathering information on companies who monitor, measure and analyze social media for businesses worldwide. I haven't had the chance to read it myself but it includes information on over 31 vendors.

There has been a recent meme in the blogsphere about Social Media as a new Resume/CV with a big focus on Blogs,Video and Google searches in general. I got tipped off to it via Jeremiah's blog and then found a nice roundup of posts by the blogger that originally started the meme Adam Darowski.

On both sides (employer and employee) user generated content is becoming more and more important to find good hires as well as attract good hires. A while back i even posted about some work we have done with clients to help them track and react through recruiting dashboards.

The funny thing is that right before i noticed the meme, i updated my Resume/CV to incorporate social media elements into the standard 'acceptable paper' format. Although many hiring managers and recruiters know enough to 'google' someone or find their blog, i figured it would be better to add those elements to a Resume/CV saving them a couple clicks. Taking a que from the Social Media Press Release, i added some dynamic icon links to my resume as follows:

• GoogleMe - (notting out some terms like for example Ben Kinsley- no it is not me)
• GMail
• YouTube
• MyBlog
• LinkedIn
• My Blip.TV channel
• Flickr
  

Some may ask why- hey they are going to find it anyway- might as well show them efficiency from interaction number one! I like this format since it removes some of the static elements of the traditional resume. This PDF resume in some one's DMS system will always point to my most recent activities yet it maintains the standard Resume/CV format that is currently acceptable.

Now the big question- would a employer/recruiter know enough to click on the icons?

I was in Portland all day today and at the end of my day at the airport i got an e-mail from Jeremiah about a new Twitter base service. Twitter allows 'micro-blogging' with text-based posts, up to 140 characters long. Yeah i know you were wondering how long it would be before i posted the word 'twitter'- in this post i give you 17 derivatives of the world 'twitter' to get it out of my system.

The subject of the e-mail was Twitterment a new Twitter search service that allows you to search what people are 'twittering' and analyze what terms people are twittering about. The Twitterforum has a detailed post on the functionality that is available but besides searching and graphing on one term it allows for comparing two terms like 'vista' compared to 'leopard'.

Twitterment provides a search interface over an index of recent updates obtained periodically from the public time line API . The Twitter API only retrieves "public" data. Twits from a protected user who is not a friend (a permissioning term) with the requesting user API would not show up.

On their site, Akshay Java one of the Twitterment authors writes:
"What makes microbloging content really valuable from an analytics point of view, is the granularity at which users are starting to provide information. This is an exciting new area is Social Media analysis and there is lot more we can learn from this. Right now are working on a sentiment analysis module and a social search feature."

Just this afternoon i was meeting with a customer and i brought up the rise of Twitter as another social media output and how many companies will soon need to monitor (and then when they begin to see impact on their business -measure) these new 'microbloging' services. Twitter is not the only one out there for example Jaiku is another.

There are already over 50 applications/services that use the Twitter API to provide different types of functionality.

and yes i have a Twitter account...but no i haven't 'twittered' yet.

At the Blogher conference two weeks ago i spoke on a panel on How To Measure Social Media ROI with Katie Paine and Lena West. One of the things that we discussed was the growing importance of monitoring Blog comments and using them as one of the aspects of measuring the success of your blogs. During the panel, i commented that you also have to understand your audience, will they leave comments, it is easy for them to do so (or do they need to sign-up like for example HP blogs), are they afraid to engage in public because they are afraid to speak on behalf of their company, etc. From my own experience, I still get a lot of e-mailed comments especially from clients on blog posts.

The Net-Savvy Executive has a recent post on Measuring blog comments that hits on that same subject and mentions some companies that allow you to search comments and others that allow tracking of comments that can then be incorporated into measurement techniques companies put together as part of their Social Media strategy. I agree with Nathan that vendors in this space are aware that tracking and measuring comments is important. This topic also came up back in December when Factiva hosted a Social Media Roundtable event in Palo Alto to gather feedback on what should be measured.

The BlogHer Business Conference two weeks ago had the conference title of "How to Succeed in a Social Media World". The goal was to explore questions about social media in the business world and consisted of two days of various panels, conversations and networking opportunities from small to global enterprise businesses that have waken to the fact that Social Media is here to stay, continues to evolve very quickly and needs to be incorporated into your business strategy.

On the first day, a lab session took place in which four business blog case studies were presented through interviews with their main bloggers and it was obvious during those interviews that social media regardless if you are selling Giftbaskets, News, educating people on racial issues or selling financial products is an important tool. After the session, we broke into groups with the case study blogger to dig a little deeper and i joined Staci Schiller a marketing program manager from the Wells Fargo Education Financial Services group and a key member of the Wells Fargo Blogs team. I volunteered to report back to the bigger group what we learned in our discussion so below are my notes on The Student LoanDown™ blog case study:

The Student LoanDown is Wells Fargo's blog about financing a college education and they blog about student loans: applying for them, selecting them, repaying them etc.

How is the decision made as to which Wells Fargo employees Blog:

• the blogger needs to know how to write and be passionate and want to write
• has to have lifestyle experience - you can't talk about a subject if you haven't 'lived' it
• subject matter experts for example the Wells Fargo Historians (Congrats on reaching your first year anniversary!)
• recently they added a fictional character that was hired specifically for Stagecoach Island Community™ which is an online virtual community to create a financial literacy program for young adults- if you want to have fun on the island you need to have money and the program shows them how.
• how much time does it take the bloggers? Staci started spending about 20% of her time blogging but now spends close to 50%
• there are 5 people on the Student LoanDown all from marketing communications . All with full time jobs and blogging has been incorporated as part of their jobs.
• how do they figure out which writer writes want post? the team has experts on specific items so for example there are specific blogger that at specific times of the year are writing about scholarships

What are the internal processes for the Student LoanDown blog:

• The Wells Fargo Blog team is headed by Ed Terpening one of their first bloggers (HERE IS AN INTERVIEW WITH ED that Staci just posted announcing their first year anniversary of the Guided by History Blog)
• It took the team about 2 1/2 months the first time they wrote a post to get it approved through legal and risk management groups. There were obviously a lot of meetings and policies but into place
• The Student LoanDown was not the first Wells Fargo Blog but it was the first blog to talk about financials issues that affect Wells Fargo products and services
• Over the months (it launched in Sept 2006) the team has learn to 'negotiate' with the legal and risk management groups and the process is shorter for approval
• The team has weekly meetings to discuss upcoming posts

Blogging in a financial world- Compliance and Risk issues to deal with

• The financial banking world is full of compliance issues and the Student Loandown team are educated on all issues
• Compliance issues certainly affect the way they write and many times that are self conscious about posts- reading and rewriting them
• Many times they might want to be judgement but obviously can't because the reader might be a potential client so that affects how and what they write. Staci shared with us an example from a recent MTV show (she is a self proclaimed MTV fanatic) in which a young women was filing for bankruptcy yet was drinking a four dollar latte from Starbucks. Her post on the incident is here.
• Because of compliance issues they need to have very clear rules as to how readers can participate. From their blog "As a bank, regulations prevent us from obtaining your personal information—hence the restrictions in our blog comments that prevent you from submitting your full name. Also, we can't capture your blog's URL in our comments due to concerns about phishing". Their guidelines in the about page are very clear.
• We asked if comments had to go back to legal/risk management and they don't- the team can make the decision to post them- they do go back to them however if they don't feel comfortable.
• We asked if there have been any comments trashing Wells Fargo products and Staci said to date there haven't really been any but if they were on topic they would be posted. They are here to establish credibility in the community and being upfront and transparent is required.

How are they promoting and measuring in the impact of the Wells Fargo Blogs:

• They are not doing active promotion of any of their blogs but have gotten a lot of coverage in the main stream media mostly because of world of mouth and the novelty of a banking institution blogging
• They go out and contact influential bloggers in the personal financial blogging world
• THIS IS A MUST FOR ANY CORPORATE BLOG: they promote it internally- with over 170,000 team members who are providing services to clients and potential clients using them as a main distribution point is ideal
• They are still not able to track conversion to specific products and do not have a solid plan to do so
• They do use multiple online tools to track what people are saying about Wells Fargo (so hey this post should pop up!)

Overall, i think both Staci's stage presentation and our little breakout session were excellent and Staci did a great job of presenting the Wells Fargo Social Media Strategy. I extremely impressed with Staci's passion for what she does and i think that myself along with many others that participated in our breakout session where extremely pleased with what Staci shared with us. I did ask Staci if i could blog this case study and she graciously agreed- whatever she said with us on that day was sanctioned as public knowledge.

The one thing i did not ask Staci is how they came up with the Student LoanDown name-did someone bring it to the table when the idea started or was it a work in process with the team once the theme was decided? i think it is pretty clever- get the lowdown on borrowing money for college at the LoanDown!

If you attended Blogher and want to add additional thoughts that i might have missed please do- thanks.

Here are some other blog links that covered this specific case study:

• Live Blogging from Blogher from The Social Customer Manifesto
• Post from Clarke Lane on all the case studies from this session
• Post from In Women with Trust that highlights Staci's influence of getting Wells Fargo to be one of those companies that gets blogging
• Post from Licence to Roam covering the multiple case studies
• We'll Know When We Get There post that meeting Staci's was one of the highlights of the conference (i agree!)

I have posted a couple of time about social tagging/bookmarking in the enterprise and i believe that it is one of those Web 2.0 tools that will reap a lot of value in the enterprise space because of its natural fit into knowledge management needs.

The Intelligent Agent Blog written by Robert Berkman of Information today has a good review of free, public social bookmarking sites that could also be suitable for enterprise use. He reviews many of the services that have been out there for a while and also reviews some new ones that i was not aware of. In addition he posts that on April 15th he will share a full article, which also contains a detailed feature comparison chart of both fee-based and free social bookmarking vendors and sites. I am really looking forward to this article since i am working with a handful of customers that are starting to seriously evaluate social tagging as a solution for their enterprise.

Social tagging & bookmarking has great potential for not only helping enterprise users save, organize and share information with each other but for natural extensions like expertise location. I am confident that it will become a common solution for enterprises. Just this last week, Rich Hoeg from Honeywell announced the launch of Connect Beam's enterprise solution.

I wish I was going to the SXSW conference because it looks like a blast and lately i have really been getting into video, but alas i am in Orlando until Wednesday for our annual global sales conference. But that is OK because Jeremiah, like many other bloggers are live blogging from the events which keeps me in the loop.

Meanwhile however, because i might be a bit quiet over the next few days, i would like to announce my blip.tv channel on information delivery which will be companion to this blog. I have already posted a couple of videos and like the blip.tv quality way better then YouTube for the types of videos i am producing. I also like the fact that the blip.tv showpage is 'clean', allows me to present an introduction trailer were i mention the fact that "The opinions expressed on this site are my own and do not necessarily represent those of my past,future or present employer" and doesn't include weird video links like YouTube. I typically forward my videos to clients or prospects and sending them to YouTube sometimes can be scary because who knows what types of videos will pop-up after they finish viewing mine!

I will probably continue to post video on my YouTube, but videos on information delivery tools, solutions and my thoughts in general will be on the blip.tv channel.