First, just what is social media? That’s a pretty broad term. In general, it has come to signify a collective offering of Web 2.0 companies like Twitter, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, and Facebook which allow groups of like-minded individuals to form loose-knit communities for the purpose of broadcasting information to large groups of people who comprise a well-targeted demographic.

Business translation? You get your intended message out to a well-tuned market who will listen your message.

Most traditional businesses aren’t even aware these services exist, well with the exception of sites like Facebook or MySpace. But aren’t those for my teenager?

The Chicken or the Egg?

Ah, now you’ve asked an interesting question. This actually shows you are not dumb at all - I’m proud of you for thinking like that. You at least know they exist.

Here’s a quick fact for all of you, Facebook recently reached 100,000,000 subscribers. A free service dedicated to helping people connect with one another now has more competitive information housed within its database than your CRM/SFA application.

Do you think you might be able to do just a little research on a prospect before heading over if they were subscribed to a service like Facebook, or LinkedIn (a popular professional network)?

You may ask, “My prospect couldn’t be using any of that stuff - could they?”

The Tipping Point is Now

Social media is at a tipping point, some might argue it is well past - but I would contend only now are avant garde companies utilizing social media outlets to capitalize on untapped markets and interact with their customers. The mainstream businesses are still grappling with search engine marketing, and the Web has been around for almost two decades, while social media is really only in its infancy.

Companies like Comcast and Dell are putting their proverbial ear to the ground in order to help foresee potential press before it hits the mainstream media outlets like MSNBC or CNN. While these examples are technology companies, it is important to note this is both an intelligence and social tool; these two companies are opting to lead the pack to both “listen to the chatter on the wire” as well as connect with their customers in a meaningful way.

Be Authentic

While you would love to have access to this wealth of raw marketing data, there is a cost. It does not necessarily come in subscription fees or maintenance agreements. There have been no proven “get rich quick schemes” here.

It takes authenticity and empathy; a genuine interest and interaction in the communities you traffic. In this manner are you given the keys to the kingdom.

Sound familiar? Isn’t it very much like how we say we sell - by building relationships? The payoff is measured in meaningful gains - at first not quantitative, but qualitative. Then, as your sphere of influence grows so to does your return: You find increased responsiveness to your brand, increased goodwill, and increased customer retention.

What you put in is what you get out, and that’s why you would use social media for your business. Not because it is a scheme, but because it is another way to build relationships with your community of customers.

Ken Stewart’s blog, ChangeForge.com, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology. Ken is also the Director of Technology at Kearns Business Solutions.

What do you think of when you think of the term ‘currency’ ? Dictionary.com offers these definitions of currency:

cur·ren·cy [kur-uhn-see, kuhr-] –noun, plural -cies.

1.	something that is used as a medium of exchange; money.

2.	general acceptance; prevalence; vogue.

3.	a time or period during which something is widely accepted and circulated.

4.	the fact or quality of being widely accepted and circulated from person to person.

It is interesting to notice that while money is certainly mentioned, first and foremost, currency is a medium of exchange, indicating value does not lie within the value of the coin or dollar intrinsically. So then, who decides what manner of exchange is to be employed and what value is to be placed upon the denominations used?

As they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

In social media terms, Twitter has followers, FriendFeed has subscribers, and Plurk has Karma… they are all status symbols signifying importance or authority… Who places value on them? The participants of those communities, of course. If you are not fond of social media, or have not been exposed to it, then you might ask why such trivial things matter?

Let’s broaden our analogy: For those in web-based marketing, often termed search engine optimization (SEO), maybe it’s unique visitors (uniques) or conversation rates. For those in brick-and-mortar businesses maybe it’s customer retention rates, revenue per employee, or sales per square foot.

All in all, we all seek to assign value to our transactions and why? Quite simply, to survive.

We live in a world where everything has a price, and in assigning value to your product or service you attempt to broadcast your worth to your clients, to the world, and most importantly - to you, yourself.

Ah, now there is the rub. Up until this point, this is all basic economics, right? Well, have you ever considered the reason you are so caught up in trying to inflate your value is to take a place of superiority for yourself - above others?

Let me give you a more personal example:

I started this blog several months ago for a reason, I would even call it a cause. My goal was two-fold:

1. I wanted people to know who I was.
2. I wanted to share my thoughts with others, and encourage debate and discussion.

I dug in, and learned more and more about blogging tools, tricks, and sought any advice I could get. I worked long hours building this site, and had quite a few frustrations. Then somewhere along the way, I discovered I was spending more time pumping my blog - pumping myself up - and less time creating content. I found I was spending less time enjoying myself.

My currency had become me… pushing me, pumping me up, talking about me… Does that sound as self-centered as it looks while I’m writing this?

Now here is my adjusted goal:

1. I wanted people to know who I was.
2. I want to share my thoughts with others, and encourage debate and discussion.

Now that I am focused on connecting with people, I am much more focused on creating content and having fun. I have rediscovered the joy of interacting with others simply for that - not with ulterior motive in mind. Where the currency I had traded in used to be a currency of “me”, I have learned that trading in a currency of “you” actually betters my experience, and comes back to me ten fold.

So as you travel through your life, ask yourself, “What currency do I trade in?” If it is a currency of “me”, you may find that you are feeding your ego and starving your soul.

Ken Stewart’s blog, ChangeForge.com, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology. Ken is also the Director of Technology at Kearns Business Solutions.

As a citizen of the blogosphere, and being technology-minded, I enjoy trying new things. Plurk was one of those new things.

While some may argue it was too weird, some may maintain it was a Twitter knock-off, and some may just not like it - Plurk has a very interesting interface and an even better community.

I first gave Plurk whirl back in early June, and even wrote a little piece comparing its features against that of Twitter, called Twitter = Ego; Plurk = Fun.

So why say goodbye? Well, there are a few reasons.

1. Noise:

I am attempting to cut through the noise, and social outlets like Plurk and Twitter generate an awful lot of that, in my humble opinion. With the amount of information coming at me, I need a very succinct way of pairing back what I don’t need - almost an RSS reader for social media - if you will.

2. Connect:

I am attempting to connect to others, in a meaningful way. While the community in Plurk is wonderful, I would liken it to happy hour at a bar. If you want to unwind and have some interesting conversations - with LOTS of tangents - then Plurk is definitely the place for you.

3. Time:

I want to learn things from others, and I get this when reading others blogs or parsing through my subscriptions in FriendFeed. Plurk was very good at this, as long as I was willing to put in a copious amount of time.

This was not productive for me. I need to invest my time wisely with all of the various priorities in my life. I’m sure each of you, my readers, can relate to this - and make these decisions more and more now as well.

In general, this was not a hard decision to make when I stepped back and analyzed my goals relative to where I am spending my time. There is only a finite amount of time and energy I have, and while each and every community out there is wonderful in its own right, I can only be part of so many.

To the A-Team at Plurk, my hats off for creating something very interesting - but it’s time I said, “good night.”

Watch-out Twitter - you may have to be next…

Ken Stewart’s blog, ChangeForge.com, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology. Ken is also the Director of Technology at Kearns Business Solutions.

For those of you fanboys (and fangirls) of FireFox 3, this post is for you:

As many of my valued readers might know, I have been following various social media outlets for a few months, with some mixed results.

Let me be frank when I say that I think there is a log of egotistical stuff going on in the world of social media, but I have met some really nice people through channels like Twitter, FriendFeed, Plurk, and so on.

Twitter, in specific, is rather interesting in that I typically post little observations or aggravations about the world at large. For those of you that don’t know what Twitter is, it is what is termed as a micro-blogging site; more to the point, it is a way for you to post little tidbits in 140 words or less.

So it was that I found myself aggravated with some goings on of FF3. It would at some points sieze up, or not allow CAPTCHA’s to be displayed properly on some blogs… This was rather frustrating.

So I blabbed about it on Twitter - and Firefox Answered.

At first firefox_answers gave me what I thought was a mundane answer, uninstall your plug-ins…

“Gee, really? What fantastic advice,” I said… and got a response back. In fact, I got several responses back, much quicker than any of the other twitterers (yes that is what they are called).

… and I ended up enjoying some crow to go with my serving of humble pie - because even though the plugin was only meant to help render FriendFeed a little more cleanly - it stepped on some other pages toes.

Here are the take-aways:

1. Those companies in Tech using social media to talk with their customers are very savvy.
2. Social media used in this fashion creates a very warm customer experience.
3. I should quit thinking I know everything about technology just because I’m in technology - and be a little more humble when instructed to do something by the official semi-official Mozilla FireFox Twitter Technical Support Account.

… it was a plug-in … come on cut me some slack!

So I’m changing my default browser back to FF3 to look for some more flaws… I know, great attitude right? Well, now I have @firefox_answers.

This weekend, the weekend before our celebrations begin in honor of our independence here in America, I found a lost feeling I had somewhat forgotten.

This weekend started on Friday much like any other, but instead of coming home to a rushed spouse and quick peck on the lips as she darted off to class, instead I came home to a wife and child eagerly welcoming me to the dinner table.  You see, this has not be the norm in my household for over a year now, and it seems odd to see this type of event now that I have grown accustomed to the distance.

We proceed to finish our dinner. After dinner we, as a family, lounged all over each other on our over-sized leather sofa while watching a wonderfully fantastic adventure, nibbling on popcorn and sipping a drink of our choice. The movie offered some scares and wows, each offering my wife and I opportunities to smile a smile of knowing love at each other only parents might know.

Friday soon passed, and Saturday morning came as usual: My wife running off to school and my daughter running into to use me as her ad hoc jungle gym. After lounging for a bit, my daughter and I managed to find our way to a friend’s wedding where my we enjoyed many smiles and excellent food. We came home to find our cozy beds and sweet dreams, to awake the next morning.

I was greeted by the banging of my daughter on our bedroom door; this has become the norm in lieu of a doorbell, I suppose. The family readied for church and had a wonderful time taking in a great lesson on patience. After service we found ourselves in the typical rush, ironically as it would seem. One might wonder if we actually paid attention.

After lunch, we parted ways as my wife made the 2 hour round trip to pick-up our monster-, aahumm, mother-in-law. I tidied up the house a bit.

At around 6 pm, we toddled on over to something our church was putting on called the “County Fair”, filled with carnival rides, great music, and free hot dogs! Several thousand people were there enjoying the festivities, and parents and teenagers alike were braving the lengthy lines in order to step onto a ride or two.

We managed to find our way through the crowds, and even met some friends and exchanged smiles and handshakes.

As nightfall began to close in, we found our way to a plush, grassy hilltop in preparation of the coming fireworks. And soon they started; booms and thunder ensued. We snuggled close to one another and covered our heads with blankets as the rain began to sprinkle our foreheads.

And in that instant, we found something digital mediums have subtly offered and still attempt to provide - a connection. It was a weekend full of emotion, both good and bad; a weekend of connections - of relationships.

You see, the digital divide is in truth just that. We have allowed ourselves to succumb to the lure of efficiency and mobility. And yes response-time, or up-time, or whatever “-time” you may want might be markedly improved. However, what I would offer is it might have come at the expense of plain ole’ quality time.

Twitter - check! FriendFeed - check!, BlackBerry - check! iPod Touch - check!, GPS navigation system - check! overly-connected - check!

Tonight I traded the noise on the net for the screams of excitement in the crowd of fair-goers; Tonight I traded the dim glow of my computer screen for the explosion of fireworks against the night sky; Tonight I found out that being disconnected is where true connectivity begins.

In the quick pauses between thunderous explosions and nibbles of cotton candy an experience is reborn anew, the human connection.

So what’s so great about all of these social media platforms like FriendFeed, Twitter, etc.? Back at the beginning of April, I signed up for a FriendFeed account (ChangeForge). I decided to join the experiment first hand to see what’s it’s all about.

Well, to be truthful, it seems like I’ve been subscribed much longer than just 2 months.

Scoble wrote a post about news v. noise (link). The premise was a simple question of whether you enjoy information from 1 of 2 sources: 

1) news, an organized stream of information from “reputable sources”, or

2) noise, the chatter in the blogosphere.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I enjoy the former more than the latter, BUT I have come to learn that social media sites and meta-aggregators are wonderful ways to find new content that I would never have found otherwise.

Think of it… you are 1 person trying to find things interesting through traditional media outlets, various e-mails, or you might even be using some sights like MySpace or FaceBook already.

So what would something like FriendFeed or Twitter bring to the table?

Think of this… you now have dozens or hundreds of individuals combing the Internet for things you enjoy and posting links back to their source. This is the beautiful thing I have come to love about FriendFeed or Twitter.

These sites do not give you that 1-on-1 feel like an Instant Messaging client might, but you can gain some wonderful links to new information, and that branch can take you to many other sources of information. It’s almost as if you are becoming part of the root system of a large tree seeking more and more sources of minerals and water.

Social Media is not without its issues; it does tend to be a little “high school” in that users tend to become incensed at the drop of the hat, it seems. It is also my opinion you need a program like AlertThingy, TWhirl, or Feedalizer to keep a little more interactive feel.

Nonetheless, it is a bold new frontier I have not regretted becoming part of. I am still refining who I follow, but this practice is, and should be, part of any evolution. Give it a try, and dive in.

Ken Stewart’s blog, ChangeForge.com, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology. Ken is also the Director of Technology at Kearns Business Solutions.

In a past post, Is FriendFeed the feed for me?, I started a little experiment to aggregate all of my various [tag]social media[/tag] traffic. It has been an interesting experiment, and I must admit I am somewhere in the middle of being completely irritated and completely thrilled at how useful the offering has been.

I’m not a big fan of the layout, but there are some tweaks I could use to help with that if I wanted to go to the trouble (e.g. [tag]Firefox[/tag] and [tag]GreaseMonkey[/tag]). However, I like to keep things as simple as possible (shhh, don’t tell the people I work with I said that).

The interface itself is a little bare to me, and it is a bit strange to keep up with the information, but it is certainly much better than going to every single other feed right? Well, not exactly … I still do that quite a bit to - mainly because I like the presentation on the host site much better. This is even true in my [tag]RSS[/tag] reader as well.

I would venture to guess, there are quite a few people that consume their social media this way, that is scan all of the information and remove what you are not interested in and then prepare your meal of information for the night.

So after using FriendFeed for a little while, I noticed a majority of the traffic were tweets from Twitter. For those of you not familiar with [tag]Twitter[/tag], it is simply a way to be just a little more hyper-connected. A [tag]tweet[/tag] is a post of 140 words or less updating those who “follow” you (friends) what you are up to and what you are thinking.

Needless to say, I decided to expand my base a bit, and signed up for a Twitter account. With all of the traffic on Twitter, I needed a real time client, like an Instant Messaging client. [tag]GoogleTalk[/tag] was supposed to fit the bill, but come to find out, there are evidently some issues with trying to use GoogleTalk with a hosted domain… and I really didn’t want to spend more than a few minutes figuring that out. Just too many other things going on.

I kept seeing alerts posted on [tag]FriendFeed[/tag] called [tag]AlertThingy[/tag]. Come to find out, AlertThingy was created using FriendFeed’s own API for managing the updates that come through FF in a desktop client format. An added benefit was that I can also interact with Twitter. How’s that for good timing.

I just installed this tonight, and have found it easy to setup and configure. Now the trick is whether I will be able to keep better track of the activity going on in these various mediums.

I’ll keep you posted, and I would love to hear your comments…

Do you find yourself wondering if you have too many sites to go to in order to keep up with what’s going on? RSS readers, Twitter, Flickr, MySpace, FaceBook, and the list goes on and on (and on)…

As a continuation of yesterday’s post Are we too connected to social media? I asked some fairly open ended questions. This all started when I read a post over at Dan’s blog (BizTechTalk) regarding meta-meta-aggregators. For those of you just tuning in, that’s a tool that crawls all of your social media sites and pulls them back together in a single portal or allows you to atleast create vectors of usable information rather than trying to sift through the static of the Internet.

As fate would have it, Scoble strikes again… and talks on FriendFeed.com. As it turns out, someone already had this bright idea (and they evidently use to work at Google - why am I not surprised?).

I have subscribed to FriendFeed (http://friendfeed.com/changeforge), and I’ll keep you all posted on how it goes. With all of these social media channels in this land grab for subscribers there has to be some players in the space to help orchestrate the static. Let’s see if FriendFeed can do it.