Deb's SM Survey:

I had a great time at PodCamp Boston 2 last weekend. It’s taken me this long to get my thoughts in order because I didn’t want to lug a laptop along and took my notes the old-fashioned way (paper and pencil).

It turns out that Saturday I spent more time attending general social media marketing panels, while Sunday I focused more on the arts and creative side. Scott Monty’s “Web 2.0 tools you can use” panel introduced me to some cool tools I will have to check out, including TrailFire (which annotates a trail of webpages to tell a story or provide context) as well as the centralized phone number and voice mail application Grand Central whose services I’m sure will be part of the future of communication.

The session on virtual worlds and gaming turned into a group discussion when the scheduled speaker didn’t show, but I still learned about the web-based virtual worlds Metaplace and whirled. Metaplace, as a HTML-based game, has URLs for objects and can have embedded RSS feeds and other features. Web-based worlds may be easier for people to access (need less computing power) and to use.

C. C. Chapman and Mitch Joel shared their “Tips of the Social Media Trade,” including many Google tools. The most valuable lesson for me: “Don’t be afraid to Mark All as Read” in the feed reader and start clean. Also don’t forget Technorati for searches, del.icio.us for research and iTunes for podcasts. To build community, we should help each other via measures like writing iTunes reviews for podcasts that we like, adding blogs we like to our blogroll, etc.

Finally, Chris Penn’s session described the four levels of people who are interested in a site — visitors, listeners, subscribers, and evangelists – with some tips on how to find them and keep them interested. Keep it simple and provide multiple ways for them to get information are two of the principles.

Tomorrow I’ll continue with my notes on the creative side of Podcamp. Thanks to the organizers and the sponsors for making this great event possible!

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I’m still in the “play around” stage on Facebook. At this writing I have 18 friends, a few from college, many from current interests and one from high school (she found me after moving to Boston and we’ve hung out a couple of times). So I’m having fun. I enjoy the clean, crisp aesthetics (especially compared to the literal bells, whistles and flashing lights of MySpace). But with all the new applications, clutter is beginning to seep in. My condo has enough clutter; I’d like to avoid virtual clutter.

I have a movie rating/sharing app, a music listening/rating app, the causes app, the Twitter app somewhere, and probably a couple that are sparsely populated but will begin to annoy me as I add more content. If another must-have app comes along, something’s gonna have to go (I don’t match movie tastes with any of my friends anyway…)

Of course, as the population of Facebook users broadens, users’ needs will expand. Comedian and commentator Baratunde Thurston laid out many of his complaints and his wish list of Facebook features in August.

I really want the ability to block applications rated as “stupid” that Baratunde mentions.

There are the everyday trials and tribulations of using juggling personal and professional contacts on Facebook that many of us have faced or will face soon. Then there’s using it as a personal promotional tool as Baratunde does.

Finally, there’s using Facebook as a marketing arena. With it’s vast amount of personal data and active groups, there are many ways to reach a targeted population on Facebook, but as with all “social media” marketing, the approach and tone of the conversation are important. Many have written far more eloquently than I possibly could about Facebook marketing: a great place to start is Jeremiah Owyang’s blog entry from August on “What the Web Strategist should know about Facebook.”
(I’m behind on my RSS feeds again, but Jeremiah’s web strategist blog is a definite must read for anyone in the field.)

And look for me on Facebook. I’d love more friends.

I attended this morning’s Social Media breakfast, organized by Bryan Person.  Digital Influence Group hosted the event and their Chairman Larry Weber spoke briefly.  Larry is the author of Marketing to the Social Web.  I’m about 45% through the book and I recommend it highly to anyone interested in marketing or social media.

Larry spoke vividly about the changes coming in the marketing landscape. The current advertising industry strategy is out of balance.  He told a story about a pharmaceutical company with a $50 million advertising budget for an MS drug that was getting little return for its ad buys in magazines.  Based on the relatively small number of people diagnosed with MS each year, a more efficient strategy would be to spend $2 million on a well-designed online community where MS patients could share their experiences and treatments. (The remaining $48 million “could be given to charity,” he added.)

He sees the current state of the web as the “emotive web,” a phase that started six months ago and focuses on visual content, interactivity, and emotional messages.  Marketing can work well within this framework.

The influence of bloggers will continue to increase, he believes.  Blogging is best done from the bottom up at a company, not by the CEO.  And as contextual search and social search become more important, Google may lose ground to whichever tool can handle those tasks most effectively.  Meanwhile, traditional advertising such as television ads will decrease as more advertising moves to the web.  Social media marketing will soon become a necessity.