I forward and read my work mail in Gmail, and use Google Calendar (which still doesn’t recognize the concept of time zones) to manage my calendar. Now, anytime I get a calendar invitation sent to my work email that I try to accept, I’m greeted with the pleasant error message:

Google has a very helpful (can you read the sarcasm?) page that explains this. Is this a less-than-subtle nudge to force more people into Google Apps? Or just Google going off as usual and making technical decisions with no regards to actual usage or business (e.g., Wave)? Or both?

More important, is anybody aware of any workaround besides deleting all my alternate emails, creating new Google Calendar accounts for them and messing around with two different calendars?

The Personal Touch: Barney’s New York
No, we don’t spend a lot of money or time there (thank God!), but my wife is a big fan of their incredible perfume collection. When she visits, the salespeople remember her name. When she buys something, she will often get a nice handwritten note in the mail. These things, in addition to the nice smelling perfumes, keep her coming back.

It’s All About Who You Know: Cafe Madrid, Chelmsford
A dear friend of ours hosted a birthday get-together for my wife on Friday. I don’t often find myself in Chelmsford, MA, but I was impressed by what I found. In addition to the great service and great food (we ordered the tapas sampler and the paella, and they threw in the Spanish equivalent of antipasto while we waited), the husband of the owner of this small Spanish-American restaurant came by our table, offered to take our picture (above), and emailed it to me. That’s service! If you’re in Chelmsford, stop by for good food (and ask Larry, who’s also a dentist and a damn fine maker of sangria, if he’s figured out that photo printer yet).

Did You Find What You Were Looking For?: Home Depot
It was in-between snow storms, and with no immediate snow in the forecast. I thought for sure I’d be able to find three things quickly: rock salt, a snow shovel, and a snow pusher for my car. The only rock salt I found was in a 25 lb. bag: quite a bit more than i was looking for. The snow shovels were hiding in the garden center, nowhere near an entrance. Finally, the snow pusher was nowhere to be found. I walked out empty-handed (the shovels sucked). I tweeted my frustration, and got a reply from Home Depot. A simple and scripted one that asked “Did you find what you were looking for?,” but it was enough (for now) to know that they at least saw my tweet (now do something about it). What can I say; I’m easy!

Know When To Say Yes: Verizon
On a whim, I wandered into my local Verizon store to complain about my mobile phone, the LG Voyager, which has gotten scratched to hell and was prone to shutting off for no good reason. No questions asked, they gave me a new phone, and found the right cover to prevent more scratching. I was prepared to give them Hell, talk them down contract price-wise, but I was so disarmed I didn’t even bother asking about getting cheaper service (that WILL come soon though, trust me, especially with $40 all you can eat data+voice plans out there).

Right Here, Right Now: Bank of America
I may sound like a total shill here, as these are brands that can evoke very strong negative reactions in people, but I have nothing but good things to say about my Bank of America customer service experience. I left my card in an ATM and got a replacement card within 15 minutes of noticing it. Bank of America succeeds by having processes in place to deal with a LOT of contingencies, and by being available to me almost all the time. The training they must give doesn’t always sink in right away, but my experience has been much more positive than negative.

Okay, so what are some examples of not giving me the personal touch that I need?

Ignorance Ain’t Bliss: ANHosting/MidPhase
This company, the soon to be former hosting provider for this blog, has BIG problems. First of all, they have a brand problem, as I can’t even really tell you what the company’s real name is. Second, they have serious downtime issues. Finally, their customer service doesn’t handle escalations appropriately, or at all. I can’t get beyond a level 2ish technician to a business-level person who can really explain all the downtime that my site has gotten. Finally, they just don’t give a rat’s ass about ANYTHING online–they won’t engage, period. Ironic (if not entirely unusual, unfortunately) for an ONLINE HOSTING provider, no?

We Are Always Right, Except When We’re Right: Apple
I know, I already went off on Apple (and the next two companies) on the SocialSphere blog, but it bears restating here. Apple does a LOT of things right, and whoever on NPR who recently said they’d rather have an Apple employee dress them than a Microsoft one is absolutely right, but Apple and Steve Jobs are NOT infallible, and they run an incredibly old school marketing program for such a hip company. I would appreciate Apple much more if I felt like it listened to me, even if it’s to say that they wouldn’t let me chose their clothes, let alone their software improvements.

Ignore The Man Behind The Curtain: Google
When customer support for any other company takes more than 72 work hours to address a complete failure of their product, you’d move on. When the company is Google and the product is AdWords, you don’t have many other viable options, so you take it. But you don’t forget.

Crowdsourcing? What’s That?: Facebook
So you now have the largest online social network in the U.S. . Do you think to leverage that incredible customer base to help make better informed decisions? No, you plow ahead, ignorant of the will of the masses, and make dumbass decisions like Facebook Beacon, the New Facebook and the completely ridiculous new ToS (apparently they’ve rolled back the ToS).

Wednesday morning I head to Babson for a panel with the Babson Alumni Technology Council on social media and business. The panelists will be asked whether this represents a new paradigm or a fleeting trend. I think you know where I fall on the issue.

The audience of more than 120 people has been given the opportunity to ask questions in advance of the panel, which is an enormous help in preparing and level-setting. So here are my responses to these burning questions:

1. How do you sort through the amount of social media sites? I get 4-5 invitations per day to join a variety of sites like that. If I choose to attend, it is almost as if I need to spend all day on these sites.

   I think you’re asking about social networking sites specifically, and there are a lot of them out there, leading to what I call YASN syndrome – as in Yet Another Social Network. From a marketer’s or a content producer’s side, I’d think twice before trying to launch a private social network for your audience. From a consumer’s standpoint, I’d draw a line in the sand and focus on no more than three social networks. Right now, for me, they are Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

   If you’re talking more broadly about social media – sites slightly more focused on content versus community – then I’d say you need to find your “system.” You can do a Google Blog Search on the phrase “social media system” and get a TON of suggestions for how to absorb and contribute to the content that is produced by the people you care about.

2. Are we in a social media bubble that is going to explode the same as in 2001 with the dot com companies?

   The explosion that’s going on right now is MUCH bigger than the dot com bomb. Sure, you’re going to see companies fail and get absorbed, often for the same miscalculation that those in 2001 made: the wrong business plan. Yes, the hype cycle returned in 2003 and 2004, and was running strong for a few years, but it never reached the noise level of the late 90s. I’m not a finance guy, but I think valuations for all but a few exceptional companies (Google, Facebook, Apple) were much more reasonable in this last cycle.

   Despite the current economy, I’m optimistic about the potential for web 2.0 / slash 3.0 / slash social media business models. There are a few basic business trends that will drive innovation over the next few years I think. Here are a few:

   
   
   • Micro-everything. I’m an avid Twitter user, and I am not alone in saying that I’d be willing to pay a small amount to use Twitter, especially if it gave me access to advanced features. I already pay Flickr for a “pro” account, even though I’m nowhere near a professional photographer. Ad-supported free business models take a very long time to ramp up to profitability, and are extremely vulnerable to economic pressure. With all the content I have up on Flickr, and all the use I get out of it, I’m unlikely to leave the service anytime soon (although my content would stay up if I stopped paying). These aren’t exactly “micropayment” systems, which is also an interesting revenue model, but they’re very easy to swallow subscription costs. Get people hooked with the free version, but offer a compelling (but not a compulsory) reason to upgrade.
   • Hyper-everything. I’m thinking specifically about hyper-local, a term that’s being tossed around the publishing industry as one possible way to address diminishing readership due to the ubiquity of news. Dozens of papers, including the Boston Globe, are experimenting with this model of developing intensely local content for neighborhoods, squares, towns, etc. Thinking bigger, hyper-everything means the ability to dive deep into content, and ultimately implies some kind of semantic web, which is one of those “Web 3.0″ terms that gets bandied around quite a lot at nerd cocktail parties (which do happen, by the way).
   • Open-everything. The world is heading toward a future where identity and ownership are ubiquitous – where with a single login you are able to access, publish and manipulate content from an incredibly wide variety of sources. In the Web 1.0 world, you had to log in separately to different sites, which had no way of working together to achieve your goals.

     In the Web 2.0 world, you have to log into different sites still, but now – usually by sharing your identity information between the two sites – you can share the content and create your own incredibly banal or extremely useful mashups. And the access to information that web have in the Web 2.0 world is incredible. Look at the federal government: you can now go to USAspending.gov and get full access to where your money is being spent. The site publishes what is called an API, which in the spirit of openness allows you to programmatically extract the data and mash it up with other data and applications (such as mapping software). RSS readers are another example of openness – they let you “subscribe” to a web site’s content and view it inside your own special application, a content aggregator that makes it so much easier to consume information.

     While tens of thousands of sites have published APIs or made their content available for use, many of them require some form of authentication – typically a login and password. Passing this information between two applications can be challenging, and presents risks. In the Web 3.0 world, you’ll be able to use just a few different logins to gain access to hundreds of sites. Projects like OpenID, OAuth and others are looking to make logins a thing of the past. This is good news for many, but also comes with very important privacy implications.

   • Measure everything. Some more good news: social media is measurable! Sure, there’s very little consensus on how to do it yet, but it can be done, which is more than can be said for many traditional forms of marketing.
   • More Than Marketing! Sorry, I have to plug my blog. Finally, social media and Web 2.0 will be much more successful when they are applied not just inside the marketing function of an organization. If you don’t read Josh Bernoff, you should. He gives some great examples of how social computing can and should be applied to business strategy, product development, customer support and many other functions.
3. Are there any lessons for business in the recent gigantic success by the Obama campaign in internet fund raising?

   Yes. Again, I’ll have you do a Google Blog search exercise, this time for Obama “Web 2.0″ lessons. You also ought to read the SocialSphere blogs to get some sense of them. You should also check out Barack, Inc., a book co-authored by Barry Libert and Rick Faulk, who are chairman and CEO respectively for Boston-based Mzinga. Also, Esquire had a great article on David Plouffe, Obama’s campaign manager, and how he created the grassroots organization that helped him win.

4. I’ve heard from social experts that “not every business belongs in social media.” How does a business determine which sites are good for them to participate in and which not to?

   It is my humble opinion that every company belongs in social media – at one level or another. Don’t believe me? Do another exercise: google “social media examples” and look at the incredible lists of both B2B and B2C companies that are successfully engaging their customers, stakeholders and influencers through social media.

   So how do you get started? When I was heading up the social media practice at PR firm Topaz Partners, I came up with five levels of social media engagement. They are:

   
   
   1. Lurking. I don’t like the argument that “social media is so cheap there’s no reason you shouldn’t be doing it,” but I make an exception for monitoring – what I like to call lurking. There’s no excuse for not monitoring what’s being said about your brand and your people online. If you’re not using Google Alerts at the very least, then by God fire up your laptop right now and sign up for them right now! You do not want to have your brand caught up in a “groundswell,” or, at the other extreme, what some people have called a “social media shit storm,” at midnight on Friday and not be aware of it until Monday morning, like what happened to Motrin.
   2. Evaluating. Okay, now that you know what’s being said, the next challenge is to figure out what to do with it. Social media is measurable. Influence is measurable. Marketing efficacy is measurable, at least it’s a LOT more measurable than before. What should you respond to, and what shouldn’t you bother with? What outreach strategy will get you the most bang for your buck. There are a lot of companies out there that can help you devise the best strategy for how to proceed – how to decide how far down the social media rabbit hole you go: of course I think my current company is one of the better ones to do that! I joke about the rabbit hole, but only partly. There are some fundamental changes you’ll have to make to really be successful online. But then again, there are some fundamental changes you’re going to have to make if you want your company to survive the next few years too – and I happen to think you can kill two birds with one stone here.

   3. Conversing. The next level is joining the conversation. This takes time and effort, and probably some kind of dedicated community manager. You’re not creating your own community here, but you’re joining the conversation on other communities.
   4. Optimizing. Now that you’re measuring and conversing, you can start testing the efficacy of your conversations and content online. This is the optimizing level, which includes search engine optimization and search engine marketing, among other things.
   5. Creating. At this next level, you’re actually creating your own community and/or content. This is even more work, requiring a significant chunk of one person’s time, or a little bit of time from a small group of people.
5. It is very difficult to explain to C-level executives the impact that social sites can have to SEO and branding, among other things. How would you suggest approaching this challenge?

   You need to set some tangible goals, tie them to specific social media programs, and put some clear measurement mechanisms in place. I’d encourage you look at the slide show and presentation that HubSpot CEO Brian Halligan gave at the Social Media Breakfast a couple months ago. First, HubSpot understands marketing in the online world. He asks his marketing team to show him, in as little as three slides, a snapshot of their overall marketing program. Slide one is a bar chart showing web traffic to their site broken down by source on a month-by-month basis. Slide two is a pie chart breaking down referrals for the last month. Slide three is the marketing funnel chart that puts metrics in place that define visitors, prospects, leads, opportunities and customers – broken down by source by month. You can clearly see in these charts the positive impact that social media efforts have made.

   I’ll tell you from personal experience that getting a hit in a popular blog can often be incredibly more important than getting a hit in a major local or national daily or weekly, for instance. I can show you traffic numbers that compare site traffic after a USA Today mention with a TechCrunch mention—there’s no comparison.

   Now take that a few steps further—from traffic to leads to sales, and HubSpot will show you how even more niche social media properties can be even more effective when it comes to generating sales than TechCrunch! They share source-specific sales funnels that really highlight the value of social media to their business. Now, they sell inbound marketing software, not widgets, but this does translate well for both B2B and B2C.

6. Can you give examples of how companies have used these technologies internally to help bridge distributed groups, or improve internal support organizations?

   This is Boston, a huge biotech and pharma hub. The biotech industry is incredibly antisocial. But if you were paying attention at last year’s Enterprise 2.0 conference (and I encourage you to go to this), you would’ve seen dozens of examples of the use of wikis, blogs and other social sharing technologies for collaboration and support purposes. Pfizer has was is probably the third largest wiki behind Wikipedia and the CIA – yes they BOTH use wikis extensively! You won’t find the Pfizer wiki online—it’s only available on their intranet.

7. How are companies deciding which social networking sites to use in their marketing? And how they are deciding which tools to use (video, widgets, apps etc.)?

   Again I think it comes down to measurement first and foremost. There are dozens if not hundreds of tools out there that can help you focus your social media efforts. This is still relatively new territory, so there are a lot of companies out there testing the waters, and not every campaign is going to be successful. My advice is pick a tool that you have some level of comfort with, make sure you understand the written and unwritten rules of marketing with that tool, and then hit the ground running. Be transparent and responsive. Hire a community manager who can be your eyes and ears, and support that manager with internal and external resources.

8. How are businesses measuring the success of their social media marketing campaigns? What metrics are they using to measure performance?

   What metrics aren’t being used to track the success social media?

   Okay, first off, don’t limit yourself to social media marketing – that’s a loaded term anyway and it really shows the limited perspective that most companies are still taking on social media.

   Next, remember that although we’re asking you to think a little differently, and social media does have implications on how you run your business, the basic measures of business success have not changed, you just need to figure out a way to tie social media metrics to your traditional business metrics. Think in terms of an engagement latter or marketing funnel and your part of the way there.

   Finally, think outside the marketing box! Yes, you still need metrics like CPM, impressions, leads, sales, etc. But remember that social media has implications beyond marketing. Can you find a way to measure social media’s impact on improving customer satisfaction? lowering support costs? accelerating product development lifecycles?

Transparency and responsiveness are two hallmarks of social media and whatever current Web revision you claim to be operating in. Yet four of the most talked about companies in today’s tech sector practice very little of it. Is it time for the companies to change? Is it time for us to rethink the rules and standards that we like to apply to everyone? Or is it time for us to reevaluate our role models?

Read the entire article, and let me know if you agree!

Does this still work in today’s day and age? I guess the same can be asked of spam, and the inevitable answer is yes, it does. “He who blasts, lasts,” once joked a colleague of mine who ran direct marketing. Nevertheless, I and many others found Matt Bacak’s hard sell a little hard to swallow. His (social media-friendly, I might add) press release yesterday took every rule out of the 1995 Internet Marketing Playbook and ran with it. I haven’t seen so much hyperbole in one place since WrestleMania III back in 1987.

Now I’m told that Matt is a multi-millionaire, and probably has a lot of great techniques, but his credibility has been hurt a bit recently. This kind of blatant self-promotional, superlative-rich, content-free press release died back in 2002 along with sock puppet corporate mascots. And I should know—I’ve written plenty of press releases since 2002, and none of them have been anywhere near as bad as this one.

Press releases are designed to attract attention, and he did well at that. But can he execute on a strategy for responding to the criticism that’s cropped up all over the blogosphere and the Twitterverse?

I hope so. His supporters are speaking up, and he has come out of seclusion (he’s been teaching a class) to respond to at least one blogger (Media Pirate–you’ve got to scroll down a LOT to find his response). Here’s an excerpt:

I never suggested to my writer to have it even say that I am a twitter god or an expert in social media or to challenge anyone because I’m not. I am new to social media (as you can tell) and have a lot to learn. But, I am very good internet marketer and email marketer. I have over 300k subscribers to my online newsletter. That’s exactly what I teach my clients (email marketing and direct response marketing).

Kudos to Matt Bacaks for coming clean, fessing up, clarifying and apologizing (with just a little chest thumping on the side). Now, get to commenting on all those other blogs that may start to get some Google juice with your name… And think about revisiting your messaging and marketing strategy for the Web 2.0 world…

We got to talking about the history of Boston’s tech community—Adam has survived more than one downturn over the years—and then the conversation turned to how we are positioning ourselves for the downturn. After sharing how my company positions itself, he questioned, given the current economic slump and growing concerns over the viability of the many startups which have banked on low-revenue “if you build it they will come” business models, whether “web 2.0” is a term anybody will want to associate themselves with a year from now.

Then, on Tuesday, I presented to a class of Emerson students about social media and PR, and got asked to predict what would be hot in the next couple of years. Of course I said “Web 3.0,” which Wikipedia concisely describes as “the evolutionary stage of the Web that follows Web 2.0″—um, yeah, thanks! I like the way the conference organizers described it:

The Web 1.0 concept was simple: web pages linking to web pages. Then came Web 2.0 – a powerful movement from web pages to web applications. Web 2.0 applications have evolved into often slick viewports into proprietary or personal collections of information. This means they still primarily house data in silos inaccessible to and disconnected from the larger world, and most importantly, from each other.

But as we approach 2009, the clear outlines of the new web are forming. Some call this next generation the Semantic Web, but we think that term is confining, and so, instead, we refer to it as simply Web 3.0.

The new web is moving beyond connecting pages to interconnecting data objects, concepts, and things. Ultimately Web 3.0 is really about creating technology that more accurately mirrors how we see and think about the world around us.

So these are the key areas I think will see a lot of development over the next couple of years:

• Trust. Trust is one of two remaining economic scarcities in the Internet Economy—there’s just not much of it out there. Chris Brogan put it nicely: “Though a company like Microsoft spent millions and millions of advertising and marketing dollars trying to improve our perception of the brand, none of us gave a sh!t until Robert Scoble came along and put a human shape around their online and event presence for us.” The trust barrier will be solved by understanding how human “trust agents” (as Chris puts it) work, and by allowing us to layer “trustworthiness” over all of our online interactions (not just in search, but social networking, bookmarking, blogging, etc.)
• Attention. Attention is the other economic scarcity remaining. There are only 24 hours in the day, and we have to sleep for a good chunk of them. The competition for the rest of them is fierce. Applications that are smartest at competing for our attention—or at helping us understand what we should be paying attention to—will have a distinct advantage in the web 3.0 world.
• Agents. Chris Brogan talks of human trust agents, but digital agents will finally come back into the public’s view as well. I’m not talking about the old school “tickler” agent (“Hey, don’t forget you’ve got to pick the girls up from soccer practice tonight”), nor am I talking about Google Alerts (“You asked me to keep an eye out for blog posts mentioning ‘Web 3.0′, so here you go…”). It’s closer to the kind of capability you see in good contextual advertising (my favorite example of which is all the “Bacon Salt” ads I get on Facebook after I signed up as a fan of the bacon page), but it’s both cross-platform and cross functional. As just one small example, you tell it that you want to be kept abreast of upcoming social media events, and it checks Upcoming.org, Facebook, Evite, Meetup, etc. and shares with you the events it finds, allowing you to sign up for them through its own interface.
• RSS. I can’t tell you how wrong-headed so many interpretations of Forrester’s recent report are (Paul gets it right in this link). RSS is not dead. It’s simply buried so deep that most people don’t even know it’s there. But that doesn’t mean they’re not using it. Content syndication will be at the heart of web 3.0. It empowers almost everything I’ve been talking about in this post to some extent. Don’t sell it short. Look for ways to use it and build applications around it.
• Semantic Web. I’m sorry. I hate to use this term. It has such negativity surrounding it. But let’s put all that bias aside for a second, and ask ourselves a question: What if there was a way, for instance, that my blogging software could understand that what I was writing about—in plain English—was an event I was trying to promote, and could translate that information so that it could automatically be shared with Upcoming, Evite, Eventbrite, Facebook, etc.? Tell me that wouldn’t be cool. The AI behind something like that isn’t too far away—hell, the Turing Test is pretty close to being passed.

Am I missing anything?

[ADDED 30 OCT 2008 1:30PM]

YES! I’m missing something:

• OpenID! A conversation between myself, @RodBegbie, @al3x and @sbtodd on Twitter made me realize how important something like this will be to Web 3.0. If you assume that trust and interoperability will be at the heart of Web 3.0—go ahead, try to argue otherwise—then an idea like OpenID becomes critical. It provides a common identity platform for interoperability. YES, to quote Alex Payne, “It’s confusing for users and developers, it doesn’t bake security in, and it doesn’t solve a problem that non-geek users care about.” But it’s just confusing because nobody’s been able to explain it well. Security can presumably be fixed. And Like I said on Twitter, it might not solve a problem most non-geeks care about*, but down the road they might!

* THIS geek certainly cares about it. I am LIVID every time some sites password security mechanism forces me to create YET ANOTHER password that I will ultimately forget. And what about interoperability? To make that happen, you’ve got to give away some security. For instance, for a lot of the cool (not to mention necessary) Twitter apps, I need to share with them my Twitter username and password. Having a security layer on top that ultimately ensured that Twhirl doesn’t have to know my password, or that I didn’t forget the super-strict password that I had to create especially for one service, could ultimately make my life easier.

Here’s a quick 10-question test you can give your company/client to see how social media savvy the brand is:

SOCIAL MEDIA SAVVINESS SCORE

Score one point for each completely affirmative answer:

1. Web Traffic Test: Using Alexa, is traffic to your site trending up?
2. SEO Test: Searching for your brand on Google, is the first page of search results entirely positive or neutral in tone?
3. Blog Interactivity Test: Do you have a blog, and if so, are people commenting on it regularly?
4. Blog Authority Test: Using Technorati, do you have a registered blog, and does it have high authority?
5. Content Syndication Test: Does your blog or website have RSS feeds available?
6. Multimedia Content Test: Using YouTube, does your brand have its own channel set up, and is it being fed?
7. Social Bookmarking Test: Using Delicious or Digg, are pages from your blog or site being heavily bookmarked?
8. Brand Visibility Test: Do you have a branded presence (an account in your brand’s name or a well-known brand evangelist) on Twitter, and is it being updated regularly?
9. Social Networking Test: Does your brand have its own page or group on Facebook or MySpace?
10. Wiki Test: Does your brand or product have a Wikipedia entry?

Add up your YES answers—you have to answer YES to every part of multi-part questions like #3, #4, #6 and #8—to get a score between 0 and 10. Where do you stand?

• 10 – FTW! Great job! But make sure you’re using all your channels. Don’t join something just to be there.
• 8-9 – w00t! Your brand is social media savvy. People probably think that you get it. Make sure you’re using each channel effectively.
• 5-7 – HTH! You’ve got a good start on things, but are probably missing some important elements of your social media strategy. Maybe we can help?
• 3-4 – OMG! Where have you been? You need to get started. It’s not that hard. Really. Yes, it will take time, but it’s time well spent, both for your career and for your brand.
• 1-2 – WTF? Get yourself and your bosses trained on this stuff. NOW! The sky isn’t falling, YET, but you need to know this stuff!
• 0 – YT? Hello? Is this thing on? Wow… How’d you even find this post? Call me.