As usual, Doc Searls has helped me clarify something that’s been bothering me lately.

Despite the fact that Hammock Inc. uses, and will continue to use, the term “social media marketing” to describe aspects of the services we offer clients, I’m expecting a major “bust” in the prefix “social-” in a couple of years.

My problem with the word “social-” in the context of online marketing and media is the same as my problem with the term “Web 2.0″: When something means anything, then it means nothing.

Personally, I prefer the terms “conversational media” or “conversation media” over the term “social media.” Conversation implies communication among individuals. To me, “conversation” captures the tools individuals now have to express themselves online: everything from blogs to photo-sharing and book-marking. I think the word “social” implies (at least to the marketers and media companies) that new forms of self-expression platforms are merely “the next” iteration of “audience” — they miss the transformative nature of individuals (customers) who are equal players in the marketplace.

Doc Searls is interested in this phenomenon as part of his work involving the concept of “vendor relationship management” — a mirror concept to the notion of “customer relationship management,” in which the buyer is empowered with equivalent tools and knowledge to that of the seller — and who, one day, will be able to leverage that knowledge in the marketplace.

Here’s the “quote of the day” from Doc:

“One more thing, and this is personal too. I am not anybody’s “capital.” You or your company may call me an “asset” or think you have “acquired” me, or “own” me as a customer. But I am and wish to remain a free, sovereign and independent agent of my own soul. There is no price on that. But there is far more value in it than anything you can measure with the economics of transaction alone.

If you’re not following this, don’t worry. One day, you will. But by then, the whole social-hypen thing will be a quaint notion from the early 2000s.

Via inquisitr.com, I learned that something called Yahoo! Glue has launched. According to Duncan Riley, Yahoo! says Glue was tested in India and was so successful, the U.S. version has been cranked up. I only mention this because last week I mentioned another product called Glue — watch this video to see what it does. Don’t confuse the two glues. The Yahoo! one is less than impressive upon my first glance (but then, I’m not a user of the service it appears to be knocking off.) On the other hand, as I mentioned in my previous post, I’m finding that my early sniffing of Glue (from the company, Adpaptive Blue) is making me high on it — and now there’s an iPhone App version.

I especially like Adpative Blue’s Glue because I finally get to explain what the term “semantic web” means with an easy-to-understand example of a service that begins to fulfill the long-held promise of that concept. While I mentioned it in my earlier post, I plan on posting a demo later to explain what “semantics” (in this use of the word) are all about.

Admittedly, I sign up for lots of web “social media” services. But I don’t sign up on far more than those I do. Sometimes I’m asked how I decide what shiny new web thing to register on.

Here’s how: I have to answer “yes” to at least two of the following questions.

Do I respect the judgement of someone recommending the site?
Is it something that seems “new” and not merely another version of something I already do?
If it is another version of something I already do, is there a compelling reason to have an alternative?
Is it something that relates specifically to a unique passion I have?
Is it something that challenges me to think in a new way?
Is it something that I believe will be of benefit — or perhaps, threat — to the clients I work with?
Is it something unique and different, but simple enough to be understood by people who aren’t geeks?

Here are a couple of things I’ve started playing with recently:

Glue: I’m actually very intrigued by the concept of Glue and believe it gives a glimpse of “what’s next” in the type of “social web use” I find most fascinating. Like “networking” sites, it utilizes the concept of “following” and “followers.” However, with Glue, you don’t go to a specific URL to check in with the actions and opinions of your friends — You discover them whenever you land on a web page about a book, movie, songs, TV shows, wines, stocks and gadgets any of your friends like, or merely have viewed. See, Glue is not a website, rather it is a Firefox “add-on.” Some fascinating things about the service: The item, a book for example, can be visited by one of your friends on any number of websites — Amazon.com, Powells, BN.com — doesn’t matter. When you land on any number of sites that sell the same title, your friend’s avatar shows up — a nice semantic trick. Like any networking thing, the service is more helpful the more people you know sign up. I don’t know yet, but it also may get a bit noisy when you start following too many. And as with any social networking service, you may want to follow different people for unique reasons — i.e., you may value someones taste in books, but not stocks or wines. However, those issues won’t become clear until enough people use it. Before signing up, I recommend you watch this screencast that does a great job demo’ing Glue. If you use Glue, follow me — I’m “rexhammock” there.

Loopt: Back in 2005, there was a company called Dodgeball that got acqhired by Google (actually, it was the transaction that inspired the term acqhire.) The concept had something to do with your mobile phone serving as a means for you discoverinh others you may know who are nearby. As I had neither the desire nor device to use the service, I decided it made no sense. (From the support they’ve given it, apparently Google didn’t either.) However, as I’ve become more fascinated with GPS-enabled devices, I’ve become a bit more warm to the possibility of having something that might alert me to an awareness of friends (or enemies, for that matter) who may be close-by. Loopt is sorta like that — with additional bells and whistles you can learn about here. I’ve just signed on.

Something common about both of these services. They both enable “passive” web activities — visiting a website, for example — to be social gestures. Glue, for example, doesn’t even require a user to “bookmark” something to share it — you just visit it. And Loopt doesn’t even require that. You just click an App button on your iPhone and your posse knows where you are. If Twitter is “micro-blogging,” then these services offer their users the opportunity to do some “Chance Gardner* blogging.”

*One of my favorite movie characters of all time. Chance Gardner is deemed brilliant by others — merely by his being there.

[Note: I now (see comments) realize that the feature being reported today is not the two-week old one I thought it was, but a new, very similar feature that allows you to point to an exact timestamp on a YouTube video.]

When I saw on my RSS newsreader this morning that TechMeme was pointing to a story on TechCrunch about YouTube enabling users to change the “time code” parameter on embedded videos*, I thought the feed was messed up. Granted, I’ve started focusing most of my tech-blog watching to the weekends, but I swear that news sounds familiar.

Oh, wait, now I remember: Two weeks ago the feature was reported by the Google Operating System blog and spent several hours on Techmeme. However, I assume that on that day it got lost in all the stories about Web 2.0 companies laying off employees. (Not that RexBlog is where you should be getting your breaking tech news, but even I mentioned (and used) the time-stamp parameter setting feature on a post about Pacman Jones a couple of weeks ago.

Deja vu or not, it’s a nice feature.

By the way, here is a list of several ways you can adjust the parameters when you embed a YouTube video.

*Translation for the non-geekish: In other words, if you’d like to embed a video on your website or blog, but have the clip begin at a specific spot in the video rather than at the beginning, you can simply change a tiny bit of code to that “copy and past” stuff you use to embed it. If you’ve followed me this far, here’s the code you change: “#t=2m15s” ['m' and 's' mean seconds and minutes, so just change the numbers to the spot where you want the clip to begin]. Also, a work-around hack has been available for a long time using splicd.com.

Today, Dell’s Small & Media Business (SMB) online marketing group launched a Facebook “community and guide” (translation: page) designed to help educate small business owners on “how to harness the power of social media to reach and serve their customers.” Dell is calling the Facebook “community and guide” Social Media for Small Business.

According to Dell, the Facebook group/community/page will include:

Guides on how to use blogs, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.
Screencast introductions to social-media tools
A discussion board
Best-practice sharing including a featured small or medium business of the week
Deals and news from Dell Small and Medium Business

According to this post by J.J. Davis, “early adopters” — I guess that means fans — will receive $100 in Facebook ad credits.

Earlier this year, Visa launched the Visa Business Network application on Facebook.

[Note: Dell is an advertiser in a magazine published by Hammock Inc., however, I discovered this news via, well, Twitter. How else?]

Technorati Tags: dell, facebook, small business

Due partially to some Ike-related distribution glitches, but primarily to some panic buying on the part of locals, there is a gasoline shortage in Middle Tennessee. Many stations have plastic bags over pump hoses and those with supplies have lines of cars backed up for blocks. It has a very early 1970s gasoline embargo feel to it.

One thing Nashville has is a lot of active users of Twitter all over the region.

So about an hour ago, I suggested in a tweet that anyone who knows of a gasoline station with a supply, post it on Twitter (called a tweet) and to include the closest thing Twitter has to a “tag,” - a # , hashtag - #nashvillegas.

Here’s the result: A real-time, updated list of gasoline stations with gas:

Where is gas available in Middle Tennessee?

Sidenote: This Nashville phenomenon is a great study in the power of rumors to drive market-behavior. While gasoline is available all around us, the word-of-mouth engine is suggesting it will be days before our supplies are re-stocked, which leads, of course, to more panic buying.

During the days preceding the landfall of Hurricane Gustav, I pointed to an online community and wiki developed by individuals, many of whom were veterans of the post-Katrina online efforts building on their previous experience and information. That effort has now evolved into Hurricanes08.org and includes:

The Hurricane Information Center: A social network utilizing the Ning platform. The site is aggregating information and content from many sources, including Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and an array of news sources and RSS feeds.

HurricaneWiki.org: This wiki — a great model for any agency that needs to put together an easy-to-edit evolving repository of information — is based on the earlier Gustav wiki which built upon the work of earlier efforts like The KatrinaHelp wiki and TsunamiHelp.

The wiki has a growing list of directories of all types of Ike-related information including weather tracking services and lists of bloggers, Twitter-users, news-media and government agencies who are providing on-going coverage of the storm.

Hurricane tracking map widget
via Lockergnome.com’s
Inside WeatherBug Blog.

With natural disasters in the past, I have pointed to ways in which volunteers, individuals, aid organizations and the media have utilized the web to help communicate and coordinate their responses. As I’ve said before, my interest in this began with having family in costal regions in Florida and Alabama — along with my involvement with blogging and other collaborative “social” media. I’ve seen a lot of efforts in the past, but little pre-planning or coordination.

Already, groups are forming who are eager to utilize their past experience and the web-resources available. While I hope that competition will not lead to duplicative efforts, that’s one of the things that happens in these situations. Rather than worry about it, I recommend that everyone cooperate when they can — or do their own things when they can’t — just get over any urges that my crop up that your are competing and liberally link to each-other and mirror any information that is displayed anywhere. (Later: I’ve updated some information to correspond with name and link changes.)

In that vein, rather than collect any links here, I’m pointing elsewhere:

The Interdictr.com Wiki: (Needs a name change, quickly, however.)GustavWiki.com: From the community that sprung up around the Katrina weblog the intedictor (that at the time, I said changed my entire opinion of the Live Journal platform), a new website at the URL interdictr.com has evolved. The group has just set up a wiki (http://gustavwiki.com/wiki/Main_Page) to collect and share information about the storm. (The new wiki is based on the Katrina Help wiki.)

Wikipedia: As typical, Wikipedia’s best and worst is on display in a situation like this. If you click there, you’ll likely find a comprehensive collection of Gustav-related information. However, I just clicked there and for a few seconds, discovered some vandalism. As the day progresses, I predict some measures will be taken to raise the bar on who can make changes to the page.

The Gustav Information Center (Gustav08.ning.com): Springing up from some industrious volunteers is a site called the Gustav Informaion Center who are using the Ning platform. They, too, are pulling together content from most of the user-contributed corners of the Internet (Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, etc.).

I’ll add that two newspapers along the likely affected coastal area that have previously displayed savvy, even Pulitzer-prize-winning use of new media are the Mobile Press Register and, most notably, the New Orleans Times Picayune.

Already, the Times-Picauyune (NOLA.com) is the center of coverage for the New Orleans area. And in the Mobile area, AL.com/hurricane is tracking the news using approaches they’ve learned in previous hurricanes. (Sidenote: the Mobile and New Orleans papers are both owned by Advance Publications, the parent company of Conde Nast, et al)

For more links, check with any of the linked sites above.

Technorati Tags: gustav

A little less than an hour ago, I received a phone call from my 17-year-old son who is attending a month-long program at the University of Southern California. “There was just an earthquake” he said. “I’m okay,” he said. “It was legit.” I’m not sure exactly what the legit part was referencing. My mind was pausing on the “Okay” part. “Call Mom,” he said, “I gotta go.”

(If you have a 17-year-old son, you’ll recognize that phone call. “Hello, I’m alive, everything’s okay, gotta go.” It’s the same call he makes to us each night whenever he’s away from home. Earthquake or ordinary day, it works the same way.)

I would typically immediately tune into CNN when news like that breaks, but today I figured that Twitter would be the best place to monitor the breaking story — from the scene. MG Siegler explains what I mean in this post about how Twitter search (formerly, Summize) allows you to track people who are ‘tweeting’ about the earthquake.

For me, however, this is a case where it’s great to be following lots of specific people on Twitter, not just a key word — people I know (via Twitter) who live in LA and who thought first to let those who follow them via Twitter know their status.

It’s situations like this that help make Twitter easier and easier to explain.

You don’t need me to tell you that Seth Godin is a brilliant marketer. He sees marketing lessons in all of life’s journey. And because his lessons about marketing are shared with parable-like simplicity, even people like me can understand them — and be inspired.

Today, he’s having a little fun demonstrating how people will join “tribes” they think are exclusive. If you pre-order his new book, Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us (due out October 21), you can “join Seth’s new tribe.” But hurry, because, “Membership is numbered, with low numbers getting prestige, first dibs on various assets and bragging rights.”

Wait, I’ve heard of this network before: It’s Melin Mann’s award-winning startup concept, “FlockdUP” — the maverick network for thought-leaders.

Okay, Seth. I’ll play along. Since I would purchase your book anyway, I’m also signing up for your maverick network for marketing thought-leaders — the receipt for my pre-order is in the e-mail.

Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape (at age 22), Opsware and Ning (translation: the smartest guy in the room), is joining the board of FaceBook, according to TechCrunch.

Andreessen, of course, has a unique position in the history of the Internet. His entrepreneurial success is also well documented. However, it was not until he started blogging that I realized what a great thinker and writer — a communicator — he is. (Although, like others, he has slowed down his blogging recently.)

I hope Andreessen’s joining FaceBook’s board sends an “openness” message regarding the future of FaceBook. Andreessen’s company, Ning, offers a platform for setting up a FaceBook-like community for your club, church, cause or company. In the past, I have perceived Ning as competitive to what I thought the longterm plans of FaceBook were. Granted, I can understand how the two could be complimentary — FaceBook is focused on macro-community, Ning is focused on micro-community. Obviously, my understanding (translation: speculation) means nothing as Andreessen and Zuckerberg are the only two minds that really had to be melded on this.

Fortunately, because Andreessen blogs, we can understand a little of how his mind works regarding the ways in which social platforms need to work together. On May 14, for example, he wrote about Ning’s integration of two “social” initiatives from Google, Open Social and Friend Connect. (They also support other initiatives like “Open ID.”)

Here’s a quote from that May 14th post:

“From a strategy standpoint, we want to enable maximum flow both into and out of Ning networks and the rest of the web. It should be as easy as possible for users to get from elsewhere on the web into a Ning network, and likewise as easy as possible to flow from a Ning network to anywhere else on the web — and ideally, while taking their social context with them. We think this makes strategic sense for two key reasons:

First, it’s good for users, and whatever is good for users is good for a service like Ning. We think that’s obvious.

Second, you don’t get lots of flow into anything on the web without having lots of flow out to the broader web.

Having someone on FaceBook’s board who advocates that point of view is a good thing for FaceBook — and the rest of us who develop tools and content designed to build community.

A comment on comments: Yesterday, I wrote the following on Twitter:

“FriendFeed, Twitter, Seesmic et al, are pointing in the direction of something. They aren’t the destination.”

Because everything I post on Twitter (and other places) is mirrored on FriendFeed, the “tweet” appeared there at the same time.

If you look at the comments following that FriendFeed post, you’ll note that my friend (and I don’t mean that just because we said so on FaceBook) Dave Winer commented that he, “Totally agree(d) with this.”

Because so many people have learned that it’s important to listen to Dave (even when they disagree with him) his FriendFeed comment about my “tweet” led to a robust disussion that still lingers 17 hours later.

Which leads me to the topic of comments: A small group of the people who read this blog are currently obsessed with trying to understand where “comments” fit into conversational media. Even those of us who think we at least have a grasp of social media — who know its role in de-centralizing “content” — are fascinated (and some, upset) that comments on our blogs are now becoming de-centralized.

It fascinates me that some bloggers, who more often than not, are using their blog to comment on items they read elsewhere, are becoming upset that comments about their posts are taking place elsewhere.

As for me, I love that comments are finally being recognized as the treasure they are.

I don’t care where the conversation takes place. I want to understand it and embrace it.

Why I find all of this fascinating: You know that kid who loves tearing apart physical things to understand how they work. The one who can actually put the stuff he or she tears apart back together again. “She should be an engineer when she grows up,” people will say about that kid.

I wasn’t that kid.

But looking back, I was obsessed with tearing apart virtual things to understand how they work. I was never interested in how my television worked, but I was extremely curious about how programs were written and produced. I was never really that interested in printing presses, but I can’t remember a time I didn’t wonder about how reporters gathered news and editorial decisions were made. I was also fascinated with what today I’d call group dynamics and how teams and clubs and cliques came together and grew or fell apart. I was an organizer of groups and a conversation “moderator” decades before I even realized that groups and conversation need to be organized and moderated. I was fascinated with why fans become fans and what “loyalty” is all about. I was that kid.

For almost 20 years (back to the CompuServe days) the online world has provided me (and many others like me) with an amazing laboratory in which we get to tear apart the flow of information and the creation of conversation and community in an attempt to understand how they work. For some of us, that’s like being a kid in a, well, info-candy shop.

I’ll admit. I’m not merely doing this for fun. I have a business that allows me to apply what I learn in this laboratory to improve our internal conversations and community — and to incorporate what we learn into improving and enhancing the products and services we sell. But, I think it’s also apparent that I still have a child-like curiousity about the ways in which people use technology to share with one-another and to spread information — and create community.

The most important thing I’ve learned is this: It’s not about the technology. I know so many people who are “afraid” of something because they think it’s “technology.” Frankly, technology developers don’t help things by creating products that are driven by features and functions than by ease-of-use. It still amazes me that after 30 years, so many professional marketers don’t understand why Apple has a cult following. “Cool” is what marketers think Apple is all about. “Not corporate” perhaps, you know, that I’m a Mac, I’m a PC thing, perhaps. As a Mac-tard since 1984, I’ll tell you why Apple has a cult following. They make products for people who don’t give a rip about technology. They make products for users. And even though they don’t say it anymore, their products are for the “rest of us” who don’t really care how the technology works, we just want the technology to disappear so we can listen, read, write, create, share, buy, sell, etc.

I’m obsessed with what’s taking place here. But I’m obsessed as a user and “content” creator and “community” builder and participant.

That’s why I’m such a geek.

[Photo: cocoen via Flickr.]

The Important Part: Despite the fact most people have only been using e-mail for the past 15 years, it has become a dominant channel of business communication — and definitely the most mis-used. A couple of interesting thoughts on e-mail have hit my radar in the past 24 hours. First, this check-list from Seth Godin with some practical (and humorous) considerations you should take before hitting that send button. Second, (via a Twitter ‘tweet’ from Steve Rubel) I saw these blog posts by Luis Suarez, a knowledge management expert at IBM, who is 14 weeks into an experiment of giving up business e-mail.

The Take Away: E-mail is not going away anytime soon, but the people who used e-mail before you ever heard of it are moving onto other methods of staying in touch with one-another. Some of this is generational - Facebook and text-messaging trump e-mail for those under 24. Some of this is frustration(al?) - an effort to reduce the noise-level that has resulted from spam and the ease some people have with hitting the send button. Your not going to moving on from e-mail anytime soon, but the next few years will see a significant evolution in how you use and manage e-mail.

Time posted: 7:57 am | permalink | categories: business, facebook, internet, twitter, web 2.0, web culture | no comments »