DISQUS

Good points, Chris. Having a big company's presence on Twitter handled by only one person is shortsighted (unless that company has only 1 product or 1 perspective to share or 1 customer or some other limiting factor.)

I talk a lot about the "reputation cloud" that a company creates through its online activities (or INactivities) here and in my new book, e-Riches 2.0, too.

You and your insights are referenced repeatedly, fyi!

Jack,
this is hilarious and clever.
let's talk about this on my podcast.
anissa has been asking me to schedule one together but i've been looking for the hook. here it is!
LOL.
Scott Fox

<abbr></abbr><abbr>Scott Fox, Author of Internet Richess last blog post..Just Released: The Best Instant Internet Business for You</abbr>

This is great stuff, Chris.

Even easier is to set up a free Google "Alert" that scours the web for you. The alerts will email you back any mentions it finds of your name, your company, your URL, etc..

These free alerts land right in your inbox. I find that they provide a lot of actionable info for almost zero additional work.

Hi Chris,
Very nice post.
We are on the same wavelength once again.
Just last week on my blog I posted "You're ALREADY the boss. It's just up to you to decide if you are going to act like it."
Of course, your development of the theme was much more thorough and entertaining!
Happy new year,
Scott

Good tips on speaking, Chris.
This sounds like the same plan that has yielded success for me as a speaker on online entrepreneurship topics, too. (except that I am way overdue on posting some video of me speaking on my Speaking page at ScottFox.com 0 thanks for the reminder!).

Social "proof" strikes again.

Assuming that the service can attain critical mass, this should be very useful, especially for traveling or parents who have recently relocated.
In fact, it strikes me as so useful that it will likely be absorbed into the culture like cell phones, email, or Google Maps itself. That will lead next generation parents (and babysitters) to wonder how we could ever have gotten along without it.
Crowd-sourced repair requests, playdate scheduling, and community-driven activities are natural extensions, too.

This is a nice theory but who needs the established media companies to incubate anything?

Entrepreneurs backed by the venture community have filled the gap just fine with plenty of promising startups.

Yes, the media companies should be doing it themselves (instead of hoping desperately that the Internet would somehow go away...) but they also have the luxury of being fast-followers and using their deep pockets to acquire the best startups.

My whole career has been based on (profitably) helping this transition. Media companies and startups need each other.

Market-based evolution at work.

Robert,

Sorry but I don’t buy this. Yes, you are trying to be constructive by giving some specific actionable suggestions to PR folks (big points for that) but isn’t the real problem here one of self-discipline on your side?

Having the whole blogosphere kissing your ass and desperately competing to get your attention is a blessing earned by your years of contribution to the community (as much as it may feel like a curse!).

If you don’t like all the attention, be more selective about the stories you cover. More importantly, turn off the faucet of incoming pitches entirely and do your own research.

PR works because it helps make a writer’s job easier. You’re (at least partially) pissed off at yourself here because you know that following leads fed by a PR firm is a lazy way to do research. Any of us who write/blog are occasionally guilty of taking the easy way by relying on PR pitches for new stories.

But many of the most innovative people and companies don’t have PR reps pushing material on you. Go find more of them independently like you often do (as in your recent posts about StackOverflow and Meebo).

That’s “Journalism 1.0”. I’m sure you remember it.

Scott Fox

Fascinating. Great material here for a 60 Minutes style investigative piece tracing unexpected uses of stock art across the web. I'm sure there would be some surprising anecdotes.

Fascinating. Great material here for a 60 Minutes style investigative piece tracing unexpected uses of stock art across the web. I'm sure there would be some surprising anecdotes.

Agreed, Chris. It's really amazing the number of little apps that have appeared to add functionality to Twitter. I find a new one almost every day.

No doubt that Twitter's strategy of open architecture has led to the development of the ecosytem you reference, which in turn keeps us all tied in that much tighter to Twitter despite it's now-you-see-it, now-you-don't SLAs.

Nice list, Jack. Thanks for compiling and sharing it.
Some good references here for my next book.

Also, my E-Commerce Success Blog is not strictly social media-focused but is full of helpful strategy and online marketing tips for entrepreneurs.
http://www.scottfoxblog.com

Have a great weekend everybody.

Badass!

Wow, Chris, that's quite a list.
Informative, detailed and actionable.
What are your thoughts on Squidoo? Did you not include it for strategic reasons or just because you had enough already?

People definitely care more about where you are located in the "real" world than I usually expect. I even catch myself often asking people "where" they work geographically.

Not disclosing your location seems to leave a hole in most peoples' mental maps of who you are.

And it's not only business cards that do this, I wrote a blog post back in March called "Web Marketing Newbie Mistake #1: Hiding Your Location."
[http://www.scottfox.com/2008/03/web-marketing-n.html]

It talks about the many good reasons that people do (unexpectedly) want to know where your business is based, and how web site owners should turn their About Us pages into an asset by using their location to attract customers.

Nice, timely post, Chris.

I agree with all the work remotely points made by other commenters, too.

Tim Ferris' coverage of the Results Only Work Environment (ROWE) at Best Buy validates much of this approach.

Also, I was just talking with Gary Vaynerchuk of Winelibrary.com video fame about "personal brands" on Thursday as an interview for my online radio show about Internet marketing.

He and I are both convinced that there is a "personal branding revolution" underway that offers major opportunities to anyone with expertise to share. They can do this independently or under a corporate umbrella as Scoble has proven.

The interview is up now here if anyone wants to hear how Gary V. has used online video to build an explosive personal brand online for himself with his wine-tasting videos: http://www.scottfox.com/blog_index.html
(or archived at scottfoxradio.com for later readers...)