DISQUS

This is not the first cyber war in any way or shape. My father was in the national security agency his entire career working against orchestrated "cyber" attacks from different countries. Going all the way to the USSR (pre break-up), there were routine electronic attacks.

Just because there are "invisible wars" going on that don't make the news doesn't make it the first attack. If we look at simple strategic placements of the first U.S. incursion into Iraq, we had frigates performing electronic warfare on a tactical level along with entire departments of government personnel using cyber warfare after 9-11.

It is a very simple realization to many U.S. citizens how fragile the economic platforms really are. If you know what domino to tip, you can cause a pretty massive cascading failure.

As a very fluent online communicator: how do you teach an master course in social media? If I were to log all the hours I spend every day absorbing, interpreting, and applying social media, I would have to challenge the course on a 10x level and simply pay hundreds of dollars on the credit.

This is of course also ironic in the fact that you simply cannot create coursework for something that changes every day. "could be self-taught." ???? as far as I know, 99.9% of social media is self-taught, working in the trenches and applying it to specific business models.

This is somewhat also ironic, because Andy has an advertisement running here for Full Sail university and an online marketing degree (which has a social media portion as well.)

Barry Hurd's last blog post..Social Media Audits - executives need to ask “Why?”

(thanks for the pointer to my policy collection)

Perhaps a chicken or the egg?

This is really a tricky legal issue, ranging from a whole range of terms of service, non-competes, non-disclosures, confidentiality, and everything in-between.

To draw some larger comparisons- when Robert Scoble left Microsoft he took a huge following with him. As we see more and more "social media celebrities" or simply spokespeople, we see a strange mix of technology, marketing, customer service, administrative, etc personnel who are now "speaking" on behalf of the company.

Having come from a f50 company and organizing a massive home office salesforce, this question also came into play when accounts (home phone numbers) became high value assets that were accidentally tied to the employees (some who left, taking numbers and calls with them.)

Great question.

I suggest it is something any employer looks at and identifies well before it becomes a crisis.

~Barry

I agree with you (and many others) on sharing opinion vs factual: but in one case from the Superbowl last night I highlighted on a blog article: "Cash4Gold Superbowl $2.7 million online reputation nightmare."

In today's digital age too many marketing types are zipping right into the field of insanity and failing to realize how different media elements connect. In some cases (like Cash4Gold), a commercial that could be rated by viewer opinion is instead being rated by consumer opinion and reviews off Google.

As more "sudden death" media channels begin to cross over, it will be really interesting to see how communication pros evolve or die.

I like the flat pricing system and being straight-forward about not being a free service from the get go.

I have been studying all these tools with a lot of attention the past twelve months. While I think the space of Visible Tech and Radian needs a lot more competitors and developed niche players (which I'm sure this will find one of those niches), the user interface is pretty rough right now. I hope that between beta and final that they spend a bit of effort on the navigation.

It will be interesting to let some of the trends collect and fall away. I can set aside the need for a pretty GUI if the results are good. My preliminary results look decent enough (but the twitter category seems to pull duplicates of the same tweets)

Kudos to Mukund, Brian, and the rest of the team for putting things together.

Yep.

I have to say that this Digg lawyer needs to study his law books again. Tortious interference is just a big word that has little to do here. If you read the description in the RCW (or even Wikipedia unfortunately) then you can see that rather than have 1 point to prove, there are five points that must be proven.

In this case, Digg has questionable complaint on all five points. Ouch. That means the other side has a 5 to 1 defense ration. Ouch, ouch, ouch.

I agree with you Chris... there are far deeper things needing to be developed with relationships and understanding.

However it is shocking to see the number of relationship based accounts in my peer-network that have been subjected to broadside after broadside because of the relationship.

Relationships really need to make sure they are being supported with an in-depth communication, as many stakeholders are having to support decisions based on numbers. That means that there are contaminated decision makers looking at budgets and results across departments and unfortunately you may bot have a relationship with the right person.

Good situational review.

I often fall on the line of PR / Social Media pro, which is really developing into a very strong niche in the PR / Comm industry.

In the northwest (especially in Seattle), most of the PR groups and many advertising agencies have exactly one person who "gets it" and they often only know the strategic side, and have little tactical support from the team understanding.

Your statement about billable hours is entirely correct, as my core team spends roughly 2/3 of our time educating ourselves. With conferences like TechCrunch 50 and Demo08, having a 25+ new companies that may influence the social media sphere becomes a significant task. In fact, just reading a site in detail (like Mashable.com) and wrapping your head around the new information is a full-time job.

Keep up the good writing.

~Barry

I agree Alister... I have been using Buddypress tied to WP for about a year and a half now and would love to see that side project come to fruition.

However Wordpress as a singular blog platform can actually utilize many plugins to create a full social network, check out http://www.stuff.yellowswordfish.com/simplepres... for a wonderful plugin. From my perspective: the Wordpress platform's main strength is in the added functionality of thousands of plugins not included in the main platform.

Edelman seems to have a knack for being “transparent” only in certain regards. It changes the way a social group works when it is contaminated by paid elements.

Imagine that ten people were wearing “I was paid $2k to be here” on a t-shirt at the event. When compensation comes into the mix from a PR company, it means a free / friendly / social event is attempting to be manipulated by a PR firm.

Not having been there- I am sure that the conversation was good on other points, Mike and the items being talked about are good discussion items. I’m sure his presence drew in a bigger crowd.

I am very interested why Edelman decided to spend money flying out celebrity bloggers, when they could have promoted the event here and drawn a much bigger crowd (including many local celebrity bloggers) who live in the Puget Sound area. Even if you just had an intern call around and invite the top 100 industry relevant bloggers here… it would have been attended by a bunch who didn’t know it was happening.

I didn't paint RipOffReport negatively: just stated what it does.

I'm not even sure RipOffReport has countrywide on it (I didn't mention, nor check) - I just know that RipOffReport is another site "dedicated to promoting company mistakes" and in their specific case "profiting from promoting company mistakes"

RipOffReport is merely an aggregation point of information that ranks well for search results. Dozens (hundreds or thousands) of sites also rank for such like-minded complaints, but very few have a profit model developed around it.

As for Countrywide... they have thousands of complaints all over the web. I do think it is ironic that someone who likes RipOffReport questions another site's ability to debate and analyze whether or not the site is itself - a Ripoff (according to the SEOmoz article, there are a lot of companies who have valid enough complaints to drag them into court.)

No Jack, not that it is too cheap- but that it is actually expensive on a larger scale. 100 x $59 = $5900.

The price point is only expensive in the idea that the value statement as provided in the available info online really isn't there for Clearspace and doesn't tie in the tool and social set that smaller companies need. For smaller companies to see the value add I really think more ground level applications that tie into the business needs of the smaller sized company.

Dave, this isn't a comprehensive list of social platforms. There are over 200 last I wrote up a list. I don't think simply putting that much information in one place doesn't add credibility to the list, it just adds confusion and clutter.

I also don't usually cover services that have fairly insane pricing models such as Clearspace @ $59/user/year. At that rate a hundred person community is simply a self-funding company by itself.

I spent about eight years working at the GTE/Verizon/Idearc beast... and think that all the people who truly get the online space left the company for better things a long time ago.

The Idearc portion of the company (the interactive/online side) has been having severe problems since 2005-06. Stock has gone from $38 to $4. As of June 2nd, they even appointed a new CEO - Scott W. Klein.

There are already multiple "Verizon Sucks" types of sites on the net. Facebook having one or more is just another sign of dwindling times.

As a phone and directory company, Verizon/Idearc is not prepared to handle the high-speed change and evolution of media. Unfortunately- they have done the only thing they can do, jump on Facebook and hope the lifeboat keeps them afloat.

Kathie- it was good chatting with you too. Please feel free to link to any of my articles here.

Sachendra- I think everyone needs a profile "makeover", including me. One of the reasons I wrote this is to help keep my own "multiple personality" disorder under control on the 500+ sites I have a profile on. Hopefully no one else has that many to deal with, but everyone should have a few gems out there that has the "best of who they are" on it.

Thanks Aurelius, always giving it a shot. ;)

Charles, I'll take a look at Virtudex. Hadn't seen that one before.

Eric- Funny you should mention the 2.0 to 3.0 conversion already happening. I'm amazed how often most adopters get "hung up" on a catch-phrase that has little tangible difference. It will be interesting to see how many marketers hold on to ideas as they go through change.

Steve- You can definitely use profiles on social sites and rating networks to foster some brand protection. I wrote an article about "profile marketing" on that very subject. The strange part about bview is that the company profiles are SEO friendly, but the personal profiles are not? You can find hundreds of profile sites out there that rank on specific industry phrases and terms to help your brand effort out.

I always appreciate the extra exposure. One of the reasons I wrote this article was simply because I knew there were so many professionals out there looking for a simple "idea" description of how to use Linkedin.

Nifty list, found you by surfing around MyBlogLog for a while. Thanks for putting it all in one place. It is nice to find like-minded bloggers.

I wouldn't just limit the Wordpress platform to small and mid sized businesses. It can actually handle thousands of indexed pages and be stitched together with a variety of other forum platforms, social media tools, and complex delivery systems.

When leveraging multi-user wordpress and having the ability to control and OWN the platform you are using for business projects, it only makes sense to control your own destiny.