I’m truly excited to share a bit of news with you…

While this isn’t the formal launch of my new book, today represents a significant milestone for me.

As of today, Engage is available for pre-order on Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, Books a Million, and Borders, with shipments expected to arrive sometime in mid-to-late February. Other sites will go live soon.

This post represents the first time that I’ve publicly released the title…Engage. And, I also join good friends Chris Brogan, Steve Garfield, David Meerman Scott, Marsha Collier, Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah as a fellow author at Wiley.

This book also serves as a touchstone in its own right for me personally. If you notice, the branding and title of my blog has changed. I’ve done so to intentionally reflect the true positioning and value of this book. It’s written for champions and executives alike in business, marketing, branding, interactive, service, and communications. It’s designed to help bring everyone to the table.

I’ll write more about it later…but in the meantime, I wanted to share the news…

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After publishing Putting the Public Back in Public Relations with Deirdre Breakenridge, one of the greatest rewards was the ability to connect with wonderful people all over the world who are facing extraordinary challenges while also accomplishing amazing things.

I’ve learned first-hand from their experiences, obstructions, struggles and resulting triumphs in almost every industry imaginable. In turn, I shared my journey and escapades to offer outside perspective and ideas to help trigger new opportunities.

As these exchanges continued to surmount, I realized, the common thread tying each instance together was the book. Every company I would speak to initially purchased books for their PR, service, marketing, interactive, digital, and social media teams to read, discuss, and then hopefully innovate inside.In turn, representatives from many organizations  took the initiative to ask for call, Web chat or in-person visit to discuss the book and also take the time to answer questions from the team.

What unfolded was an online and offline book club that connected ideas, questions, and guidance.

I would like to extend the same opportunity to your company or school.

If you purchase books for your team, please let me know if you’d like to host a book club chat where we can discuss the lessons, examples, concerns, and thoughts contained in the book or those that stemmed from reading it. Or, if your class is reading the book this semester or next, let’s arrange a virtual visit.

In most cases, we hosted a video discussion via Skype to save on travel fees and time. We simply organized the book club team in a conference room with a notebook and webcam one side and me with a notebook and camera on the other. Seamless and effective…

Some of the companies that have hosted Book Clubs to date include:

- Facebook
- Southwest Airlines
- Home Depot
- Wynn
- Forrester Research
- GM
- San Francisco University

Please reach out and let’s explore the possibilities of hosting a live chat.

I would also like to take a moment to thank Lara McCulloch. She created and hosted the first Twitter-based book club series, discussing a chapter online every week. Thank you Lara. And also, thank you to everyone who helped organize a book club in the past.

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(via PhysOrg.com) -- Although often seen as an inconsequential feature of digital technologies, one's self-representation, or avatar, in a virtual environment can affect the user's thoughts, according to research by a University of Texas at Austin communication professor.

In the first study to use avatars to prime negative responses in a desktop virtual setting, Jorge Peña, assistant professor in the College of Communication, demonstrated that the subtext of an avatar's appearance can simultaneously prime negative (or anti-social) thoughts and inhibit positive (or pro-social) thoughts inconsistent with the avatar's appearance. All of this while study participants remained unaware they had been primed. The study, co-written with Cornell University Professor Jeffrey T. Hancock and University of Texas at Austin graduate student Nicholas A. Merola, appears in the December 2009 issue of Communication Research.

From PR 2.0

Source: Shutterstock

Prior to leaving Forrester to join Altimeter Group, Jeremiah Owyang, along with Josh Bernoff, Cynthia N. Pflaum, and Emily Bowen, published a report that attempted to bring the future of the Social Web into focus. If we viewed the content of his research as a social object, the conversations that would transpire could in fact expedite the development and implementation of the most valuable predictions and observations contained within.

The first part of the report observes the state of the Social Web and summarizes its direction:

Today’s social experience is disjointed because consumers have separate identities in each social network they visit. A simple set of technologies that enable a portable identity will soon empower consumers to bring their identities with them — transforming marketing, eCommerce, CRM, and advertising. IDs are just the beginning of this transformation, in which the Web will evolve step by step from separate social sites into a shared social experience. Consumers will rely on their peers as they make online decisions, whether or not brands choose to participate. Socially connected consumers will strengthen communities and shift power away from brands and CRM systems; eventually this will result in empowered communities defining the next generation of products.

In the report, Forrester documents the evolution and direction of the Social Web in several distinct stages:

1. The era of social relations – Starting with AOL and others in the mid-1990s, this era witnessed the connection of people through simple profiles and friending features that served as the foundation for online conversations through connections.

2. The era of social functionality – Evolving from friending to platforms that supported social interaction through applications and infrastructure, facilitating communities through relationships locked within the confines of a particular network.

As I’ve said before, social networks are jockeying to become our individual online OS – a Social OS essentially. Facebook released its Facebook Connect infrastructure to allow us to traverse the social web with our Facebook identity and relationships in tow, bridging our updates back to the Facebook News Feed to share with our social graph. This is a monumental furtherance as it starts to demonstrate the power of an interconnected activity and profile stream and network that makes the Social Web a much smaller place.

However, what we really need is a “Facebook Connect” within every site, not confined to or benefiting any one network. This will create the segue-way to the era of social colonization as predicted by Forrester.

This need is of particular, perhaps even consequential, interest to brands as they will spend an insurmountable amount of time, resources, and money trying to engage in noteworthy conversions across multiple networks of interest.

3. The era of social colonization – Deemed as the next stage of social evolution, which will emerge as soon as this year, tools such as OpenID and Facebook connect will enable individuals to freely journey from network to network. Forrester believes that we will be able to do so with our social graph in tact, but I believe that the initial phase of social colonization will make a general identity portable between networks. The portability of corresponding data, social objects, and friendships we maintain in each network becomes the Holy Grail.

For consumers, surfing the Web is no longer a lonely experience. Forrester foresees the release of new browsers and frictionless, uncomplicated technologies that allow people to truly surf the Web with friends or see what they’re doing in real-time.

Like we’re already witnessing or hearing (depending on your status on the  invitation list), Google Wave represents the ability to centralize and aggregate user activities and collaboration across the Web and across multiple platforms.

Forrester also observes that this era of colonization will leverage the recommendations of peers within the communities where individuals are active. Brands can capitalize on this behavior by instilling and engendering advocacy through direct engagement, blogger relations in the magic middle, and also via sponsored conversations.

This will serve as the bridge to social context.

4. The era of social context – Starting in 2010, social networks and sites will recognize the preferences of users, but more significantly, they will also recognize personal identities and relationships to customize the experience based on preference and behavior.

While this technology already powers, at varying levels, dedicated networks such as Trusted Opinion and Yelp, this functionality will be inherent to future networks using technology similar to Baynote to leverage the Wisdom of the Crowds as it inspires the personalization of content for each individual. Baynotes believes that the Web, and sites in particular, can learn from collective intelligence to improve the experience based on the behavior of crowds over individuals.

In the near future, much of the content will be automated, but will still rely on the explicit express of individuals to improve the experience. As Forrester notes, “Portable IDs mean you’ll be able to flip a switch to tell Nike you’re a woman who runs 12 miles a week and immediately see the shoes that are best for you — along with input from experiences of your running buddies.”

I believe that the combination of semantic and collective intelligence systems will improve the content and overall interaction within sites and social networks over time.

5. The era of social commerce – In 2011 – 2012, social networks will eclipse corporate Web sites and CRM systems. Forrester believes that communities will become a driving force for innovation and as such, companies will be forced to formally cater to communities, signifying the trading of power towards connected customers.

The Dawn of SRM

While Forrester predicts the era of Social Commerce, the future of the social Web as I see it, starts to embrace a corporate philosophy and supporting infrastructure that migrates away from CRM and even sCRM to one of Social Relationship Management or SRM. This will usher in the fifth era as observed by Forrester. And, SRM is also acutely cognizant of and in harmony with VRM (Vendor Relationship Management). Championed by Doc Searls, Chris Carfi, among others, VRM is the opposite of CRM, capsizing the concept of talking at or marketing to customers and shifting the balance of power in relationships from vendors to consumers. As such, systems are created to empower consumer participation and sentiment and improve products and services with every engagement.

While some believe that relationships aren’t technically manageable, in the world of business and a vibrant and influential social Web, it is not a question. And for all intents and purposes, they’re still personable.

The Social Web is distributing influence beyond the customer landscape, allocating authority amongst stakeholders, prospects, advocates, decision makers, and peers. SRM recognizes that whether someone recommended a product, purchased a product, or simply recognized it publicly, in the end, each makes an impact on behavior at varying levels.

Therefore customers are now merely part of a larger equation that also balances vendors, experts, partners, and other authorities. In the realm of SRM, influence is distributed and it is recognizes wherever and however it takes shape.

SRM is a doctrine aligned with a humanized business strategy and supporting technology infrastructure and platform. SRM recognizes that all people, no matter what system they use, are equal. It represents a wider scope of active listening and participation across the full spectrum of influence mapped to specific department representatives within the organization using various lenses for which to identify individuals where and how they interact.

From Adoption to Sophistication, No Social Network is an Island

Forrester recognizes that the past five years of Social Media evolution have focused on growth and adoption, but anticipates that the next stage of advancement  is dedicated to improving social functionality. I would also add personalization and portability. The biggest opportunity for the expansion of social networks is to build bridges between these isolated islands to deliver a more fulfilling, meaningful and productive experience. As I see it, we will start to see a the social web not as a collection of distributed islands, but as one greater collective better known as a human network – a contextual and relationship-based network that consists of like-minded individuals no matter where their profile resides.

In the near-term, the future of the Social Web starts with our online identity.

Whereas in Social Media, content is still king, in the business of social networking, data is its currency. I believe that everything starts with empowering the individual with the ability to host one secure profile/identify online that would serve existing and emerging social networks across the Web. OpenID, for example, provides central and protect login credentials for users, connecting identities to other third-part networks including Google, PayPal, AOL, MySpace, among others. Perhaps the future lies with making data mobile while still providing value to the economics of social networks. DataPortability.org is working with some of the most renowned networks to enable users to bring their identity, friends, conversations, files and histories with them, without having to manually add them to each new service. Each of the services we choose to use can draw on this information relevant to the context within each network. As our experiences and connections accumulate and change corresponding data, this information will update on other sites and services if permitted, without having to revisit others to re-enter or re-create it.

The future of the Social Web must begin with data portability to accelerate proliferation throughout Roger’s Diffusion of Innovation adoption system. The lack of it might serve as either the “chasm” that hinders mainstream adoption or the monopolization of user data by a few dominant players.

How do you envision the future of the Social Web?

From PR 2.0

Over the years, Twitter search was plagued by an unbelievable flaw. Deleted tweets remained in Twitter’s search index and thus, would appear in the search results regardless of the conscious act of manually removing the tweets from your personal stream. Believe it or not, this problem remained constant much to the dismay of many power users. To my pleasant surprise, Twitter has finally rectified this problem and has officially removed deleted tweets from its index.

Now that Google and Bing are channeling Twitter search results, it’s widely suspected that Twitter had no choice but to remedy this enduring problem. Imagine if your deleted tweets ranked among the top results in Google or Bing? Obviously privacy is a primary concern and this is a step in the right direction. However, privacy on the social Web is an oxymoron of sorts. Once a Tweet is published for example, it is indexed by many other third-party services, networks and applications. And, even if you delete a Tweet, it still may reside somewhere else. For example, if you stream your Tweets to Facebook and Tumblr, obviously you’d have to delete the updates across multiple platforms. But, the other challenge is that there are several other services that pull tweets where they may also reside once deleted.

Either way, to officially have deleted tweets removed from search results is a welcome update that is way overdue, but valued nonetheless.

Oh, and make sure to check out Collecta for real-time search results…it not only indexes the live twitter feed, but also the social web to reveal activity around keywords as they appear online. (Note: I’m a tech adviser to the team.)

SOURCE

From the Christian Science Monitor

During the trial of an Arkansas lumber supplier In February, one of the jurors tweeted his buddies that they should stay away from that product: "It's bad mojo," he thumbed, "and they'll probably cease to exist, now that their wallet is 12m lighter."

During a four-month-long political corruption trial in Philadelphia earlier this year, one juror was found to have been updating his Twitter account almost daily, at one point posting: "Stay in touch for a big announcement on Monday everyone."

Wanda Keyes Heard, a Baltimore City Circuit Court judge, now warns jurors: "At no time are you permitted to talk to the witnesses, lawyers or parties, go to the scene or use Google, Facebook or Twitter concerning the case."

"With Twitter and instant messaging, being first, getting something out immediately is a thrill for them," Cynthia Cohen, president of the American Society of Trial Consultants, told the Huntsville, Ala., Times. "They get caught up in the excitement instead of following the rules and laws of the legal system. It's definitely a problem."

The impact of tweeting jurors continues to be explored in the legal world.

In the case of the Philadelphia corruption trial, the judge denied a mistrial motion based on the thumb-nimble juror, deeming that the juror's actions didn't affect the outcome of the trial. An appeal of the Arkansas lumber contractor's case is pending. The contractor says the tweeting juror undermined the integrity of the trial.

"The task of keeping the modern juror focused on the witnesses and exhibits admitted into evidence – and insulated from the onslaught of potentially prejudicial communications – will be an ongoing challenge for the judiciary and the bar," writes Mr. Sweeney.

For more on the psychology of Twitter, please click here...

Source: Young Go Getter

Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to work with “Viral Marketing Scientist” Dan Zarrella on special projects related to Twitter. His focus on social science and psychology as it relates to new media and online interaction and behavior is in line with my philosophy and approach to understanding and documenting socialized media.

Zarrella recently debuted TweetPsych, a sophisticated system that uses two linguistic analysis algorithms (RID and LIWC) to build a psychological profile of a person based on the content of their tweets. He also adapted the service to analyze a site URL and the content on that page to create a list of the 50 Twitter users who’s profiles are psychologically aligned with the site you provided. It’s a fascinating service for those actively seeking to expand their contextual networks.

One of the most actively discussed aspects of Twitter is the art and science of retweets.  Retweets, in my opinion, are one of the most sincere forms of recognition and validation, empowering users to pay it forward through the recognition of noteworthy content. According to Dan, retweets also serve as the foundation for assessing the qualities of viral content, “You don’t spread ideas just because they are “good;” you spread them because of some other trigger or set of triggers has been pulled in your brain. We can now compare millions of viral ideas to uncover the building blocks of contagiousness.”

Aside from my very simple advice to leave room in your tweets for people to add RT and their username, “120 is the new 140” and to also tweet something worth retweeting, Zarrella studied the science of retweets over a period of nine months to discern the attributes and characteristics of tweets that spawned memes and those that didn’t. His sampling group was not insignificant either. He analyzed roughly five million tweets and 40 million retweets to discover the art and science of getting retweeted.

He published the results in a 22-page report, which you can download here.

Zarrella’s initial finding estimated that 1.44% of all tweets are ReTweets. From there, he recognized other important common traits for successfully getting retweeted.

Read the rest of the post here...

Source: Shutterstock

Recently, Facebook announced that it had surpassed the 300 million user mark. According to Experian HitWise, Facebook accounted for 58.59 percent of all U.S. visits among a custom category of 155 social networking Web sites in September 2009. This is an interesting stat and I would love for Experian HitWise to send the full list over, so that I can also analyze the playing field for new, emerging, and declining players across the board.

The report noted that Facebook’s growth was the highest among all social networks, with U.S. visits increasing 194 percent between September 2008 and September 2009.

Market Share of U.S. Internet Visits to Top Five Social Networking Web Sites

But then, there’s our “social” darling…Twitter. Twitter had the largest percentage gain in market share of visits among the top five visited Web sites, increasing 1,170 percent compared to the previous year. In fact, 2009 is “The Year of Twitter” as documented by the traffic and reach of Twitter.com at Alexa and Compete.

According to the report, U.S. visits to all social networks was up by 62 percent from September 2008 to 2009. Except of course, at Myspace and myYearbook. From 2008 to 2009 each experienced a significant erosion in visits by -55 percent and -40 percent respectively. The good news for MySpace however, is that the network topped the charts for average time spent in the network. And, as engagement is a key metric for social media, this data is critical to the future of MySpace engineering, innovation, and the ecosystem it creates moving forward.  But, that engagement level is slipping, as it reflects a 12 percent loss of attention year-over-year.

As you’ll see in a report I will soon publish, Twitter is starting to appeal to the youth who have powered MySpace in the past and still do today. Fusion and integration are key at the once dominant social network.

Click here to read the rest of the post.