An overwhelming majority (93%) of online Americans say companies should have a social-media presence, and 85% believe these companies also should be interacting with consumers through social media, according to research from Cone.

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Idaho’s largest insurer and the biggest co-ed gym chain in the world are the latest supporters of an effort to ban smoking from Boise bars. Blue Cross of Idaho, which has 550,000 members, and Gold’s Gym, with more than 600 facilities in 42 states and 30 countries, have endorsed Smokefree Boise, adding to a growing list of high profile healthcare, fitness and business leaders backing the group.

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We have an opportunity. An opportunity for people like us, an opportunity to define the future of our home – Boise.

Did you know that we have the oldest legislative body in the entire nation? Our state representatives, many senior business leaders and officials leading the education infrastructure are not tech savvy. Worse, they glaze over and talk in circles whenever tech is mentioned (most of them anyway).

Meanwhile the evidence is clear that Idaho is becoming home for many of the lowest paying jobs in the nation. These are comprised of service industry (McDonalds, Taco Time, etc.) and call centers (T-Mobile, CitiCard, etc.) where the bulk of the positions range from $5.25 to $12 an hour. The reality of life is that it takes much more than that to live in our community.

Tech jobs are skilled and pay better.

The median tech professional in Boise makes ~$25 / hr. That means half of wage-earners are below and half are above, but the reality is that this lumps in tech workers in semi-skilled manufacturing positions. The higher end of the spectrum are people like you who code applications or architect solutions. These are great jobs and not only promote quality of life monetarily, but also create a quality of life that is consistent with the culture and lifestyle of Boise.

Tech jobs (software development, etc.) are green jobs. Tech jobs are are not dependant on distribution lines (and the costs associated therein). Our geographic isolation does not hinder the delivery of the product / service. Boise is a perfect location for this type of work. We have a strong engineering base, strong tech corporations, and a state university in our city core. What we lack is:

• entrepreneurial spirit,
• legislators who will get out there and press the flesh with those from other states to discuss the resources we possess.
• Tax considerations for small and mid-size businesses.
• No charge or low charge resources to educate people on starting and running a business focusing on areas that are not core to their competencies.
• mentors (yes I am talking to you.)

We have an opportunity to become great – good to great is not a far leap!

Great communities like Boise are rare. TechBoise seeks to surface the tech community, build upon it and create awareness of our technical powerhouse for the entire world to see. It begins with a discussion at a TechBoise FREE event which is the catalyst for great innovation, imagination and opportunities yet to be realized.

Now ask yourself, shouldn’t you come to the next event?

1. I suffer from information overload already.

Possible replies:

Information is just nice to have unless it is actionable – that is the problem with email. If you are like me then email comes in, it’s scanned for task items, categorized in some manner and filed. In social media the feed is just there – searchable when needed, but current and living. There is no need for a constantly connected feed.

The right tools for you will feel helpful in time, not like a burden. Experiment for awhile with new tools and stick with the ones that deliver you the most high-quality information, whether those tools are high-quantity or not.

Check out tools like AideRSS and FeedHub – just two examples of services aiming to improve the signal to noise ratio.

Times change and so do information paradigms. Get used to it. The amount of information you had access to 3 years ago was infinitely more than people at any other point in history and we’re in the middle of another huge leap right now.

Concession:

If you think consuming all this new information is a challenge, wait until you try to find the time to make sense of it!

2. So much of what’s discussed online is meaningless. These forms of communication are shallow and make us dumber. We have real work to do!

Possible replies:

Much of it is not meaningless, but if you feel overwhelmed with meaninglessness – try subscribing to a search for keywords in a particular service and using that as your starting point for engagement.

Having a presence and starting a conversation is rarely a bad thing – bring quality conversation to a space and you’ll find others ready to engage.

Personal information can be very useful in understanding the context of more explicitly useful information.

If learning how the market feels about your organization, engaging with your customers and driving traffic to your web work – all very realistic goals for social media engagement – aren’t work, then I don’t know what is. Even in the short term, strategic engagement with online social media will have a clear work pay-off.

Concession:

The signal to noise ratio will be easier to maximize if you can find an experienced guide to learn from. Just jumping into social media and new tools on your own will not necessarily lead to a meaningful experience. It could, but it will take longer. Noise is noise, but relevant noise is gold.

3. I don’t have the time to contribute and moderate, it looks like it takes a lot of time and energy.

Possible replies:

If you aren’t going to eat that lunch of yours, I’d be happy to, thanks.

With practice, familiarity and technology fine-tuned with a little experience you’ll find the time required will decrease.

You might consider this time spent on marketing or communication with existing customer base – perhaps there’s something else in that department that isn’t working well and could be replaced with online work.

Concession:

Doing anything well does take time and energy. You’ve obviously been thinking about this stuff a lot, it is important – and it’s going to take time and energy.

4. Our customers don’t use this stuff, the learning curve limits its usefulness to geeks.

Possible replies:

You might be surprised to learn how many of your customers do already use these new tools. Even more will do so in the future.

The best designed tools are designed like good games – you can get small rewards right away and then learn more advanced skills to win bigger rewards. Among online services that are intended for general audiences, only poorly designed ones are too geeky.

Many of these tools provide value vastly disproportionate to the literal number of people they reach. These are like high-value focus groups where you’ll gather information and preparation to engage with the rest of the world.

Try asking someone near you to give you an in-person demonstration of one of these tools. You’ll find it much easier to learn once you’ve seen the right paths taken to show what it can do.

5. Communicators [bloggers, tweeters] are so fickle, better to stay unengaged than risk random brand damage. We don’t want hostile comments left about us on any forum we’ve legitimized.

Possible replies:

If you need to, you can require that any comments left on your own site be approved before they appear. This slows down the conversation but if it makes conversation possible for you then do it.

There are far fewer people who will take the time to say hostile things, even on the Internet, than you might imagine.

Engage – you’ll be appreciated more for it. People are going to say what they are going to say – you can either let any criticism go unanswered or you can be the bigger person/brand for responding well.

Conversations are going to happen online, better to be engaged than to have it happening behind your back.

It’s ok, no one believes that anyone is perfect anymore. Swing for the fences sometimes – you might strike out, but sometimes you’ll hit a home run.

Even if you’re not responding publicly, you should watch closely so you know what people are saying. Maybe you don’t have a blog, but subscribe to a blog search feed or alert for your company’s name. Maybe none of your people are on Twitter – you can subscribe to a feed for a search via Terraminds.

Concessions:

Some of the critical things that get said about you online might not warrant a response. Just decide which ones do and file the rest away somewhere.

Communicating in this different context is very new and challenging for traditionally trained business people. Good luck.

6. Traditional media and audiences are still bigger, we’ll do new stuff when they do.

Possible replies:

They already are, from blogging to online video to social networks to mobile to micro-blogging – big, established brands are already doing all of it. They may be experimenting, but they will bringing all their market dominance into the most useful social media sectors as soon as it suits them. Will that be too late for you? It might be.

Traditional media audiences are also more passive – online audiences can engage with, rebroadcast and otherwise amplify your communication efforts.

Concessions:

That’s true and fair, if you think your business can thrive while taking that attitude towards a period of intense social and economic change then you just rock on with your bad self. I’ll be taking my love of innovation to the employer down the street.

7. Upper management won’t support it/dedicate resources for it.

Possible replies:

A lot of technology adoption has for some time had to happen despite this reality. People adopt new tools on their own at work, without permission. They discover powerful ways to solve their problems and then they share them horizontally.

Compared to other expenses, meaningful engagement with new online technology does not have huge costs.

Concessions:

Meaningful engagement with new technology does require some expenditure of time, energy and money. If you’re not willing to do this then you’ll be unlikely to see big benefits.

8. These startups can’t offer meaningful security, they may not even be around in a year – I’ll wait until Google or our enterprise software vendor starts offering this kind of functionality.

Possible replies:

The skills you build and the connections you make will remain with you, though. This is a paradigm shift underway more than it is about any particular tool.

Chose your tools carefully – expect data export as an option so you can back up or switch services whenever you need to. This isn’

t widespread yet, but the best tools allow it.

Concessions:

You do need to be careful, but if you do so intelligen

tly then the benefits can really outweigh the risks. It is very possible that any one of these services might shutter in a year or two, but you’ll get a lot out of them in the meantime and hopefully won’t lose access to your data if that happens.

9. There are so many tools that are similar, I can’t tell where to invest my time so I don’t use any of it at all.

Possible replies:

A little experimentation goes a long way.

Try asking people in your field who have some experience what tools they are using.

Try searching for keywords related to your work in various sites. You’ll find out that way which sites are best suited for you.

Concessions:

It’s true, it can be very confusing and very few people are able to keep up with all the new services that are launching. Don’t worry about it, just do your best.

10. That stuff’s fine for sexy brands, but we sell [insert boring B2B brand] and are known for stability more than chasing the flavor-of-the-month. We’re doing just fine with the tools we’ve got, thanks.

Possible replies:

Some of these things, RSS and Wikis for example, aren’t passing social fads – they are emerging best practices and the state of the art.

ROI is very hard to measure, but try allocating a little energy over time to experiment and see what kind of results you get. From connections between people and projects, to search-friendly inbound links, to early access to important information – the benefits of engaging in new social media go on and on.

Conclusion

Finally, remember that social media is about people and their impact on your brand and your impact on their lives. If you are relevant, add value, and have an open and honest conversation with your customer, then you will reap the rewards. And that, my friend, is ROI.

What’s consumer word-of-mouth advocacy worth to marketers? Try $1 billion.

That’s how much marketers spent on WOM — as it’s known to its practitioners — in 2006, according to an independent research report on the field that will be unveiled during a session at the annual Word Of Mouth Marketing Association conference in Las Vegas. The analysis, believed to be first in-depth look at word of mouth, reports that spending on the emerging discipline has increased from $76 million in 2001 to $981 million in 2006 and is expected to grow to approximately $3.7 billion by 2011.

“It’s starting to be recognized as an established industry,” said Leo Kivijarv, Ph.D., VP-research of PQ Media, which performed the analysis.

Read the entire article here >

Google is back with a bang would be an understatement seeing the impact its new application can create on the Internet especially on social networking sites and maybe even deciding the future of the world wide web. Is this simply the way collaborative innovation is going to be in future? Or is this a reaction to Microsoft getting into its domain by investing into Facebook? Or is this a way of telling Microsoft and others to layoff in a space ruled by Google?  Or maybe all the three? To understand this first a little background.

What OpenSocial Does

Google on Saturday announced the release of OpenSocial — a set of common APIs for building social applications across the web — for developers of social applications and for web sites that want to add social features. According to Google “OpenSocial will unleash more powerful and pervasive social capabilities for the web, empowering developers to build far-reaching applications that users can enjoy regardless of the web sites, web applications, or social networks they use.”
OpenSocial – the new face of internet?

Facebook, termed as the next big thing on the Internet, has for sometime had applications which users can add and use. Noteworthy is these applications have recently become immensely popular with some of them being sold on sites like eBay amongst others.  

How OpenSocial is different is this the first time that multiple social networks have been made accessible under a common API to make development and distribution easier and more efficient for developers. In others words the influence of Google now spans over not just Orkut but also giants like MySpace, Bebo, iLike,  Salesforce.com LinkedIn, Hi5, Friendster, Oracle, Flixster, RockYou, and Slide and more. In others other words Google’s masterstroke has got practically anybody who matters on the Internet under its influence.

The influence of Google can be gauged from the fact what Aber Whitcomb, CTO of MySpace had to say of this partnership “We’re all citizens of a larger Web – no network is an island onto itself.” He added “We look forward to continuing to develop great technology with Google and all of the OpenSocial participants. It’s exciting that social networks are getting social with each other.”

An Island called Facebook

Aber is absolutely right when he says “We’re all citizens of a larger Web-no network is an island onto itself.” But what about Facebook? Does it also figure in Google scheme of things?  When I posed this question to Vinay Goel, head of products, Google India, he had a similar answer like Aber about “common API to make development and distribution easier and more efficient for developers”. Till such time Facebook comes in the Google scheme of things Facebook, the would be next big thing on the Internet has suddenly turned small.

OpenSocial – The added benefits

OpenSocial is built upon Google Gadget technology, so you can build a great, viral social app with little to no serving costs. With the Google Gadget Editor and a simple key/value API, you can build a complete social app with no server at all. Of course, you can also host your application on your own servers if you prefer. In all cases, Google’s gadget caching technology can ease your bandwidth demands should your app suddenly become a worldwide success.

Noteworthy webmasters can use this technology for exposure to target market practically free of cost. In other words a successful app can result in tens and thousands of visitors flowing to your web site.  According to Ali Partovi, CEO of social music service iLike “Thanks to the broad adoption of the OpenSocial platform, iLike can now enable artists to reach an additional 200 million music enthusiasts across the wide range of websites that have adopted this new platform.”

He adds, “Building upon the 15 million music fans we already reach through other channels, the OpenSocial platform helps us pursue our vision of becoming the broadest artist-fan communication platform on the web, without having to write custom software for multiple web sites.”

Microsoft – Wisdom or Desperation

The battle of dominance is at its peak and tech giants Microsoft and Google are battling it out. Google dominates our online experience and Microsoft has so far ruled our offline/desktop experience. As connectivity gets pervasive the offline-online lines are fading and creating tension between the companies. Google has continued to attack Microsoft in places where few would dare. Noteworthy is the attack on Microsoft’s cash cow MS Office.

Microsoft on the other hand is trying to get onto the online experience through Office LIVE amongst other initiatives. Microsoft’s desperation to get onto the online user experience can be gauged from the fact it recently paid $240 million for a stake that values Facebook at an astounding 150x of revenue – $15 billion dollars. Google has now struck back in a way so hard by getting almost anybody who matters under its influence that Facebook billed as the next big thing on the internet suddenly seems dwarfed. 

Has Microsoft goofed up on Facebook or has it been a wise investment? Nobody really knows but Robin Harris in ZDNet termed it rather well “Did Google bluff Microsoft into over paying for Facebook?” Says Robin “Was Google ever serious about Facebook, or did they just want to see Microsoft invest more of their battered prestige in another closed platform?”

The Last Word

After a series of mediocre to bad innovations Google’s muse is back. OpenSocial has the potential of getting innovation onto a level unparalleled ever before in recent history. Apparently as I write this there is news of the first OpenSocial Application hack within 45 minutes. Consider it good news first day, first show and already an attempt to hack, gauge it as popularity. Google’s popularity has been built on its openness, wisdom and innovation of masses. It’s nice to see Google back in form, again.