Now that SocialCorp: Social Media Goes Corporate has been published, I am looking for a Community Manager to help with ongoing promotion via Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and other social media sites and services. If you love social media and want the experience and the visibility of a role promoting one of the most popular books on the subject, you should consider this opportunity.

You could commit to any amount of time per week, and use your creativity in promoting the book, speaking engagements, etc. (And I would love to hear your ideas on how to do this.) This is an unpaid position, but this is real world experience you can put on your resume. At the very least I’ll send you a t-shirt, and a copy of the book, and I’ll tell everyone how awesome you are.

Please email me me or DM me on Twitter if you’re interested. I could not have written the book without the amazing help I received from friends on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. If you’d like to help me get to the next stage, get in touch, and please let friends know about this as well. Thanks!

Tags: career opportunity, internship, community manager,, social media,, socialcorp

Paul Dailing writes on HuffPost that he is annoyed with what he calls the “Death of Newspaper bloggers.” He cites posts by Jeff Jarvis, Paul Gillin, Jay Rosen and Clay Shirky who, says Dailing, are

“competing to see who can use the most jargon to describe something everyone knows is happening. Apparently, it’s very simple. The more you self-reference, pick feuds and talk about the failure of TimesSelect, the better you’re doing. If you make it sound like you’re the one who figured out newspapers are dying, you win.”

Dailing is right in identifying this trend and finding it quite annoying. It’s contrived controversy. (How’s that for alliteration?) But of course the winner is not the one who can frame the discussion such that it appears he/she predicted the demise of print, but the one who takes the most in-your-face approach, thereby generating the most links, blog visits and comments, which equate to importance and prestige in the social media world.

There are a handful of reasons, other than “getting into the conversation,” that top bloggers use, and in some cases are addicted to, social media. These include things like reward, recognition, and validation. The CEO of a major IT company, when asked why he continued to work so hard after having made the company and himself a stunning success, responded that it was because he never felt he measured up to his dad’s expectations. Isn’t that why many “A-list” bloggers behave the way they do? To not only measure up, but to receive accolades in the form of tens of thousands of Twitter followers and Feedburner subscribers?

What Dailing has missed is the whole Death Of meme that is so popular with bloggers who have predicted/called for the death of PR, the press release, and surprisingly, blogs themselves. I mean, without a blog, how are you going to blog on the passing of the blog? It bloggles the mind.

I’ve campaigned against this idiotic practice a dozen times. I’ve called for an annual “PR Is Dead” day to celebrate the fact that it isn’t. I’ve begged bloggers to stop declaring the press release dead, motivating me (frighteningly) to pen the only cartoon I have ever drawn.

I even wrote an obituary for the Death Of meme.

It’s time to declare the death of essays discussing the death of things. But sadly, the narcissistic impulse to declare things dead or dying will persist as long as site visits and comments are the measure of a person’s worth.

Tags: Paul Dailing, HuffPost, Huffington Post, Jeff Jarvis, Paul Gillin, Jay Rosen, Clay Shirky, death of meme

On March 14 at SXSW, we* launched Presently.com, designed to be the first professional microblogging environment. The idea behind Presently.com is that we wanted to bring the best of microblogging and career/professional social networking into one environment. Think of it as Twitter meets LinkedIn.

Twitter pioneered microblogging and its features, like 140-character status updates, followers/following lists, and direct messages have proven extremely popular with users, and the service is growing dramatically. LinkedIn provides a more professional focus, but lacks social features, and therefore the true, dynamic Web 2.0 communications platform of a true social network.

Presently.com is based on Intridea’s Presently microblogging platform, which is used daily by many large corporations and government organizations. Presently extends and maintains the basic Twitter metaphor with additional features, like group messaging; the ability to embed formatted documents like MS Word, PowerPoint, Excel, video and images; message capacity beyond 140 characters without compromising user experience; and extended user profiles to help people more easily identify others with common interests.

Why Professional Microblogging?

There is no doubt that Twitter is a revolutionary communications tool. But some users, even those who limit the number of people they follow on Twitter, are finding the noise ratio to be too high. Trivial and personal communications are inevitable in any public forum, and are in fact a big part of the appeal of Twitter. With Presently.com, we set out to flip the signal-to-noise ratio from 20-80 to 80-20, so serious users spend less time sifting through trivial information.

The Power of Group Updates

In addition to public updates, and private direct messages, features found in most microblogging environments, Presently.com users can create groups and send updates to just a few people, such as the employees of a company, or members of a workgroup or industry organization.

Anyone can create a group for a specific profession, hobby, project team, or any other community of interest. Groups on Presently.com can be public, private or secret. Public groups are useful for encouraging communications and collaboration within particular communities, such as the legal profession, graphic artists, web designers, and gamers. Private groups require an invitation from a current group member, and are useful for closed communications, within, for example, a committee, a sports team, a company, a project team or workgroup, or multiple parties negotiating an agreement or planning an event. Secret groups are private groups that are not listed in the publicly viewable group directory.

Once a group is created, users can send updates to the entire group, to individuals, or to one or more members of the group. Inviting new members is easy. Users can share documents, such as MS Word, YouTube video, Adobe PDF, PowerPoint, and Excel, and can also enter formatted text, including software code, directly into an update. Presently.com maintains threads so that users can see the origin, progression and completion of a conversation, project or discussion.

Who Can Join Presently.com?

Presently.com is currently free to all users. Presently.com allows users with any email address to join and form groups of common interest. Similar services, like Yammer are built around communities based only on common email domains, such that users from a single company can form a group, but can only include members with the same email domain. (For example, you could form a Yammer group with people who have email addresses ending in @yourcompany.com, but could not add people with email addresses ending in @anothercompany.com.)

Try It Out!

Presently.com had a great reception at SXSW. We were really pleased to be able to chat in person with new friends and old. I hope you’ll check it out. I’d love it if you did your next group chat on Presently.com to see how much more seamless and enjoyable the experience is. On Presently.com, you don’t need hashtags (though you can still use them) so participants, particularly those who are less technical, won’t have to use an additional site or service to monitor the discussion. (And you won’t lose track of people who forget the hashtag or format it incorrectly.)

Speaking of hashtags, Presently.com has a unique and powerful way of dealing with tags. Once a tag is used, it is automatically added to a tag list. Users can see which tags are the most popular, can click on a tag to see all of the updates related to that tag, and can click to be alerted any time someone uses a particular tag.

If you like the idea of professional microblogging, please create a few groups in Presently.com. There are already quite a few there (many of which we created to get the ball rolling), but the site really needs to belong to users to be effective.

You can sign up at: http://www.presently.com/

* Disclosure: I am a senior partner at Intridea. For more information please visit the Intridea web site, and also take a look at the Requisite Information and Services (What I Do) pages on my blog.

Tags: Presently, Presently.com, professional microblogging, Twitter, LinkedIn, Yammer, Intridea, status updates, enterprise social media

It’s probably not a new idea, but amidst its rising popularity, and increasing speculation that Twitter might charge “commercial” users, I wonder if charging business users on a per-follower basis might be one way the service could make money.

In the world of print, advertisers are charged on the basis of “impressions,” usually expressed in CPM (cost per thousand). It costs more to advertise in Wired than it does in Model Railroader. (No offense to model railroaders.)

“But wait,” you say. “Isn’t everything online free?” (Of course not, but thank you for asking.) Online advertisers pay Google AdWords based on the popularity of the term and on the number of clicks, measures which represent the number of people who have opted (agreed) to view the advertising content. (The term “social media,” for example, costs $2.28 per click. Save money by buying three word terms like “social media marketing” and “social media PR” for just $.05.)

In other words, marketers have tacitly agreed that they are willing to pay based on cost per impression. When someone follows a company like Southwest Airlines, Zappos, or Dell, that represents something equal to a click, and in fact, may be more valuable, as it indicates agreement to view multiple, ongoing advertising messages from the company.

This proposal raises a number of issues of course. What is commercial use? Clearly a Fortune 500 company promoting its goods and services is engaged in commercial activity. So, too is a crafts person with an Etsy account or a real estate agent, but they don’t stand to achieve the same commercial advantage as the larger corporation. This seems inequitable, although, to be fair, they would pay Google AdWords the same dollar amount for the same words and clicks.

Non-profits, schools, public safety, public health organizations and many other classes of users are non-commercial and should not be charged based on their follower count (and no one is saying Twitter plans to charge them.)

But the intensity with which Twitter users pursue any and every strategy to grow their follower count, including offering expensive prizes like laptops to attract new followers, demonstrates recognition of the value of a large number of followers.

The question is, how many will continue to recognize this value when they are asked to pay for it?

Tags: Twitter, commercial, business, pay, followers

Recently I’ve noticed people repeatedly following and unfollowing me on Twitter. This morning, my good friend Michelle Naranjo explained why this is happening.To understand this phenomenon, you need to know a little background on Twitter following/unfollowing.

Twitter bars users from following more than 2000 people until they are followed by 2000 people. This is intended to curtail spam accounts that follow thousands of people, though I’m not entirely sure how you spam people who don’t follow you and hence don’t get your updates any way. (Another topic for another time.) So for the new Twitter user, the follow/unfollow is a way to get past the 2000 limit. The reasoning is, you keep following people, some follow back, some don’t, but if you keep rotating the “pool” of followed/followers (by unfollowing most people), you’ll get to 2000 followers much faster than if you had just waited for actual relationships built on value and mutual respect.

But the wrinkle is that I am seeing the same behavior by long time Twitter users with follower counts far in excess of the 2000 limit. Here’s how Michelle explained it to me. These users are targeting other users with large followers/followed lists because new users go to these lists to find new people to follow. (I know, it’s complicated.) So the thinking is that I have around 5000 followers, therefore new users might look at my list for suggested people to follow, and these veteran users who are gaming the system trying to add followers en masse want to be at the top of my list so they get found and followed more readily. They can move to the top of my lists by “renewing” their membership, by unfollowing me, then following me back, hoping I then follow them back. (I automatically drop anyone who unfollows me and I never follow them again, because I’m not interested in playing these games.)

This is just the latest in a series of games played by people who see you and me as numbers, notches in the social media belt, and not as people worth engaging with, or who have something of value to say and who are looking to be informed by others. I call this Twitter Friend Optimization (TFO).

Before I understood this dynamic, I was “flattered” that such popular Twitter people were inclined to follow me, but now I just find it insulting and a waste of time.

Tags: Twitter, follow, unfollow, followers, scam