The still infant universe of social media continues to expand - and rapidly at that.
But a few planets are cooling and hardening into shapes and orbits that will become a defined part of that universe. Mashable has long been a good source for many topics of technology and Social Fresh has become a good, reliable curator of issues and topics about social media. (Many others exist, too, of course.)
To that end, Social Fresh just established (oops, almost wrote, "published) a social media directory, Invest in Social. It's intended to be a complete guide to companies immersed in and practicing the growing craft of social media, from agencies to to consultants to providers of the tools needed for social media consumers and practioners.
And, yes, Relevanza is listed - along with over 1,000 other companies. Visit our page.
Gator Press Printing, a Cape Coral, FL., company founded in 1967, has been added as the official print sponsor of the inaugrual Entrepreneuer of the Year Award.
Set for May 23 at Florida Gulf Coast University (FGCU), the award will recognize a small to mid-sized Southwest Florida business for its overall success as well as provide an opportunity for the local business community to celebrate its achievements. Click here to read more.
The award is the project of FGCU's Small Business Development Center (SBDC).
Gator Press Printing joins a growing list of sponsors including the Presenting Sponsor, Markham Norton Mosteller Wright & Co.. and Contributing Sponsor, Brennan, Manna and Diamond P.L. Relevanza is pleased to be a sponsor along with Dolphin Global Technology Solutions, Guerilla Media, Photo Magic, Slick Ink ALL MEDIA, John Fernandez Photography and Third Eye Management. The event’s exclusive magazine sponsor is Gulfshore Business magazine.
The presentation banquet will be held in the Cohen Center (Student Union) ballroom of FGCU. WINK News Radio anchor Jim McLaughlin will serve as the event’s emcee.
The event’s keynote speaker is Carl L. Gould, a lifelong entrepreneur, business mentor and award-winning coach who created the largest business mentoring organization in the world.
Nominations for the award should be a business from the five-county area (Collier, Lee, Glades, Hendry and Charlotte) served by the SBDC. Candidates will be in business for three or more years; display a high level of overall success; and be able to demonstrate innovations, achievements and a substantial effect on the regional economy.
Full nomination rules and eligibility can be found here. Entries will be judged by an expert panel of community business leaders headed by Tim Cartwright, chairman of Tamiami Angel Fund I, LLC. Deadline for entries is March 31.
Tickets to the Entrepreneur of the Year Award and Dinner are $100 per person.Tickets and additional sponsorship opportunities can be found by clicking here or calling (239) 745-3705.
SBDC Director Dan Regelski explains more in this video:
It’s always a real treat when lawyers – especially local government lawyers – start discussing social media and open record laws.
Our state, Florida, has some of the nation’s best open meeting and public records laws in the nation. Put simply, the laws require all public decisions be made in public and all public records be available to the public. Wow, what…a concept.
For some unexplained reason, however, government lawyers have so far shown a tendency to completely freak out when these very simple principles of open government are applied to social media and the InterWebs in general.
Our community’s library advisors met last week, for example, to hear from our county attorney’s office about the use of social media in and among the routine business of the public library.
The lawyer cautiously told the library advisors and staff it was, um, okay to use Facebook (the extent, apparently, of the lawyer’s knowledge of social media) but warned “that Facebook page would have to be maintained for public record.”
In good lawyerly fashion, she went on to suggest library employees print out and maintain in a file for public review any online communication they may have, including emails.
“When in doubt, just avoid (online and social media communication),” she said.
Troubling at the worst; just plain silly at the least.
First, if you think ANYTHING you post online isn't already WAY public already you’re fooling yourself (yes, all caps…I’m yelling).
Second, printing out in hard copy any social media posting is not only wasteful but also redundant.
Like Broward County, Florida Commissioner Stacy Ritter explained in a piece published by the Sun-Sentinel, “There’s very little privacy left. Once it’s out there, it’s out there.”
Exactly.
Postings on any social media platform by public officials and public employees are “out there,” in the public, available for all the world to see the moment that “send” button is clicked, the very moment that “post” button is pushed. And that’s a good thing.
If you want to see an elected official’s Facebook or Twitter posts, all you really need to do is look. Pull up the feed and there it is on any computer screen, of which I understand the village now has a few. Facebook's new timeline feature makes it even easier to see posts stretching back over a few years.
What is there to fear?
(Broward County elected officials seem to be getting it right, by the way, according to the published piece.)
Social media is a friend of open government, a whole set of new tools that should be used to bring more sunshine, more openness to the art and craft of governance. Our friends in the Middle East certainly understand that point.
Maybe, some day soon, our own government officials will learn that, too. In a spin on an old Ry Cooder song, "the very thing that makes millenials poor and unemployable by posting videos of naked, drunken beer-pong battles can make democracy rich."
Ry sings, "The Very Thing That Makes Her Rich Will Make You Poor..."
The social media space is nothing if not the boom town of the InterWebs, the gold rush of the Ethernet, the wild, wild west of 21st Century communication – except no one carries a six-shooter.
The latest big wave in the maelstrom of social media is, of course, Pinterest.
Unless you only live in World of Warcraft, you’ve no doubt heard something of Pinterest, the newest social curatorial site on which users post photographs (and other tidbits), attract attention to a wide variety of (mostly) sales sites and graphically yell, “hey, look at me,” …and buy what I’m selling. Users can “pin” and post, go to other links and generally, well, be social.
Photographer and blogger, Trey Ratcliff, a Pinterest advocate, calls it, “window shopping on steroids.”
It may prove to be that banal but for now, one must give Pinterest its due. Actually launched in 2008 in Palo Alto by a former Google staffer, Pinterest has come roaring onto the social media space only in the last couple of months, jumping to 11 million unique visits in January from just under five million in November. (If you’re counting, that’s 22 million eyeballs.)
It has yet to make any money, according to the Wall Street Journal, on a $37.5 million initial investment but is said to now be worth $200 million. But here’s the question of the day: is it useful? Well, we’ll sure find out, won’t we? The numbers certainly can’t be discounted and initial anecdotal evidence suggests risk is low and the reward potentially great. One little experiment suggested eight follows almost immediately by posting architecture photographs (with a Facebook login to Pinterest.)
Will we play with it more? You bet. Stayed tuned.
Visual.ly tells us 83 percent of Pinterest’s users are women between the ages of 18 and 34 and 97 percent of Pinterest’s Facebook fans are women. This little tidbit prompted Time Magazine’s Techland blog to claim “women are from Pinterest and men are from Google+” because the later is populated two-thirds by men.
We can only imagine next up: a dating site to pair Pinterest women with Goo+ men.
We find so many people who know about social media but, often, do KNOW social media.
The slides below can give you a very basic introduction and how social media works. The slides are from Relevanza co-founder Birgit Pauli Haack's Social Media Boot Camp, the next edition of which will be held March 3rd, 10th & 17th at Florida Gulf Coast University, again in conjuction with FGCU's Small Business Development Center.
- Click here to register.
- Read more at our Social Media Technology blog at Tumblr.
- http://www.slideshare.net/bph/social-media-bootcamp-day-1
- View more presentations from Birgit Pauli-Haack
Graphic: Ad in Southwest Florida Business Today, February 2012 Edition
Problogger has a wealth of information about blogging for business and other purposes. This article not only explains what is a Zombie-account on Reddit, it also provides a great list of sites where your content can be submitted for particular topics. Not necessarily by yourself though. That’s the moment you would need to rely on your cheerleaders and biggest fans in your audience to go the extra mile.
The most visited sites, Reddit and Stumbleupon, frown on and punish via algorithm self-promotion. That is probably why they are so successful. It comes from the notion that if your friends/followers/circles think your post and information is relevant, they will tell others and do the extra step and submit it to those sites. Then the quality of the sites collection of articles is much better, than when companies and bloggers, spam the site with their self-serving messages.
Read more at our Social Media Technology Tumblr adventure...
Over the last three years, we've grown very fond of the Google Chrome web browser.
It’s fast. It’s optimized for Google Apps and it has a small foot print on your machine. And a little techie tidbit: each tab runs in its own process on the machine, so if one website crashes the browser, the other tabs won’t go down with it. It’s cross-plattform, runs on Windows, Ubuntu/Linux & Macs.
With a growing need to manage your online life across various devices, desktop, laptop, smartphone, office computer, home computer, tablet, iPad, Kindle Fire, using Apps also on a browser reduces a lot of synchronization and configuration issues.
Today, I wanted to share Mashable’s Top 10 Google Chrome Plugins for Small Business.
My most recent discovery was the rebuilt and expanded Tweetdeck by Twitter with well-thoughtout features you need to manage your growing Twitter interests and keep personal and business accounts separate. I am working on ”How to use Tweetdeck” post for next week.
If you don’t have Google Chrome yet you can download it here.
This post and much more is also available at our Relevanza Tumblr discussion, Social Media Technology.
And: Make sure you post comments and share your experience here for others to read, too!
Clearly, we are in the age of the entrepreneur.
Tough economic times give way to creativity and entrepreneurial creativity can thrive where ideas and models of the past wither.
To recogonize the growing entrepreneurial spirit in Southwest Florida, the Small Business Development Center of Florida Gulf Coast University will hand out its inaugrual "Entrepreneur of the Year" Award on May 23. Nominations are being accepted now.
Relevanza is pleased to be among the sponsors of this new effort.
The award will recognize a small to mid-sized Southwest Florida business for its overall success as well as provide an opportunity for the local business community to celebrate its achievements. The presentation banquet is set for Wednesday, May 23 from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. in the Cohen Center (Student Union) ballroom of FGCU. WINK News Radio anchor Jim McLaughlin will serve as the event’s emcee.
The event’s keynote speaker is Carl L. Gould, a lifelong entrepreneur, business mentor and award-winning coach who created the largest business mentoring organization in the world.
Nominations for the award should be a business from the five-county area (Collier, Lee, Glades, Hendry and Charlotte) served by the SBDC. Candidates will be in business for three or more years; display a high level of overall success; and be able to demonstrate innovations, achievements and a substantial effect on the regional economy.
Full nomination rules and eligibility can be found here. Entries will be judged by an expert panel of community business leaders headed by Tim Cartwright, chairman of Tamiami Angel Fund I, LLC. Deadline for entries is March 31.
Tickets to the Entrepreneur of the Year Award and Dinner are $100 per person. Tickets and additional sponsorship opportunities can be found by clicking here or calling (239) 745-3705.
In addition to Relevanza, sponsors include the Presenting Sponsor, Markham Norton Mosteller Wright & Co., as well as Brennan, Manna and Diamond P.L., Dolphin Global Technology Solutions, Guerilla Media, Photo Magic, Slick Ink ALL MEDIA and Third Eye Management. The event’s exclusive magazine sponsor is Gulfshore Business magazine.
So, you have your website and you've set up your Facebook page, Twitter account, LinkedIN profile, Google+ page, Pinterest photos; even posted that silly video of your cat jumping over the couch to YouTube and you're ready to take it live next time to UStream.
Now what?
Connections, baby, connections. Social media is nothing without connections and connectivity is what helps you build your community. But let's start slow, break it down, take it one step at a time. Maybe try using RSS feeds to fill your Facebook page.
Here's a link to an excellent slide show put together by Relevanza co-founder Birgit Pauli-Haack for a recent social media boot camp.
You can find this presentation and others at our Tumblr blog on social media technology.
Oh, and by the way, the next social media bootcamp is set for March 3rd, 10th & 17th at Florida Gulf Coast University. You can register here.
Forbes likes lists and Forbes writers & editors especially like, "Top Whatever," lists.
So, it was bound to happen that Forbes created its Top 50 Social Media Influencers list. Centered around Twitter, these are the voices who carry the most weight on the Twitscape - and, therefore according to Forbes, the greatest influence on the larger social media ecosystem.
We compiled the Forbes list on our own @Relevanza Twitter page the list and latest Tweets.
And to that list we'd also like to add: @bethkanter, non-profit social media expert of the first hour and author of Networked Organization; @charleneli, co-author of Groundswell & Open Leadership - thought leader pioneer in the space, light years ahead of Forbes; @jbernoff, co-author of Groundswell and of Empowered, another prophet of the open public organization, a visionary; @jtobin, founder of Ignite Social Media, the first SM agency and his company, @ignitesma; @ericboggs, founder of @ArgyleSocial.
Feel free to add to this list, as well!!
