But hey, it’s not all about the technology. We’ll also explore some tactical things you can do with the toolsets and discuss the best way to build roadmaps that take advantage of what vendors offer in the social software sector.

What are you interested in learning?

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A while back I attended a PRWeek and Waggener Edstrom event at the posh  Hotel Palomar here in Big D. The event was titled Campaigns in the 21st Century: Measuring Perceptions. Dan Gallagher delivered an interesting look at how they analyzed content being created on the web related to the Presidential candidates. The analysis was done back in Sept. 2007 and was accomplished using the Narrative Network, a toolset they created using some pretty nifty algorithms. You can download Dan’s presentation here. (if it doesn’t work. lemme know) And here’s the movie.

In short, it’s text mining and brand mapping that creates a visual map of how the media perceives a particular brand or topic. That’s pretty hot stuff these days with all the attention on social media measurement or brand monitoring. Smart companies and agencies are finally figuring out that social media measurement is just another layer in a well-integrated approach to digital marketing and public relations.

I’m still a little baffled when clients don’t want to budget for stuff like this. It really gives new meaning to the “intel” connotation.

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How’s this for the lead..

After mooching off the open source world for 10 years and making millions, Backcountry.com finally threw the Postgres community a bone in the form of a database synching tool curiously called Bucardo.

And judging by their PR firm’s (Base Camp Communications) transparent writing style, they clearly architected it. Good for them.

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I can hear it now.

Have you seen that video on YouTube?! Makes us look like a bunch of idiots I tell you.

Technorati Tags: AT&T, youtube, social+media, video, iPhone, environmental+awareness

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And speaking of clean, the other image is from Micro Target Media and comes straight to you from a genuine Addsion, Tx Port-o-Potty. It cracked me up that the PROs — portable restaurant operators — got into the acronym game. But apparently I should have done my homework. PRO is a common term as you can see in the comment thread.

And you wonder why social media and brand measurement is so hot. It took what, less than 48 hours for somebody to track me down. WOW.

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One of the best things about the FASTforward conference was seeing how customers have used FAST technology - how they’ve applied it to the real world. I sat down last Thursday with CEO Tauseef Bashir of TauMed, a virtual health community, and got a glimpse of how healthcare information is evolving. This time the evolution is being  driven by social media and powerful search technologies.

(Photo | Tauseef Bashir and Jerry Bowles)

According to some recent stats from TauMed’s PR firm about 10 million Americans go online each day searching for answers to health questions. And to no one’s surprise Health searches are now just as popular as paying bills online, reading blogs, or using the web to find phone numbers and addresses.

With that kind of activity, you can see why there’s an information land grab going on. So Is there room for another WebMD? And how do you compete with the 800 lb. gorilla? Bashir says they’ll do it by improving the quality of information, how that information is delivered and expanding the site’s social networking capabilities. No small task by any stretch.

The beta site, launched in December, is impressive. It’s actually more impressive when you see it go head-to-head with WebMD. During his demo, he showed me some of why there’s so much buzz around search becoming the new interface. When we searched for “MS” (multiple sclerosis) in WebMD’s v1.0 site and asked to see the Web results, we  saw things like Microsoft Corporation and other irrelevant items. Doing the same search in TauMed rendered much more precise results. The other things I liked were the “ask a question” and “HealthShare“ features. Tauseef’s product team uses rich Ajax interfaces to dynamically serve up content, giving the site a clean, interactive feel when searching for data or contributing content for HealthShares. 

Tauseef,a former FAST employee, is passionate about the company’s prospects and knows they’ve got a fight in front of them. He says consumers have short attention spans for fruitless searches and irrelevant information and intends to capitalize on it.  The data mining and contextual analysis is the key, he says, to serving up razor-sharp results and creating a memorable user experience. But search aside, I dug a little deeper on the social networking aspects of TauMed’s community. Apparently, they’ve built their own content management system (CMS) and blog-like capabilities. I couldn’t help but notice how their user profile pages mimic blog features, providing very simple and intuitive interfaces and easy onramps to adding user-generated content. 

The other thing that popped up during the demo was advertisements, mostly from Google. I’m OK with that, but what surprised me was the irrelevancy of certain ads. In the midst of deep-diving for additional multiple sclerosis (MS) information, a political ad obtrusively took over half the side rail in TauMed’s 3 column-ish layout. Suffice to say, Tuaseef quickly pointed out their product team is in the midst of improving their ad-serving backend. He also added TauMed was an early AdMomentum customer, putting much of the platform under rigorous testing and customization.

But let’s face it, as Web 2.0 as TauMed 1.0 is,  they still have a numbers problem. Not the financial kind, but traffic. Outside of mass media advertising, you’ve got  a classic case of a company needing some good ol’ fashioned grassroots and word-of-mouth marketing. Perhaps they should also reach out to other social software providers supplying the resources to companies building intranets, niche communities, and other social-oriented portals. You could even include some of the office 2.0 candidates like ZoHo, CentralDesktop, and others. They too will become more and more dependent on customized content as user bases grow. I guess you could think of it as enabling TauMed to become the de facto health widget.

However it plays out, they’re an interesting company that has a new evangelist.  

Cross-posted @ The FASTforward Blog

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Still, the company may need to hurry up a bit. As IDC analyst Chris Chute pointed out, Kodak is now the No. 3 seller of digital cameras, behind Canon and Sony, and investors are getting impatient with quarter after quarter of red ink. Fourth-quarter figures aren’t in yet, but Kodak’s market share for the third quarter was 14%, down from 21% in 2005, he said.

And I thought this excerpt was funny:

The executives interviewed said they are not sure how the video made its way to the web in December, but the best guess is one or more tech-savvy employees copied it or uploaded it from the company intranet.

Why hide this? Kodak makes it sound like video and the web are foreign to their average employee. Maybe that’s half the problem.

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Note:: First seen @ Organic’s blog

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Take a look at this slide show

What I can’t figure out is how some of these decisions come about? Was the agency and client simply chasing publicity or was it just a case of the non-existent strategy? (Hint: Don’t always do user-generated media because everyone else is doing it.)

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My premise for pitching the SMNR to them was simple. Let your audience slice and dice your content on their terms. Some folks will download the video, some will pull down a photo. Others might decide to just Digg it and move on. Whatever the interaction with your SMNR, the key is just that, interaction.

It’s fascinating to think how early we are in all of this. Fast forward a few years and think how silly it’ll seem gloating over an embedded video (below) inside of a press release.

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It looks like 2006 will be viewed as the watershed year for social media, and with good reason. The impact of social spaces like MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn, along with the emergence of video, business blogs, and the mobile web was hard to ignore.  

Now it’s still early, but clients are asking the right questions when it comes to social media. Instead of just building a website or microsite, they’re asking how to build community. They’re asking how to facilitate conversation. And they’re asking how to create and distribute content in new and innovative ways.

The new Web is a very different thing. It’s a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it’s really a revolution.

It seems The “Information Age” has finally found its frontman. You.

 (First seen @ http://www.innovationcreators.com)

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Specifically, I commented on the collaboration between PR firm Shift Communications and Whitley Media that spawned PRX Builder. Well, I mentioned SHIFT but left out Whitley Media.

S-o-o-o, in the spirit of any good blogger, writer, or journalist, I wanted to get the facts straight and give credit where credit is due. Fortunately I received a comment from Shannon Whitley yesterday reminding me of their part in the ongoing SMPR efforts. We can all join the discussion here. 

This time I’ll just quote him from my email message:

All other firms are more than welcome to pitch-in and help improve PRX Builder, taking us to the next level.  I welcome all new ideas and perspectives.

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My gut tells me they won’t see much of an uptick unless they have a brilliantly planned grassroots effort in the works. How can you “hope” to generate buzz with light direct mail and search engine marketing?

..there will be no print ads or broadcast spots. Instead, over the next 30 days, there will merely be some direct mail to targeted consumers, a presence on several search engines and, hopefully, some buzz.

I would have an events calendar that would put me and my Rondo in the back pocket of every one of my consumers every time they walked out the door in my target markets. And I think you have to go deeper than that. How ’bout monitoring your competitors’ brand on the web to see what’s driving some of those purchasing decisions. Once you’re privy to those conversations, you can plan an effective strategy that blends the best of traditional and new media approaches.

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The report, from The Keller Fay Group and PR firm Manning Selvage & Lee, sampled responses from 1,100 people between June and August.

And according to Keller Fay CEO Ed Keller, more than 80% of conversations about brands happen offline.

That doesn’t surprise me too much. Think about the last time you made a big purchase. You probably sought all kinds of opinions from your influencer network, right?

What we’re seeing here is reflections of everyday conversations,” he said. One of the most important findings, Keller said, is that 15% of the population consists of what he calls “conversation catalysts,” or “influencers.”

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When we’re working with clients we’re trying to absorb everything that constitutes a brand. Is there a corporate and conservative nature to the brand? What about colors and fonts? It all plays into the experience. I mean, can you imagine UPS saying, “what can yellow do for you”? 

One of our recent brand efforts was for one of our clients in the restaurant business, Mary’s Cajun Corner. We wanted a bit more playful feel, but one that also captured the look of a national brand.

Let us know if we can help you brand you.

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And in an effort to get the word out about Jaegerman,we’ve (TheWOWAgency) helped Cym’s team rev up the marketing engine. For starters, you can download the first four chapters of his exciting thriller on his website. And since Cym has additional novels in the works, we wanted to give you the opportunity to have an ongoing conversation with him on his blog. (screenshot below) Congrats to Cynthia, Cym, and Reflection Fine Art for putting on a great show. And if you missed the pomegranate martinis from Imperia Vodka, go find one!

You can see the rest of the Flickr photostream here.

         (Screenshot from ~ The Novelist:The Weblog of Cym Lowell)

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And speaking of books, Cym’s new novel Jaegerman features Chartier’s  artwork on the cover…it’s really quite stunning.

So come by for a fantastic show where you’ll also enjoy Imperia Vodka martinis and Barefoot Wine along with some great food from Ziziki’s.

Raising the adult literacy rate in the DFW Metroplex benefits everyone!

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