One was by William Marzullo – Highly-Qualified Staffing and Recruiting Professional [ LION™], TopLinked.com where he stated:

“Social media is a tempting low cost method of sharing your idea, concept, product, and service but I believe it is limited in its approach for a pure marketing campaign. The difference between industrial media and social media is the difference between being “spoken to” and discussing.

While many unsolicited (positive) responses to planned and strategic topics can bolster any marketing campaign, negative responses will do the opposite. It would take a very courageous and secure organization to launch a marketing campaign that is primarily responses and interface from user and consumer generated media forums.

It is that lack of control and ambiguity that keeps companies on the edge, pushing the limits of hybrid marketing that includes both industrial and social. Perhaps moderated forums are the answer, but rest assured the low cost and scalability of Social Media will find its way into mainstream marketing.”

The other answer was written into an article and published by Steve Latham – Founder / CEO of Spur Interactive.  Steve says in part in his article:

What are the barriers to Social Media Marketing?  In addition to legal  (liability? truth in advertising)? and brand management issues (what if our tweets violate our brand guidelines!), I believe there are three primary issues that impede companies from leveraging Social Media:

1. The Business Case for Social Media
While most intuitively believe social media is a low-cost way to extend your reach, build your brand and drive new business, most need hard data to justify the investment of time, energy and resources (people). And in this climate, few are going to stick their neck out to try something that isn’t embraced by CXOs.  BTW – I heard there’s a very insightful presentation available for viewing on the Business Case for Social Media.

Read Steves complete article at
http://blog.spurinteractive.com/2009/07/15/barriers-to-social-media-marketing/

G. Wayne Clayton is the founder and Chief Visionary Officer of Integerol/SocialMarketingExpert.org. He’s a former newspaper publisher and investigative journalist. He has been seen seen and heard on CNN, Fox News Talk radio, and is a Guest Blogger on FastCompany.com.

Microsoft appears to have come to its senses over an advertisement that had some observers claiming it was the worst technology commercial ever.

The company has yanked official versions of the online-only ad for its Internet Explorer 8 Web browser off online video sites after users complained it was offensive. If you haven’t seen it, count yourself lucky.

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/07/02/microsoft-makes-users-sick-pulls-ad/

Below is the tasteless video in question… sorry you MUST see this if only to learn what to NEVER do…

to see it simply click on your FOLLOWING or FOLLOWERS link to the top right. Here is one version of it – the EXPANDED look

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Then there is the LIST look.

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I like them both. Makes it easy to see what that potential new follower has last posted. And with the rash of spammers now setting up shop on Twitter, it makes deciding on whom to follow much easier.

If you click your cursor in the ACTION button, a mini menu of four choices pops up. Much more elegant.

The only addition I wish Twitter would make is a radio button so you can mass follow and unfollow. Today I was a :grateful recipient” of being followed by a spammer who created 50 accounts and they all followed at once.

You can see there is no text indicating they had tweeted anything yet… but the way he created accounts is a dead giveaway as to his spamming intent. Lucky me I had 2 more bacthes of 50 so to delete/block almost 150 accounts is time consuming.

Twitter has gone through incredible growth over the last 90 days. Its really about time these “tweaks” were put in place.

G. Wayne Clayton is the founder and Chief Visionary Officer of Integerol LLC  along with SocialMarketingExpert.org.  He’s a former newspaper publisher and investigative journalist. He has been seen seen and heard on CNN, Fox News Talk radio, quoted in The Toronto Star and is a Guest Blogger on FastCompany.com.

The rise of social networking sites over the past few years has been nothing short of phenomenal, but yet, many people still don’t understand why these types of sites have succeeded. Especially given that many of the sites are extremely basic, and simply offer methods of communicating that people have enjoyed for decades.

On more than one occasion I’ve heard people say about Twitter, “so what’s the big deal? What can you really say in just 140 characters? After all, don’t you need more room (than 140 characters) to say something really important. And frankly, I don’t care to hear about what someone’s eating for lunch!”).

True enough. I don’t care what others are eating for lunch either, but for some reason, people are more comfortable sending a message via public forums like Twitter and Facebook, rather than simply picking-up the phone., or typing an email.

This fact is backed up by a recent Nielsen report. In it, Nielson states that the use of social network sites (called Member Communities) such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube finally passed the use of email in becoming the 4th most popular activity online. These communities are realizing a growth rate more than twice that of any of the other four largest sectors. The rapid increase in the number of social networking sites has been such a marvel that many fail to appreciate or comprehend why they keep growing or why they thrive.

So… just why have Social Networking sites become “the next big thing?” The key is the first word… social – the social part of the operation. People are such social beings that they naturally will start “friending” as a big group over common ideas or interests. In other words people collect, concentrate, congregate, convene, converge, convoke, corral, flock, gang around, gather, hang out, mass, meet, meet up, muster, pack, rally, rendezvous, round up, and swarm, This is why you will see groups of people gathering over Maker’s Mark ® Bourbon or bingo. This “friending” creates a bond among those who are in the group. Social networks keep track of those common ideas, interests, and information that then can be used to find other people with whom we share those same common likes and interests.

Let’s say I made an acquaintance at a restaurant on a weekday. We sit over a few bottles of beverages sharing with each other about our past week and I discover that he is a carpenter. He impresses me and seems to know what he’s doing. Remember now, this was the first time I spoke to him. Five days later, one of  my co-worker’s tells me that he needs someone to remodel his basement. Recalling that my newfound friend is a carpenter, I put my co-worker in contact with him — I refer him. This is a simple illustration of a business concept that has been repeated a million times over in many different venues. It’s called “word-of-mouth.”

This is the concept that social networks have tapped. People recommend others and invite still others to join conversations. The sharing of knowledge spreads camaraderie and trust.

This concept is what many internet markets build on. By using social networks, it is easy to build a following for your products or services that get you trust by proxy. Doing one good thing for one person alone will result to more customers if that one satisfied person you helped passes on the information to others. Social networking is one that also encourages responsibility and diligence — it’s “word-of-mouth” (for both good and bad experiences) on steroids.

G. Wayne Clayton is the founder and Chief Visionary Officer of Integerol LLC  along with SocialMarketingExpert.org.  He’s a former newspaper publisher and investigative journalist. He has been seen seen and heard on CNN, Fox News Talk radio, quoted in The Toronto Star and is a Guest Blogger on FastCompany.com.

Social media has become the hottest method of marketing in today’s world. Millions of people are using Facebook every day – that’s a market that needs to be tapped. With the creation of the Facebook “news feed”, getting information about you to other people has never been more simple.

As a hotel, you can certainly use Facebook as an effective method to bring in more guests. However, you need to be careful. Like any marketing method, if done incorrectly, it can become a tremendous waste of both time and money. Here are a few ways that you can market on Facebook without wasting your time or your money:

The rest of the article goes into more details as to what hotels can do specifically…heres a summary of the 10 suggestions.

1) Create a profile so people can contact you

2) Post an event.

3) Post some pictures or videos.

4) Share news articles.

5) Create a Facebook group.

6) Create a Facebook page.

7) Post a classified ad on Facebook Marketplace.

8) Purchase Social Ads.

9) Start a poll.

10) Sponsor a Facebook Application.

Copyright© 1995-2009 Hospitality Net™ All rights reserved.

To read the entire article go to  http://www.hospitalitynet.org/news/154000320/4042071.html

G. Wayne Clayton is the founder and Chief Visionary Officer of Integerol LLC  along with SocialMarketingExpert.org.  He’s a former newspaper publisher and investigative journalist. He has been seen seen and heard on CNN, Fox News Talk radio, quoted in The Toronto Star and is a Guest Blogger on FastCompany.com.

Commissioned by security vendor Websense, research firm Dynamic Markets reported that 54 percent of Australian respondents thought email services such as Hotmail, Yahoo & Gmail constitute Web 2.0 while 48 percent said Wikis and 30 percent said sites that enable users to upload photographs are Web 2.0.

A further 44 percent said Web 2.0 are internet portals such as iGoogle; 44 percent social networks primarily used for business use e.g. LinkedIn and 43 percent said auction sites.

Read the entire article at

http://www.crn.com.au/News/147311,web-20-confuses-australian-professionals-survey.aspx

Wired’s Danger Room blog has obtained a copy of a May 18 operations order from the Army’s 93rd Signal Brigade directing information managers on domestic military bases to allow personnel to access Facebook, Vimeo, Delicious, Flickr and Twitter.

Read the entire article at  http://techinsider.nextgov.com/2009/06/army_to_stop_blocking_some_soc.php

I still dont get the negative impact that using social media would’ve made… unless they were concerned the Taliban is on Twitter or North Korea has a Facebook Fan Page…maybe I should check LOL

G. Wayne Clayton is the founder and Chief Visionary Officer of Integerol LLC along with SocialMarketingExpert.org. He’s a former newspaper publisher and investigative journalist. He has been seen seen and heard on CNN, Fox News Talk radio, quoted in The Toronto Star and is a Guest Blogger on FastCompany.com.

Just picked up a new book that came highly recommended to me. It titled: What Would Google Do? & authored by Jeff Jarvis. It’s published by Collins Business, a division of HarperCollins, and should be avilable in most major retail bookstores, and online, of course.

The idea: Jeff tries to reverse-engineer the success of the fastest growing company in the history of the world, the one company that truly understands how to succeed in the internet age, and then take those lessons and apply them to a number of industries, companies, and institutions, from carmakers to restaurants to universities to government. 

Wild guess on who that company might be? Anymore? That’s right, Google. 

If you’d like to watch Jeff talking about his book, here is a 20 minute video to check out  -  http://fora.tv/2009/02/18/Jeff_Jarvis_What_Would_Google_Do 

Here’s the blurb from Amazon:
“In a book that’s one part prophecy, one part thought experiment, one part manifesto, and one part survival manual, internet impresario and blogging pioneer Jeff Jarvis reverse-engineers Google—the fastest-growing company in history—to discover forty clear and straightforward rules to manage and live by. At the same time, he illuminates the new worldview of the internet generation: how it challenges and destroys, but also opens up vast new opportunities. His findings are counterintuitive, imaginative, practical, and above all visionary, giving readers a glimpse of how everyone and everything—from corporations to governments, nations to individuals—must evolve in the Google era.

Along the way, he looks under the hood of a car designed by its drivers, ponders a worldwide university where the students design their curriculum, envisions an airline fueled by a social network, imagines the open-source restaurant, and examines a series of industries and institutions that will soon benefit from this book’s central question.

The result is an astonishing, mind-opening book that, in the end, is not about Google. It’s about you. ” 

I should finish it over the next week. I will let you know my thoughts on the book.

When you think of the Web 2.0 phenomenon, what words come to mind? Transparency, engagement, conversation, guru, apps, social networking, social media, social marketing… any of these sound familiar? Web 2.0 lingo has saturated articles, blog posts, tweets, and conversations across the web, but what does it all mean? And more importantly, how does it apply to the health and growth of your business? Thankfully, the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco helped to answer these questions in an applicable way, since it was “focused on ideas and solutions that will translate into real value and ultimately sales” (Bub.blicio.us). To read more valuable takeaways from the event, go to :
http://www.gosmart4u.com/blog/building-your-business-in-a-web-20-world-web-20-expo-highlights/165/

There has been speculation for well over a year now about Facebook’s “soon to launch” virtual currency, but up until now, no services had been rolled out. As of last night, Facebook began testing the ability to let users send credits to each via comments according to Venturebeat’s Eric Eldon. Facebook has previously reached out to developers via the developer forum for testing out a virtual currency system but since then very little has been mentioned..

More of this article can be read at 
http://www.allfacebook.com/2009/04/facebook-begins-testing-virtual-currency/