What is Web 2.0?

I’m currently reading a book called Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide by Amy Shuen.

In the preface, there’s a discussion of “What is Web 2.0?” Google this question and about 365 million web pages are returned.

The top-ranked YouTube videos you’ll see included among the Top 10 search results are:





According to Amy, “These YouTube videos provide two ends of the spectrum of Web 2.0 definitions. The technical folks tell us that techniques, architectures, and technologies have combined to trigger a phase transition—from a Web 1.0 collection of static web sites to a Web 2.0 platform for a new generation of dynamic social web applications and services. The social sciences folks show us that ‘we are the Web’ and that right now—whether you call it Web 2.0 or not—people are shaping the Web and the world’s digitized collective knowledge in unexpected directions through their uploads, content, and billions of clicks a day.”

OK. That’s quite a mouthful (and we’re not even into Chapter 1 yet), but her point is that no matter what you call it, it’s here (the era of Web 2.0 and social media).

. ..and here's her book, which I'll be discussing further in future posts.

Blogs v. Forums

Synopsys hosts both blogs and forums in the Community section of synopsys.com.

But what's the difference between the two?

Blogs and forums have become equally ubiquitous fixtures in cyberspace, and they have a lot in common in that each allows users to "join the conversation" by posting comments. Because this feature facilitates multi-directional interaction, blogs and forums both contribute to the development of online communities.

But there are multiple distinctions that set the two apart and make each unique, such as:



There are other differences as well (examples include the ability to subscribe via RSS, send private messages or see who else is online), but some of these lines are blurring through time.

In my view, the most important row in the grid above is the one labeled "Objective."

In other words, whether you're writing, contributing or viewing a blog or a forum, what's the purpose? For most blogs, the objective is (hopefully) clear by browsing a combination of the blog title, the "About" description (if there is one) and a few recent posts.

For most forums, regardless of topic or industry, the primary purpose is to advance one or more of the following goals:

Ask questions/initiate discussion threads

Provide suggestions and help to others who share a common interest or pursuit

Grow and contribute to a reliable body of knowledge

Enable people to find answers to questions others have encountered and solved

Compare experiences and results with others in the community

For additional information about these two forms of online engagement, here are some links:
Wikipedia: Internet Forum
What are the Differences between Message Boards and Weblogs?
Blog v. Forum: What's the Difference?

…and I was just wondering, can two things really be "equally ubiquitous?" Or is that more of an "on/off" condition in this digital world of ours?

The Sweet Spot

As I was walking through the exhibition area of the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco last Friday, "The Story of the Three Bears" crossed my mind. (Yes, yes, funny how the mind works!)

Specifically, I thought of the part about porridge that's "Too hot or too cold versus just right."That concept actually has a lot to do with customer experience -- at a trade show or anywhere a company interfaces with people.

Midstep somewhere in Aisle 500, an overly enthusiastic sales guy caught my eye, flashed a wide smile and proceeded to tell me about how his company is changing the way businesses worldwide buy IT. I didn't have the heart to tell him that I don't have a role in buying what he was selling, but if experiences are porridge, this bowl was way too hot by any measure.

A short while later, I stopped at a booth that looked genuinely interesting. Not change-your-world interesting, but on-topic for social media and therefore worth further investigation. Ah, but here the lone booth representative was so engaged with his BlackBerry that, after a few minutes of waiting, I simply picked up a brochure and moved on... porridge too cold.

The exhibit booths that were on-target for my interests and well-staffed with engaging and knowledgable people were, of course, just right.

I attended the Web 2.0 Expo, not as a buyer of products and services, but as someone interested in learning as much as possible about the vendors in the social media space. In other words, nobody made their year or went out of business on Friday because of how I experienced the temperature of their porridge.

But the experience was a good case study, nonetheless, of how opinions are formed and word-of-mouth begins. Interactions matter, whether your customers are external and far away or internal and in the cube next door.

Ask yourself... If customer experience is porridge, what temperature will you be serving today?

Demystifying RSS

RSS, which is an acronym for "Really Simple Syndication," is a huge time saver for people who want to receive updates from their favorite websites whenever new content is published.

How does RSS work? Let's say that there are five websites you follow regularly. In the old days before RSS existed, the only way to know if those sites posted new content was to link to each one individually and visually scan the pages for something new. Not a very efficient use of time, especially when there was no new content to see.

With RSS, you no longer have to go out on the Web to see what's new on your favorite sites – an RSS feed will automatically do that work for you and then alert you whenever new content is posted.

The convenience of RSS is available on any site that displays this icon:

One of the weaknesses of RSS is that there is no single method or "one-click" procedure to subscribe to feeds. In general, here are two popular options:

• On a website or blog with a feed, find the RSS icon or button, right click, copy the link location, and paste the URL into your RSS feed reader, or
• Find the button for the RSS Feed Reader of your choice, click and follow the instructions

A third option is to set up an RSS feed from within Microsoft Outlook. Here's how:

1. On the Tools menu of Microsoft Outlook 2007, click Account Settings.
2. On the RSS Feeds tab, click New.
3. From your Web browser, select the full URL of the site you wish to subscribe to and press CTRL+C to copy
4. In the New RSS Feed dialog box (in Outlook), press CTRL+V to paste the URL of the RSS Feed
5. Click Add, Click OK

For more on the basics of how RSS works, check out the following video:

RSS in Plain English

Additional resources:

Add an RSS Feed

RSS Tutorial

Basic Introduction to RSS Feeds and Aggregators for Non-Technical People

The Art of the Online Interview

Do you know everything there is to know about all things? Or even everything about your own areas of expertise?

If you author a blog, forum or other type of content for the Web – and your answer is a modest "No" – then the ability to develop and publish online interviews can be a tremendous asset to both you and your readers.

Not only is Web 2.0 all about the conversational attributes of the Internet, readers generally appreciate the availability of diverse insights and perspectives on the topics they're interested in following. Plus, as a writer/content developer, engaging with smart people who are passionate and knowledgeable about their topic is rewarding on multiple levels. Finally, for subject experts interested in sharing their insights, participating in an online interview is a great way to reach a larger audience on new sites.

Online interviews, in other words, are a win/win for all. Here are my suggestions for how to proceed:

Approach

• Introduce yourself, your role and the opportunity at hand
• Set clear expectations for how the interview will be conducted and used
  • Where it will be published? When?
  • Address any questions or concerns the interviewee may have to their satisfaction
• Describe the interview process: Once an interviewee agrees to participate in online interview, the basic process consists of the following three steps:
  • You propose a set of interview questions and send them to the interviewee via email
  • They respond to the questions and send the responses back to you via email
  • You edit for typos, format and publish the final interview as agreed
• Provide the interviewee with clear information about how to contact you

Preparation

• Begin by asking yourself: "What is the purpose of this interview?" Your answer to that question will help guide and inform the types of questions you ask
• Be prepared: Do whatever homework is necessary to ask the best possible questions
• Structure the interview with a set of 4-5 questions (too many more than that can be burdensome, fewer can make for too short an interview)
• Think in terms of "What," "Why" and "How" to develop the interview questions
• Questions should be phrased in an open-ended manner whenever possible (rather than ones that invite a yes or no answer)
• The primary purpose of interview questions is to set the stage and provide easy openings for the interviewee to expand on the overall topic of the interview. If any of the proposed questions are off topic or awkward in any way, let the interviewee know that you are willing to edit the proposed questions – or ask different questions – if he or she prefers
• Encourage the interviewee to provide URL links to sources for additional information, if appropriate
• Ask for any supplemental content you may need (i.e., photographs, illustrations, etc.) at the time you send the interview questions
• The last question should encourage the respondent to provide any additional insights or information they wish to add: "Is there anything else one should know about this topic?"

Execution

• If you are confused or unclear by any of the responses you receive, ask for clarification
• Trust and integrity are essential: If the interviewee requests that you consider any portion of the content provided as "off the record," always honor such requests
• Check any linked URLs for accuracy before publishing
• Format photographs, illustrations and other graphic files as necessary to fit the parameters of your site
• Proofread all content once again after formatting and before hitting the "Publish" button
• Remember to thank the interviewee for their time and thoughtful insights

Happy interviewing… If you have additional tips to share on this topic, please post a Comment.

The Successful Blogger

How does one go about creating a successful blog? Here are five basic recommendations:

1. Establish a Clear Objective

What is the general theme or topic you plan to blog about? This consideration may seem obvious, but thinking it through before launching a new blog is an important first step. Developing an outline of topics you'd like to cover can be helpful in narrowing your focus as well as building an initial pipeline of ideas to draw from down the road.

2. Be Consistent

New posts keep subscribers coming back, and they add juice to search engine indexes. Frequency recommendation: weekly is optimal. Every other week is OK. More often than that is hard to sustain (for author and reader alike) and a lesser frequency tends to lose traction.

3. Keep it Simple

As every writer knows, the space between staring at a blank screen and finding the groove that begins with the first few keystrokes can be daunting at times. The good news is that you're blogging, not writing the next great novel. Keep your blog posts simple, single-topic focused and not too lengthy and your readers are likely to appreciate your communication style. Plus, writing blog posts is apt to become as natural as tapping out email messages -- a skill you've long ago mastered completely.

4. Think Links

Building inbound links is a priority for most bloggers, and for good reason. They drive click-through traffic from other blogs, they increase your exposure around the blogosphere, and they help to boost your search engine rankings. Getting a few links from respected blogs can help with search engine traffic, but the added credibility that you get can be just as important, especially for newer bloggers.

5. Have Patience

New blogs generally take months, if not longer, before they gain enough juice to produce any significant search engine-generated traffic. Building a blog that is search engine-friendly is critical if you want to maximize search traffic. In addition, although posting needs to be consistent to keep traffic levels as high as possible, that doesn't mean that traffic levels will always be consistent. Every blog has ups and downs – be sure that you enjoy the times when traffic is high, and don't obsess over the numbers during slower times.

Post with Care

Do you assume that some areas of cyberspace are more private than others?

Surely you're aware that email messages can live well beyond their intended life – or audience – but what about social media sites where you can take comfort in being able to screen friend requests and have a say in who gets to participate in your online universe?

Well, don't get too comfortable.

And don't assume that what you intend as private online communication between yourself and select others is any more "safe" than an ordinary email message.

This is the digital world after all. Check out http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/23/privacy-disaster-at-twitter-direct-messages-exposed/ for the story about a hapless Twitter user with 650 followers who had the embarrassing experience of seeing her very private direct messages show up in her normal Twitter stream for the whole wide world to read. The problem was eventually traced back to a flaw with a third-party Twitter application but, nonetheless, damage done.

Another blogger describes his experience with Tweetbeep, a service that sends you an email alert (similar to a Google Alert) when a tweet is posted anywhere on Twitter that contains whatever keywords you specify. In this case, the blogger was able to see private content aggregated through Twitter's API that users thought was protected. "I was surprised to see that their Twitter page said their updates were protected and I had to submit a request to the user to follow them. I couldn't see the updates, but somehow tweetbeep was able to? That must mean there is a loophole… it is only a matter of time before websites start popping up that will allow you to read a Twitter user's private tweet time line." The full story is at http://www.thorschrock.com/2008/11/02/tweetbeep-can-see-through-twitter-privacy-protection/.

Does what happen in Facebook stay in Facebook? Check out: http://www.albumoftheday.com/facebook/. For further reading, try Your Privacy Is An Illusion: Why Facebook Employees are Profiling Users

What's a social media-savvy person to do?

My recommendation is to exercise the same discretion and good judgment online as you do in other parts of your personal and professional life.

Finally, remind yourself that "Once I hit the Enter key, I will have zero control over the future of this communication." If there's no inner voice urging caution regarding that which you're about to send, you should be just fine.

The Future of Engagement

I presented a Social Media 101 workshop for a group of Synopsys colleagues on Friday. The attendees were terrific: engaged, attentive, inquisitive – everything one hopes for when standing in front of a room to share insights and knowledge with others.

So when I received a link from my manager later that day to a blog post titled How to Present While People are Twittering, I stopped to read it right away (thanks Karen!).

Presenting while your audience is twittering – what a dismal thought. It's bad enough when a dining companion starts thumbing a Blackberry during table conversation or you find yourself in a conference room where various others have more important things to do online than fully participate in the meeting at hand. But presenting to a roomful of people who are busy twittering while you're trying to make a little eye contact and stay focused on delivering your personal best as you fulfill your objectives and obligations as a speaker? Not so much.

Yet Tamar Weinberg (the blog's author) suggests multiple benefits of such emerging Twitter behavior for audience and speaker alike. Referring to Twitter interaction as a "back channel" for the audience, she says, "There are huge benefits to the individual members of the audience and to the overall output of a conference or meeting." Tamar's list includes 1) Twitter helps audience members focus, 2) the audience gets more content, 3) audience members can get questions answered on the fly, and 4) the audience can innovate as well as participate.

What about the speaker? Tamar says, "We're used to having eye contact with our audience and using that eye contact and audience reaction to measure how well we're engaging the audience. Now when you say something brilliant, instead of nods of appreciation, there will be a flurry of tapping. Here's the positive spin… the typing means you're provoking interest, your colleagues can answer questions for you, you'll get immediate feedback, and they won't fall asleep."

To be fair, Tamar's blog focuses on conference environments where audience size is often orders of magnitude beyond that of a training workshop. But who's to say how human conduct will continue to morph and evolve through time? If twittering tweets in a room full of a thousand people is the hot new trend, what about a roomful of 100, or 20? There are already those who are perfectly comfortable interacting in cyberspace at a table for two, so what forms of interconnected conduct will we find professionally (or personally) acceptable in future years?

What do you think?

90-9-1 Redux

I wrote about the 90-9-1 rule of social media in last week's blog post, and was rewarded with some enlightening feedback that warmed my heart and broadened my appreciation of a few fundamental truths:

• Truth #1: You don't need a megaphone to participate or contribute something important to a given community
• Truth #2: Active, engaged listening is often the better part of discourse – without listening, you might as well shout to the sky or pound sand
• Truth #3: In every community, everybody matters

The 90-9-1 rule asserts that in most online communities, 90% of users "never contribute," 9% of users "contribute a little," and 1% of users account for "almost all the action." Even before the contours of the rule are colored in (what crayon would you choose to personify a Lurker?), the basic premise was viewed as objectionable to several Synopsys colleagues.

Gail Gauvin remarked that, "This model seems to imply that anyone who has 'only' been reading the newspapers/magazines for their adult life – and not writing a letter to the editor, let alone submitting a freelance article of their own – are not contributing to society. And what does it say about all those book buyers, who have been merely– dare I say it? – reading, and not actually writing a novel of their own?"

Touché Gail, who went on to say, "In any social construct (commerce, politics, entertainment…) we need producers and consumers. Consumers are not lurkers or inactive; they contribute by absorbing, distilling, disseminating, promoting, acting on, or teaching for or against the 'product' that they are consuming. Not everyone at the party likes to wear a lampshade on their head, or even dance, but many like to hear the music, tap their foot and feel the pulse of the crowd."

I heard similar sentiments from others, including this excerpt from an email received directly from another colleague: "I actually prefer to stay behind the scenes. I'm not usually very talkative, I prefer to listen. And when I do communicate, I still like to talk/write to a specific person directly, not some large unknown group. Even though I don't contribute, I do like being part of an online community. I enjoy reading your blogs. I find the information useful. I just wanted to let you know this. And I look forward to reading your next blog."

Thank you.

I hear you, one and all, and here are my conclusions:

• To my fellow bloggers: Don't assume that the number of public comments you receive to your blog has any correlation to the value of what you write in the minds of others
• To my fellow bean counters: Don't be too quick to judge the effectiveness of blogs and forums based on the Sirens call of low-hanging metrics, such as "# of Comments"
• To my fellow colleagues: Whether you write, read, occasionally comment or simply pass through from time to time, you matter
• To everybody: Let's broaden our assumptions and definition of what it means to "contribute"

90-9-1

I always refer to it as the "1-9-90" rule because that seems less confusing to say conversationally, but most definitions I've seen refer to it as the 90-9-1 rule.

The rule is actually a theory, which asserts that in most online communities, 90% of users are "lurkers" who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.

In their book Groundswell, Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li take the theory a bit further in presenting their Social Technographics ladder, which basically expands the three 90-9-1 groups into six categories. (In research parlance, that's called a finer level of granularity – which provides book authors and others with much more to talk about.)

Bernoff and Li's categories are composed of Creators, Critics, Collectors, Joiners, Spectators and Inactives. Creators are people who author blogs, own a Web site or otherwise originate online content. Critics react to content created by others by posting ratings or reviews or participating in online forums. Collectors save URLs or bookmark pages, joiners maintain profiles on social networking sites, spectators consume what the rest produce and inactives are doing other things besides being online at all.

That's probably more granularity than one needs to see the main point: all large-scale, multi-user communities and online social networks share one property, which is that most users don't participate very much. In that sense, they can be said to "lurk" in the background.

I didn't coin the term and don't much care for it. Given the definition, I have many friends who could be described as lurkers when what they're actually doing is reading, observing or otherwise engaging. Just because somebody doesn't choose to blog or jump into an online discussion shouldn't earn them such a pejorative label. OK, no more ranting (in this post).

This 90-9-1 paradigm where 90% of users are non-contributors (ah, now that's a much nicer term), 9% contribute from time to time, and 1% of users account for most contributions underscores an essential point that is easily missed amid the percentages and labels: all online users matter.

One could even say that the 1% of users who always seem to be online matter too much in that they are not representative of whatever group they're from. Whether the group is EDA, the electronics industry or the world in general, you almost always hear from the same 1% of users who almost certainly differ from the 90% you never hear from.

This has several valuable implications – and that will be the subject of my next blog post!

Social Media and ROI

How do you measure the ROI of social media? The first step is to define that which you're attempting to measure.

Wikipedia defines ROI (return on investment) as "a measure of investment profitability" and as "the ratio of money gained or lost relative to the amount of money invested." The wiki page offers an expansive discussion on the topic, but the bottom line comes down to a simple proposition: "If I do X, then I expect Y in return" – the difference between X and Y is the ROI (positive or negative).

There are many examples where ROI is fairly simple to measure: If I put $1,000 in a savings account, I expect to achieve an ROI measured in pennies. If I properly water and fertilize a field of wheat, I expect to produce a crop that ultimately returns a profit.

But in the field of marketing, ROI often defies such "cause and effect" simplicity. If you pay $10,000 for an ad, run it once, and nothing measurable happens, can you conclude that advertising doesn't work? Or that nobody reads the publication? Or that you completely wasted a bunch of money? Of course not, and the main reason is that marketing is not a one-time, flash-in-the-pan event.

Marketing is the orchestration of a journey of exposures, interactions and experiences that happen over time. Just as ads are conceived in campaigns acting in concert with other points of exposure (i.e., PR, seminars, trade shows, sales calls, etc.), social media is an increasingly important component that complements the rest of the mix.

Measuring the ROI of social media isn't about looking for a more granular level of accountability than what's expected from other marketing resources. The metrics that matter are in the realm of figuring out how to track progress towards long-term customer-centric goals such as:

• Building trust relationships

• Increased customer engagement

• Enhanced customer experience

• Rapid response to customer feedback

Stay tuned for much more on this topic in future blog posts.

BTW, one can never assume that the ROI of doing nothing equals staying even.

Tweet, Tweet… or Become a Birdwatcher?

Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows people to send content (called tweets) and follow the tweets of others. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length. Updates are displayed on the user's profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them.

Twitter will celebrate its second birthday next month. As with most two-year olds, there's plenty of hope and promise ahead, but nobody knows for sure how this youngster will actually turn out.

So far, it appears that Twitter has some valuable advantages:

1. Twitter provides a medium for forging and maintaining relationships through social interaction. To the extent that "who you know is often as important as what you know," Twitter can help LI>
2. If you have interesting things to say and can add value to the river of thought enabled by Twitter, micro-blogging can advance your personal brand as you attract and build new followers
3. As you follow and interact with others, you gain an opportunity to learn and be in the know ahead of the curve about a wide variety of topics and developments
4. If you need a hand or want to test a new idea, Twitter can provide an instant focus group to collect feedback from many valuable points of view

Yet there are some notable downsides to Twitter as well. Chief among these are:

1. The 140-character limit may be plenty to report on your current mood and such, but it's not ideal when it comes to communicating complex ideas
2. Forging and maintaining relationships on Twitter takes a considerable amount of time and intention, and to reap those benefits you must participate, and often
3. When worlds collide: in the Twittersphere they surely will, which circles back to the idea of personal brand. Is your brand "standing in line for a cup of coffee," or something more meaningful in a business context. Twitter is not Facebook where you get to accept or ignore friend requests. Twitter is a public forum where whatever you say is, for better or worse, public
4. This public aspect extends beyond any specific individual – when the day comes for an influential but skeptical manager or two to check out Twitter for themselves, will their first impressions of employee activity in this sphere convey business value or something that could taint their broader assessments about social media? Might they come away thinking, "Just wasting time on company hours?" If so, that would present a big downside on our broader social media objectives

With regard to the actual business case for or against Twitter, the jury is out. Twitter may be exactly the right Web 2.0 tool for some, but it's probably not ideally suited for all people or every business. While we're waiting for the verdict, however, there is one thing we can already be sure of: Twitter is a social media phenomenon that companies must monitor, or ignore at their own peril.

Listen. Monitor. Pay attention. These are forms of participation that are every bit as important as proactively tweeting or staking out a personal presence with a Twitter account.

In fact, the very first thing we should be doing as a company from a strategic perspective is to become savvy birdwatchers, developing a well-tuned ear for tweets that matter. What are our customers saying about us – or are we mentioned at all? (The answer is yes, there are a fair number of tweets about Synopsys and our competitors on Twitter.) To see for yourself, check out some of the Twitter tracking tools such as Monitter, Tweet Scan and Twitter Search.

Last but not least, if you're a Twitter user, what is your own first-hand experience with Twitter? Even more significantly, what would our senior staff think?

You Can’t Tell the Players without a Program

Social media is a fast-moving phenomenon. There's a lot to know and get up to speed on, and more happening all the time. Sometimes it helps to pause for a few moments and take a look around. Check out some of the trees that compose the forest.

Here is a random overview of some of those trees. Some have already grown into mighty redwoods, others are mere saplings. This list is definitely not comprehensive, but maybe you'll find a few items of interest here or tap into a jumping-off point for further exploration. And as your own explorations uncover sites or applications that you find particularly useful, please let me know.

Although I have accounts on sites like LinkedIn, MySpace and NewsGator, I have not analyzed or delved into many of the other sites on this list deeply enough to endorse or dismiss them. Some may be useful; others may be virtual time wasters.

But that's the nature of social media: As the number of sites and applications continues to grow at Internet speed, some social media tools will demonstrate significant value for businesses while others will not. Be that as it may, knowledge is power and hopefully this list will contribute to our collective knowledge:

Bloglines is a free online service for searching, subscribing, creating and sharing news feeds, blogs and rich web content. Upon registration, users can access their account from any computer or mobile device.

Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking service that allows users to tag, save, manage and share web pages from a centralized source. With emphasis on the power of the community, Delicious strives to improve how people discover, remember and share on the Internet.

Digg is a site for people to share content and collectively determine its value. As submissions receive increasing numbers of "Diggs," they are promoted for other visitors to see.

Digsby is a free software product that helps you manage all your IM, email, and social network accounts from one application.

EveryZing provides search technology and brings the benefits of search engine optimization (SEO) to online audio and video content. By aggregating structured and unstructured digital content for faster, easier discovery, EveryZing adds value to search and drives user consumption of multimedia content.

Facebook is a social networking site. Millions of people use Facebook everyday to keep up with friends, upload an unlimited number of photos, share links and videos, and learn more about the people they meet.

Flickr is an image and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community platform. In addition to being a popular Web site for users to share personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers as a photo repository. Its popularity has been fueled by its organization tools, which allow photos to be tagged and browsed. As of November 2008, it claims to host more than 3 billion images.

Friendfeed is a feed aggregator that consolidates the updates from social media and social networking websites, social bookmarking websites, blogs and micro-blogging updates, as well as any other type of RSS/ Atom feed. Users can use this stream of information to create customized feeds to share (and comment) with friends.

Goodreads is a free website for book lovers, conceived as a large library that you can wander through and see everyone's bookshelves, their reviews, and their ratings. You can also post your own reviews and catalog what you have read, are currently reading, and plan to read in the future. You can also join a discussion group, start a book club or contact an author.

LinkedIn is a social networking site. When you join, you create a profile that summarizes your professional expertise and accomplishments. You can then form connections by inviting trusted contacts to join LinkedIn and connect to you. Your network consists of your connections, your connections' connections, and the people they know, linking you to a vast number of other professionals.

MySpace is an online community that lets you meet your friends' friends. Create a community on MySpace and you can share photos, journals and interests with your growing network of mutual friends

NewsGator seeks to help individuals and businesses improve the way they find information and communicate internally and externally through a wide range of RSS aggregation products and social media tools.

Pageflakes is a customizable portal to the Internet based on '"Flakes" – small, movable versions of all of your web favorites that you can arrange on your personal homepage.

Plurk is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send updates (otherwise known as plurks) through short messages or links, which can be up to 140 text characters in length. Plurk is a communication medium meant to form a balance between blogs and social networks, and between email messaging and instant messaging.

Qik is a web application that enables users to share video from their mobile phones and post video live on any website.

Reddit is a source for what's new and popular online. Users vote on links that you like or dislike and help decide what's popular.

Seesmic is a video blogging web application in alpha stage to make video uploading easier for those using webcams. Seesmic has been called the "Twitter of video", however conversations do not take place in real time. The service has 20,000 users to date and 70,000 viewers per month.

SlideShare is a community for sharing presentations. Individuals and organizations upload presentations to share their ideas, connect with others, and generate leads for their businesses. Anyone can find presentations on topics that interest them. They can tag, download, or embed presentations into their own blogs and websites.

StumbleUpon uses ratings to form collaborative opinions on website quality. When you stumble, you will only see pages that " like-minded stumblers" have recommended. This helps you discover certain content you might not find using a search engine.

Technorati collects, organizes, and distributes the global online conversation. Technorati was founded to help bloggers to succeed by collecting, highlighting, and distributing the online global conversation.

TweetDeck is a free beta application that aims to improve the functionality of Twitter by taking large numbers of twitter feeds and organizing them into topic-specific columns, thereby consolidating tweets into more manageable pieces.

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users' updates (AKA tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length. Updates are displayed on the user's profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them.

Viddler is a web application that allows you to upload, enhance, and share digital video inside your web browser. Viddler supports tags as a way of identifying content and finding a specific video (even among your own) when you don't know or remember the title.

Vimeo is a video-centric social network site that supports embedding, sharing, video storage, and allows user-commenting on each video page. Users must register to upload content.

Yahoo Buzz can be about anything - a great story on a major news site, an extraordinary bit from an obscure site, an intriguing video, or a fantastic blog that shouldn't be missed. Instead of editors, anyone can help determine the top-rated stories. With Buzz, Yahoo determines the most popular topics that people are searching for on Yahoo. Then they showcase the most popular stories within those topics, based on activities like voting and emailing stories to friends. Stories with most "Buzz" are then published on the Yahoo! home page.

Yahoo Pipes is a Yahoo composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web. Simple commands can be combined together to create output, such as combining many feeds into one, then sorting, filtering and translating it.

Comments? Insights? Welcome to the conversation!

The Community Decided

Congratulations Barack Obama on this, your first day as President of the United States.

One of the mantras of social media is "The Community Decides," which simply means that the interactive discourse between people enabled by the Internet has the power to trump even the most artful hyperbole and spin.

The peaceful transition of power that took place on the steps of the U.S. Capital today culminates a journey that began with the first campaign speech in a democratic election process that at times seemed endless. Through our votes, throughout America, the people (AKA the community) decided on who will lead us as the head of government through the serious challenges ahead.

Those challenges, of course, are far bigger than any single person can solve. But not only has the community decided who will lead, the community is also speaking to how we want to be led. Even with storm clouds all around, this day feels bright and hopeful -- due in large measure to the rhetoric President Obama expressed in his inaugural speech…

"Our challenges may be new, the instruments with which we meet them may be new, but those values upon which our success depends, honesty and hard work, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism -- these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history.

"What is demanded then is a return to these truths. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility -- a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character than giving our all to a difficult task. This is the price and the promise of citizenship."

Do these words inspire, motivate and empower? Do they reflect our hopes and ambitions? Do they resonate as authentic and true?

The community will decide.

Trust, but Verify

The Internet is a remarkable invention. Not only is it the backbone of all things social media, it has forever changed the way business is conducted, how human beings interact, how problems are identified and solved and so on.

In the early days of corporate blogging, even the companies that led the pack in recognizing the vast potential of social media quietly worried about pitfalls and risks, like "What if one of our bloggers says something wrong?" or "What if readers say something bad?"

Today, it's widely understood that the benefits of blogs and other social media systems far outweigh such risks. Even the worry that somebody might say something bad about our company has matured into a realization that companies do not control public conversations (we never actually did). Moreover, the multidirectional nature of social media-based communication provides a powerful means of surfacing issues… and solving them.

Having said that, let's be clear that the same cyberspace that manifests so many wonderful benefits also has the potential to do great harm.

From spam to phishing to mischievous hacking to criminal fraud, it's a dangerous world out there.

Somewhere between laughing in the face of danger versus sitting meekly on the sidelines, there is a middle ground that calls for basic vigilance.

Everybody knows not to share passwords with strangers or to run executable applications from unknown sources. Here is one more precaution to add to that list:

If you are a blogger, always read user Comments before approving them to "go live."

One of our Synopsys blogs was attacked earlier this month by spammers trying to post comments with X-rated links. Although our spam detection software caught and filtered out hundreds of such attempts, about a dozen dastardly comments arrived in the "Comment Approval" queue right alongside perfectly legitimate entries. At that point, human vigilance and engagement is the last line of defence against bad content going live.

In this case, I noticed and promptly removed the offending content. But let's always remember to work together as a team on this. If you ever see malicious content on our website, escalate it immediately – either to me or through the management chain – for prompt resolution.

By the way, the guidance to read comments before approving them should not be confused with the idea of censoring or filtering legitimate comments, however negative.

Social media depends upon transparency and authenticity to perpetuate trust and credibility.

There's plenty of room in the blogosphere for all manner of views and opinions, positive, negative or in between. It's the bad stuff from the dark shadows that has no place on forthright websites.

Discuss v. Talk At

Here is a graphic that illustrates one of the key points of my previous blog post (The "Social" in Social Media)… the part about the fundamental shift in marketing from a one-way "tell" paradigm to a model that's multi-directional, interactive and conversational.

In the "olden days" when customers were a fragmented bunch, companies marketed to their target audiences through advertising, slickly-produced collateral and such.

Marketers worked diligently to come up with innovative, catchy, memorable messages that they could "tell" their customers.

That kind of telling cost lots of money, of course, because it took untold thousands of paid impressions (in the form of repetitive ad messages, direct mail campaigns, etc.) to try to break through the noise of a competitive marketplace and create/build/enhance brand awareness.

As marketers focused on doing all that telling, did customers totally believe what they were told?

Ever watch a focus group from behind the trick mirror? Or talk to a customer about whom they most trust for unbiased product information? (Hint: telling and selling have never been the final word.)

The power of the Internet and the tsunami of social media are opening new doors and opportunities as they present compelling challenges for how to effectively communicate with customers.

With community interaction at the core, welcome to the era of "Engage and Influence."