Social Media News of the Day: December 29, 2010

Already Thinking About Next Christmas

I have to admit that I’m a top notch gift giver. I can remember conversations no matter how small or meaningless they were. For example, my college boyfriend loves Conan O’Brien, so I called the 1-800 number every day for a month to get tickets to his show the weekend of Valentine’s Day. The tickets were free, and we have friends who live up there so I only had to buy the flight. He still, to this day, says it was one of the best moments of his life.

My college boyfriend is my best friend now, and for Christmas this year I made him an iPhoto coffee table book full of pictures of us over the past 10 years. Now I wish I would’ve known about Keepsy, a new company that allows you to create a collaborative photo book with your Facebook friends.

It’s easy. You send an invitation to your friends to help you with a book for someone’s birthday, wedding gift, etc. and everyone adds their pages and can even offer to help pay for the book.

Watch out, because I’m already thinking about who’s getting this next year!

The Ultimate New Years Eve app!

IKEA is known for having some of the most affordable and modern furniture for college students and new homeowners. What you might not know about the Swedish company is they’re home to one of the most creative New Years Eve iPhone applications (according to me).

Before the ball drops, pull up the Skal! app and search through a selection of IKEA champagne glasses. Once you’ve picked your glass, find your toasting friend, and at midnight, toast one another. The best part is when you toast the bumping motions of the phones automatically exchanges your information, takes a picture of the toast and updates your Facebook and Twitter accounts!

Cheers!

How Social Media Changed the Holidays Forever

After a crazy holiday week, I sat back with a cup of coffee from my new coffee maker and started to think about how different this holiday season seemed. Was it the first white Christmas at my parents’ house since 1947 or the realization that maybe my whole Christmas list was as boring as I always dreaded in my youth? No, sitting there watching the snow fall, I realized social media had changed the whole month, but in a good way.

The 2010 holiday season brought major changes via Facebook, Twitter and geo-location tools. If you’re on Facebook, then you probably saw some of the holiday deals listed. According to the National Retail Federation, 39.2% of retailers said they would use their Facebook page to announce and promote their day-after-Thanksgiving deals. Forget skimming through newspaper ads, consumers who liked Macy’s Inc. on Facebook could click on a Black Friday tab to view all the special deals the retailer was offering. The Facebook page also offered a tool that enabled consumers to drag and drop items showcased as Black Friday specials onto a shopping list, so this year’s mad rush was less crazy than previous years.

In addition to releasing shopping information and specials on Facebook, retailers also tweeted about deals. I followed many bargain and deal-oriented profiles, and scored big! If you live in the south, make sure to add @SouthernSavers to your list, and everyone should be following @slickdeals. They have the best and most up-to-date deals I’ve found.

Retailers really started to use the power of geo-location this holiday season with Target, Walmart, Best Buy and Toys R Us really making big pushes. Target had more than 17,000 check-ins on Black Friday! To help push the check-ins, many retailers offered prizes for checking in. Sports Authority gave away $500 gift cards to 20 randomly-selected people who used Foursquare to check in at one of its stores on Black Friday, and JC Penney offered $10 off any ticket exceeding $50 to those who checked in during the entire month of December.

Not only did I do all of my holiday shopping online, I feel like I got the best price possible, and that’s a great combination when you you’re watching your budget and your time.

How did social media change your holiday season this year?

Is Google Voice Ready for Prime Time?

The good: Powerful features, no cost at all. The bad: No support, occasional outages, no guarantee of future service. Here’s what you need to know about using Google Voice for your business.

Is Google Voice good enough to use for business? The answer is a resounding “yes” for Lyn Mettler, co-owner of Step Ahead, a social media marketing company. Mettler began using the service when she lived and ran her business in Charleston, S.C. At the time, she and her small staff worked out of their homes and Mettler wanted to eliminate her land line. But her cell phone, part of a plan shared among her family, had an Atlanta area code. She didn’t want to change mobile plans, but she did want her Charleston customers to have a local number where they could reach her. She signed up for Google Voice, which forwards calls to any number or numbers you wish.

The service became even more useful more recently, when she moved to Indianapolis. “Now my Charleston customers can still call me on a Charleston number, which makes them feel like I’m not so far away,” she says. “My Indianapolis customers call me on an Indianapolis number. And it all rings to the same phone.”

To her surprise, she also found Google Voice improved work flow. “What I like about it that I didn’t expect is that voicemail messages arrive in email.” That’s handy, since most customers call Mettler’s number with questions or concerns, and she hands them off to whichever team member is working on that project. Instead of having to compose an e-mail or have a conversation about the client’s question, she now simply forwards the phone message itself.

For Barry Greenstein, co-founder of bGreen lifestyle + building, Google Voice makes an all-mobile operation workable. bGreen sells environmentally friendly flooring and other building supplies, so it makes sense to have a mobile showroom — a refitted van –rather than a stationary office. Greenstein says he hasn’t had a land line in years — and in any case, without a traditional office, there was no place to install one. On the other hand, he didn’t want his business number to be recognizable as mobile, so he uses a Google Voice number instead. An added benefit is that voicemail messages go to both Greenstein and his business partner, so they get the same information at the same time

Powerful features

Anyone familiar with Google Voice knows that these are only a small portion of what the service can do. It also keeps a record of every incoming and outgoing call, text, and voicemail, lets users create special greetings for particular callers, allows for blocking specific numbers, call screening, and even for listening in on a caller’s voicemail and picking up mid-stream, among many others.

Its most-mocked feature is also the most unusual: Google Voice attempts to create a transcript of every voicemail, and sends that transcript as an e-mail and text message. Needless to say, errors are common — “Hi Minda” becomes “I’m in the” — for instance. But, flawed as they are, these transcripts can be hugely useful. “Ninety percent of the time, I don’t even listen to the message, because the transcript gives me a general idea of who left the message and what it was about,” Greenstein says.

“With a text of the transcript, I can check my voicemail while I’m in a meeting, and find out if it’s anything urgent,” says Dave Michels, a consultant and analyst who closely follows unified communications, and author of the blog Pin Drop Soup. “That isn’t an easy feature to get elsewhere.”

Possibly, Google Voice’s most powerful feature is its cost: $0 for the service, $0 for calls within the United States and Canada, and very low rates, starting a $.02 per minute, for international calls. That’s a powerful incentive for a startup or small company on a tight budget. “We use every Google product we can because they’re free and good,” Greenstein says. In the absence of Google Voice, he says, he would look for the lowest cost VoIP solution available, or use a Skype phone number.

No guarantees

But if Google Voice offers huge benefits, it also has a few drawbacks that businesses should know up front. First, there’s no support. If you encounter a problem, your only recourse is the online FAQ and user forums. “If you’re not a little tech-savvy, you might get lost,” Greenstein says.

There’s also no service level agreement, which means no guarantee of how reliable the service will be. Indeed, it has had occasional outages, though most were relatively brief. “I have had some people say they got a busy signal on one of the numbers,” Mettler reports. “I’m not sure whether that was an issue with Google Voice or with my iPhone. And I have had people occasionally say a number just rang and rang, without going to voicemail.”

Another possible drawback for businesses is that Google Voice is designed for individual users who control their own phone numbers. There’s no option for centralized administration. This means that a departing salesperson can take his or her phone number along, which makes it extra-easy to take customers along too. Also, Google Voice does not currently allow users to import their existing phone numbers. But Michels speculates that both features will be offered if Google someday introduces a business-class version of Google Voice, akin to Gmail for Business.

Perhaps its most worrisome down side is that it comes with a degree of uncertainty. “There’s a lot of risk using any service you don’t really own, and people underestimate that,” Michels says. If an employee using Google Voice violates its terms of service, you might find that number or numbers abruptly cut off. Or, the company could simply decide to discontinue Google Voice altogether, as it recently did with another highly popular free service, 1-800-GOOG-411.

This is not to say that you shouldn’t use Google Voice — it’s a valuable tool for many businesses. But, Michels advises, go into it knowing the risks. “Google Voice must cost the company a lot of money. It has no advertising so it isn’t generating much revenue. What could their plan possibly be? It’s fun to have those conversations. But the last thing you should do is assume that the service will be available –or free — forever.”

In Just 10 Years, a New Way of Communicating

Like everyone else over the age of 25, I arrive at the end of the year saying, “What happened to this year?” There’s just something about growing older that speeds up the passage of time. And this year is particularly monumental as we close out the first decade of the 21^st century.

A mere 10 years ago, not everyone had an e-mail address, a cell phone or certainly not a Facebook account (what was Facebook?!). In 2000, I got my first laptop computer – a thick Dell that probably weighs twice as much as the one I bought earlier this year. In 2000, people still read newspapers and thus I assumed a career as a newspaper reporter was a solid decision.

Ten years ago, we didn’t have iPod, iPads, iPhones or app stores. We didn’t have gmail accounts (remember hotmail?) or Twitter followers. We didn’t know anything about 4G this and 3G that. I was simply excited to get a DSL Internet connection. Hey, I could surf the Internet and people could still call me on my home phone (another relic of the past).

Sometimes I long for the days when were slightly less connected, and if someone needed me, they just left a message on my answering machine. I didn’t feel compelled to answer calls and texts while out to dinner.

And yet, this proliferation of technology and the dawn of social media have brought about a number of new opportunities – the chance to reconnect with old friends, meet new people via Twitter and tap into a wealth of information and knowledge.

I suspect we feel much like our grandparents when television arrived, eventually making its way into every living room in America. Each new invention has both pros and cons.

I do know we have entered an age of rapidly-developing technology, social media and new forms of communication. We certainly won’t be going back, but how we’ll communicate in 2020, I can’t even fathom.

What do you remember from 10 years ago? Are you amazed by all the new technology we’ve seen?

Social Media News of the Day: December 20, 2010

Santa Claus is Coming to Town

I was the only child for eight years, so I believed (yes, genuinely believed) in Santa until the insanely too old age of 15. Every year I’d mail Santa a letter with reasons why I was good and explanations for when I was bad. I honestly never got a response back and looking back on those letters I think, “Wow I hope they at least entertained someone at the post office.”

Now when I decide to have children they can email Santa and actually get a response back! On top of being able to get an email from Santa, you can get a video, voice mail and even track Santa’s every move through Google.

Man I wish I still believed! Hmmm, maybe I will email Santa tonight.

Winding Down

This is the week where it just seems silly to be working, right? It takes most people a little bit longer to respond to emails, there seems to be less interaction via social media and most people are starting their busy holiday traveling plans.

Even with the slowdown, social media professionals like myself need to stay on top of their accounts. While we’re saying Merry Christmas to our families and friends, we need to remember our Internet-savvy friends as well.

Here are some great tips from Mashable and Anthony Rotolo of Syracuse University for balancing your social media and family time this holiday season!

Social Media News of the Day: December 17, 2010

Whether You Like It or Not

Facebook recently changed the layout of your profile page, and while some are fans, others like the old format. Whether or not you approve of the changes, these creative uses of the new profile are amazing. I only wish I thought of doing something creative like this first!

Mashable is Celebrating My Birthday!

SXSW is a yearly event full of live music, movie reviews and emerging social media trends. My first encounter with SXSW was in 2007, where as an intern for a music management company, I planned the company’s schedule for the four-day music portion of the event. Now, that I’ve moved into a social media profession, this week long event in Texas still catches my eye!

Mashable is going to have a SXSWi House at the 2011 South By Southwest, March 13-14. They will have meet-and-greets, open houses and private events going on throughout those two days. I’m hoping on Sunday the 13, they’ll sing a special Happy Birthday song for me!

Mark Zuckerberg Named Person of the Year: Our Team Weighs In

I woke up this morning to a CNN News Alert telling me that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was named TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year, an always controversial designation. Wow was all I could say. And that got me thinking is this deserved or not? I asked my team to weigh in on if this social media and cultural behemoth is Person of the Year worthy. Here’s what they had to say:

Bailey

“In general I am not big on people being voted “Person of the Year” period. The only people looked at are those in the press quite a bit or the famous and I feel like the people who do massive amounts of good are big enough to be considered. With that said I think Mark Zuckerberg deserves the title.

“He’s had a tough year with privacy issues, uncomfortable interviews, lawsuits and “The Social Network,” depicting a year of his life in a way that may or may not be true. Despite all this, he’s created the #1 social media outlet in the world with 500 million users.

“He is one of the youngest billionaires ever and his generosity is outstanding: donating $100 million to a school system in New Jersey and dedicating the majority of his wealth to charities over the course of his life!!”

Lyn

“Is Mark Zuckerberg a good candidate for Person of the Year? Absolutely? We have to remember that Person of the Year is not necessarily the person who’s done the most good over the past year, but rather the person who’s the most influence on our world over the past 365 days.

“Zuckerberg has phenomenally influenced the world’s culture, fundamentally changing the way we communicate with our friends. To me, for good or bad, Facebook is revolutionary, like the invention of the car or the iPod. It changes the way we do things day to day.

“And as the focus of an Academy Award-nominated movie, a daily face in the media, rolling out major announcements one after the next and positioning himself as one of the globe’s top philanthropists, I’d say Time was spot on.”

Simon

“I guess I don’t have much of an opinion either way on Zuckerberg. I loved “The Social Network” as a movie, but he is portrayed as, well, let’s say less than likable. However, it is good to see that he’s already given $100m to the Newark school system and has taken the Giving Pledge, the initiative from Bill Gates and Warren Buffett for billionaires to give away at least half their money to charity. Whether for PR purposes or a genuine feeling of altruism is for others to decide, but at least the money will be going to good causes.”

Laura

“I don’t agree. Facebook was very important in 2010, but we all knew that would be the case. Plus, at this point Zuckerberg isn’t the only person behind Facebook. Lots of Facebook’s great ideas don’t come from him.

“So, as important as Facebook is, I think at this point it could continue on its same path of success without him. I think Julian Assange or the Chilean miners would have been better picks. The Chilean miners brought the world to a stand still and reached across so many languages.”

Jessica

“I think he does deserve it. If you take a step back and look beyond the controversy that surrounds Zuckerberg and the early stages of Facebook, what has been created has completely changed the way we communicate on all levels. People are able to renew and maintain relationships that in previous years most likely would have faded — friend requests from junior high classmates, anyone?!

“In addition, Facebook has forced businesses to completely reevaluate the way they relate to their customers. I don’t think the advertising industry has had to switch up their game in this way since television was introduced. For instance, the fact that Pepsi dropped all Super Bowl ads in lieu of focusing on a social media campaign is huge.

“Zuckerberg did not invent social media, but he legitimized social media. At 26 years old, he’s played a major role in revolutionizing human interaction and for that, he deserves to be TIME magazine’s Person of the Year.”

Melissa

“I think he deserves it. His philanthropy is pretty remarkable.

Thought this was a great quote from him: ‘People wait until late in their career to give back. But why wait when there is so much to be done?’”

Social Networks and Search – Two Great Tastes that Taste Great Together

Social Media News of the Day: December 14, 2010

Here’s a Reason to Tweet

If you’re still skeptical about why you should be tweeting, is $500 a good enough incentive? Um, hell yeah it is!

If you purchase a new Toyota by January 3, you get a $500 prepaid debit card just by sending a tweet out about it. If you or someone you know is looking to by a car soon, this might be just the thing to help them decide where to buy.

Make sure to visit Toyotashareathon.com to make sure you’re doing everything correctly, but it seems as simple as it can get!

Social Media Gift of the Week: “Baby It’s Cold Outside”

All over the country there have been record low temperatures, and here in South Carolina, I’m not used to these frigid temps. I can tell you that my toes and fingers have felt like ice cubes the last few days, and I can’t seem to ever get them warm!

In honor of my freezing fingers, the gift of the week are gloves, and not just any kind of gloves, these all allow you to play on your touch screen device without having to take them off!

These are the perfect stocking stuffer!

December Social Media Star: Chuck Gose

Many business professionals are connected to their contacts via social media, whether it’s Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or any other of the many social media tools, but what about good old fashioned face-to-face contact?

Chuck Gose, co-founder of Indy Social Media and director of business development for MediaTile, has effortlessly merged his online social media contacts and real world contacts. Back in August 2009, Chuck Gose and John Palmer started Indy Social Media. The organization gives social media experts and newbies alike a place to come together to meet, share and learn. The organization is so successful that its social media breakfast series usually sells out!

Read more from Chuck and find out his take on corporate blogs and why he loves LinkedIn.

What is your job/company/profession/title?

I am the director of business development for MediaTile and am the co-founder of Indy Social Media, a non-profit dedicated to educating the local business community while raising money for local college scholarships.

What was the first social media technology you used?

The first social media site I uses was LinkedIn.

What is your favorite social media tool?

I’m a huge LinkedIn junkie and think it’s an underrated, underappreciated and underused tool.

How have you used social media for your business/company and how has it benefited?

I created MediaTile’s social strategy, starting out with blogging. It’s a great way for a business to differentiate itself in the marketplace. And with respect to the Facebook and Twitter fans, a corporate blog is the one platform a business has control over.

How much time would you say you spend a day engaging social media?

That’s a tough one. I’d say I’m in and out of it all day long. I try to respond quickly to any messages I receive on the platforms.

How do you incorporate it into your day so it’s not a time waster?

For me, it’s never a time waster because I use it. Even during times when people might think that it’s goofing off, it helps get the creative juices flowing.

We know the Indy Social Media Breakfast series usually sells out. What tools do you use to spread the word about the event?

We just recently launched IndySM.org. Before that, we relied entirely on Twitter and Facebook and used Eventbrite for registrations.

Is there a social media tool/technique that you think is underutilized that you would like people to know about?

I’ll get back on my LinkedIn soapbox here. People think it’s just a site for older professionals and the unemployed. In fact, it’s one of the single greatest databases out there. If you’re in any sort of business development role (and everybody is), LinkedIn’s data is priceless.

Where can people find you online and via social media?
Facebook: Chuck Gose
LinkedIn: Chuck Gose
Twitter: @chuckgose
Google: Chuck Gose

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