Monthly Archives: June 2009

Community Moves From BlogCouncil.org to SocialMedia.org

The Blog Council, a community of social media leaders at large companies, has officially changed its name to the Social Media Business Council and will call SocialMedia.org its new online home.

“Every day, our members share advice on how to build successful, scalable and self-sufficient social media programs,” said Andy Sernovitz, CEO of the Social Media Business Council and its parent company, GasPedal. “This new name and domain better reflect the wide range of issues our community focuses on.”

The name change was a collaborative effort, with members sharing dozens of name suggestions before selecting Social Media Business Council through a vote at Member Meeting 4 in New York City.

“We’ve got a great group of active members,” said Sernovitz. “It’s fantastic to see how much pride they take in the Council and how willing they are to collaborate — not only on social media issues — but also in advancing the group itself.”
Social Media Business Council members represent the heads of social media at the world’s largest brands, including: Abbott Laboratories, AccuQuote, Allstate, Amway, Analog Devices, Ariba, Avery Dennison, Chevron, Cisco Systems, CME Group, The Coca-Cola Company, Community Medical Centers, ConAgra Foods, Dell, Duke Energy, First Data, Ford Motor Company, General Electric, General Mills, General Motors, H&R Block, Hewlett-Packard, Home Depot, IDG, Intel, Intuit, Johnson & Johnson, Kaiser Permanente, Kraft, Mayo Clinic, McDonald’s, Microsoft, Molson Canada, Nestle Purina PetCare, Newell Rubbermaid, Nokia, Novartis, Orange Business Services, PepsiCo, Petro-Canada, Pfizer, Pitney Bowes, Procter & Gamble, Progressive Insurance, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Salesforce.com, SAP, Sara Lee, Starbucks, SunGard, SWIFT, Symantec, Turner Broadcasting System, Tyson Foods, U.S. Coast Guard, UPS, USAA, Walmart, and Wells Fargo.

About the Social Media Business Council:
The Social Media Business Council, formerly the Blog Council, is a brands-only community that helps large organizations build successful social media programs. Members gain instant access and advice from the heads of social media at the world’s largest brands and collaborate with one another in a friendly, productive, and private environment. Learn more about the Social Media Business Council: http://socialmedia.org

The Social Media Business Council is a GasPedal project. We teach word of mouth marketing and social media to companies of all sizes. Learn more about GasPedal: http://gaspedal.com

Reid Hoffman, founder of business-oriented social networking site LinkedIn, says that the massive amounts of social data available on the Internet will change the business world by allowing for the development of products that yield analytics from user relationships and identities.

A video interview with Hoffman, discussing how new products will be created from social data, is featured on IdeasProject, a website developed by Nokia. IdeasProject is an online “information space” that provides a new way to interact with thought leaders and their big ideas about the future of connected communications. For more on Hoffman’s big idea, visit: http://www.ideasproject.com/idea_person.webui?id=4101

“Once you have all these piles of data, people will build products out of the synthesis of this information,” explains Hoffman. “I think the Web 2.0 platform concerning actual identities and relationships is really just at the beginning stages of its growth–we’re not close to even the midpoint of this development.”

“As the founder of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman redefined online professional networking, making a seminal contribution to the rise of social media,” said Valerie Buckingham, Director of Technology Marketing, Nokia. “Now Hoffman is once again setting his sites on the future, exploring how companies will use the growing base of online social networking information as a foundation for business innovation.”

Over the next month, editors from the IdeasProject are featuring their favorite ideas as submitted by the public and sending a Nokia N95 to the ‘Big Thinker’ who contributed. Share and submit your ‘Big Idea’ with the world by visiting http://master.ideasproject.com/userideasubmit.webui

About Reid Hoffman:
The founding CEO of Internet-based professional network service LinkedIn and now its Chairman and President, Hoffman has been called the ‘most connected man in Silicon Valley.’ He has personally mentored many of the Web 2.0 CEOs and has given valuable advice to many Silicon Valley VCs, as well as to the United States military. Credited with inventing the term, ‘Second Generation Web Entrepreneurs,’ he is director of such social network enterprises as Mozilla, Vendio, Six Apart, Kiva.org, Grassroots Enterprises, and Tagged. He is also an investor in Facebook, IronPort, Flickr, Digg, Technorati, Dopplr, Ping.fm, Nanosolar, Care.com, Knewton, Kongregate, and several other firms. As Executive Vice President of PayPal, Reid was instrumental to the acquisition by eBay and was responsible for partnerships with Intuit, Visa, MasterCard and Wells Fargo. Reid graduated with distinction from Stanford University with a BS in Symbolic Systems and from Oxford University with a Master’s degree in philosophy and a Marshall scholarship.

About IdeasProject:
IdeasProject, a project of Nokia hosted at www.ideasproject.com, brings together the most visionary and influential “big thinkers” to contemplate the big ideas that matter most to the future of communications. It is a new kind of conversation platform aimed at uncovering the connections between these thought leaders and their disruptive ideas. Explore the IdeasProject website, subscribe to its RSS feed, join its Twitter feed (IdeasProject), and come back often to learn about great new big ideas as they break.

About Nokia:
Nokia is the world leader in mobility, driving the transformation and growth of the converging Internet and communications industries. We make a wide range of mobile devices with services and software that enable people to experience music, navigation, video, television, imaging, games, business mobility and more. Developing and growing our offering of consumer Internet services, as well as our enterprise solutions and software, is a key area of focus. We also provide equipment, solutions and services for communications networks through Nokia Siemens Networks.

HubSpot announces a social media monitoring feature, the newest addition to its inbound marketing software. The tool tracks a small business’s activity on social media sites, monitoring the company’s brands, relevant industry keywords and online coverage and activity of competitors as an integrated part of HubSpot’s inbound marketing system.

http://www.hubspot.com/blog/bid/4884/HubSpot-Introduces-Social-Media-Monitoring-to-Inbound-Marketing-System

While other social media monitoring services can be expensive and geared toward big businesses, HubSpot’s new social media integration offers an affordable way for small businesses and marketing professionals to monitor and share relevant, interesting content with their communities. As an integrated part of HubSpot’s comprehensive inbound marketing software, the social media monitoring tool eliminates the need for companies to use multiple marketing tools and services.

HubSpot’s social media monitoring tool collects new content daily that is relevant to a company’s industry keywords or brands. The tool makes it easy for users to post the content to Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites; comment on it; and track the developing conversations. The tool offers a simplified way for a company to engage with its audience to establish itself as a thought leader and a hub for interesting, useful information about its industry.

The social media monitoring feature is integrated with HubSpot’s inbound marketing system, a software platform including tools that allow professional marketers and small business owners to get found online by managing search engine optimization, blogging and social media, as well as landing pages, lead intelligence and marketing analytics. There is no additional cost to existing customers for the new tool.

“Many small businesses struggle to manage multiple tools in attempt to monitor their online brands while working within tight budgets,” said HubSpot CEO and co-founder, Brian Halligan. “HubSpot has added social media monitoring to our inbound marketing software to let small businesses easily manage their online presence using one comprehensive system they can afford.”

Learn more about HubSpot’s inbound marketing software at http://www.hubspot.com/products.

About HubSpot

HubSpot, Inc. provides Internet marketing software that helps businesses get found online, generate more inbound leads and convert a higher percentage of those leads into paying customers. HubSpot’s software platform includes tools that allow professional marketers and small business owners to manage search engine optimization, blogging and social media, as well as landing pages, lead intelligence and marketing analytics. Based in Cambridge, MA, HubSpot can be found at http://www.hubspot.com. HubSpot’s free marketing tools can be found at http://grader.com.

clickbooq, inc. (http://www.clickbooq.com), a leading provider of interactive marketing solutions for professional photographers and visual artists, today announced it has successfully deployed Amazon CloudFront to serve the image-based content of its websites. CloudFront is a groundbreaking web service that is optimized for superfast delivery of web content worldwide. By integrating CloudFront technology and Amazon’s Simple Storage Solution (S3) platform to serve client images, clickbooq provides the professional photography market with the best possible site performance and speed around the world.
Using CloudFront, clickbooq is able to deliver image-based website content through Amazon’s global network of server edge locations. When visitors view a clickbooq website, their browsers’ file requests are instantly routed from a conventional central server to an edge server — generally located near the visitor — which means the request encounters fewer server hops; resulting in lower latency and dramatically increased delivery speed. Amazon CloudFront uses 14 edge locations to serve the major markets worldwide: eight are in the United States (Ashburn, VA; Dallas/Fort Worth, TX; Los Angeles, CA; Miami, FL; Newark, NJ; Palo Alto, CA; Seattle, WA; St. Louis, MO), four are in Europe (Amsterdam; Dublin; Frankfurt; London), and two are in Asia (Hong Kong, Tokyo).

“CloudFront gives clickbooq websites a huge speed advantage compared to competitive services and makes the clickbooq platform a truly global solution. Now, our users’ websites and images are served faster than ever before,” said Bryan Heu, CEO. “And the performance isn’t limited to our US-based users. clickbooq users around the globe will benefit from our CloudFront implementation, especially those users and visitors based in Europe and Asia.”

About clickbooq, inc.

clickbooq (http://www.clickbooq.com) provides a turnkey solution for professional photographers to create one-of-a-kind websites they can update anytime, without any technical know-how. Using clickbooq’s web-based application, photographers can build a full-featured Flash website quickly and easily. The company’s key competitive advantage is a multi-disciplined team of creative, technical, and strategic professionals with over ten years of experience in the interactive marketing industry.

clickbooq is headquartered in San Francisco, CA. For more information visit http://www.clickbooq.com.

Gigya, Inc., the leading technology for connecting content and consumers with the social web, today announced that its Socialize technology is now available as a plug-in for WordPress. WordPress, the largest self-hosted blogging and OpenSource toolset in the world, has quickly become a favorite among developers seeking rich functionality and ease of use.

The new Socialize plug-in enables WordPress sites to easily add multi-dimensional social and authentication functionality by providing a single point of access to Facebook Connect, MySpaceID, Sign in with Twitter as well as OpenID providers like Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and AOL Mail. The plug-in is available on Gigya’s website at http://www.gigya.com/public/Content/About/Press.aspx?m=Press&p=1171 or on WordPress at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/gigya-socialize-for-wordpress/

Powerful Authentication, Social and Promotional Features
WordPress sites that implement the plug-in have immediate access to a variety of powerful authentication and social features. Users can log into the site using their social network or webmail identity, enabling the Socialize plug-in to personalize the user experience by displaying the user’s name and image. Users can also update their status, promoting their activity to the newsfeeds of their social network, or invite specific social network friends with a custom message, driving traffic back to the original site. The Socialize WordPress plug-in also enables users to post comments on blog posts directly to their newsfeed on Facebook.

With the Socialize WordPress plug-in any site can allow users to share content or a specific event on the website. By integrating user profile and social graph data, Socialize makes the user experience social.

“It has never been easier to add so many social features to a WordPress powered site,” said Patrick Salyer, Director, Business Development, Gigya Inc. “No engineering skills are needed to add this functionality to your WordPress Toolbox. It is a great way to include seamless authentication, social and sharing features on any WordPress website.”

Gigya has also released a plug-in for Wildfire, the industry standard platform for sharing content to more than 70 destinations. The Wildfire WordPress plug-in enables bookmarking and email functionality for blog posts, providing another way for users to share content with friends and followers.

Currently, plug-ins for both WordPress and bbPress, WordPress’ forum software solution are available. They are both fully configurable from the WordPress administration panel, require little time to install, and require no programming knowledge.
Socialize’s code is also OpenSource, so developers can customize it as desired for their specific site needs.

About WordPress:
WordPress was born out of a desire for an elegant, well-architected personal publishing system built on PHP and MySQL and licensed under the GPL. It is the official successor of b2/cafelog. WordPress is fresh software, but its roots and development go back to 2001. It is a mature and stable product. We hope by focusing on user experience and web standards we can create a tool different from anything else out there. For more information, please visit: www.wordpress.org.

About Gigya:
Gigya’s technology is the standard for connecting content and consumers with the social web, providing publishers and marketers with powerful tools for increasing audience reach and engagement. Reaching more than 250 million people each month, Gigya’s innovative widget advertising network enables marketers to engage consumers in social environments and enlist them as brand advocates. The company’s Wildfire and Socialize products enable publishers to syndicate and track their content across more than 70 unique platforms, and to integrate and promote their own websites with popular social platforms like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. Publishers and advertisers including Coca-Cola, DoubleClick, Electronic Arts, Hyundai, JCPenney, Kraft, Levis, Photobucket, Samsung, Turner and Unilever choose Gigya to connect their content with the social web.

Commuto has officially released their new community bartering widget, targeting social networking, gaming and blog type websites, based on the ever growing Commuto.com social bartering site.

“We’re very excited to release our Community Widget, a first of its kind, which allows users to take their bartering communities and place them on their sites. Now users can create or join hobby specific communities like book clubs or more obscure ones like plant trading and place it on other sites.

Members of MySpace, Ning and other social networks will be able to place their bartering communities on their personal pages for all their friends to see. So even non-members of Commuto will know what they have to trade and what they want,” says Stephen Arbib, Founder of Commuto.

The widget will show users the location of the community, its members, the items available for trade and the items users want. In order to download the widget users will need to visit the specific community page and click on the “Grab Community Widget Code” link.

Since its launch Commuto has released a Facebook application that provides nearly all the functionality of Commuto within Facebook, and their Barter Buddy Widget that helps users find others in their communities with similar interests based on what they own, want, and like. Through Barter Buddy, users are able to build local specific communities with ease and find users in their cities who fit exactly who they want in their communities.

About:
Commuto is an online social bartering network where members can swap in person with others members in their cities, schools, workplaces or any other communities they create or join. For more information please visit Commuto.com

KineticaRT has started a TwinCAT Developers group on the professional networking website Linkedin to provide a forum for all levels of Beckhoff TwinCAT PLC developers to discuss programming and system engineering issues, problems and solutions.
KineticaRT has been developing solutions using TwinCAT for several years and it would have been great, during that time, to have been able to share our problems with others. Support from Beckhoff and their in-county agent was excellent, but some of our problems might have been solved more quickly or elegantly based on peer knowledge.

To join the TwinCAT Developers Group on Linkedin go to
http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=1860933&trk=anetsrch_name&goback=%2Egdr_1245320419899_1

KineticaRT develops innovative and reliable systems and software for complex engineering and scientific applications. For more than 6 years we have provide companies across the globe with automation, measurement and test solutions by the integration of software and Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) hardware.

KineticaRT offers the following services:
* Consultancy
* Requirements analysis
* System design
* Software development
* System integration and test
* System support

KineticaRT can deliver full turnkey solutions through established partnering with others for:
* Mechanical design and build
* Electrical and electronic design and build

KineticaRT Limited
The Innovation Centre
Rennes Drive
Exeter
EX4 4RN
England
+44 (0)1392 217855
[email protected]
http://www.kineticart.co.uk

YourMembership.com Inc., a leading global provider of online member communities and membership management software, today announced the launch of a new add-on, called SocialConnect™, that provides Facebook® integration.

The SocialConnect add-on to YourMembership.com communities leverages Facebook Connect technology and enables members of YourMembership.com customer communities to sign in to their organizations’ private communities using their Facebook credentials (username/password). Once signed in, members have the option to post updates automatically to their personal Facebook walls when they conduct many actions within their organizations’ private communities.

Actions that publish from a YourMembership.com community to Facebook include: blog postings, photo uploads, events, fundraising activities, member profile updates, media uploads, résumé updates, forum posts and more. As member activity is automatically posted to Facebook, these updates also are included on the Facebook homepage feeds of their connected friends.

“SocialConnect helps extend our customers across the social grid. The more information that they share across open social networking sites, the greater their exposure and visibility,” said William H. Stover Jr., CEO and president of YourMembership.com. “With the purchase of the SocialConnect add-on, our customers can increase member registrations, member interaction, event registrations, transactions and overall brand recognition for their organizations.”

While a member’s Facebook wall may feature links to content on his/her organization’s private community, access to private content is controlled by YourMembership.com’s security settings. To access private content, an individual must be an approved member of a YourMembership.com community.

About YourMembership.com

Founded in 1998, YourMembership.com Inc. develops online member communities and web-based membership software for associations, non-profits, government organizations, corporations, congregations, secondary schools, universities, foundations, fraternal organizations and private social networking sites. Serving hundreds of customers around the world, YourMembership.com creates truly dynamic, secure and connected member communities with all product features, design, hosting, future product upgrades and customer service included for one low fee. Please visit www.YourMembership.com for more information.

SocialConnect is a trademark of YourMembership.com Inc. Facebook® is a registered trademark of Facebook Inc.

FatCow (www.fatcow.com), a leader in Web hosting services for individuals and small businesses, worked with Google to become the first Web hosting company to implement the Google Services for Websites console that customers access directly from the hosting control panel. The goal of Google Services for Websites is to enable customers to maximize the potential of their Web site and provide easy access to expanded services such as Webmaster Toolsâ„ , AdSenseâ„ and Custom Searchâ„ .

Google Services for Websites allows Web site owners to easily install, activate and access their Google Web tools through a central location on the hosting control panel. Product Managers from Google and FatCow worked closely together to develop Google Services for Websites and provide hosting customers with a superior user experience.

“We wanted to capitalize on all of these great Google tools by making it easier for customers to utilize these best-of-breed tools through a single sign-on,” explains Mitch Haber, Vice President, Product Management at FatCow, “It was an amazing experience to work with Google. We were able to integrate their innovation, technology and commitment to excellence with our understanding of hosting customers to deliver an outstanding application.”

“People who manage Web sites are looking for easy access to simple and powerful tools because they want to focus on retaining users and managing their business,” said Rajat Mukherjee, Group Product Manager for Google Custom Search. “It’s optimal when we can work with a valued Web hosting partner like FatCow to develop new interfaces that make the lives of our Webmasters easier and more organized.”

Each tool within Google Services for Websites adds value to a customer’s site, improves the user experience, and helps the site better “communicate” with Google. The tools include:

* Webmaster Tools – Allows customers to see how Google views their site, identify visibility issues and submit sitemaps.
* Custom Search and Site Search – Adds a customizable search box to their site with a consistent look and feel.
* Adsense for Search – Helps customers generate revenue and better serve visitors’ needs by displaying relevant ads with their search results.

Existing FatCow account holders will find Google Services for Websites in their online control panel under Web site tools and new customers can learn more about this tool and many others by visiting http://www.fatcow.com. Google Services for Websites is also available through other leading hosts, including IPOWER, StartLogic and PowWeb.

About FatCow:
FatCow provides shared Web hosting solutions for individuals and small to medium sized businesses looking for an affordable, reliable Web hosting option. FatCow pioneered the “one plan one price” philosophy when it began offering its signature all-in-one Web site hosting solution, The FatCow, back in 1998.

Odojo Inc. today announced the launch of a new service that monitors and archives a company’s social network activity, meeting the requirements of both Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) and Regulation FD (RFD). The Odojo Archiving Service monitors all activity, created both by company employees as well as content created by 3rd parties, on a host of social networking platforms and archives it into a database for future use. Built upon cloud computing technology by Amazon Web Services™, the Odojo Archiving Service requires no customer IT department involvement and operates as a Software as a Service (SaaS) browser based application. The service monitors and securely archives both company sponsored social networking accounts as well as “keyword mentions” of a companies name, trademarks, and ticker symbol on numerous social networks including (but not limited to) Facebook™, Twitter™, and MySpace™.

“The Odojo Archiving Service provides a mission critical tool to both public and private companies that want to monitor what is being said on social networks by both their own employees as well as 3rd parties,” said Mike Stemple, Founder of Odojo Inc. “Having watched the explosive growth of social networks like Twitter™, we saw a need for a service that can help protect a company from not just SOX and RFD compliance but also keep track of how 3rd parties are utilizing a companies trademark and stock symbol online.”

The Odojo Archiving Service is currently in limited trials with a handful of companies with the company looking for additional “early release” clients.

Additionally, Odojo announces a company authored white paper outlining the numerous risks public companies are experiencing with the advent of social networking. The white paper entitled “Twitter in the Age of Sarbanes-Oxley and Regulation FD”, can be downloaded from the company website.

About Odojo Inc.
Odojo provides a return on investment (ROI) for companies or brands utilizing Twitter™. The Odojo platform helps a company better engage their customers on Twitter™ while providing ROI metrics for their micro-blogging efforts. Odojo has frequent communication with companies in numerous verticals that all have a similar problem, “How can we leverage the power of Twitter™ while also being able to track its ROI?” Odojo solves the problem of how a business can utilize Twitter™ while insuring all communication is archived, secure, measurable, and accountable. The company has built a future proof platform that addresses these problems while also allowing a company to explore other ways to leverage Twitter™ for marketing, advertising, sales, customer service, and more.

Odojo Inc. has no formal relationship with Twitter™, Facebook™, MySpace™, or Amazon™. All trademarks used are properties of their respective owners.

In a proposed answer to the shortage of leads and new clients for small-to-medium businesses, ReferQuest.com, a refer-and-reward platform, has developed a Facebook application to help businesses experience growth, in the down economy. The ReferQuest Facebook app, available at http://apps.facebook.com/referquest/, allows business owners to utilize the power of social networking to develop leads and acquire new customers. SMBs can use the free application to offer finders’ fees to reward customer acquisition (“$10 reward if you refer a new customer”) The ReferQuest Facebook application is available to Facebook users in North America.

During a recession, advertising budgets are amongst the first cutbacks for many small and medium businesses. However, according to separate studies conducted by McGraw-Hill Research and American Business Press, businesses that continued advertising, or increased their advertising, during a recession, saw substantial growth during the economic dip and after it ended.

While the ReferQuest Facebook application may not be a viable alternative to print-and-web advertising, it does allow business owners to acquire warm leads, or leads from a known party, with exposure via viral networking channels where payment is only required on a per-acquired-customer basis. As with other business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) promotions via social networks, the ReferQuest application is the online version of word-of-mouth advertising.

According to Camille Landau, the CEO of ReferQuest.com, the benefits for small-to-midsized business owners are noteworthy:

* Businesses can acquire new customers directly, in stark contrast to traditional advertising methods
* Advertising is free, and payment is only due upon a successfully acquired customer
* Businesses can find customers, partners, and employees who are unreachable via other advertising methods

About ReferQuest.com

ReferQuest.com is a public forum which allows users to offer finder’s fees to those who help them get their needs filled. The ReferQuest Facebook application is available to North American Facebook users, and is available at http://apps.facebook.com/referquest/