For entrepreneur’s, small business owners, and self-starters of any kind I would say that you should get started using social media. In fact, this should have been the first post in the Social Media Take Away series, but hey I’m improvising and making things up as I go here…

What is social media?

Social media is any web tools that allows groups to generate content and engage in peer-to-peer conversations and exchange of content (examples are YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc…)

Social media is particularly valuable for entrepreneur’s, small business owners, and self-starters in-general, I’m thinking artists – painters, musicians and the like, because it gives them low cost, high value, far reaching exposure for whatever they’re doing. As I write more about the social media value, I’ll cover some of these. For starters, I would say see this post on Twitter or items tagged with social media on this blog. Though, I’ll be covering stuff more in-depth, and high level, alike as I develop this feature of the blog.

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I found the PR News Digital PR Next Practices Summit to be highly informative. It was a good chance to brush up on theories of social media in application, but it was also good to see some different things that people were doing. For me, though, there were a couple really great stand out presentations. The first one that really stuck out for me was:

Social Media Relations: Getting Positive Coverage in the Conversational Age, which featured the folks below, with their names being links to their respective presentations. This one was great:

Johna Burke (@gojohnab)
Vice President
BurrellesLuce

Julie Crabill (@julzie)
VP, Consumer Lifestyle Practices
Shift Communications

Monte Lutz (montelutz)
SVP of Digital Public Affiars
Edelman

The next one that I thought was really great, and I would say, possibly the best one, because the presenter, Paula Berg, was a great presenter, with a lot of enthusiasm and a real sense of humor about what she’s doing, was YouTube and Other Video Tactics to Advance Your PR:

Paula Berg (@PaulaBerg)
Manager of Emerging Media
Southwest Airlines

Here are some highlights from PR News Digital PR Next Practices Summit as posted on Twitter by attendees:

@montelutz #prnsummit – reporters are setting up spam filters for phrases like “great story idea” to weed out bad pitches –> @gojohnab

@gojohnab #prnsummit @julzie SM release preso old releases no longer applicable too much marketing speak not enough community and conversation

@cericwright @julzie says your brand belongs to the community at large #prnsummit

@montelutz “your brand’s already been hijacked. it doesn’t belong to you. it belongs to the community” #prnsummit ht @julzie

@nduhoski Check out Microsoft, Cisco, Ford for good social media newsroom site examples. #prnsummit

@nduhoski Google is as much a reputation engine as it is a search engine. #prnsummit

@nduhoski RT @DenverPRguy Your brand has been hijacked already. Its not owned by you but by the community. Be part of the community’s convo #prnsummit

@nduhoski When it comes to SM Best Practices: Beg, Borrow & Steal, then give back, credit. #prnsummit

@FlightpathNY Coke did not start their facebook page, even now they co-manage it with fans of the brand #prnsummit

@Rat_Race Lots of talk about engaging employees as brand advocates. Wonder how a work life balance fits in… Is there a balance? #prnsummit

@julzie @paullyoung “hits: how idiots track success” #prnsummit

@DenverPRguy Social Media users are 83% more likely to be brand loyal than non-users (from Paull Young, Converseon at #prnsummit)

@FlightpathNY Relationships with community members is the most critcal element & the most difficult to measure. Transparency remains paramount #prnsummit

@kdpaine RT @DenverPRguy: Relationships are what makes SM successful. UR measurement plan should track what those relationships look like. #prnsummit

@paullyoung says that the most powerful analytics tool is the human brain, use common sense #prnsummit

@mtkiefer @leeodden “if content can be searched on, it can be optimized” #prnsummit

@MerrittPR Incorperate links within online content and don’t have link read: click here but rather imbed within content of release or copy #prnsummit

@DenverPRguy Amen. “One of the biggest dangers of social media is not getting involved.” #prnsummit

@gojohnab Good #CEO ’s recognize smart people no matter what level in the organization and will engage when appropriate #prnsummit

@gojohnab: #prnsummit Matthias Preschern: Content is king. Participate by linking in vs. Trying to build communities on your own

@MerrittPR Why does the blogosphere matter? B/c 71% of all journos read blogs for content #prnsummit

@MerrittPR Engage the blogosphere BEFORE, during and after a crisis! #prnsummit

@DallasLawrence Great comment by Southwest at #prnsummit – no link between quality of video and views. In other words, content and authenticity rules

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Some of my regular readers may have noticed that the site has been changing over the last month or so. This really started with the merging of the Digital Imperative blog and my music/design site. I wanted to bring my career workinline with my creative and artistic work here at mattborghi .com. Since then I’ve been reading some of your comments, emails and past posts (of which this is post #90) and thinking about the editorial direction and content overall of The Digital Imperative. This week it became clear to me that while I might talk about Google, Twitter or Yahoo, or Web and Digital Strategy or communications, as well as posting videos or Mp3s of recent work at the core of my message is that of entrepreneurship. Whether you’re a corporate entrepreneur working inside the walls of a Fortune 500 company, the small business owner who’s reach is much more local than global or a Do-It-Yourself artist trying to gain a broader audience for your work — Entrepreneurship is an attitude.

It took me talking to a trusted colleague this week for that to become clear to me. We spent a good amount of time talking about what it means to be a small business and a small business owner. Entrepreneurship encompasses a series of soft skills, including ambition, persistence, organization, attitude and most importantly a belief in one’s self, but there are many other words that describe what an entrepreneur or entrepreneurship is.

I plan to spend more time talking about entrepreneurship and what it means to be an entrepreneur. Keeping in mind that my definition of an entrepreneur is looser than most. I define an entrepreneur as someone who works to put something together and is willing to take the risk for it.  This goes together with the newly-crafted editorial statement that I crafted for this site: The best investment you can make is in yourself.

So that’s the plan, and the direction I plan on taking with things. I’ll still be talking about social media, Web strategy, communications and the like because of course it’s absolutely the entrepreneurial spirit that drives one to undertake these things, especially as best practices are being written as we go. As always, I welcome your feedback, and look forward to the continued conversation.

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Free as in gratis, rather than free as in libre… that’s a phrase that’s been echoing through my mind today. Why? Because it’s hard to put value on something until

a.) It’s gone

or

b.) It’s free and starts to cost money

It’s part of the human condition, I’d say, we take stuff for granted when it’s abundant and freely-available and then when it’s gone and is no longer free we start to miss it, it becomes an issue of scarcity. Two situations that ride this median between scarcity and abundance come to mind, both of which are music listening-oriented.

The first is a story of my local public radio station in East Lansing, WKAR, licensed through Michigan State University ran Music from the Hearts of Space for years. I donated regularly because I wanted to support the programming, specifically HOS, as it’s referred to by fans such as myself, but then one day it happened, and HOS was pulled. What could I have done? I don’t know. I did contact station management, and received the standard “budget cuts” reply, fact-based, to be sure, but not very helpful. Bummer.

The second story has to do with Pandora, the excellent music player that came out of the Music Genome Project. I’ve cultivated an excellent playlist on Pandora over the last couple years, and it’s a music outlet I hope not to lose. However, recently they started advertising and introduced a premium service. I’m going to sign up for the premium service, almost certainly, but it got me thinking about what’s lost when you don’t lend your support, and sometimes even when you do. This takes me back to my opening points, I talked about the bummer of losing HOS, which was free, abundant and easily taken for granted. However, it’s the second point that I think of when Pandora comes to mind – b.) It’s free and starts to cost money

When something goes from being free to costing money, no matter how good it was for free, it was just free so how you could make demandments, and have expectations, but when you’re a paying customer you expect a say, you expect a great product, a product worth paying for; the algorithms that brought you Yanni when you were trying to enhance your Harold Budd playlist just aren’t as acceptable when you’re paying. The whole mindset changes.

This is one of the things I love about Google. No matter how much free stuff they give out (of course it’s not just out of the goodness their corporate heart), they don’t slouch on their offerings because they’re free. They beat expectations, they give you stuff you want before you even know you want it. Thankfully, they’ve found revenue streams outside of their software, unlike Pandora, which is the revenue stream like many other software as service Web sites.

Free as in gratis, rather than free as in libre, as I’m thinking about it now, means that something is free of a price, monetary or otherwise, but with regard to libre, it’s totally free and price can’t be attached to it. That was the experience of HOS on the radio, and Pandora when it was ad-free — Libre… However, for a time, it was gratis, too… More thoughts on difference, here.

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Yesterday, in this post, I talked about how if you want to be successful you have to create value, stay centered in the Tao and the rest will follow. Almost immediately after posting that I saw a New York Times alert that announced that Google was launching an operating system. An operating system! Really!!! They’re a search and advertising company, right? Well, not exactly, they’re quite diversified into applications, and cloud computing in general. Anyway, with yesterday’s post fresh in my mind, I couldn’t help but think there was Google yet again stepping out of their niche.

This is a brilliant move, here’s why:

People want an alternative to Microsoft – If all netbooks are running some flavor of Microsoft OS then susceptibility to viruses is a huge problem, and a netbook, by it’s very nature is on the Web all the time, so that means you might as well sign up for a life (of the machine) membership with McAfee, Norton, or whomever’s playing that game these days, because with a Microsoft OS you’ll need all the help you can get.

The Mac alternative – for netbooks, there isn’t one.

Linux or something – Nobody wants to buy a netbook with no OS… command prompt takes us back 15 years to when nobody wanted to use computers precisely because of this daunting reality, and native Linux netbooks, so far, haven’t gotten great reviews.

The release of Google’s OS is a case study in what it means to deliver value, keep to the center and be successful. Their following what people need, but not in the classic ‘find a niche and exploit it’ kind of way, rather through  organic means they’re putting it out there opening the code to the open source community, and letting anyone have access to it for free. The value is not just that it’s free, the value is that it’s freely available, and available to be built upon and further refined; as they say on their blog “we believe choice will drive innovation for the benefit of everyone, including Google.” This statement is what it means to be at the center and also illustrates that they know what it takes to be a success.

As the Tao Te Ching says, ‘whether you go up the ladder or come down it, it’s still shaky and better to be on the firm ground’… another illustration of the center. Google knows the center, and we need more companies like them.

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For many years, I’ve been inspired by the Taoist concept called Wei Wu Wei, doing by not doing. This philosophy can be applied in many ways, but since the focus of this site is digital strategy, let’s focus on that: When you’re doing digital strategy the greatest success is found when you’re working with the Tao, or loosely translated, the unseen current of the universe. If you’re working against the Tao, then somehow, you just won’t succeed, or succeed for very long. Why? Because you can force anything, but forcing, by its very nature infers opposition, or opposing something… many dollars and much energy can be spent to force things, but eventually dollars and energy run out and whatever was being opposed prevails. If you’re working with the Tao, then there’s no need for force, because there’s no opposition.

You only have to look at what drives and what’s driven the Web to see that this is true. Whether it’s open source projects like Unix, Linux, Apache, or openness and sharing that occurs naturally on the Web, think Twitter, Facebook, or earlier BBS systems, or the approach of company’s like Google who’ve tried to harness these open source, sharing models. They’re successful, because, mostly, they work with the Tao rather than opposing it. Microsoft is a good example of an organization working counter to the Tao, specifically now, as they try to use dollars and energy to push their Bing search service to overcome the natural and organic (or Tao-centered) adoption of Google.

If you want to succeed, be concerned less about being a success, and more about how you can add value, centered in the Tao the rest will surely follow.

Note about Taoist references.

I’ve been a student of Taoism and Zen Buddhism for nearly 15 years. Early Zen was influenced greatly by Taoism, which preceded it, philosophically, in China, and so much of what’s been written in both schools of thought is complimentary. This isn’t always true, but frequent enough to mention. Taoism isn’t a religion as much as it’s a life philosophy. I’m wary of mixing anything that be construed as religious with my professional work, but I’ve been working on a translation of the Tao Te Ching, and I’ve come to see many examples of how working with or against the Tao can predetermine success or failure. In fact, patterns were so great that there was a point when it was hard to not correlate success and failure to how centered or uncentered in the Tao a given organization or service was. Anyway, there are sure to be more references to Taoism as I move through the translation and come to understand more of these small and ordinary mysteries…

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This press release that the IABC – International Association of Business Communications issued yesterday is very interesting to me. It’s titled: Two Out of Three Communication Professionals Don’t Think Twitter’s Popularity Will Last…

To be sure, this is a bold statement, not because I’m a super Twitter user, though I did crack 100 followers yesterday (not much in the scope of @Oprah or @APlusK (Ashton Kutcher)), but because this statement positions itself to be some kind of pronouncement about Twitter as a communication tool. Twitter, or any other Web/electronic communications vehicle is temporal at best, and subject to the natural evolution that has affected communication methods since the dawn of the Web.

With the Web communication approaches are always changing – Usenet, BBS Systems, and Listservs were improved upon by OneList, eGroups and later Yahoo, Google Groups and AOL Instant Messenger. Yahoo and Alta Vista informed Google, which Google improved on. AOL Instant Messenger laid the ground work for ICQ, and Facebook, or semantically different, but no different really, Twitter and micro-blogging. Live Journal laid the groundwork for blogging and MySpace which laid the ground work for Facebook, and Facebook was informed by Twitter when they integrated a Twitter-esque piece into Facebook, which actually was more reminiscent of AOL Instant Messenger status messages… Anyway, you get the point.

Facebook, if they’re still around in ten years, will be radically different. Twitter, if they’re still around in ten years, will be radically different. This is the evolution of sharing ideas, information and our lives in our community, while the definition of community, and what it means to communicate with that community, continues to change.

The bone that I really have to pick with IABC’s press release is their choice of wording in the title. Many communicators don’t get Twitter especially in the context of business. So in some ways this title, from a leading communications organization creates the appearance that they’ve washed their hands of the value that Twitter could add to communications, and the subtext is that communicators should, too… Maybe that’s unintentional, but from my perspective that’s how it comes off.

I’m assuming that IABC considers themselves to be experts in communications, as it is they’re business and issuing this press release could support this theory to some, but truly, if they were they would understand the history and context of not just Twitter but the history of communicating on the Web in general and fold some of that history, if only a couple paragraphs, into the release. They didn’t, though…

Twitter is a tool, and tools become outmoded and improved upon. Anybody trying to harness the power of these tools needs to recognize their temporal nature. Neither Twitter nor Facebook are here to stay in their current form; if they stayed in their current form they wouldn’t exist at all in ten years… MySpace stuck to their “current form” for too long and they’re foundering because of it, replaced by Facebook; same with Yahoo! who were improved upon so long ago by Google that they’ve become the de facto cautionary tale of why you have to change (Read: evolve) or die.

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Site Pro News is a great resource, and one that I look at daily. Late last week, I came across a great story on linking and SEO, two things that confuse a lot of folks. So in an attempt to provide value to readers of this blog, as a digital concierge, of sorts, I wanted to add a link to this site. The story is called Links 101 – Puritans, The Puerile & The Pragmatic by Ben Kemp, who also maintains his own blog called The SEO Guy, and as far as I can tell, this is the most brief and definitive discussion on the place of links and SEO I’ve come across. I’ve wanted to take the time to discuss these same things, but when I read Ben’s article, I decided why should I reinvent the wheel, I’ll just repost this article. I highly recommend that anybody interested in linking and SEO, or for those just confused by the whole things, read this story.

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There’s an interesting post here, called The Web Will Be the Death of Google. This is a good article that ties into all the press that Bing and it’s attempt at knocking Google off the top of the search mountain is getting. The thing that’s easy to forget is Google did next to no marketing for their search (interesting Salon article from 1999 that touches on this a bit, as well as a 1998 Cnet article here). I know for me, back in 1999 or 2000, numerous people recommended that I use Google, as I had been a big user of Yahoo! for everything. Eventually, Google became the search tool of choice, not just for me, but for a lot of folks. Was it because it worked well? Was it because it was lean and uncluttered? Was it because it was quick? Honestly, it’s probably some combination, but I know that value that Google offered came to me through word-of-mouth, and when I tried the tool, it delivered as promised. It was no frills, just a simple tool that worked well.

Again, Google did very little marketing; they put something out there that worked, and people came to it. Clearly, they knew what people wanted, and how to add value. This is a piece that Microsoft has never figured out. I’m not sure if it’s just been a case of willful ignorance, or just customer indifference because their OS monopoly made them a required player. However, either way I would say to serve is a privilege, and if your tool is chosen, then it’s bonus and bonus! Create the tool of choice, and cherish the privilege of service.

So as many folks sound the Google death knell, I say Google will die only once they’ve decided that they don’t want to serve the customer with imaginative and innovative ideas. Anyone, who saw the preview of Google Wave, last week, knows that they’re clearly not there yet. Yahoo! might be there, MySpace might be there, and there are others, but then there are folks like Twitter, and Facebook who keep trying to develop innovative tools to serve the customer.

The fact is any company that stops thinking about, or doesn’t consider their, customer is going to go out of business; whether they’re selling Web services or hot dogs… I only have to look at my home of Detroit to know this is true.

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I hate to pile on Microsoft, who seems to be struggling with finding their place on the Web; but one would think that Microsoft, who’s been at technology marketing longer than most, would get how to do a product launch. I’m talking about the launch of their new Bing search service.

For starters their home page, the one linked above, is a cobbled together DNS forward: http://www.bing.com/ComingSoon that points at http://www.decisionengine.com/Default.html, however, when you get to that page there’s nothing but a perpetually loading video (that never quite loads on both Firefox and IE7 with the most recent Flash plugin), and while trying to keep this Web 2.0 is a noble effort with the video piece, the “Find us on Facebook, Follow us on Twitter” and “Share this Page” links seem to be a superficial allusion to being Web 2.0-minded, which is what Microsoft folks purport to being at this page here: http://www.decisionengine.com/Letter.html (note that they’re again using the decisionengine.com domain, rather than bing.com, so much for branding the URL and product name)…

From a Web launch point-of-view there are quite a few things that Microsoft should have done differently. Perhaps there was a rush to get to market, but with a cumulative total of six pages, max, I’m not sure why they couldn’t have done a better job than they did. The URL as product branding is huge, how could this have been overlooked?

Unfortunately, the shoddy approach that was taken to launching this new product taints my expectations of it. If the rush to get these pages up and posted was so great that they overlooked significant details like consolidating the URL used, as well as getting the homepage video to work on their own browser, then what else wasn’t worthy of taking the time to do it right with regard to the product? If it’s great, I’ll eat my words, but based on this launch I’m not holding my breath.

On the flipside I can’t help but think that with all of the expertise and R&D, to say nothing of money, with which they could just buy good ideas rather than try to create (or replicate) them, Microsoft has tried to create their own flavor of Google. It’s sad, really, because think of what Microsoft could do if they weren’t playing catch up.

For me the lesson taken away from this and the lesson I would share is:

If rushing sacrifices the integrity of your strategy, don’t do it.

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