LSQHA Blog Reviews

In an effort to recognize the changes in the social media space, I’ve started this post series ( see archives ) to both track and congratulate folks who get promoted, move, or accept new exciting positions. Please help me congratulate the following folks: Also, my submission form has changed to a new URL, the former Google form was giving me problems, so please use this one going forward .  Lots of movement in the social business category, including a few key hires at firms that get the social business landscape and quite a few submissions continuing to come in on the form. Bruce Tempkin , top blogger at Forrester and Analyst departs Forrester, you can find his blog announcement . I’ve admired Bruce’s commitment and quality of work as a fellow colleague, and wish him luck on his next ventures. He really is one of the Star Analysts out there, be sure to connect with him and clinch his sage advice early before he gets totally booked. Dr Natalie Petouhoff “Dr Nat”, is a former colleague at Forrester covering the customer experience and knows the Social CRM landscape and social support. She’s also moved on, you can find her blog , and you should connect with her as she launches her consulting career. Dion Hinchcliffe joins the Dachis Group, one of the leading consulting firms that gets social business. The Dachis Group is poised to become the next system integrator vendor and consulting firm, and I expect them to give the ‘big’ consulting firms a run for their money as they continue to hire talent, thought leaders, and stay nimble and flexible. Steve Gillmor, famed Techcrunch IT editor (and former colleague of mine at PodTech) j oins Salesforce in the strategy team . This is an extremely smart move for Benioff as Salesforce knows success of the chatter and appxchange platform is to connect with the web startups. Steve is a direct and indirect influencer over the startup ecosystem and this lays a big bridge down for Salesforce to take marketshare in the developer ecosystem. Mona Nomura joins MySpace as a social media marketing manager , her online presence will match with the youthful and active MySpace community, a key hire in the regrowth and build of MySpace. Sanjay Dholakia former CMO at Lithium is now heading up Crowd Factory as the CEO , I’ve worked closely with Sanjay and am looking forward to see the next successes he does in the future. Uwe Hook launches BatesHook focusing on business transformation agency by integrating Social Media initiatives. Maria Ogneva joins Biz360 as Director of Social Media Propel and manage online buzz for Biz360, a social media monitoring and measurement platform. Greg Hollings joins FreshNetworks as Head of Community Management Manages and heads up the community management team at busy social media agency. Glenn Conradt joins CoreMedia as Vice President of North American Marketing, Sales and Operations. Dean McBeth joins Wieden + Kennedy as the Old Spice Community Manager focused on using social media to maximize the positive perception of the brand and the effectiveness of campaigns. Ryan Turner joins ZAAZ as Director, Social Media Lead the social media practice at ZAAZ, part of the WPP network. Brett Goodwin joins MyWebGrocer as Senior Account Director focused on sales. Sabrina Suares joins MyWebGrocer as Director, Eastern Sales Talented Bob Garfield joins Fizz as Consultant in Residence, I look forward to the work he does, find his announcement blog post . Ben Grossman joins Oxford Communications as Interactive Strategist Launch concerted social communications group and serve as interactive strategy lead for digital projects from an integrated standpoint. Ariel Sasso joins DataXu as Marketing Communications Manager Growing DataXu’s reputation and presence with integrated marketing, communications and social media initiatives. Tom Edwards joins Red Urban as VP, Digital Strategy & Emerging Technology Digital & Social Media Strategy How to connect with others (or get a job): Several people have been hired because of this blog post series, here’s how you can too: Submit an announcement If you know folks that are moving up in the social media industry, submit to this form Seeking Social Media Professionals? If you’re seeking to connect with community advocates and community managers there are few resources This list, which started with just 8 names continues to grow as folks submit to it. List of Social Computing Strategists and Community Managers for Enterprise Corporations 2008 –Social Media Professionals . Job Resources in the Social Media and Web Industry Web Strategy Jobs powered by Job o Matic (Post a job there and be seen by these blog readers, these affiliate fees pay for my hosting) Read Write Web keeps announcements flowing at Jobwire , although is broader than just social media jobs Facebook group for community manager group in Facebook Jake McKee’s community portal for jobs Chris Heuer’s Social Media Jobs SimplyHired aggregates job listings, as does Indeed ForumOne Jobs for Social Media and Community Teresa has a few jobs, some around community New Media hire has an extensive job database Social Media Headhunter Social media jobs Jobs in social media Altimeter Group’s list of social media consultants and agencies Social Media Strategists and Community Managers for 2010 Hiring? Leave a comment If you’re seeking candidates in the social media industry, many of them are within arms reach, feel free to leave a link to a job description (but not the whole job description, please)

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People on the Move in the Social Business Industry: April 18, 2010

Taking advantage of the increasing importance of social media management for businesses, Spredfast , a finalist at this year's Microsoft BizSpark Accelerator at SXSW, has received $1.6 million in funding from Austin Ventures. Featured here on ReadWriteWeb in January, Spredfast is the first enterprise-class social media management system. Sponsor Spredfast supports companies at both the enterprise and SMB levels, allowing businesses to manage their social media campaigns through a single dashboard. Spredfast incorporates data from multiple platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr and most blogging platforms (such as WordPress, Blogger and MoveableType). As the information from these platforms is in one location, and as the service integrates both Omniture and Google Analytics, Spredfast facilitates social media automation and then ties social media analytics with Web analytics to secure "click to conversion" metrics. The pricing for the services range from free to $100 per initiative per month. Since its public launch in January, Spredfast has attracted Oracle, AOL, HP and IBM to its customer base. "We've been working to establish Spredfast as the 'Omniture for social media', a valuable tool for anyone trying to effectively manage and measure a social media initiative," said Kenneth Cho, Spredfast's CEO. "Our relationship with Austin Ventures, specifically with AV partner Mike Dodd previously of Omniture, is great validation of the huge gap Spredfast is filling in the social media market and the reception so many customers are having toward the product." Discuss

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Social Media Management System Spredfast Secures Series A Funding

Email may be old fashioned, but it's still where we spend a lot of our time online. Today Google announced that its webmail service Gmail is becoming all the richer with the inclusion of support for sending Google Calendar invitations inside the email composition window. In addition to being able to insert invitations, you can also cross reference your calendar availability with the availability of anyone included in your email thread that you have given permission to see the Google Calendar. It's not a perfect system, but it's pretty neat and it demonstrates the potential for building cool new features on top of our email inboxes. Sponsor Mashups and platforms are all about cross referencing multiple sources of data or functionality, as in this case: email plus calendar. We wrote earlier this spring about a startup called Rapportive that cross references email and social media data about an email's sender (see also competitor Etacts ), and earlier this month we discussed the incredible potential in Google's announcement of a way to give developers secure access to the contents of your emails for analysis and the creation of innovative services. Yahoo has been calling this kind of approach Inbox 2.0 and has been working on it for more than two years. Here's what we wrote in our November 2007 coverage of Yahoo's vision - how do you think it's worked out? ( Yahoo Says the Future Will Be Modeled on Facebook ) The social network of the future will be populated by the RSS feeds of the activities of your friends and your friends will be determined by email. The big players won't put a major push into building a new social network. "It is much easier to extend an existing habit than to create a brand," are the words Google's Joe Krause. Your email account isn't valuable because it's got the email adresses of other people who could be solicited commercially - it's valuable because it articulates who in the world is able to command your attention. It contains analyzable, direct communication between you and the people most important to you. [Yahoo's] Garlinghouse says that in the future email and IM will be prioritized depending on the importance to you of the people who send it to you. We're not talking about the number of times people email you - we're talking about the percentage of times you open those emails, the keywords used in them relative to your personal/work profile, there are metrics so crazy we can hardly imagine that are available for determining the importance of people in your life. In your email. Facebook's people-search uses some similar math already. Various Ways Email Gets Innovated On Clearly there are all kinds of different levels of sophistication that can come with these sorts of developments. In fact, two plus years after Yahoo's call to action, things still seem relatively elementary. Rapportive displays data uniquely well but Etacts displays more data. This new Google Calendar integration with Gmail offers some visibility into your and your contacts' availability, but it doesn't tell you what you've got scheduled at a given time. Etacts offers inferior invitation sending but has a whole set of reminder and follow up features that Gmail doesn't offer natively. And Yahoo Mail more closely ties into Facebook than any other email, something millions of people are sure to enjoy. So while all the kids rant and rave about Twitter, Facebook, augmented reality, iPads and location based social networking, don't let them deny: email can still be very exciting. Discuss

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Your Inbox as Platform: Google Calendar More Closely Integrated With Gmail

For the past few days, we attended SAS and SugarCRM user conferences in Seattle and San Francisco. These are just a few of the observations that comes from conversations with developers, business managers, product managers, entrepreneurs and executive management. At both companies, you see the influence of social technologies in the discussions and what their partners are offering. With this social wave comes a variety of new methods to crack the biggest nut: "The most effective way to organize, discover and share information." We've been pounding on that last issue for the past week. We have numerous examples for how web applications can be aggregated into environments like SugarCRM but its the complexity of organizing that data which becomes the biggest challenge. Sponsor The consumer social networks give people lots of ways to use applications. For example, Twitter is a hub for delivering messages to external sites from the application or services such as Tweetdeck and Seesmic. It is a bridge for external services that provide data services that aggregate Twitter data to be uses for specific uses. Recommendation services like Mr. Tweet provide a person with references to other people the individual may want to follow. The enterprise is a different beast. It is not the most popular for the hungry young entrepreneurs and developers we met at companies like Twillio Tuesday night on the eve of Chirp, the Twitter developer conference taking place this week in San Francisco. Still, in conversations there, we met a few people who are developing for the enterprise environment. What they bring is a fresh look at how the social technologies apply in a world where compliance issues abound, complex processes rule the day and knowledge often exists in ERP silos and email archives. What these young people see are front-end tools like Google Wave that serve as the foundation for collaborative services. These are platforms, for instance, that seek to eliminate email from the process. These young developers create a certain effect. They've developed ways to organize and share information that the enterprise accepts. So much so that the giants have developed their own services, again, in many respects, inspired by the developers building web oriented platforms. And it is having a transformative effect. On Sunday night, we sat in a conference hall at the Washington Convention Center. It was the 35th anniversary of the SAS Users Conference. It was our first time attending. Twitter was the focal part of the opening. Large screens showed the Twitter updates. Their vice president of marketing used his time on stage to push out his second tweet...ever. The singing group even tried to collaborate with the crowd to create an improvised song from their Twitter stream. We learned the next day that this was a first for SAS. Twitter and the variety of other social technologies in the market are giving this conservative, data analytics company a new view, best illustrated in the launch this week of its Social Media Analytics platform. It's a complete, powerful service that takes structured and unstructured data from social networks, applies it to preset rules and delver the results in a dashboard environment. It's lacking a certain level of automation. It's not self-service by any means. It requires SAS to do the analysis and then present it through a web site. But that's okay. The service acts as a pivot that gives SAS the capability to move into new markets. It moves them from the back of the deal to the front of the deal. In the back of the deal, for instance, SAS helps analyze customer guarantees. They do a lot more than that but it's an example of the textual analysis the company provides. Now they have greater access to the front side of the deal to. They can use the platform to reach into agencies where they can help customers craft brand strategies. That should have an effect all of its own. It gives SAS the opportunity to interact with marketers, designers and UI specialists. They may recruit a few people or take the knowledge inside the company and turn it into something. That should help SAS improve the Social Media Analytics platform, making it a service that is more easily available for users to do more on their own. At SugarCon, the story is also a social one. Perhaps best summed up in the second day keynote by Paul Greenberg: "Do You Really Have To Worry About the Social Customer?" I am not so sure you have to worry about a social customer. But it might be a good idea to get know them a little bit better so you can build on your own transformations, whatever they may be. Discuss

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From Seattle to San Francisco, Social is Everything

Although securing and promoting your company's brand is an important step when starting a business, and although protecting that brand can be an ongoing concern, the question of what it means to associate a person with a company brand is a lot more complicated - a fact made obvious in light of Tiger Wood's sex scandals. The companies that featured Woods in their advertising had sought to latch onto Tiger-Woods-as-a-brand - an image crafted to suggest his tenacity, reliability, skill, and success. Sponsor The gulf we now see between Tiger-Woods-as-a-brand - "the perfect role model" - and Tiger Woods as a flawed human being points to some of the potential dangers in associating your company's brand with a person. Of course, few startups are in the position to build a brand based on a celebrity's image or reputation. Instead, if there is a person associated with the startup's brand, it is likely someone from within the company. Tiger Woods serves as a cautionary tale, obviously for the businesses who endorsed him but also for individuals who seek to promote themselves as a brand. Despite concerns about people as brands (branding is, after all, what we do to cattle ), the power of brands continues to be a way to quickly identify a product or service or idea with your business. For many entrepreneurs, developing a brand isn't merely a matter of creating a company brand, but of also crafting a personal brand. The idea of a personal brand is hardly new, often traced back to a 1997 article by Tom Peters, "The Brand Called You" : "To be in business today, our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You." It may be that some of the fallout from the Tiger Woods scandal has made the idea of personal branding seem trickier - people are people, after all, not objects and not cattle. As Doc Searls has argued in two recent blog posts, brands are " boring " at best and " bull " at worst. Technological innovation has made personal branding easier, in some regards. Registering a domain name under your own name has become an incredibly straightforward and inexpensive process . Having a domain name is a simple step in helping make sure that content you produce is readily associated with your name. And services like Google Alerts can be useful to monitor the Internet for mention of your name. The rise of social media has made creating an online presence quite simple, but signing up for social media networks or having a LinkedIn profile for example, is not necessarily sufficient or suitable for crafting your personal brand. As the information available online about all of us increases, it is likely that our ability to create and maintain personal branding will become more difficult. Undoubtedly, building trust is fundamental to business success. Maintaining reputation is crucial, whether or not you want your name to be synonymous with a product, a service or a company. What are your thoughts on personal branding? Has it become impossible? Or has it become ubiquitous? Discuss

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To Be (a Brand) or Not To Be (a Brand)