Rosemarie's Pearls » internet

Why the Social Media Genie Isn’t Going Back in the Bottle

rosepena — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 12:44:37 +0000

A couple of weeks, ago, Geoff Livingston wrote a post called “What Will You Do When Social Media Isn’t Special Anymore?” While I agree with part of his premise (that social media won’t remain the shiny new object forever), the other part (that traditional agencies will soak up the social media work) is simply wrong. Here’s why:

Historically, specialists stick around

Geoff argues that once the PR, advertising and interactive agencies figure this all out, they’ll take the work back. This should be true, but it never is.

1996: “Once advertising agencies figure out HTML, they’ll do all the web development. These interactive agencies will be absorbed.” Should’ve been true. Wasn’t.
2000: “Once the interactive agencies figure out the tricks of SEO, specialists in search engine optimization will go away.” Again, didn’t happen.
Today: “Once the PR people, or the ad people, or the digital people, or maybe the SEO people, figure out this social stuff…” Not going to happen.

In fact, it never happens.

Big brands that are already utilizing social media agencies include Ford, Microsoft, Intel, SAP, Citibank, Coke. The list goes on. These folks have access to all types of large, talented agencies, but they see a need for specialists—for some of what they do.

Divergence is the most powerful force in the universe

In their outstanding 2004 book, “The Origin of Brands,” Ries and Ries demonstrate how the world gets infinitely more complicated and products, and specialties continue to branch out. The telephone splits into landlines and cell phones. Landlines split into traditional and VOIP. Cell phones split into texting phones, smart phones, flip phones.

And on and on.

Complete article here…

Why the Social Media Genie Isn’t Going Back in the Bottle.

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An open source to a brighter future?

rosepena — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 12:19:22 +0000

Giving your core product away is certainly an unusual business strategy, yet some succesful software companies are doing exactly that

If you went to your bank manager and said you had a great idea for a business in which you gave away your core product to your competitors, it is likely you would be instantly shown the door and not just because of the credit crunch. Yet this is exactly what some of the most successful companies in the world are doing.

Red Hat, the company which spearheads the development of the Linux operating system, generated revenues of half a billion dollars in the 2008 financial year, the vast proportion of which was profit, while IT company, Sun Microsystems, spent $1 billion in February 2008 to acquire database provider, MySQL.

The common thread is that both Linux and MySQL are open source systems. So what is open source?

The core concept is that software developed in this way can be freely redistributed by others. Open source also guarantees open access to the software’s source code, the lines of programming that make up the application, to enable others to develop and improve it.

This may sound as though the evolution of open source software is a free-for-all, but the truth is far from it. The development of open source technology is usually overseen by some form of governing organisation, which determines the general direction the development takes and which improvements are included in new versions.

This organisation can take the form of a broad community of developers and users, as is the case with the Apache web server, or a dominant single company taking input from other companies and individuals, such as MySQL.

Martin Michlmayr, a former project leader for Debian, an open source operating system, argues: “Open source is not a lawless frontier at all. There are clear license terms that have to be followed, even though open source generally offers more freedoms than proprietary software. It’s true, that many organisations are still struggling to understand open source and its license terms. That’s why Hewlett Packard, together with other partners, started a open source governance community, FOSSBazaar, to share best practices.”

While the open source concept may seem unusual in a business sense, it is far from new, with Red Hat arguing that scientists and mathematicians have shared their discoveries with each other for centuries with the goal of pushing forward the entire pool of knowledge.

It is this culture of openness and transparency that open source supporters say enables applications to be developed far more quickly and at a lower cost than proprietary alternatives. Also, as open source software is freely redistributed, this can lead to a rapid uptake among a user base. Take, for example, the speed at which open source web browsers such as Mozilla Firefox and Google’s Chrome have been eating into Microsoft Internet Explorer’s domination of the sector.

However, it is not just individuals who are downloading and using open source software, businesses are embracing open source too. LinkedIn, the professional social networking website, started using MySQL to handle its database of more than 30 million people around the world last year. At the time, the company’s chief technology officer, Jean-Luc Vaillant, said that the “open and reliable environment” it provides saves the company both “time and money”.

According to John Newton, chief technology officer and co-founder of Alfresco, a provider of open source content management systems used by organisations as diverse as Islington Borough Council, the French Air Force and games maker Electronic Arts, the company’s software has been downloaded more than 1.5 million times. “It is probably the most widely used content management system from an open source perspective. We built the product, people try it and they may pay for it but they may not,” he says.

The company makes its money through providing around 1,000 enterprises with technical support, training or consulting services to develop their own applications using Alfresco as a platform.

The Anatomy of a Tweet: Twitter Gets a Style Guide

rosepena — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 18:55:12 +0000

They’re no Strunk and White, but Dom Sagolla and Adam Jackson are aiming to do for Twitter what “The Elements of Style” did for good writing on paper: outline elementary rules of usage, composition and grammar.

The bulk of the book, titled “140 Characters, A Style Guide for the Short Form,” will revolve around eight key lessons from the Twitter universe, such as the importance of simplicity, honesty and humor. The project will also highlight notable figures worth following on Twitter, anecdotes from the community and even examples of the few occasions Twitterers have gone overboard: For example, Mr. Sagolla points to “bathroom tweets,” or messages about bodily functions, as falling into the category of things not to post to Twitter.

“This is a new genre of writing,” said Mr. Sagolla. “A new form of literature, in some ways.”

A portion of the book will also double as a memoir from the perspective of Mr. Sagolla, who was involved in the early stages of development for the tool. Mr. Sagolla, who now works at Adobe Systems as an engineer, is also planning on including a mini-dictionary of Twitter lingo, like “retweet,” the reposting of another Twitterer’s message, or “twoosh,” a message that is exactly 140 characters.

The book came about after Mr. Jackson and Mr. Sagolla met after an informal gathering of iPhone developers and began chatting about Twitter. Mr. Sagolla decided to bring Mr. Jackson, who he said updates his Twitter feed as many as 10 times an hour, into the fold.

The two expect the book to be available for download on Apple’s iPhone by the end of the month. Although the plan is to eventually get a version of “140 Characters” in print, Mr. Sagolla said releasing the book through iTunes first would be a good way to reduce the need for a major investment upfront, as well as a springboard to attract interested publishing houses.

“140 Characters” isn’t the first book written about the popular San Francisco, Calif., micro-blogging company. There’s also “Twitter Revolution,” “Twitter Means Business” and “Twitter for Dummies,” for starters. But Mr. Sagolla says that while the previous publications tended to home in more on the business and money-making potential aspect of the tool, “140 Characters” is an attempt to create easy rules for all sorts of social networking sites, including Facebook.

“Our goal is to make Twitter applicable to any kind of user,” said Mr. Sagolla.

The Anatomy of a Tweet: Twitter Gets a Style Guide – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com.

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Which apps are using the new Facebook APIs?

rosepena — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 00:17:30 +0000

This past weekend’s announcement by Facebook that the company would be opening up its APIs to allow for posting of notes, videos and more has left some companies scrambling to add new functionality to existing applications. Below we’ve highlighted a handful of the ones that let you post to Facebook from a desktop client, be it standalone or something that plugs into your browser.

We’ve talked to the people at each one to see when you should be expecting to be able to make use of the new API in each app:

“Blogo already supports Facebook status updates through its integration with Ping.fm,” says Benjamin Jackson, Blogo’s technical director. “As for more robust Facebook integration, you can be absolutely certain that we’ll be running to integrate this as quickly as possible. We’ll be shooting to send out a beta next week.”

Friendbar creator Edo Segal says “we love the fact that facebook [is] opening up more services,” and “definitely plan to include support for these API’s in upcoming versions.” Segal also says he wants a higher level of access to that data. “For example, to be able to post comments to users photos and status updates, and to directly send a Facebook message to a user via the API.”

Posting of notes through Ping.fm is up and running. “We’re still assembling some other ideas on how to use their new features,” says founder and CEO Sean McCullough. Worth a mention is that many of the services on this list go through Ping.fm to re-syndicate user messages.

“Sociagami has always been committed to deep integration with social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace and we will definitely be taking advantage of the new API features in 2.0,” says Charlie Robbins, director of social network integration for Sociagami. “Unfortunately, using an API based implementation will mean that Sociagami 2.0 will not have the messaging and wall posting features that came with 1.0.”

Working on it for an upcoming build. “The video part will be an important one!” says Loic Le Meur, CEO of Seesmic which acquired/owns Twhirl. The latest version, which was released on Monday added in Ping.fm support, letting you cross post messages to your Facebook profile.

“Yes, we are actively working on implementing the new Facebook API and rolling it out ASAP,” says Regan Fletcher, Yoono’s VP of business development. Our overall objective really is to maximize our use of the Facebook API in order to allow users who have added Facebook to Yoono to have the best possible experience and functionality.”

“It does look like some of this new functionality is available via the REST API which we use and we can run FQL queries (which we do),” says AlertThingy creator Clive Howard. “We will be revisiting this prior to the next version and if we can do then I’m sure it will make it into 3.x.” Version 3 of AlertThingy was released on Monday morning.
Apps that we pinged but have not yet responded: Flock, Feedalizr, Moodswing/blast, and Gwibber. We’ll update this post if we hear back.

Which apps are using the new Facebook APIs? | Webware – CNET.

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Whee! New numbers on social network usage!

rosepena — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 00:09:33 +0000

(Credit: Compete.com)

The blogosphere simply loves to slurp up social-networking traffic stats, and on Monday we got a nice tasty serving of them with some new numbers from Compete.com for the month of January. The results? Facebook is in the lead, with about 68 million unique visitors, well ahead of MySpace’s 58 million. (The two are pegged at 1.1 billion and 810 million page views, respectively.)

This may be the first survey we’ve seen that puts Facebook ahead of the News Corp.-owned MySpace in U.S. traffic. It also puts Twitter as the third-biggest social-media site in the country by total page views, with only about six million unique visitors but a whopping 54 million views.

Compete’s numbers are interesting, because they often are pretty different from other analytics firms’. Here are some clarifications, explained to CNET News in an e-mail sent by Compete’s Andy Kazeniac: These are numbers stemming entirely from Web browser data in the U.S. That means that you won’t be pulling in any international numbers, where most of Facebook’s users are now, or data from widgets or third-party applications, which are how many avid Twitter users access the service. That means that it’s likely that Twitter’s reach is bigger than the numbers indicate.

What’s also intriguing is that there are a few social-media sites, like Flixster and LiveJournal, with relatively low unique visitor counts but proportionally very high page view counts, indicating that they probably have smallish bases of very loyal users.

Also pulling in notable numbers are LinkedIn, with about 11 million unique users, Classmates.com, with about 17 million, and Reunion.com, with slightly under 14 million. On the other end? AOL’s Bebo, an $850 million purchase, which Compete.com clocks in as having just shy of three million unique visitors. True, its biggest user bases are in the U.K. and Ireland, but that’s not good considering the price tag.

Still, statistics are like tequila shots. Always take ‘em with a few grains of salt and a slice of lime, and be warned that they may give you headaches.

Whee! New numbers on social network usage | Webware – CNET.

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Twitter Fast Growing Beyond Its Messaging Roots

rosepena — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 17:24:13 +0000

Thanks to its open-ended design and a thriving user community, Twitter is fast outgrowing its roots as a simple, easy-to-use messaging service. Enterprising hackers are creating apps for sharing music and videos, to help you quit smoking and lose weight — spontaneously extending the text-based service into one of the web’s most fertile (and least likely) application platforms.

Hardware hackers have set up household appliances to send status alerts over Twitter, like a washing machine that tweets when the spin cycle is through, or a home security system that tweets whenever it senses movement inside the house. Others have incorporated Twitter into their DIY home automation systems. Forgot to turn off the lights? Send a tweet to flip the switch by remote control.

“It’s so simple and easy to access, people are thinking of more and more uses for the platform,” says Dan Wasyluk, creator of the Twitter-based Snipt service. Wasyluk launched Snipt last week as a way to let programmers share short snippets of code over Twitter.

Launched in 2007, Twitter quickly became a darling of the life-and mind-casting interneterati. But some saw boundless possibilities in the 140-character limit, and what was a slow trickle of innovation is now quickly elevating what is essentially a micro-blogging service into one of the internet’s most important technologies, along with instant messaging and e-mail.

Though it’s main use — sending and receiving short messages to your social network — is often dismissed as time-wasting trivia, Twitter’s potential as a broad internet platform is just beginning to be fully realized. Twitter has grown into a ubiquitous presence — you can send tweets from your phone, your desktop and your browser — that has potential to not only facilitate communication among humans, but even to make machines do your bidding.

Businesses are starting to be built around it. Botanicalls, for example, sells a Twitter-enabled hardware kit that lets your neglected house plants alert you when they’re thirsty.

The company has developed a tiny moisture sensor attached to a circuit board with an Ethernet port. You stick it in your plant’s soil, and when the moisture levels drop below a certain level, your plant sends you a tweet begging to be watered.

Using Twitter’s application programming interface (API), a programmer with even a modest amount of experience can create a web app that gathers public data from Twitter, or uses it to send links, commands or bursts of information.

“[Twitter's] open API is a huge reason it has grown into such a platform,” says Wasyluk.

File sharers were the first to rush in. The photo-sharing service TwitPic, one of the oldest Twitter mashups, lets users send pictures to their followers by storing a photo on its servers, then passing the link around on Twitter. Now there are newer apps like Tweetcube and Twittershare, which let users share larger media like MP3s and videos.

Twitter’s limited format of short, text-based announcements are a natural match for sites like TrackThis, which you can use to get status updates on FedEx and UPS packages, and Tweetajob, which job seekers can use to get real-time updates about new job openings.

Anyone who needs help quitting smoking can use Qwitter to monitor their progress. Those looking to lose weight can turn to TweetWhatYouEat or TweetYourEats.

Hardware hackers have put a new spin on the Twitter mashup — as it turns out, just about anything that can be plugged into the internet is capable of talking to Twitter.

Programmer Ryan Rose rigged up his washing machine to send him a tweet when his clothes are done. He just follows his machine’s twitter account (it’s PiMPY3WASH) and he knows when to go downstairs and move his undies to the dryer.

Linux hacker Shantanu Goel set up a video camera and some motion-sensing software on a PC connected to the internet. If anyone breaks into his house or goes snooping through his room, the software detects the movement and sends out a tweet.

Tech-savvy environmentalists can install Tweet-a-Watt, a gadget that plugs into your wall socket and connects to your wi-fi network. Once a day, the pocket-sized device broadcasts stats of your daily energy usage to Twitter.

Whether that sort of transparency results in embarrassment or bragging rights can be determined by a system like the one created by Justin Wickett. The Duke University student wired up his home so he could turn his lights on and off remotely, just by sending a text message to Twitter from his mobile phone.

Twitter Fast Growing Beyond Its Messaging Roots | Epicenter from Wired.com.

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Twitter starts to talk up the charging companies plan

rosepena — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 17:17:40 +0000

Sometime soon, Twitter is expected to unveil its plan to make money. Based on comments made by Twitter co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams recently, it seems likely that plan will involve charging companies for accounts with special privileges.

In New York Magazine this week, both Stone and Williams said that charging companies for brand verification is something that the company was looking into. This makes a lot of sense, especially given the rise of fake profiles, like the one that was recently taken down for the Dalai Lama. They note that a paid corporate account could have features like a prompt when a new user joins a company’s feed.

Then today, Stone made similar comments to the UK-based Marketing Magazine. “We are noticing more companies using Twitter and individuals following them. We can identify ways to make this experience even more valuable and charge for commercial accounts,” Stone told the publication. He went on to note that other ideas of charging companies to use Twitter to market products and/or provide customer service were on the table.

The latter part is something which companies like Zappos and Comcast have been doing for a while. They have employees that scan Twitter (something much easier now with Twitter Search) to see who is saying something about their company. If it’s something negative, or there is some kind of problem mentioned, these Zappos or Comcast Twitter users send messages to the user having the problem. I’ve experience this first hand with Comcast’s Twitter rep, Frank Eliason, who tweets from the account ComcastCares.

Marketing products on Twitter is a potentially more interesting idea from a revenue perspective. Late last year, Dell reported that it had made over $1 million in revenue thanks to Twitter. More recently, Dell announced that it would start offering deals exclusively to users who follow its accounts on Twitter. With Dell using Twitter to spur sales and clearly making money off of it, it makes sense that Twitter should be getting some of that. But the question of how much, is a tricky one.

“If it becomes complicated and costly, our instinct would be to move elsewhere,” Bob Pearson, vice-president of communities and conversations at Dell told Marketing Magazine. Other companies Marketing Magazine asked about the idea of Twitter charging businesses to market on its service, said similar things.

This idea of charging for corporate accounts, has been around since at least October, when CNET reported it was hearing whispers about such a plan. Since then, we’ve heard the exact same thing from a few other sources. In November, Williams started to float that idea out there publicly. But now, with talk about this plan clearly picking up, I think it’s a safe bet that it’s coming sooner rather than later.

Twitter has raised over $20 million in funding. Recent reports suggest that it’s looking for another $20 or so million, which could push its valuation close to a quarter of a billion dollars.

Twitter starts to talk up the charging companies plan » VentureBeat.

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Facebook Opens Up (a Little) With New Developer Tools

rosepena — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 19:34:27 +0000

Look for a brand new crop of Facebook applications to spring up; the company recently announced some new API methods that will allow outside developers to access previously off-limits data, like your status updates, links and notes.

The new API tools see Facebook knocking a few welcome holes in its “walled garden” approach to the web, but don’t think Facebook is going to let anyone pull out your data and use it how they like. As always, protecting user privacy trumps everything else in the Facebook ecosystem.

As an example, the Facebook developer blog talks about how a travel app could use the new tools to allow its users to create and share notes on Facebook. The app could import text, pictures, and even videos — collect that data under a single application tab and you have a community travel network.

In other words, the real growth from the new API tools will be in pushing data into Facebook, not offering new ways to pull it out.

Some have suggested that that new API tools are Facebook’s bid to take on Twitter, but that logic misses the point entirely. If Twitter is the world shouting out 140 character conversations, Facebook remains a private dinner party.

The new API methods merely add some new things to the private party menu — namely status updates, links and notes. If Facebook’s private party is emulating anything it’s FriendFeed — the new API tools open up a way to add more topics to the conversation, not a way to move the conversation out in the open.

While it certainly seems like Facebook would like to see a mashup and application ecosystem — like Twitter has spawned — develop around its own platform, the site is also hamstrung by its beginnings as a very private place to share information with friends.

Unlike Twitter or Flickr — which both grew, at least in part, as a result of their open APIs, allowing developers mashup and re-purpose data in ways far beyond the original design — Facebook has grown as a closed service that jealously safeguards its users’ data and privacy.

I spoke with Dave Morin and Mike Vernal, the lead developers behind Facebook Connect, earlier this month, asking both where Facebook Connect was headed and whether or not the site will ever really open up.

While Morin and Vernal made it clear that Facebook wants be part of the open web, nearly every question I asked circled back around to the common theme — how can Facebook open up, yet still keep user data protected?

Announcement’s like today’s new API tools are a welcome step toward an open Facebook, but ultimately it seems almost impossible to have it both ways (private and open).

Facebook might want to be a source of popular mashups and support an entire ecosystem of apps like Twitter, but the main reason those ecosystems exist is because all the data on the site is available to mashup/application developers.

How interesting would a Twitter meme tracker be if it only tracked 5 percent of Twitter users? Given Facebook’s API limitations, that’s about the best statistical sampling a Facebook app can hope for.

In order to protect user data Facebook applications can only access data from users that have agreed to let the application do so. Even the most wildly popular applications can only claim about 15 percent of Facebook users are participating — hardly a compelling data source when there’s Twitter or other services available that offer full access to all data.

Is Facebook wrong to protect its users data? Of course not. That’s where much of its value lies — people trust Facebook with sensitive information. But the downside to that is that Facebook can never be Twitter, nor can it be Flickr, or any other truly open site.

But of course that doesn’t mean that Facebook can’t carve its own niche. The real value of the new API tools lies not in pulling data out of Facebook, but pushing it in. Does that mean your links and notes will disappear behind the Facebook walls? Yes, but if the links are pulled from Delicious and the notes from FriendFeed (for example) then the content is already on the open web.

With more data coming in there will be additional stuff to explore within Facebook — potentially the biggest winners are groups and communities both within Facebook and those that are starting to form around Facebook Connect.

Expect tools like news aggregators, community link pools and perhaps Digg-like link suggestion and rating applications to pop up in the wake of the new developer tools.

Facebook Opens Up (a Little) With New Developer Tools | Epicenter from Wired.com.

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Skype 4.0 for Windows delivers truer video, sound

rosepena — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 13:43:47 +0000

Skype 4.0 (download) became available for free on Tuesday to Windows users. The free desktop VoIP communicator is a worthy final version that brings some key enhancements with video and audio bandwidth, though it leaves behind some of the extra adornments of version 3.8, the last stable build.

Those who have been following the triple release of betas since the summer won’t see more than a few changes. If 4.0 is new to you, however, the developments are more notable.

Skype concentrates on video size, quality, and performance in this version. From version 3.8 to version 4.0, every design change has been made to draw video and IM to the forefront, and for the most part it works. The video window has expanded and calls are easier to start. The classic two-pane interface has consolidated into one, though you can still split them apart if you prefer.

Skype’s beautifully staged marketing shot shows Skype 4.0’s new videotopia.

(Credit: Skype)

As the culmination of the beta series, Skype 4.0 gets a pumped-up video and a completely new audio engine. Compared with other codecs out there, the new audio engine, named Silk, is touted to give Skype superwide-band audio (which operates like broadband), but uses half the bandwidth. Fewer bandwidth demands gives Skypers with dial-up connections (like a lot of people in India and Brazil) a bigger boost, keeping calls from being dropped or mangled beyond recognition.

I’ll attest to the great call quality during my interview with Skype’s London-based product manager. It was clear and the vocal timbre sounded true. Keep in mind that I dialed in from a newish, memory-loaded Asus computer with full broadband support and a set of top-tier headphones. Quality will still depend on your Internet connection and hardware configuration. Using headphones that support ultra-wideband audio will help.

The video stream was similarly good. Though far from the perfection of TV, I noticed fewer jumps and blips and sound syncing that was very close to real-time. Problems that have beset Skype’s video calls in the past–a frozen or choppy image and packetized audio–were largely absent during test calls. According to Skype, that’s thanks to a new back-end addition that sticks a finger in the air of network conditions. As available bandwidth drops, the bandwidth manager tries to salvage audio first.

What my demo call looked like on a Vista set-up.

In choppy conditions, it helps steady the video, too, by lowering the rate of frames per second and by compressing images more heavily. Your friend on the other end may become blocky and the image delayed, but faces should also break up less than in previous versions.

Other new features include abuse reporting if you receive an invite from an unauthorized Skyper, and a light stub installer that pulls down the rest of the application.

Skype, it seems, has also been pulled into a toolbar partnership. Now when you install it, you’ll see that an optional toolbar that comes bundled with Skype 4.0. The free Browser Highlighter includes the ‘Compare on eBay’ tool for Firefox and Internet Explorer. Considering that eBay owns Skype, it’s not a surprising addition, but one I’ll nonetheless pass on every time.

What’s missing

There are two skins in version 4.0, the default light gray and blue combo called Skype ‘Chrome,’ and the classic hue. Skype hinted at more skin support in later versions coming out this year. There aren’t plans at the moment to support third-party skins, but customization, I’ve been assured, will get more attention.

Along these lines are absent customizations that had not been making beta testers happy. If you’ve been holding your breath for greater IM treatment in this release, or birthday reminders, you might breathe again until the next launch.

Those of you shouting about the cessation of public chats will be glad to know that Skype 4.0 for Windows will support those you already have, but it will keep you from adding new ones. Skype representatives told us they’re still playing around with ideas of how to become more Web-oriented. It could as easily look like a reshaped version of chats as it could go in a different direction.

That brings us to Skypecasts, another source of some users’ lamentations. Skypecasts was pulled last September because it just couldn’t grab the hoped-for attention. A similar(-ish) feature will probably be rolled into whatever public chats becomes in future releases.

For now, Skype has retreated to its bread-and-butter position of providing good, clean voice, video, and text chatting. If worldwide Windows users notice consistently improved audio and video quality, that’s not a bad place to be.

Skype 4.0 for Windows delivers truer video, sound | The Download Blog – Download.com.

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5 Ways to Integrate Social Media with Public Relations

rosepena — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 13:18:03 +0000

Generally, the goal of public relations is to create or manage a buzz around a business, product, service, brand or individual. According to Wikipedia, “public relations is the practice of managing the flow of information between an organization and its publics.” With the emergence of social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Myspace and LinkedIn, businesses have almost unlimited access to the public. In order for PR to successfully manage the tide of information, PR representatives must venture beyond traditional media outlets to Web 2.0 in order to monitor all messages. In fact, social media management should be an integral piece of your public relations campaign.

Through social media management, a PR pro can help businesses interact with clients, customers and prospects to increase brand awareness and direct traffic to the desired website. A channel like Twitter allows your business to engage with customers, other industry leaders and the media to grow your list of followers and update them on your latest company news. Another top networking site and PR opportunity is LinkedIn. Through discussion forums and queries regarding a particular industry, you can be positioned as an expert. A high level of involvement online improves brand/business recognition and gives search engines and crawlers extra opportunities to find you and place you higher on search engine rankings. Regardless of which sites you use to increase your exposure (or your clients’), below are five ways to get the most out of social media as part of your public relations strategy.

Link to articles. Almost every media outlet has online versions of articles and news segments. When an article runs about your business, let others know by posting a link on your social media networks. This not only heightens brand awareness, it also shows the publication or channel that the public is interested in what the reporter said about your business. Bookmarking sites like Reddit, Delicious, StumpleUpon and Digg are also great ways to flag an article for others to find through keyword searches.

Drive traffic to website. Do not forget to always include your website in every email, blog comment and forum post. On LinkedIn, for example, after answering a question or posting on a forum, include your URL. If your post was interesting or informative, chances are high that the viewer will click on your link for more. In public relations, the online objective is to do more than just raise awareness; it is to direct interested parties to the business? door or web page. Then it is up to the business to make the sale or pursue the relationship.

Be an industry expert. Rather than focus on selling, present yourself as an educator. If you are in the IT industry, answer general questions and prove yourself to be a credible resource. When others view you as an industry expert, they will be more likely to turn to you for their IT needs and refer others to your business. This particularly applies to LinkedIn or any professional network.

Respond to feedback. The general public freely gives opinions all over the World Wide Web. A big aspect of managing social media is maintaining a pulse on what your customers and prospects are saying about you or the brand you represent. Gossip is no longer exchanged behind your back, it is public and is as simple to find as a Google or Twitter search. Once you discover comments, whether positive or negative, respond. If people sing your praises, thank them and use the feedback as a testimonial or an opportunity to retweet on Twitter or include as a status update on Facebook, FriendFeed or LinkedIn. If you come across disgruntled customers, it is best to make it right and put your best customer service practices to work.

Involve the audience. Some of the best viral marketing campaigns involve audience participation on Twitter, Facebook fan pages, YouTube and Myspace. One way to harness attention of your business through public relations is to host a contest. If you have a new product, invite your customers to think of a name for it. Include directions on your website, then direct participants to submit YouTube video entries and vote via Twitter or other sites. Not only would this make your company be incredibly searchable, but you generate a big hype around the new product that may warrant news coverage for your company as well.

5 Ways to Integrate Social Media with Public Relations | SocialComputingMagazine.com.

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