Fact checking is a staple of traditional journalism. Good and ethical media hold back from printing or posting news that hasn’t been thoroughly verified. But, in this instant Web 2.0 world, we are all publishers and citizen journalists. Nothing holds any of us back from publishing content online, whether truthful, questionable, or outright misleading.

We have reached a slippery slope where none of us can truly determine what is real from what is fabricated or twisted. And just because we can post a link to another site for reference, who’s to say that what’s posted there has any merit?

The news, which used to be comprised of important topics affecting our world community, now include reports on Lindsay Lohan’s jail time, the latest viral YouTube videos, and countless reports on a sports figure’s trade to another team. Has America dumbed down this much?

I’m waiting for the pendulum to complete its swing and return to its central position on the fulcrum. I’m waiting for people to realize that real journalism doesn’t come from bloggers like Andrew Breitbart (who posted Sherrod’s speech). It isn’t coming from CNN’s ireporters, or from biased opinion pieces or op-ed shows. It comes from investigative journalists who work on news ethically and impartially using the 5 Ws  (who, what, where, when and why).

What do you think? Is journalism dead or are we in some type of transition? What do you think of citizen journalism?

In an article from “The Observer,” John Naughton wonders in amazement at how society ever managed without the Internet. Naughton ponders a world without Google, Skype, instant messaging, and online bank accounts. And while the Internet has created boom for most of us, the rise of social media hasn’t been sweet ambrosia for all companies. In fact, with social media and Internet technologies, now company decisions and actions are mostly public, including those of front-line employees. Now, actions that happened last week, last night, or 10 minutes ago can be broadcast across the globe in seconds, creating very dangerous challenges for company branding and reputation efforts.

In the Financial Times article “Perils of a Tarnished Brand,” authors Morgen Witzel and Ravi Mattu notice that even the most scripted and orchestrated product launches can go haywire. And even when “best-intented” marketing plans are well-executed, companies can be exposed to the ramifications of their daily operational and strategic decisions (e.g., Google in China and BP). “What affects reputations, in turn affects brands,” the authors point out.

Every employee is a brand ambassador, and brand management is no longer simply the purview of marketing managers. Even the best branding intentions can go awry when actions don’t back up corporate speak, say Witzel and Mattu.

Of larger concern however, is marketing cost-cutting trends in the name of efficiency that potentially leave brands and reputations exposed.

Robert Mabro, Honorary President of Oxford’s Institute for Energy, describes this problem in a letter to the Financial Times. He writes, “(Companies) no longer want to employ specialists in soft matters, such as political issues and the like. When an accident occurs, they find themselves hopelessly unprepared. This of course (ends up) destroying shareholder value!” Moreover, economist John Kay sums up the problem quite succinctly, “Yesterday’s cost-savings are so often today’s corporate crisis.”

One potential solution is for companies to invest more in “softer matters” like brand, reputation, crisis and risk management. Undoubtedly, some of these considerations are tough to justify in an age of narrow return on investment marketing calculations such as cost per lead.

However, Internet and social media technologies that transmit events, news and crisis accounts—at the speed of light—aren’t going away. To succeed in such an environment, companies must invest in the softer functions mentioned above even when “payback” doesn’t appear imminent.

It’s difficult to forecast all types of crises that could occur. A much better plan is preparedness. Is your company up for the challenge?

Related: Financial Times “It Pays to Expect the Unexpected“

What concerned me was that most of the titles related directly to tools. At least six of them were about Facebook, another six about Twitter, two were focused on blogging, there was one about YouTube, and so on.

This was evidence of a focus that, to me, is unhealthy. Consumers are putting much more emphasis on the “how” and less on the “why” … tactics before strategy. I think that is a mistake. It’s classic putting the cart before the horse. Unless you understand why you’re doing something, it makes little sense to learn how.

Here is an outline I like to follow when speaking to groups about this topic:

• Be aware of the problems that mandate the use of social media.
• Understand the principles underlying its use.
• Determine the purposes by which you need to use social media.
• Implement a plan of action.
• Decide on the practices (tools) to be used.
• Never forget that social media is about people first and foremost.

Though not following this outline explicitly, this slide deck explains my thoughts in greater detail: The Digital Handshake: Proven Strategies to Grow Your Business Using Social Media.

I admit to re-examining my approach to see if it can be a bit more tactical in orientation while working on the strategic aspects. I’m convinced, however, you can’t have one without the other.

How about you? Do you think a focus on tactics at the expense of strategy is a mistake? Is there an undue emphasis on the tool set at the expense of the mindset?

However, most small businesses today still don’t have a website in fact less than 10% of small business owners are online. For them the problem is not just that they don’t have a website but promoting their website as well.
Enter Yodle
Yodle helps small service based business get a web presence and then help them promote their business by buying lots of niche keywords and syndicating the results to local businesses. (ex Teeth Whitening Union Square NY)
Yodle growth has been outstanding (around 700% year over year) which should come as no surprise since their customers are long tail and so are the keywords they buy for them.
Check out my podcast with their CEO Court Cunningham –

Link to Original Audio Source

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About Court
Court Cunningham is the CEO of Yodle, Court oversees all aspects of operations and strategy, including technology, product development and sales and marketing. Prior to joining Yodle, he held the position of COO at Community Connect, a niche social networking company, where he lead consumer marketing, product management and development efforts. Before that, as SVP/GM of the Marketing Automation group at DoubleClick, he was instrumental in establishing DARTmail as the industry leading email marketing solution.
Court received a BA in English from Princeton University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

It’s not that it isn’t good. It has plenty of merits. It’s a very simple screen format, although it took me some time to figure out where to locate my imported bookmarked sites. That part wasn’t as intuitive.
It wasn’t until I clicked on my e-mail marketing supplier’s Web site that it gave me problems. Like most new technologies, it takes time to become fully compatible with other programs. My e-newsletter software could not recognize it, and so, I had to revert back to my old IE7 to do my marketing homework.
That doesn’t mean I won’t give it another try. I heard a Google spokesperson interviewed on NPR radio yesterday and it sounds like this is the first browser entering the world of new media. I applaud their efforts.
Has anyone else tried it yet? What’s been your experience?

Of course April is always a busy time in life as well as at work, and yeah, there’s never a good time to get away. But my wife assured me that every hotel we were staying in had Internet access. Now you know, it’s been a decade or more since the Internet became mainstream, and that seemed sensible to me. But what transpired I could never have expected.
Internet access in Istanbul was perfect in the hotels. My Blackberry and iPhone worked very well. Once outside one of Turkey’s main cities, Internet access became very spotty. In fact, in one town I got on the Internet one day, and then it was out for two whole days!
Now I consider myself part of the Geek Technorati, and I offered my services to help. I rebooted the router at the hotel, then reset it, then plugged directly into it …. and nothing. They told me perhaps I wanted to go to an Internet café. I grabbed my two boys and hiked down to the Internet café where I found tons of Turkish kids playing games that were downloaded onto the hard drives of several desktop computers. When I inquired about Internet access, they huffed and puffed a bit then decided to turn on their dial-up modem! Here is a five-year-old “Internet café” with one dial-up modem! They too were unable to connect to the Internet after trying for a half hour. Upon returning, I was told by the hotel that “the Internet was down all over the city.”
Here is the Point –
Clearly the Internet is playing a large role in connecting everyone across the world. And businesses from all over the planet have come online to sell their wares. But my report to you is indicative of where were stand in connecting even the most remote places of the world. Bottom line: We are just not there yet.
What was curious to me was the pervasiveness of mobile in Turkey. Use of cell phones not just for calls or SMS messages but for taking pictures and shooting video was surprising to me. Many native Turkish people used their phones for everything, more so than their American counterparts.
When I was pitching the idea for this article to Internet Evolution, the Editor James Johnson responded to me with this case study.
Internet Development in Turkey: A Case Study
The paper makes the point that: The main problems in Turkey are the ISP monopoly and the speed of international connectivity. It takes nearly half an hour to receive 10 emails from an out-of-country mailbox. This means that it is practically impossible to use the Internet in Turkey.
The Internet gives developing countries the incredible opportunity to catch up with more developed countries, and any governments that try to control or ban the Internet will be giving up this chance.
We have definitely come a long way. But we still have some of the last miles to go!
NOTE: Please don’t let any of the above deter you from going, my family and I had a great time despite the fact that I am a workaholic that needed to be connected to the internet 24/7 …. but I did some awesome Twitter-ing while there as well at took plenty of great pictures and videos.

* * * * *
A common worry among designers, when building a website, is that the many affordances we make for usability limit what the designer can do to make it look good or to make it “cool.”
It turns out, though, that those affordances create opportunities for greater creativity and more usable experiences for people other than the designer. As easy (and fun!) as it is to blame designers for being stereotypically stubborn, the problem lies not only with them, but with everyone too familiar with their company and unfamiliar with the power of creative constraints.
Thanks to the book, Made to Stick, I learned that one of the most difficult things to do when you know something is remember what it was like to not know it. This is of particular importance when you are building websites for someone other than you. This was brought into clearer focus when I finished reading The Design of Everyday Things, which explained that not only must websites be attractive, but they must also help prevent errors by creative and constructive use of design constraints.

The usability of a pencil

Certain tools are built with few meaningful constraints, and they require the expertise of the user to put it to good use.
A pencil, for instance, is a simple yet elegant tool. I’m not sure, but I suspect that it is pretty clear after seeing it used one time that the pointy end goes on the paper, and that dragging it across the page with a little pressure makes a mark.
However, a pencil is most useful to people who already know how to write or draw. It has one function with many uses. The quality of the work depends on executing a set of variables among infinite possibilities within the constraints the user deems necessary to achieve a specific end.
The difficulty is that the pencil gives no indication of what those constraints are.

An example

I am a novice illustrator. It’s a casual hobby for me that I haven’t practiced in many years. Give me a pencil, and the results wouldn’t be that striking.
My brother, on the other hand, has been studying and practicing art for decades. A pencil in his hands can be magical, meaningful, or just plain funny.

He’s able to use a pencil so well because he is an expert with it. With the same tool, I couldn’t accomplish the same thing without years and years of practice.

What you know can kill your site

Obviously, your audience will know how and be able to read (or will have workarounds). But that doesn’t mean they know the internal or industry jibberish you sometimes use when you communicate with your associates. So, by design, do not use it, as much as possible. If you must use such nonsense, do your best to explain them clearly.
Put another way, you must constrain your vocabulary intentionally to make sure what you write can be and is likely to be read by your intended audience.
The reason is this — Except in certain rare cases, your website isn’t going to be used by just experts.

Build for your audience, not for yourself

You have to consider the larger audience. Therefore, you have to do more than create a tool (like a pencil) that can be used in one way (your preferred way) out of a million — You have to ensure it can be used only in the way it was intended, which means designing meaningful and intuitive constraints.
The more complicated the task, the more difficult this is, but in the end, your site should be more like color-by-numbers than a pencil.
To be effective, the constraints must be visible and easy to understand, so that the users can easily predict what can be done and what results they will get.
This will build your users’ confidence in your site, and therefore you. Once that confidence is built, your users will understand that it is risky to go to anyone else to buy what you have to sell. Therefore it is important that you implement these principles quickly. Confidence, once lost and found elsewhere, is difficult to regain.
Image credits:
Pencil by Big-E-Mr-G
Drawing table by ArSiSa7
Caricature sketch by Gannon Beck
(used with permission)

* * * * *
You must admit — marketers have a curious way with language. For decades it was the industry’s goal to “target” an audience, as if to say the only way to make money was to treat consumers as objects to be destroyed. More recently, although we are using more 2.0-friendly language for interactive marketing, just as often we still use “target” and “engagement,” both of which project the consumer as an adversary.
Though it seems strange and disjointed, the language isn’t actually the problem. Even when we use the “right” terms — or at least terms the hypersensitive have less to be offended by — too often to be ignored, the problem is that our goal is still the same as it’s always been.
Consumer Electronics: An Analogy
Imagine walking into an electronics store in search of some speakers for your home entertainment system. You don’t know exactly which ones you want, but you’re pretty sure you’ve got an idea about how to narrow your choices. You just have a few questions you want to ask about the ones the store has available.
You track down a salesperson and explain what you’re looking for and what type of system you have. Easy enough.
A normal person would expect to be given helpful information, but the head of marketing, hip to the whole “Information Superhighway” thing that’s all the rage with the kids these days, meticulously trained the sales team on how to approach prospects. Thus, instead of giving you the answer, the salesperson hits you with a thirty-second explanation about how great his company is. Worse yet, there is no skip button (Not that
one would help).
Sound like any splash pages you’ve seen?
Beyond Appearances
This is what clueless people think passes for “marketing 2.0.” For all our ruminations and advocacy on the blogosphere, the goals of marketing today are the same as they’ve always been: Interruption and
Transaction. They are just dressed in a different garb.
Today’s marketers call what they do “engagement,” “interaction,” “relationship-building” or worse yet, “encouraging the customer to experience the brand.” However, substitute “brand” with “Tabasco enema,” and you can picture the usefulness of such tactics and how uncomfortable your audience is with them.
The sad news is that your company’s brand isn’t nearly as important to your audience as it is to you. Unless you’re the only provider available online, which is unlikely, it’s very easy for your audience to find someone else. No amount of “brand engagement” you pull out of your magic hat is going to make people think more about you than they do of themselves.
So don’t fool yourself about this “brand experience” thing. It’s important, and it can be done, but it isn’t going to happen because you dressed your marketing up with prettier language or pictures.

o Twitter is ephemeral.

Its immediacy and community are addicting, but Twitter has no permanance.
You can’t search it; you can’t categorize the posts. You can’t illustrate a point with a photo or artwork. You can’t post a video. It’s as fleeting as any conversation.

o Limiting your network leaves you preaching to the choir.

It’s extremely interesting and valuable to share information with your peers. But if you want to expand your business, you need a global reach.

Where blogging is headed:
Blogging is evolving and maturing. Bloggers who have a real passion for writing and who have developed an audience will keep the conversation going in this platform. But the format of blogs is changing, as well as the content of the ones that are starting now.
For me, and I think for a lot of other serious business bloggers, a blog is a storefront and, once it gains a big enough audience, a global micro-brand. You don’t just walk away from a successful blog that took blood, sweat and tears to build because a shiny new object came along.
o C-level executives are just getting comfortable with blogging – and are becoming more open about discussing issues that previously would have been vetted or banned by legal.

Take a look, for example at the new JNJ BTW, which promises a three-dimensional view of Johnson & Johnson. There’s a discussion of J&J’s lawsuit against the Red Cross – something you would never have seen even two years ago. “Everyone else is talking about our company, so why can’t we?” says the “About.”

o Businesses have finally become much more open to launching blogs built on substantive and strategic premises.

And hopefully most have learned that unless they are genuine and transparent in their approach, they will not have an audience.

o Blogs will become more communal.
You’ll see more multiple-author blogs like the Clutter Control Freak that I just launched for Stacks and Stacks. It is difficult, as any long-term, serious blogger can tell you, to keep a blog lively, interesting, and frequently updated with just one writer.
I see blogs becoming more like magazines than journals, and less likely to pretend to be objective. Because objectivity is not the point of blogging. This new medium is about opinions, and transparency. And it’s here to stay as long as people who feel passionately about broadcasting their opinions can maintain and grow an audience.
And, since we’re social creatures who like to talk to people who share our interests, as we can on Twitter and Facebook, micro-media and socnets are here to stay too.
See, we can all just get along. We just need to keep adding new features to keep things interesting.

“Socnets” offer a glimpse into the Internet’s future …. which will increasingly include mobile communication from devices like the iPhone with small screens. That’s what makes them so exciting.
The “Real Work” is changing
Social networks can look like distractions from the “real” work of business. Business is built on relationships and strengthening relationships is much of the “real work.”
Sometimes socnets are just a distraction, but more often, they help increase the strength of business and social connections relationships. And I’m surely more likely to respond to an email or call from someone I’m in regular contact with than someone I don’t “know.”
I’ve been spending time building my Facebook network, and I’ve made Twitter a daily habbit (ok, I’m addicted) because:
o it makes me and the really smart people I hang out with on Twitter distill ideas into their essence because each tweet can only be 140 characters
o The potential to make money from them is vast. I have already had several client inquiries and been granted direct access to several of my heroes whom I might not have met otherwise
o Twitter is, so far, free from spam and PR pitches. Or at least if there are pitches they have to be only 140 characters. And if someone is annoying, you can easily block them.
o There are already several examples of intelligent marketing use of socnets.
o My socnet guru, Steven Streight, aka Vaspers the Grate, is the bard of Twitter. I love reading the ideas, questions and links he and other active Tweeties post.
o Twitter’s fun
Socnets are changing blogging, and much more
Already this form of micro-blogging has led me to use my blog for longer, more thoughtful posts (well, not always) and put the short takes and links in Twitter, or Facebook, or 8apps.
This type of change by several well-known bloggers has caused some speculation that blogging is dying. That could not be farther from the truth. Blogging is evolving, and only those who are truly dedicated to writing and sharing information are still, well, dedicated.
Some will say that expressing thoughts in 140 characters contributes to the dumbing down of our society. And they’re probably right. But honey, fighting that one is a losing battle, so you might as well join in.
Shiny Object Syndrome
The A-list blog crowd is flitting around in what some call Shiny Object Syndrome (SOS) like moths to a flame. Nobody, repeat nobody, has time for active participation in six or eight social networks. As an Internet marketing strategist, I join and test socnets because I want to see if my clients should participate in or sponsor them. Until you join and look at the features and give it a test run, you can’t tell which is a keeper.
Soflow, one of the early social networking sites, just announced today that it is closing. Adrants, which had a forum on Soflow for years, recently replaced that with a Ning-based ad industry forum, which seems more feature rich. So the socnet shake-out has begun. And funny thing: podcasting and Second Life seem to be so last quarter.
Many people are heavily invested in creating their LinkedIn networks, and aren’t about to leave those contacts behind in any hurry. Facebook is the “in” socnet of the moment among the digerati, who will most likely abandon it a few weeks from now. It’ll be a long time before the monster business networking app makes itself known.
Remember the web portals, bulletin boards and chat rooms of the 90s? They were all the next big thing once.
We’ve come a long way baby. And we’ve got a looooong way to go.

Here’s what I mean: I travel a lot. And when you travel a lot you discover a lot of important things. You learn the answers to crucial questions such as: Why is a dog a man’s best friend? Because a dog always welcomes you home and a dog thinks everything is a great idea.
Right now, as I write this, our dog, Bran, is lying behind me. When I throw a glance at her, she responds immediately, gazing admiringly. “You work too hard,” she seems to be saying. “Have a break.”
Outside my window, Frodo, our cat, sits preening himself. When I catch his attention, he stares back at me. “Open the window,” he seems to be saying. “Like, now.”
Web sites are generally designed by dogs. There’s a lot of optimism. The dogs look at the site and think of it as an endless attic. No matter how much stuff you into it, there’s always room for more. The dogs approach each design step with a “have gigabytes, must fill” enthusiasm.
Dogs think it’s great fun thinking of all the cool new things you can do. They love picking colors and moving things around. They love choosing small font sizes and grey text; coming up with new ways to navigate.
Dogs are very egalitarian, particularly when it comes to navigation. They never want anyone to be lost anywhere on the site. So they create all sorts of navigation, ensuring that no matter who you are, no matter what your interest is, not matter what page on the site you are on, there will always be a link just for you.
If dogs had their way, then every single link on the website would also be on the homepage. In that way, everybody would be one-click away from finding everything they ever wanted to find. That would just be so cool.
Dogs love content. As far as dogs are concerned there’s no such thing as bad content. Dogs will always give you 100% effort. And if just one person out of 7 billion is interested in this piece of content, then dogs want it published.
Dogs are fascinated by technology. All you have to do is say words like “portal” or personalization” or “new content management system,” and the dogs just start yelping and jumping all over the place. Installing new software is just like going on the biggest, baddest walk and finding the juiciest, smoochiest bone along the way. It’s a dog’s dream.
And then cats have to manage the Web site. The dogs let everyone publish and the cats are certainly not going to review all this stuff. The dogs created an architecture where everyone can find everything and now nobody can find anything. The cats shake their heads.
The dogs thought the mystical, magical search engine in the sky would solve everything. The cats know that’s like two-month old pie in the garbage can.
Sure, we need dogs’ enthusiasm, but we also need to bring the cats into the planning and design meetings.

What so often passes as a piece of “web fun” actually performs a vital role in the creation of a brand or organization’s web strategy. Let me explain.
A couple of days ago, I found a site that allowed you to upload photos of yourself for scanning and comparison against the faces of celebrities (my closest match is William (Capt Kirk) Shatner). The site then constructs an image that showed those celebrities who most look like you (or is it the other way around?). Sounds like fun, right? It is… it makes you want to send it to your friends and colleagues.
As Tom Cruise (a.k.a. Drew McLellan) points out, there is a serious piece of strategy at play in this gimmickry. By creating an online tool that encapsulates its brand, this fun tool from MyHeritage.com simultaneously demonstrates how the site functions as well as providing an immediate emotional linkage between the consumer and the site — you are, after all, uploading a photograph of yourself.
This same approach worked spectacularly well for the Movember charity campaign in Australia last year (hey … is anyone following this up for 2007 in North America?). Why does this work? Because there is a strategy in place to drive an increase in trial/sampling … and the strategy does so by placing the consumer literally at the center of the experience.
And this is something that the web can do like no other channel. So if you think that a “web strategy” is not something applicable to your brand … think again. And think harder.

In many cases, you’re not going to be particularly reassured by the answers you get to your question. You’ll be given an assortment of “nice” reasons to blog, such as: