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Up to now Groupon has offered deals for local retailers and it’s been a boon to the niche businesses to get access to a bigger market. Even a tiny business can get a lot of bang for their buck out of a Groupon offer. With today’s offer from the Gap though, the game has shifted. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great for Groupon and it’s users, and I might even buy this one for my niece, but does it spell doom and gloom for the niche businesses it has served so well in the past?

It’s interesting that Groupon started to offer two coupons at once recently(see above) and we can hope that even if the main offer is a big brand that the little businesses will still be able to opt in to the service. Unlike their regular deals, the Gap deal is offered in a number of cities at the same time,

Rumors have it that Groupon is backed up with offers and that could be the big bottleneck to their growth since they only post one (now two) per day per city. If big brands start sucking up that premium space will there be room left for small business?

As companies like the Gap try on different social promotions like check ins on Foursquare group coupons Facebook and Twitter, it will be intrusting to see which they adopt.

Twitter announced today a new feature called “Twitter Tales“. The idea is to feature the stories of users and how Twitter has impacted their lives. The first story is about Natasha Badhwar (@natashabadhwar ) from New Delhi, who writes micro-poetry and stories that inspire and entertain as well as fragments of insight into her life as a mom, film-maker and self-confessed multi-tasker. Natasha uses Twitter as a place of expression and Since I’m a big fan of The Blogess on her blog and on Twitter and her blog, I was tickled to see the first humor post is about her. Another story is about the joys of commuting on Caltrain and tweeting the experience.

It may sound mundane but I think it’s a good example of how a site like Twitter impacts everyday lives in unexpected ways. Browse Twitter Tales and see if it strikes a chord for you. Who knows, maybe your story could be up next! Just email  tales@twitter.com and tell your story.

I had lunch today with a friend and we got to talking about creating a personal brand online. It was a really great discussion and I wanted to share some of it with you.

I don’t care where you work or how happy you are in your job right now, you still need to build your own personal brand online. That means separate from your identity as a business or even as the head of a department or your own company. Why? Because your reputation is being searched right now by somebody online who is researching your company, thinking of hiring you or making an appointment to meet with you. What are they going to find? Take a moment and go Google yourself. What is your overall impression of that person? It might need a little fine-tuning.

Life these days is incredibly transparent and if you’re not putting a public face out there that represents you somebody else will do it for you. Or worse yet, all people will find is a bunch of half filled out profiles and vague references to something you did in high-school. Is that how you want to be perceived?

I’m not saying you have to out your personal life–nor should you–but what you think about what is happening in your sphere of interest can attract a better job, an important partnership or connections that can teach you things you would have spent years to learn. Even if your field is governed by rules and regulations there is always an opportunity to speak out about something without your words becoming a liability. You’re smart enough to know your space and what is and is not acceptable to talk about.

You don’t have to blog

OK, so I know not everyone wants to blog about their life. Maybe that’s not your communication medium. What about pod casting, video blogging or becoming the curator of all things in your particular niche on Twitter?

You’ve got opinions, everybody does. Share them and share links. Listen to what other people in your niche are saying and support or respond to it on their blogs, Facebook pages, Linkedin groups, Twitter and forums. Start a discussion wherever you find something that interests you and you’ll find that your personal brand will develop naturally and people will begin to listen.

Once they start listening you’re in a better place to learn from each other and exchange information, and so your network grows and your brand adds value.

Speak with your true voice

Don’t put on an online persona that you wish you were. It’s not sustainable and if the facade cracks it will be very, very messy. Be true to what you believe in and the right connections will come your way. Speak out about what is important to you and you’ll create an extended network of connections with similar interests and values. That in turn leads to deeper conversations that are actually interesting to you and your network. Remember that your personal integrity is a big part of your brand.

Keep it simple

When you’re first defining your brand you can experiment with different areas at first until something clicks. Then you know you’ve got the niche you really can talk about because you care about it. Once you’ve defined that niche hone it down to a fine point and stay focused. It’s a lot easier to build a brand in a defined space than it is to say “EVERYBODY needs to know this”. Trying to maintain a brand that covers too much makes you look like you don’t really care about anything.

You can always branch out later. For now spend some real quality time exploring what really matters to you as a person. If it’s not what you’re doing right now don’t worry about that. Follow your passion anyway. You never know how it may turn into a life changing opportunity. Who knows, there could be somebody out there with the same passion who’s been looking for someone with your exact skills to start a business with. Or hire as a consultant.

Your brand isn’t what people think you are today

Only you can define what your personal brand really is, so don’t let people tell you what it should be. Whatever your brand is now can be changed by simply focusing on what you really believe in, what you think about, and what matters to you. Once you know what that is–and you follow your passion in whatever format works best for you–you’re well on your way to defining your real brand. You’re going to have to work really REALLY hard at this, but trust me it will be worth it and pay off in ways you could never have imagined. Look at what it did for Gary Vaynerchuk. Love him or not, he’s built an authentic brand and an empire. Like he said at TED, “Do what you love (no excuses!)“.

Take control of your brand right now. It’ll be the best decision you ever made.

Social media has had such a huge impact on small businesses, both to reach out to a global audience and to their own backyard as well. I love to see local business flex their social media muscles and offer specials to local residents, through innovative and fun marketing, deepen their relationships in their neighborhood and support the community as a whole.

That’s why I suggested this panel for next year’s SXSW, and I asked some amazing local business and social media folks to join me. Jason Sutherland from Peninsula Shops, Alejandro Reyes from Sacramento Marketing Labs and Ryan Kuder from Bizzy.com.

We’re not going to go on and on about how wonderful social media is. You know that or you wouldn’t be reading my blog. We’re going to talk about real cases and real action that local businesses can use. We want people to walk away thinking about how they take action right away in their own local area.

SXSW has a tradition of selecting panels by votes from the community at large. The entire list of panels that made the first cut are up for voting on their site. The ones that get the most votes will be finalists for selection in the 2011 SXSW. They got well over 2,000 panel submissions, and to make the cut we’ve got to get ours to rise to the surface and be seen.

So now we need your help to get the panel voted up on the panel picker. Take a moment to visit the panel picker and give it a thumbs up, and while you’re there browse the rest of the submissions and see what people are thinking. There are some fantastic panels proposed.

Recently there have been several injection exploit attacks on WordPress through specific hosting companies. Godaddy, Network Solutions, and most recently Media Temple hosted sites were targeted for the attacks.

The one I just dealt with on this blog (and 23 of my own and client blogs) was called JohnnyA. It inserted a Javascript that re-directed my site to a spam site and then spread PHP files through the site like fwrite.php, fclose.php, eregi.php and modified several including index.php. It created new users with admin permissions on some of the blogs affected. Once we got in there, it turned out there were more than one type of Javascript inserted so find and replace caught only some of them initially. And of course this happened less than an hour after we’d launched our new WordPress Classes! Yucko. (We shut the offer down, it will be re-released soon, I promise!)

Cleaning all this up requires knowing what to look for and finding it file by file including every file in the database. A hugely daunting task when you manage as many WordPress installs as we do. Even though we’d taken a lot of precautions, we still got sucked into I signed up for service on Sucuri.net, a security consulting firm that scans and restores sites that have been attacked with Malware. I spent all weekend working with it. The team at Suciri went above and beyond to get me the information and tools I needed to get up and running quickly and their support team was helpful and responsive even outside of their posted support hours.

After running the scripts they gave me I spent the rest of the weekend tightening up all of the installs and making it at least a little harder to hack in. I know it’s not going to stop a dedicated hacker attack, but something more random might bounce off and Sucuri will let me know the minute it happens again so I can deal with it.

Now I have to say that although Media Temple initially sort of threw up their hands and passed the buck to WordPress when they realized the damage it was going to do to their reputation they stepped up and created a bunch of support docs and the Media Temple support team made every effort to answer calls. That said many clients reported 30 minute or longer support queues which is not at all common on Media Temple.

Bottom line it could have been any server. Maybe it could have been handled differently but it IS true that not updating often enough and being a bit sloppy about making your WordPress install secure is asking for trouble.

So, enough griping.
The fact is some of us have been lazy about security and that’s gotta stop now. It took me many hours of stress to resolve this, and a lot of frantic client calls in between. These kinds of things happen and as WordPress is so popular, PHP based AND open source it’s bound to happen again. Should you change blogging platforms? Probably not. It could happen to any of them. So I’m sharing with you what I did to resolve it, how to know if something happens again, and some steps to take to make WordPress secure. At least a little more secure than a standard install.

Set up an account with Sucuri
At least you’ll know when it happens the next time and the team at Sucuri will help you solve it before you lose everything.

Update WordPress
Although Media Temple inferred that this didn’t happen on up-to-date installs that’s not true. I had updated several blogs to the most recent version and they still got hit. Still, update frequently. Here’s how to know when to update WordPress.

Admin user name
It used to be the default for the admin username to be “admin”. WAY to easy to guess and then all they have to do is figure out the password. Set up a new user and give that user admin permissions. Then demote the old admin user name to subscriber, or if you haven’t got any posts associated with the admin user then delete it.

Database
Using the default name in your database tables “wp_yourdatabase” is asking for trouble. Many hosts give you the option of creating new names. Avoid using wp at all costs.

Login Lock down
Doesn’t it make sense that you don’t want an unlimited amount of login tries from the same IP address? That’s a common way for a hacker to find your password. This plugin blocks them after a set number of tries.

Secure WordPress Plugin
This plugin removes code that is easy for a bot to find and link to WordPress. It removes the version except in the admin area, sets permissions so only the admin is able to update plugins and themes etc and a slew of other things. They also offer a free security scan as well as a paid service on SiteSecurityMonitor.com

Windows Live Writer
This is notoriously vulnerable and so it makes your WordPress install vulnerable too. Learn how to use WordPress and you won’t need it.

Backups
Do regular backups of your database and your themes. That way if you have to restore them you won’t lose too much. If you’re using Amazon S3 there’s a great plugin to update directly to Amazon. WP S3 Backups.

Add a robots.txt file so search robots don’t index folders they don’t need to.
Here’s an example:

User-agent: * Disallow: /spamming/ Disallow: /wp-content/ Disallow: /wp-includes/



It’s no secret that I think WordPress is the best blogging platform, and I recommend it for Websites too. WordPress can enable you to create an online presence for a fraction of what a traditional web site costs and have an easy to use content management system (CMS) to boot. Installing, configuring and training on WordPress is a big part of our business at Tatu Digital.

Over the years we’ve gotten so used to using it that it’s pretty much second nature for us, but that’s not so for everyone. We get a lot of questions on how to use WordPress, from basic “How do I create a page?” to how to install themes, using the editor, what plugins to use, etc., and it just makes sense to create a series of tutorials to share with our clients and the members of the Social Media Coaching Center.

It makes even more sense to offer it as a series of classes so that everybody can use it–for themselves or to offer to their own clients–(we’ve got an affiliate program) so we just launched WordPress-Classes.com. There are over 20 tutorials in the series right now, something for all skill levels, and just for the launch period we’re offering the entire series for $20. Sign up now and you get access to all the tutorials we add later too.

When’s the price going to go up?
I don’t know yet. It depends on response and how many new tutorials we add. We’ve got to cover our costs after all and we can’t keep adding things and not raise the price.

Where are the new tutorials going to come from?
We’re asking our users to submit questions they need answers too. Who better to drive the process than the people who need it? We’ll create new ones based on that input and add them to the list. We already know we’ll be doing more tutorials on how to use the Thesis and Headway themes and some of our favorite plugins. We’re open to ideas and it’s built right into the classes.

Check out our WordPress-Classes.com and help us spread the word.

I’m sick and tired of social media and I don’t want to talk about it! Those were the first words out of my friends mouth the other evening. I’d just come back from a trip and we were re-connecting over drinks. Harsh words for somebody like me to hear since social media is interwoven pretty tightly in our lives these days.

She went on to rant about how social media was ruining her life. Her boyfriend constantly has his head down, texting and tweeting on his crackberry. She’s got an iPhone and checks in on FourSuare, Gowalla, MyTown and Yelp at every coffee shop. Her office uses Yammer for inter-office communications and we choose our meeting place based on reviews on FoodSpotting and UrbanSpoon. How could we possible avoid talking about social media?

So we decided on a little experiment. We’d spend the next hour or two with our phones turned off, and every time a social network or an iPhone app was mentioned the offender took a shot of Tequila (I don’t recommend this).

It started out bravely, talking about my trip visiting family and her job at a tech company. The food we’d had in Florida and the hot new San Francisco restaurant she’d tried. How’d she find it? Foodspotting of course. Shot 1.

I told her how I found an ATM  in the sprawling Miami airport with Gate Guru, an iPhone app she’d told me about. Shot 2.

We talked about Shirley Sherrod and the video. Of course we’d seen it on YouTube. Shot 3.

We lasted 15 minutes.

We switched to talking about local events and news I’d missed while out of town, but it really didn’t go any better since my Twitter network kept me on top of the Shirley Sherrod mess, Contador ‘s gaffe passing Andy Schleck in the Tour de France, the opening of the movie Inception and related reviews, even Nelson Mandela‘s birthday. Things degraded pretty quickly after the first few slips and then it just got laughable. And we did.

And then we talked about the things you don’t talk about on social media sites. Job issues, family squabbles and the things we share only with our closest friends.

I can understand the angst about social media and how it’s embedded in our lives. The family back home sighed often enough about putting down the iPhones to know everybody isn’t as deep in it (OK obsessed) as we are. But here, in Silicon Valley, it’s a way of life. That doesn’t mean we can’t take a little time off and really get to know the hearts of our dearest friends without putting it all on Facebook.

Every successful blogger or blogging coach will tell you it’s important to blog regularly to maintain the interest of your readers. How often is up to you, but often it’s helpful to set a sort of schedule to your blogging so people begin to expect to hear from you on a regular basis.

It can be disappointing to go through your feed readers and see that many of the feeds have not been updated recently. I delete a blog from my reader if it doesn’t update enough. It’s just taking up space and not adding value and there are always new blogs to add right?

So what to do if you don’t have anything to say right now? Don’t panic, it happens to everybody. That’s why I’m writing a blog post about writing a blog post! I’m actually on vacation so I’m a little distanced from my reading list and perhaps a bit less inspired than usual. So I posted a note to Twitter and asked the Twittersphere how they find inspiration for a blog post. Here are some of the responses and some of the ways I use to keep my posts interesting. (I hope so anyway!)

Start an editorial calendar
If you blog about business, processes, food or a whole host of other things wait for a day you feel a bit inspired and write out a list of everything you’ve ever thought about blogging about. Sort through it and see if a pattern unfolds. Is there a series of posts you could write and then post over time? A natural cycle of posts you can plan for? Events you know will come up you can talk about?

Write it all out on a calendar and decide when you will publish. Then either write them before your scheduled publishing date and set them to go live on time or scedule the day you will write them and publish.

Make a list
Sometimes you come up with ideas in a flurry and not know what to do with all of it. Make a list and keep it near your writing desk. When you need it scan the list quickly and see if you’re inspired by an idea or combination of ideas.

Lazyfeed
Lazyfeed is one of my favorite resources for inspiration that is timely. You can set up some keyword searches in advance and see posts almost as they are published. Watch carefully and you may see a trend developing. I’m not suggesting you should steal an idea, but listen to what others are saying and add your own take on it. Be sure to link back to the original blog or blogs and give credit where credit is due. This just encourages community discussion and give a wider point of view on the subject at hand.

Twitter
Do what I did, and ask your network on Twitter, Facebook, forums, whatever networks you belong too. Where do you see a hole in the discussion? Share your thoughts on a subject and see where it goes.

Books, magazines, trade journals, media
What are you reading? Have you developed opinions or have a review to share? Heard something on the radio or TV that made you think?

You don’t have to write a treatise
Remember that blog posts should ideally be between 300 and 500 words in length. Don’t feel like every post has to be War and Peace. Write something that asks a question of your readers and leave room for discussion. Sometimes the best part of a post is in the comments and that’s just fine. Let your readers participate and we are all richer for it.

SO. What are your tips for writing regularly? I know I could use some more..

I thought I knew quite a bit about search engine optimization until I found this nifty new tool called Scribe. Even though I optimize sites for search engines as part of my daily duties, it can be tedious and there is always more to learn. Unless you do this for a living it’s probably not the central part of your day now is it?

So how do you learn SEO techniques and see how it relates to your own content online? If you’re like me, you want to get your hands dirty and see SEO best practices as they apply to your actual content instead of reading an e-book and then trying to see how it relates to what you do.

That’s where Scribe comes in. Install the plugin, write your content and analyze it to see how to fine tune it for search engine optimization, learn some best practices and really get an understanding of how all this works. Analyze it again until you gt the results you’re looking for.

Here’s a video I put together to show you how it works on a post and what I do when I use it in WordPress.

var flashvars = { width: "600", height: "353", autostart: "false", repeat: "false", backcolor: "111111", frontcolor: "cccccc", lightcolor: "66cc00", stretching: "fill", enablejs: "true", mute: "false", skin: "http://janetfouts.com/wp-content/plugins/proplayer/players/skins/simple.swf", image: "http://janetfouts.com/wp-content/plugins/proplayer/players/preview.png", plugins: "", javascriptid: "1183pp-single-4c6d62f5052c3", image: "http://janetfouts.com/wp-content/plugins/proplayer/players/preview.png", file: 'http://janetfouts.com/wp-content/plugins/proplayer/playlist-controller.php?pp_playlist_id=1183pp-single-4c6d62f5052c3&sid=1282237173' }; var params = { wmode: "transparent", allowfullscreen: "true", allowscriptaccess: "always", allownetworking: "all" }; var attributes = { id: "obj-pro-player-1183pp-single-4c6d62f5052c3", name: "obj-pro-player-1183pp-single-4c6d62f5052c3" }; swfobject.embedSWF("http://janetfouts.com/wp-content/plugins/proplayer/players/player.swf", "pro-player-1183pp-single-4c6d62f5052c3", "600", "353", "9.0.0", false, flashvars, params, attributes);

You can also use Scribe with other types of sites and here are videos for Scribe for Joomla, and Scribe for Drupal too.

When you consider what it can cost to hire a web copywriter who understands SEO this plugin is quite the deal. How does that old proverb go? “Teach a girl to fish”??

Anyway, here’s a link to Scribe Plans and Prices

Want to learn more about SEO? Click here to grab your free SEO copywriting report by Copyblogger founder Brian Clark, a step-by-step strategy for creating content that scores well, is highly readable and engaging, and ranks well in search engines.

Please note: This post contains affiliate links for this product. I stand behind this review and hope you’ll support the work we do by clicking any of the links above.

I’m a big fan of group coupon networks, deals and discounts offered through Twitter. In these times what’s not to love about buying a coupon for a dinner at 40 or 50% of it’s market value? It’s a win for the vendor too because they get new faces in the door and most times we spend more than the coupon. Sometimes I even forget I bought it and the money I spent stays in the pocket of the vendor.

The most popular of these sites seems to be Groupon, and I recommend it to my clients for their small businesses. Hey, if I’m the demographic they’re looking for then they should be using Groupon or one of the other discount sites too. In fact, Groupon raised over $175 million in funding. I guess the investors are buying it too! They’re not alone of course. You don’t have to surf social media networks for very long to run into another ad for a coupon site offering “GREAT DEALS” and “HUGE DISCOUNTS” and there are plenty of them vying for attention on Twitter already. It’s the hottest meme out there right now.

Does it work? Sure it does. You only have to look at the huge successes of Dell, JetBlue, Southwest Airlines and Woot to see how offering deals on Twitter can attract a big audience and their money too.

Twitter is getting into the game and offering discounts tweeted through an account called @Earlybird. Earlybird will tweet out local deals through it’s Twitter feed. It’s pretty easy to assume it’s going to be popular. With only two tweets on the site (one of them says “Send “follow earlybird” to 40404 to receive each deal via SMS. A head start never hurts.“) the account is followed as of this writing by 23,667 people and is on 931 Twitter lists.

So are they too late to the show? Uh no. Twitter owns the show. Besides, as an effort to monetize, this is an awesome answer. If I don’t want to see the tweets from @EarlyBirdI don’t have to listen, but it offers their advertisers a way to access the huge market with localized ads that are welcomed instead of dissed. WAY better than the dreaded “promoted tweets” idea.

Basically I’m all for it as long as the powers that be don’t decide to block other sites from continuing their special offers too. I love Twitter and I’m happy to support it and save a buck or two on dinner at the same time!

Fast Company has been a darling of the geek set since it first launched. The magazine is full of the coolest gadgets, the hippest companies and really good information and the website is a vibrant community.

So what went wrong with the “Influence Project”? The site which recently launched entices a user to enter their name and view their social media influence. Then it encourages a user to try to get their network to respond to a comment or post about the site to show how much influence that user has. The more people who click your link the more influence you have.

What do you get?
“Your picture could appear in the November issue of Fast Company magazine as part of an amazing photo spread. The more influence you demonstrate, the bigger your picture will be.” (oooh cool)

How is your influence measured?
“The number of people who directly click on your unique URL link. This is the primary measure of your influence, pure and simple. You will receive partial “credit” for subsequent clicks generated by those who register as a result of your URL.”

People are already gaming it by adding shortened links to the page with their user ID embedded so they get more influence rankings. It’s getting pretty bad buzz on Twitter right now under the hashtag #InfluenceProject from a broad spectrum of people.

What’s the big deal?
To many it sounds way to close to the old “Who’s Who” scandal where you get a message you’re been nominated to e listed in who’s who but first you have to pay to have your name featured. It’s a vanity call. It’s a pyramid scheme where nobody really makes money( except for Fast Company maybe by selling ads and magazines).

While the influence project doesn’t cost any money, it could cost in something more. Like Fast Company’s reputation. When they say there’s no such thing as bad PR Some of the most influential people in social media have 3-4 connections so far at best and many are not listed at all.

Even more interesting are the names who are not signing up. I did a quick search and many of the social media folks I most respect are not represented or have very few connections. Amber Naslund, Cathy Brooks, Chris Brogan, Liz Strauss, Aaron Strout haven’t been listed yet and I’m thinking it might turn out against Fast Comp nay in a way they haven’t expected.

Whoever has less influence on the Influence Project wins!

If you’ve got a great story it seems only natural for PR to reach out to bloggers in your space and get them to write about you right? Yeah…. well that seems to be the latest problem for bloggers who get tons of emails and press releases every day trying to get them to write about whatever product or service. So if you really want to connect with bloggers you need to read these best practices first. At least it might get you in the door, and maybe you won’t end up on the Bad Pitch Blog.

Create relationships before you need them
Take the time to get to know the bloggers in your area of interest. Comment when it’s relevant, re-tweet them on Twitter and share links you think they will find useful. I’m a lot more likely to write about your product if I already know you and we’ve been in conversation already. Besides befriending a particular blogger, get to know their network. Having a natural conversation among friends is a good way to share your latest information and you may find more than one in the group who will help get the word out.

Read their blog!
Know your audience seems like a basic idea but you’d be amazed how often it happens that bloggers see mass emails that have no interest for them at all. Resist the urge to broadcast send to nay and all in hopes of landing quality bloggers who are interested in you. Read the blog and see if it is a good fit. When you reach out, do so in the language of the blogger not press release sound bytes. Find out how they want to be contacted, if the blogger is the first point of contact great, but if they have an agent or virtual admin show some respect for their process.

Make it short and rich
Nobody reads press releases. Really, they don’t. Well maybe some read the PitchEngine releases, but bloggers? Not so much. It’s better to write a custom email with some quotable information and links to a video, images or PDF they can use for the story and distribute to their readership. Make it short and to the point and then tell them you’re happy to give them more info and your contact phone, email, twitter or whatever works best for you both.

Make it personal
Make sure you make it personal, comment on a previous post that relates to the topic at hand or you enjoyed. Tell them why their readers need to know about this and how it will add value to the blog and it’s readership.

Share the love
If a blogger writes about you make sure you share the link love with your network. That’s only a part of it though. Share links to great posts they’ve written without respect to your own gain. Be an honest supporter of smart bloggers and they may support you back.

Got a cause?
The Blog Action Day event is a huge success year after year. Why? Because they tell bloggers right up front that they are the center of the event. 13,606 blogs from 156 countries with more than 18 million readers responded with one or more posts and badges on their sites proclaiming their participation. You can’t beat return like that. Look carefully at what they’ve done and if it’s a good fit for you or not.

There are some really wonderful nonprofits out there that work to develop water resources in places where water is scarce. But what about when there is water all around but none that’s safe to drink? This is what’s happening in Southeast Asian countries. Sure there’s water but it’s not safe water. Top that with limited funds and resources for filtering systems or water purification plants and you’ve got a lot of sick families.

What if you could come up with a simple filtering system that would provide clean water with a handful of readily available ingredients that the villagers could make themselves? These filters can be made anywhere from materials easily found in most villages. Nothing to buy, no shipping or distribution centers needed, just good old practical know-how. In a short time water contaminated with pathogens can be safe for drinking.

About the founder of Abundant Water
The Abundant Water project was initiated by Sunny Forsyth, an Australian engineer and AW project manager. In 2007, whilst working as an Australian Government Youth Ambassador for Development, Sunny became aware of the lack of access to safe drinking water in rural communities in Laos. Click here to learn more.

Unsafe water causes 80% of all sickness and disease in the developing world and kills more people than war. Cholera, typhoid fever, amebic and bacillary dysentery, diarrhea, hepatitis A and E are all common illnesses in Laos contracted from drinking unclean water. YOU can help change that. Watch the video below and then go visit AbundantWater.org to see how you can help.

What it takes to be a success in social media is the ability to be fluid and organic in your approach. To move quickly and decisively as new issues develop, evaluate new tools and networks for their usefulness, usability and appropriateness. To interact with your users and community and listen to what their needs and desires are. You need to be able to evaluate opportunities quickly since things come and go in a flash in this environment. You need to understand the capabilities of your team and how to help them grow their skills.

You pay attention very closely to what your community wants to do. What platforms do they like? What networks do they avoid? What do they just not get? What kind of tools do they want to use?

As a new tool evolves you need to know what it does and how it works and decide if it’s a good fit for you and for your users. Give it a try and if it doesn’t work or it’s not a good fit move on. Even if it’s the latest, hottest, coolest tool you’ve ever seen, if your community doesn’t want to adopt it, it might not be a good fit. It’s not about what you want. It’d about what your community wants, how they communicate, the tools they are comfortable with. You must understand that that may not be the latest networks or shiny bright objects. Sure, you may be able to educate them and show the value, but if they don’t adopt you can’t force it or you lose them.

Lots of clients come to us asking for a schedule and a step by step program. I’m sorry, that doesn’t exist. Every situation requires new research into who the market is and what tools they feel comfortable using and all the things I just mentioned above. Then there are branding and corporate structures to consider and the skill level and time and energy of the implementation team.

If you try to lock yourself into a step by step program and project out a year or or more you are limiting your own potential.

Every single social media program must be a custom one, an ever-evolving organically driven program. That’s what keeps it interesting and it’s also why I never tire of helping people find their own formulas. That’s what I love about being a social media coach, it’s fun.

I was on a panel today at CFP entitled “Privacy, Activism, & Social Networking: Protecting Privacy While Running a Media Campaign in 140 Characters or Less” with Tamar Gubins, Deborah Pierce, David Roth and  Danny O’Brien and I’ve been going round and round in my head  about my own position on privacy online and looking at social media from the viewpoint of an activist who may have a deeper need for personal privacy for safety reasons.

I’m a bit more pragmatic than some of my co-panelists on what privacy we can actually have in this day and age. After all, if you own a home it’s likely anyone who wants to can search online tax records and find your address and more personal information. If you carry a cell phone you can be located by anybody who can triangulate the signal. I’ve been an active user online for many years so I’m pretty easy to find. I’ve always stuck to the “if you don’t want it public don’t put it online” philosophy. This is especially true when you are on multiple networks. Think of your online conversations as an aggregate whole and not just one network at a time.

Unfortunately you don’t always control what’s online about you so I’m a big advocate of setting up alerts in Google and Social Mention among others to get a heads up when someone posts something about you online. New York, Philadelphia and several other city police departments are monitoring Twitter to watch for trouble before it starts. There are stories of activists using Twitter to transmit summaries from police scanners to let protesters know what actions police are taking too.

I’m trying to keep my focus in this case on activists and their issues with privacy online. You can’t mention activism and social media without James Karl Buck coming up. As an activist and a blogger he’s very visible online and his one word Tweet “Arrested” made headlines around the world. His tweet activated his social network and word spread quickly. Buck was released, but it was quite some time before his translator was also released–due in part at least–to Buck’s nonstop reporting on Twitter about his friend’s plight.

This is one example of social media being used to secure the privacy of an individual. Blogging and frequent updates on social networks can at least let people know where you are and if the communications stop or radically change, your friends will be paying attention.

Being visibility can keep you from “disappearing” in remote locations. On the other hand it can make you an easily visible target too. Social media can be used against you personally or against the cause you are fighting for. Telegraphing the location of a protest can increase the opposition at the same location.

So, how can an activist use social media to promote their cause and stay safe at the same time?

• Set up those alerts for your name, the organization you’re working with and the opposition as well and monitor them frequently.
• Get a P.O. box and use it for all of your online accounts (not just social media).
• Set up an email account just for social media and don’t use it for anything private
• Get a Google number that forwards to your cell phone for any time you have to put a phone number in a form online
• Create an active social voice so you can transmit your ideas and keep in touch wherever you are
• Make sure that network is active long before you need it and identify who is going to speak for you on your behalf if something happens
• When using a public computer at a cafe etc, be sure to log off and clear the cache and delete cookies of the browser.
• When you join a social network you don’t have to use your real birthday. Change the date across all your networks.
• Use a service like Hushmail for secure email that is encrypted and virus scanned
• Use a USB device like StealthSurfer so data is stored on your USB instead of the computer
• I was told about this list of 8 things you shouldn’t give to social networking sites at CFP. Good stuff here too.

Bottom line? If you understand the internet and the privacy issues we face it’s your responsibility to help others see the issues too, advocate for privacy right sand then self police yourself. You have to take responsibility for what’s said out there about you and what you say about others that could put their privacy at risk.

If you don’t know about these issues start educating yourself. Start with CFP and some of the videos of sessions at this conference. Don’t put it out there if you’re not willing to stand behind it and watch what you say in aggregate form about yourself AND other people. Responsible use of social media is up to all of us.

Well I guess he sorta did. I went to the Ragan Social Media Summit event at Cisco #RaganCisco ) last week and I have to say Guy’s presentation was outstanding. He’s amazing and I loved it. Even if he DID call out a certain group of social media mavens as “social media Nazis”. Ok, and he’s right to some extent. There are loads of people who say the way Guy Tweets isn’t the “right way” to use Twitter, and you can’t blame him for being a little defensive about that. After all he built an amazing empire in Alltop by tweeting the way he does, and he’s very transparent about what he does and why he does it. I follow him and I read Alltop all the time. There’s great stuff here, and you can quickly scan the headlines in almost any category you could possibly think of.

So let’s look at how Guy Kawasaki uses Twitter and whether it’s right for what you want to do.

Auto-posting
He’s a big fan of ObjectiveMarketer and Twithawk and he and his team use it to point out fascinating, odd and often useful bits of information. He advocates posting the same post more than once a day, and scheduling posts for future release. he also feeds RSS Streams of information to Twitter and Alltop.

Upside

• This can be a very good way of building followers who enjoy wandering off topic into distraction land on occasion.
• Tweets like this get re-tweeted a lot and that boost your following
• Tweeting at different times of day reaches different readers so your absorption rate increases
• Every time that tweet goes out in increase your SEO value
• Feeding related rss streams to Twitter is just brilliant if you’re driving traffic to a portal
• If you’ve got a lot of followers replying to a hundred “thanks great post” tweets and re-tweets is time consuming

Downside

• Too many tweets will turn some people off (I have a column in Seesmic just for @GuyKawasaki)
• If your tweets get too far off-topic you can lose some keyword saturation and people (and search engines) will have no clue what you’re about
• Sometimes it’s just plain annoying to get duplicate posts
• Twitter doesn’t like duplicate posts. Maybe you could re-phrase it a bit for each iteration?
• Feeding rss streams to Twitter that don’t relate to what you want to promote is just noise

Auto Following

Guy says he follows everyone out of courtesy. And when you’ve got a following of over 244,000 people it’s a full time job to keep on top of who to follow! I’m of the quality over quantity camp here. I view every profile and look for people I want to talk to. Preferably ones that are smarter than I am. Anyway, here’s the pros and cons of auto follow.

Upside

• Auto-following will build your numbers faster
• Once people know you auto-follow you’ll get added to lists of people who follow back and your numbers will skyrocket
• You don’t have to view all of your followers and decide whether or not to follow them or not
• Some who you might not have followed could actually be lost opportunities

Downside

• This is how you start getting those spam direct messages offering you answer to problems you never knew you had.
• If you auto-follow you might be paying less attention to who people are in your network.
• It’s just so mindless. Social media is about being social, so if you auto follow go through the list occasionally and reach out to people.

Ghosting
Lots of outrage poured out on Twitter when Guy let the world know he wasn’t writing all this great content himself. DUHHHH people, he wouldn’t have time to do anything else! I don’t have any issue with using ghosts in social media and having multiple people feed the Twitter stream as long as there is transparency that you’re doing that. Lots of companies do it too and it frees the team up to actually engage with their followers. Besides, if you send a tweet to @GuyKawasakiodds are good he’ll respond in person and not one of his staff, so what’s the harm?

So, am I a “social media Nazi”?
Mebbe so. Mebbe not. I’ll let Guy decide. My goal isn’t to drive traffic to a portal of fantastic information like Alltop at least not on this blog. I like to filter things more. I wouldn’t ever say the way Guy tweets is wrong because it’s not wrong for some sites. If you’ve got a site that’s all about sharing information and you need to drive traffic, Guy’s techniques are a brilliant way to build traffic.

Do I auto-post? Not so much. I don’t follow everybody back and my network is relatively small, but I’m OK with that. I’m a quality and depth of conversation girl. But you can be sure I use his ideas and share them with my clients!

Want to learn more about how Guy Kawasaki Tweets? Here’s a link to the page on Alltop he uses in his Twitter presentation, and here’s an FAQ on how he tweets. Oh and if you ever have a chance to hear him speak, GO. I’ve seen several presentations. He’s never boring and you always learn something.

I attended one of the pre-sessions of the Ragan Communications Social Media Summit at Cisco today. The session was on legal issues, but the first part was really all about security, and Christopher Burgess a senior security officer at Cisco (@burgessct on Twitter) brought up some interesting points.

True, most of it is very common-sense to the average person who’s been online “forever”, but it’s important to remember that not all of the people in the room may have been online as much as we have. It’s still it’s good to touch base with security now and again anyway right?

There is no such thing as internet privacy
I say it almost every time I speak publicly, and I’ll say it again. There really isn’t any such thing as internet privacy. You write an email and save it in a folder on your Gmail account only to have it suddenly show up on a web site. You click a “like” button to your website or blog or share a favorite website with a friend.  “Private” groups on Facebook, Linkedin, or just about any other network have information leaked all the time. Sometimes it’s completely innocent, as in the case of a friend tweeting your latest status update even though you are in their “private info only” group on Facebook. Sometimes it’s more nefarious like malware built into an application you unwittingly downloaded and used for private information that was then transmitted to somewhere you didn’t intend.

Small businesses who don’t have big security structures need to be more wary–perhaps than those that do. Your network may be more vulnerable or your security practices lax and allowing employees to share data on insecure services. Again, the example of forwarding your company mail to Gmail so you can “check it from home” creates a security risk.

Leaks happen all the time from supposedly private networks
Look at the Hotmail security breach where over 30,000 email passwords were posted online for all to see. Or the Google Buzz nightmare, the phishing scam that released malware on thousands of Linkedin users computers, or even the malware attached to those cute e-cards you get from your less savvy relatives.

Don’t self-edit
Another good point for bloggers and anyone who write public information on web sites, press releases etc., is to not self-edit your work. This isn’t just to catch mere typos but to find improperly phrased messaging that could affect your brand’s perspective or unwittingly release information sensitive before it’s time.

Cisco has what sounds like a pretty robust process for this. If you write a blog post about a particular process or tool it gets vetted by the team before it goes out on the blog. In talking about how the process works Christopher said he writes a post, it’s “eviscerated by the team” and then he re-writes it based on the feedback before publishing. While this may seem extreme think about it in the context of your own business. Is there information that needs to be precisely stated? How does the person writing your blog posts know that?

On geo-location
Some applications default to having the geo-location turned on. I certainly agree with Christopher that these apps should default to “off”. Check on your laptops and handheld devices as well as your home computer to see that you’ve opted out of geo-location except when you want to use it. You are responsible for the safety of home and family, why put them at risk by drawing a big circle around your house on Google maps and then telling Twitter or Foursquare you’re leaving for the weekend?

On Personal data
Sure, there are lots of ways or me to find your phone number and even your home address with some searching online, but again, why make it easy? Christopher told the story of how he dealt with it in his house. The family has specific (likely fake) addresses for each social network and they keep track of which mailing address, user name etc. they use for each network. This way it’s been easy–and quite informative–to see which networks are sharing their data by observing spam and un-requested information and which address it comes from. You can simply cross reference that with the network and voila, you know who leaked it. There’s a good reason to get a P.O. box if there ever was one!

Want to learn more? Here are some good resources on internet privacy and keeping your data and personal information private. (well, as private as it gets).

• Facebook Violates Privacy Promises, Leaks User Info to Advertisers
• Top 8 Things You Shouldn’t Give Social Networking Sites
• FTC Information Security Guide
• Social networking sites passing on user data to ad agencies
• #Internet safety on Twitter
• #online safety on Twitter

I spoke this week at Radio Ink Convergence on the Silicon Valley Microsoft campus with James Hipkin, Alejandro Reyes and Bryan Fikes. I thought the show organizers were spot on with this opening statement “Interactive Media is Radio’s Next Big Boom. You cannot manage it if you don’t understand it.” Here’s the highlight reel from day 2:

Our panel was on Sales 2.0 and geared towards the sales teams. It’s a pretty big subject to cover on a panel in less than an hour, and as usual I’ve got a bit more to add. So let’s talk about social media and sales shall we?

The social media sales cycle
As I mentioned several times today, listening is the first step of any entrance to social media no matter what your business is. Who’s your market? Where are they hanging out online? How can you best approach them? Which networks have the most concentration of people you want to reach?

Remember, you don’t want to spend all day nurturing multiple networks right off the bat. The learning curve is relatively shallow for these networks, but all together they can aggregate into a mountain. Pick one or two to start. Establish your presence, make sure the brand is visible and the profile contains information about the station and who to contact for more information. Expand your reach later as your network grows organically.

Listen locally
For a local station leveraging the local social media sites is just plain smart. Get out there and listen for opportunities to help. Here’s a short list of social media listening tools that can help. The idea is to engage people where they are already comfortable and in language that fits the network instead of creating your own network and trying to fit them into your box.

Raise awareness
Can you answer a question, give directions or raise awareness of an issue by directing users to a particular program? Add worthwhile input to the conversations you discover and become more visible. Stick to the 80/20 rule. 80% of what you post on any network should be in support of others. Is there a local charity, school or event you can talk about? The other 20% can be about you, but you don’t ask for the sale at this point. We’re building awareness in the public sector, and if you’re interesting you will see inquiries from prospects. Be a connector within your network and others will return the favor.

Get to know your prospects
There’s a lot of information out there. Some might say too much. Like any other kind of relationship building you need to get to know who you’re dealing with. If you do some searches on me for example you’ll see that I’m a Mac user, I ride horses, love the California coastline and travel quite a bit. Any salesperson worth her salt sees the value in this kind of information to develop a relationship, right?

Prospects to leads
So you’ve attended the tweetups, had conversations with people on your blog, Facebook page or whatever networks you’re using. Now what? Use those listening skills you’ve developed to look for an opening to convert a prospect into a lead. Just because you met them online doesn’t mean you have to go through the whole sales cycle on Twitter! Use your social media presence to encourage prospects to subscribe to a newsletter. Call them on the phone. Send them flowers on their birthday. I don’t need to tell you how to take it from here now do I?

Evangelists
Probably the most touted word used by social media consultants is “evangelist”. The truth is; when you create relationships online and show you’re an honest forthright person making a living, when the station shows it’s support for the community, the people in the community support you back. When you send out a call for help for a promotional campaign they are more likely to respond to the guy they’ve been chatting with online than a cold call. Wouldn’t you?

How long is it gonna take?
Building awareness and goodwill, communicating with your market, connecting people who need to know each other, all help to raise your visibility and increase public awareness of what you do. These kinds of deeper relationships are going to show a much faster return than if you broadcast your message out to a pile of networks but don’t connect with individual users. That said, it’s not a magic bullet. Expect to see some returns such as personal connections in a fairly short period of time. Deepen those relationships without asking for a sale until you know you’ve reached the tipping point. Expect to nurture these relationships for a minimum of 3-6 months before you start to see a significant volume of return. Then watch it snowball and pick up speed.

Measurement
I’ll be the first to say it’s hard to measure the ROI on social media. How do you “measure” a relationship online that turns casual acquaintances into evangelists? What value does the evangelist have? What value do the evangelists’ networks have? Their networks networks? If you really want to dig into social media measurement KD Paine is the diva of measurement. Visit her site for a deeper understanding of how this all works.

It’s never over
Social media evolves constantly. Your relationships need to be nurtured even after the sale (maybe especially after the sale) like any other valued sales lead. The cool thing is, with social media you can continually feed your network of prospects, clients and future clients with useful information that enriches their day and keeps you in top of mind.

And there’s more!
I spoke a bit about creating a corporate social media policy and efficiency as well. Here are some additional links I think you’ll find useful.

• Build your corporate social media strategy
• Create a social media schedule
• Choosing social media networks
• Social media and traffic building
• Beware the social media black hole

Last but not least, if you’ve got questions put them in the comments below or shoot me an email ( Janet at JanetFouts.com ) or find me on Twitter. I love questions!

There, I said it. And I feel better for it. See, here’s the thing. Some people sell social media as a “great traffic driver” and it is, it’s awesome Google candy too, but that shouldn’t be your goal or your sole reason for using it. What you really want to do is build visibility of your brand, whether that’s a personal or corporate brand. You want to be discovered and for people to actually care you exist. You want to establish your professional reputation. You don’t do that by peppering your conversations with link after link to your services page.

These promoters who say they can drive tons of traffic to your site may be just increasing your bounce rate. Think about it. The last time you went to a social bookmarking site looking for something interesting. You clicked on how many links? How long did you stay on those pages and did you connect with the brand or read a bit and move on?

In most cases it’s the latter unless there is a reason to engage.

So. Here’s my new mantra. Who cares about traffic to your web site. Build traffic to YOU instead. Whatever social site or web site you have a presence on has value and it’s highly likely that your aggregate traffic to your social media sites trumps your web site altogether. So quit worrying about where people find you and just make sure that wherever they do find you they get real, valuable information and a way to connect with you personally.

If you’ve got profiles on multiple social media networks it can be a bit of a hassle to keep up with everybody and their various updates. Gist gives you the ability to link your address book and your contact list on a number of social media sites together with some email applications (It’s particularly powerful combined with Google Apps and Gmail) and bring it all together into one handy dandy dashboard. Emails, links, attachments, blog posts, news—all relevant data is organized and prioritized by contact. Oh, and there’s an app for iPhone too so your contacts can always be right in the palm of your hand.

Here’s a quick video overview of Gist.