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Persuasive Picks for the week of 05/26/08

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Weezer - Pork and BeansTag Recommendations for Content: Ready to Filter Noise?
Properly tagging your content can go a long way to improving your visibility on the Net. Hutch Carpenter shares his review of four bookmarking and tagging services you can use to boost your “Google-Juice.”

Death of Education and the Dawn of Learning
Here’s a great post on the Servant of Chaos blog that speaks to the way kids communicate in a Web 2.0 world and how the education system needs to catch up. Today’s kids are tomorrow’s employees and customers. Will your business survive if you don’t join the social media/network space?

Charity Auction: Buy Yourself a Social Media Guru
Buy yourself time with one of five social media and online marketing experts as part of this excellent charity auction. The toughest part will be deciding on which guru to bid on with the talents of Chris Brogan, Joseph Jaffe, Aaron Strout, Geoff Livingston and Greg Verdino up for grabs!

Basic Business Blogging Suggestions
Speaking of Chris Brogan, this post he wrote earlier this week provides some nice basic information for companies that are just starting to launch a blog. As usual, Chris’s community of readers are providing great comments to the post, so be sure to read through those as well!

Pork and Beans
I’ll wrap up this week with something entertaining. Here’s a link to the new Weezer video that has been released by the band to promote the new single. The relevance? They included noteable internet “celebrities” in the video which is a sure-fire way to boost it’s potential for going viral.

Persuasive Picks for the week of 05/12/08

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Why Twitter Matters
As the popularity of Twitter continues to grow, we’re starting to see it gain more mainstream press coverage. This post on BusinessWeek.com by Stephen Baker dives into what the future might hold for the Twitterverse.

Best Social Media Advice From This Site
Chris Brogan compiles some of the best and most informative posts on his site and breaks them up into categories for mass consumption. Enjoy filling your brain with this Social Media feast!

Answers to all of your Groundswell questions
From one information packed pick to another! Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li provide answers to the many Groundswell related questions that came to them from the 700+ people who joined their recent webinar.

SEO Quick Tips
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is generally an area of expertise that can take a good portion of mental bandwidth to master. However, most readers will find value in getting some exposure to the basics. Steve Spalding from the “How to Spilt an Atom” blog posted these SEO Quick Tips that were shared with him by Mark Hager of Knoxville, TN Web Design.

CBS to Acquire CNET for $1.8 Billion
Definitely the most highly “tweeted” acquisition story this week. It should be interesting to see how CNET’s content changes and what plans CBS really has in-store post merger.

Top Time-wasters for Web Workers (And How to Cure Them)
Valuable advice for those (like you) who utilize the web on a daily basis. Just be sure to practice the cures AFTER you finish being distracted by this week’s Persuasive Picks!!

SMB7 – Hiring/Getting hired in a Web 2.0 World

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On the morning of Thursday May 1st, Bryan Person hosted the seventh Boston area Social Media Breakfast. This time around, the venue switched to the spacious Ryles Jazz Club in Cambridge where there was a great mix of both new and familiar faces.

This month’s topic focused on hiring and getting hired in a Web 2.0 world. In support of the topic, Bryan recruited Stever Robbins, Aaron Strout, Todd Defren and Chris Brogan to present their perspective in support of the topic. Each speaker did a great job in telling their story as well as answering the audience’s questions during a short panel at the end.

I attended the event with video camera in hand to capture some footage for those who couldn’t be there in person. The first video we have available features Aaron Strout, VP of New Media for Mzinga speaking about his experience with hiring though the use of Twitter, LinkedIn and other web-based tools as opposed to requesting traditional paper resumes.

Once completed, the remaining presentations will be available on the PerkettPR Vimeo Channel. I’ll update this post and send out some “tweets” when the are complete and ready for viewing.


Thanks again to Bryan for hosting the event, and we’re looking forward to attending again next month!

UPDATE:

Additional videos: Chris Brogan

Persuasive Picks for the Week of 03/31/2008

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Persuasive PicksThis week we bring you six “Persuasive Picks” across 5 different topics. Enjoy!

Seesmic Acquires Popular Twitter AIR Client Twhirl
Seesmic and Twitter fans have a new reason to be giddy. Seesmic’s acquisition of the popular Twhirl Twitter client will bring about the perfect blend of video and Twitter messaging. It will be interesting to see if this merge brings more business use to the current, primarily social use of Seesmic.

How to Come Up with Topics to Write About On Your Blog
Are you a blogging business professional? Do you find it difficult to generate a steady stream of topics to blog about? Uber-blogger Darren Rowse from ProBlogger.net shares a great video demonstrating one of the techniques he uses to generate ongoing blog topic ideas.

Writing Effective Blog Posts
Now that you’ve watched Darren Rowse’s video from our pick above and have your topic to write about, check out this short post on the techniques social media-master Chris Brogan uses to craft his daily posts.

The Ultimate Top Ten List For Small Business
Lela Davidson from the Business Pundit blog compiles a great list of links to “Top Ten” lists for small business. The linked topics include “Top Ten Marketing Blogs,” “Top Ten Best Presentations Ever,” and “Ten Tips For Time Management in a Multitasking World.”

Ten Things You Didn’t Know About Facebook
Guy Kawasaki taps “I’m on Facebook – Now What???” co-author Jesse Stay for a list of ten Facebook power tips. There are many good nuggets here if you’ve been hesitant to use Facebook for social networking as a business professional.

How to Deal with Internal Stakeholders
Forrester’s Jeremiah Owyang continues to pump out amazing posts and this one is no exception. In this post, he shares many tips on how to leverage the power of your company’s stakeholders (internal customers) to maximize your social media and web strategy efforts.

Thats all for this week. As always, let us know what you think and happy reading!

Persuasive Picks for the Week of 03/17/2008

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This post marks the start of a new weekly series on PerkettPRsuasion that will highlight many of the notable happenings in the world of Social Media and PR. From time to time we’ll also include links to posts about personal productivity and tips for working in a virtual company like PerkettPR (10 years strong!!). Each entry will include links to the original post as well as some brief commentary explaining a bit about the topic and its relevance. Here are the “Persuasive Picks” for this week:

25 Social Media Buzzwords Explained (Part 1 & Part 2)
Jim Tobin from IgniteSocialMedia.com shares this great two-part post listing 25 common Social Media buzzwords and brief explanations of each. This is a good primer for folks who are new to the Social Media space and want to get a jump-start on the lingo.

Bucking the System
Forrester’s Josh Bernoff shares insight on strategies for pioneering change towards Social Media within your company. The advise is taken straight from Bernoff and Charlene Li’s upcoming book, Groundswell.

15 Free Social Media White Papers and Ebooks
Even if you’re a seasoned Social Media maven, there are sure to be some interesting nuggets and different perspectives found in this compilation of 15 white papers and ebooks posted on Mashable.

How I tamed my inbox
Chris Brogan shares his process for keeping his email inbox clean and projects organized. Both are chores that haunt web-workers on a daily basis! Chris also provides a link to Merlin Mann’s excellent “Inbox Zero” talk that he presented at the Google offices last year.

Organizing Our Digital Lives
Scott Monty fom Crayon appears on MarketingProf’s Daily Fix this week and shares a number of web-based aggregators that can help you get a handle on the fire hose of information that can drown the typical web-worker. I’ve played with a few of them, and they can definitely help get the flow under control.

Starbucks Transformational Agenda
Brand Autopsy’s John Moore takes a look at the initiatives that Starbucks announced after their 2008 Shareholders Meeting and offers an interesting perspective. All eyes are on their announcement of the MyStarbucksIdea.com website that is being launched as part of their new Social Media strategy. Its success (or failure) could be the next most popular case-study!

Thats all for this week. Feel free to leave a comment and start a discussion on any of the topics. Let us know what you think of the format, and stay tuned for more “Persuasive Picks” next week!

Mzinga Acquires Prospero – Come join the conversation!

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Mzinga acquires Prospero

PerkettPR client Mzinga announced today that it is acquiring Prospero, a fellow Massachusetts-based social media platform builder. Both companies excel in the creating white-label social media platforms that allow companies to create feature-rich online communities. This merger clearly places Mzinga in the spotlight as the leader in business oriented social networking. The true question lies in how this will affect other white-label providers in this space.

Notable social media bloggers such as Chris Brogan, Jeremiah Owyang and Scott Monty have already posted on the merger and shared their views on what the future might hold in this space. What is your take on the future of white-label social media platforms or even social media for corporations in general? To help answer that question, leaders from the newly formed Mzinga along with PerkettPR and Topaz Partners will be hosting a Twitter-based Q&A session throughout today (Monday, March 3rd).

Feel free to follow and converse with any of us on Twitter:

Mzinga/Prospero: Aaron Strout, Jim Storer, Colin Browing, and Heather Strout
PerkettPR: Jeff Glasson, Lisa Dilg and our corporate presence
Topaz Partners: Doug Haslam and Sandy Kalik

Additional Reading:

TechCrunch – More Consolidation in the White Label Social Networking Space: Mzinga Acquires Prospero

Mashable – Mzinga Acquires Prospero to Grow Online Community Solutions Sector

ReadWriteWeb – Enterprise Community Provider Mzinga Swallows Prospero

CenterNetworks – Mzinga Raises $32.5 Million and Acquires Prospero Business Social Networking Platform Provider

Aaron Strout, Mzinga – Red Letter Day

Jim Storer, Mzinga – Following the Mzinga/Prospero News

Colin Browning – Social Media: Working Behind The Scenes

Tech PR Gems – What do you do when a social media client has big news?

This event is a great example of social media companies actually putting social media tools to use and engaging in conversation to benefit the community. We look forward to chatting with you. See you in the Twittersphere!

Jump-start your Twitter experience with the Twitter Pack

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Following along our post last week about why to use Twitter, today we provide a bit more information on how not only to start, but how to maximize, your presence on Twitter.

Twitter Pack Screenshot

For many people, the experience of using Twitter for the first time can conjure anxiety similar to the first day of high school after moving to a new town. Everyone you see is a stranger and breaking the ice with someone seems next to impossible. If you’re like me, most of your real-life friends don’t fall into the “techie” category which makes getting started even harder.

By shear coincidence, the same week I joined Twitter, I also became a member of Chris Brogan’s Grasshoppers social network on Ning. At that point in time, Twitter was still very new and very few tools were available for searching to see who already had an account. After a quick post to the forums about my Twitter woes I experienced an influx of followings and my micro-blogging network began to expand.

Almost a year later, there are now a growing number of ways to find people to follow on Twitter. However, most involve finding matches to your existing social graph or searching for discussions involving select keywords. Keyword searching may work in some cases, but say you would like to meet fellow Twitter users in your local geographic area or maybe others who enjoy similar hobbies, such as running. Chris Brogan enters the picture again with a new experiment called Twitter Packs.

The basic idea of Twitter Packs is to allow the creation of editable lists of Twitter users grouped into categories like geography, company, events and identity. The lists are maintained by the Twitter community since the site was launched as a wiki. Definitely a smart choice of tools on Chris’ part. As a new Twitter user, being able to quickly find other people of similar interests to follow is fantastic and can get the conversations rolling in no time.

While the initial reaction from the Twitter community has been favorable towards the idea of this type of listing, it is not without potential flaws. The idea of being on a publically accessible list and grouped in a specific category seems like a great way to meet and connect with people of similar interests. I’m sure most would agree that it is. However, some folks fear that this will cause Twitter to become more clique-driven and work against the open nature that the platform originated with.

Regardless of any flaws that people may find with Twitter Packs, it’s certainly off to a strong start and it should be interesting to see how it evolves. If you are new to Twitter or have been thinking about giving it a try, this is definitely a great resource to help you get started. Feel free to follow PerkettPR on Twitter or any of our employees who are currently active Twitter users!

Tech Cocktail Offered…Cocktails

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A few of us attended the Boston Tech Cocktail party in Boston last night. Unfortunately the venue, a major nightclub in Boston, didn’t make networking quite as easy – or productive – as some other tech events we’ve participated in (as sponsors and attendees) previously. While the sponsors did a great job providing free drinks and colorful corporate schwag, the overall atmosphere was more like a college party than a serious networking event for business professionals (or maybe I’m just getting old). It’s hard to make connections when you’re shouting at people to be heard over the music.

From the “PR-girls-we’d-never-hire” shimmying across the floor in matching dresses, to the skateboarding “dude” who invited us to an after party, we were definitely amused but not making the connections we had hoped. Granted, my heels were killing me and forced me to sit down for the latter portion of the party – although ironically, that’s when we met a majority of new contacts.

Someone we would like to hire is Clarence. What a brilliant marketer. This guy is smart, down-to-earth and a great marketer at heart. Too bad he doesn’t want to work in a tech PR agency. We didn’t see a lot of media but we did meet Chris Brogan, co-founder of PodCamp and overall social media mastermind.

The sponsors were interesting emerging tech companies like Geezeo, a “social finance application” – poised for huge success as they begin looking for Series A funding (according to Co-Founder Peter Glyman). We met several entreprenurial attendees – like Phillip Zannini – who shared their new business ideas with us and who were hoping to meet interested VCs and have the opportunity to provide their elevator pitch. We hope they are successful.

The drinks were free, the music was loud and the Wii games were cool. Talking to techpreneurs is always a blast because it’s our passion to work with such enthusiastic and intelligent folks. Fun on a scale of 1 to 10 was about a 7; business productivity about a 5.