Two bills being voted on next week in the House of Representatives contain language that could censor the Internet in ways you would never imagine.

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House of Representatives and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate are well meaning, but if passed, will be destructive to internet freedoms we’ve all come to expect as well as forces that have helped innovation on the internet flourish. Both pieces of legislation greatly weaken theDigital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which for over a decade has helped Internet companies grow and flourish.

The recording industry, movie studios and television studios are the driving forces behind these bills. We are all very aware of how the music industry ‘s slow and regressive response to digital music backfired while not helping recording artists or the music industry.

Instead of creating better ways to legally download music (as Apple did for them by creating iTunes), their solution was to sue music lovers. Imagine the repercussions of this industry, and the Hollywood studios that have not adapted to how digital innovations have affected their industry, dictating policies that regulate the Internet.

Some of the companies and organizations that have opposed these bills so far include American Express, AOL, Creative Commons, Demand Progress, Discover, eBay, Etsy, Facebook, Foursquare, Google, LinkedIn, MoveOn, Mozilla, OpenDNS, PayPal, Twitter, Visa, Wikimedia Foundation, Yahoo! and Zynga. They are joined by web founders, public interest groups, non-profits, advocacy organizations, thinktanks, industry associations, websites, online services, cybersecurity companies, engineers, international human rights advocates, entrepreneurs, founders, CEOs, executives, venture capitalists, academics, experts, educators, editorial boards and student newspapers.

Would you rather have these companies and Internet-related professionals determine what’s best for the Internet and its users? We can probably agree that they are more aware of what’s beneficial for the Internet than the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America.

Reddit has announced a blackout on January 18th to protest SOPA and Wikipedia is considering joiningthem. Thousands of people are changing their Twitter and Facebook avatars to include a Blackout SOPAbadge across their face in protest.

SOPA and PIPA aim to help private corporations shut down unauthorized websites where people download music, movies, and TV shows. Most of these websites are outside of America, so these corporations are looking to combat them in a few ways. 1) Block access to infringing domain names. 2) Sue U.S. based search engines, blogs, websites, directories and forums to remove links to these sites. 3) Stop funding these websites by not allowing advertisers to support them.

The consequences that SOPA and PIPA supporters do not mention include: 1) This will not stop downloaders. History has proven this. 2) It will cripple startups by allowing corporations to sue any company they decide is not filtering to their subjective satisfaction. One of these lawsuits can easily bankrupt new websites and search engines that offer competitive alternatives to their corporate brethren. 3) The ambiguous language in PIPA and SOPA leaves plenty of room for misinterpretation that can make websites pioneering new avenues look like pirates. In the past, this could have affected sites like YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, Facebook and hundreds of other social sites where people express themselves, organize protests, share news or make art.

The bottom line and main question to ask yourself is, “Do I trust the U.S. government to censor the Internet and protect free expression of its people? And if I do, do I trust other governments who will probably follow suit?” The next question to ask yourself is, “Is it worth the potential of creating a censored internet that is less innovative and stable in order to possibly help the RIAA and MPAA sell more music and movies?”

I strongly recommend contacting your Senators and Congressional Representatives or visiting American Censorship to make your voice heard on these critical bills that can negatively impact the Internet that you use every day. If online activists could make GoDaddy flip its support on SOPA and PIPA, then it can happen with Congress too.

This article was originally posted in Huffington Post

It wouldn’t be a prudent business decision to build any core aspect of your business on a platform you have no control over, right?  Yet in today’s world, having a Facebook Fan Page for your company is essential, and unless you’re Mark Zuckerberg, you don’t control anything Facebook does with it’s platform.

How will you feel if you have to abandon your Facebook Page one day after years of work to build up your followers, engage your community and have a strong presence on the #2 most visited destination on the internet?

Along with the many upsides to having an active Facebook Fan Page come some crucial downsides.  The reality is that having a Facebook Fan Page is both an indispensable marketing and customer service tool while simultaneously being the equivalent of building a gigantic castle on the beach that could be swept out with the tide without any notice. For example, company’s are currently  losing their Facebook Fan Pages after someone else gains admin privileges and deletes them as an admin to their own page.  This is a major issue, but like losing all of your unsaved changes to a 15 page Word document, your only recourse to this unfortunate event happening to you is to start again from scratch.

I believe in knowing what we can’t control, but focusing on what we can control.  Let’s cross our fingers that you won’t have to deal with your Fan Page being deleted or Facebook imploding anytime soon.  Instead, check out the Top Five ways to build your Facebook Fan Page to make sure you’ve got your bases covered:

1.  After you have 25 fans you should grab the custom username for your business page.

2.  Choose your Fan Page name carefully.  After you have over 100 fans you cannot change the company name on your fan page, so if you owned a business named “Buzz Coffee Shop” and later changed the name to “Buzz Cafe”, you would have to shut down the Facebook Fan Page for “Buzz Coffee Shop” and create a brand new page (with zero fans) for “Buzz Cafe”.

3.  Understanding Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm will help you to create content that is more likely to be seen by your fans.

4.  Create a custom welcome page to greatly increase your conversion rate of visitors who become fans.

5.  Build your community on your Facebook Fan Page by consistently using the Photos, Questions, Twitter, Networked Blogs and other customizable tabs to create a variety of interesting content to share with your fans.

Photo via http://gplus.to/billypan

News and speculation about Google+ is flowing faster than the  Boulder creek during this monsoon season.  We’re not even 3 full weeks into the release, you still have to receive an invite to get in, and Google+ users are already expected to hit 10 million by tonight and 20 million by the weekend.

Some people are wondering about privacy.  Spammers are asking people to click on links in the comments of popular posts.  Ford built a Google+ business page before Google released their own versions.  Early adopters are prematurely announcing the demise of Twitter and Facebook. And on the opposite end of the spectrum, I gave a presentation to a class of executive MBA students last Saturday who hadn’t even heard of it yet.

As someone who thought Google Wave would have a major impact, before watching it crash - along with no one really using Google Buzz, I’m hesitant but overly optimistic that Google got it right this time.  The fact that millions of people are using it daily already, when Google Wave never got much traction, proves that we’re finding value and ease of use for the first time in a Google product aimed at social networking.

Photo via Dobromir Hadzhiev

Only time will tell how successful Google Plus will be, but the main factor will be how much time people choose to spend on it versus other social networks.  If you have to choose between reading news feeds from friends and posting on Facebook, Twitter and Google+ it could feel like too much time to manage.  In addition to this, there’s also the time you spend reading blogs and consuming other online media.  Of the people I’ve surveyed, Google+ is cutting mostly into Facebook time, but as quickly as Google+ hits 20 million or 100 million users, our habits and the amount of time we spend on each social network will certainly change.

If a shiny new technology object sees a great launch, the ensuing challenge is sustaining interest.  That probably won’t happen with Google+.  The main reason that they are the only company that has a chance of unseating Facebook’s social networking dominance is that Google has the resources, credibility and user base to make a major impact swiftly.

Google+ is already tied into Gmail, the 3rd largest webmail provider.  Google Apps is used by over 3 million businesses with over 30 million employees. Google Search enjoys over 34,000 searches per second.  With that many people spending time on Google products each day, mixed in with Google+ being a social network people like, and we may see Google take back the coveted mantle of where web users spend most of their time online.

This article was originally published in The Huffington Post.

I recently reviewed the social graph of a company looking to increase their Facebook fan and Twitter follower counts as quickly as possible.  What company doesn’t want that, right?

The truth is that any company can spend their way to 5k fans or followers through a PPA advertising campaign.  Without discounting this method, it’s worth noting that its results are limited if they aren’t working in conjunction with communication and marketing strategies based on your company goals.  Holistic approaches that build communities are the way to go.

In this particular case, the company had previously hired someone who brokered social media services that did not give them significant results, so the first mistake was not hiring a company that directly did the work and had a track record for producing great results.  Always research the companies you hire and explore their personal and professional social graphs if you’re buying social marketing services.

Hitting a number means nothing if that’s your only goal.  Once you have the followers, the most important questions is ‘How are you going to convert them into happy customers and develop relationships that make them high lifetime value customers or raving fans that spread great word of mouth promotion for your business?’

This company’s bigger problem was that they didn’t know how to communicate with the fans they already had.   Hitting a magic bullet of 5k Facebook fans and/or Twitter followers will not necessarily spike their sales.

The reality is that hard smart work and relationship building is the only magic bullet that exists.  You have to test and measure an educated communication strategy based on experience to effectively interact with your community.  If you’re not building relationships with your followers then you’re wasting your time and money, and it could tarnish your reputation rather than boost it.

In this case, they were close to 2,000 Facebook fans and had over 1,000 Twitter followers.  The Facebook page had been touting the virtues of the main product and they were giving away a very healthy contest prize.  Everyone who Liked the Facebook page was entered into a drawing to win a trip to NYC with some other benefits. …and still they couldn’t move the needle on their follower counts.

To highlight some mistakes you want to watch out for, let’s look at their basic social graph in a nutshell:

1)   The website home page did not even mention the contest.  In fact, their social link widgets were buried at the bottom left hand corner of the home page, way below the fold, so you had to scroll through the full page to even know they were there.  Fail.

2)   The Facebook page did not come up in a search of the company name on Facebook unless I hit ‘get more results’.  After clicking the company fan page name I was delivered to the ‘info’ page – not the Welcome page (which did not invite me to “Like” the page.)  Once I clicked on the Wall page I saw desperate posts asking for visitors to Like the page, with no valuable content besides the contest bribe mentioned above.  Why should I care?  You’re treating me like a number rather than respectfully giving me content that makes me feel special and aligned with your product.  Now I like you less than before I arrived on your Facebook fan page.  Fail again.

3)   The Twitter stream is one long broadcast of why the product is awesome.  Rule number one – your customers should tell me you’re awesome, not you.  You can have the greatest product ever, but if you say so it’s hype and if a customer says so it’s fact.  They had no conversations with anyone on Twitter; not even a Retweet or a Reply to acknowledge that they are trying to connect with a community of living, breathing humans rather than lifeless wallets with valuable money they want.  Fail for the third time – you’re out. …for now.

The good news is that since the internet is based on real time activities, you an clean up situations like these in a matter of  days or weeks of consistently doing the right things.

Getting visitors to do more than Like your Facebook fan page and never come back isn’t rocket surgery (as I read on a bumper sticker.)  If your company wants more fans and followers then make sure you’re giving good love to the ones you already have.  You will find that when your followers genuinely feel understood and appreciated they’ll tell their friends you’re awesome because you’re being awesome and because you’re product is awesome (if it is); which is much better, easier and fun than wasting time and money trying to convince people you’re awesome.  Numbers are a play in the game, but they’re not the game.

So if you know anyone in this situation, suggest they do their due diligence on who they’re hiring, even if they feel like this world is foreign to them.  Their gut will send them in the right direction and save them the pain this company experienced, and they’ll enjoy a faster road to social marketing success.

Photo by Orlando Photo Chic via Flikr

I’m probably not the guy you’re expecting to say that social media strategy is a myth.  But alas, I’m THAT guy.

There’s a huge misconception about the term ‘social media strategy.’  Social media is a tool.  Saying you have a ‘social media strategy’ is like saying you have a ‘shovel strategy’ or a ‘hammer strategy.’  Maybe that’s why almost anyone with a Facebook page or Twitter account can sell ‘social media strategy’ to people who don’t know any better until after they hire them.

What businesses are really looking for is a marketing strategy, and tips on effective persuasive communication, to use on social networks. …but that doesn’t roll off the tongue as well as ‘social media strategy’, does it?  The harder part is that a lot of times they short-sightedly think they just need a Facebook and Twitter presence without having a clue about how to effectively communicate on these social channels.

When I create social marketing strategies for companies they always interact with offline marketing campaigns and offline activities that don’t become marketing until you create content about them online.

A great social marketing strategy has three components: 1) It begins with how to reach the top goals of the business, 2) It leverages multiple offline and online channels, and 3) It builds a community for the brand based on ongoing and ever-deepening relationships with customers.

So if you’re calling yourself a social media strategist – stop!  You’re calling yourself a tool strategist; which is only one degree away from calling yourself a tool.  If you have a marketing education and experience then call yourself a social marketer or digital marketer or anything besides a social media strategist.  If you have no marketing education or experience, stop pretending you know how to help businesses operate online – what they do is different from what you do with your friends online.  At best, you’re a social media theorist, not a strategist.

If you think you want help with social media for your business then look for people and companies with great marketing experience who effectively use social media daily themselves. This way you get the benefit of their marketing expertise  in how to best communicate to people through social tools.  What struggling or growing companies need is great business strategy+great marketing strategy+understanding best practices for social tools to = reaching company goals.

Now it’s your turn, leave comments on your reactions to this post – including if you think I’m off base on this one.

The announcement that Goldman Sachs invested $500 million in Facebook, giving it a market valuation of $50 billion sent ripples across the media.  With this deal including Goldman helping Facebook to raise an additional $1.5 billion, and noting that Facebook has raised $800 million over five rounds of funding, it is official that social networking is big business that is only getting bigger.

What this means to any user is that their services are only going to get more addictive and beneficial.  What this means to any business owner is that you now have a place where increasing numbers of individuals and groups of people potentially interested in your products and services are actively engaging.

This isn’t news to everyone, but this benchmark clearly states the markets confidence in the future profitability of Facebook, and therefore in social media marketing.  This announcement had additional gravity that reflects the shift from old media to new media’s prominence in that it came on the heels of the New York Times losing it’s slot on the S&P 500 to Netflix.

If you have a business that does any marketing then this is great news for you.  The bigger Facebook gets, the larger their user base is growing and the larger opportunities grow for brands.   The two main channels you can utilize on Facebook that are uniquely Facebooks are the fan page and Facebook advertising.

Through Facebook fan pages, which are now even more of a must than having a website for your company, you can build loyalty, announce product launches like Ford did, and gain from Facebook’s #2 ranking in the search engine indexes among other benefits.

Through Facebook advertising you can extend your reach through targeted advertising that reaches people who have raised their hands as being interested in topics related to your products.  This is especially good for local businesses.  You can also reach their friends while receiving detailed reports to reveal your campaign cost and conversion analytics.  Try getting those numbers on a magazine ad, television spot or a billboard campaign. …there’s a reason why Facebook will make over $2 billion in revenue, and served over 1 trillion display ads, in 2010.

The cash infusion from this latest round of funding signals even more development of features that make Facebook the social networking 500 pound gorilla it is.  Facebook page views and average times spent on site continue to rise with each new innovation.

As our Facebook usage habits grow along with these other growth factors there will be fewer competing platforms that can effectively get the marketing results that Facebook delivers.  Whether you love or hate Goldman Sachs and whether you love or hate Facebook, if you’re in business, recognize that marketing through Facebook has become as necessary as having a phone number, a website, and a product people want to buy.

Add This, the social sharing widget, recently released the trends in social sharing they documented for 2010. It’s not surprising that Google had more growth than Facebook, but did you expect Stumble Upon to have more growth than Facebook?

The statistic worth noting is that Email is 38% bigger than Twitter.  This doesn’t make Twitter ineffective.  In fact, Twitter click through rates kill Facebook and Email.  If you want people to click on a link Twitter is the place to place those links.

What the Add This statistic on email should tell business owners is that email should not be overlooked.  As social media has risen in prominence and stature in the word of mouth marketing world, email has been prematurely ignored or abandoned by many companies.

The simple truth is that email still builds relationships when consistent communication is sent to people who opt-in to read messages from your company.  The open rates on email campaigns can run run as high as 36% where direct snail mail campaigns average a .05% – 2% open rate.  Remember that most snail mail marketing is unsolicited and unwanted whereas email is requested by people who want to receive offers and information from your company.

In summary, don’t put all of your eggs in one basket.  Just as you need to use the best in offline and online marketing to support your word of mouth efforts, you need to use a mix of the best online tools to extend your reach and build your business.  Three tips you can takeaway from this article are:

1. Twitter is where your links will receive the highest click through rates so connect to your friends and followers with URLs on Twitter
2. Facebook is where people share the most and where you should engage your customers
3. Email will get you the most referrals so communicate weekly with your customers

This post was originally published at Oxstein Labs.

Do you remember life before fax machines, email and searching online? Do you remember making an appointment to see your doctor to get an opinion without being able to Google professional and everyday opinions on your computer first? It’s like a movie you watched years ago with a plot that’s vaguely familiar but has no relevance to your current life.  That’s how you’ll think of the current web versus the social web that’s expanding daily.

The epicenter of the social web has become Facebook. You already know that over 500 million people use Facebook. Did you also know that people spend over 700 billion minutes on Facebook per month, or that Facebook just surpassed Google to be the #1 site on the internet?

It’s Google and Facebook’s world today and we just surf it. As a Facebook or Google user you win no matter what because they’re building better products, but this world has not been peaceful since Google and Facebook have unofficially declared war on each other over the past few months. Most people have not noticed that it’s even happening, but it will affect all of our online habits in the future. It will also affect the advertising you consume and the availability of your private information.

This war over data will reshape our online ecosystem. Facebook and Google continue to change their minds about how much data they will share with each other. The main reason for this is that you have a Facebook ecosystem of contacts and lifestyle information that rivals your Gmail contact list and your Google search profile. Each ecosystem has some valuable data that the other does not.

At this point Facebook appears to have the upper hand in the war over your attention. Facebook has become the center of the social web with more page views and more time spent on their site than a Google search page will ever commandeer. The release of the Facebook “Like” button on web pages across the globe was a tipping point for socializing the web rather than just using isolated social websites. In their recent effort to have users add Facebook as their web browser home page, Facebook just took another leap forward in having us unconsciously experience Facebooking as the main reason to be online.

Google has been unsuccessful in their attempts to join the social web so far. Google Wave crashed as an experiment in real time messaging and collaborative project development. Google Buzz is still humming along, but has failed to gain widespread adoption, which is the name of this game. Some new products and features seem great when they roll out, but if masses of people do not choose to use them then they wither on the vine. So far, Google is winning this battle in the areas of online search and email, but losing them on the social media front.

The ultimate result of the ensuing war over your online social habits is that you’ll see Facebook and Google both bending over backwards to create more inventive ways to make it easier, faster and more fulfilling for you to communicate with your friends and business colleagues online. Watch for Facebook to add features that let you search the web while staying on Facebook, and watch for Google to add features that connect your social graph and help you more to connect to your friends online.

This article was originally posted in Huffington Post.

This article was originally posted at Oxstein Labs.

Even as more and more companies hire Community Managers to give them a social media presence, the general attitude towards social media is, “Everyone’s doing it, so we need to do it too.”  If this is where you’re coming from, you’re most likely to cover the tactics with little strategy and mixed results.  A better way to go about it is to follow these Top Three ways to build a kick ass social media marketing presence.

Photo by ChicaD58 via Flikr

1. Have a strategy. Having a Twitter account and a Facebook page does not a social media strategy make.  The first question is not, “What are you doing online?”  The first question is “What do you need to see in three years to know that your business is succeeding?”

Once you know the answer to this question you can look at the numerous tools and tactics available through social media to create a strategy.  This strategy needs to be based on your business goals and ideally will integrate your social media marketing actions with every department of your company.

If a social media expert acts like a hammer looking for a nail and talks about what social media will do for you without first asking you about your business, RUN.  I’m amazed at the number of social media firms that don’t practice offline what they preach about online.  Listening isn’t just a tactic, it’s a way of operating that makes every person and every business better.

2. Define and express your brand personality. If you don’t know what your brand stands for, no amount of social media marketing will help you. Write down the three words that you feel best describe your company. Then ask your partners, employees and customers to tell you three words they think of when they think about your company.

Chances are that they will tell you something different.  If so, then it’s time to do further research on what your customers most want.  Then make sure your brand offers what they want.  This is much more important than what you think they want or what you think you should give them.  Listen to them and then deliver what they ask for.  It’s a simple concept that most companies ignore.

The message that most companies think they are sending is usually not the one that the public is receiving unless they have millions to spend on broadcasting the message incessantly.  Volvo means safety, but what does your local ice cream store stand for?

Your brand personality is the foundation for your social media marketing actions and should be the foundation of how your company operates in every department.  If your message is unknown or not consistently practiced daily by every employee then it is false and the public will figure it out faster than you can Google comments about your company.

This personality needs to affect what you tweet, who you follow, how you respond to people, what contests you do or don’t run on your Facebook page, whether you make videos, if you ask fans and followers to make videos, what context you come from when you announce something, whether you have an online TV show, how you build relationships and alliances online, and much more.

Photo by Jonny Goldstein via Flikr

3. Establish your social media presence with your goals and message in mind. Yes, I said presence, not campaign.  You can’t do this short term.  Social media marketing is as essential to your business as customer service and good accounting practices. People live online now.  If you aren’t interacting with people where they hang out, you will be left out.  No two ways about it.

Strategically decide if you want to be on Twitter, Facebook, You Tube, UStream or whichever social platforms you choose.  Depending on your company size, your industry, your budget, where your target audience participates and lurks online, and other factors, you will have to prioritize your online activities.

Once you know where you want to be you can plan out when and how you will launch and develop your presence to meet your business goals.  Have realistic goals with grounded plans of how to reach them and always be anchored to your core message.

I have had clients who pull numbers out of the air like expecting 10,000 Facebook fans in a month.  Well, that’s a nice goal in a short time frame, so how do you expect to get there?  What are you going to give people to make them care about you enough to “Like” your Facebook page?  Why do you want 10,000 instead of 1,000? How will you entice them to come back again or to tell others about you?  How does this number, or how you get to this number, represent and enhance your company goals?  What demographics do you want to make up this 10,000 number?  Do you realize that 100 rabid evangelists that love your company are worth more than 10,000 people who click “Like” and then don’t pay any more attention to you?

Social media marketing, like all streams of marketing, is part art and part science. If you develop your brand and your communications in authentic ways with your goals and your customers in mind you’ll be thrilled with the results.  What other tips would you give companies just starting out on the social media marketing road? What tips can you add for companies maturing in this space who are looking to improve their results?

This article was originally published in Huffington Post.

Labor Day 2010 will forever be remembered in Boulder as the day the Four Mile Canyon fire began to burn. Today, two days later, over 7,000 acres and 140 structures (including 9 homes owned by fire fighters) have been consumed by the fire that is still burning.

In a sign of a tech-savvy community, residents immediately began flooding Twitter with the hashtag #boulderfire to share information. This proved to be most helpful as we discovered the failure of the 911 callback system designated to alert people to evacuate their homes. It is rumored that once it was clear that the 911 callback system was not reaching home owners, Twitter became the main way to reach people in the evacuation area quickly.

As the fire spread, the Humane Society offered newly homeless pet owners a sanctuary for their pets. Again, the news was shared primarily through their Twitter account. Restaurants quickly followed suit with offers of free food and drinks for anyone who was displaced by the fire. People with police scanners or personal views of what was happening rounded out the real time Twitter postings of news while others retweeted posts to help. And TweetyGotBack has created a Twitter background to support fire fighting efforts along with a link to BoulderFire.com where you can use the “Offer Help” or “Get Help” buttons in a Craig’s List-like system to connect donors with fire victims to get them the items they need.

On Facebook the City of Boulder announced community meetings and health warnings. Residents also posted updates on their personal Facebook pages to share helpful news, pictures and You Tube videos of the fire taken by residents.

On this third day of the fire, we are still tracking the fire through Google Maps because they have the most detailed information available in one place. This is only possible because community members are generating the content in real time. Google Maps offers the only platform where we can all aggregate shared knowledge in an actionable way.

Finally, cloud computing has also come to the rescue in the form of a Google docs editable spreadsheet organizing help by the community and for the community.

If that wasn’t enough, a Four Mile Fire Help forum is organizing housing help and other resources for fire evacuees. Since Gold Hill residents lost everything, they have started a collection website. They can use anything from clothes and personal hygiene products to toys, bikes, cars, kitchen utensils and almost anything you have laying around as an extra item in your house.

We are living in an age where connecting, engaging and building community happen in ways we could not even imagine just five years ago. Tragedies are never easy to weather, but hopefully the prominent role social media has taken in our lives will be one additional way to help, heal and maybe even save lives, when disaster inevitably strikes.

All Hazards blog has a larger list of Colorado Wildfire Resources in one place. The Boulder Daily Camera has a good list of How To Get Help. The Boulder Office of Emergency Management launched a comprehensive response page at http://boulderoem.com. Donations for Four Mile Canyon fire victims are being taken by calling either 211 or 866-760-6489. Goods, money and food are also being collected by Volunteer Connection at services@volunteerconnection.net or 303-413-7737.