I just joined a LinkedIn group. It was recommended by a colleague. My first stop, as always, was the Discussions page.

Guess what I found. C’mon, give it a try.

Ok, I’ll tell you. I found 5 featured discussions – the ones with the gold-headed pins in them – and every one of them was put there by the group owner. Now, if that doesn’t seem strange, and perhaps it’s not, this might do the trick…

…The most recent discussion was posted 29 days ago. The others are 9 months, 9 months, 8 months and 3 months old. Here’s the best part, though: there are exactly 2, count ‘em 2 comments among the 5 “discussions”. That is an average of .4 comments per discussion.

LinkedIn groups have a hard enough time surviving. What starts as a forum for peers to collaborate and share best practices too often turns into an unpaid ad for the latest webcast, or place to throw a link to your recent blog post and fish for comments. The groups are becoming self promoting (where did I hear that before?), and now at least one group owner is driving the self promotion bus. Unless we use these groups for their intended purposes – see the first sentence of this paragraph – they will die, and one of LinkeIn’s most wonderful assets will be no more. 

If you joined LinkedIn to take you on an ego trip, please be up front about it. It’ll save the rest of us who actually want to use it a lot of time and headaches.

The social media revolution is over and it’s time for all of us to take a collective deep breath – in through the nose and out through the mouth. Now, before you accuse me of being a complete moron for proclaiming the end of social media, let me clarify what I mean.

I believe social media – as a practice – is in its infancy. We are emerging from a time that saw the development of an amazing number of tools anyone can use to engage on what came to be known as social media. Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, blogging platforms, Twitter, YouTube, UStream, Utterli, and the list goes on . Some, like the ones I’ve mentioned here, have been wildly successful. Others have slipped below the surface and  been assigned to the Web 2.0 category of Trivial Pursuit. The ones that made it, and the ones that didn’t, were part of the revolution. Their advent came at a time when we were all comfortable with the Internt. And isn’t that the way it always goes. Just when we get use to the status quo someone else gets bored with it and decides to stir the pot.

We went from needing a website to participate to needing only access to the web. You don’t even need a computer. All that’s required is a visit to your local library. The revolution that is social media made it possible for us to communicate with, potentially, the entire world. It took the concept of global communications promised by the Internet and made it not only possible, but real. Whether text, audio, or video, each of us now has the power to send our message anywhere and everywhere.

And that, my friends, is a revolution if ever there was one. People took something that existed in one form and through a lot of hard work and struggle created something new from it. The old didn’t go away, but it is not what it once was. So where does that leave us today? The same place we were on September 3, 1783 when the treaty ending the American Revolution was signed. The revolution was over, but the evolution was about to begin. And this country has been evolving ever since.

The tools are the revolution, but he evolution are the tools grow up around those tools to make them more powerful. Twitter is wonderful, but the real power of Twitter is in the hundreds of applications we leverage to make it better. Blogs are nice, but RSS feeds, Diggs and del.icio.us are just a few of the technologies that have helped blogs realize the potential of their communication power.

We have the tool to communicate to our markets in ways we never dreamed possible. Now it is up to each of us to figure out how to use those tools to accomplish the goals we’ve set. The original thinking that social media tactics should reserved for communications and not for marketing is already evolving and will continue to do so. 

What we have today is so because people were willing to push boundries of what the Internet could do (revolution) - people a hell of a lot smarter than me. But each of us is capable of taking the gifts they’ve given and evolving them to derive greater and greater benefit than even the revolutionaries might have imagined.

The revolution is dead. Long live the evolution.

@goaliegirl tweeted about the NHL’s use of Twitter and I felt the urge to comment.

As a huge fan of hockey (pro, college, high school & youth) I am simply giddy that the NHL gets social media and is using Twitter to generate fan interest. Unlike the NFL, and even some college conferences, the NHL is embracing social media tactics and the benefits they can bring. Seems an odd thing on the surface, but look beneath and you’ll see the logic.

Then NFL and NHL have one thing in common: both are professional sports leagues. Other than that they are worlds apart in popularity, pay scale, TV revenue and just about any other metric you can throw at a spreadsheet. For those who don’t know the “H” in NHL stands for Hockey.

I grew up, and still live, in Minnesota and hockey is woven into the fabric of my life. I have two boys who’ve been playing for years and two girls just starting out. My youngest is only 19 months so she won’t be playing for a while, but we’ll have her on the frozen pond before the end of winter. Even though I have an irrational emotional attachment to the game, I’m pragmatic enough to realize the hockey talk outside of the snow belt is not a normal part of the conversation. Apparently the NHL knows that as well.

The NHL is the CBS News of professional leagues, constantly languishing at the back of the pack, and anything they’ve tried hasn’t changed that. Outdoor games are interesting, but after a couple non-fans loose interest.  When Carolina was rolling toward a the Stanley Cup a couple of years back, they had trouble selling out the building (Not much of a natural fan base in the Southeast).

In contrast, the NFL is the number one revenue generating professional sports league in the country. It’s annual television contracts are worth billions and the Super Bowl always ranks near the top of the highest rated shows. It gets more press than it deserves: ESPN spent months covering the Will-Favre-sign-with-the-Vikings-or-won’t-he saga. And it dominates television sports every Sunday and Monday from September through January.

In short, the NFL is no. 1 and happy to move slowly in an effort to protect that ranking. The NHL, running a distant 3rd, has nothing to lose and risks very little by jumping on the social media bandwagon, provided they do it properly.

 Fan Tweetups first took place earlier this year during the Stanley Cup playoffs and were a great success. But the playoffs run through June, so the weather warmed – and casual fans turned away – the league found success using Twitter to maintain interest. Replaying that same strategy as the 2009-2010 season is set to open this week is a natural follow up and one that I’m sure will be repeated throughout the season.

If necessity is the mother of invention, the NHL is trying to prove desperation is the mother of adoption.

Robert Henson is a rookie linebacker for the Washington Redskins. Marcus Fitzgerald is the brother of Arizona Cardinal receiver Larry Fitzgerald. But football is not the only thing they have in common: both are also complete and utter dunces when it comes to Twitter.

After a recent game, fans voiced their disapproval of the Redskins’ play by launching into a chorous of boos. Henson took exception to the booing and told the fans so on Twitter:

“All you fake half hearted Skins fan can . . . I won’t go there, but I dislike you very strongly, don’t come to Fed Ex to boo dim wits!!”

For his part, Fitzgerald was annoyed with the meager 34 receiving yards his brother had and took it out on the quarterback Kurt Warner calling him an “old man.”

According to the article:

The NFL has already set a Twitter policy in place, prohibiting players, coaches, and team personnel from sending out tweets 90 minutes before a game until the conclusion of media interviews following a game.

So, if I read this right, the NFL allows players to be morons in Twitter outside of the window of time described above, but if you trip on your Twitter within the window you have to face the consequences. Whatever those are. 

Forgive me for saying, but the policy is worthless without the addition of proper training for players, coaches and everyone else covered by it.

The NFL – and other professional leagues – spend gobs of money instructing people how to interact with the media and how to be good community citizens. All professional leagues would do well to extend their training programs to include the proper use of Twitter and uses of other social networking sites.

President Obama called Kanye West a jackass. I saw it on Twitter so it must be true. And Politico reported on it here. Considering what he did to Taylor Swift on Sunday night, I agree with the president: Kanye West is a jackass.  But that’s not why we’re here today.

What Terry Moran of ABC News did is inexcusable. He, or one of his staff with access to his Twitter account, sent an off the record comment across the web at light speed as casually as one might lean in to the person next to them and whisper “Psst. The president just called Kanye West a jackass.”  To call this an ethical lapse is an understatement.

This is not the same as the many “open mic” incidents that have occurred over the years with politicians, celebrities and pundits unknowingly giving us a glimpse into their true feelings. Off the record comments are commonplace and credibility is the lifeblood of any journalist. Moran broke a trust with the president and his credibility deserves to suffer for it.

There are still too many people who fail to understand the power of the internet. Who can’t grasp the simple concept that once you’ve sent a message it is A) no longer yours and B) cannot be retrieved. You can usually tell these people by the photos of last weekend’s party posted they posted on Facebook.

If we are going to be trusted to use the tools Web 2.0 has placed at our fingertips, our mindsets and how we think about ourselves in the grand scheme must evolve. With so many people having access to vast amounts of information, it’s human nature to take the occasional “scoop” and run with it before thinking about the consequences. Recent history is replete with examples of news organizations that ran with stories that were ultimately proven to be false. Granted, Moran’s tweet is not false, but it was off the record and it’s not like he revealed it to his mother during a friendly chat. No, he was talking to his 1,066,522 followers. Talk about the power of distribution.

You’ve heard of the Chaos Theory - aka Butterfly Effect? The Internet takes the theory and multiplies the effect by a factor of infinity. There’s a lot of power in those characters, all 140 of them, and Moran, or one of his colleagues, misused it.

As a rule, it is better to give than to receive. However, as with all, there is an exception to this long-standing rule: voicemail.

I love receiving voicemail from people. So much so, that I rarely pick up the phone unless the caller ID is from someone I know. My love of voicemail comes not from an irrational desire to feel needed, rather it is based in my completely rational desire to be entertained – and have I been entertained.  

A couple of years ago we started receiving voicemail in a wav files. Not coincidentally, I started saving the best of the worst for future use. Today I can announce that the future has arrived. I’ll be sharing share some of the voicemail I’ve saved, edited to remove names, companies and phone numbers for your amusement.

My aim is not to embarrass – hence the heavy editing-  but to inform.

As a means of communicating, the telephone is irreplaceable and it is imperative that we learn how to use it properly. Nothing new here, right? The problem is there are far too many people who’ve not been trained to use the phone as a tool for doing business.

I suffered from the same lack of training until 1998. I was working as an account executive for the MNN Radio Networks in the Twin Cities at the time and one of my colleagues had the good fortune of meeting Steve Kloyda (@SteveKloyda), founder of Telemasters. Station management arranged for the entire sales team to take Steve’s 5 week training.

Each week, we met individually with Steve to listen to calls we recorded – voicemail and connections - with prospects and customers. I won’t speak for everyone, but through self critique and with Steve’s coaching I learned to use the phone as a business tool.

I don’t mean endorse Telemasters – although I highly recommend it – but I do want to endorse telephone training for anyone in your business who uses the phone for their work. Keep in mind they are representing your company and the impression they make will last forever. Make sure that impression is positive.

I’m off to the studio to begin editing and commenting on the worst of the worst.

I want to personally thank Tom Pick of WebMarketCentral for his tips on selecting an SEO consultant. His post dredged up some bad memories and very good lessons learned from my own experience.

(Stick with this post and you’ll find additional nuggets of SEO wisdom you can pull out when you need them)

A couple of years ago - late summer of 2007 - we launched our first-ever SEO initiative. We did it to support a brand-spanking-new website that was to be launched on January 1, 2008. We were bound and determined to do it – design, content, meta data, etc. – right from the beginning and knew just enough to get us in trouble, so we decided to engage the services of an SEO vendor. After a few weeks of researching best practices, we identified three potential vendors and started the evaluation process. 

I haven’t polled the team, but I’m willing to bet there is a consensus that we made a poor decision. I know we did our due diligence and asked all the right questions, but the project still crashed. A lot of time was spent discussing tactics – white hat v. black hat – and we were convinced the chosen vendor used white hat SEO practices. In the end, what was positioned as white was turned a dingey gray through the combination of two key pieces to any SEO initiative: content and keywords.

The vendor’s proposal called for a list of 50 keywords from which they would develop content that would link to appropriate pages of our website. The vendor developed pages were positioned as a deeper layer of content that, through intra-linking, would increase organic search rankings. Makes sense. The more links to relevant content the better.

Red Flag no. 1:The first sign of trouble came when we saw the questionnaire that was to drive the development of the keywords. From the first question to the last two things were painfully clear. First, the vendor’s key market is small retailers. Second, their practice is structured around companies that have little if any website experience – design, content, etc. I must admit I cringed a bit when I submitted the answers, knowing they would be used to develop the 50 keywords. My cringe was vindicated a few days later.

Ref Flag no. 2: The keywords returned were, in a word, worthless. I’m being a bit extreme, but the truth is most of what the vendor delivered was meaningless. There were a few semi-useful keywords, but most had no basis in the reality of the industry I serve – manufacturing. Disappointed, but not completely disillusioned, I contacted the project manager only to find out they were not really a project manager at all. Worse yet, I found there was no project manager assigned.

Red Flag no. 3: Worser yet, the vendor does not assign project managers. Instead, there is a different body for each step of the process – keywords, content creation, link building, and so on. Worser worser yet, no one body knew how to communicate with other bodies assigned to the case – if communication was allowed. They lived in the ultimate Silo Land. I insisted on and got a point person assigned for the balance of the project.

Red Flag no. 4: In the end, I created all the keywords the vendor would use to create the content they promised. I even provided rules for how keywords could and could not be used. (For example, it makes no sense to discuss process manufacturing and medical devices on the same page). What I got back page after page of gibberish. Unusable garbage that wasn’t fit to line a digital birdcage. I called the “project manager” and expressed, in no uncertain terms, my utter disappointment with the content. The reply I got sent me over the edge. I was told that it didn’t matter that the content made no sense, only that the keywords were represented and ultimately linked to the appropriate pages of the website. That is the point at which everything became crystal clear - or dingey gray – to me.

The vendor had no intention of providing content that would actually add value to visitors to the website. With this revelation in hand, I asked about the possibility of one of these pages showing up in a search and someone, a potential prospect or current customer, seeing the nonsense we were publishing. The “project manager” assured me the chances of that happening were infinitesimally small. Furthermore, if one of the pages did pop up, the reader would likely navigate to the page, click on one of the keywords and follow that link to a page – one that I wrote – that contained the information they wanted.

Lovely. Just lovely.

In the final analysis we paid for the priviledge writing our own keywords that were ultimatley used to create worthless content that was just this side of being black hat SEO. The content as provided by the vendor still sits in a file. It is unused and will remain ever so.

Here are a few of the lessons I learned from the process:

1. Ask potential vendors what their customer base looks like. If it doesn’t look like you, say good bye.
2. When vendors talk about generating content, have them clarify exactly what that means. If their content isn’t fit for public consumption, if it’s something you wouldn’t show your mother, say good bye.
3. Ask about the team that will be assigned to the project and who the project manager is. If they tell you the team is TBD, say good bye.

I purposely did not mention the name of the vendor, although I know at least one person reading this post knows the answer, but it is a well known name in the industry. They would do well to be honest about their core market and their SEO tactics because if someone does ask, I’ll recommend they steer clear of this one.

Do any of you read Justin Kownacki? You should.

He wrote a post last month calling for a rebellion. Not an armed insurrection for the overthrow of government, rather he wants the his generation to take social media back (I didn’t know it was taken away) from those (like me) who use it for profit and use it, instead, as a catalyst for cultural change. A Woodstock for today. The Summer of Love revisited:

Social media is still locked in the hands of the technophiles and the marketers, who focus on mechanical and business applications.  They’re either unwilling or incapable of creating true cultural change, seeking instead to find practical ways to use these tools for financial profit.  And that’s functional, but it’s not the kind of sociological earthquake that’s going to define a generation — unless we become defined as the generation who’d rather consume than create.

I understand what Justin is getting at. The internet is the most powerful distribution engine ever created. Like radio and TV before it,  but with copious amounts of digital steroids injected, the WWW has opened up a new world of sharing news, information and opinion and has shattered the barriers to entry. Any garage band with aspirations for greatness can find an audience without the aid of a manager or recording contract. Any writer can satisfy their passion through blogging. Any budding director can film  – old school I know – edit and distribute their work and not have to deal with the politics of Hollywood.

Although Woodstock is considered the defining event of the Baby Boom Generation, the phenomenon of 500,000 people spending three days stoned in the mud listening to great music did not change the culture.  It was, however, one of several pieces that came together to make a dramatic and lasting impact on the cultural make up of the USofA. In fact, the cultural change Justin is seeking might have already taken place.

Like the cultural shifts of the 1960’s and 1980’s, the ingredients for a movement were in place in 2008, but a catalyst was needed to turn the potential into the kinetic. In the 60’s it was Vietnam, in the 80’s it was Reagan and in 2008 it was President Obama.

Last November, Barack Obama rode a wave into the White House. It was a wave built using social media to distribute, and make viral the candidate’s message and the messages of his supporters. Where Kennedy used television, Obama mastered the Internet to build a coalition of supporters that would assure his victory.

Only history will tell if his election was a defining moment of a generation, or one ingredient in a larger dish of cultural change. Either way, change is not an item on a menu to be ordered when one is in the mood and, more often than not, we can only recognize it and its impact through the lens of history.

An interesting sidebar story is brewing in Germany following last week’s regional elections. Apparently exit poll data from three states was leaked via Twitter – 90 minutes early – causing some officials to question how such technology might impact future elections. BreitBart reports on the story here. 

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s team took it on the chin in the elections and the one of the people quoted in the story has the bruises to prove it:

• The deputy parliamentary head of Merkel’s Christian Union party, Wolfgang Bosbach, said the leaking of the results “damaged        democracy.”
• “There is a danger that an election could be falsified,” Bosbach told the Koelner Stadt-Anzeiger local daily.

The other quote comes from Roderich Egeler, the federal election commissioner:

• “It would be a worst-case scenario if the exit poll results were to become known before polling stations closed,”

BreitBart’s story also points out:

• A similar leak also occurred during the parliamentary vote to re-elect Germany’s President Horst Koehler on May 23. On that occasion, a handful of lawmakers announced Koehler’s re-election before the results were officially published.

That’s the set up. Now I’m going to weigh in.

A leak…in politics…whoda thunk it?

I realize people involved in politics, are genetically coded to speak in hyperbole, but claiming the leaks  – and by association Twitter- are capable of damaging democracy is ridiculous on its face.

Information, as they say, is power. But information has only the power that we assign to it. Those who shrugged off the early exit poll data and continued to the polls gave the reports no power at all. Others heard the same information and gave it the power to inform their decisions. My bottom line, anyone who did not vote Germany based on exit polls reported too early have only themselves to blame.

We went through a similar incident in 2000 when the networks called Florida for Gore, then took it back, then gave it to Bush, and took it back again. Republicans cried “foul” because the original call was made before the polls in the Florida Panhandle closed. They claimed Bush lost thousands of votes because disheartened supporters didn’t bother casting their vote on the belief it was irrelevant.

At home the networks were rightly embarrassed and changed their processes. In Germany the leakers could face criminal prosecution.

With all the information swirling around the web, and the ability for anybody with a computer and internet connection to add to the chaos, we need to be more vigilant than ever when assessing what we hear, see and read. We need to be mindful of the source and what, if any, agenda they have.

Information is power, but if we are educated and responsible consumers of information, we decide what power has.

Traditional marketing uses campaigns to build brand awareness: Coke – “The Real Thing”, Pepsi – “The Choice of a New Generation”, BASF – “we don’t make the products you buy; we make the products we buy better”. Each is recognizable and each company invested millions of dollars to reach consumers.

I’m gonna take a stab in the dark, but I’m betting you, like me, are working with budgets that are substantially smaller than Coke, Pepsi or BASF. Guess what, it doesn’t matter because we all have access to the great leveler in the branding battle: the Internet.

OK, it’s not a perfect one-to-one exchange, but the power that lies within the worldwide web is boundless and with a little imagination and hard work you can leverage that power to create a brand for your product.

Until now, marketing and social media have been treated as separate and distinct and, truth be told, there’s argument that can be made for keeping them as such. But that doesn’t mean the latter can’t support the former.

Boiling it down to its simplest form, branding campaigns are designed to leave a mark, an impression on the mind. It is an impression you create and communicate, but the impression is only a perception, an opinion based on the message you provided.

As consumers, B2C and B2B became more sophisticated, their response to the bombardment of advertising became, “I’ll be the judge of that.” In other words, they wouldn’t accept what you have to say until they buy it, try it and make up their own mind. Your ads may get someone to buy once, but if reality doesn’t live up to the perception your advertising created they won’t buy again.

The power of the Internet makes it possible for all of us to turn perception into reality before they buy.

When you use social media tactics to promote the thought leadership in your company, when you expose the subject matter experts within to the market you are building credibility, you are building awareness. You are showing customers, potential and current, that there are people behind the brand. People who know the industry, people who know their customers and understand the business issues they face and are trying to solve daily.

In short, you are branding reality for your company, its products and services.