Every week, Copywrite Inc.’s Rich Becker and I discuss a blogging best practice on BlogStraightTalk, a Bumpzee community. This week we discussed the recent iPhone pricing controversy, and the ensuing slew of related blog posts.

The conversation evolved quickly out of iPhones and into does it make sense for bloggers — particularly business-centric bloggers — to post on such trendy topics? It’s easy to get caught in the excitement of such a widespread event. When trendy topics happens, everybody loves to blog about them.

But in the end, this may not be the best thing for your blog. Readers expect certain content, and in the thrill of the moment, a trendy post may stray from the blog’s mission. Here were our top takes:

Rich

• When you write about deeply covered topics, the shelf life is much shorter than that of topics that aren’t covered as much.
• Sometimes you cannot see the whole picture if you post too early on a topic just because it seems hot. I wanted to see more before posting on it.
• When you do pick a hot topic (which we do from time to time), it always makes sense to lend something new to the conversation.

Geoff

• Many bloggers mimic the A-List and follow the memes of the day. And those blog posts may get “dugg,” but they will not build a loyal readership.
• The best way to get a loyal readership is to develop subject matter expertise and deliver it to the masses or the few via your blog. Substance stands out.
• Whatever you do with content, think for the long term, and what will matter to your readers.

BlogStraightTalk publishes every Monday. Join us.

Wow, what can I say? I guess “Now is Gone” will have to be a posthumous best-seller.

Geoff Livingston was the tragic victim of a Web 2.0 incident last night. The police haven’t ruled it an accident or intentional, but sometime around 1:30 am he did the unthinkable. He plugged his Tumbler RSS feed into his Jaiku account - then took his Jaiku feed and aggregated it within his Tumblelog. Sadly, Hollywood has warned us about the dangers of such a Lifestream disaster for decades:

Dr. Egon Spengler: There’s something very important I forgot to tell you.
Dr. Peter Venkman: What?
Dr. Egon Spengler: Don’t cross the streams.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Why?
Dr. Egon Spengler: It would be bad.
Dr. Peter Venkman: I’m fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing. What do you mean, “bad”?
Dr. Egon Spengler: Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Right. That’s bad. Okay. All right. Important safety tip. Thanks, Egon.

Who knew Social Media could be so deadly?

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All joking aside - there is a bigger issue lurking out here. As we get more ability and empowerment to “play” with our data, we’re bound to run into some pretty dire consequences. The idea of “nimble data” is crucial to our digital freedom. It allows us to aggregate and mashup in new and creative ways. It also tempts us to try the latest and greatest gizmo, app, or website in an effort to become ever more the master of our digital identities.As time goes on, we’ll see an inevitable rise in the number of services and offerings we can submit to - and the operative word is “submit.” When you “submit” your data, you are literally ceding control over what happens next. Where are the standards for web-development in this regard? Is there a universal off-switch in the monkey-brain of every coder, that prevents Geoff Livingston from dumping his Lifestream into a Moëbius Loop of eternal RSS? Where is the undo button?

The more Web 2.0 playtoys there are, the greater likelihood we’ll have of a bad marriage - two APIs locked in a battle, and your data is the killing field. Don’t say that it can’t happen - that programmers are too polished or professional. First of all, too much of this stuff is Open Source. Don’t get me wrong, I love Open Source apps. I can live with the occasional bug or burp along the way, knowing the community will squash it or squelch it. What I fear is we’ve taken too many of these services for granted.

Seriously - does anyone bother to read the technical specs before signing up? We don’t even read the EULA anymore, and more than half the time don’t read the FAQ.A responsible web service developer would know to check for self-recursion, to prevent an idiot from plugging his Output feed into his aggregator’s Input. But we’re not dealing with ordinary idiots here. I know for a fact that Geoff Livingston uses a lot of services. Once you wash a feed through a Tumblr or a Feedburner or a Yahoo! Pipe, all traces of the origin are gone.

All it takes is a faulty pass with the timestamping, and you’ve got duplicate entries multiplying like rabbit-shaped coat-hangers in the fertility closet. The next internet worm won’t be passed through e-mail - it will be a Web 2.0 service that goes supernova, belching out self-replicating data packets to every other service scraping that feed.I’m not calling for you to shut off your accounts and book the next buggy to Ludditeville, but just be careful when brandishing your brand - or you might end up where Geoff did.

Facebook has some true marketing potential for some companies. The question is which companies, and what’s the right way to use Facebook?

Several recent posts have contested Facebook’s value as a marketing vehicle for companies, including the Buzz Bin post, “Beware of Facebook Frenzy.” In many ways, these posts are realistic reactions to contemporary media and A-List bloggers positioning Facebook as the social media panacea.

Facebook is not right for every company. But it does offer some companies a great way to market themselves. It always comes down to the community. Is the company’s target community on Facebook? If so, then perhaps Facebook is the right place. Here’s a look at some of the methods a company can use.

We look at three forms of marketing on Facebook: Applications, community development and advertising.

Applications

When this post was written, there were approximately 4,000 applications available for Facebook readers. Facebook’s open policy towards applications has caused a flood of companies seeking to attract Facebook users and tie into their web site or service. Examples vary greatly, but some successful applications include the Amazon bookshelf and the Twitter application.

In summary from Facebook Frenzy, Kyle Flaherty, and Ike Pigott’s post last week, the application marketplace — stimulated by Facebook’s open API — has become extremely crowded. Sub-communities within Facebook are over-saturated.

Applications must hold great value for community members. If there is no substance to the applications, or if the actual core community is relatively small (thousands as opposed to millions), the application faces great challenges. There are also great successes available to companies who do this right. Consider RockYou’s success: 15 million new users through Facebook in three months (as documented by Robert Scoble).

At this time, B2B companies and organizations should hold off on Facebook. Applications work best when there are mass buyers across multiple verticals that may be interested in what the organization offers. Given the core audiences involved and increasingly low conversion rates on applications, think hundreds of thousands.

The application must give the community great value. Invest in developing a creative experience that will compel people to spread the application virally. But before you do that, measure cost against 1-2% conversion ratios and decide whether a different social media campaign would better serve the organization. Investing in a social network like Facebook should be a well thought-out decision.

Community Development

Networking within Facebook seems to be a great way to develop “reasonable results, and make some great contacts.” At the same time, with Facebook’s popularity has come a great flurry of friending.  This has created over saturation for some people who won’t simply friend community developers upon request. In many ways, friending comes down to basic networking skills.

A grassroots community developer can use the groups and event functions to create great discussion areas for its Facebook public. Advocacy and charitable groups on Facebook seem to do this best, waging wars on high oil prices, ethical treatment of animals — without PETA, breast cancer, and heart disease.

To date, many companies have relied on applications, not community groups to market themselves. That may change as companies realize that Facebook offers a great way to aggregate community members in one place to communicate and engage with them. For example consider Target’s success with its group.  Affiliate marketing seems to work here.

The key — as with all social media marketing outreach — is creating valuable information for community members, non-intrusive updates, and an open approach that enables community members to say whatever they want. Negative feedback should be viewed as an opportunity to engage Facebook members in a dialogue about their needs and concerns.

Tinu Abayomi-Paul created a PDF on best practices for Facebook marketing. Tina writes a great deal about ways to intelligently network within Facebook, and create savvy calls to action within profiles and groups. This is great reading for community developers.

Advertising

Chris Webb wrote a pretty inclusive post on the weak power of Facebook advertising. No need to reinvent the wheel. To sum it up:

I can point to several reports that seem to show traditional advertising models don’t seem to be working on Facebook - at least not in its current form. Facebook is working on a more focused system for advertisers, and those results remain to be seen. Perhaps more focused efforts will have better results.

Moving forward, advertising will likely have continued low click-throughs. Facebook is best leveraged for marketing via community development and applications.

So this is it!!! The bottom text may change color/size, but this black masthead with current lettering, subway image and yellow base will stay. Once the art is finalized, we’ll get the book listed on Amazon.

Last night I had the opportunity to spend time with some members of Women In Technology. We talked about participation public relations. Nothing like a roundtable of 15 powerful women CEOS to get a great conversation going.

My intent was to talk about the modern Public Relations environment. Specifically, how social media has forced contemporary media to become 1) much more accountable to its readership and 2) extremely trend oriented.

Well after we got through a great conversation on blogs and their impacts, we started to discuss participation PR. The WIT CEOs were quick to pick up on the following facts of the new PR world:

• Message control is gone
• Media outlets cater to the communities, not the companies, and want great info to serve those communities
• Ethics and transparency are musts. Companies will be held accountable if they are caught wandering from the path…

The way we react to social media’s impact is by moving away from message control, and getting back to creating value for the community served by the newspaper (or TV station or…). This is participation PR.

Give them the information you have as a subject matter expert… The information that the community values, wants and needs. Not necessarily the information the company wants to promote. Generally speaking, reporters respond to this kind of pitch. This is no different than the general precepts used to create an editorial mission for a blog or social media campaign.

Yet this thinking has become lost in the past twenty to thirty years. And the basis for this participation public relations thinking? The dictionary definition of PR is (via Dictionary.com):

1. the actions of a corporation, store, government, individual, etc., in promoting goodwill between itself and the public, the community, employees, customers, etc.

2. the art, technique, or profession of promoting such goodwill.

Perhaps public relations is an art. So many practitioners don’t get it (see Brian Solis article). But in my mind social media is just another form of old-fashioned public relations: creating goodwill by being a contributing, participating member of the community (see Kami Huyse article).

At the end of our two hours, I think all of us got there. I enjoyed my conversation with the women CEOs at WIT, and hope we can pick up the thread again soon. Thank you to Helios HR CEO Kathy Albarado for asking me to participate.

Additional Related Reading:

• Online Marketing Blog: Future of Online PR and Reputation Management
• Chris Heuer: Participation is Marketing

Photos by Susan Rook Photography, a former CNN anchor working the camera.

A lot’s been happening in the blogosphere in the past weeks that may be of interest. Here we go:

A&P had a bad reaction to some employees’ YouTube video.  The result is causing more negative publicity than the original video (Shel Holtz).

Dell2Direct is looking to evolve its social media effort (Buzz Bin).

More from Shel. A discussion of Delta’s corporate blogging effort.  The lack of hoopla indicates that corporate blogging has hit a tipping point.

Jeremiah Owyang delivered a primer on using Twitter (Web Strategist).

Smashing magazine gave a great overview of what makes a good blog template.

Business and Blogging discusses what’s your blogging ROI?

An analysis of the Johnson & Johnson lawsuit with Red Cross, and the J&J blog (BlogHer).

The CIA is going to adapt new media with its own social spy network, A-Space (Buzz Bin).

Every week, Copywrite Inc.’s Rich Becker and I discuss a blogging best practice on BlogStraightTalk, a Bumpzee community. This we week we discussed White Hat Marketing vs. Black Hat Marketing.

The purpose of the Joe Thornley post “White hat social marketing” was to clarify what is appropriate business behavior and outcomes for social media. At issue is protecting the trust and transparency that are essential to social media. A paraphrase of the post for context…

White Hat Marketing: Find others who share our interests and form communities with them. Companies need to “understand how to enter into mutually beneficial long term relationships with online communities.”

Black Hat Marketing: Use social media to achieve a short-term increase in conversions for online commerce. Mine the information we enter in social networks to generate marketing databases or post corporate marketing videos under the guise of consumer generated media.

Here are some of our takeaways…

Geoff Livingston:

• Any business that attacks social media with Machiavellian hard selling, non relational pitches will fail. They must engage in conversation, build relationships and foster a community with their efforts. That’s how conversational marketing works.
• To assume that a commercial concern – i.e. a business – will invest in and execute social media campaigns for no tangible benefit is ridiculous. Why? It flies in the face of the very role businesses play in our real world community.
• Companies have gray hats. Their conversation allows them to become a better serving member of the community, but they are there for a reason.

Rich Becker:

• The white hat-black hat definition of social conscience has been around much longer than social media. Its roots are easily identifiable within community relations and strategic philanthropy.
• Most businesses are operating to generate some type of revenue. Believe it or not, that might actually be a good thing because as they earn revenue, they employ more people, which stimulates the economy; they give back more to the communities in which they operate (we can hope); they can earn more for shareholders, who tend not to be “fat cats” as much as they are little people with 401K plans who would like to retire one day.
• For good measure, they can employ social media to help nurture the concept of active consumers as opposed to passive shoppers. How cool is that?

BlogStraightTalk publishes every Monday. Join us.

Related links:

What’s Your Blogging ROI and True ROI on Blogging and Social Media

David Armano (of the incredible “Logic + Emotion” blog) offered up this Twitter entry on Labor Day:

“just uploaded a pic of my newly created tree stump on FB. I didn’t want to do it, but the storm got the best of it…”

My response?

“are you using the new Stumpy! Application for Facebook? Or will I be able to view it on DebrisMaster..?“

Sadly, Facebook has become its own parody.

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The Defining Question

Welcome to the billion dollar question, and it’s the Social Media version of the Chicken and the Egg:

“Does the Application host the Network? Or does the Network host the Application?”

Let me explain, using Facebook as an example. Facebook doesn’t build “community,” it reconnects existing relationships. You can’t “join” the Upton High class of 1989, any more than you can dress up in a Yankee uniform and expect to split time with A-Rod. The advantage is you can quickly hit critical mass and draw the flock to membership. Conversely, the flock can fly the moment another shiny object flashes into view.

I’m not yet impressed by the growth in Facebook membership, because we’re about to lose the shine on the toy. All the new apps and the openness has been fun, but when it comes right down to it your Profile page is a virtual bonsai tree. It’s cute, it’s cool, and it squeezes a lot into a little space - but it takes forever to keep pruning, it’s expensive (on your time), and it is guaranteed to die when you stop feeding it. And that’s exactly what is happening. I quit feeding my page a while back. I’m tired of turning down invites to applications, and I don’t want to take sides in Zombies vs. Vampires. If I’m going to participate in multi-level marketing, I want actual financial compensation and not just a badge for my website.

At one point, I had a Wall, an Advanced Wall, and a Mega Wall - all so various friends of mine could write me virtual graffiti. All I needed was a fourth wall to keep all the invite crap at bay.

Facelift? or About Face?

A year from now, will these same people be playing with Facebook? Or will they abandon the platform with the same gusto that they now shed applications? Can a platform like Facebook with so many disposable elements avoid becoming disposable by association? In five years, what will differentiate it from Classmates.com?

I’ve been a part of a number of online communities. The successful ones are those that add value to the conversation and to the relationships, by virtue of allowing members a chance to do something different. The successful ones evolve and take on a character and syntax of their own. In that regard, they are a microcosm of successful businesses in a service economy. Don’t just sell me a product. Sell me a lifestyle. Sell me membership in an exclusive club. Let me be your customer evangelist.

Facebook’s challenge is in staying relevant to its core. I don’t buy the argument that today’s Sophomores will bail because their parents now have profiles and FB has lost its cool. Rather, all the extraneous “stuff” required to make it the Internet Swiss Army Knife also makes it exceedingly distracting. Kids used to spend an hour or so on Facebook connecting with classmates, sometimes for reasons associated with learning. Now they can spend that amount of time just keeping up with messages they could have gotten sooner elsewhere, turning down applications, or playing Tower Defense.

Trivial Pursuits

Facebook is currently a Network of people supporting a closed platform with an API that is way too open. Build a better ‘Facebook’ with a higher ratio of signal-to-noise, and the world will beat a path to your portal. Otherwise, this could happen to you:

(actual screen capture from Ike’s Facebook page)

Seriously.

Somewhere, in the middle of C.a. Marks‘ installation of “Free Gifts” and Allan Jenkins‘ acquisition of the Interactive Friends Graph, Lee Hopkins found the time to get married. Good on ya, mate!  (Come to think of it, “getting married” is at the intersection of interacting with friends and free gifts…)

The following bloggers had either blog posts cited in and/or were interviewed for Now Is Gone. I am listing these sources permanently on the Now Is Gone blog on the sources page in the masthead ( a permanent blog roll that will never change). My intent is simply to honor them and provide business readers additional source material.

If you have questions about marketing the book or the use of bloggers as sources, I refer you to the prior post, “Marketing Now Is Gone.” To the bloggers, thank you for creating great content in the new media world. The book’s sources are:

• Teli Adlam, The OptiNiche Blog
• Adam Aleman, FlashReport
• Todd Andrlik, Todd And: The Power to Connect
• Scott Baradell, Media Orchard
• Richard Becker, Copywrite
• Jordan Behan, Tell Ten Friends
• Toby Bloomberg, Diva Marketing Blog
• Bob, Bob Meets World
• Kristina Bouweiri, Make It Better
• C.C Chapman, Reality Bitchslap
• Ed Cotton, Influx
• Todd Defren, PR Squared
• Chris Dorobek, The FCW Insider
• Alicia Dorset, GM FastLane
• Kevin Dugan and Richard Laermer, The Bad Pitch Blog
• Eric Eggertson, Common Sense PR
• Li Evans, Search Marketing Gurus
• Susan Getgood, Marketing Roadmaps
• Heather Green, Blogspotting
• Karl Greenberg, MediaPost Publications
• Chris Heuer, The Future of Communities
• Sally Seville Hodge, Marketing Profs
• Shel Holtz, A Shel of my Former Self
• John Horrigan, Pew/Internet
• Kami Watson Huyse, Communications Overtones
• Shel Isreal, Global Neighborhoods
• Beth Kanter, Beth’s Blog
• Rob La Gesse, Stuffleufagus
• Tim Leberecht, iPlot
• Charlene Li, The Groundswell
• Joe Lichtenberg, Marketing Profs
• Brian Lusk, Nuts About Southwest
• Valeria Maltoni, Conversation Agent
• Richard McManus, Read/Write Web
• Jake Matthews, 10e20
• Brian Oberkirch, Like It Matters
• Lee Odden, Online Marketing Blog
• Janice Partyka, GPS World
• Jeremy Pepper, Pop! PR Jots
• Ike Pigott, Occam’s Razr
• Chris Polito, Total Telecom
• Jeff Pulver, The Jeff Pulver Blog
• Aaron Reed, SYS-CON Media
• Laura Ries, Origin of Brands
• Kim Roach, Lifehack.org
• Frank Rose, Epicenter
• Jay Rosen, Press Think
• Hanni Ross, Successful and Outstanding Bloggers
• Darren Rowse, ProBlogger
• Steve Rubel, Micropersuasion
• Mike Sansome, ConverStations
• David Meerman Scott, Web Ink Now
• Doc Searl, Linux Journal
• Brian Solis, PR 2.0
• Michael A. Stelzner, Marketing Profs
• Amy Stodgehill, Green Options
• Mario Sundar, Marketing Nirvana
• Dan Tapscott and Anthony Williams, Wikinomics: The Blog
• Robb Tokatakiya, Tokatakiya
• Joe Wilkert, Publishing Blog 2020

I had the opportunity to be a keynote for the New Media Nouveaux conference on July 13th (Toby Bloomberg was the headliner). At the time, I had just completed the book so it seemed appropriate to chat about it.

I delivered a thumbnail sketch of “Now Is Gone: A New Media Primer for Executives and Entrepreneurs” a few months in advance of the book’s release. This slightly edited speech (26 minutes) provides a sneak preview of Now Is Gone’s general thesis and a rudimentary outline of its content.

P.S. This is a little choppy, as I am still getting used to podcasting. Please excuse any irregularities. If you prefer to download, visit media.libsyn.com/medio/geoliv/NMNkeynote.mp3.