The biggest search and social networking companies to date were born in America, so it’s easy to be seduced into thinking that the American way of doing things online is the best way of doing things online.  But most netizens today are not Americans.

The majority of Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin users reside outside of the US. And in many of those places, commerce is not necessarily the primary objective of business. In some countries, the ambitious are suspecting of undermining the public interest.  Profits are like air.  You need it to live, but it is not the purpose for living. Surely, you can’t deny that in the US, there are corporations that profit at the expense of the greater public interest.

Maintaining sensitivity to cultural nuances outside the US is key to successful online communications.  SXSW, the annual mecca for the global tech community, draws an international audience.  But it happens in Austin, so the global perspetive is diluted through an American lens.

Le Web on the other hand, which happens every December in Paris, showcases the global tech scene through a distinctly European filter, which is extermely valuable to communicators residing inside the US.  Produced by Loic and Geraldine Le Meur, it is the fastest-paced, most entertaining of the tech conferences — with the best food and the higest production values — and packed with hard newsbreaks.

Here’s some of the announcements at this year’s conference:

• Release of the new, new Twitter with a new algorithm “discovery feed”
• Live demo of Ice Cream Sandwich, the next Andriod OS, with desktop widgets and facial recognition
• Facebook’s committment to HTML5, even though the BRIC nations won’t have the infrastructure to support it for years
• Uber’s $32 million in funding for an app that makes cars services in most major cities available via mobile
• Evernote’s deal with Orange which will give customers access to the premium version for a year for free

But the bigger, more strategic lesson I got came from experiencing the emerging online tech sector in a mature market like France.  Consider the history.  The French government has long been regarded as overly bureaucratic, contempous of corporate greed and downright arrogant.  Here are a few examples:

• Just a few days ago the Autorite de la Concurrence slammed P&G and other soap companies with huge fines for price fixing
• Wirelss broadband is simply not available from any local provider in Paris without a one-year contract
• Last minute scheduling changes at Le Web happen daily. It’s just the way they do things. Shut up and wait.

It’s easy to dismiss the French as aloof.  But my take is, they just have different priorities. You may not be able to get online easily, but if you have a medical emergency, they’ll take care of you for free, with or without insurance. The French also have a much lower tolerance for anticompetitive practices and revile unchecked corporate power. They seem to legitimately want to put the public interest before commerce. It’s a noble goal. You don’t get ripped off on soap and you can get healthcare when you need it. But it doesn’t always work, especially when it stymies innovation.

In his keynote, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt said the role of government is to equip citizens with reliable, fast and affordable wireless and stationary broadband, so they can innovate themselves out of the current economic funk.  Rome had roads. Then came highways. But today, if you want to spur innovation and commerce, you need high-speed broadband.

Easy, cheap access to the Net in Sweden lead to a number of breakthrough technologies including the peer to peer file sharing, which led to Skype, and more recently Spotify, a social network that lets user share privately, who’s founder also presented at Le Web. Silicon Valley needs a competitor, says Schmidt, and unless you want to live in Berlin or Stockholm, other European governments need to make it easier for people to innovate.

Some say unchecked corporate power in the US has led to an environment where corporations have grown at the expensive of individuals. Last week the Federal Reserve reported said household net worth declined 4% over the summer, while company holdings climbed for the fifth consecutive year.

The bigger lessons from this year’s Le Web is this:

• It’s less expensive that ever to access global markets
• The cost of doing business keeps coming down
• The size of the market keeps expanding
• Access spurs innovation
• Incentives spur commerce

But cultural differences really do matter. Different cultures have different expectations which anyone selling to a global audience needs to be mindful of.

I rented an apartment in Paris through AirBNB while attending Le Web and after getting locked out, l was challenged to overcome a difficult situation without anyone to advocate on my behalf in a timely manner.  I have since exchanged tweets with the company’s founder Brian Chesky inviting him to discuss my experience at On the Record…Online, and spoken to the company’s staff, but no one appears to be willing to talk to me on the record about my experience.

In my next post I’ll write about my AirBNB experience.  I’d like to acknowledge AirBNB’s point of view of in my post, so I hope Brian, or someone at AirBNB, will agree to a constructive, civil dialogue about my Paris apartment rental experience.

Make no mistake about it!

The killer app for B2B social media at trades events is, believe it or not, the app.

But not just any app.  Mobile apps.   More and more, attendees are using iPhone and Android apps to network digitally at events, and marketing them in the process.

Most of us have had some experience using mobile applications at professional conferences and corporate events to post status updates, tweet, check-in and exchange ideas with others who are either in attendance or following the event remotely.   With the help of hashtags on Twitter, the social media back channel makes for better networking, spreading awareness worldwide all the while.

So powerful is the prospect of mobile social networking at events that a number of conference organizers have already taken a stab at building their own, branded mobile apps. So far, the results have been mixed.  Because just like any other social media channel, those that go the distance prevail.

That means using technology to add value to the stream, whether it’s through content marketing, community management or automation. You’ve got to offer people something of value, be it ease-of-use, networking with a targeted community or the ability to engage in a niche back and forths without spamming your friends and family.  B2B mobile apps can deliver this value at events.

For a B2B mobile app to deliver, it’s got to help attendees get more out of an event and give the conference organizers a way to generate excitement before during and after the program dates.  For an app to get used, it’s got to do more then just provide the program schedule, speaker bios and basic event info.  It’s got to enable interactions, both in popular social media, and via partitioned, semi-exclusive spaces.  But what exactly does that mean? And what specifically does it take to succeed and delivery a truly useful B2B social media mobile app?

Here’s my punch list:

1. Social Sync – Perhaps the single, biggest benefit a mobile app can offer event attendees is the chance to see if anyone they know is registered to be there.  Social sync gives them a way to see of any of their Linkedin connections, Twitter followers or Facebook friends are planning on attending. Working with Janrain, the mobile app at SXSW 2011 allowed attendees to cross-reference their social networks with registered attendees to see who they know that’s attending.
2. Make Public Posting Optional – It’s great to be able to publish to Twitter or Linkedin from a branded, mobile app, but don’t force the user to do so.  They may want to use the app to have a segregated conversation with attendees without crowding up their Twitter feed.  Not that they would need to keep those conversations private, but they should be able to decide, on a per share basis, what they want on Twitter, Linkedin or Facebook, and which ones they think are only useful to people on site at the event.
3. Think Beyond the Event – It may be tougher to get people to download and invest their time in a mobile app for a single event.  From a B2B social media marketing standpoint, the whole idea of the app is to generate excitement for the event before it happens, and extend that excitement after it’s finished. Cisco Events used Double Dutch to build what is one of the most useful apps I’ve seen to date for extending the reach of B2B events via the social web.
4. Location Based Social Networking – B2B mobile app should let attendees “check-in” on their mobile device at different locations. This can be a great way to drive traffic to exhibitors or sessions.  To make sure attendees don’t check-in without visiting an exhibitor’s booth, build a QR code reader into your app, and offer incentives to attendees who check-in the most.
5. Auto Generate Hashtags – For those attendees who choose to publish their shares from your mobile app to their Twitter stream, make sure you give them the option to include the conference hashtag in their tweet.  If it’s an internal company training event, use different QR Codes on the last slide of every presentation deck and use incentives, like leaderboard listings and other event privileges, to attendees who collect the most QR codes.
6. Socialize the Photo Opp – In the old days, trade show exhibitors would book a celebrity to come by their booth for photo opps.  Nowadays, it would by silly to do something like that without integrating social to extend the reach via the web.  Make sure your app offers a way for people to share photos and video among conference attendees and easily publish them to Twitpic, TwitVid, Flickr, YouTube and Facebook as well.  Remember my cardinal rule of usability: ease of use drives adoption.
7. Notifications – Don’t make your attendees have to open your app to see new activity. Offer push notifications as an option and make darn sure the mobile app icon on the device home screen displays a number in a red circle in the upper right hand corner of the desktop icon to indicate new activity since last time it was opened.
8. Offer a “Pull” Option - The value of syncing your Linkedin account with your Twitter account is not so much the ability to syndicate tweets to Linkedin, but rather to search the tweets of other Linkedin users by industry, geography, company and time frame.  Go to Linkedin, sync up your twitter account, and try searching Linkedin Signal.  The tweets from your first, second and third tier connections appear, and can be segmented by a variety of options. If your app can pull in and display all the social networking activity of other conference attendees, that’s useful, even after the event is over, because it serves as a sort of lens to bring social networking activity of a particular community into focus.
9. Offer Keyword and Klout Score Search – B2B decision makers in different parts of a company have different priorities.  Give users the ability to isolate the discussions they’re most interested in by keyword or phrase.  To fight digital illiteracy, let them also filter by user’s Klout scores, so they can learn what online influencers do to stimulate engagement. These are features in Hootsuite’s premium service, which is very useful when conducting influencer relations at live events.

The Cisco Events app that I mentioned earlier offer many of these features.  But if I had one piece of criticism, it would be that the app offers social sync for Facebook and Twitter, but not Linkedin, which is, in my opinion, the most important network to B2B users.  According to my discussion with the folks at Double Dutch, this is something they expect to offer very soon. In fact, some time has transpired since we spoke and I wrote this up, so it’s entirely possible they’ve got it up and running now.

If you’d like to hear my briefing with Double Dutch, I released it as a podcast at On the Record…Online, so jam the like button, follow us on Twitter or subscribe on iTunes and listen in.

In my book Social Marketing to the Business Customer with Paul Gillin, we deep dive into every aspect of B2B social media marketing, from winning buy-in from disengaged managers and clients to B2B search and social optimization, and it will be no surprise to readers of this blog that Linkedin is by far the most important social network for business professionals.

I hope my B2B mobile app list of features is helpful.  What features did I miss and what B2B mobile apps do you think are most effective?

Which are the best B2B mobile apps from a user and a B2B social media marketer’s perspective.  Please post your favorites here, and let’s see of we can get a list of the most important functional specs for event-focused B2B mobile apps ever assembled.

What features would you put in a mobile app designed for use at B2B events?

The first step is the toughest one. But it’s also the most important.

Provide everyone with clear-cut, easy-to-follow guidelines to help them distinguish between conversations that can happen in public, and conversations that need to be kept private.

Social media has become an integral part of our personal lives.  Unless organizations take the time to specify how (not if) employees can use social media at work, they risk forfeiting the chance to:

• Capitalize on social marketing opportunities
• Attract and retain top-notch personnel
• Thwart obsolescence

Here’s why:

On social networks, trends direct our attention.  We have more confidence in crowds than individuals. A Yelp restaurant listing with a 3-star average and 300 ratings is more meaningful than one with a 5-star average and just 12 ratings.

For the same reason, organizations realize the true value of social marketing when everyone gets involved.  The more people there are discussing a topic, the greater the likelihood others will discover it.

A corporate Twitter feed and Facebook page driven by a PR department are nice to have, but they’ll never be as useful as the conversations of a diverse, engaged community.  And the larger the community, the more confidence we have in what they say, and the more likely we are to give it our attention.

Whenever an employee uses social media to get their job done, they leave behind a digital record that can be found and shared indefinitely.  If you have no policy, that notion is more than a little scary.  But if you’ve thought it through, it becomes a productivity windfall, because marketing becomes the byproduct of using social media to get the job done.

Remember, your employees are using social media already in their personal lives.  If you’d like them to use it for business too, they need to know what’s expected. Leadership needs to set clear-cut boundaries, so employees know what is and isn’y acceptable.  Companies that fail to take this step, will most likely also fail to mobilize their personnel to make the best use of social media.

It’s critical that the social media policy leadership sets be fair and just.  Blocking access to Facebook from the corporate network while expecting employees to respond to email outside of business hours sets uneven standards.  In fact, blocking access to social networks is both unfair and futile, because workers should have the right communicate with their friends and family, as long is it doesn’t interfere with the quality of their work.

Social media blackouts are the result of digitally illiteracy. They are enacted by misguided leaders from an age when the restricting information flows was possible and effective.  But as Wikileaks, Twitter and Napster have proven, the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. Or as Esther Dyson said back in 2006, companies that profit from inefficiency will die, and for many types of communications, social media is simply more efficient.

Once the boundaries are in place, and everyone knows what can be public and what should be private, social media becomes a productivity gain, not drain.

Check out how Johns Hopkins and Avery Dennison are using internal social networks, or the workplace productivity gains of Chatter.

In this environment, the organizations that can draw a clear line between public and private have a huge advantage.  The road to getting there runs straight through policy, because you can’t draw that line between public and proprietary unless you do the homework to figure that out, and you can’t teach others to respect boundaries if they don’t know where they lie.

Social media without governance is reckless. And rules without training are toothless.  Take a look at my Social Media Policy Template to accelerate your policy development efforts or attend my upcoming Social Media Marketing Workshop in Los Angeles June 30 – July 1, 2011, where we spend a fair amount of time on this subject.

Welcome to the social media world of uncontrollable communications. You’re in it, whether you like it or not.

In my next post, I’ll start getting into what it takes to host an effective social media training.

Despite the wide spread adoption of social media on a global basis, most companies remain clueless about how digital technology is changing the way people communicate and share information.

How else do explain the ineptitude that spurred articles in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal about these events:

• Burson-Marsteller’s email smear campaign against Google for Facebook. Seriously? That’s the best they could do?
• A famous British soccer player’s lawsuit against Twitter to unmask his anonymous critics. You’re kidding, right? Does he think he’s going to gag Twitter?
• Comcast’s threat to cut funding to a nonprofit that criticized its hiring of a former FCC commissioner on Twitter. And they did so via email. Did they think that was maybe a little risky? <sarcasm>
• JC Penny and Overstock.com’s decision to employ black hat SEO tactics, resulting in their websites being manually demoted in the search rankings. Guess that’s what happens when senior management is clueless about organic search.

The cold, hard truth is that these lapses in judgment are so sophomoric, all you can do is chalk it up to digital illiteracy.  And by the way, if the errors they made aren’t clear to you, you’re digitally illiterate too.  But don’t feel bad.  You’re not alone.  And chances are, it’s even not your fault.

You’ve probably been to a few social media conferences where you learned just enough to be dangerous.  Speakers took the stage and told you how well they did with social media to promote themselves and generate new business.  They avoided the gory details.  No one’s ever actually sat you down and explained how these channels really work, or how to master them.  Why would they? They want you to hire them.

The fight against digital illiteracy will not be won through keynotes or panel sessions. What’s required is practical, applied knowledge.  You need to know how to:

• Build a social media monitoring dashboard to find, listen and engage with your existing online community. You may not know it, but you’ve an online community already.
• Use white hat search engine optimization tactics to make it easier for your customers to find you via search. Coming up forst for the name of your company doesn’t count. Google gives you that one for free. It’s about coming up for early-stage, buyer-oriented keywords. Has anyone ever actually showed you how to find them? It’s not that tough.
• Or how to optimize a website or blog for social sharing.  Can you install Facebook “Like” button, “Tweet” button and Linkedin “Share” button on your corporate website?  And can you optimize your Facebook status updates from maximum engagement so you rank high in the social newsfeed?

Over the next few days I’ll be running a series of posts to help you stamp out digital illiteracy in the workplace. I’ll lay out specifically what you and your colleagues need to know, and how to teach it to those with only minimal exposure to social channels. And if you want to take a short cut, join me for my Social Media Marketing Workshop in Los Angeles June 30 – July 1, 2011.

Or just stay tuned to my blog.  I’m going to share my recipe for bringing digital immigrants up to speed and for winning resources and buy-in from disengaged managers and clients.

If you’re a past attendee of one of my trainings, what did you learn?  Was it valuable?  And how, if at all, has what you learned helped you avoid a major mistep?

Just because you know social media does not mean you know how to social media market for travel. Over the last few years, the recession put travel marketers through the ringer. But now, as we emerge from the bottom, social media marketing is more important than ever for travel PR Pros. If you want to know why, read this post.

Social media travel marketing was an advantage for hospitality companies competing for rare leisure and business travelers during the recession. For better or worse, fierce competition for hotel guests promises to persist now that travel spending is on the rise after years of pain.

Travel marketing is heating up again this season, with Bloomberg Businessweek’s Nadja Brandt reporting last week that stock prices for Marriott, the largest publically traded U.S. hotel chain, rose along with increases in vacation bookings.

Travelers are feeling better about the economy, a sentiment captured by the Bloomberg Consumer Comfort Index, which has climbed steadily for a month in line with growing employment. Forecasts for the upcoming travel season will take clearer shape shortly as Wyndham Worldwide Corp. releases its earnings on April 27, Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc. (@StarwoodBuzz) on April 28 and Hyatt Hotels Corp. (@HyattConcierge) on May 3.

As the opportunity for growth returns, competition for customers will be as, if not more, intense than it was during the recession, with the leadership of major hotel chains already pledging not to lose market share to competitors as business picks up. It may be a good time for travel marketers to ask the question: am I prepared to make the most of the social media communications revolution that has taken place in the time since the travel recession began in 2008?

Social media PR became even more vital during the recession with consumers demanding “the big deal,” requiring more online touch points to make decisions and demanding service in real time, says Karen Gee McAuley (@gemtweet), executive vice president of Blaze PR (@BlazePR_LA), and a veteran of developing social media capabilities on behalf of hospitality industry clients.  Karen’s insights should prove useful as you craft travel marketing plans this spring.

1. Remember Recession’s Lesson:  Focus on the Real-time Deal

Recession marketing PR programs shifted as “the deal” became all important to consumers, who demanded a reduced rate, and at the luxury level, that extras be thrown in with the price of the room (a spa treatment or a round of golf).

Travel industry prospects should begin to recover shortly, but marketers will need to mindful that a cost-driven consumer mindset will linger.

Furthermore, there may be long-term strategic value in pursuing population segments that have continued to spend money on travel despite the recession, including baby boomers with intact nest eggs.

Online travel agents like Priceline (@THENEGOTIATOR), Orbitz (@Orbitz) and Travelocity (@Travelocity) grew dramatically through the recession because the new consumer is focused not just on the deal, but on the real-time deal. This change will continue to force consultants to create systems that promote discounts offered by the online services on their client’s properties with Twitter-like speed (too fast for traditional media).

2. Employ Social Media to Influence Returning Travelers

Social media travel marketing in the last three years has come to play a central role in outreach by public relations firms to media that customers consume, along with an upswing in direct communication to customers, Karen says.

Social media travel PR includes the pushing out of promotions via Facebook and Twitter pages that travel customer communities have learned to pay attention to, including online venues of major traditional media outlets.

Every major daily newspaper now has an online operation that often offers content not available in that newspaper’s Sunday travel section. The Los Angeles Times, for instance, has the Daily Dish and the Daily Deal blog. Perishable product does well online, and this impacts media targeting.

Online travel marketing gained added credibility when a survey fielded by the Hospitality Sales and Marketing Association International found travel consumers need seven online touch points to influence their travel decisions. Social media may provide the opportunity to have the required series of conversations needed to sway a prospective traveler, as opposed to a single interaction.

3. Use Measurement to Drive Strategy

Social media metrics can be captured by aps like Omniture and Google Analytics. The results of client social media campaigns can be measured daily or weekly, and should focus tightly on which sources drive most people to the website.

Click throughs are the key, and it may not be a mention in the Wall Street Journal that drives the most traffic. A niche online article may deliver more click throughs, and may keep delivering over time. Social media travel PR, more than ever, must advance client priority metrics, whether it be message delivery, preserving the rate charged, driving click-throughs to a website or capturing data to guide distribution of an e-newsletter.

During the recession, the key strategies to emerge included attempts to “keep the guest dollar on property” with stronger promotion of in-house spas, restaurants and golf courses.  Marketers also switched to a regional “drive-in” strategy to attract the “staycation” customers in their backyard who were less willing to fly.  If indeed a recovery is underway, marketers will need to quickly determine which trends are replacing these to succeed, and in part by listening to the marketplace via social media.

This post is a follow up to a podcast with Karen Gee McAuley and Joann Kileen Furtney on Travel PR in a Recession at the PRSA International Convention.

About the Guest Blogger

This is a guest blog post written by Greg Williams (@gregscience), an independent consultant specializing in public relations for medical science and technical companies. After beginning his career as an editor for the Associated Press, Greg has since served as a public relations strategist for two international public relations firms and two university medical centers, and as a writer for institutions including Eastman Kodak and the National Academy of Sciences.

Web 2.0 advocacy is now a decisive lever in national policy debates, and has been put to good use recently by organizations not immediately associated with blogs, Facebook and Twitter, according to communications leaders at nationwide advocacy groups.

Social media activism helps organizations of every political stripe to efficiently mobilize  members around policy debates, and the power of such tactics has been skyrocketing alongside social media adoption.  The value of new media advocacy lies it is ability to drive engagement as part of a call to action.

With budget matters so hotly debated that the federal government is approaching a shutdown, communications pros for organizations on both sides of the debate need to make the very most of two-way social media conversations to win the day. If you were tasked with finding, and inspiring, constituents in a group to call Congressmen, vote for a candidate or join a protest, how would you use social media to get your people moving?

Paul Anderson, vice president for Communications Strategy and Public Outreach at AARP, was charged with doing exactly that on behalf of AARP in the build-up to the vote on the historic health care reform legislation passed last year. Social media research helped AARP to sharpen its policy arguments and to find like-minded AARP members, champions within its own ranks to deliver AARP messages to Congress. Use the insights provided by Paul to benchmark your efforts at social media advocacy as you get ready to issue a call to action.

1. Employ Social Media To Collect Real World Examples that Back Your Policy Plank

During the healthcare debate, AARP collected via social media interactions 15,000 stories of real people who either fell into income or age gaps in the Medicare prescription drug benefit, or who had been denied insurance coverage because of a pre-existing condition, or who, because  of age differentials used by insurance companies, were paying as much as eight times what their child would pay for the same medical procedure. When it comes time to send your lobbyist in to talk to a given Congressman, arming him or her with large numbers of compelling examples from their own district will obviously very persuasive.

AARP seeks to start dialogues through its social networking sites, and listens closely to the comments on its blogs and articles (comments on outgoing content are as important as the content). AARP research determines which members will take suggested actions on the organization’s behalf and will follow relevant AARP social media campaigns. Social media activism requires that advocacy groups find people that agree with an institutional position and ensure their members take the right form of action. Social media content must be a balance of what is most useful to audiences and what moves forward institutional priorities.

2. Free Your Entire Team To Engage Via Social Media/Commit Necessary Resources to Achieve Real-time Listening and Engagement

Social networking sites enabled AARP to start dialogues and to listen more closely to the comments on its blogs and articles in the approach to the healthcare reform debate, says Paul Anderson. Using social media as a lead vehicle for driving change, however, requires a commitment to real-time conversation monitoring and to placing trust in staff members. AARP staff in all 50 states are now empowered to blog, post their own comments on social networking sites and run their own social networks. Set your social media policy, distribute your messaging priorities and be prepared to debate robustly, respond quickly and react (or not react) to negative posts with a level head.

3. Learn How Best to Integrate Many Channels (Print, Online, Mobile) Before the Debate Starts

Multiple social media communications channels at first represented a strategic challenge for the AARP.  In response, AARP leadership employed matrix management to integrate AARP channels and communities, and to ensure that its content can be repurposed regardless of medium.  Once the content was streamlined, the organization added mobile social media communications to create value for members through accessibility and ease of use. AARP just launched several IPhone applications that leverage its publications and services, including scan-able bar code application that enables members to get AARP discounts at participating stores using their iPhones.

This blog post is sourced from an audio interview with conducted by Guest Host, Greg Reeder is the director of the Marine Corps Element at Defense Media Activity and Editor-in-Chief at Marines Magazine, USMC for Eric Schwartzman’s for On the Record…Online.   Greg interviewed Paul Anderson, vice president for Communications Strategy and Public Outreach at AARP, about priorities in the management of social media advocacy programs.

About the Guest Blogger
This is a guest blog post written by Greg Williams (@gregscience), an independent consultant specializing in public relations for medical science and technical companies. After beginning his career as an editor for the Associated Press, Greg has since served as a public relations strategist for two international public relations firms and two university medical centers, and as a writer for institutions including Eastman Kodak and the National Academy of Sciences.

This post (written based on the presentation embedded above) explains how the Facebook “Like” button is poised to kill online display advertising as we know it, and help you understand why the social networking giant has been valued at $50 billion.  It is the second in a series of posts about marketing with Facebook. The first post with about marketing with Facebook Pages and Facebook Ads.  Let’s get started.

At first, the web was about surfing the information highway. Then it evolved into a place where the focus was on web content, pages, databases and documents. Today, it has become a place to connect with friends and trusted colleagues.  The web of tomorrow will be about finding relevant content from our friends, signaling the end of algorithmic search as the dominant means of locating relevant content online.

Facebook is a platform, which means third-party software developers can create applications that run inside the service. Since the launch of Facebook in May 2007, more than 550,000 Facebook apps have been created.  Today, more than a million developers are creating Facebook apps. And, as you probably know, the social network counts 500 million users.

Facebook “Like” buttons are the killer app for achieving the kind of reach that up until now, had been the exclusive province of mainstream media. “Like” buttons are the most used and easiest to use of Facebook’s Social Plugins and they provide a practical way for filing URLs and other online objects as nodes on the Facebook social graph.  But if you count all Activity Feed (meant for news sites), Live Stream (meant for Live Events) and other Facebook  widgets, more than 2 million websites are extending Facebook functionality to their sites and roughly 10,000 new sites  are joining them every day, using Facebook social plug ins.  Today, 250 million people use Facebook through destination websites without visiting Facebook.com, every month.

Life is Short. You’re Busy.  Why Bother?  Three Reasons:

• Traffic - Getting people to your website who wouldn’t otherwise have found it.
• Engagement – Like, comment and share functionality results means they do more and stay longer.
• Insights – The ability to see exactly how people are engaging with your brand, get demographics on who they are, and improve your efforts over time, whether its at Facebook.com or via your destination domain using Facebook Connect.

How Do You Do It?

What’s the easiest way for a nontechnical person to extend Facebook functionality to their website?  Here it is.

“Like” Button – This is by far the most important Facebook Social Plugin.  It’s how Facebook users can attach an object, like a web page, to their newsfeed and social graph.  They click the “Like” button and create a feed story, which can be seen by their friends at Facebook.com.

Their friends can “Like” it as well, attach a comment to it or forward it to their Facebook friends by clicking the “Share” button, extending the object’s reach and adding social relevance. “Liking” an object also means it becomes a node on the Facebook graph, so it appears in search, and if it’s a product, brand or service, it also appears on the Facebook profile page of the “Liker.” On social optimized sites, the “liker” or recommender’s profile picture appears beneath the “Like” button. So in this case, if you like the movie The Social Network, your Facebook friends will see your “like” as a recommendation on IMDB as well.

Last summer, Facebook director of media partnerships Justin Osofsky launched a campaign to get more news media outlets to integrate Facebook functionality, so their audiences can share articles in their newsfeeds, and find articles that their Facebook friends have “Liked.”  The Independent newspaper in the UK has done so by positioning the “Like” button in the upper right-hand corner beside every article on their website.

The advantage of integrating the Facebook like button in this manner — rather than just using a simple share button such as Add This — is that if any of my Facebooks friends “Like” an article, I wind up seeing their profile picture on the Independent’s website. In the example above, if my Facebook friends happen onto this story on the Independent’s website, they can see I’ve recommended it.

The article also gets posted to my newsfeed. The more of my friends who “Like” it and comment on it:

• The more people who see it
• The more social relevance it gets
• The broader the reach
• And the more referrals to your website

When installing a “Like” button, you can elect to show faces, and set the width . Given the amount a real estate the default settings require, the inclination is to go adjust the setting and so with the smaller “Button Count” or “Box Button” options.  But these are not nearly as effective because profile pictures do not appear.  The options shown below right, which are the default “Like” button widget settings, are much more likely to encourage engagement.

Seeing faces amplifies the likelihood of getting click recommendations ten times, says Facebook partner engineer Simon Glass.  As the research from Facebook shows, once just two Facebook friends have clicked a “Like” button, the likelihood that others will click it as well increases exponentially.

The Italian newspaper La Repubblica is using the Facebook “Like” buttons to let users subscribe to their content in their Facebook newsfeed.  Instead of relying on users to come back to their destination website to “like” content, La Repubblica readers can use the “Like” button to subscribe to news by subject-matter, and any stories the published on that subject appear automatically in their newsfeed at Facebook.com.

Readers can “Like” their favorite football team, and links to stories about their team are syndicated directly to their Facebook newsfeed in one click. La Repubblica got 104,000 “likes” in the first 5 weeks of deploying their new “Like” button subscription integration.  “You can kind of think if it like RSS, but that people actually use,” says Mr. Cross, who formerly worked as a developer for the Beeb.

What are the benefits of using Facebook “Like” buttons?

• Distribution on Facebook.com
• Collect social recommendations
• Reach new people through personal recommendations
• Drive inbound traffic and user engagement

Half of Facebook’s users visit Facebook.com every day, and many of them do so multiple times daily.  Before La Repubblica integrated Facebook, readers had to go to the website to check for updated content but with this new integration, the newspaper can get links to it’s articles in front of readers where they spend the majority of their time on the Net.

Facebook users spend on average 5 hrs 25 mins on Facebook.com per month, versus 2 hrs 17 mins on Yahoo, 1 hr and 52 mins on AOL, 1 hr and 41 mins on MSN, 1 hr 17 mins on YouTube and 1 hr 14 mins on Google.

This blog post was written using source material from a special session at Le Web 2010 presented by Facebook partner engineer Simon Cross, a complete audio transcript for which is available at On the Record…Online. At the time of this writing, the PowerPoint presentation he used was also available.

Pre-Internet, elaborate, detailed corporate policies on public disclosure weren’t necessary.  A line or two in the corporate code of conduct policy sufficed.  Companies hired marketing and public relations professionals and let them do their jobs.

But a world where a public disclosure is as easy as a Facebook status update or a tweet, setting forth clear-cut guidelines and boundaries for what is, and is not permissible through corporate social media policy has become central to effective online communications strategy.

After reviewing dozens of corporate social media policies, I created this Social Media Policy Template to accelerate policy development initiatives for organizations of all sizes.While I do believe this social media policy template is very comprehensive, I do not subscribe to a one-size-fits-all policy development approach. Just as no two organizations are exactly alike, the right social media policy should accurately reflect your organization’s management style.

Nevertheless, to get you started, here’s my social media policy template, which includes:

• Policy Statement – An overview statement designed to manage the reader’s expectations about what they will find in the policy.
• Definitions – Explanations of specific social media related terms used in the policy.
• Objectives – Specifically what the social media policy is designed to achieve.
• Guiding Principles — Over arching principles on which the policy is based. These may be situational or aspirational depending on a company’s brand management style.
• Practical Guidelines — Best practices for social media community engagement with clear-cut boundaries of what is and is not permissible.
• Penalties – Consequences of noncompliance.

My social media policy template was developed through my work with the US Armed Forces and large organizations and with the aid of many online sources, who are listed in the bibliography.

Gavel image by WalknBoston/Flickr.com

I hope you find it useful.  I am grateful to those who contributed, and to my clients for sponsoring the many months that went into creating this corporate social media policy corporate template.

by Intersection Consulting

Just as we use the telephone and e-mail to communicate with our colleagues, friends and family, people of all ages are increasingly using social media to communicate as well. that means most of your company’s employees are using social media throughout the course of the day to contact friends and associates, make plans and organizes activities.

Since those interactions are often discoverable after-the-fact, organizations are developing social media policies to provide employees with clear-cut guidelines of what is and is not permissible use.

Prior to social media, issues of public disclosure were often relegated to a paragraph in an organizations code of conduct policy that was written to restrict unofficial spokespersons from releasing official company statements through conventional channels like the mainstream media or press releases.

But today, if I were to happen on to a discussion between an employee of a company and someone else about anything related to the category in which the Company competes, that discussion would probably impact my perception of that organization. And it would probably, in many cases, have more of an impact than would a company’s marketing copy or official company line.

In this blog post, inspired by a discussion with Chris Boudreaux and Paul Gillin about developing corporate social media policies, I’ll suggest 7 aspects of policy development you probably haven’t considered:

1.  Sometimes You Can’t Stop Blocking — Shel Holtz maintains a website called “Stop Blocking” to compel organizations to loosen access to social media sites from within corporate networks.   But in industries like financial services and insurance,  it may be that the reason the company is on lockdown is because the current social media tools simply lach the necessary audit trail to The comply with government regulations.   companies may be required by regulators to store communications for number of years and unless the company’s CRM solution accommodates social media this may just not be possible.

2.  A Winning Business Case is Key — I recently spoke with Brian Solis about how he builds the business case for social media initiatives inside companies which you can listen to as a podcast.   Chris Boudreaux says organizations can and do turn on and off access to social media sites quickly, so don’t assume that because a company is blocking access to social media sites that it’s in some way going to take them longer to come up to speed.  You can listen to my discussion with Brian here.

3. Organizational Complexity is More Important than Size — The more business units there are, and the greater variety of subcultures that exist,  the longer it takes to develop and initiate a corporate social media policy. So if you find competing agendas among the various stakeholders who will be involved in developing and approving a corporate social media policy, it’s probably going to take you longer to accomplish it.

4. Strong Executive Leadership Eases the Way – It is leadership’s responsibility to think ahead of its employees and establish policy to protect them and the organization. Those protections are even more important if the employee is using social media as part of their primary job function. “The best policies are born out of a desire to utilize social media in a way that advances the corporate objectives, and to both protect the employees as well as the company. And that takes an understanding of the business which is is usually strongest among the folks who are running the business,” says Chris Boudreaux.

5. Legalese Can Kill a Social Media Policy — Like American linguist William Lutz, who I spoke with in this podcast about the dangers of doublespeak, Chris Boudreaux agrees there’s not much sense in a policy if the people it’s designed to guide can’t understand.  Policies should be written so that they can be understood without the aid of legal counsel.   and since many companies make fair social media policies public it may also be a good idea for those charged with writing the policy to collaborate with the marketing or public relations departments to ensure its accurately reflects the characteristics of the brand.

6. Policy Can Also Shape Opinion — Fairness can also be a smart objective of the social media policy. Many organizations make their social media policy available on the corporate website Where it appears as a testament of the organizations trust and respect for its employees. Harsh language and overly strict guidelines may reflect poorly on the organization and by association, your product brand or service.

7. Be Realistic About the Impact of Your Policy on the Organization —  In most cases, it’s probably unrealistic to think you’re going to change a company’s management style or corporate personality with a social media policy draft.  Social media policy needs to support the existing leadership style of the organization. For example, if the organization is inclusive and collaborative in its management style, that will lead to one type of social media policy. On the other hand, if you’re in station is commanding control, like say Apple Computer, that will lead to a different type of social media policy. It may be naive to think you can change an organization’s leadership or management style through social media policy.

It is the responsibility of those charged with developing a social media policy to create one that supports the company’s objectives in a way that is compatible with their existing business.  “You or I may not like a lot of the answers to a lot of leaders arrive at. But we have a choice to not work for those people,” says Chris Boudreaux.

As I mentioned earlier if you’d like to hear the podcast with Chris Boudreaux and Paul Gillin on corporate social media policy development, you can find it here.

If you’d like an opportunity to learn more about how to approach social media policy development for your organization you might also consider joining me at my upcoming Social Media Boot Camp in Los Angeles August 18 — 19, 2010 or my Social Media Master Class in Los Angeles August 20 — 2010, where I cover policy development and social media strategy in a workshop environment.

When it comes to a positive user experience, the show presenters have taken painstaking efforts to ensure the comfort of festival attendees. Where there’s a power outlet, power strips are provided and prominently branded by a show sponsor. There are thousands of people attending, but at least in the common areas, there’s plenty of tables and chairs indoors and out where you can sit and congregate. There’s free bottled water and cups in every hallway, instead of forcing you to buy $5 bottles of water.

They even have mounds of Lego in one corner, so there’s something for your kids to do if you’ve got them. And the convention center is conveniently located in downtown Austin, surrounded by tons of restaurants and hotels, all within walking distance.

While the panel sessions were a mixed bag, the keynote and break out presenters were riveting. Kaiser Kuo traveled in from Beijing to present a sociological portrait of Google’s trials and tribulations in China. According to Kaiser, the notion that freedom of expression and free markets are inextricably linked is a predominantly American idea.

“Because they [businesses] can’t be critical of the People’s Republic of China, that doesn’t really hamper their ability to do business,” said Kaiser. In terms of Google’s censorship of their search results in China, he also said that while sanitized results are obviously worse unsanitized results, they’re still better than no results, because they allow people to see information that they wouldn’t otherwise have. “Imperfect information is better than no information,” he said.

Most of China’s leaders were educated as engineers. The country is widely regarded as the world’s largest technocracy and leaders approach problem solving dispassionately. “They tend to believe that everything can be discreetly taken apart and analyzed rationally and solved,” says Kaiser. This logical approach extends not just to diplomacy, but social problem-solving as well.

On the flipside, in her keynote about making sense of privacy and publicity online, Microsoft Researcher Danah Boyd suggested that Google, a technocracy in its own rite, missed the mark with their new Buzz product because they integrated a social network, which people think of as a public system, with email, which has always been regarded as private.

Even though their approach may have been firmly rooted in logic and reason, it was seen by the community as a violation of privacy because it challenged online social norms, proving that logic is not always the best compass for navigating social scenarios. Sure, small talk may be a totally inefficient use of time. But it is a social ritual that is not going away. Logical or not, our customs are deeply interwoven into our social fabric, and they cement our expectations. If we ignore them in the design and implementation of online social networks, we do so at our own peril.

But whether it’s the result of the privacy expectations of consumers or the proprietary nature of business concerns, as Google open web advocate Chris Messina explained, even in the west we are obstructed from obtaining access to information, and he used the activity streams that result from our actions as an example.

Sure, my credit company may send me a paper bill or PDF listing how much I paid to whom on a given date. But an itemized list of what I bought and the geodata concerning where I bought it are withheld, and the data cannot be combined with other information like what songs I was listening to on Pandora when I made those purchases, where I was before and after I made the purchase, which my cell phone provider certainly knows, if I exercised and what I ate on the day I made the purchase. Our credit card providers have better records of our activities than we do. Imagine the usefulness if this data could be combined into an activity stream.

“If you understand your activities, you can make better decisions,” said Chris Messina who is currently working to convince organizations to adopt open standards for activity streams that go beyond RSS so we can develop a better understanding of our behaviors and ultimately live smarter.

Twitter CEO Evan Williams unveiled @anywhere, a new app platform for integrating Twitter into websites. @anywhere is designed to allow website visitors to follow Twitter users from their own sites. Hovering a cursor over a Twitter ID will reveal a pop-up window that enables following directly from a publisher’s website. Discovery is one of the hardest challenges because of the sheer volume of content that’s out there. So putting the ability to follow in the context of the individual or organization your following reduces some of the friction that’s currently present in discovery.

“The main thing that @anywhere does is reduce friction,” said Twitter founder Evan Williams, who admits he’s not sure how developers will ultimately wind up using the new app platform. One of the more obvious features is the ability to tweet links directly from a participating website.

@anywhere can also be used to let users log into any website with their Twitter credentials. Thirteen different websites will beta @anywhere, including Amazon, Ebay, Yahoo, Bing, YouTube, The New York Times, Digg, Salesforce.com and others.

Online infographics specialist Shan Cater of The New York Times showed how the Grey Lady’s website is using data visualization to show you the story as it unfolds. Mashable CEO Pete Cashmore spoke about how the iPad could, for the first time, present publishers with the long sought after paid digital packaging opportunity for news and information. Creative Commons founder Joi Ito spoke passionately about his decision to relocate to Dubai to advocate information sharing in the Middle East, to promote world peace. The Google Droid team showed me how to get the most out of my phone, which I love now! And those are just the highlights.

SXSW is a highly social event, with so many parties every night it’s overwhelming to figure out which one to go to. Most of the parties I went to had blaring music, an open bar and a debaucherated vibe. I’d always regarded SXSW as place professionals went primarily to network and party. And for many people, as you can see, that’s definitely the case.

But I would urge you not to write this event off for that purpose. If you’re interested in the impact of social media on politics, business and culture, this event is quite possible the biggest and the best.

But since there’s always room for improvement, here are some thing that could be done to make SXSW even better:

SXSW encouraged iPhone and Droid users to download a barcode scanning application to scan the badges of people you meet, so you can generate a friend list to take with you into the digital realm. But the scanning the barcode only let you follow a contact in the MySXSW portion of their website. This would have ben effective if your friend list included the person’s contact information, but it does not. And this is something that could certainly have been available on an opt-in basis so you could chose to display your Twitter ID and Facebook profile link as well.
MySXSW.com also had a section where you can review all the panels, pick your favorites, and export the results to your calendar, which other than the fact the names of the presenters and panelists aren’t listed – a critical factor when making your picks – the system had a little glitch that actually resulted in me missing my flight home.

I use Google Calendar, and since I live in Los Angeles, it’s set for the Pacific Time Zone. But my Droid knows when it’s in another time zone, so it adjusts my schedule for the change from the Pacific Time Zone to the Central Time Zone, and moved all my appointments accordingly. I tried to compensate the differential in my head, and for the most part I did a pretty good job, but in the end it got the best of me. Luckily, I just made the last plane out to DFW where I was still able to connect through to LAX.

Finally, there’s a little too much reliance on technology. The pressroom decided not to hand out a schedule of who would be available for interviews because it had been emailed previously. But there was so much information emailed, attending press I spoke with missed it. Having the list in the context of the pressroom would have been helpful. Similarly, unless the presenters announced them or projected a slide, the complete names, companies and titles of the panelists was nowhere to be found in the sessions. Sure it was digitally available. But when you’re at a conference, dealing with small screens and running on batteries, having this data on the printed page, along with the name of the session and the hastag would have been useful.

But these hang-ups shouldn’t deter you from attending. I got a huge amount of value out of attending SXSW. As the chair of the Digital Impact Conference May 6-7 in NYC, I have also learned some very valuable lessons about what makes a great conference.

On a more personal note, my friends Marine and Brian Linder and their 7-year old twins Emma and Owen have been splitting their time between Los Angeles and Austin. They took me around and showed me the town, and I have to say, it’s an absolutely delightful city. For parents with young kids, it is a very alluring destination, as long as it’s not summer.

But to sum it all up, SXSW is an excellent opportunity to deepen your knowledge of the impact of technology on the world. As someone who spends a good deal of time at professional conferences, I wholeheartedly recommend this event not just for networking, but for expanding your consciousness about the evolution of social media.

I’m definitely planning to make it an annual ritual. Will I see you there in 2011?

But after a discussion with Mark Yolton, the senior vice president of the SAP Community Network, a B2B social networking site nearly 2,000,000 members strong and growing monthly at the rate of roughly 30,000 new members spanning 200 countries worldwide, I’m convinced that social networking just may be the killer app for B2B marketing online, and here are 4 reasons why.

1. Faster, Better, Cheaper
According to Yolton, “If it can make our customers more successful than our competitor’s customers, then our competitor’s customers are going to come to us. Or our customers our going to buy more, upgrade faster, extend their capabilities and so forth.” And that’s precisely what the SAP Community Network does.

2. On-Demand Subject Matter Expertise
By providing stakeholders with free access to subject matter experts, the SAP Community Network helps its customers implement its solutions and resolve issues faster, decreasing time to market. “Our hope is that if they can reduce some of the burden of day-to-day operations, adopt best practices and overcome challenges faster, they’re going to have to budget left over to buy more stuff,” says Mark Yolton.

3. Self-Serve Professional Development
Customers can use the SAP social network to increase their knowledge within their organization at a very low cost. These savings extend to SAP as well, because customers share knowledge directly with other customers, reducing the demand on SAP’s salesforce to educate the marketplace. The scale of the SAP B2B social network is also beneficial, since it’s sheer size increases the possibility that there will be customers within the same industry to share best practices.

4. Reputation Management Opportunity
For SAP’s customers, many of who are system integrators, participating in the B2B social network allows them to procure sales leads and actively build their reputations to attract new business opportunities. The social network has become a primary channel for customers and partners to demonstrate their expertise within a focused community, and in so doing, attract qualified leads.

Want More?
To listen to an in depth, one-on-one interview with Mark Yolton of SAP on the benefits of B2B social networking, visit “On the Record…Online” and download the audio transcript, or subscribe to the podcast via RSS or Twitter.