Launch­ing today, Tweet­share lets you have Twit­ter con­ver­sa­tions around any piece of content

The annoy­ing aspect of Twit­ter is that it’s really dif­fi­cult to fol­low con­ver­sa­tions. There’s noth­ing inher­ent to Twit­ter that makes it easy for you to back­track a con­ver­sa­tion. What many peo­ple use for con­ver­sa­tion track­ing is hash­tags, and then search­ing on the hash­tags. Prob­lem with hash­tags is they’re not threaded so you can’t see specif­i­cally how one per­son responded to another. Nor can you see the begin­ning of the conversation.

One ser­vice I’ve used before that’s a good solu­tion is Twitoaster, which allows you to fol­low con­ver­sa­tions that you ini­ti­ate, or some­one else ini­ti­ates. It’s pretty good if you ask a ques­tion and you want to fol­low everyone’s answer to it, but it’s hard to back track a tweet up to its source.

Fol­low­ing con­ver­sa­tions is nec­es­sary because so many peo­ple send out tweets that don’t ref­er­ence what they’re talk­ing about beyond the @ reply.

Launch­ing today is a new ser­vice called Tweet­share, which allows you to have Twit­ter con­ver­sa­tions around any piece of con­tent, whether it’s an HD video, pic­ture, Word doc­u­ment, or any­thing else. Load the con­tent, and then tweet it out from Tweet­share. The auto­mat­i­cally included link takes read­ers of your tweet back to the Tweet­share space where the con­tent resides. Each response you give includes that Tweet­share space link, allow­ing every­one to be in the same space talk­ing about the piece of con­tent. As you would with a blog or web­site, you can cre­ate a branded Tweet­share page to post all your tweet­able content.

Tweet­share is also a brand new client of mine, and I’ll be attend­ing SXSW next week shoot­ing videos for Tweet­share and post­ing them to their tweet­able zones. I invite all of you to par­tic­i­pate then, but feel free to try out the ser­vice now. All you need to do is log in with your Twit­ter account.

But I’m inter­ested in know­ing what ser­vices you use to fol­low Twit­ter con­ver­sa­tions. Do you use any, or do you just use search? Or do you don’t even bother because it’s far too complicated?

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Whet­her you’re look­ing to get hired, or you’re look­ing for A+ tal­ent, you want to be seen as or want to be look­ing for super users.

This 14-minute live pre­sen­ta­tion was given at the Dice event at The Com­puter His­tory Museum in Moun­tain View, Calif. In the pre­sen­ta­tion I explain the super user model and give exam­ples of how com­pa­nies have found, built rela­tion­ships with, and hired super users.

What do you think? Do you think the 8 ½ x 11 paper resume has any future in the age of social media? If you want to get hired, become a super user. Attach your­self to a brand and/or indus­try. Cre­ate, share, and build rela­tion­ships with indus­try mem­bers and other super users. And if you’re a com­pany look­ing for tal­ent, look to super users. They’re highly vis­i­ble and pas­sion­ate. You’ll find they’re an excel­lent source for mar­ket­ing, staffing, and busi­ness development.

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At the RSA Con­fer­ence in San Fran­cisco, I inter­viewed Andrew Hay (@andrewsmhay), a secu­rity blog­ger and Infor­ma­tion Secu­rity Ana­lyst at the Uni­ver­sity Leth­bridge in Alberta, Canada. Hay had keynoted the hip­per side secu­rity con­fer­ence known as Secu­rity B-Sides ear­lier this week.

One of the issues Hay talked about at B-Sides was that secu­rity blog­gers were becom­ing the voice of the secu­rity indus­try, and as a result, they had a respon­si­bil­ity to the indus­try. Hay said that secu­rity blog­ging first respon­si­bil­ity is to be edu­cat­ing every­one else and help­ing oth­ers under­stand the chal­lenges of secu­rity. Part of that involves engag­ing oth­ers on how to solve secu­rity prob­lems collaboratively.

Given that blog­gers are not beholden to an edi­tor or a pub­lisher, the secu­rity blog­ging com­mu­nity self-polices each other and hap­pily jump down each other’s back when they make mis­takes. Sure they’re in secu­rity, but they’re only human, so they do make mistakes.

Lastly, I asked Hay what’s the best way to com­mu­ni­cate with a secu­rity blog­ger if they say some­thing for which you don’t agree. He gave the most com­mon, and I believe cor­rect response, and that’s to not air your argu­ment out pub­licly online. Pick up the phone and have a con­ver­sa­tion. Find out what the core of the dis­pute is. Hay’s seen a lot of anger quelled by a sim­ple phone call.

Check out more of Tripwire’s cov­er­age from the 2010 RSA Con­fer­ence in San Francisco.

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I’m at the 2010 RSA Con­fer­ence here in San Fran­cisco this week report­ing for Trip­wire.

Before the expo floor opened, I sneaked in (yes, seri­ously, at the secu­rity con­fer­ence), and got a pre­view of Sophos’ pre­sen­ta­tion on pro­tect­ing your­self from social net­work­ing mal­ware. After his prepara­tory run through, I asked “media tart” (his words, not mine) Gra­ham Clu­ley (@gcluley) if I could inter­view him on how to pro­tect your­self and your com­pany from mal­ware over social net­works. He pro­vided some good tips. Some of them I’m sure you’ve heard before, but do you actu­ally adhere to them all? Here’s a sum­mary of his recommendations:

• Get an anti-virus pro­gram that scans every link you click on.
• Just because some­one who says they’re you’re friend, they’re not necessarily.
• To pro­tect your­self from what’s behind a short URL, add a plu­gin to your browser that gives you a pre­view of what the long URL is. As a Fire­fox user, Clu­ley rec­om­mends Long URL Please.
• Use dif­fer­ent pass­words for dif­fer­ent sites. Clu­ley says 33% of peo­ple use the same pass­word for every sin­gle site. I per­son­ally use Roboform2Go for pass­word memorization.
• Don’t use a dic­tio­nary word as your pass­word. Pick some­thing dif­fi­cult that com­bines let­ters and numbers.
• The scam­mers are always out to get you. Make sure you’re aware of the threats by read­ing secu­rity blogs. He highly sug­gested you fan the offi­cial secu­rity page on Face­book.

Read more of Graham’s tips on secu­rity on his blog. And please check out more of Tripwire’s cov­er­age from the 2010 RSA Con­fer­ence in San Francisco.

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Here’s our roundup of social media, tech and mar­ket­ing con­fer­ences and events sched­uled for the month of March. For the full year, see: Cal­en­dar of 2010 social media, tech and mar­ket­ing con­fer­ences.

Note that we’ve pub­lished a cal­en­dar of 2010 social change con­fer­ences on our sis­ter site, Socialbrite.

We’ll pub­lish a list of note­wor­thy con­fer­ences and events on the first of each month dur­ing the year. Hope to see you at some of these. If you know of other must-attend events, please add them by post­ing in the com­ments at the bot­tom and I’ll add them as I can.

Con­fer­ence	Date	Place
March
Global Ignite Week	March 1–4	World­wide
Ignite, started in 2006, brings together geeks to do 5-minute talks in front of small audi­ences — with slides that rotate every 15 sec­onds. Global Ignite Week fea­tures 500 talks in 40 cities, includ­ing New York, LA, the Bay Area, Boston, Madrid, Manila, Paris and Sydney.
SMX West	March 2–4	Santa Clara, Calif.
SMX West fea­tures three days of ses­sions, keynotes and access to the lead­ing ven­dors in search mar­ket­ing. Ses­sions will focus on SEO, PPC, social media, local & mobile search and more. Other SMX events: Toronto (April 8–9), Syd­ney (April 22–23), Lon­don (May 17–18), Seat­tle (June 8–9), New York (Oct. 4–6).
The Co-Alignment of the Cor­po­rate and Per­sonal Brand	March 4–5	Chicago
You’ll develop your copy of “The Draft,” SOHO’s 16-page social com­mu­ni­ca­tions pol­icy work­book for busi­nesses and cor­po­ra­tions. The focus in 2010 is co-aligning the cor­po­rate brand with inter­nal and exter­nal communications.
Search­Fest	March 9	Port­land, Ore.
Search­Fest is ded­i­cated to search mar­ket­ing edu­ca­tion and net­work­ing. Indus­try experts and thought lead­ers from around the coun­try are sched­uled to deliver in-depth pre­sen­ta­tions. This year will be the most com­pre­hen­sive Search­Fest ever with top­ics like Social Media Mar­ket­ing, Advanced Search Engine Opti­miza­tion, Local Search, Ana­lyt­ics, Paid Search Mar­ket­ing and more.
We Media Miami	March 9–11	Miami
Here you can meet the Game Chang­ers, watch the PitchIt! finals, be a part of a live global broad­cast by The BBC and exchange ideas with a group of inno­va­tors, thinkers, vision­ar­ies, investors and entrepreneurs.
Media Sum­mit	March 10–11	New York City
Hun­dreds of the country’s top media, enter­tain­ment and tech­nol­ogy exec­u­tives are expected to attend this gath­er­ing to dis­cuss broad­band, wire­less, adver­tis­ing, TV, film, cable, satel­lite, pub­lish­ing, news and other media.
South by South­west*	March 12–21	Austin
This year’s SXSW sched­ule: Inter­ac­tive March 12–16, Film March 12–20, Music March 17–21. Coun­ter­cul­ture meets geek techies, indie film­mak­ers and alt bands.
Social Net­work­ing World Forum — Europe	March 15–16	Lon­don
The con­fer­ence bills itself as Europe’s lead­ing social media event. The event fea­tures con­fer­ence streams and work­shops on enter­prise social media, mobile, social TV and more. A date for the World Forum — North Amer­ica in the fall has not been announced
MIX10	March 15–17	Las Vegas
Now in its fifth year, Microsoft’s MIX con­fer­ence is a gath­er­ing of design­ers and devel­op­ers who are build­ing the world’s most inno­v­a­tive websites.
ad:tech	March 16–17	Syd­ney
ad:tech is the event for dig­i­tal mar­keters, with lots of hands-on ses­sions with prac­ti­cal tips and case stud­ies. Other ad:tech events are in San Fran­cisco (April 19–21), Sin­ga­pore (June 3–4), Lon­don (Sept. 21–22), Shang­hai (Oct.), Tokyo (Oct. 28–29), Bei­jing (Nov. 17–18) and New York (Nov. 3–5).
OMMA Global	March 17–18	San Fran­cisco
This bian­nual con­fer­ence and trade show for the busi­ness of Online Media, Mar­ket­ing and Adver­tis­ing attracts about 4,000 peo­ple. This year’s theme is Cut­ting The Cord: The End Of Online.
DEMO spring	March 21–23	Palm Desert, Calif.
More than 20,000 inno­v­a­tive tech­nolo­gies have been reviewed and 1,500 com­pa­nies selected to launch on the DEMO stage over the past 19 years. How­ever, the start-ups pay a steep fee to do so.
Opti­miza­tion Summits	March 23–24	Dal­las
At the Dal­las 2010 Opti­miza­tion Sum­mits, you’ll expe­ri­ence learn­ing by doing. You’ll build your own two-day cur­ricu­lum on top­ics rang­ing from social media to rev­enue management.
Social Media Strate­gies for Travel	March 24–25	San Fran­cisco
Social media is chang­ing the way we com­mu­ni­cate with our cus­tomers. Get the low-down on how travel com­pa­nies are cap­i­tal­iz­ing on social media and take home prac­ti­cal advice on how to drive real return from your social media initiatives.
Social­Tech	March 25	San Jose, Calif.
Social­Tech 2010 brings together the vision­ar­ies and experts who are using the power of social media to trans­form the way that B2B tech­nol­ogy com­pa­nies mar­ket their prod­ucts and services.
The Freemium Sum­mit — The Busi­ness of Free	March 26	San Fran­cisco
The first Freemium Sum­mit is a one-day event focused on explor­ing what it takes to suc­ceed under the freemium busi­ness model.
Where 2.0	Mar 30-Apr 1	San Jose, Calif.
Sit­u­a­tional aware­ness has become one of the essen­tial ana­lyt­ics for our lives and our busi­ness. Where 2.0 looks at mon­e­ti­za­tion strate­gies, emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies and how new com­pa­nies are jump­ing in to change the rules.

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Keep­ing your Social Web accounts up to date can seem over­whelm­ing, but there are ways to make the process more pain­less. This pre­sen­ta­tion on Slideshare out­lines two sam­ple inte­gra­tion plans you can imple­ment to help stream­line your Social Web presence.

Let’s say that you have a blog as well as accounts on Face­book, LinkedIn, Twit­ter, Flickr and YouTube. Using either plan, you’ll want to stream­line such tasks as updat­ing your sta­tus updates, dis­trib­ut­ing your images and dis­trib­ut­ing your video clips.

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Nicholas de Wolff, National Film Fes­ti­val for Tal­ented Youth:
“Too many peo­ple are div­ing into the Web 2.0 and 3.0 pools
before they even know with whom they are swimming.”

Social busi­ness seen as mak­ing seis­mic waves in mar­ket­ing, sales, operations

The adop­tion of Web 2.0 and social net­work­ing accel­er­ated sig­nif­i­cantly over the past year, and it shows no sign of stop­ping. Global dig­i­tal word of mouth is dis­rupt­ing grow­ing swaths of busi­ness mod­els, and CEOs want to under­stand its oppor­tu­ni­ties and threats. Although the Web is resplen­dent with prog­nos­ti­ca­tions from social media gurus, the voices of enter­prise prac­ti­tion­ers are too rarely heard.

To rem­edy that, I’ve gath­ered the per­spec­tives of highly expe­ri­enced exec­u­tives who share their thoughts on how Web 2.0 is chang­ing their busi­nesses and mind­sets. They also share its lim­i­ta­tions and prob­lems. Keep in mind that each con­trib­u­tor wrote inde­pen­dently, and I have made no attempt to unify their views, although I will offer my analy­sis and con­clu­sions as well as the intrigu­ing back­story below. Here is a sam­pling of the group’s eclec­tic insights:

• A seis­mic shift in mar­ket­ing is emer­gent, and chief mar­ket­ing offi­cers will require robust strate­gies to suc­ceed con­sis­tently with Web 2.0 and use it to their advantage.
• Gam­i­fi­ca­tion will rede­fine “work” and “play” and grad­u­ally make them indistinguishable.
• Per­for­mance demands on gov­ern­ment will force it to shed its lag­gard stereo­type and pio­neer social busi­ness at local and fed­eral levels.
• Arguably the biggest dis­rup­tion of all is that green energy is enabling bil­lions of pre­vi­ously uncon­nected peo­ple to join the world as par­tic­i­pants; China and India are two of the fastest grow­ing economies of the world, and mil­lions of peo­ple are jump­ing online every year. Infra­struc­ture lim­i­ta­tions are forc­ing extreme innovation.

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Shel Israel and Laura Fit­ton at New­Comm 2009m (photo (cc) by Ken­neth Yeung)

I’ve been a senior fel­low with the non­profit Soci­ety for New Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Research since shortly after it was founded about 6 years ago and always look for­ward to the New­Comm Forum it holds each spring in North­ern Cal­i­for­nia and fall in Boston/Cambridge.

SNCR has just announced the lineup for the next New­Comm Forum and is offer­ing a dis­count to read­ers of Socialmedia.biz. I’ll also be giv­ing an hour­long pre­sen­ta­tion on New Paths for Jour­nal­ism. Details:

What: New­Comm Forum, the pre­mier con­fer­ence focused on help­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions pro­fes­sion­als to lever­age the power of the social web. Found­ing fel­low Shel Holtz calls it the best event of its kind.

When/where: April 20–23, 2010, San Mateo, Calif.

Theme: The Social Web – Redefin­ing Business

Dis­count code: NCF133 gets you a $100 dis­count, plus an addi­tional $200 early bird dis­count if you reg­is­ter by March 12. Reg­is­ter on this page.

My ses­sion: Entre­pre­neur­ial jour­nal­ism: Next year’s media model today
Fri­day, April 23 at 10:15am

Story after story pro­claims a cri­sis in U.S. jour­nal­ism, as major news orga­ni­za­tions appear on the brink of bank­ruptcy and the pub­lic is left won­der­ing who’ll be left to cover the news. J.D. Lasica, a jour­nal­ist and social media con­sul­tant, argues that a solu­tion can be found not in prop­ping up exist­ing news insti­tu­tions but in mak­ing way for a new gen­er­a­tion of
entre­pre­neur­ial news gath­er­ers who marry the best of jour­nal­ism with the dynamic, con­nec­tive abil­i­ties of social media.

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(CC) photo by Joi Ito

Yester­day I wore two hats as a guest and co-host on David Mathison’sBe the Media Radio pod­cast on BlogTalkRa­dio along with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. The topic was online com­mu­ni­ties — how to grow, nur­ture and sus­tain them,

Here’s our hour­long con­ver­sa­tion — Jimmy Wales comes in about 20 min­utes into it:

It was a wide-ranging con­ver­sa­tion about the democ­ra­ti­za­tion of media, the birth of Our­me­dia and YouTube, the thriv­ing global open source devel­op­ment com­mu­nity of Word­Press, Cre­ative Com­mons licenses, Ning, entre­pre­neur­ial jour­nal­ism, Sil­i­con Valley’s mantra of embrac­ing fail­ure, and the state of Wikipedia. (Dis­clo­sure: I’m men­tioned in a cou­ple of chap­ters of Mathison’s book, Be the Media.)

I con­veyed to Wales an obser­va­tion by author and friend Howard Rhein­gold, who lit­er­ally wrote book on vir­tual com­mu­ni­ties: All online com­mu­ni­ties have life cycles, he said. When they mature, it becomes more dif­fi­cult to main­tain a fresh flow of new­com­ers. Mature online com­mu­ni­ties can con­tinue for years, but there is a dan­ger of stag­na­tion that accom­pa­nies longevity. Howard has tried a num­ber of dif­fer­ent approaches with his own com­mu­ni­ties, pro­vid­ing a “fresh space” for newcomers.

Wales said it was a thought­ful point and an ongo­ing chal­lenge for Wikipedia, which is now com­ing up with inno­v­a­tive ways to keep peo­ple engaged, par­tic­u­larly mak­ing the edit­ing expe­ri­ence more intu­itive for nongeeks. (Even for a geek like me, fig­ur­ing out how to do some­thing as sim­ple as adding a foot­note remains obdu­rately difficult.)

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2 essen­tial tools: Dis­clo­sure Best Prac­tices Toolkit & Social Media Poli­cies roundup

Today’s Blog­Well event in San Diego offers a good time to post a sum­mary of resources avail­able for busi­nesses and orga­ni­za­tions begin­ning to dab­ble in social media. This is not the Wild, Wild West where any­thing goes. By now cer­tain cer­tain cus­toms, eth­i­cal stan­dards and unspo­ken social inter­ac­tions are widely expected on the social Web.

First, a word about Blog­Well: How Big Brands Use Social Media. reps from the U.S. Navy, Star­bucks, Clorox, USAA, Tur­b­o­Tax and State Farm are talk­ing openly about how they’re using social media in their com­pa­nies or orga­ni­za­tions. There’s a live blog of the event’s proceedings.

One rea­son Blog­Well rises above some of the other social mar­ket­ing events pop­ping up every­where is its asso­ci­a­tion with the Social Media Busi­ness Coun­cil (for­merly the Blog Coun­cil, a asso­ci­a­tion of major brands that use social media. See a list of mem­ber com­pa­nies — I just signed up for their newslet­ter. And socialmedia.org — some­one shelled out a few dol­lars to buy that domain.

“Almost every social media scan­dal involv­ing brands boils down to a lack of dis­clo­sure.”
– Andy Sernovitz

When I attended the first of two Blog­Wells, orga­nizer Andy Ser­novitz made a point of putting ethics and dis­clo­sure front and cen­ter. “The num­ber one issue around ethics comes down to dis­clo­sure — being hon­est about your true iden­tity,” he said.

Dis­clo­sure is essen­tial, easy but requires edu­ca­tion, Ser­nowitz said. “You don’t tack on a dis­clo­sure state­ment later, you start with that. You start with ethics and that’s how you lead.” It’s not only the right thing to do, but “it’s essen­tial as a way to stay out of trou­ble. Almost every social media scan­dal involv­ing brands boils down to a lack of dis­clo­sure. The blo­gos­phere expects to know your motivations.”

The “10 magic words” for employ­ees ven­tur­ing onto the social Web, he said, are these: “I work for X, and this is my per­sonal opin­ion.” That dis­claimer goes a long way in help­ing to sep­a­rate offi­cial com­pany pol­icy from an employee’s per­sonal views.

Here’s my Dis­clo­sure and con­flict of inter­est state­ment, which I posted in early 2008 and have updated repeat­edly since then.

Dis­clo­sure Best Prac­tices Toolkit

The Social Media Busi­ness Coun­cil has cre­ated a Dis­clo­sure Best Prac­tices Toolkit — a handy and essen­tial resource for any com­pany involved in social media. This is not an impe­ri­ous one-size-fits-all list of must-dos — “we’re not a stan­dards body or trade asso­ci­a­tion,” as Ser­novitz says. Instead, it’s an open source toolkit to help you build your social media policy.

“Adapt it to your com­pany, teach your team, improve ad share,” he adds. It could be a full-blown pol­icy that comes out of cor­po­rate com­mu­ni­ca­tions, it might be part of your company’s employee hand­book, or it could be a set of infor­mal guide­lines for your depart­ment or team.

Down­load the 10-page tookit as a Word docx. Details:

• How to use
• FAQ
• Cre­ative Com­mons License
• Check­list 1: Dis­clo­sure of Identity
• Check­list 2: Personal/Unofficial Blog­ging and Outreach
• Check­list 3: Blog­ger Relations
• Check­list 4: Com­pen­sa­tion and Incentives
• Check­list 5: Agency and Con­trac­tor Disclosure
• Check­list 6: Cre­ative Flexibility

This is an Open Source Document

• This is a liv­ing doc­u­ment that will con­tin­u­ally change.
• This doc­u­ment will con­tinue to evolve with com­mu­nity feed­back and participation.
• Share and change this doc­u­ment as much as you like. It is licensed under a Cre­ative Com­mons Attri­bu­tion 3.0 Unported License and attribute it to the Social Media Busi­ness Coun­cil and link to http://www.socialmedia.org/disclosure.

The next Blog­Well gath­er­ings are in Cincin­nati on April 7 and Seat­tle on May 5.

Socialmedia.biz has put together a resource guide to Social Media Poli­cies cre­ated by cor­po­ra­tions, media orga­ni­za­tions, non­prof­its and other groups. The poli­cies of Intel, HP, IBM, Wells Fargo, the Wash­ing­ton Post and Bread for the World are among those included. Here are some of our posts on ethics and best prac­tices in the online arena:

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