Follow­ing the advice of social media and Web 2.0 experts, you have estab­lished your own blog and joined a num­ber of social sites, includ­ing Face­book, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twit­ter, YouTube, Flickr, Library­Thing, and Upcoming.org, among oth­ers. Now, the experts say you must add con­tent to each of these accounts reg­u­larly to keep them dynamic. So, how’s this sup­posed to make your life easier?

Relax. With some care­ful plan­ning, you can stream­line the process of keep­ing all of your Social Web accounts fresh and engag­ing with­out break­ing your back or the bank. The trick is to make your social accounts work together. Most social sites use the con­cept of open source to make it easy for devel­op­ers to write appli­ca­tions that enhance the fea­tures of the site. For our pur­poses, we will look at appli­ca­tions that can help us stream­line our exist­ing pres­ence in the Social Web.

To demon­strate what I mean about stream­lin­ing the process, I’ll start with an exam­ple. Imag­ine that you have the fol­low­ing social media tools and accounts already in place on the Social Web:

• A Word­Press Blog
• A Face­book Profile
• A Face­book Page
• A MySpace Page
• A YouTube Account
• A Flickr Account
• A Twit­ter Account
• An Upcoming.org Account
• A GoodReads Account

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Twit­ter and Face­book top of mind: The nascent power of weak ties and small touches

What a dif­fer­ence a year makes! The Social Net­work­ing Con­fer­ence debuted sev­eral years ago as a forum for social net­work­ing sites and ven­dors, with enter­prise clients few and far between. Miami 2009 took place Jan­u­ary 22–23, 2009 at the Miami Beach Con­ven­tion Cen­ter, and it was a ver­i­ta­ble enter­prise 2.0 con­fer­ence. Many of the pre­sen­ters hailed from enterprise-focused high tech­nol­ogy ven­dors, but they spoke as social net­work­ing prac­ti­tion­ers. The good prac­tices they shared reflected the mat­u­ra­tion of social net­works. Don’t get me wrong, we are still in early days, but it was obvi­ous to see that social net­works would be com­pletely main­stream this year. Enterprise-focused ven­dors pro­vided addi­tional evi­dence by explain­ing some of the new social net­work fea­tures in their offerings.

You may down­load this report as a PDF:

Social Net­work­ing Watch’s Mark Brooks gave an overview of key trends, while jetBlue’s Mor­gan John­ston and IBM’s Adam Chris­tensen drove home the mes­sage that com­pa­nies could be rewarded for trust­ing their cus­tomers in social net­works. Ford’s Scott Monty, Sun’s Lou Ordor­ica and Microsoft’s Marty Collins shared how they were using social net­work­ing to evolve their com­pa­nies by open­ing up to cus­tomers and adopt­ing P2P, two-way com­mu­ni­ca­tions.Yammer’s David Schwartz and Faceforce’s Clara Shih pre­sented two tech inno­va­tors that promised sig­nif­i­cant dis­rup­tive poten­tial. SAP’s Steve Mann, Opera’s Thomas Ford and Dow Jones’ Tom Aley all shared fas­ci­nat­ing social net­work­ing ele­ments of their port­fo­lios, which were all enterprise-focused. Aware­ness Net­works’ John Bruce was on hand to share good prac­tices and pit­falls. I pre­sented the only industry-focused preso, focused on how social net­works were begin­ning to dis­rupt the U.S. health­care indus­try. I also gave the pre-conference work­shop, Suc­cess­ful Social Net­work­ing Projects in the Enter­prise.

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Last month I had the plea­sure of talk­ing with Ezra But­ler, Luck­yS­tar­tups’ Israel cor­re­spon­dent.  In our inter­view, Ezra and I dis­cuss every­thing from my per­sonal life and where I grew up to the ser­vices I pro­vide as a “one-stop-shop” for star­tups, plus of course, let’s not forget, Ezra’s love for alco­hol and choco­late. We also dis­cuss the dif­fer­ence between Amer­i­can and Israeli men­tal­ity, the amaz­ing Israeli tech scene and I offer my own 2 cents to startups:

1. If you don’t know social media, don’t do it on your own!  If you want to do social media on your own then read up first– if you try to do it with­out guid­ance, odds are your cam­paign won’t be a suc­cess.  If you want to learn more about how to use social media in the right man­ner, a few good blog­gers to read are Chris Bro­gan, Chris Heuer, JD Lasica and my own blog.

2. Don’t rush things!  A lot of star­tups are being pres­sured by investors to launch, espe­cially dur­ing these dif­fi­cult eco­nomic times.  Don’t launch until your prod­uct is at its best or you may suf­fer an unwar­ranted flop!

Watch the video above to see my full interview.

I was thrilled today to see that, as one of his first offi­cial acts of busi­ness, Pres­i­dent Obama signed an exec­u­tive order that effec­tively reversed eight years of gov­ern­ment secrecy by inter­pret­ing the Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion Act as favor­ing dis­clo­sure and trans­parency by default.

Remem­ber, we should all cheer this, because cit­i­zens are the media, too — you don’t have to be a news­pa­per jour­nal­ist to use FOIA. Here’s a reminder from Dan Gill­mor in the pack­age I edited on cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism: Free­dom of infor­ma­tion: It’s for every­one.

Wash­ing­ton Post: New Obama Orders on Trans­parency, FOIA Requests.

CNET News.com: Obama to .gov agen­cies: More Inter­net openness

Broad­cast­ing & Cable: Media Praise Obama FOIA Fixes.

Busi­ness & Media Insti­tute: Obama ‘Open­ness’ Announce­ment Greeted with Cheers in CNBC Stu­dio Says Anchor.

Here’s an excerpt from the FOIA memo (and scroll down for the full memo):

The Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion Act should be admin­is­tered with a clear pre­sump­tion: In the face of doubt, open­ness pre­vails. The Gov­ern­ment should not keep infor­ma­tion con­fi­den­tial merely because pub­lic offi­cials might be embar­rassed by dis­clo­sure, because errors and fail­ures might be revealed, or because of spec­u­la­tive or abstract fears… All agen­cies should adopt a pre­sump­tion in favor of dis­clo­sure, in order to renew their com­mit­ment to the prin­ci­ples embod­ied in FOIA, and to usher in a new era of open gov­ern­ment. The pre­sump­tion of dis­clo­sure should be applied to all deci­sions involv­ing FOIA.

Produc­ing and attend­ing cor­po­rate events, like con­fer­ences and trade shows, is not cheap. But peo­ple still ‘attend in’ and ‘pay by’ the thou­sands for the unfore­seen value to be had in edu­ca­tion and new busi­ness relations.

What­ever rep­u­ta­tion devel­ops from your event, every­one can ben­e­fit from lay­er­ing social tools (some call it Web 2.0 tech­nol­ogy) to enhance the con­nect­ed­ness and inter­ac­tiv­ity among all inter­ested par­ties. Event-based social media is in line with the goals of atten­dees and event pro­duc­ers: to improve phys­i­cal logis­tics, dis­trib­ute infor­ma­tion, con­nect peo­ple, and enhance face-to-face conversations.

If you’re pro­duc­ing an event, begin by ask­ing your­self what ser­vices, often free, can I take advan­tage of to extend the event’s social value for those peo­ple attend­ing, those who can’t attend, and every­one who wants to look back after the fact. You should look towards Web 2.0 tools, those that behave like social­ized desk­top appli­ca­tions, to be the cat­a­lyst to spread the knowl­edge and enhanced inter­ac­tion among all inter­ested par­ties, whether they’re phys­i­cally present or not. An event’s infor­ma­tion and con­ver­sa­tion can be dis­trib­uted via a vari­ety of means: bul­letin boards, pho­tos, video shar­ing, recorded dis­cus­sions, news reports, live wikis, quick updates, opin­ions of event goers, Q&A, group chat, reminders, rec­om­men­da­tions, how-to advice, maps, and direc­tions to the next event.

His­tor­i­cally, social net­works and like-minded Web 2.0 tools empower users to keep in touch with the thou­sands of peo­ple they’ve col­lected in their con­tact data­base. With­out appli­ca­tions like social net­works, blogs, micro-blogs, photo shar­ing, pod­casts, video blogs, and of course email it would be impos­si­ble for any­one to stay in touch with so many people.

When you meet some­one at an event, fol­low through takes effort, a lot of effort. The com­mu­ni­ca­tion drop-off rate fol­low­ing a con­fer­ence is huge. You start with good inten­tions, trade busi­ness cards with the promise of fol­low­ing up. But if you don’t make a note of your meet­ing and send a mes­sage imme­di­ately after the con­fer­ence, the moment is long for­got­ten. Luck­ily, Web 2.0 tools offer plat­forms for atten­dees and pro­duc­ers to take advan­tage of com­mu­ni­ca­tions before, dur­ing, and after an event.

Read the full article

I offer my full arti­cle “How to Web 2.0-enable your live event.” Read online or down­load and print the PDF. The arti­cle offers advice for pro­duc­ers on how to extend the func­tion­al­ity of a live event by social­iz­ing a con­tent net­work with Web 2.0 tools and enabling con­ver­sa­tion around it. Plus it includes a check­list to make sure you haven’t for­got­ten anything.

At noon EST, Barack H. Obama became the 44th pres­i­dent of the United States. In this short video, watch as the (Twit­ter) world watched.

I loved this wise pas­sage — from the Sun­day New York Times Mag­a­zine in Behind ‘Obama’s Peo­ple’ — about the nature of por­trait pho­tog­ra­phy, which I’ve been slowly get­ting into:

In “Cam­era Lucida: [Reflec­tions on Pho­tog­ra­phy],” his search­ing reflec­tion on how pho­tographs con­vey their mean­ing and emo­tional power, Roland Barthes sug­gests that any time a sub­ject steps in front of a cam­era to have his por­trait taken, four peo­ple show up: who that indi­vid­ual thinks he is, who he wants oth­ers to think he is, who the pho­tog­ra­pher thinks the sub­ject is and whom the pho­tog­ra­pher will try to make use of to bring about his art.

The bril­liant Mike Luck­ovich of the Atlanta Jour­nal Con­sti­tu­tion says it all.

Just watched the Inau­gu­ra­tion and inau­gural address. I’ll let the blogosphere’s ver­sion of the pun­di­toc­racy dis­sect it (I’ve con­fined my remarks to Twit­ter.) Mean­time, back in the social media/citizen media space:

Tak­ing the media into your own hands has fil­tered down to the mid­dle school level. I bumped into the report­ing team from the Santa Bar­bara Mid­dle School Teen Press a cou­ple of times at Mac­world Expo but oth­ers where inter­view­ing them so I decided not to dis­tract them with another inter­view request.

Michael Aivali­o­tis at VI Shots has the low­down on these young media makers.