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's Be 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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Heidi shows off the ingenious Telefingers.

This year's Macworld Expo was the smallest I can remember. I've attended most Mac Expos for the past decade, which used to be a celebration of the genius new products from Apple, but this was the first show that Apple abandoned. And so the downsized Expo took up only San Francisco's Moscone North hall instead of North and South.

That said, there are still a slew of cool products on display at the Expo. My favorite: Cabulous, an iPhone app that lets you actually see the location of cabs in your area and add cabbies to your network of favorites.

Here's a Flickr photo set of what I caught.

Memory lane

• Macworld Expo 2009 (mostly photos)

• Middle schoolers as citizen reporters (Jan. 2009)

• No ‘one more thing’ at MacWorld Expo (2008)

• DataPilot: sync your cell phone and computer (Feb. 2008)

• At Macworld: Steve Jobs unveils the iPhone (2007)

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Spent last weekend at an annual retreat put on by a friend and consultant. This was the biggest gathering to date, with 90 of us from around the U.S. and Europe holed up in Marshall, Calif., near Point Reyes. (I mean holed up literally, given the extreme weather and the lack of Internet and cell phone access throughout.)

This was a retreat, not a conference, so I wasn't in note-taking mode. But here are a few dozen photos I captured, and some interesting snippets. (We played by Aspen Institute rules, so we could report on comments but not attribute them without permission):

• I helped steer the most spirited discussion of the weekend, alongside author Scott Rosenberg, about the fate of news and journalism as they decouple from daily newspapers. I was surprised by the near-unanimity of the view that the kind of investigative journalism performed by news organizations like the New York Times needs to be preserved. How we get there is a story for another day.

• Coolest allusion of the weekend: to The Tralfamadorians, the creatures in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five who could see in four dimensions, including everything about a person's past and future.

• Attendee Tom Gruber's new iPhone app Siri launched during the retreat and shot to the No. 1 lifestyle app in the iTunes Store. I can't wait to use it -- it's getting great reviews (NY Times) (USA Today).

• "intellectual property regimes are the exact opposite of social capital." (I would differ.)

• "Stone Age people had more leisure time than we do."

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I've been in the social media space now for quite a few years and I meet with at least 5 companies each week who have understood the importance of utilizing social media for their businesses but are still afraid of entering their brands into the new media age.

What are they worried about? Here are the top five concerns that I've heard from executives and my response to them:

1) They're afraid they'll lose control of their brand and open themselves up to negative feedback - When you open a business and start marketing your services and exposing your brand to others, people will start talking about your brand. And this is why you exposed them to your brand in the first place.

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In a tag team interview session, I interviewed Carlos Rodela, CEO of AllofUsAreFamous and co-host of “Rad on the Web.” Rodela hosts many shows on the Mevio network. Mevio streams its shows live through the Justin.tv network which has a live chat built into the page.

I talked with Rodela about the importance of engaging with your audience live during your show. It increases viewer loyalty but viewers can also provide content for your show. Watch Rodela's interview with me about where my media career all started, "The Baywatch Report."