Christina Gagnier on the set of TechZulu Law at BlogWorld.

At BlogWorld Expo earlier this month, I ran into attorney-podcaster Christina Gagnier (pictured above), and we got to talking about the law, since we met a few years ago after publication of my book Darknet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation.

Christina, who describes herself on her Twitter account as an "IP & Tech Lawyer, Online Strategist, Information Broker, Tech Policy Geek," remarked that she was struck by the fact that BlogWorld had absolutely zero panels about the intersection of copyright law and grassroots media.

She then invited me to sit in as a guest on the new TechZulu Law show that she and co-host Lisa Borodkin launched earlier this month. Here's a link to our discussion.

Here are some of the points I raised -- or wanted to raise, because the segment flew by so fast. Issues of law and grassroots media extend well beyond copyright and intellectual property issues.

• As we all become citizen publishers with our blogs, shared videos, Facebook updates and tweets, we should keep in mind that there are not only rights but responsibilities when publishing to a global audience. Remember that bloggers and people using Twitter and Facebook have been hit with lawsuits in the past couple of years.

• Although many thousands do, it's still disappointing that more blogs and citizen media efforts don't take advantage of Creative Commons licenses, which turbo-charges online sharing by letting people fine-tune their copyright. Dan Gillmor's upcoming second book will be published under a CC license as well as all of our contributors' posts on Socialmedia.biz and Socialbrite.org. I'm also working on a new project, CommonsWire.org, that will soon showcase blogs using CC licenses.

• I'd like to see a future BlogWorld session on how to use the Freedom of Information Act. Here's Dan Gillmor's article on Freedom of information: It’s for everyone.

• What are your rights as a photographer when shooting in public places? See our guide to shooting photos in public.

• Do video producers or photographers need a model release form from the people they shoot? What about shooting people performing in public? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. And you better know when the answer is yes. See the rules around capturing public performances and Do video producers need a publicity release waiver?

• Where can you find free images to include on your website and blog and in your newsletters, podcasts (intros, outros, bumpers), whitepapers and presentations? Where can you find video footage you can include in your own works without violating copyright law? See Socialbrite's amazing directories of free photos, free music and free video footage.

• Let's not forget that we need to be aware of the differences in Terms of Service at media hosting sites when uploading our content.

• See Socialbrite's invaluable roundup of resources related to grassroots media and the law for more information -- it's one of the most thorough free set of articles and tutorials on the subject you'll find on the Web. Also see bit.ly/mobilize for resources on how to mobilize your cause.

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Photo by Zuberance

Advice for brands on interacting with your customers

One of the enduring questions in the social media landscape is: Can we really use social tools to move the needle financially? That topic was met head on Tuesday evening at an event in San Francisco titled How to Turn Word of Mouth and Social Media into Sales.

Here's the 48-minute audio of the session, compiled by David Spark:

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At the sold-out gathering, sponsored by Zuberance, a few folks asked me to post a blog entry about the panel, so here are some takeaways from the speakers' remarks:

Becky Brown: Don't outsource your listening

Who: Becky Brown, Director of Social Media Strategy, Intel

Comments: The brand advocacy program is a huge part of how we measure social media success at Intel. We listen to influencers who are talking about Intel. The company uses two main social media tools: Radian6 to measure sentiment and Objective Marketer to manage campaigns. "Be resourced," Becky said. "Use employees and advocates and agencies."

She said it was important to use listening tools "to find people who are not your brand advocates, who are negative advocates." And take it on yourself. You cannot ask an agency to read all your posts for you. You cannot get college grads to handle your Twitter account. These are real customers talking about your brand, so engage with them directly. "I dream of a day when I have a team dedicated to positive and negative responses" on these networks.

(Disclosure: I'm a member of the Intel Insiders social media advisory group.)

Tony Lee: TiVo turns things upside down

Who: Tony Lee, Vice President of Marketing, TiVo

Comments: Summed up the credo of Silicon Valley well: "If you're not failing quickly, you're not doing an interesting enough experiment." Take chances. Launch multiple programs and initiatives.

TiVo stands traditional marketing on its head with its decision to incentivize and reward its long-time customers over newcomers just coming into the showroom floor. "We now give our best deals to our best customers." (Yay! I've had two TiVos since 2004 and wrote about the company in my book Darknet.)

"Your customers aren't stupid. There are times when you need to listen. If a customer is screaming and rude, others will understand. It's OK to ignore people who are rude."

Rob Fugetta: Put in $1, get $10 back

Who: Rob Fuggetta, CEO, Zuberance

Comments: Rob cited a company that assayed customer loyalty with the "ultimate question": "How likely are you to recommend our brand or product to a friend?" Customers responding 0-6 were considered a "detractor"; 7-8 a "passive"; 9-10 an "advocate."

Great advice: Rob told brands to involve customers by inviting them to respond to questions and "make it easy for your advocates to engage with your brand." He pointed to a campaign by HomeAway, a vacation rental site, and said that its success lay in interactions with their community -- "we just gave them a way to connect" -- rather than offering giveaways or free T-shirts.

He pointed to a lawsuit just brought against TripAdvisor, which was sued for defamation because, the litigants alleged, the hotel guests posted 'inaccurate' reviews. Audience reaction? Overwhelmingly on the side of TripAdvisor and the unfettered flow of opinions, right or wrong.

He talked about a $20,000 investment by ClubOne that led to a $180,000 return -- 69 percent of participants in a 14-day free offer brought a form into ClubOne to try out a membership, and 15 percent of those people purchased memberships. You can measure with great specificity the results you get from social marketing.

Final words of wisdom? "Put in $1 and get $10 back" by launching a word of mouth campaign that stokes genuine conversations about a product or service. "This is earned media, not paid media," where fabrication and marketingspeak hold forth.

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Jim Tobin on BlogWorld Expo from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

Last week's BlogWorld & New Media Expo was one of the best social media gatherings I've attended in some time, and not just because of the Las Vegas nightlife. The conference is attracting an increasingly robust set of tracks that highlight leading thinkers from sectors like social health, nonprofits, travel, mobile and social media business. Plus, the networking was awesome.

I conducted a few video interviews, which I'll post here and on our sister site, Socialbrite.org, in the next couple of weeks. Meantime, here are some of my takeaways and highlights from BlogWorld.

Social health, politics, case studies & photos

• Here's my roundup of BlogWorld's Social Health track, which I wrote over at our new site, Time for Nurses. I also wrote about the Registered Nurses Breakfast I attended.

• I didn't bring my Nikon because I had way too much stuff to lug around, but managed to capture these 45 images with my Panasonic camcorder and a point-and-shoot digital camera. Here's Mark Burnett, creator-producer of CBS's "Survivor," with Brian Solis:

• Democratic pollster Mark Penn: We are now approaching 40% of voters not affiliated with either major political party -- the biggest change in politics over the past generation. "It busts the myth that this is a blue-red country." Not sure I agree.

• More Penn: 54% of people in swing districts say the United States would be better off with a third party, according to a recent poll. My take: We have plenty of third parties but the way our elections are conducted is stacked against them.

• Karen Hughes, former adviser to President George W. Bush: In 2000 "we thought Al Gore was a little weird for using a BlackBerry and texting Tipper." By 2004 "we couldn't run a presidential election without" mobile devices.

• Hughes said she was concerned the brute force of anonymity on the Internet, saying it can debase political culture, make discussions more coarse, dehumanize people and lead to more misinformation. Completely agree.

• Panelist: "Twitter.com represents only 18% of all tweets" because majority of users use a Twitter app and referrals through those apps aren't counted. But Twitter itself said last month that 78% of Twitter users use the website, not apps -- see chart above. So can it really be that this minority of power users (less than 22%) account for 82% of all tweets? I've never seen any stats on that.

• The mobile search engine ChaCha now has 500,000 users. If you search using a mobile device and want real humans to help with your search, check out ChaCha.

• I was surprised in one of the sessions to see that only a handful of the 200 people in the room were using Klout, a cool service that tracks social media influence. Klout announced at the conference that it will soon be adding your LinkedIn presence to your Klout Score.

• I sat down for a TechZulu Law interview with the fabulous hosts Christina Gagnier and Lisa Borodkin and hope to do a separate post on that here soon.

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Socialmedia.biz contributor Deltina Hay now has a featured column on Technorati called You'll Be Back: Search Optimization & Survival. The column focuses on search optimization as it applies to the entire Web: search engines, social search, mobile search, the semantic Web, etc. You can read the articles right here on Socialmedia.biz every week.

In this first series of articles, we discuss each of the fundamental elements that are moving us toward an application-driven, Web-based, mobile computing era, and how they will ultimately affect search optimization.

Web 3.0 aims to make online content easier for machines to understand and opens up and links large sets of data in consistent ways.

Finding a definition for Web 3.0 is no easy task when most people are still trying to grasp Web 2.0. However, it is a necessary task since Web 3.0 technologies are encroaching on the Internet quickly. Perhaps the best way is to start at the beginning.

Web 1.0: The Internet in one dimension

In the beginning, the Internet was flat. Think of it as a collection of documents (Websites) lined up side by side. Though many of the sites may have linked to each other, those links simply took a user straight to the linked site, and maybe back again.

Each website was classified using metadata composed of meta-keywords, meta-descriptions, and meta-titles that described what the content of the website was about. At their simplest, search engines used established search algorithms to comb through all of the websites’ metadata to return what it considered relevant results based on your choice of keywords.

The inventor of the Web, Timothy Berners-Lee, refers to this phase of the Internet as a “Web of Documents.”

Web 2.0: A two-dimensional Internet

This next generation of the Internet added another dimension: collaboration.

This added dimension means that websites were linked in a more collaborative way. Instead of sending a visitor away from a site to view related content, the content is actually drawn into the visited site from the related site using RSS feeds or widgets.

But it isn’t only the websites that are more collaborative, it is also the users of the websites’ content. Internet users tag and comment on content and collaborate and interact among themselves.

Search engines have a whole new layer to consider in their searches: user-tagged Web content and the relevant connections between the users themselves.

Berners-Lee named this Internet phase the “Web of Content.”

Web 3.0: The third dimension

Even with the rich metadata, collaboration between websites and users, and user-generated relationships to draw from, machines are still machines, and they still find it difficult to discern actual meaning from human-generated content. The third evolutionary step of the Internet aims to fix that by adding the dimension of “semantics.”

The goal of this phase is to make the content of the Web more easily interpreted by machines. Web content is typically written for humans, which means that it is produced with aesthetics in mind — little attention is paid to consistency or relevancy of the content itself.

Tim Berners-Lee calls this phase -- rather passionately -- the “Web of Data.”

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Iwas impressed by the last gathering put on in San Francisco by this team -- Social Media Marketing 2010 -- so I can heartily recommend Monitoring Social Media, a full day conference on Thursday followed by a half-day training bootcamp on Friday. Monitoring and tracking are among the least understood elements of brands' social media campaigns and long-term efforts, so you should send a rep to soak in as many insights as possible.

There's a meetup for the event tonight at 6:30 at Minna in San Francisco; check it out on the San Francisco Blog Club Meetup.com page.

Socialmedia.biz readers get a special discount of 10 percent when registering by using this discount code: Socialmediabiz10. Hurry, there are only a few tickets left!

Here are the details from event organizer and social media specialist Murray Newlands.

What: Monitoring Social Media – San Francisco

Where: The Box SF, 1069 Howard Street, San Francisco

When: Thursday, Oct. 21, from 8:30 am to 5 pm, followed by an optional half-day bootcamp Friday

Who: The sterling speaker lineup includes Marcel LeBrun, CEO of Radian6, Giles Palmer, founder of Brandwatch, Ben Straley, CEO of Meteor Solutions, Jennifer Zeszut, Chief Social Strategist of Lithium Technologies and many others.

Agenda: The conference will bring together leading brands, PR and marketing experts to discuss the latest ideas, trends and techniques in social media monitoring and measurement. Topics include:

• Social Media Monitoring Tools and Services
• Brand and Reputation Management
• Sentiment Detection and Analysis
• Data Quality and Filtering
• Identifying and Connecting with Influencers
• Beyond Listening: Measurement and ROI
• The Future of Social Media Monitoring
• Case studies and Best Practice

Who's coming:

• Marketing Strategists & Directors
• PR & Communications Managers
• Social Media Experts
• Bloggers & Journalists

Register here. Ticket price includes lunch (optional), refreshments and a handbook and networking drinks at the end of the day.

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Can individuals and organizations use social media to advance the social good and create meaningful societal change?

In his Oct. 4 article in the New Yorker, author Malcolm Gladwell argues no. The revolution will not be tweeted, he says. “We seem to have forgotten what activism is. ... The kind of activism associated with social media isn't [deep] at all. The platforms of social media are built around weak ties.”

I'll be moderating a panel at BlogWorld & New Media Expo on Saturday that addresses just this topic. I plan to open with a 5-minute presentation, above, that looks at a few examples of how organizations have used social media to bring about significant change. And I lay out five steps to get supporters to take action.

This track is geared more toward nonprofits and cause organizations than businesses, although I'll also be participating in the Social Health track. Details on our panel:

Mobilizing Your Social Network

Where: Las Vegas Convention Center, Mariners B11, South Pacific Ballroom

When: 11 am Oct. 16, 2010 (Saturday)

Panelists:

• Andres Glusman, Vice President Strategy & Community, Meetup.com
• Giselle Diaz Campagna, Development Director, Free Speech TV
• Justin Perkins, Director of Nonprofit Strategy, Care2
• George Weiner, CTO, Do Something

Moderator: JD Lasica

Hope to see you there! Contact me to meet up. If you can't make it, follow the #bwe10 and #bwe10mob hashtags.

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There is little doubt that brands today have realized the critical value of social media in developing powerful brand awareness. So now the burning question is how do we effectively engage the people we wish to connect with in a way that creates real, tangible and effective results for the brand.

uTest specializes in software testing services through its community of 30,000+ professional testers from 165 countries around the globe. Companies - from garage startups to Fortune 500 software giants - have used uTest's services to test their web, mobile and desktop applications.

In the last few months, Blonde 2.0 (part of the Socialmedia.biz network) has worked with uTest to create a social presence for the company, nurturing current clients as well as reaching out to potential new clients,while developing a central hub for their community of testers.

We began by working on bringing testers closer together through social media channels. By doing this, testers could connect with one another from around the globe; chat; share notes and join in the uTest community experience. In addition, it created the perfect opportunity for uTest to recruit new and raw talent, enhance brand awareness and create a virtual meeting point for other companies to learn about uTest's services.

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Todd Park, CTO of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, at HealthCamp SF Bay.

Here are some images I shot last Wednesday at the HealthCamp SF unconference at Kaiser Permanente in San Leandro -- part of Health Innovation Week in the San Francisco Bay Area. Some 350 to 400 people turned out for the event, which featured a stellar lineup of thought leaders in healthcare, including Todd Park, CTO of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Here's the Flickr set of 60 photos I took. Next week at our new site TimeforNurses.com I hope to publish my interview with Kathy English, RN, of Cisco, who led a breakout session that covered new technologies for hospitals and nursing departments. (Disclosure: Socialmedia.biz built the nursing site -- I hope you check it out!)

A few snippets from HealthCamp SF

Here are a few of the many takeaways from HealthCamp SF:

• HHS CTO Todd Park trotted out the number of people who play Farmville -- 73 million! -- and said, "The guy or gal who invents Healthville will provide a tremendous service to the community." Healthcare needs to be engaging and interesting.

• More Park: He mentioned that he recently played a game of "healthcare poker" and was hooked for three hours. The game pitted health indicators in Boston vs. those in New York -- say, the lung cancer rate. "I learned things about health care in America that I didn't know," he said.

• Ron Gutman, founder of HealthTap, which puts on Hacking4Health and helps you make better decisions about your health and well being: "There are a million developers on the Facebook platform today. We want to bring 100,000 developers to health." (Check the #Hack4Health hashtag from time to time.)

• Alex Tam (@alextam) of Frog Design showed off Healthy Commute, a Google Maps mashup still in development that will let you see healthier restaurants along your commute.

• You've probably seen the commercials for Nike Plus, which contains a sensor in your running shoes to track fitness -- it now has 2 million users.

• Susan Brown of Silicon Valley led a breakout session and pointed to two valuable resources: Realwomenonhealth.com and The Women's Health Conversation Network.

• Carl Says (@carlsays) looks to be a cool iPad app that provides rewards/deals when you check into Facebook Places or Foursquare.

• A fun mobile app: RunKeeper lets you go for a run with your phone and you get a 5k badge that lets you brag to your Foursquare network.

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An excerpt from Jeffrey Hayzlett's book 'The Mirror Test'

Jeffrey Hayzlett, a friend of Socialmedia.biz, is the author of the best-selling book The Mirror Test and former chief marketing officer of Kodak. He is the keynote speaker at Search Engine Strategies Chicago, Oct. 18-22. Following is an excerpt from "The Mirror Test: Is Your Business Really Breathing":

Don’t be shocked, but social networking is nothing new. It’s been around for years as the Kiwanis or Rotary club. But with Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, it takes on a more global stage, where the curtain goes up and down faster than ever before.

But there’s another old idea that’s gaining new momentum and picking up speed. The elevator pitch is what most people know because it’s the time you need to sell what your company does and what you do, in the time of an elevator ride. I call it the 118. The elevator ride used to take three to five minutes, but today your time is less than that. It’s 118 seconds. Technology makes things go faster, but also increased the need for speed and nimbleness in responding. Today we’re left with just seconds to capture someone’s attention and less than two minutes to get your whole message completed. You only have 118 seconds to get that pitch out and done. It breaks down to eight seconds to get my attention and hook me, and then up to 110 seconds to drive it all home. All told, less than two minutes!

Why that amount of time? It’s about people and persistence. The first eight seconds is the length of time the average human can concentrate on something and not lose some focus. Then it’s a special amount of time for one of the roughest and toughest rides in the world – a qualified ride in professional bull riding. In these first eight seconds it’s crucial you be focused, strong and compel the listener to want more. You cannot give up as one of the most brutal animals in the world tries to buck you. This is no different than a good prospect that may not have spare minutes, but spare seconds that you need to take advantage of and appeal to. If you’re pitching to me, if you get me hooked in those 8 seconds, and I’ll give you 110 more to drive your message home with no bull. But if you cannot sell me on the idea at the end of the 118 seconds, I will begin to tune out. I know at the end of 118 if we’re going forward to a sale or if we’re done.

Every year I attend hundreds of meetings, conferences and events where I am inundated with entrepreneurs, business owners, managers, or their sales and marketing representatives. But too many don’t understand the importance of elements in the 118. The 118 is more than just what your business does or unique selling proposition (USP). It’s crucial to your brand and explains you, your business’s promise and the promises you will deliver on. Your 118 defines and explains the promises you make.

The 118 connects directly to the foundation of every business’s growth. I’m not saying a bad one means certain failure, but it’s rare that I see a good one that when put in place properly does not help a business grow.

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