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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How a social media cam­paign helped HP Israel’s PSG Group gain momentum

When Blonde 2.0 began to assist HP Israel’s Per­sonal Sys­tems Group with their social media mar­ket­ing efforts, we found they had no rep­re­sen­ta­tion in the social media world. A com­mu­nity had not yet been built for the group and their cus­tomer base did not have a proper net­work to turn to for ques­tions and answers.

Let me tell you what we did. Over the course of a few months’ time, Blonde 2.0 and HP quickly exposed HP Israel’s PSG group to the social media world and began engag­ing with cus­tomers and poten­tial cus­tomers to increase the group’s brand aware­ness in the community.

When you build a com­mu­nity from scratch, the tar­get audi­ence you pri­mar­ily want to attract are com­mu­nity lead­ers, early adapters and other movers & shak­ers in your indus­try in order to gain some momen­tum. Blonde 2.0 launched HP Israel’s Face­book Fan Page in Sep­tem­ber and started from a zero fan base. Since close to a third of Israel’s pop­u­la­tion has a Face­book pro­file – 2.5 mil­lion Israelis and the demo­graphic groups we wanted to tar­get were found on Face­book — this social net­work was a great place to start build­ing a com­mu­nity around HP.

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ICQ7 intro­duces a way to man­age social mes­sag­ing across networks

If we look back in his­tory , we will find that much before Face­book, MySpace and YouTube, there was ICQ. For any­one who doesn’t know, ICQ was cre­ated in 1996 and is now wholly owned by AOL. Back in the day, ICQ was the pio­neer of social media and real time updates. It intro­duced us to instant mes­sag­ing and a rev­o­lu­tion­ary new way to com­mu­ni­cate with peo­ple instantly in real time.

ICQ could have been a sort of Face­book or Twit­ter a long time ago. It’s taken ICQ quite a long time to get back to its sta­tus as a social pio­neer, but now with its new client soft­ware, ICQ is get­ting back to what it was about all the way from the begin­ning: a place to inter­act with your friends every­where. “Every­body Every­where” is, after all, ICQ’s slo­gan, and being an ICQ vet­eran myself, I am very excited to announce the launch of the new ICQ 7.

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It’s about tar­get­ing the right few, not the undif­fer­en­ti­ated many

Many B2B com­pa­nies ask me whether social media is right for them. This post is all about why social media and B2B go hand in hand.

Social media is all about con­ver­sa­tional mar­ket­ing, and that’s why it works so well with a B2B strat­egy. Social media is not about the masses. It is about reach­ing your tar­get audi­ence. Lis­ten­ing before sell­ing and hear­ing before talking.

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Yester­day I attended Jeff Pul­ver’s 140 Con­fer­ence in Tel Aviv. I really enjoyed @thekotel’s pre­sen­ta­tion, which unfor­tu­nately I didn’t film — go to the twit­ter pro­file and check it out. Alon Nir is doing a remark­able job there.

The lec­ture I enjoyed in par­tic­u­lar was Yedda CTO Yaniv Golan’s “The 140-characters Netscape,” where he said:

“I believe that in two years the Twit­ter brand will be in the same posi­tion as the Netscape brand is in now: Twit­ter will be cred­ited with start­ing the rev­o­lu­tion, and paving the road for fol­low­ers. But at the same time, it will be pushed into a minor posi­tion in the mar­ket with other play­ers tak­ing the lead or, as is the case with Netscape, will no longer exist.”

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I was invited yes­ter­day morn­ing to the Biz Stone press con­fer­ence hosted by the Col­lege of Man­age­ment in Tel Aviv, Israel. For me per­son­ally, it was very excit­ing to meet one of the founders of the social plat­form that I love and admire the most. Biz didn’t sur­prise us with any new acqui­si­tion in Israel but mostly talked about the role that Twit­ter has been play­ing until now and what the future holds for the com­pany. He did say that 2010 is the year that Twit­ter will start mak­ing real money.

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Last week Eytan Galai, brother of Yaron Galai (founder of Quigo, which was sold to AOL) came to our offices to show us all the lat­est that’s been hap­pen­ing with Out­brain. For those who don’t know, Out­brain has recently launched its rev­enue pro­gram Out­Loud.

For $10 a month, you can sub­mit an inter­est­ing arti­cle to Out­Loud. Out­brain will then take the arti­cles you sub­mit­ted — rang­ing from jour­nal­ism and blog entries to press releases for which you want to get more vis­i­bil­ity — and rec­om­mend them on rel­e­vant pages across thou­sands of sites using their con­tent rec­om­men­da­tion engine, rang­ing from USA Today, Slate, Fox and Tri­bune to Golf.com and the Sport­ingNews.

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Image by Polyvore.com

With the new plat­forms of open­ness, all you need is social love

These days we’re liv­ing a historian’s wet dream. We are con­sis­tently record­ing his­tory through all our social tools. Our actions, feel­ings, thoughts, our every­thing, con­stantly being recorded. From where we are eat­ing to what we are annoyed about to what it is that makes us tick. Not only are we record­ing the “big” things but we are record­ing every­thing. It’s his­tory with­out hiccups.

Ben Parr wrote an excel­lent post on Mash­able on the topic. Parr: ” For the first time in human his­tory, the day-to-day inter­ac­tions between peo­ple are being per­ma­nently recorded and for­mat­ted in eas­ily orga­ni­z­able seg­ments of information.”

Mil­lions of us are pub­licly record­ing our daily activ­i­ties on our Twit­ter feeds for the world to know for the rest of time. All details are recorded from who we were with and what we were doing to when and where. His­to­ri­ans in the future will not need to guess any details. They’ll have all the infor­ma­tion right in front of them.They’ll actu­ally prob­a­bly know more than they care to know. With pic­tures on Flickr and videos on YouTube and text on Twit­ter and links on Face­book and, to top it all off, per­sonal blogs, his­to­ri­ans will have much the info they need about our inter­ac­tions with one another.

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The bril­liance of Twit­ter lists and sug­ges­tions for mak­ing them more powerful

In my opin­ion Twit­ter is the best tool we have today to engage with oth­ers, spread a mes­sage, net­work, meet other like­minded peo­ple, and stay on top of the news, in any indus­try. The only aspect I’ve always found prob­lem­atic on Twit­ter was the impos­si­bil­ity of orga­niz­ing infor­ma­tion. This is some­thing that’s changed now with the new Twit­ter lists, which allow you to orga­nize peo­ple in any sort of list you like.

So how have you been using lists? What sort of names have you been giv­ing your lists? It’s quite inter­est­ing to see what lists peo­ple have put you under and how you have been “cat­e­go­rized.”  With Twit­ter lists, I can put peo­ple I am fol­low­ing into spe­cific cat­e­gories. So for exam­ple, I have cre­ated lists of “blog­gers,” “social media,” “brands,” etc.

Twit­ter lists are going to change the way we net­work and socialize. No longer are we going to have a list of jour­nal­ists’ emails to send a press release to but rather we’ll have a Twit­ter list of all these jour­nal­ists with their Twit­ter han­dles. Patrick Kitano writes in his post titled Twit­ter Lists will Orga­nize the social graph: “It takes an indi­vid­ual an hour to build a 200-person Twit­ter List in com­par­i­son to the days / weeks it takes to attain a 200-fan FB page. This will make Twit­ter Lists the pro­lific stan­dard for orga­niz­ing the social graph.”

Each of us is orga­niz­ing his/her own “fol­low­ing,” or rather social graph — basi­cally  help­ing twit­ter orga­nize its data­base for them. These lists will become invalu­able to us both pro­fes­sion­ally and socially. How­ever, please note that one Twit­ter account can cre­ate only 20 lists and each list can only con­tain 500 mem­bers, so choose your lists care­fully and who’s in them even more care­fully. Robert Scoble wrote  an excel­lent post describ­ing the lim­i­ta­tions, bugs, impact and bril­liance of Twit­ter lists.

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Xsights is a new start-up that has just come out with its Light app for the iPhone, which enables its users to bring print to life. Xsights makes it pos­si­ble to trans­form sta­tic printed items that can be cap­tured through the cell phone’s cam­era into an inter­ac­tive mul­ti­me­dia expe­ri­ence. (Dis­clo­sure: Xsights is a Blonde 2.0 client)

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