Books, Blogs, and Beyond

Are you (or your clients) obsessing over social media ROI?

By Tom Collins

If you've read some of my own posts on ROi, you'll know why I just had to share a couple of quotes from Bryan Eisenberg's The True ROI of Social Media.

After noting that measuring short-term sales attributed to social media activities "is the wrong end of the telescope to be looking at measurement from," he explains:

"Social media is about relationships. And anyone who has ever had one can tell you that you cannot judge a relationship from a snapshot; you need to observe a relationship over months or even years to get any sense of the quality and value of that relationship. Sadly, most of the social media analysis tools in the marketplace don’t provide this viewpoint."

Learning about the FTC Endorsements & Testimonials Guides at BlogPaws 2010

One of the coolest parts of working on the BlogPaws 2010 pet blogger conference has been connecting — or re-connecting — with some amazing people involved in the online pet community. That's especially true of the speakers! Today we released a preliminary speaker page, with keynotes including Charlotte Reed (check out her Pet Writing Conference coming up next week), our pet blogging buddy Dr. Larry McDaniel, and Elisa Camahort Page, co-founder of BlogHer.

I'm not going to list the other 18 (and counting) speakers here — that's not why you came — but one of them is Mary K. Engle, Associate Director for Advertising Practices at the FTC. She'll be speaking on a panel disussing "The Dos and Don'ts of Product Reviews." As part of putting together the speaker page, Mary sent me to a page on the FTC site where she's posted a set of videos discussing the FTC's Revised Endorsement and Testimonial Guides. In several of the videos, she speaks directly to how the Guides affect bloggers. Here's an example:

Fun Stuff and Big Ideas from OMMA Global 2009 in NYC

By Tom Collins

Quickly, over lunch, I'm going to share a few of my live Tweets from the sessions, Scott Monty's slides from his keynote yesterday morning, and a video that Terence Kajawa of GCA Savvion Advisors showed at yesterday's luncheon, to give you a flavor for the "radical" ideas floating around here. The theme is "The New Socialism" afterall.

From my tweets yesterday through this morning:

Can Data Be Cool? Only When Filtered Through a Brain

By Tom Collins

Got linked to Tim Berners-Lee's talk at TED this morning. His current big idea relates to getting the world's data online, accessible, and usable, i.e., linked.

The data itself is, IMHO, kind of useless stuff. The individual bits rarely mean what we think they mean, until we connect them and put some thought into what we've collected. But oh, what we could do with all that data, linked ...

Sidenote: My link came via the KMgov email list. I watched the video and then shared the link on Twitter. Now I'm sharing it again here.

A couple of years ago, Kevin Kelly asserted that the hyperlink was one of the two most important inventions in the last 50 years (the other being tags). Links may turn out to be the most important ever. Think about that, your social networks, and the trail that led us here, as you watch and learn:

Following a Leader into Web 2.0

By Tom Collins

Are you a leader in any of your organizations - business, professional, social?

Yesterday, Federal Computer Week blog reported the GSA has reached an agreements with Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo and blip.tv that "make it possible for federal agencies to use new-media tools while meeting their legal requirements."

Hello? Maybe the GSA missed it, but as of this writing 1,124,225 people had viewed the first of President Obama's weekly YouTube addresses on The White House YouTube Channel, which began just a couple of days after the inauguration in January:

Okay, so some folks at GSA probably knew about it.

But what's up with them entering into agreements now that supposedly authorize agencies to "immediately begin using new-media tools that let people post, share, and comment on videos and photos on the Web." The assumption seems to be that the terms of service agreements that nobody reads somehow violated some government rules somewhere.

Typewriter to Bookstore video: Blogging a Higher Art Form?

By Tom Collins

Wondering why your book took 30 years to get published? How Second Life avatars fit into your book marketing plan? What makes author blogs "a higher artform" — as well as "far more lucrative" — than book publishing?

The helpful folks from the MacMillan Digital Marketing Team explain all (found via Guy Kawasaki's Tweet):

As with most humor (they are joking, right?), there are grains of truth and a serious topic or two in there, so perhaps we'll return to this another time.

Books, Blogs, and Beyond ... Publishing 3.0 ...

What's that all about?

Well, that's what we're going to explore in this blog, pulling together threads from our earlier separate blogs. From 140 characters on Twitter to 300 page hardcover books ... a blog as your social media base camp ... a book as your business brochure ... what does "publishing" mean in our continually evolving digital world?