Seth Godin has launched a new effort to provide public pages for brands called “Brands In Public” Can offical public brand pages work? Is that even what people want?

I think customers want interaction from brands and that they don’t need official pages to make that happen. Expections are shifting and they want brands to come to them. It seems like Seth is working on an outdated idea…

Great video. Must watch. I suggest showing to anyone who doesn’t understand how media is changing.

14 things I learned about Matt Mullenweg and WordPress at WordCampRDU | Social Wayne, Wayne Sutton ’s Blog.

If you don’t have time to read his post my big conclusions are:

1. Videopress is a game changer. I may start using it for all of my video hosting o nthe Web. The player is great and open source. Matt says we wil lbe able to customize it in the future.

2. P2 as a theme is a brilliant idea. It basically also you to blog super quickly from your page without going to the dashboard. I like it so much I have started to use it on my personal blog: KippBodnar.com.

3. WordPress is rewriting their iPhone app from the start and it sounds like it will be a huge improvement!

A big thanks to everyone who shared knowledge at Word Camp RDU!

Our goal is to taste and review every wine made in North Carolina. With 80 winereies in North carolina each producing many types of wine that is going to be a long journey. We are publishing two video reviews of North Carolina wine each week. So far we have published our first six episodes and have found some good ones, but also some bad ones. Over time Jeff and I also plan to visit each of the wineries in NC as well. We will be doing our visit on June 27th at Raffaldini Vineyards.

The bottom line is I am having a great time and I am on my way back with more social media marketing related posts.  If you enjoy wine, I hope you will take a minute to watch North Carolina Wine TV.

Today I argue that all good social media marketing is social (cause) marketing.  Cause marketing has always been about organizing a group of people in support of something: quitting smoking, fighting cancer, saving the environment, healthy eating etc. How is this different from the most popular social media marketing examples you’ve seen spewed by every “consultant” on Twitter?

Zappos
The idea for this post came from watching a video of Seth Godin speaking at TED. Here is the video, well worth taking 20 minutes to watch it:

Zappos has long been touted as an example of social media marketing for the way that it encouraged its employees to use Twitter to share information with each other and customers. The common questions that revolve around the Zappos example is: How did they do it? Why don’t other companies do it?

Other companies can’t do it. In fact Zappos could only do it because Tony as a leader has created a culture around the idea of surpassing customer expectations. Because his employees have bought into the idea of going above and beyond, Twitter was an easier sell.  This is why Tony can do it at Zappos, but other companies fail at even getting one person to use it for work.  Zappos using Twitter is not a social media marketing example it is an example of leadership and the willingness of employees to support a cause:  customers who love shoes.

Dell IdeaStorm
Dell’s IdeaStorm platform has long been considered the best example of using crowdsourcing to develop and market products. IdeaStorm isn’t marketing as much as it is a place to collect ideas that were flooding in by e-mail taking up valuable staff resources. IdeaStorm serves a cause.  It serves a group of people that want better technology: hardware and software. Dell’s simply helped them organize and in the process has an invaluable way to determine the demand for a new product in the market place.

Wine Library TV and Gary V
Gary has long been the poster child of social media marketing and personal branding. He has done a great job. He is interesting, polarizing and often over the top. Sure all of those traits help to get 80,000 people to watch a daily online video of wine reviews.  If you think it is Gary’s amazing personality that won everyone over, you are wrong.  Watch the first 100 episodes of Wine Library TV, they sucked. Gary’s secret just like all other social media success stories was his ability to build a community and unite them them through a cause.

The secret to his success is not his crazy reviews instead it is how he closes his show. “You with a little bit of me. We are changing the wine world.” That is a powerful and empowering quote. That is the sentiment that a leader uses to rally a community or as Seth would say a tribe.

Social Media and the Hedgehog
One of my favorite and also probably one of the best business books ever written is Good To Great by Jim Collins. In it Collins look at good companies and how they became great companies. He asserts that all of the great companies share similar traits. The one trait that always resonated the most with me was his idea of the Hedgehog concept. In short it is the one goal that you can be the best at that will lead to the success of your organization.

I think of the hedgehog concept as it relates to social media is critical. What is the one “thing” that you can do to effectively lead your community that will result successfully reaching your goal?

Social media marketing and casue marketing are the same, but regardless what you call it you have to have the right leader with the right goal.

The web is flooded with news everyday, most of it trivial, but every once in a while we get a day that is a true game changer. Today is that day for all marketers. Today Facebook will announce changes to its API allowing third-party developers to access user submitted information from Facebook for use in their applications. You are asking yourself right now, what do geeky API calls have to do with marketing? Everything.

Now that you have read my previous post about API marketing, I hope that you are beggining to see the implications of Facebook’s announcement. Facebook with more than 200 million users is the largest social network on the Internet. API data has gone primarily under the radar until now because most applications offering APIs had much smaller user-bases. Twitter is the application that made API’s popular.  It has more than 3,000 applications built on its API but it only has around 13 million users. Facebook in addition to having a huge amount of users also has a vast variety of data from text, images, videos, etc.

Opening The Walled Garden

Until this most recent announcement of API changes Facebook as been considered a walled garden in which you had to be a member logged into Facebook to share information and once logged out the information was not accessible. Companies have had access to most user submitted information.  This includes information on sites like Twitter, Digg, message boards, and niche social networks thanks to tools like Google Blog Search, Filter Box, Radian6 and other tools built to monitor user submitted data. However, Facebook and its mountain of data remained the kid by itself standing in the corner.

Why is Facebook doing this?

Understand that these changes to its API offers Facebook the greatest potential for monetizing of their platform. Their has long been discussion about the lack of effectiveness of advertising in social networks and Facebook knows this. Lets be clear, really brilliant people work at Facebook, they know what they are doing. They understand the true value they have is in the data not eyeballs. I have said this before but it is worth repeating.

The social web economy is about data and relationships relationships not about eyeballs and impressions.

That being said this API announcement is the first step for Facebook to monetize its data. For example, Twitter users that use desktop applications are currently allowed 100 API requests per hour. Sending a tweet, looking up a profile, doing a search, are each one API request. Facebook could potentially set a free level of API request activity and then charge developers for additional API requests. This is a simplified monetization strategy but could be the foundation for the approach they take.

Implications For Brand Marketers:

If you are a marketer, your job changed today.  Today Facebook gave you the keys to a luxury sedan of consumer insight and data. Most commentary surrounding Facebook’s API changes will be detailing what developers can do with the new API. Their will also be discussions about the validity of building a business on another company’s platform. This post though is for marketers, especially the non-geek marketers, the people that may not even know what an API is.

Marketers have spent years trying to determine what their customers want and what triggers actually lead a consumer to by a product. This has been done through market research, focus groups, surveys and a host of other methods used to collect customer data. Today the social web has flipped that process because now consumers are freely submitting their own information onto the web and the organizations that can effectively collect and analyze it and use it to build positive relationships with consumers will be successful.

Facebook has opened the spigot on the web’s most robust source of social consumer data. Here are some examples of how this data could be used by brand marketers:

• Incorporate Facebook data into existing social media monitoring systems for added insight
• Company’s like Ford that have dealers that sell their products could build applications that sort by location consumers talking about buying or needing a new car and what they are looking for. This information could be used to provide insight to the dealer on local customers as well as their opinions of dealer’s advertising and marketing.
• Create an extensional of current CRM sales tools that incorporates individuals Facebook updates and data into their CRM profile in real-time. This could be used to make more relevant sales calls, meetings and help build relationships.
• Aggregate and display how consumers are currently using your product to showcase uses to potential consumers from a trusted third-party.

Above are only some quick thoughts and more possibilities will be known once Facebook releases its updated API documentation later today. If you are a marketer you must realize that user generated data is key to future consumer insights and building brand advocates. Today Facebook has handed you something you have long been looking for…

The rules for this post are the following:

1. Please post this on your blog in its entirety
2. Bold or underline your uses for Twitter
3. Add the tag twitter101 to the post
4. Make sure you link back to both of the originating posts: Kipp’s and Jeff’s
5. Add a comment to this post if you like
6. Tweet your post with the hashtag #twitter101

101 Uses for Twitter
1. Answer the Question “What are you doing?”
2. Tell Your Friends Your Going To Jail
3. Alert Your Family That your Plane Has Crash Landed in The Husdon
4. Explain To The World What You’re Eating
5. Announce You’re Currently Peeing
6. Your Chair Can Tell The World You’re Farting
7. Plants Can Tweet You For More Water
8. Say Something That Gets You Fired
9. Gather A Group Of Friends For Drinks
10. Say Something That Gets A Job Offer Pulled
11. Say Something That Angers a Client
12. Complain about a Product or Service
13. Ask for Free Stuff
14. Obsess about Bacon
15. Tweet for Your Dog or Cat
16. Showcase an Endless Array of Self-Portraits
17. Meet People at a Concert
18. Share News
19. Report from a Natural Disaster
20. Pimp Your Blog Links
21. Pimp Your Mom
22. Ask for 1,000,000 Followers
23. Announce the Song You are Listening To
24. Tell People How Awesome Your Macbook Is
25. Wonder How This Twitter Thing Works
26. Gratuitous Cursing
27. Comment That You Are Sitting At Your Desk
28. Make Fun of People Who Use PCs
29. Complain about How Facebook is Ripping Off Twitter
30. Wondering if Anyone Uses MySpace Anymore
31. Ask Someone to Marry You
32. Report on Your Blind Date
33. Tell Everyone What You Thought About the Latest Blockbuster Movie
34. Spoil The Ending of a TV Show
35. Thank Someone for Great Customer Service
36. Complain About Bad Customer Service
37. Bemoan The Fact That Traditional Media Doesn’t Get It
38. Share Speaker’s Quotes from Conference
39. Make Fun of People Who Are Not at SXSW
40. Revel That You are Not at SXSW
41. Tell People How Wasted You Are
42. Talk about the Weather
43. Share Heartwarming Stories About Your Kids
44. Link to Photos of Your Vacation
45. Use a Location-Based Service to Tell Everyone about Your Latte, including a photo and a map
46. Post Cute Pictures of Your Pets
47. Meet Members of Your Local Community
48. Sell Stuff
49. Buy Stuff
50. Promote Events
51. Crowdsource Ideas for Things You Get Paid to Know
52. Hire A Freelancer
53. Report on Terrorist Activity
54. Name Drop People You’ve Only Met Online
55. Name Drop People You Are Having Lunch With
56. Send A Message To The President
57. Talk About Which Twitter Desktop App You’re Using
58. Talk About Snuggies
59. Use Stupid Shorthand such as: nom nom, lol, FTW, WTF, etc…
60. Try to Make Others Jealous of How Awesome your City is
61. Pimp The Latest Sci-Fi Trailer
62. Tracking Trends
63. Announce Your Plane has Landed: Wheels Down
64. Review Movies
65. Tell A Story
66. Make a Public Apology
67. Admit You Did Something Stupid
68. Ask for Computer Help
69. Complain about Battery Life
70. Pitch Your Startup to Scoble and Techcrunch
71. Make New Friends
72. Exclaim the Guy/Girl Across the Room is Hot!
73. Argue Politics
74. Wish Twitterville Good Morning
75. Tell your Followers to Have a Good Day
76. Tell the Twitterverse Goodnight
77. Share Quotes
78. Express Your Belief in a Higher Power
79. Avoid Sending E-mail
80. Learn
81. Listen
82. Ask for Help
83. Raise Money for a Charity
84. Share Stats of Social Media’s Growth
85. Auto-Pimp your New Twitter App
86. Auto-DM Welcome New Followers
87. Get a Date
88. Ask for Travel Recommendations
89. Share What You’re Reading Offline
90. Provide Traffic Updates
91. Talks Sports and Update Scores
92. Share Recipes
93. Tell Someone You’re Running Late
94. Find and Share Funny Videos
95. Talk to Your Boss
96. Train Surgeons
97. Make Yourself Look Smart
98. Change the World
99. Bash Microsoft
100. Express your Undying Love for Twitter
101. Retweet

So after a quick count it seems I have done 64 of the #Twitter101. How many have you done?

As the social web grows up, their is a lot of discussions on making money, but not a lot of specifics discussed. Better yet, few examples of companies innovating to increase sales in new ways. E-Commerce is nothing new to the web, but has the web gets social it to has to change.

I stumbled across a great example of a using wisdom of the crowds and the spirit of competition to promote and sell products. Amazon, an e-commerce retailer who has long been know for innovation and its willingness to try new things has started something new with its MP3 download service and its use of Twitter.  If you take a quick look at the image that leads into this post, you will see that Amazon MP3 has started using its Twitter feed differently. Until recent the service’s Twitter feed was only a listing of its daily music sales. This week that changed when they announced #bandbattle.

For #bandbattle Amazon picks two bands and then has followers tweet @ replies for the band they like the most. The band with the most replies will have its records put on sale on Thursday by Amazon.   I love this approach to using competition to determine special sales and the big upside is that with Twitter’s ability to spread word-of-mouth makes it a great promotion platform for the bands. I am not sure if Amazon is taking the loss on the sales, but if it is, it should work to partner with bands for the sales so it can reduce losses as it is providing marketing support.

Check out which band is getting the most votes.

Can this approach work for all companies? Probably not, but is can certainly extend well beyond the music business.

What do you think?