More videos from my September visit to Ecademy in London continue to flow in from YourBusiness Channel. As you saw from my November post which highlighted videos on social marketing for business, sales and startups and that from October on leveraging social networks to build Web traffic, we tried to deliver a great deal of information in easily-consumable bite size chunks.

Recently published are three more, including sales advice in the world of social media, how to launch a high quality business blog that gets traction amidst all the noise and three steps to a robust social media strategy. All are embedded below.


Three Steps to A Robust Social Media Strategy


Making Sales on Social Networks


Starting a Business Blog that Gains Traction

Although this year seems to be the real deal, the hype around Apple's Mac Tablet being set for imminent debut is "same old same old" to us jaded Cupertino fans who have been watching the company closely for the last decade-plus. While the January 26th date for a presentation no doubt involving Steve Jobs finally moves this long-broiling rumor toward the line for reality, hardly a year has gone buy since the beginning of the last decade when it wasn't expected that Apple would finally get a Web tablet out the door and onto shelves and desks everywhere.

Much of the background for the initial hype around the long-rumored Mac tablet came from Steve Jobs' cancellation of the Newton PDA line upon his return to Apple, with hints that the company would eventually return to the market. Rumors about Apple handhelds on the Cupertino campus were rampant, even as the Palm Pilot took the world by storm, and Handspring came and went. While subsequent stories have quoted CEO Steve Jobs saying he was just as proud of the products they had chosen not to ship as those they did, rumors for a handheld never quite went away, and they eventually morphed into often wild speculation around the tablet - the one that might finally be released in a few weeks.

Did you know these rumors have been going on for a full decade? If you are a Mac rumor afficionado like I am, you would. Observe:

"And just to keep true to those old 'Apple-developing-a-PDA' and 'Apple developing a Mac tablet' rumours, the iWalk contains full PDA functionality."

Apple's ‘breakthrough’ – iPod or iWalk?
The Register, October 23, 2001

Remarkable, even to my jaded eyes, was the fact that the latest name du jour, the iSlate, was suggested as far back as 2002...

"May we speculate that the big item due to set the Macintosh welkin ringing ... next month just might be an Apple tablet computer. Think of a name: iSlate, iNote, iPad (maybe too close to iPod)."

-- Garry Barker, Livewire, December 4, 2002

And when MacWorld San Francisco 2003 didn't see the Tablet debut, rumors continued, saying we even knew factories that were hard at work making plastics. Sound familiar?

Mobile Mac slate device to launch?

"All we know about this piece of plastic is that:
1) it is vouched for by a "previously good source" who has contacts in the factory where it's being made
2) it is almost an inch thick, at 24.6mm; and its other dimensions are 188mm by 132mm
3) the factory where it is being assembled is supposedly under contract to Apple."

-- MacWhispers, March 29, 2003

By the end of 2003, from his pulpit, Robert Cringely said that within the year, Apple would finally deliver a tablet, one powered by Intel, instead of the PowerPC chips at the time running the entire Macintosh line. So yes, a 2004 debut was expected!

"A year from now, I am sure these technical problems will be solved, but by then Motorola will have been shipping DS-CDMA products for 12 months. And some of those products will be going in that Apple tablet computer. Watch TV in your bathroom, access your audio and video collection from anywhere in the house, control your big screen TV and route video to it from your desktop or the Internet. "

Apple's Tablet Computer Might Finally Be That Link Between Your PC and TV
-- Robert Cringely, November 27, 2003

But it didn't come in 2004! A shame! What about 2005 then? And what if it ran full Mac OS X or a derivative, often discussed as Mac OS X Lite?

"Speculation over what Jobs might reveal this year are all over the map ... (including) an Intel-powered Mac Tablet running Mac OS X or a "Mac OS X Lite.""

-- MacDailyNews, May 27, 2005

It didn't happen that year either. A shame! Again! Good thing that the following year, 2006, saw companies in Taiwan working on costs for this product, to be launched in mid 2007. Sound familiar, again?

"Apple researchers have built a full working prototype of a Mac tablet PC and three Companies in Taiwan are now costing a product for a potential launch in mid 2007..."

-- Smarthouse, via MacDailyNews, November 26, 2006

So here we are at the beginning of the new year, 2010, and once again, the Mac faithful, and now the many, many media followers who have piled on to original core of Mac rumormongers, are ready for the Tablet, again. This time, it seems real. Rather than jump in and tell you what I think it is, or whether I think it will be a good fit for my home, I have learned to sit back and trust Steve and his team. They were right about the iPod. They were right about the iTunes Store. They were right about Mac OS X and they were hugely right about the iPhone. Like I said yesterday, in my article on 2010 computing, the entire industry is waiting to see if Apple really is going to make a tablet this time, and what that means for everyone.

But forgive my jaded elder ears if I am not piling on the Tablet bandwagon and arguing who is right and who is wrong. The hubbub isn't that we are bored and out of shiny objects to discuss, what with Android and all matter of iPhone apps. The issue is not that we don't need the tablet, or that some people don't want to be told what to speculate about, but that I know we don't know, just like we didn't know in 2002 or 2003 or 2004 or 2005 or 2006 or 2007.

I hope 2010 is the year that this debuts, if for nothing else that we Mac fans can find something else to speculate about.

As more companies, marketers and PR reps wake up to the world of Twitter, the art of discovering what is being said about businesses and their products is hardly a dark art at this point. Most have figured out the basics of tracking customer responses, or individuals are able to set vanity queries to get alerted each time they or their works are mentioned in Twitter streams. But so far, this data has only flowed one way. With the use of Twitter's free widgets, and some creativity, you can let Twitter users' updates speak on behalf of you and your company.

Twitter has what they call a "Goodies' page, which includes code for customized widgets, which can be placed on your Web site and blog, or social networks, like Facebook and MySpace.

The four widgets offered today include a profile widget, which displays your own updates, a search widget, which can track any keywords or hashtags you enter, a faves widget to show off those tweets that are your favorites, or a list widget, which presents outwardly lists that you have created.

Of these, the search widget and the faves widget have the most potential for your business.

The first, a search widget, can be set up to query for your brand or its products. Pretty straight forward. You can see an example below, enabled for Apple or iPhone:




The same script for SocialToo, where I am an advisor:





The above search widget grabs all activity on Twitter that mentions these products. It is great for showing volume, but it has no filter for what is a positive mention or a negative mention, and could include spam.

A better way to create a solid representation of you, your brand or your products, is to use the Faves widget. While some people are using Twitter favorites the same way that I use Google Reader shares, to capture top news as it flows in, others, including me, are using it to track positive mentions. In theory, as you amass significant favorites this way, this faves widget can be presented as unsolicited endorsements of you and your company online.

Take a look:




The above widget, which I have embedded on my About LouisGray.com page, gives a list of recent updates on Twitter that have presented me or my content in a positive light. All it takes is a combination of using the typical vanity searches, monitoring @replies, and favoriting the best of that list.

The process is easy:
1. Search for the desired terms on Twitter. (like this)
2. Mark those you like as favorites.
3. Go to the Twitter Goodies Widget Page.
4. Choose the Faves Widget.
5. Customize the title, appearance and dimensions.
6. Add to your site!

If you don't want to have your individual account (or your corporate account) using Twitter in this way, there is always the option to add a second account just for favorites. For example, you could make an account called "fordfaves" that favorites the top mentions of Ford and its cars on Twitter, and then show that widget on the press mentions page of the Web site.

As I have often said, Twitter is what you make of it. It can be a tool for conversation, or for broadcasting. It can be a tool to talk with friends, or to communicate with brands. But no matter how you use Twitter, a ton of information is being poured into the site, and it's up to you how you can extract value.

The story of the Prisoner's Dilemma is no doubt the most widely known example of game theory. In the prisoner's dilemma, it is assumed that when given a choice whether to cooperate or betray someone, people may benefit as individuals more by choosing the latter, as opposed to cooperating and delivering a mutual solution that benefits both parties.

Prisoner's Dilemma In Business

In business, the opportunity to choose one's benefits over those of your customer can come into play with every business deal, with every product introduction or feature change, or becomes especially tempting at the end of a sales quarter.

But as companies choose their own benefits over those of their customers too frequently, any relationship that previously existed can be permanently damaged, to the long-term loss of business. Similarly, as customers look to take advantage of a business, be it through theft of their products, or other bending of the rules, so too can trust and relationship be eroded from the opposite side, despite any short term benefits the customer may have received through free products, unapproved functionality, etc.

The ideal win-win solution is for the company to produce high quality products that bring benefit to customers, and do so in a transparent and trusted fashion, working to put the customers' success in line with their own. It may sound like an unrealistic utopia in a world of capitalism, but as I watch Google closely, I wonder if their "Do No Evil" strategy could be part of the company's game theory that has them siding with consumers in virtually every case, driving up increased success for both parties.

Lest I be accused of seeing through the world through Mountain View donated multi-colored glasses, consider how Google sees their own products.

Google and Prometheus

As with many tech companies, Google uses internal codenames to refer to their products before they have been released to the public.

Although it wasn't widely disclosed, the codename of "Prometheus" referred to Google App Engine, which lets users run Web applications on Google's infrastructure. Introduced in April of 2008, App Engine lets developers use the same tools that Google uses when creating its products, such as Google File System (GFS) and Bigtable, their distributed storage system for structured data. (Background)

For those who know their Greek mythology, Prometheus was known for stealing fire from the Greek god Zeus, and giving it to mere mortals. Prometheus was also known for making people powerful by teaching them valuable skills. For Google, the act of releasing Google App Engine was the equivalent of giving fire to mortals, power to the people.

This delivery of "fire" is a clear win for engineers looking to leverage Google's tremendous infrastructure and tool set. Instead of keeping the advantages close to the vest, as could be dictated by traditional game theory, Google opted to "Not Be Evil" and released Prometheus. You could see this again with their recent release of Closure Tools in November. More fire to the people. More tools and more skills.

Mutually Beneficial Cooperation

Google is a business, not a charity, so they need to compete aggressively in those areas that deliver them significant profits, namely search and advertising. But the company, in parallel, is driving dozens upon dozens of Web services that are speeding up the Web, helping companies know more about their own Web sites and communicate more easily. The company employs many different employees, who in theory, don't directly contribute to the bottom line in a significant way. But what they do is improve the quality of life on the Web. The company can afford to do this because their for-profit businesses are so successful, but when they do get the opportunity to "Do Evil", or at least stop being charitable, they aren't.

I believe that this approach of mutually beneficial cooperation, in the upper left quadrant of the prisoner's dilemma, and consistent execution on this approach, is part of why Google, for the most part, is trusted, while other companies are not, seen for having chosen their own best interests ahead of their customers.

Prometheus gave power to the people. Prometheus delivered fire to the mortals. Google's approach to game theory, playing the role of Prometheus, is part of why I am so bullish on what they are doing.