This morning, I had the opportunity to speak on a panel with the well-traveled and well-respected Chris Heuer and Tom Foremski of Silicon Valley Watcher. The three of us, speaking to a group primarily comprised of PR and Marketing professionals looking to get a grasp on new media and emerging social tools, discussed how to better track your brand online, how to interact with prospects, and how the move toward the semantic Web, including tagging and group-derived suggestions, would pose both new opportunities and challenges.

While the conversation got technical at times, I felt the places where I connected best with the audience was when I talked to them in terms of e-mail, iTunes and spoke their language in terms of understanding how they had to answer to multiple clients, who each wanted to broadest visibility, in a time when media outlets are disappearing.

A few hours later, this afternoon, I was back on the phone talking social media to a group of PR people looking to, again, figure out just what the heck Twitter and FriendFeed are and why they would have any value to their own outreach campaigns. And I could tell, based on their responses, that to take on these new tools sounded daunting.

Frankly, we, as consumers and developers, for the most part, are not doing a very good job of explaining these tools and making them simple enough to comprehend to the average layperson, let alone adopt. In describing these services, we need to do a lot less about talking about 140 character limits, feeds and aggregation, and instead talk more about connections, sharing and community.

What we need to do is help translate these honestly geeky tools into something that makes sense to the mainstream. Instead of talking about how many people you're following, APIs and how you use TweetDeck to follow specific terms in Twitter, start by explaining that the service is essentially text messaging that gets recorded and can be sent to many people at once. As for FriendFeed, I always explain it by breaking up the service into its two pieces. The Feed captures all your activity online. The Friend lets you see what your friends are doing, find new ones and interact with each other's content. Don't talk about 40+ supported services and how you can redirect to Twitter or Facebook. Start with the basics.

At Blog World Expo this September, Chris Brogan famously teased Jesse Stay with a comment I posted to Twitter:

"Look, tech dork, software doesn't solve problems, humans solve problems."

But the mistake is an easy one, especially for people who don't have a background in PR, communications or marketing, because the technology itself can seem so exciting, and to be honest, it can at times be fun to sound more knowledgeable and "elite" above those who don't have the same understanding.

At times, I find myself clenching my teeth and wincing when I hear an engineer or elite technologist try to explain how something works. What users don't want to hear is the process of how things work, but instead what the results are, and how they can benefit. So let's be real clear - these new tools, no matter how many lines of code you have developed, have in most cases been made to offer a solution, so make the story about the user, not about you.

Help use their language and their own frames of reference to make the services less intimidating and overwhelming. Don't throw them into the deep end without a life jacket, but walk them down the steps holding their hand until they get used to the water.

By Corvida Raven of SheGeeks.net (FriendFeed/Twitter)

For me, social media is one of the greatest things to hit the web since RSS. I love using tools and services like Twitter, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Brightkite, Toluu, Disqus, Tweetburner, ReadBurner, RSSMeme, and tons more. The vast amount of connections I've been able to make since March would not have taken place had these social media tools and services never existed. They've made connecting with others across the globe so easy and simple. They've also landed me numerous jobs and job offers. However, when I decided to use social media to get off the computer and out of my house I began to wonder if social media was keeping me out of touch with reality.

For one, because of LinkedIn, I've yet to update my resume. Honestly, my resume is months behind my LinkedIn profile at this point and I dread updating it. I dread it because it's so much easier and much more flexible to update my LinkedIn profile. Resumes have too many rules and restrictions. I find it hard to show my personality in my resume. This is quite the opposite for me when using LinkedIn.

However, I began to realize that if LinkedIn disappeared off the face of the web, I'd have to do some serious thinking about how I would update my resume now. Also, I love the recommendations feature of LinkedIn and I've accumulated numerous recommendations. Unfortunately, I can't drag these over to my resume. Who's really going to read them in the corporate world? When I set back and thought about all of this, I felt so out of touch with reality. If there ever came a day where I needed to get a job offline, I'd probably be devasted because all of the work that I've put into my accomplishments are available online and I have no desire to pull them offline. "Real people" would think I've lost my mind.

Secondly, I'm beginning to become irritated with my offline friends that have no clue about the tools that I use. They come to me with questions and problems and I can't help but wonder what the heck do they do online? How could you not know about the vast array of tools available that can help you accomplish just about any task. This irritations progresses everytime I log into my online class. Unfortunately, the school has no type of social media offerings that I know could make things a lot easier for me. Give me a calendar or an RSS feed! Send me a tweet or something. We use forums for our group projects and I feel like they're out of touch with "my world" and I'm some type of alien. Meebo chat anyone?

Unfortunately it gets worse, but I won't elaborate on how. Instead, I'd like to ask you what are some ways that you feel social media is keeping you out of touch with reality? What are you doing to bridge the gap? Tell your story in the comments section or on FriendFeed!

Read more by Corvida Raven at SheGeeks.net.

Last week, I had the opportunity to meet with Christopher Golda and Michael Montano, founders of BackType, and talked with them about the growth of the site, and their continued efforts to become the blogosphere's number one repository for comments, tracking, search and alerts. Among the first steps they promised, and have already delivered, was the option to add comments you make on social services Digg and Reddit to your profile page. Along with the site's recent integration with FriendFeed, BackType has risen in visibility and functionality, even as few are using the site to its fullest potential.

As Golda and Montano explained over lunch Thursday, the site was originally started to track comments activity by friends they followed from around the Web. With so many different commenting systems out there, from WordPress to TypePad, Disqus and more, no one service provided a full history of individuals' activity, and they saw an opportunity to create a product that was built around comments and the people who make them, rather than individual blogs and their readers.

As BackType has gained awareness, the founders have so far been surprised by the high number of people using the site for social media marketing - tracking keywords for their company and the competition, but it's become a natural evolution of a service that can gauge a company and its products' visibility across the Web. Extending the services that BackType tracks, like Digg and Reddit, makes the product's database more robust and diverse.

Additionally, the rapid integration of BackType to FriendFeed has helped raise the product's visibility, they said. Now, assuming the blog you comment on is being tracked, any comments you make on the Web, assigned to your e-mail address and name, can be pulled into your FriendFeed stream, like Disqus and IntenseDebate have been doing for some time. (You can see my BackType stream in FriendFeed here)

Interestingly, at least for now, the BackType integration into FriendFeed does not track comments from Disqus or IntenseDebate. Golda and Montano offered FriendFeed a "Disqus and IntenseDebate free" version of the feed, as to not avoid overlap from those who had already turned on those services, but FriendFeed took that as the standard, meaning users who want all comments still need to integrate both services. (For example, my Disqus feed is also live.) This might change later, but FriendFeed would need to make the update, and their "to do" list is no doubt long.

As BackType's database has grown, so too has its functionality for companies looking to track their keywords across the Web. I've even set up an RSS feed from BackType for the company where I work, so if we are mentioned in a comment somewhere, our PR firm will see it and have the opportunity to respond or evaluate quickly. You can set your own alerts by e-mail on the BackType.com site or use their Trends site to see the velocity of updates. (Examples: Google, Seesmic, and Obama.)

Smart marketers and public relations people are already searching news, blogs, and Twitter to monitor their brand. To track the brand across comments throughout the Web using BackType is just as important. While you can still follow people and discover what they're saying at the blogs they frequent, and discover new sites, I think BackType will become a more integral part of people's social media monitoring than anyone ever expected. Adding Digg and Reddit, while small additions, just makes their sphere of tracking even more thorough.

In case you want to see what I'm saying on BackType, follow me here: http://www.backtype.com/louisgray.

By Mike Fruchter of MichaelFruchter.com (Twitter/FriendFeed)


I'm making an effort to become less reliant on visiting websites for the data I need. Spending a majority of my time in Google Reader, I decided RSS could help me accomplish this task. I no longer have to visit Yahoo to read my horoscopes or sports scores. I now track my Ebay auctions from Google Reader. These are some of the ways I started to recently use and rediscover RSS.

This post touches on 30 different ways RSS can be used.

1) Tabbloid is a "hatchling" project that comes to us from Hewlett-Packard. It's a very simple and useful utility that turns your RSS feeds into a personal magazine via PDF format. You can generate your PDF files on the website, or have them emailed to you.

2) Track deals for hotel and airline fares at Expedia,Travelocity,Orbitz and Kayak.

3) iTunes music store RSS generator allows you to set up notifications based on your genre for new releases, top songs, top albums, featured albums and exclusives.

4) Track your favorite sports team news and game scores at Yahoo Sports. Basketball | Baseball | NFL | Hockey

5) Simpletracking.com lets you view the latest tracking information from all the major US shipping carriers. No need to go directly to the carrier's website anymore. Get notified when your package tracking information has changed directly from your feed reader.

6) Create customized news feeds and track specific keywords. You can get a feed for any search you do on Google News. First do any search on Google News, then simply use the Atom or RSS link on the left-hand side of your search results page to generate the feed. Here is what my FriendFeed Google news feed looks like.

7) Track your favorite online comics strips. Tapestry Comics maintains an RSS directory of comic strip feeds. Dilbert, xkcd and several hundred more feeds can be found here.

8) Create customized Ebay auction search feeds. Keep track of Ebay auctions with ease.

9) Set up custom feeds for job searches using the Indeed job search engine. As with Google News, the process is the same. RSS job feeds are automatically generated on the search results pages.

10) Get real time reports about current traffic incidents in your area. Traffic.com delivers RSS feeds of traffic information for most major U.S. cities.

11) Be notified of severe weather warnings and advisories for the United States, issued by the National Weather Service.

12) Get notified of the latest movie and dvd releases courtesy of Movies.com.

13) Get notified of current airport delay courtesy of Flightstats.com.

14) Listen to the President of the United States radio addresses.

15) Get the latest NASA news articles and press releases.

16) Read your Daily Horoscopes.

17) Send RSS feeds to Twitter using TwitterFeed.TwitterFeed is a simple utility that will check an RSS feed for updates and send them to Twitter accordingly.

18) Get notified of RSS feed updates via SMS messages sent to your phone.

19) Convert RSS feeds to audio recordings. You can also subscribe to them as podcasts via iTunes, and download your recordings as an mp3 file.

20) View the latest public pictures being uploaded to Flickr. You can also generate custom RSS feeds based on a multitude of parameters detailed here.

21) Generate custom Picasa RSS feeds for your family pictures. You can also generate feeds from public pictures. All search result pages will generate an RSS feed for that keyword. Here is one I set up for "Dogs."

22) View the real time public Twitter time line. You can also get your Twitter account time line by going to your Twitter profile page. Scroll to the bottom right of your profile page and you will see an RSS link located there.

23) Keep track of your recently played Last.fm tracks. Replace mfruchter with your Last.fm user name. ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/user/mfruchter/recenttracks.rss

24) Keep track of what you and your friends are bookmarking. If you wanted to find out what Louis Gray has bookmarked recently, you could go to his FriendFeed or Delicious url. Better yet you could check your Google Reader. To find yours or a specific Delicious user's RSS feed, simply goto their Delicious profile page and scroll to the bottom right of the page where you will see an RSS icon. You can also generate custom RSS for specific keywords/tags. All tag search result pages will have a corresponding RSS feed option. Here is one I set up to track of all recent public bookmarks tagged "twitter."

25) Watch the most viewed YouTube videos of the day. You can also customize this to your liking based on this criteria.

26) Keep track of new products on Amazon.com. Never miss when new items become available. You can generate an RSS feed for just about any product category Amazon has to offer.

27) Try an RSS feed matching service to find new feeds based on your interests. One that comes to mind is Toluu. Toluu allows you to upload your existing OPML file to their service, they in-turn will match you to new feeds and members who share similar preferences in feeds.

28) View all of your publicly shared RSS items on one web page. This is a great built in feature of Google Reader. Any item you star or share is automatically saved on a public html page that Google generates for you. Here is what my shared page looks like. To see the public page containing your shared items, click the "Shared items" link in your Google Reader. You'll see a list of everything you've chosen to share, along with a link to the page where they are displayed.

29) Use Google Reader as a new tool for microblogging. With the ability to “share” or “share with note" option in Google Reader, you can leave comments and invite conversation on posts you publicly share. Aggregate Google Shared items into a site like FriendFriend, so others can voice their thoughts as well.

30) Get the best of FriendFeed without ever going to the actual site. FriendFeed generates RSS feeds for almost every user function of the site. You can view your mainfeed as well as your, comments and like feeds in Google Reader. Have you created any topical lists? You can get RSS feeds for your lists too. I have found this function particularly useful as I can now track my "social media whales" list in RSS. Often I spend more time in Google Reader then I do on FriendFeed. RSS gives me a backup and safety net, so nothing goes under the radar.

Read more by Mike Fruchter at MichaelFruchter.com.