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Both the submissions on this job announcement board, as well as available social media positions at corporations continue to pour in. In fact, this is the second time this month I’m posting this “On The Move” post due to submission volume. Clearly, there is more activity happening in the industry from my perspective, and I expect for this to continue, as we near planning for 2011.

In this continued digest of job changes, I like to salute those that continue to join the industry in roles focused on social media, see the archives, which go back a few years.

People on the Move in the Social Business Industry

• The social media powerhouse Louis Gray now joins My Sixth Sense as the VP of Marketing, congrats.
• George P. Johnson Experience Marketing Appoints Kenny Lauer Vice President, Digital Experience.  I’ve worked with Kenny on personal projects and now in a professional relationship, and have been consistently impressed with his energy, spirit for new media, and willingness to connect and work with others.
• David Parmet, who’s been in this industry as long as I can remember, joins Converseon as Director of Communications Managing the agency’s public relations and marketing efforts.
• Colleen Carrington, joins as the new Online Mktg Mgr/Social Media of Concur Technologies.
• Dan Huss joins Digitaria, a digital agency as Account Strategist Account Strategists at Digitaria bridge the gap between business vision and tactical delivery. The strategist is dedicated and accountable to the client and remains a consistent layer, providing strategic leadership across multiple initiatives
• Joakim Nilsson joins Mangas Gaming Group as Head of Social Media Responsible for social media strategy for the Mangas Gaming brands, BetClic, Expekt, Bet-at-home, Everest.
• Jim Larrison joins Influentials.net General Manager & President Ex-Adify exec has been tapped to build a new business for Cox Media Group focused on the intersection of Brand Marketing and Social Media.
• Su Amaranayaka joins MYOB Online Community Manager Drive the use of online communities for support and marketing.
• Josh Pelz Gansevoort Hotel Group Social Media Manager Consumer engagement
• Mario Arauz joins Pan American Games Guadalajara as 2011 Social Media Strategist Social Media Strategist, Web Strategy, Program Manager
• Stacy Van Meter joins Deluxe Corporation Talent Community Manager Lead the social, mobile and new media strategy for Talent Acquisition
• Tom Diederich joins Ninety Five 5 as Community Manager Manage the company’s new 5 Online community and Ninety Five 5’s social media strategy
• Matt Thomson joins Klout as VP, Platform Define the business model and help with partnerships.
• Timothy James Dimacali joins GMANews.TV as Online Community Manager Development and management of social media strategies for news gathering and reporting.
• Myles Kleeger joins Buddy Media as General Manager, Strategic Brand Partnerships to oversee Buddy Media’s biggest and most important brand partnerships with global marketers who are looking to establish and grow their presence on Facebook around the world.
• Eric Lituchy joins Buddy Media as VP, Digital Marketing to oversee all of Buddy Media’s digital, email, search marketing, as well as demand generation, website strategy and optimization.
• Joe Ciarallo joins Buddy Media as Director of Communications to lead all media interaction and strategy and oversee company communications.

Submit a new hire

• Submit a new hire that’s ‘on the move’ with this easy-to-use online form.

Seeking a job?

1. See the Web Strategy Job Board, which includes paid submissions from the top brands in the world.
2. Community Manager jobs by Jake McKee
3. Social Media Jobs by Chris Heuer
4. Social Media jobs, filtered by SimplyHired
5. Social Media Job Network by James Durbin
6. 25 places to find social media jobs by Deb Ng

Additional Resources

• Community Manager Facebook Group
• Community Manager Appreciation Day (Every 4th Monday of Jan, yearly)
• List of corporate web strategists and community managers for 2010
• List of agencies and consultants by Altimeter Group
• Social Media Headhunter: Career advice, job postings and services
• New Media Hire community by Jim Long and team

Please congratulate the new hires by leaving a comment below.

In February, we talked about social media monitoring newcomer Viralheat and how they were lowering the barrier to entry for social media monitoring by offering quality results at lower-than-typical prices. Now the rising start-up is doing even more to shake up the monitoring landscape by offering a top layer of monitoring results through its Charts feature to anyone … for free.

The offering is an expansion of their Social Trends feature, available since the product’s launch, which allows paid users to make part of their keyword searches public for all to see. If a client has set up a monitoring profile for the iPad, for instance, and make that search public, anyone can go to Social Trends and see the results. (Seventy percent of Viralheat’s users made their results public.) Social Trends was also free for anyone to use, so long as a paid subscriber (or Viralheat folks) had set up a search for the term  you were trying to find. If not, you could pay for an account and set it up yourself.

The new Charts feature allows anyone to build a comparison search. Now you can search, compare and contrast multiple brands (e.g. – iPad vs. Kindle vs. Smart Pad or others) and not only see the results, but grab the embed code and offer up a real time chart on your blog or website. (Awesome idea for a transparent company wanting to show people online chatter and sentiment for their brand vs. their competitors.) The company’s open API for paid users also allows  to tap into the usefulness and build out dashboards for the data. (Social Trends has a free API which allows you to pull out the publicly available data and use as you like.)

CEO Raj Kadam told me the information they’re making available to everyone for free has previously only been available to big brands with big market research dollars. I would add that some of it has also been available to bloggers and journalists in product demos, but typically only the iPhone or iPad data. (Someone please do a different default demo search. Heh.)

Kadam said Viralheat gets a lot of requests from journalists who are interested in the real-time, online buzz about a certain person or topic. Now the reporters can do the search themselves and embed the results right on the story page on their website. And if you’re about to say, “Yeah, right. Like journalists would even know how!” Hold your fire. ESPN is using Viralheat’s open API to create real-time buzz tracking dashboards of NFL teams this fall.

Oh, and sentiment scoring on all those results? Included. Free. (Kick ass.)

Viralheat also told me they’re making their library of infographics open and downloadable for anyone to use. They’ve got a pretty interesting collection worth checking out, for certain.

As for the paid version of the software, you can still get the Cadillac version for just $90 per month. Plans start at $10. At those prices, I don’t have a lot of problem with Viralheat execs calling themselves a “disruptive” social media monitoring company. They kinda are.

Left: The crew at Hawaii Public Radio, Oahu.  Left to Right: Ryan Ozawa (@hawaii),  David Lau (@synwpn), Kara Imai (@hawaiikara), Jeremiah Owyang (@jowyang), and Burt Lum (@bytemarks)

How to hotels, restaurants, attractions, airlines, entertainers and cruise ships use social media to connect with tourists?  Listen in to find out.

Thanks to Burt Lum (Twitter) and Ryan Ozawa (Twitter), the hosts of the long running tech show called “Bytemarks Cafe” on Hawaii Public Radio. At the Hawaii Tourism Conference in Oahu two weeks ago, I had the pleasure of presenting a primary research findings from a project Altimeter was contracted to do (with my colleagues Alan Webber and Christine Tran) on the socialgraphics of Hawaii tourists. I was joined on the call by Kara Imai (Twitter), head of digital and therefore social media at Hawaii Visitors Convention Bureau (HVCB) who hired us for this primary research project.

Listen in to this podcast to hear how social media impacts tourism, especially for marketing destination organizations.  We get past the news and start jumping into this topic at 20 minutes into it.

Click this player (Below) to start the audio

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You are missing some Flash content that should appear here! Perhaps your browser cannot display it, or maybe it did not initialize correctly.

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download mp3
(59:00)

Key Takeaways:

• Finding out how your target customers use social media (Disclosure: Altimeter was hired by HVCB to conduct socialgraphics research), and where they are online is the first step in a social business strategy.   We call this socialgraphics, learn more about it here.
• Mom and pops, small businesses, and even large hotels can benefit from social media.
• What happens at the destination (and how people rate their experience, even in real time) is a form of marketing.

True to living social media and travel research, I uploaded pics, which we found in the research is common, if you have questions on the whereabouts leave a question in Flickr and I’ll respond.  Someday, I hope to make Hawaii a second home, yet see my current personal goal called #OperationBluewater.  I’m at 10/30 days this year.

Kit Kat got a lot of flack from the Greenpeace brandjacking, yet, I wanted to point out a marketing campaign where they leveraged popular news mentions. What was interesting is they used a simple email and some doctored photos, on Good Friday in the Netherlands (a country in which 45% are not religious)

A few questions: When consumers find out this was a hoax, does this create distrust? Does tapping into market memes demonstrate being in tune with your market? Would it have only worked in a country where a large portion are not religious?

Whether sacrilegious or brilliant marketing, perhaps it can only work in the Netherlands –it would have never worked in the US, You be the judge, I look forward to hearing your comments. (link via Donald Lim, who shared this at the IMMAP workshop)

Data is important. It helps us to guide our decisions based on facts –not just gut instinct. Lately, this data from eMarketer (thanks Scott Monty) has been floating around the web, and I want to add my own thoughts. Having conducted similar trust research, or seen the data from others, much of this is confirmation to what we already know. I do however want to provide my additional insights to how I interpret the findings.

Further Analysis: Sources of Information Users Trust

• Tally: People Trust People They Know: When I was at Forrester, similar research was launched, showing that blog posts (often by people you don’t know) weren’t as trusted.  This data shows that blog post (item 1) from people you do know show a higher degree of trust.  Item 2 and 3 also show upticks in trust increasing from people you know.  I added up the positive trust (trust completely and trust somewhat) to aggregate sources of trust, you can see that eMarketer also segmented it the same, here’s my tally:
  • Friend: Blog Posts from those you know = Positive is 64%
  • Friend: Posts by friends in Facebook = Positive is also 64%
  • Friend: Tweets from friends = Positive is 45%
  • Brand: Blog posts by a brand = Positive is 36%
  • Brand:Posts by a brand in Facebook that you follow = Positive is 41%
  • Independent: Fellow community member = Positive is 37%
  • Brand: Brand product in a community = Positive is 32%
  • Brand: Brand Twitter stream = Positive is 26%
  • Independent: Blog by independent blogger (I assume that’s someone you don’t know) = Positive is 25%
  • Independent:Tweets from independent blogger (likely not someone you know) = Positive 21%
• Tally:  Trust Highest with Friends, followed by Brands then Independents
  • Trust is highest with people you actually know.  I averaged 64, 64, 45 to be 57.66% across the various data sources above.
  • Brands that produce their own content (owned) 36, 41, 32, 26 averaged at 33.75% positive.  Far less than the 57% of people that you know clearly indicate that consumers trust brand far less, but more so from people that they don’t know.  This leads to conclude that while brands may be telling consumers the positive aspects of a product, it’s more likely to be based on facts.
  • Similarly those that are ‘independents’ (or people you may not know) the trust goes down significantly.  37, 25, 21, for an average of 27.66%.  Those that you don’t know are about half as trusted as those you do.  Therefore brands focusing on social media should instead but areas of focus on harnessing the social graph –not just mindless social media from the masses.
• Recommendations: Focus on Harnessing the Social Graph
  • Brands should focus on social marketing that harnesses the “social graph” which is getting friend to share with their own friends.  By developing advocacy programs and focus on word of mouth marketing, brands can increase marketing and sales margins by getting customers to do the work for them.   See my article on Forbes on advocacy programs, or see how Zuberance encourages WOM, as well as aggregate your customers social graph on your own web proprieties using Gigya, Janrain, Disqus, and Echo.  At the very basic level, encourage sharing tools like Sharethis, Addthis to the mix.
  • Clearly brands should continue to produce their own ‘owned’ content in social media, as there’s still a degree of trust, but balance out this inventory with a greater degree of ‘earned’.  Yet rather than try to sway the masses that your product is the best, publish factual information about products and services, and retweet, repeat, and echo back what customers are saying.
  • Focus less on triggering word of mouth of independents, while it will happen naturally, this data is indicating that inviting people to share with their friends, may yield a greater degree of trust.

I hope you found this helpful, I gave my additional analysis and insight to the eMarketer data, as well as suggestions from brands.  This data is confirmation of data I’ve seen from a variety of other sources.

My friend Edward Boches had a crappy experience at a Marriott Hotel last week. Like any good content producer, he blogged about it. Social media more than any other communications mechanism before has done more for placing market control back in the hands of the consumer. The barrier to entry to the web is a pulse and scant brain waves. If you are moderately functional, you can publish.

Boches, who has far more brain waves than most of us, offered a fantastic suggestion to any business in his post. He saw through his frustration to offer up a customer bill of rights of sorts for Marriott. He suggested it look something like this:

1. We guarantee your satisfaction.

2. We guarantee your room will be clean and that everything works: the clock, TV, lamps, bathroom.

3. If for any reason your stay with us was unsatisfactory we will make it up with comparable accommodations on us.

4. We will take any complaint and suggestion seriously and respond as quickly as humanly possible.

5. We encourage you to Tweet, blog, and post images and video of anything you find below standards or unresolved.

Edward Boches. Image by Bob_Collins via Flickr

Certainly, the customer bill of rights idea is noble. Many of us in the power-to-the-consumer world of social media immediately nodded and virtually high-fived Boches for the concept, even if it was less original and more a reminder of what companies should be doing.

When Boches got his response from Marriott and they offered apologies and explanations and engaged commentors on his original post, he followed up with a lessons learned kind of story. In it, he offered these thoughts for customers to keep in mind as a sort of quid pro quo for brands who grovel accordingly:

We should make our issues public.

It’s smarter to offer suggestions than criticism.

We should welcome any brand or individual who tries to learn and engage.

If we want brands to deliver better service, it’s partly our responsibility to guide them there and hold them to it.

And the congregation said, “Amen.” Right?

Maybe not.

While I’m certainly supportive of the idea that brand should treat their customers with the utmost care and respect, least they flee to hungry competitors or even to the interwebs to vent their frustrations with them, I think enumerating these ideas as requisites for the general consuming public is idyllic and naive. For every consummate professional out there (like Boches), there exists about 15 dipshits who will only bitch to bitch. Or bitch to get free stuff.

The customer is not always right. In fact, sometimes the customer is quite an asshole.

Should consumers hold brands to a higher standard? Yes. Should we unleash the huddled masses, trailer trash and mouth-breathers on Twitter and Facebook and blogs to whine about every misstep or oversight they encountered while buying Natty Light and Marlboro Light 100s at the Circle K? I’m thinking no. Half their problem is that they wouldn’t have hurt themselves stepping on the pop-top if they were wearing shoes, or were paying attention to where they stepped rather than yelling at their baby-daddy on the prepaid cell.

Yes, the portrait is exaggerated, but to illustrate a point. Not everyone is a civilized consumer. Not everyone plays fair. And this country is as mired in moany, bitchy negativity as it frankly needs to be, in my opinion.

Maybe I’m just having a bad week, but there’s a big difference is a polite blog post pointing out a bad consumer experience and a web full of Springer plots.

Thanks to Boches for opening the dialog. Thanks to Marriott for learning from the experience and participating in the conversation. But don’t we owe it to our sanity to establish some limits? Or is sufficient brain waves to figure out how to publish online enough?

A penny for your thoughts … unless you’re barefoot in public. The money would be better spend on footware. Heh.

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by Josh Bernoff

Here's what I think about Brian Solis' book Engage.  You should buy it. And you shouldn't necessarily read it start to finish. But you'll find yourself diving in again and again when you need help with . . . just about anything social.

To be fair, I was intimidated. I had promised Brian a review, but the thing is 382 pages long. And Brian has made some unfortunate choices -- Chapters 3 through 14 (of 25 total) have the titles "The New Media University: Social Media 101," "The New Media University: Social Media 201" and so on. It doesn't exactly invite you in.

And yet, it turns out this book is going to be one of the most useful things out there for anyone social.

Start with the theme. Brian's manifesto is "Engage or Die." This is what drives him to write, and it's a good start. It's a good twist on a theme that's been embraced, in one form or another, by the wide variety of people out there who are trying to build social applications.

This is followed by what may be the most comprehensive, believable book on social media available anywhere. Starting with the social media statistics (Chapter 2) and continuing with the "101, 201, ..." chapters I mentioned earlier, this book hits everything, and I mean everything, that there is to know about social applications. There's a complete list of tools and technologies. There are not one, but two definitions of Social Media, of which I prefer the shorter:

Social media is any tool or service that uses the Internet to facilitate conversations.

There's a list of the top 10 monetization trends for social media and microcommunities. There's a nice discussion of how to separate (or blend) your personal self from your corporate self. In fact, whatever you're looking for, it's here. Not one, but several complete sets of social media guidelines from the likes of Intel and IBM, plus a template for your own.

Brian is not shy about quoting others. For example, the Forrester/Groundswell Social Technographics Profile gets a full writeup here, along with other competing systems.

It's a little difficult to get a read on Brian's position on some issues, since he typically quotes both (or all) sides of an argument. But there is no better way than bone up for that argument than with this book.

So, here's what you should do.

If you're new to social media, I'm a bit surprised you're showing up at this blog, but in any case, read this book cover to cover. It will be worth it.

If you're experienced, buy this book and go back into it when you need help. Use the index, the glossary, and the other tools in this book to find what you're looking for. Because whatever it is you're looking for, it's here. When you're preparing that presentation, looking for that example, or trying to convince your boss, you'll find yourself looking in this book for help.

If you're a professor teaching social media, recommend this for your students.

Brian, thanks for putting this all together, it must have been quite an effort. We appreciate it.

Someone asked me a question about blog commenting recently that I thought peculiar. It’s a question that many brands, marketers and public relations folks have asked, for sure. But for whatever reason, the question just seemed odd to me. The person asked:

“What is the best way for a corporation to comment on a blog without seeming to promote their products?”

The root of the question is the company’s desire to not be spammy with their blog comment activities online. I’m thrilled marketers are asking that question. But it still seems peculiar to me. Maybe my perspective is a bit different, but here’s how I answered:

“The best way for a corporation to comment on blogs without seeming to promote their product is to comment without promoting their product. I know that sounds flippant, but take it literally. If the comment is to correct a misstatement about the price of a phone, for instance, you’d say:

‘Hey, It’s Jason from Verizon. Just wanted to clarify a mistaken number in the post. Our Droid X retails at $199.99 with a two-year contract if ordered online, not $249. If you saw it listed for that price, let us know so we can let the retailer know that’s not kosher. Thanks!’

You don’t say,

‘Hey, I work for Verizon, the greatest phone company on the planet, and our Droid X is now just $199.99 with a two-year contract and if you order online, but only until Sunday, Sunday, Sunday. So hurry down to your local Verizon store an save, save, save on the best smart phone known to man. This thing will mow your lawn. We’ve got apps! We’ve got savings! We’ve got the lowest prices in the tri-state area! Verizon rocks. Verizon rolls. Gotta love your Verizon Smart Phones! (Void where prohibited, fees do not include titles, tax, license or ferrets.)”

Is that so hard for people to understand? I don’t see why.”

So is it so hard to understand? Why?

NOTE: I used Verizon Wireless as an example for analogy only. They sponsor Social Media Club Louisville, of which I serve as president, but are not presently a client or sponsor of this blog.

The Empowered book tour is beginning. Here's where you can meet us -- and we'll be adding more events around the ones in these cities as we get closer to the dates:

Josh, San Francisco/San Jose, August 23-27. Josh will be speaking at the ANA Business-to-Business Marketing Leadership Conference in San Jose on August 26. Topic "B-to-B Social Media and The Dynamics Of Peer Influence." I'm also meeting with some journalists and bloggers and doing a client event at a San Francisco Giants game. (Some of this travel has its advantages . . .)

Josh, Chicago, September 14-15. Josh working with clients.

Ted, Boston, September 16-17. Ted will be speaking at Forrester's Security Forum 2010 on "The Role of Security In An Empowered Enterprise". Empowering employees can be scary for information security professionals -- Ted will explain the security model that can keep them innovating safely.

Josh, London, September 21-22. Josh will be giving a keynote at ad:tech London. Topic: "The Dynamics of Peer Influence."

Josh and Ted, New York, September 27-28. We give a combined talk at the Web 2.0 Expo. If you're in New York, this is the perfect chance to hear more about the whole book and the implications of the HERO idea for marketing, management, and IT.

Josh, Boston, September 30. Josh will give a book talk to the Ad Club of Boston.

We hope to see you in one of these places. For more details on our travel schedule and speeches, see the authors page which lists them all.

There’s lots of buzz around “social CRM” software, strategies and programs these days. It’s getting the kind of play “social business” did about this time last year when the analysts at Forrester jumped ship for Altimeter and Dachis. They had to invent new phrases to sell their services to the C-Suite. If you don’t have an innovative-sounding name for what you do, then I guess you don’t attract as much attention.

Social CRM is being hawked by monitoring services, market research firms, traditional sales software and — if you can believe it — Twitter applications. Brand managers, marketing managers and agencies everywhere are anxious to get them some of that social CRM, by golly. Sadly, most of them don’t even know what CRM stands for.

Before you go and plop down money for software that does nothing if you don’t understand the purpose for it, let’s look at what social CRM really is. (It’s customer relationship management, in case you were wondering.)

Fanscape has a nice report out called The Value of a Social Relationship in which they put some mathematics around the value of a customer. It’s worth the download, even if the math is more complicated than ObamaCare. In it, they say:

“The aim of CRM is not only to maximize the revenue from a single transaction, but to build a lasting relationship with the customer, thus increasing the customer lifetime value.”

I would generally agree that is the goal of a CRM program: to increase the lifetime value of a given customer to a company. By building stronger relationships with your customers, you can foster and encourage more purchases over time that the one-and-done method of straight sales. The part that makes it work, though, is the relationship building. Good CRM has to be customer focused, not company focused.

CRM software was (ironically) created to try and automate some of that relationship building. Instead of the labor- and time-intensive act of one-to-one communications, technology allowed marketers to build in automatic direct mail pieces, emails and even telemarketing calls to prospects, customers and advocates around campaigns, calendar dates or issues to keep those audiences invested in the brand at opportune times.

But a lot of CRM software is really just sales management software that tracks how many times you ask someone to buy stuff. That’s not really CRM. CRM is about tracking all communications, gathering information and informing your decisions around a particular customer. It’s not always about the sale.

When most companies say they sell “social CRM” software, what they’re really selling is a contact database that includes fields for a customer’s Twitter handle, Facebook account and other social media profiles. They don’t actually do much to allow you to build relationships in manual or automatic fashion. They just have the links.

True “Social CRM” systems not only help you know where your contacts are, but allow you or, even more importantly, those contacts, to manage how you communicate with them, how often and for what messages. Think of a good Social CRM system as email opt-in on crack.

Then the system allows you to leverage your contact’s public social data and even private communications with you to better inform your timing and decisions to communicate with them. Many thinkers in this space also think of Social CRM as allowing you to pull collective intelligence from your customers to improve products, etc. I don’t discount that possibility, but a forum will do that, too. Besides, that thinking is company-centric, not customer relationship-centric, so I tend to not focus on it as a primary function.

There are a lot of companies out there who claim they have a good Social CRM tool. I’m sure several of them will jump in the comments and lay it on thick. But one that I’ve been experimenting with I really like is JitterJam.

JitterJam allows your company to import your email lists, Facebook Fans, Twitter Followers and more into a database. You can tag each individual or groups of individuals anyway you like, making filtering and custom outreach by group easy. As you have contact with each person, those conversations are captured into each person’s profile. The system allows you to track and gauge when someone moves closer to your funnel, going from contact to prospect to customer to advocate.

The above graph shows the progression of contacts, prospects, customers and advocates for World’s Best Cat Litter, which is using JitterJam with and through its agency partner, MicroArts. (The big jump midway through represents awareness brought about by a DirecTV campaign … yes, traditional advertising! Oh my!) Anytime someone interacts with WBCL on Twitter or Facebook, joins its email list or otherwise has a connection to the brand online, they’re brought into the JitterJam platform. From there, the brand can reach out to the person in the medium in which they connected and give them what JitterJam calls a “Make Me Happy” ask where people can opt in to company communications and specify which mediums are acceptable. (See JitterJam’s Make Me Happy page here.)

Seeing the rise of the customers thanks to their efforts, you can visualize how effective your outreach has been.

“We needed something that was going to be more than a reporting solution,” explained Drew Schulthess of MicroArts. “We needed a better context to the relationships we’re building with our customers. We need to know who our customers were, who our evangelists were and how we were connecting to them.”

But JitterJam has much more to it than managing contacts. You can create and post social messages, emails, text messages and more, distribute those to everyone or filtered lists of your contacts, monitor the social web for conversations around your brand or your chosen keywords then funnel the individuals in those conversations into your system as new contacts, too.

When I think of a good Social CRM platform, I see one that has a little bit of everything … social media monitoring, influencer identification, email marketing, SMS capabilities, social outpost management, list management, segmentation ability, contact assessment and measurement and so on. JitterJam has almost everything in one package.

The challenge for using a platform like JitterJam is similar to the challenge of using any robust platform: You have to really master the software to get the most out of it. Yes, it’s one of the most powerful platforms out there, but you’re going to need to learn the ins and outs before you can really milk this thing for all it’s worth.

Still, all its worth could be golden for your company. Imagine communicating with 50,000 people at once. Now imagine communicating with all 50,000 in the medium or mechanism they choose to receive messages from you in and powered by intelligence that allows you to cater the message to customer groups in more relevant ways. JitterJam accomplishes this.

Yes, there are competitors out there that have nice platforms (I’m diving into Shoutlet next, which has some cool DIY tool creation with it) and do a lot of the same work. No, this review is not meant to say that JitterJam is the end-all and be-all to Social CRM. But it’s awfully powerful and worth a look-see.

And with tiered pricing starting at $290 per month, small businesses can afford the tool, too. Sure, the more sizable your lists or volume of your keyword searches, the more you’ll pay, but the pricing seems awfully fair for the functionality to me.

What does Social CRM mean to you? What software have you used to accomplish that and how did it fit your needs? If you use JitterJam, tell us about your experiences. The comments are yours.

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For the better part of the last five years, companies, agencies, consultants and managers have been sifting through all sorts of different platforms, softwares and programs, looking for that one social media tool that will solve their company’s or client’s problem. I have personally wasted about 57 aggregate days of my life sitting through hour-long demos on everything from Twitter clients to social media monitoring platforms and CRM solutions to WordPress plugins.

For the record, and for all you sales and marketing tools out there … er, um … people who sell and market tools, let me give you a few suggestions for your demos. First, keep it to 15-20 minutes. We’re busy. Second, get rid of the company background slides. I don’t care who founded or funded you. I care about the thing your stuff does that I can’t do better without it. Third, show me a real use case using a real client that outlines their problem and shows how your tool solved it. If I can’t connect your tool to a real solution, I won’t remember it.

But then there’s the age-old paradox of tools. They really become useful when someone figures out a different reason to use them.

Image by tcd123usa via Flickr

It’s like my Cousin Johnny’s method of getting rid of a ground hog. To rid his backyard, garden or farm of a pesky ground hog, he uses three tools: a shovel, a five-gallon bucket and a six-pack of beer. Think about those tools for a moment and make assumptions on how he would use them.

To get rid of a ground hog, Cousin Johnny places the bucket, upside down, beside the ground hog’s hole. He drinks the six-pack of beer. By the time he’s finished, the ground hog pop his head up. He whacks the varmint on the head with the shovel.

Social media tools, too, can have a paradoxical nature. Social media purists have claimed for years that you blog to engage your audiences. Compendium Blogware (a client) has proven time and again that you can also use a blog to win search results and drive leads to your business, even without any measurable level of engagement. Those same purists claim Twitter is a conversational platform and one-way blasting of messages doesn’t work. Still, many mainstream Twitter users enjoy the fact they can follow feeds of companies or media outlets to just get the news of the day. (See @cnnbrk, @NBA, @MarthaStewart or @GStephanopoulos, all top 100 Twitter accounts, or even a feed like @BayerUSNews, which keeps media and pharma industry folk updated on the corporation’s goings on.)

More importantly for brand managers and companies buying tools, there’s the paradox of expectation. You expect a social media monitoring tool to monitor the Internet and take that burden off your shoulders. But the tool monitors nothing. It only presents information in an organized fashion so that you may monitor it more efficiently.

You expect a market research firm to tell you how to run your brand or make marketing decisions for you. But it only presents information about your audience, brand, market or competitors that enable you to make smarter decisions. An enterprise management system like Valuevine will not manage the Facebook and Twitter presence for the 150 separate locations for you. It will give you a mechanism to manage them, however.

The tools, in and of themselves, are not important. What you do with them is.

So the next time you’re suffering through a product demo, listen through the sales pitch and propaganda and ask yourself, “How can I use this tool? Who will manage its use on my team? Can I afford it in both fiscal and human resources?”

Those answers will help you pick the right tools for your social media marketing efforts.

NOTE: No actual ground hog was harmed in the writing of this blog post. While you’re welcome to complain about the violence Cousin Johnny uses to get rid of ground hogs, he hunts deer, too, so your concerns will probably fall on deaf ears. Sorry if his methods offend you. For good measure, here’s an article that explains more humane ways of ridding your property of a groundhog.

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by Josh Bernoff

The Forrester Groundswell Awards entry deadline is in two weeks, on August 27. As usual, most of you have waited until the last two weeks to enter. If you haven't entered yet but plan to, this advice is for you. (If you just want to see other people's entries, click on the items at the left of the Awards site.)

Our awards process is transparent, and so are our criteria. So in interests of helping you spend your time wisely, let me tell you how to win. I'll use examples from entries already submitted, and from previous winners. (Just because I show an example doesn't mean it will win ... we judge things in detail, this is just from a cursory review.)

I'm going to assume you already built a kick-ass social or mobile application for customers or employees. So your only problem is to show it off. Here are three pieces of advice:

1.Include numbers. Show us, as quantitatively as you can, how you accomplished a business goal. For  example, this entry from TurboTax has some impressive numbers including a sales increase of 18%. That kind of thing gets our attention.

2. Link to more detail on the Web. For example, this entry from Federated Media links to a PDF file on Google Docs. The PDF file has links out to several other places, including a video. Our entry form may be limited in space, but with the URL you get to type into it, you can link out to any place on the Web where you talk about your entry. Some people just link to a blog posts about their entry ... that's a nice way to tell others that you're entering the awards even as you provide the backup information we need to judge the entry fully. In the case of PTC the blog post was right within their own community, which is a nice touch.

3. Point out what you've done that's unique. For example, this employee application from UPS saved money by using viral techniques to accelerate hiring -- not a typical objective for a social application.

By the way, don't agonize about what category to put your entry in. The FAQ gives details on this, but if we determine that your entry would be more likely to win in a different category, we'll move it.

We'll leave with three pieces of advice on what NOT to do.

1. Don't wait until the last minute. A good entry is made up of a lot of pieces -- an external site, a graphic, some statistics on how you accomplished business goals. You're not going to be able to do a good job if you have to assemble this on the last day. And we won't accept late entries -- the deadline remains August 27.

2. Don't forget to get your client's permission. Those who submit the entries -- including technology vendors, PR agencies, and advertising agencies -- need to secure permission to publish the information. We've gotten those embarrassing calls -- "Our client doesn't want to make this public, can you please take it down off the site?" -- and they make you, the agency or vendor, look very bad. You did check first, didn't you?

3. Don't call us to see if you've won. I promise, if you've won, we'll call you.

So, now you know how to win. Get those entries in! We can't wait to judge them.

I joke that Dan Zarrella has too much time on his hands. The “social media scientist” has been researching the social behaviors behind many social media tools long before HubSpot noticed and gobbled him up. The insights that he’s produced from that research over the years has been a mixed batch of awesomeness that has helped build better tools and refine social media marketing behavior for more efficient use of the tools.

Now Zarrella has turned his attention to conference presentations and, more specifically, how to amplify the effectiveness of them through social media. Since I give a lot of talks, I am interested in his insights. Since many of you may either presently, or in the future, take your social media expertise to the podium, I wanted to share some of those with you. I asked Dan for a sneak peek at his research, which he’ll present with a free webinar on August 19, and he was kind enough to share a nice takeaway with us.

From Dan:

In my research, I found that how often your audience can Tweet about your presentation is limited by how much time they have (labeled as “trying to focus” in the graph above). If they find your talk engaging and interesting, they will probably want to pay as attention and can have some difficulty in pulling themselves away for a few minutes to mention you on Twitter.

I also found that 6.5% of people who took my survey only Tweeted “pithy” soundbites. Soundbites that are under 140 characters and can be understood on Twitter, outside of the greater context of the presentation.

One easy way to add a bit of contagiousness to your presentation and take advantage of my findings is to use “Tweetable Takeaway Slides.” I gave a webinar in June about Facebook marketing that was the 8th most Tweeted about topic, and I credit the takeaway slides for part of that success.

My takeaway slides used the format shown above. I included my username and the webinar’s hashtag as well as Twitter bird logo to really drive home the fact that these were “Tweetable.” Slides like these will allow you to pause for a second to let your audience Tweet about your without losing focus or missing anything, and it they will for you to write pithy sound bites perfect for Tweeting.

The takeaway slide insight is just one of the many cool ideas Dan will share on the webinar and in the ebook (also free). You can download the eBook now and register for the August 19th Science of Presentations webinar. See you there.

Oh, and Dan is also the author of The Social Media Marketing Book (affiliate link) which is well worth your investment.

What ideas do you have leading into Dan’s talk that might help make your presentations more conducive to Tweeting, sharing and generating online buzz? Share your thoughts in the comments.

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by Ted Schadler

(Cross-posted from Ted's blog)

We are getting many requests for help on iPad strategies for the enterprise. It's clear why. iPads are a tremendously empowering technology that any employee can buy. My colleague Andy Jaquith has a report coming real soon now on the security aspects of iPhones and iPads, and I'm launching research on case studies of iPad in the enterprise.

I am currently hearing about three business scenarios for iPad and tablets, but I'd love hear of your experiences, plans, concerns, or frustrations. Ping me at tschadler(at)forrester(dot)com. Here are the three scenarios:

1. Sales people out in the field. This is the "Hollywood pitch deck" scenario. The iPad, particularly with a cover that can prop it up a bit, is a great way to scroll through slides to show a customer or demonstrate a Web site. In one situation, I heard that there's a competition brewing for who can manipulate the Web site upside down (so the client across the table sees it right side up) without making any mistakes. Now there's a new skill for sales: upside down Web browsing.
2. Executives on an overnight trip. No, iPad doesn't replace a laptop (at least not yet; more on this below). But it's great for email, calendar, reviewing documents, and presenting PDF or Keynote decks.
3. Warehouse managers, retail floor staff, medical staff, and anybody else that needs real access to apps while on their feet. iPad's form factor, battery life, mobile Internet access, panoply of applications, and touchscreen abilities make it a great device for these typically frustrated and under-served employees. Why retail floor staff? Because then a customer can be served with a custom order while they're looking at the too-small-but-way-cool sweater on the rack.

So what can't iPad (yet) do? Here are my top three requests:

1. Full Microsoft Office support. Microsoft's missing a huge opportunity to build apps that can create and edit common documents. Tablets are going to be huge, but Microsoft's Office business will have to device-agnostic to avoid getting displaced on it. Today, I have to use Keynote to make a presentation. But I'd rather use PowerPoint. The Office Web Apps products could solve this problem fairly easily. Until we get that, iPad will never replace a laptop.
2. Mouse support. For pete's sake, I can use a bluetooth keyboard, why can't I use a bluetooth mouse? That would make it a full authoring tool. Until we get that, people will suffer finger contortions and stiff necks reaching over their keyboard to touch the screen.
3. More and better business apps. This is mostly a matter of waiting for the market to build great iPad apps. We have some great ones already: Citrix GoToMeeting, Cisco WebEx, Email, and I'm sure a whole lot more that you'll tell me about. But until we get access to corporate applications, employees will still have to log around their laptops.

I'm working on a report for the Fall on using tablets for business, and I'll be presenting on this empowering technology at our Content & Collaboration Forum in October, so please let me know what you're interested in learning.

Alos, please let me know how you are using iPad for business. What features do you want? What other tablets are you excited about?

If you subscribe to my monthly newsletter, you know when it comes to location-based services, I’m quite partial to Whrrl. Unlike Foursquare or Gowalla, there’s more to Whrrl than checking in and getting coupons. Whrrl allows you to annotate your visit with notes, images and more to create virtual scrapbooks of your event or visit. (Think a child’s T-ball game.) When there are more Whrrl users at an event, you can tie the stories together on the location’s page and see what other users are adding to the scrapbooks.

But the system is more than checkin and build content. There’s a full gaming component, recommendations and referrals and even real world activation for businesses and corporate partners. (Yes, Whrrl has opportunities for you to partner with them to drive real foot traffic to your location and take the concept of viral spread off-line. Watch the video. You’ll get it.)

During my recent trip to Seattle, I visited Whrrl’s offices and sat down with parent company Pelago CEO Jeff Hoden and product manager John Kim to talk about Whrrl.

Check out Whrrl. And if you’re close to a Murphy USA, give that a spin too. You could win free gas and more. Nice!