* Social Media Vulnerabilities: From the New York Times Sunday edition came a report of a Hollywood burglary ring whose members not only targeted celebrities, but used celebrity gossip web sites to figure out when those celebrities would be out partying, so they could break in knowing no one would be at home.

Granted, celebrities aren’t normal people — their movements are tracked and broadcast with unhealthy intensity. And the burglary ring (alleged, that is) doesn’t seem to be composed of criminal masterminds, relying in a few cases on doggy doors and keys left under mats to get inside the target homes.

However, to my eye, we keep edging closer and closer to scenarios that I outlined in my entry, Please Burglarize My House, where criminals, aided by quick Web searches, find the information that we willingly blast out to the world telling people were we are (and thus, where we aren’t — in realtime), plus what we have that’s worth taking, and a whole bunch of other information that’s useful to them.

Folks, this isn’t a moral panic here — it’s just a recognition that criminals adapt to new technologies, too. Postal mail opened up a whole lot of new opportunities for scams that didn’t require physical presence; cars and roads gave new mobility to criminals of all sorts; and burglars could case a house just by using a telephone.

In many ways, there still seems to be a naivete about potential negative impacts of social media on your physical existence, that borders on an adolescent’s invulnerability.

* Social Media and Crisis Communications: Two followups from CrisisCamp — the first is a very literal one, since it builds on conversations between representatives from Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft at the first CrisisCamp in DC: At Random Hacks of Kindness, coders got together to build apps to harness social media and communications tools to help improve communication during disasters.

I’m pretty sure I was in the session (primarily as a spectator) where light bulbs went off and commitments were made, so it’s cool to see concrete things coming out of it.

The second item is more of a spiritual successor: The US Navy’s Office of Naval Research awarded a contract to Lockheed Martin to see how social media could be used during disaster and crisis operations. Valued at  a “miniscule” $1 million over 24 months, it shows that social media is a serious, useful phenomena, and that even large, traditional institutions are trying to find ways it can be harnessed.

* One More Thing: Oh, and one last thing — this entry marks my 1-year anniversary as a contributor to the Solutions Are Power blog. (I suppose I should re-read and revisit my first entry at some point.) Time flies — it seems like only yesterday that I barely used Twitter and I still hadn’t yet wasted any time on Mafia Wars. Even so, the social media landscape has changed a lot in just a year, but I’m glad to still be here to write about it.

Thanks to Shashi, Jill, Steve, and the rest of the Network Solutions blog team, as well as to all readers and commenters, for continuing to indulge me. I hope you’re getting as much from reading my writings as I am from writing them, and I hope to continue doing so for as long as you’ll have me.

Apparently, another characteristic of weekend unconferences is that I’m unable to get to them on time. I also forgot my camera (brought the accessories, though) and had a hard time finding parking, so I was a little frazzled — I missed the agenda-setting and first session, so it took me a while to get settled in.

The event was held at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library (aka the DC Public Library), spread between the basement meeting rooms and some of the upstairs lobby rooms. I don’t think I’d ever actually been inside the library before. Access to power and wifi was good (except for one room); outside of some early temperature shifts and the occasional random passerby wandering through the upstairs lobby rooms, the space was fine.

The first session I attended (second of the day) was about developing gadgets for Google Wave, though also covered the essential question, “What the heck is Google Wave and what’s it good for?” (I got my invite and have used it, but admit I still have no good answer to the question.) A lot of attention has been focused on the real-time chat aspect (where you can others’ typing as it happens), though we were encouraged to not get distracted by that and look at Wave more as interconnected, embeddable, commentable document collaboration (with gadgets), without having to worry about servers and protocols, and that it will iterate and evolve according to how users actually use it.

The lunch session I sat in on sought to form organizing committee for a TEDx event in DC; TEDx essentially licenses the TED concept, bringing thought leaders across disciplines to speak (there had been a TEDx Mid Atlantic just this month that’d I’d managed to miss completely). TEDx is the kind of prestige event that I most likely wouldn’t be able to attend unless I was helping to organize it, and there’s no shortage of star power in DC, so it’ll be interesting to see what happens.

Post-lunch was a neat session looking at free, location-based mashup technologies (that broadened to look at other mashup technologies); I’ll just throw out a bunch of links mentioned including GeoNames, MaxMind, ip2location, GeoHash, OpenCalais, ProgrammableWeb, and my favorite, StupidFilter.

The next session I split between a discussion of computer-generated audio and video (I would characterize it as trying to build Anthem, the everything-to-music converter from Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency), and a wide-ranging discussion of generalist vs. specialist (which covered everything from the elevation of manual labor, work-life balance, networking and personal growth).

The final session was a pretty useful discussion on how to be a good freelancer; there was a lot of good, though sometimes contradictory info about how to talk to your employer about side gigs, corporate structure, the role of lawyers, accounting tips, managing clients, managing projects and scope creep, and billing.

Because of scheduling, the last session was abandoned (or rather, continued at the bar) — the happy hour included BarCamp participants, as well as the woman-oriented DC She’s Geeky (scheduled at the same time as BarCamp, it may account for the particularly male-heavy attendance there).

For more information, check out posts, photos, and tweets tagged “barcampdc3″ and “barcamp.”

But there’s a giant upside, probably accounting for all those folks taking that 25^th hour to learn more and do more to market online. All of that sweat equity can deliver sharper focus and more success.

Take social media marketing.

There’s a learning curve when you begin blogging, Facebooking, Twittering, etc., and it takes time to get started. But these venues are designed for the average time-challenged human being. They’re forgiving, a necessity for busy entrepreneurs, right? You can dip a toe into social media marketing any time, day or night, and then build on it at a pace you can handle.

Who has time to Facebook? Why Twitter? The answer to these questions may be a few other questions: Who are my customers? What are my customers looking for? What are my peers in my industry thinking about and what are they saying?

So maybe you can’t afford a PR firm to answer these questions for you, but you sure can Tweet, Facebook, blog and, generally, jump in on the conversation. You can get some answers.

There are guides to social media marketing out there for sure, written by enthusiasts eager to share their struggles and successes. Consider us one of them, because we are sold on the marketing power of social media. Here’s a white paper to help you get started on getting social: “Using Social Media Marketing to Drive Traffic to Your Website” (more)

Follow-up reading: Wondering how social media marketing helps with SEO? Steve Fisher addresses the effect social media is having on search engine listings.

The top three reasons that small business owners avoid developing their online marketing plans and stay away from social media is lack of capital, lack of time, and lack of skills. This is where a blog will fit your needs perfectly—it is relatively cheap to incorporate into your site, requires very little time, and you do not need any special technical skills or writing expertise to use it. View this guide for tips on getting started with a blog and for best practices on maintaining it.

What is most important to having a successful blog is to understand that it is like hosting a networking event on your site, around the clock. People can read what you’ve written, which should be entertaining and informative. They can also participate by asking questions and posting comments. This can become a sounding board for revealing your areas of expertise and truly helping potential customers. It can also be a place for your current customers to tout your goods or services.

The beauty of the blog is that it does not need to be a picture perfect dissertation of what you do; as a matter of fact, it is better if it is more conversational and speaks to the masses. You can also have fellow employees or business associates write posts to expand your reach. One cardinal rule of blogging is to not only start this conversation, but to respond as well—keep the interaction moving.

Learn more and get started today!

Located online at www.twitter.com, Twitter stands for “Typing What I’m Thinking to Everyone Reading,” and is easily accessible from the Web or the latest generation of smart cell phones and PDAs. Twitter users compose “Tweets,” quick entries consisting of no more than 140 characters. Tweets range from talk of today’s lunch to breaking news; many forward-thinking businesses use the service to get quality content to readers and to build brand loyalty while promoting awareness.

Like many tools on the Web, Twitter began as purely social—a tool for friends to keep tabs on one another via quick updates about their days—but quick-thinking entrepreneurs and businessfolk knew a good thing when they saw it. Now many businesses are on Twitter, monitoring chatter about their brands, promoting deals, and answering customer questions. The great thing about Twitter is that it’s not a purely promotional tool—what it really promotes is good conversation.

If you’re not on Twitter, are you missing out? Wondering how to get started, and what to do once you’re on board? Take a look at our white paper, How Can Twitter Help My Business, and you’ll be setting hearts all a-Twitter in no time!

Once you’re set up, be sure to follow our Social Media Swami, Shashi Bellamkonda, @shashib.

Good luck, and happy Tweeting!

Trend #1 – Advertising is shifting from Contextual Relevance to Temporal Relevance

I recently was chatting with a friend of mine who works with a large social networking company about online advertising and how we are going through a shift. For as long as web advertising has been around it has been about contextual relevance. What is written on the page drives the ad copy to increase the click through potential. This is how Google Adwords works and almost every web advertising system out there.

What is emerging is what he calls “temporal relevance” which is driven by advertising in a time sensitive manner. While this could be a spammers delight (see hashtag spamming on Twitter) it could be great to increase click throughs when the maximum amount of people are looking for something in a particular topic.

Trend #2: Google Wave is the New Era of Real Time Collaboration

I have been using Google Wave and the amazing real time collaboration available with this platform blows my mind. The potential for this tool is staggering. I always explain Google Wave is like Twitter, IM and email had a baby. Mashable talks about this topic as well:

“Real-time will play a major role in the future of online collaboration. We’ve seen all the hype around the new Google Wave platform, as well as the growth of Twitter and Twitter-like communications (such as Facebook status). On the business side, SAP’s Gravity, a prototype of real-time collaborative business process modeling within Google Wave, is a good example. But I see this as the tip of the iceberg.”

Trend #3: E-Commerce will transform to a shared and social experience

Similar to the trend of social commerce, imaging a shared shopping experience but take it a step further. What if you have prices change in real-time based on demand. This has been happening for years to a certain degree with the travel industry and its revenue management systems. But still, that was based on historical data and human modification of current trends. It is not truly real time. With real time data and real time e-commerce, Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving in the United States where everyone shops for Christmas) would never look the same. What about products that rely on a certain freshness or “cinderella packaging”. Mashable talk about it with this great example:

“For consumer facing applications, real-time pricing can be a competitive advantage for perishable goods. For example, the grocer with fresher fruit can theoretically charge or sell more by providing real-time freshness data. With the growth of smart energy grids, real-time pricing of solar energy and electric power provides tremendous cost-savings for consumers. Generally within e-commerce, real-time inventory information that is accessible through the web is valuable for both the consumer and company. What are the other areas of high impact? Travel? Off-season luxury goods? Event tickets? Let us know in the comments below.”

What else? Analytics? Job Contracting?

What else do you think will be impacted by this shift to the real time web? Leave us a comment and tell us your thoughts.

(I am hampered by the fact that I am not a sociologist — not even an armchair one. But let’s ignore that for now.)

I’m getting hung up trying to figure out how much of these generational differences are due to inherent attitudinal differences (brought about by reactions to prior generations, defining historical events, other external factors), and how much is simply due to the technology not being available.

Basically, it’s the question, “Would your parents have Twittered? How about your grandparents?”

The technologically-deterministic view says that human nature pretty much stays constant, so changes in technology are what matters. Because the desire for communication and recognition are pretty constant, you can map the behaviors we see with social media tools now to analogous behaviors in the older offline world. The role taken by Twitter now was fulfilled by… I dunno, malt shop gossip and other real-world social interactions, as well as things like snail mail and physical bulletin boards. The function that Twitter serves now, and those venues served then, was basically the same — social status updating and self-promotion.

Which basically suggests that my teenage self, my parents, and say, the characters from Little Women, would have used social media in similar fashions, had the technology been available at the time. Though subject to the mores, modesties and values of those particular times, which is a pretty huge caveat. Hence the problem of figuring out where the technological factors end and the generational ones begin.

Also, I don’t think it’s true. Some behaviors are just simply new, born of technological change. For example, the idea of nostalgia didn’t really come about until the industrial age (if nothing ever changes, there isn’t anything to be nostalgic about). I’m not sure at what point the metaphor breaks down. Private paper diaries are radically different from publicly published blogs; putting a bumper sticker on your car is nothing like a social status update.

However,  expectations of fame, expressions of reputation, and the existence of microcelebrity have probably always existed in one form or another — first among physical relationships, then in early media-enabled connections, then expanded across online networks. Even something like celebrity culture is nothing new — if anything is new, it’s the expectations of access and the (largely illusory) idea that you can have a deeper, authentic relationship than you could before.

I guess the question really isn’t “Would your parents have Twittered?” but “Would your parents have Twittered the way you Twitter?” Pretty clearly, the answer is no; technological determinism can only go so far, and that’s where genuine generational differences kick in.

For my next entry, I think I’ll take a look at some of the attitudinal differences that influence my own use of social media, and how it differs from those darn kids today.

Does any of this make sense? Please leave a comment either way.

Fast forward a year later and I signed up for this new product still in beta called PeopleBrowsr (spelling is correct here) and was intrigued by its approach to monitoring your life stream. I used it a little bit over the last year and when I was in LA last week for the 140 conference I saw that PeopleBrowsr was sponsoring and Dave was there with the PeopleBrowsr team to promote its new release and demo the product.

According to their site “PeopleBrowsr is a data mine and social search engine for real time conversations. We’ve built a set of applications sitting on the data mine to monitor your brand, identify your audience, analyze tweets sentiment, filter the buzz, manage feedback, share accounts, run campaigns, track keywords, build widgets and engage across multiple social networks simultaneously.”

I find it is great for personal brand and corporate brand monitoring but I will let Dave tell you himself. Here is the interview with him and the demo in the video below: