* 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.

And without disappointment, it turns out that Salesforce is rolling out what they’re calling their “biggest breakthrough ever”: Salesforce Chatter.

According to their release, Salesforce Chatter is the “first social computing application and platform for real-time enterprise collaboration.” It will apparently revolutionize how social networking models will shape the workplace. Of course with social networking, Salesforce has opened up their platform to allow for developers to create their own custom or third-party application.

Not really surprised that Salesforce would wind up opening up their platform to support third-party applications. This coming on the heels of PayPals’s inaugural conference where they too also unveiled that they were opening up their platform for developers to experiment with and create outstanding products. This could potentially be a good thing for the company that just announced their third quarter results that they said would exceed $1.3 Billion – a 20% increase from last year.

With a customer base of nearly 68,000 people, Salesforce must have been constantly asked about whether they would be integrating social media into the mix and also about whether they’d be opening up their API – and the first enterprise cloud computing company has responded with a resounding “YES”.  As it relates to real-time collaboration, Salesforce will allow companies to share information through the use of profiles, status updates, feeds, groups, social apps & content, integration with Twitter and Facebook and even have it be available on mobile platforms!

The big question is when will this become available and how much will Salesforce Chatter cost customers? It seems that they’re going to release this new program to everyone in 2010 and those who have purchased Salesforce.com applications will need to make purchase decisions from the inital set of features currently available? But it seems that if you’re paying for the CRM and Force.com access, you’ll be able to get Salesforce Chatter included. Or, if you just want to get a new Chatter Edition, just pay $50 a month per user which will also include Salesforce Chatter, Content & Force.com.

More information can be found at Force.com.

So how do you choose the right keywords for your enterprise’s website? Depending on whom you ask, there are many ways to go about it, many online tools—Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery—that you can use, and a number of places to get started. But the important thing to remember is that no online tool or SEO expert knows your business as well as you do.

That’s why a brainstorming session should be a part of beginning an SEO or PPC campaign. Bring in everyone who’s important to your business and start talking; write down as many phrases as you can and don’t worry about repeating yourself or weeding things out just yet. Make a big, long list of all the ways people might try to find your site online.

Now you’re ready to turn to the tools, the online wizards, the keyword experts. They’ll help you figure out which keywords are most natural, most relevant, most specific, and most often searched. From there, you really can begin to realize the extent of keyword power.

These hints (with some liberties taken, of course) are excerpted from our white paper, Keyword Power: Optimize with Attention-Grabbing Keywords. To download this and other whitepapers, stop here and drop us a line.

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.”

It didn’t take long for someone to create it.

Not long after Twitter announced it was opening the doors for everyone to have access to the list system, someone created a directory for lists. And perhaps this is the biggest help people will find to showing what lists are popular and which ones they should follow. Here’s how it works:

If you have a list that you want to share and help people find, then you can add that to the Listorious database. So if you’ve amassed a Twitter list of people you know are masters of the Rubik cube, for example, then you can include that simply by adding it to the website. If you aren’t submitting a list, then perhaps you might be more interested in finding a list of Twitter users who fall in a certain category? Perhaps a list of influencers in a particular industry? Listorious allows you to search in a variety of categories: people’s names, list name or a particular tag.

Listorious will let any business user who might be trying to reach out to influencers and personalities take their search up to the next level. It might be interesting to find the diamond in the rough when it comes to your search -when I’ve been searching for online video influencers, for example, I already had the usual suspects such as Robert Scoble, Veronica Belmont, Cali Lewis, etc., but I did find some other interesting people on a video list that I might not have been able to find otherwise.

This tool is probably pretty good to help do some research on a particular brand or individual to see how many lists they may be on. Yes, you can obviously go to their respective Twitter pages, but having that particular list added to Listorious seems to add a hint more credibility to show how many other folks are following it – perhaps showing some significance? Maybe this service is an Twitter version of AllTop as well? From the get-go, you’re able to see a litany of lists on the website segmented by category, including: news lists, art, sports, food, celebrities, politics, health, humor, charity and finance.

Twitter lists seems to have such far-reaching implications, beyond simply organizing your own followings. In fact, it’s able to allow you to track those whom you think are all talking a similar point or have a common interest. For me, I attend a lot of conferences and I’d love to follow some of those people who are also attending to get their thoughts on the sessions. If someone creates a Twitter list of those going, then perhaps I’ll be more inclined to follow it back once I find it on Listorious and then will be kept abreast on what people are tweeting – then perhaps will get the most out of the event. And it doesn’t have to be conferences either. It could be any major event, such as an election or sporting event or perhaps unfortunately, a disaster.

In all aspects of its functionality, Listorious gives users a directory of pundits, regardless of the event or topic…and you’re going to be able to find it easily through this website.

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.

Starting this week, we begin a new video series that we call “Interview with the Product Manager”. In this video series we will highlight Network Solutions Products and their respective product managers. We will talk about the re-branding and what changes have occurred regarding new features, product mixes and discuss what is coming in the future.

Our initial series will cover the following:

nsSpace & nsBusinessSpace – Warren Smith, Director of Product Management

Central Registry Solutions – David Morse, Senior Manager, Domain Product Team

nSMarketing – Matt Ho, Product Director

nsMail – Mike Hollen, Product Manager

nsWebAddress – Lynne Brehmer, Product Manager

nsHosting and VPS – Miguel Ramos, Product Manager