(In much of the publishing, business, and corporate world, things just flat out shut down between Christmas and New Year’s. As in, offices-closed-doors-locked. As a blogger and potential social media maven, you could try to take advantage of the lull and blog to help fill this void. Assuming you can find something worthwhile to talk about.)

Anyway, in that spirit, here are my picks for 5 of my favorite entries from this here Solutions Are Power blog from the year 2008 (this is an expanded version of the list that you’ll hear in the Solutions Out Loud podcast — subscribe now!)

(In the interest of modesty, I will omit my own entries from consideration.)

1.) Legal Considerations for the Small Business — By way of Shashi, this entry comes from Statton Hammock, Director, Legal and Business Affairs at Network Solutions, and it covers in broad strokes six steps you’ll need to cover as you work to create an online business.

While this topic is obviously huge (check out the Small Business Administration, your state’s business development department, and local resources like your Chamber of Commerce for more help), it’s a great primer, and I found it to be very informative.

2.) The coverage of the Blog Potomac conference was excellent; if I had to pick one entry, it’s the interview with Lionel Menchaca, of Direct2Dell. It’s always gratifying to see how a big company is working to use social media tools to really listen to customers (especially after they’d taken their lumps for not doing this, previously).

3.) 8 Tips to Protect Your Domain Registration, not so much for the actual content, as to see it in the larger context of Network Solutions’ response to a domain hijacking dustup this spring. It also demonstrates how being un-self-conscious (like providing tips that apply no matter who your domain registrar is) is genuinely helpful.

4.) 10 Reasons to Use Facebook for Business – Coming from Mari Smith, here’s another primer, this one for conveying the benefits of using Facebook to business owners. It really helps focus the issue, especially at a time where some business owners may be flailing around, hearing they have to do something with this Facebook thing, but not sure how or why. Simple, effective, to the point.

5.) Trademarks 101– Another entry with suggestions on how to deal in the legal realm, specifically, trademark issues. I wasn’t able to attend this event, so the event summary done up by Steve was very helpful. (Also, as you can tell, legal-ish things aren’t my strong suit.)

Perhaps it’s obvious, but my strategy for picking the best entries of the blog for 2008 was the same strategy I use when I buy gifts for people — I find the things that I want for myself. If you’ve got your own favorite entries from 2008, feel free to share in the comments.

Frank Gruber, AOL’s Social Media & Web Product Development Expert, and Author of Somewhat Frank
He writes the blog “SomewhatFrank.com” and started a few years ago and got started when he went to an SEO conference and there was a session on blogging. He moved into blogging about products he loves and met Mike Arrington the same time TechCrunch launched and he started writing comparison pieces on products out on the market. That lead to some popular posts and was contacted by AOL to join them and help start My.AOL.com and it was launched in July of 2007.

We then began to evangelize social media within AOL and educate the other marketing teams on how to leverage this area in their own marketing departments. He is in the “Social Platforms” group that includes AIM, Bebo, ICQ and Gooey in its product stable.

Here are some of his favorite products:

Twitter
Summize
Tumblr
FriendFeed
SocialThing
TubeMogul
Viddler
Mixx
Digg
Delicious
StumbleUpon
Shareaholic
Evernote
FiltrBox – Track your name “Vanity Search”
AwayFind
Lijit
TripIt
Dopplr

He started TechCocktail in Chicago last year and the first event had 250 people by word of mouth. It has grown to other parts of the country (Boulder, Boston, DC) and we get about 500-600 people. We held our first conference and it was very well received.

He uncovers all these shiny objects (products) through invites and sites like TechCrunch. By starting the blog he started reading more and uncovered all of these sites.

Since most of this stuff didn’t exist 3 years ago, there is a concern of sustainability. People are having a tough time sort out all of the choices. People are incorporating things more into their lives everyday once they find the products they are most comfortable with. But most importantly are those products that actually solve a problem or make a social connection.

Author KD Paine

KD has headed her firm KD Paine & Partners for six years which is a social media marketing and measurement firm. Despite being a measurement person, she hasn’t balanced her checkbook since 1973.

That is cool since I was born in 1971 and I never have balanced mine.

The way you know you need to have something and that it is having an impact is to measure it. There are six steps to this:

Step 1 – You have to understand the return on something
Step 2 – You have know who your audience is and the impact
Step 3 – You have to have metrics
Step 4 – You have to have something to benchmark against
Step 5 – You have to get away from the notion of eyeball counting
Step 6 – You have to know the value to you

The least paid attention to element to measurement is “so what?”. When you do a campaign, you have to provide the “so what” for others in order to continue the project. Because if it is not working, then why continue in the first place?

MyPrPro Principle Kami Huyse

She has been in PR for 15 years and started here in DC. When she moved to TX in 2002 she realized that the world was moving very fast and started following blogs and becoming an anthropologist of social media.

In the vein of ethics, there is stuff that goes beyond right and wrong and then there are the gray areas. Like the “Flog” – the fake blog. A good example of this is last spring at Hunter College where a class was funded by an anti-counterfeiting organization. An imaginary person had a blog and lost her coach bag and there was a reward. Then they said that they got their bag back and the funny irony was that the bag was fake.

The question is – is this ethical? Maybe, but it is definitely stupid marketing. An audience member thought it sounds like an after school special.

The Word of Mouth group has a great code of ethics, “honesty of relationships, honesty of identity, and honesty of opinions”. “Blogging is not a sales channel, it is a communications channel.”

That’s a wrap

This concludes our coverage of the BlogPotomac event. It was a great event with great people and great content. If you want more information go to the site and hit the news section to see the full presentations in all their video glory. We are looking forward to Jeff’s team doing this again next year and making it bigger and better.

Last Friday, Network Solutions sponsored Blog Potomac in Northern Virginia which brought together some of the top minds in social media and public relations. They talked about the current landscape and how companies can benefit from implementing a social media strategy. You can see recordings of the presentations on the Blog Potomac site.

Maggie Fox  CEO Social Media Group

The process for the traditional media agency is different for the online media agency. It is not about the “big idea” like “let’s do a blog”. It’s about who you want to talk to, what are they talking about and how can I join in on the conversation. Then you have to go inside. What is it about these tools that accomplish what you are trying to achieve for example, “improve customer support”.

There is the notion of “this is a campaign” with a finite budget and timeline. This is an ongoing process and you have to make sure that companies understand that otherwise the initiative will probably die on the vine.

There are metrics to measure effectiveness. There is the traditional “1 and 99 rule”. 1% will contribute and the other 99% are passive consumers. Then there are the metric tools to track site traffic and other things.

What are some examples where blogs are working internally? Very typically companies use blogs from a collaboration perspective, like IBM. They also use presence applications like Facebook to connect people. At IBM Spain, they used blogs to “flatten the dialog” where people can connect directly with executives. From a knowledge management perspective and just reading a white paper, you can connect with the person that actually wrote that and further connect with them.

Jeremy Pepper Pop! PR Jots

The basic question of social media is “why?”. With all the tools out there you need to ask the question “why should we”. If you have ever done things like participate on boards and forums you were doing social media 10 years ago. It back to one-to-one and it is about the audience. How are you communicating with your audience?

Within advertising agencies we wanted to talk to people who were enthusiastic about the products that a company sells. Selling internally you have to find the champions of what you are trying to do.

Taking control from the marketing department is challenging to find out what people are saying about the company and show people that we need to work together to get the right message out and have a full dialog. Start with the internal team the conversation that is going on outside the company. Blogging is one small component and you must see how it works within your organization. Depending on where your audience is that is where you actually engage with those platforms (e.g. LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace).

10% of the pitches I get are within my area. There needs to be training within agencies so they understand that they don’t have to pitch everything and please learn how to write. Look at the blog and see if your pitch is on target.

Please look hard at your pitch, is it newsworthy? Otherwise it will never go anywhere.

The main problem is that people think this is a numbers game. How many followers on twitter or friends on Facebook can I get? This is wrong. If you don’t get a response the first time, they really don’t want to hear from you.

Lastly, have a strategy and review all of the tools to find the right strategy for your company because no two companies are alike.

NEXT TIME IN PART3

In part 3 we will continue the recap and cover the presentations by Frank Gruber, AOL’s Social Media & Web Product Development Expert, Author KD Paine and MyPrPro Principle Kami Huyse.

This is part 1 of 3 in the recap of the event.

Lionel Menchaca, Digital Media Manager and Chief Blogger, Direct2Dell

Lionel is a Fortune 50 blogger and is a rock star in the blogging world. He spearheaded the blog and social media effort at Dell 2 years ago. He has been there for 15 years starting in tech support.

He started the blog with as a tech support type of blog and the big challenge was the support issues people had with Dell. Started to look at the difference between supporting one customer and talking to a large audience at once.

His mantra from companies looking to leverage social media is “People want to connect with other people, not a corporation”.

Digg-style features and ideas voting from the broader public to have Dell actually take those recommendations and do something with them.

Microblogging is the next step in our strategy to create discussions in a whole new way.

Strategy for us now is to have our people active on IdeaStorm and touching other blogs and the rest of the blogosphere. We are working to blend these things to make it easier for customers to engage. It is right now the tech-savvy user and we want to bring this to a more mainstream audience.

Washington Post Local Business Editor Dan Beyers

The trend over the next 10 years is that it will all be sent over the Internet in some format. Don Graham, Publisher, is a huge social media junkie and recently they had an intern lunch and he asked for people for Facebook app ideas, which impressed most people because of how the paper is perceived as an old media dinosaur. WPI has 60 blogs that cover every topic under the sun, even an obituary blog….

His strategy is that you should stick to your niche, write quality content, create a new model of audience engagement and that the online content is one big database and we have to unleash it in new and exciting ways.

Our mission is to inform the world and we must move the way the future is going. There is a discussion raging in the publishing world that the print side of the business should move to the non-profit model for posterity and keeps the media alive for the record.

The newspaper still makes more money in ad revenue than the online right now but we are in a transition period where that will be changing. The online advertising revenues are for national campaigns where the print thrives on the local ads.

The difference between the blogs and the traditional articles is that the blogs must be read by a second person and fact checked which is less than the traditional article review process.

Each blogger is responsible for moderating their blog’s comments and it may take a bit longer to review than we would like. It is a good exercise because we are interacting with the audience that people see as extremely important.

Blogs in elections – from a newspaper standpoint, we can deliver content faster which is great. We are also looking to move to tags to make the content more accessible and easily searchable. We are trying to prove that editor driven blogging works to free up the journalists for “higher altitude blogging”.

NEXT TIME IN PART 2

In part 2 we will continue the recap and cover the presentations by Maggie Fox, CEO of Social Media Group and Jeremy Pepper of Pop! PR Jots.