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.