Have you ever been to a cocktail party and met people who did nothing but talk and talk about themselves? How did you respond to these people? Probably by escaping from their circle as quickly as possible then avoiding them the rest of the evening.

Apply that line of thinking to social media. The participants who do nothing but talk about themselves—broadcasting their events, news, and good fortune—are creating the same situation they’d find themselves in at a cocktail party: Everyone stops listening and avoids them.

To be a successful social media participant, you must first learn to listen. Listening is one of the most important aspects of communication. In order to truly interact with others in the social media venue, you must hear what they’re saying. How do you cut through all the noise? By using these tactics:

Using Google Alerts: The first thing you should do is create Google Alerts for yourself and your practice. This free, easy–to-use service will send you a condensed e-mail each night reporting all mentions of the keywords you request. I suggest you program Google Alerts for your practice’s full name, as well as the names of each veterinarian on staff. If people are mentioning your doctors or the practice—with good or bad comments—you’ll know about it within 24 hours.

Using Social Mention: Similar to Google Alerts, this free service is offered at socialmention.com. This program scans all forms of social media and sends you e-mail alerts whenever your chosen keywords—again, practice name and doctor names—are mentioned.

Retweeting on Twitter: When you retweet (noted by RT) on Twitter, you re-broadcast a message someone else posted, indicating your support of what they had to say. Simply retweeting a few posts goes a long way in showing others in the social media world that you are listening.

Monitoring your mentions on Twitter: Pay attention to who’s speaking to you—or about you—on Twitter by clicking on the “@yourname” button. You can also do this by using free tools like Tweetdeck or Hootsuite. These programs help you organize your Tweets and allow you to view columns of mentions, as well as to create categories of people you follow, such as veterinarians, clients, or even pets.

Remember, before you start posting to Twitter and Facebook and sites all over the World Wide Web, take a few moments to listen. You’ll be a much more effective social media speaker when you do.

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New York, NY, April 22, 2010 –(PR.com)– Binah Advisory is pleased to announce the 2010 revised edition of the book Unlocking Your Empire – Keys to enable your social media powered business.

Unlocking Your Empire – reveals how to transform your business into a people centric, value adding, and profit making well oiled machine.

Within the 295 page book you will find the keys to business 3.0; the power of social media to unlocking your empire, along with proven management strategies for building companies that will last for generations to come.

The author – Tullio Siragusa, developed the content of the book over 10 years; a collection of both practical ideas that have been tried and true in Tullio Siragusa’s 20 year career as a senior executive and entrepreneur, along with the introduction of new thinking around social powered business 3.0; why and how it serves as the keys to unlocking your empire.

Pick up your 2010 revised copy of the book to get an inside look into timely ideas for managing business in today’s ever changing social information enabled world.

–
About the Author

Tullio Siragusa is a visionary leader who has impacted over $2.9 Billion Dollars in revenues; a 20 years veteran of Media (search, publishing, web/mobile and social networks), Software (products and services), Consulting (IT, M&A, professional services), and Telecommunication (data and voice) industries.

Tullio Siragusa’s background prior to starting Binah Advisory includes: Co-Founder and CEO of M3 Mobile Ltd – UK, a self publishing social media platform on web and mobile for entrepreneurs; CEO of SEM/SEO expert Ansearch Ltd. (publicly traded on ASX); Senior Global Vice President of Operative Media (Edison Venture Fund); Director and Partner roles with Softtek / Ernst & Young, Computer Sciences Corporation, and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Tullio Siragusa brings a truly international perspective to his work, having been born in Switzerland, lived in Italy, London – UK, Toronto – CA, Monterrey – MX, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and now residing in Los Angeles California.

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The rising popularity of Twitter has made it an invaluable tool to marketers and business owners. With more than 75 million people making 600 tweets per second, Twitter allows business owners to connect and engage with prospective clients 24 hours a day.

A new study conducted by HubSpot shows that businesses that have an active Twitter account can attract more business. According to the research, small- to medium- size businesses that use Twitter will generate two times as many leads as businesses that don’t.

Further, having more followers on Twitter will increase the number of leads obtained. The study found that having 100 or more followers was the key to maximizing lead generation.

Businesses that blog may also generate more leads than business that don’t. According to the research, businesses that averaged 52 or more blog articles a month gained 77 percent more leads than those that did 24 to 51 per month. These results were consistent with both B2C and B2B organizations.

Facebook is similarly important in B2B online marketing. A recent study conducted by Morpace indicates that people are more likely to buy a product or service recommended to them by a Facebook friend.

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WhatApp.org – a Stanford project dedicated to measuring security – recently found that Facebook users had significantly less privacy than Twitter and the iPhone. The site uses experts’ analysis to rate different applications, and on the whole, Facebook scored 2 out of 5 while Twitter and the iPhone scored 3 out of 5.

The site’s co-founder, Ryan Calo, is a Stanford University Law Fellow and feels that the results of his site are accurate and match people’s frustration over using Facebook Applications:

“I think people are upset because when you download an app, you don’t have any control over what the app developer sees on your profile,” says Calo. “There’s the perception among users that they don’t need to give away so much information to have the apps do the same thing as they are currently doing.”

The WhatApp site works by approving experts to help measure the privacay, security and openness of web and mobile applications as well as their platforms.  The goal is primarily to look at specific applications, but results can be extrapolated to determine how platforms are faring as well.  The site focuses on approving experts such as lawyers, security gurus and computer scientists to do the actual ratings, where other users can join to leave comments and suggest applications.

According to the Forbes analysis, Facebook got 2 points out of 5 for all three categories.  The problem here is that you can’t see how many experts rated the platform at this point, but Calo is planning to add this shortly.  Calo also adds an “expert review” analyzing the site and knocking its privacy settings.  Twitter and the iPhone were slightly higher at 3 points out of 5.  The problem here is that if Ryan Calo, who is a law student, qualifies as an expert, how can we trust the score?  How do we know these are objective results and analyses of security if we can’t even see how many experts, and which experts, gave the rating.  There are still some problems to work out here, but the idea is definitely sound and fits a niche.

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The first step in developing a social media strategy is deciding what you hope to accomplish by using Facebook, Twitter, and so on for your practice. Here are some examples of goals to consider:

> Attract new clients
> Boost your presence in the community
> Create pet health awareness campaigns
> Enhance your practice’s image
> Get news alerts and information to your clients as quickly as possible
> Increase traffic through your practice’s door
> Increase retail sales

Start by choosing just two or three goals to incorporate into your strategy. This narrows your focus and helps you avoid spinning your wheels. (You can add more ideas as you become proficient using social media.) Then write down the results you hope to achieve and the people you hope to reach—and be specific.

Next, you should outline your plan for the following three months. Sit down with your team—and a calendar—and brainstorm the topics you need to write about in order to achieve your goals and connect with your target audience.

For example, are you looking to create health awareness campaigns and increase traffic through your practice’s doors? Then plan a pet health topic to blog about each week. Write each topic on your calendar, preferably scheduling the blog for the same day each week so your readers (aka, clients) start to “tune in” to see what’s next. (Don’t have a blog yet—or not even sure what one is? Don’t worry. We’ll focus on blogs in a more in-depth article in the next few weeks. Remember, we’re just building strategy now.)

If you blog every Monday, then on Thursdays you should create a follow-up “call to action” that encourages members of your social network to visit the practice. For example, if this week’s blog post is about dental health, then your call to action might be a complimentary dental examination for your Facebook fans or Twitter followers only. Then you can track how many of these people came in your doors—did you see a jump in the number of dental cleanings?—so you’ll know how your strategy is working. Whatever call to action you decide on, make your audience feel special by offering them something outside the norm.

Take the next week to lay the groundwork of your practice’s social media strategy with your team. The next few articles will help you refine your plan by explaining the finer points of listening to your network, as well as developing your clinic’s blog and other social media tools.

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The new investments, in photo-sharing service TweetPhoto Inc. and Twitter marketplace TweetUp Inc., follow Twitter’s acquisition last week of Atebits LLC, maker of an iPhone client called Tweetie, and the launch of its own client for Blackberry devices. Twitter says Tweetie, which sells for $2.99 in Apple’s iTunes store, will be renamed Twitter for iPhone and distributed for free in the coming weeks.

The announcements have sparked concerns among developers, voiced throughout the blogosphere, about how many third-party services Twitter intends to acquire or develop into rivals with their own products. Those fears were further stoked when Fred Wilson of Twitter investor Union Square Ventures wrote a blog post suggesting that Twitter should be building for itself many of the features and services offered by third parties.

These concerns, however, didn’t sway Canaan Partners from leading TweetPhoto’s $2.6 million Series A, which included participation from Anthem Venture Partners, Qualcomm Ventures and angel investors.

“When we first did this a few months ago, one of the biggest issues was, will Twitter want to do this themselves?” Canaan General Partner Deepak Kamra said. “We kind of knew this was a big possibility going forward, but we decided to go forward. We think [TweetPhoto has] a meaningful strategy.”

TweetPhoto, based in San Diego, offers a real-time media-sharing service that enables users to instantly share their media to popular social networks through mobile devices and on the Web. Sharing photos is a popular practice on Twitter, so it seems natural that Twitter would build its own photo tools or acquire the company with the most robust offering.

“Is Twitter going to get in the photo-sharing business?” TweetPhoto Chief Executive Sean Callahan said. “A lot is about to happen that will shape the direction of where we go.”

That direction may be a bit clearer later this week when Twitter holds its official developer conference, Chirp, where the developer community hopes to receive a better explanation of the micro-blogging service’s strategy. Twitter also is expected today to switch on a new advertising service called Promoted Tweets that will place ads at the top of search results on the Web site.

To differentiate itself from competitors like Twitpic Inc. and yFrog, a service operated by Sequoia Capital-backed ImageShack Corp., TweetPhoto is trying to integrate new ways to share and interact with photos. For example, among the business models the company is flirting with is an online social game related to photos.

“What we do is more than photo sharing,” Callahan said. “We’re building a platform that could quite quickly turn into a real-time information network, much like that of Twitter.”

TweetPhoto is generating revenue through advertising, but it plans to use the new funding to secure office space and bring on a full-time team, which was previously working part-time from home. He said the team is focused on finding the best way for the service to serve consumers and make money. The company also is working on licensing the technology to other developers who need a photo-sharing component to their offerings, Callahan said.

Despite its name, Callahan said the company also is trying to be less reliant on Twitter. TweetPhoto users can link their accounts and publish media instantly to Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, LinkedIn and other popular social networks, and the TweetPhoto APIs support features such as photo commenting, favoriting and voting, meta-data filters, geo-tagging, location-based search, friend feeds and customizable widgets.

TweetUp, meanwhile, has developed a new Twitter marketplace designed to showcase the world’s best tweeters.

Backed by a $3.5 million round led by Index Ventures, the company is creating an algorithm to determine relevance, allowing tweeters to bid on keywords in a competitive marketplace very similar to what now occurs at Internet search engines.

TweetUp is backed by Betaworks, Index Ventures, First Round Capital, Revolution LLC, Jason Calacanis and Jeff Jarvis. The company was founded by Bill Gross, who is credited with developing the first model for paid Internet search over a decade ago. A representative from TweetUp was not immediately available for comment.

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According to Apple, Adobe’s software is outdated, it is a security risk and Steve Jobs said that they crash the computer. There is some truth to that – Adobe’s PDF and Photoshop takes up so much resources when starting up that practically everything else has to shut down. It basically freezes your computer or worse crashes it. Further, Adobe’s PDF is major target for malware and Adobe does a great job of routinely plugging those holes. However, every time a hole is plugged the patches get bigger. Eventually Adobe software on your computer become a big application and takes up more space on your hard drive. Now that the Adobe application is bigger it takes up even more resources during start up (bigger applications don’t always take up more resources).

However, others say that the war is not over any of this. The war dates back to 1996 when Adobe dropped support to Mac products. At that time Steve Jobs needed Adobe’s support because he was trying to woo the artist and designer community. However, Adobe decided to support only Microsoft. This is what Adobe CEO said:

Creative professionals will “be able to edit their video in Premiere, edit their images in Photoshop and be able to create DVDs in a very creative way”, Chizen said. But they may not be able to do that on a Mac with an Adobe product. Making a Mac DVD product is “something we’re still evaluating”, Chizen said.

In 2004 Adobe published a report that showed certain Adobe applications running faster on Windows PCs than on Macs. It was not until 2005 that Adobe ported Photoshop to OS X. Until then Adobe focused solely on Windows. Adobe did not support Flash on Macs either, but when Apple turned around and bought a Macromedia offshoot, repackaged it as Final Cut and cut Adobe out of a lucrative revenue stream, Adobe came running.

It was not until 2006 when Apple was a hit that Adobe decided to start supporting it. By then it was too late. In fact some say “Adobe thought that it had the dominant hand and displayed its arrogance in public“. A blogger writes:

Sorry, Adobe, you screwed yourselfl. You made a business decision in 1996 to screw Apple when it needed you most to gain credibility for its fledgling OS with the creative crowd. Somehow, Apple making a business decision to protect its customers from your shitty product is the most egregious ethical concern of our time.

How about Adobe start fixing their relationship with the Apple community one step at a time: fix Flash for the desktop and then we can chat about the iPhone, iPad and i….

Adobe made a wrong bet in 1996 and is suffering the consequences in 2010 and has no one to blame except themselves. It’s Adobe’s turn to show that it matters to Apple and the tech industry. I don’t remember Apple or Steve Jobs whining in 1996-2006 about Adobe not contributing to the Apple ecosystem.

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The Internet Trust Index has reported a modest level of trust amongst U.S. online adults of 61.5 on a scale of 100 – with zero representing no trust and 100 representing absolute trust in the Internet. This is interesting as getting a pulse on how users perceive the Internet could be valuable for a number of reasons. It provides some insight into what activities users are likely to engage in online, whom is most active online, and where demographically. From a design perspective, this can help guide decision-making with regards to driving feature sets, look and feel, and even communication design. This can also help with regards to technology considerations such as decisions to implement trust marks on a Website such as a trust seal, green bar, or other markers.

The recently released Internet Trust Index (pdf) provides a gauge of consumer confidence on the Web. The results are compiled from a survey of U.S. adults designed to understand their Internet-related behaviors and attitudes. The survey measures nine different criteria to explore consumer’s online activities, experiences, behaviors and concerns. It characterizes major Internet user groups to arrive at why some groups trust the Internet more than others and what are influencing factors. The results are sometimes surprising.

Here are some key findings:

* Though equally active online, men and women tend to engage in different
activities. Men check sports scores more often, while women engage in
social networking more. Women are more concerned about being online than
men when conducting financial activities and releasing personal
information online.

* Users in the Pacific region are more likely to engage in a wide range of
online activities. Across all regions, up to half or more of overall users would never engage in such activities as online dating, social networking, adult content, virtual networks, managing stocks online and logging into work remotely. However, the Pacific region (compared to Mountain and West North Central regions) is less inhibited to engage in these activities, most likely due to the West Coast’s more tech-savvy contingency.

* Trust in the Internet is highest in West North Central, New England and
Mountain regions, and lowest in East South Central and East North
Central regions.

The report is published bi-annually. The survey is conducted for VeriSign by TNS who also conducts the monthly Consumer Confidence Index survey for The Conference Board.

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Brands have rushed to Facebook to build fan bases, with some amassing millions of connections. The nagging question has been: What is the monetary value of these fans?

Social media specialist Vitrue, which aids brands in building their customer bases on social networks, tried to put a media value on such communities.

The firm has determined that, on average, a fan base of 1 million translates into at least $3.6 million in equivalent media over a year.

The company’s findings are based on impressions generated in the Facebook news feed, the stream of recent updates from users’ networks.

Vitrue analyzed Facebook data from its clients — with a combined 41 million fans — and found that most fans yielded an extra impression. That means a marketer posting twice a day can expect about 60 million impressions per month through the news feed.

“It’s important to understand that once you build that fan base, you want to make sure you’re leveraging it,” said Michael Strutton, chief product officer at Vitrue.

Not all brands are created equal. Vitrue found wildly divergent impression-to-fan ratios. Some marketers generated just .44 impressions per fan, while another saw 3.6 impressions. Strutton chalked that up to sexier brands having more engaged connections, giving them access to the news feed more often. The impressions are not unique.

Vitrue arrived at its $3.6 million figure by working off a $5 CPM, meaning a brand’s 1 million fans generate about $300,000 in media value each month. Using Vitrue’s calculation, Starbucks’ 6.5 million fan base — acquired in part with several big ad buys — is worth $23.4 million in media annually.

“It helps [marketers] justify the spend they’re making, especially in acquiring a fan base and engaging that fan base,” Strutton said.

Of course, the figures don’t include perhaps the most powerful incentive for brands building fan bases: social customer-relationship management. Marketers often use their Facebook hubs to inform fans of new products, services and promotions.

“When you start to [add] engagement value, it goes higher,” said Strutton. “We were trying to get an easy-to-understand valuation terminology.”

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States hungry to grab billions in back taxes can now call in the big guns in the form of IBM.

Big Blue announced on Monday new Tax Collections Optimizer software designed to help state governments more effectively collect money owed from deliquent taxpayers.

The software uses data analytics to determine the total amount of back taxes owed. It then compares those findings with the existing workload and available staffing at state tax agencies and recommends the best methods for collecting those taxes.

Specifically, the software analyzes certain taxpayer information, such as the total amount of money due and an individual’s past tax payment history. It then determines how tax collection agents can most effectively follow up and deal with each delinquent taxpayer, given the limited time and resources of each agent, IBM said.

“The current processes used to recover unpaid funds by tax agencies around the world are complex, outdated, costly, and generally ineffective,” Michael Schroeck, vice president of Business Analytics and Optimization Services for IBM Global Business Services, said in a statement. “Organizations are handling more information and data than ever before, but at the same time they know they are not keeping pace.”

State governments are under pressure to balance their budgets with less staff and fewer resources, prompting them to turn to technology to bring in tax dollars. The average state is now looking at billions of dollars in back taxes owed, said IBM.

The state of New York already worked with IBM last year to implement the new software and is hoping to scoop up an additional $100 million over the next three years as a result.

The Tax Collections Optimizer was designed with IBM’s research arm as part of the company’s fraud detection software.

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