If there’s anything we’ve learned about social media over the last few years, it’s that most businesses aren’t doing it right, but those who “get it” are hitting home runs.

There’s no other way to say it. This infographic by our friends at GetSatisfaction brings it into perspective nicely for us.

Click to enlarge.

Via: Automotive Internet Marketing and Automotive Social Networks

Despite all the posts raving about it on basically every social media blog and news site known to mankind, Google+ is most assuredly not the next great social network.

I said it. Wanna make something of it?

Let me be the first to say: TurntableFM is the future of social networking.

A lot of jokes have been made about G+ being like Facebook, but not Facebook. And for many people, that’s enough. Sure, it has the Sparks and the Hangouts and is a very nicely designed social network.

But TTFM has something neither FB nor Google has: the ability to create an all-but-instant emotional connection between users.

I was working from home a couple Sundays ago and wanted some background music while I did some computer housekeeping, so I signed onto TurntableFM to see what all the fuss was about. The first room I found was labeled “80’s alt/new wave.”

Ah, the music of my teen years. You know, when I wore black on the outside because black was how I felt on the inside. (If you get the reference, you want to check this room out.)

The point is, music works on an emotional level and creates connections between people on a much stronger level than posting funny pictures on Tumblr or tweeting interesting stuff on Twitter or posting all that stuff on Facebook.

“Music is a really personal choice. When you can find a group of people who like the same music you do, there is an instant recognition of a kindred spirit – someone who shares a connection to a moment of time even though you’ve never met,” said Kristin Elliot (SheNerd).

Exactly.

I mean, don’t get me wrong – I’ve made new friends on Twitter and Facebook and Tumblr. People I consider actual friends, some of whom I’ve met in real life. In fact, Kristin joined Neex (the alt/new wave room – short for New Wave Excellence) on my recommendation; we’d first met because of Digg and Twitter.

But after less than a week of being on TTFM, NYC-area denizens of the alt/new wave room had our first meetup scheduled, for tomorrow. These are people who I added on Facebook without thinking twice about it. Heck, Kristin and I hadn’t connected on Facebook yet until TTFM.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized this was the social network we’ve been waiting for.

It’s not just the sullen youth of the 1980s who’ve found a home on TTFM. I’ve heard from friends of all ages, from all over the country, who have become addicted to TTFM’s addictive charms.

It’s all about the music. If you like the same music as someone else – particularly if it’s a specific genre you’re unlikely to hear on commercial radio – you have a connection that’s much stronger, even, than the TV shows you watch and the books you read.

Music strikes an emotional chord (pun intended). It has the ability, somehow, to remind us of things we thought we’d forgotten. You might see a TV show from your youth, but you aren’t going to remember what you were doing the first time you saw it. You know why? Because you were watching television.

Music serves as the soundtrack to our lives. A few notes of a song can take us back to our first kiss or the time we squeezed 12 people into a Datsun. We’re suddenly back with the people we shared these experiences with, and even if the people you’re talking to didn’t have those exact experiences, they had other experiences that were probably pretty similar.

“You make online friends instantly, because music has this ‘straight to your heart’ quality, which is much more effective than that often tedious creation of your online persona through text and images,” wrote Aleksandar Macašev (DJ Ellen Ripley), a fellow member of Neex.

For those of us in Neex, we were more likely than not to be kind of shy in school, certainly not in with the popular crowd. We don’t carry those scars with us, however – we carry that as a badge of honor.

The next stage of social networking is the niche, as many have said for years. TurntableFM’s niche is music. But it has the ability to create niches within that, niches that strike at our emotional cores.

I really liked the different thoughts everyone had about TTFM and so I’m sharing all their comments here almost in full.

DJ Ellen Ripley (Aleksandar Macašev)

Music seems to be the best social glue ever. It transcends all kinds of boundaries (age, ethnicity, background…) and it is so emotionally charged that sparks fly every time you meet a music soul mate.

I’m originally from Ex Yugoslavia (SE Europe) and it’s amazing how I instantly bond with someone from any part of the world over a couple of songs we both like. Like we grew up together.

I stumbled upon turntable.fm info on a random Facebook post literally five days ago, and being a bit of a social networking geek I clicked it immediately. After a couple of rooms I got stuck with this 80s Alt New Wave crowd and now I just can’t get out. It’s almost always there in the corner of my screen whether I’m DJing or not. It’s also this generational thing (30-40-ish) and it feels like founding a long lost family. You make online friends instantly, because music has this “straight to your heart” quality, which is much more effective than that often tedious creation of your online persona through text and images. Besides all of that one of the best features of turntable.fm is listening/DJing in real time and it simulates a real life situation better than any other social network service on the market.

After a couple of days I really wanted to meet some of DJs, so I initiated a live meetup for the NYC crowd. We’re gathering in East Village this Wednesday, 20 July.

eforce (Erica Forrette)

I have been on TT since nearly the beginning and even created my OWN “80s alt” room, but then I found Apa’s room. I have enjoyed hanging out in there so much because first of all, the music takes me back. What really adds to it for me is my fellow DJ’s. I thought I was an 80s music trainspotter, but man, I’ve discovered some great new (to me) music that I’d never heard before. I agree that I feel totally relaxed and at ease interacting with everyone; the shared interest in the music we play is a natural affinity- and respect-creator and genuinely creates what may be considered an instant connection. It’s been really interesting to watch how this mini-society has been working too. The group works together to ensure the rules are followed, and that everyone gets their turn. It’s so refreshing to see an online society not full of trolls and “LULZ” seekers. This group is super respectful of one another. Again, because of our shared musical tastes? And that’s also what keeps me coming back.

SheNerd (Kristin Elliott)

Kurt Vonnegut said it best: Music to me proof of the existence of God. It is so extraordinarily full of magic that in tough times in my life I can listen to music and it makes such a difference. (from the music doc 1GiantLeap)

My own thoughts: Music is a really personal choice. When you can find a group of people who like the same music you do, there is an instant recognition of a kindred spirit – someone who shares a connection to a moment of time even though you’ve never met.

I inadvertantly ruined a guy’s date at Red Rocks Amphitheater seeing Peter Gabriel. His date was in the restroom and he and I started chatting about our PG music and concert experiences. She came back and we kept talking about PG. She piped in her dissatisfaction that he had not performed Sledgehammer, and he looked at her and said, “You don’t get it. He’s more than that song.” The night didn’t end well for him.

Chris Hampton (apollonia666)

What I love so much about the 80′s alt/new wave room is that it has connected me with so many people who love all of these bands and artists and songs that nobody else I hang out with anymore ever even knew. It’s a nostalgia trip, sure, but in addition to wallowing in stuff we’ve always loved, we get to rediscover so much great music we’d not thought about for years, and introduce each other to so many bands otherwise forgotten by music history. I feel like I’ve found my tribe. It’s felt sort of like a whirlwind romance, but I hope it lasts longer than those usually do!

Timm Booker (Kaidoz the Timelord)

This site is the single most addictive thing since love itself was discovered. I can’t tell enough people about it, even though they look at me as though I have three heads! The camaraderie and the discovery for me has been groundbreaking. No radio plays this, no clubs dare play this, so it is up to us to keep these songs alive. Books have libraries and art has museums, music now has Turntable.fm!! And I am a better, happier person because of it!!

Benny Blanco (bennyblanco)

For me, TurntableFM has brought back an energetic feeling of the old chat rooms (vrave) in the ‘good ol’ rave days’ of the early 90′s and you just can’t get enough. I’ve had a few days where productivity at the day job may not be where it should be. I’ve dialed back the daytime consumption in fear of somebody catching on. My evenings are spent more and more with TurntableFM alongside as regular as ‘brushing my teeth before going to bed’.

This time, the feeling is only slightly different in that all of us on TurntableFM are highly accustomed to interacting in the digital realm and feel comfortable and at ease with the chat format after 20 some years of practice. The polarizing glue to all of this is the fast rotation of musical selectors and we have audio as the new technological component playing for us in the background. The conversation stays mostly focused on the music being played, a news tidbit somebody may have picked up or a past recollection or experience of why the song being played is special for them.

My personal selfish reason for enjoying Turntablefm so much is two fold. One, I desperately want to get ‘schooled’ on some music I slept on or missed out at the time (at least in the 80′s alt / new wave booth). The second reason is the gaming aspect of trying to earn ‘awesomes’ so I can have a bigger and better avatar, but that takes time which I cannot always give in to. Restraint is practiced frequently. I’m conscious of it too.

The social aspect has been a bit secondary, although I do find it easy to jump into a conversation to add tidbits, facts, urls, stories on the artists I’m well versed in. I think the sharing of information is something people appreciate here. Increasing their knowledge. The knowledge is already pretty high and I feel right at home and at ease with all the selectors. Trying to one-up the others on song selection is part of the fun for me anyway. If I were to attempt to have a similar conversation OUTSIDE of some of these TurntableFM rooms, I’d be just another boring music snob, but here on TurntableFM, everybody is pretty well educated in their areas of expertise which is comforting and can continue the dialog back and forth with such ease and added humor.

I have pondered aloud a few times in 80s alt / NEW WAVE as to what will become of TurntableFM in the future, the coming months. Right now, is the gold rush moment of this site, and I’m a bit terrified of the explosion of traffic that is yet to come. I’m down with more great people to come aboard, but I loath the potential of TROLLS coming in and disregarding room rules that have been setup and the overall vibe possibly changing for the worse.

Perhaps the only thing in business more painful than looking for a job is finding someone to fill a position. Getting hired is hard, but hiring can be even worse. It’s normally easier for an applicant to know what they’re getting into when applying for a job than for the business to know what they’re getting when looking at people.

Social media can help.

The infographic design below by our friends at MindFlash gives us some helpful information on using social media to reach out and add people to your company. While it’s not necessarily a replacement for help wanted ads (yet), it’s still a very effective way to make the process easier.

Click to enlarge.

One of the biggest challenges facing businesses today is adjusting to the use of the Internet as a community and conversational tool rather than simply a broadcasting medium. It’s human nature to want to “belong” with other like-minded people. As a result, groups have been forming on the Internet to facilitate this.

It can be traced back as the origin of social media.

This graphic by our friends at Flowtown makes it clear through statistical analysis that we’re a people of belonging. Whether through religious organizations, work groups, or hobby-based interactions, we are a people who migrate towards social media to fill that need.

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The team over at MerchantCircle are going on the offensive, trying to attract local businesses to use their services to fight corporate retail stores like Wal Mart and Starbucks.

Apparently, it’s working.

The concept isn’t new but they have been able to carve a strong niche by combining social networking with standard directory-style listings to create a service that the important companies (Google and Bing) love and that consumers can utilize. With the trend of reviews and hyper-local advertising increasing in 2011, MerchantCircle is a company that we will be watching closely.

Here is their CEO Ben Smith, IV, appealing to small, local merchants by pointing out that the “big guys like Wal Mart, Home Depot, Starbucks are using the Internet to beat up the little guy.”

The message makes sense.

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Read more about Social Media Marketing on this blog.

One of the greatest strengths of the Internet is in filling the “need to belong.” It’s human nature for many to feel part of a like-minded group. Even those who are more introverted or socially inept in real life can “spread their wings” and show strength in their abilities to interact in online group settings.

This Flowtown infographic has a ton of data, but it’s worth the time. Understanding how and why we interact the way we do online can help us to better comprehend how the real world and the Internet have become interchangeable and complementary. Our actions online may not always reflect our actions in real life, but we do tend to express more of our hidden feelings and desires there.

Click to enlarge.

There are varieties of software’s that can assist with organizing your company and sometimes it is difficult to figure out which one will best suit you. In the age of getting social – perhaps the smartest move would be to have the two integrate as one.

Many companies use Salesforce, a software that helps maintain, manage and communicate throughout your business and gives users the ability to ensure the project at hand goes to the correct employee and department. Salesforce is a great way to get organized and an opportunity to see how all of your departments are doing with their work flow. With this ease, it will make tasks faster to complete and for the business owner, the ability to over-see completion.

This software has become more social as well and looking to you to add it within your time spent on Salesforce with its new feature “Chatter”. Businesses around the world have started using this new way to collaborate and have seen results.

Some improving their work-flow from closing 10 tasks a day to 40 which is a huge hike in productivity and ultimately, success. Others have said that it has provided better insight to their company and raising sales as well.

Can getting social at work truly improve your quality of work?

According to Salesforce, Chatter can help your company find hidden connections, follow sales deals, receive instant answers to questions, stay connected with your colleagues, unite your team, collaborate on presentations, and find customer references.

The abilities through using this Facebook/Twitter like look and feel of a social network, Chatter also allows your company to streamline world wide communication on global accounts, share sales tactics, find a competitive expert and make a smooth transition from sales to service. Ultimately it seems as though Salesforce’s Chatter will help you deliver a smile to a customer as well as keep your employees interacting and working as a team.

This innovative thinking may be exactly what you need to help with off-site employees, keeping informed regularly of what is happening in and with your company and perhaps even freshen up your business, which could then rejuvenate your employees.

It has been proven that 53% of people will use Social Networks for business; with a whopping 46% of people using Social Networks while at work for personal reasons. Perhaps Chatter is the perfect way to intrigue your employees to engage again on working while still fulfilling their need to engage with people while at work.

Do you use Chatter? Or will you?

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With so many open source variations of social media sites, there are new ones launched every day.  Most cater to a very small niche and rarely make it to 100 registered users.

Tip’d is the exception.  After its official launch last week, it has already made some amazing strides as of October 20, 2008:

• 750+ registered users
• 1000+ articles submitted
• Approaching 10,000 Tips received
• 600+ comments made

The real splash, though, is in the quality of users.  Social media powerhouses like zaibatsu, tamar, jaybol, Emit, nowsourcing, weblaunches, webaddict, 1only, coloneltribune, ritubpant, TunisianGuy, and  adrian67 have been active on the site.  Many of them came because of the endorsement of another social media powerhouse, msaleem.

With that kind of backing, there is very little doubt that this broad-niche social media site has positioned itself well for success.  Their niche?  Finance.  Could there possibly be a better time for a news site about the economy?  Here is what they have to say about themselves:

Tip’d got started because two businessmen, Andy and Jimmy, enjoyed discussing investing news with each other. They wondered: why wasn’t there a better casual, friendly, online place to share and discuss current financial ideas and news?

So they started their own community to do just that. Tip’d is a place for investors — both amateur and professional — to meet, share, discuss, comment, and vote on what’s happening on both Wall Street and Main Street.

Social News Watch will definitely be watching.  Our prediction: social media is a bull market and Tip’d is well positioned to go up in value.

Over at Social News Watch, we’re trying to compile a complete list of social media sites.  There are so many out there — tons of brand new ones and a ton of old ones that might have been forgotten.

Whether for marketing or simple enjoyment, it’s good to have a complete list.  While submitting to thousands of sites might prove to be counter-productive, we plan on breaking down the list into several different versions so that everyone has a chance to find the ones they really like and want to use.

Head over to SNW and see what you can add to the conversation, or simply post the sites that you know (or lists of sites already put together) and we will begin the long process of finding, checking, and classifying the sites into something manageable.

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Read more about social media websites on Soshable.

The automotive industry has always been notorious for being a year or two behind the rest of the world when it comes to the internet.  When other industries such as real estate and e-commerce were starting to get onto the Internet, car dealerships held out as long as they could.

When websites started getting more intricate and interactive, car dealers started throwing up online billboards.  Search Engine Optimization started becoming a necessity around 2004 around the time that equipment leasing hit it big on the Internet.  In the car business, it really became popular this year.

Web 2.0 has been a part of most industries for a couple of years now.  Web 3.0 is just around the corner.  Yet, the automotive industry still hasn’t quite embraced the social aspects of the Internet…

…until now.

TK Carsites, known in the industry as the cutting-edge leader in the industry when it comes to website design and automotive Internet marketing, has been accumulating knowledge and understanding of Web 2.0 for a couple of years now.  After all that time, they have started to launch products that are unique in their ability to put car dealers where they haven’t been before.

Blogs

Blogging has been a growing segment of the internet for years.  They range in scale and scope from huge technology blogs that receive hundreds of thousands of visitors per day to personal blogs that simply allow people to vent with only their friends and family to visit it.

There are several strong automotive blogs.  TK Carsites has built the only true automotive blog network that encompasses just about every facet of the industry.  They have recently expanded their network to reach out to other industries that are logical cross-overs into automotive such as environmental, tech, business, and finance.

TK has also released a blog program that caters to individual dealers’ needs.  They can help dealers get set up and trained to run their own blog internally.  They can set up the blogs and manage the content completely.  They can even custom tailor a program that lands somewhere in between where the dealer is involved but not solely responsible.

Blogs help on many fronts.  They can offer a public view of the dealership, “humanize” it in a way by offering useful tidbits, highlight community accomplishments, and house tools that local people can use.  They are also excellent SEO hubs, sending links to pages on the dealer’s web properties and serving as a listing itself on the search engines to push competitors and negative reviews lower in the rankings.

Dealerships need a blog.  Some could do well to have several.

Social Networks

Websites like Facebook and MySpace can be useful in the automotive industry, but it is in the niche social network sites where things can get more personal.  This arena, dominated by web platforms and applications like Ning.com, KickApps.com, and GoingOn.com, bridge the gap between the world-focus of large social networks and the local focus of community driven social networks.  It has been starting to get some attention in the automotive industry over the last couple of months.

TK Carsites has had an active automotive social network running since mid-2007.  They were the first in the segment and they are the first to perfect it for their dealer clients.  Similar to blogs, car dealer social networks have several uses.  The one thing they have that blogs do not have is direct interactions with the customers.  People can join these networks, communicate with the dealership or other members, and help to create a local community that can put the dealership in a good light.  More importantly, they are excellent venues for addressing customers’ complaints.  Sound like a bad idea?  It’s better to find it on a network controlled by the dealership where they can make things right rather than having a negative listing on Ripoff Report or Dealer Rater pop up on searches for the dealer’s name.

Like with the blogs, TK can guide dealers through the process, they can run it for them, or anywhere in between.  A well run social network can be golden.  On that is poorly run (or not run at all) can be more of a negative than a positive.

Social Media

What would a story on this blog be without discussion of social media?

This is by far the most difficult aspect of Web 2.0 to integrate into the automotive industry.  Social media is user driven news.  Most sites such as Digg, Reddit, and Propeller are designed to allow users to submit news, videos, or images from other websites and to have these submissions voted up or down by other users.  Others, such as NewsVine and NowPublic, allow users to publish their own content on top of working with a similar style as the other sites mentioned.

Regardless of which type of social media site it is, the automotive industry is a hard sell.  Media regarding car dealers (unless it’s negative or embarrassing) has very little chance of success on these sites.

TK Carsites has taken on the attitude of, “If you can’t beat them, join them.”  More importantly, they have taken the first steps in creating and maintaining a social media site that is geared specifically for the automotive industry and car dealer media in particular.  Their new website, which is currently in beta testing, promises to push the automotive industry into social media in ways that have never been done before.

Next?

That’s the million dollar question that experts in and out of the car business are tackling.  What’s the next “big thing”?  Microblogging?  Social Hybrids?  Integrated Web Communities?  Regardless of what it is, based upon their track record, TK Carsites seems to be best positioned to conquer Web 2.0 for their clients as well as prepare for Web 3.0 in the near future.

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Read more about automotive social media on this blog.