Every few months I take a serious look at my chosen profession and wonder if it’s really a tool for good or if it’s real “use” is to promote the negative in the world. There are many examples of good happening through social media whether through revolutions that weren’t possible a few years ago from oppressive regimes or the simple connection of people with others who they need to meet.

I normally come to the same conclusion every time:

1. Social media is neutral
2. Most who use it are indifferent
3. Some use it for good
4. Some use it for bad.

My final disposition at the end of each social media soul searching sessions is that it’s a wash. This time, I’m starting to lean towards social media being a bad thing.

Three of the four truths of social media are relatively constant. It’s the second one, “most who use it are indifferent,” that I’m starting to realize may lean towards the negative side of the argument (which, in essence, pulls social media as a whole towards the negative side). The indifference and self-promotion/exhibitionism that plagues social media might not be harmful in itself, but is it preventing people from becoming more? Are we becoming too indifferent to the real world, too complacent that our social media “goods” are enough to make a difference?

This is a question that social media users need to ask themselves, but before you try to answer it, watch this video first.

This is a spoken word poem video production and performance by David Bowden. This video is presented by Scott Klososky and Future Point of View consulting based in Oklahoma City, OK.

Every year many people perform the loose ritual of making promises to themselves to improve something or another in their life. Many say they will strive to be healthier. Others set more ethereal goals such as “I will live life with no limits in 2012.”

In the past, I’ve always addressed the concept with a whatever-floats-your-boat mentality. In other words, I took a cynical approach to it all believing that most people will not be inspired or disciplined enough to complete their mission and fulfill their goals. It’s negative, I know, but I’ve been a poor study on human nature the last few years with the internet being at the center of our laziness.

Then, I saw this video a few months back and thought that it would be perfect for New Years. Sometimes, the best resolutions are born from a seed planted by a concept. No, I’m not talking about Inception here – nobody’s going dream surfing today. What I mean is this (and here’s where it applies to social media): we spend so much of our time online and with the general abandonment of direct interpersonal interactions with other people, there are many (myself included) who often react to people on the other side of the computer screen differently than I would if I were talking to them face-to-face.

Before you set forth on your New Year’s Resolution, watch this video. Even if it has a minor impact, a small seed planted in the back of your brain reminding you every now and then when you’re ready to breath virtual fire on people through the keyboard, then it will be worth the few minutes it takes to watch.

The story of Ben Breedlove is sweeping the internet. It has achieved full “viral” status by reaching both the social media and mainstream media audience. Just as Susan Boyle did with her voice and Chuck Testa did with his humor, Ben Breedlove’s story went from YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter to mainstream media through television.

It started from the heart.

More should (and will) be written here about the message, but it’s important to watch the videos first. We’ll post more later, but watch Ben in his own words.

I know, it’s hard to tear yourself away from Twitter and Facebook.  It’s probably even harder for your friends and family, who are trying to respond to the many messages you’ve left them.  This holiday season, give them – and yourself – a break with an eBook that will give them a new perspective on their social media lives.

Check out these recommendations, compiled by www.free-eBooks.net:

1. 550 PR, Marketing & Social Media Tips by Cyndy Hoenig & Heather Lytle

If you’re using social media to grow your business, you’ll value this book.  Cyndy and Heather give you Twitter-sized bites of knowledge on how to mold your corporate profile and market your company in the most effective way possible.  Some of these tips will serve as reminders, while others may trigger some big changes.

2. How to Sell Social Media by David Bullock

There are still people out there who haven’t jumped on the social media bandwagon.  (These people clearly aren’t friends of yours, but stick with me here.)  This eBook explains why these outlets should be considered valid in the modern workplace, and it offers you solid tips on how to sell social media to clients.

3. How to Nail Social Media Without Fail by Jon Rognerud

Besides having an awesome title, Jon’s book shows you how to garner social media traffic with some weight behind it.  He’ll demonstrate how you get quality feedback on your site, as well as how to start a conversation with your community.  If you’re into case studies, there are several in these pages.

4. Twitter Wonder Tactics: Harness the Power of Twitter for Pure Profit by Grigore Turcanu

You love to blast your colleagues with 140 words’ worth of your thoughts on a daily basis (and I’m sure they love it, too).  This “social club” atmosphere actually makes it easier to socialize your way to making money.  Twitter’s user rate grows over 1000% per year; read this book to understand how you can use Twitter as a resource and not just as a forum for your thoughts on sheepherding.  (Although you can use it for that, too.)

5. Social Media Mastery by Mark Collier

For a taste of something different, check out Mark’s book, which includes exclusive interviews with three social media experts.  This volume also provides in-depth tutorials and helps you develop strategies to use Facebook and Twitter to brand yourself.

6. Social Media for Business by Warren Knight

Warren has worked with businesses like Disney and Nickelodeon to expand their social media marketing; he may know a little something about this arena.  He knows that not every strategy fits every business, and you should, too.  He’ll help you identify which methods will work best for your company, and how to implement them.

7. Mainstream Social Media by Jerry Holliday

It’s easy to think that since everyone’s on the mainstream social media sites, all of the marketing ideas have been exploited.  In reality, having so many people on these sites makes networking easier, and it allows you to present yourself in ways you never could before.  This eBook will help you put a new spin on your old social media brand.

8. Internet Marketing Strategies by Nicholas Ritchey

Nicholas’ mantra is to work smarter, not harder.  (Interesting, that’s my motto, too.  Great Nics think alike.)  This eBook is a practical guide on how to maximize your traffic while minimizing your exposure to scams.  It also gives you the straight story on the costs associated with making yourself a marketing success.

9. Social Media Marketing Secrets for Online Business by Jon Rognerud

(Yep, this is Jon’s second entry.  Just read one of his books already!)  This is a great read on how to focus your social media efforts so you can transition from having a scattershot approach to developing a cohesive brand.

10. Social Media Directions by Jay Deragon

Did you know that 96% of all online advertising fails to get attention from its audience?  Increase your chances of conversion by picking up tips on targeting your readers and meeting their needs.  Rather than using social media to deliver your message, use social media to interpret your clients’ expectations.

Reading one of these free eBooks over the holidays will give you great motivation going into the new year, and you’ll come back to your social media accounts refreshed. Even better, your friends will appreciate the new goals your gifts will help them set, both for their companies and for their personal brands.  (They’ll appreciate this just as much as they’ll appreciate the break from your Twitter battle with that sheepherder in Australia, I promise.)

It was a year where a ton (perhaps too much) attention was given to social media. While it’s relatively old in internet years, every day brings more people onto Twitter, Facebook, and apparently even Google+. 2011 proved to have some very excellent uses for social media from amplifying rage in Egypt to major IPOs in the tech industry (met with relatively little success, unfortunately).

For every good use of social media, there was the Anthony Wiener or Charlie Sheen making asses of themselves on it. Whether for cutting-edge innovations in information transmission or to simply laugh at the follies of morons, social media enjoyed another year of high-level interest from the population.

This infographic breaks down some of the big hits and misses, the bullseyes and the missed shots, that populated our Twitter feeds and made for excellent discussions on our Facebook walls. Click to enlarge.

Buzz has always been an important element when trying to launch a startup. The rise of social media from 2005-2008 became a great way for people to get their budding businesses attention. Then, something happened. Social media became TOO big in 2009 and the noise levels started drowning out the potential benefits of the buzz that was getting generated.

Jump ahead 2 years and social media shifted again, becoming an even more-valid venue to generate the buzz. As more people joined, the noise levels stayed about the same but the industry reached a tipping point where there was so much noise that some of it actually had a chance of standing out (if positioned properly). We’re not here to discuss the ebb and flow of social media noise over the years, but it’s important to understand, particularly for those who tried to use social media during the “dark years” of 2009 and 2010 to try to launch their startups.

In most cases, it simply didn’t work. Today, it has the opportunity to work yet again.

Unfortunately (or thankfully, depending on your point of view), it isn’t as easy as getting a lot of people to post about your concept on Facebook and Twitter. Things have become much more complicated. There are more options not only in the number of social media sites to use but also in the ways that individual social media sites can be used.

This infographic by our friends at Udemy breaks down how social media can be used by startups to get off the ground. Done right, it’s a wonderful thing. Done wrong, it’s worthless.

Click to enlarge.

Social networking began as a confusing mess for many growing companies. Since then, teams of web developers, internet service providers and engineers have simplified the experience through web apps, smart phone applications and user-friendly APIs.

Now the process of marketing your business through social media is easier than ever. This ease of use, however, has turned out to be a double-edged sword. With many one-touch solutions for creating social networking profiles, the web has become cluttered with a mess of business-related social media accounts blasting massive volumes of sporadic marketing messages.

This is a serious problem for any company with long-term social media marketing ambitions. Recent studies done by the Altimeter Group showed that companies with more than 1000 employees averaged over 39 Twitter accounts, 31 blogs and nearly 30 Facebook accounts or pages. What this equates to is patchy distribution of content and inconsistency in the image of a brand, resulting in mixed feelings from a business’s customers.

Consolidate Social Media Efforts

It is a common misconception that a company’s organizational architecture should be reflected in their social media campaign. That is, every department and every product will get its own Twitter and/or Facebook page, etc.

The sad realization is that a business’s web presence becomes separated into several, hard-to-follow, fragmented online communities. If your social media strategy is flooded with unnecessary accounts, you may eventually lose your captive audience. It is important to remember that nobody can manage several dozen pages simultaneously without exhausting unnecessary amounts of effort. As a result, many pages will become dormant, customer engagement will tank, and your online marketing strategy will suffer as a result. From a very practical viewpoint, some internet service providers may not be able support massive amounts of digital content.

Instead, your company’s online marketing campaign should implement a strict social media policy, one that outlines exactly what warrants the creation of a new social media page. You should also consider the amount and types of resources required to operate and maintain each social media account. If you’re able to minimize your social media strategy in terms of shear account volume, the costs of managing these accounts will go down, and your efforts will be more effective in the long-run.

Linking and Liking

Every social media campaign needs to identify a clear link and interaction structure. Effective link structure lets you clearly establish and assign significance of each individual social media account.

It’s important to do this as quickly and as efficiently as possible. This lets you map out a plan to gauge how you can best serve each micro-community associated with each social media account.

This also opens the door to assigning value to content as it relates to other pages. As you set this plan in motion, you can then re-purpose content across your multiple social media pages (text, video, infographics and tweets). As the social web becomes more cluttered with useless content, the practice of implementing good link structure technique will be social media’s saving grace.

Plan Before You Post

Finally, after consolidating all necessary social media accounts and putting a solid structure into place for linking and liking, it’s time to plan content. Many companies believe that just like in advertising, sheer volume equals success. The problem with publishing lots of content constantly, is that at some point, audiences will get sick of you.

Carefully planning content publishing initiatives is the best way to keep from burning out an audience and maintaining appeal. Many companies setup an editorial calendar, not unlike what magazines, newspapers and trade publications use. Simple, scheduled, and consistent messages will always reflect a business better than sheer volume. How does your social media campaign reflect your business?

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Note: Photos courtesy of smemon and thecampbells via FlickR Creative Commons.

It may seem fairly obvious that the Internet is an incredible innovation that has changed the world. What other tool allows you to access every newspaper in print, find a phone number, and share a spreadsheet database with your entire company all in the course of an hour, without leaving your chair?

Like with all great tools, the potentiality for misuse is inherent, and the Internet is no different. Social networking, one of the most revolutionary platforms on the Internet, is the subject of a lot of heated rhetoric regarding privacy, wasted time, and marketing exploitation. Many of these concerns are relevant and valid. But here is a list of reasons why social networking is still a force for good in the world:

It allows friends to stay in touch no matter how much geographic distance or cultural confusion stands in the way. Think of how many people lost friends forever in pre-Internet times simply because of hiccups in continuity or place-based barriers to communication. Social networking is a shared language that bonds friends and unites strangers.

It facilitates the spread of information in a way that subverts censorship and unjust control over expression. Recent revolutions in the Middle East, such as in Iran, Libya, and Egypt, have shown how powerfully social networks such as Twitter and Facebook can transmit valuable, time-sensitive information. Even when traditional media sources like television and radio are shut down, social networks keep communities connected to the world at large.

Social networking democratizes media in a way we’ve never seen before. Social networks allow everyone a voice on important global matters regardless of their race, gender, sexual orientation or class. Village square meetings held over Twitter illustrate the trend toward social networking as a major force in political debates. More and more, policy-makers check in with the crowd-sourced consensus before making any major a legislative efforts.

Social media has helped small businesses compete with large corporations in the world of commerce. Online retail, SEO, and video marketing give entrepreneurs a fighting chance at establishing a widespread clientele even without the big money that traditionally grants exposure to the top dogs. You don’t need to buy expensive TV ad space.  With the Internet, anyone can get their message out and reach consumers in new innovative ways.

The Internet can be used for good or bad. So can social networking. So too can language, thought, and physical movement. But we still consider these things necessary to human civilization. The challenge now is to make sure the Internet remains a neutral place, where democracy can continue to evolve and be inclusive to as many people as possible.

It’s a rare thing. Normally, when a social media site makes major changes, users hate the changes. That’s actually universal – it would be hard to find a site that made major changes that wasn’t met with anything other than absolute disdain from the users.

Facebook faces it all the time but has the clout to not be affected. Smaller sites like MySpace, Digg, Propeller, and Delicious faced tremendous push back from users after major changes. Some didn’t survive. Others may die sooner than later.

StumbleUpon’s changes have been met with mixed reactions, but compared to other sites making changes at the degree they have, this has been a hugely successful transition. There will always be users who have issues, but this particular batch of changes – the first in nearly a decade – are pushing the site in a positive direction.

There’s a new focus on mobile beyond anything else. This is smart, of course, because they see the writing on the wall that people really want everything to be accessible and easily usable from mobile devices when it comes to social media.

Their business element is enhanced. Now, they have “Channels” that better highlight their partner sites. This is an extremely important element because giving large brands the ability to acquire followers and have their content stumbled directly will help promote the value that SU brings to the table.

Channels aren’t just about big brands or large publications. Celebrities have channels as well. From Jim Carrey to Gary Vaynerchuk, StumbleUpon people channels offer a limited but diverse range of people who may be interesting to stumblers.

The profile pages are completely different. They announced that they would be pulling down content over a month ago, which for those using StumbleUpon as a blog (yes, there were a few) it is a disappointment, but overall it makes for a much cleaner look and interface. One omission that we don’t like – profile visitors. You used to be able to see who’s clicking on your profile. That feature is gone.

Overall, this is a step in the right direction for StumbleUpon, a company that has stayed below the radar considering that they send more traffic on a regular basis to websites across the internet than Facebook. We’ll see if this is enough to bring them more into the mainstream spotlight.

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Read more about StumbleUpon on this Social Media Blog.

If you’re feeling like “OMG WTF” when scrolling your comment thread, you may be dealing with a troll. Trolls aren’t just readers or customers who are complaining about your product or service; these are creatures, spawned of the Internet, with the sole purpose of being a nuisance or creating a destructive presence on your site. Trolls don’t have legitimate grievances and they don’t want to talk rationally about their concerns.

They want to cause a commotion and they want attention. But before you take the bait and start responding to comments like “You mad, bro?” consider these tips for dealing with trolls on your blog or social-networking sites:

Don’t Feed the Trolls

The most common advice given by fellow bloggers and Internet users in dealing with trolls is “Don’t feed the trolls.” In other words, don’t
give them want they want: Attention. Don’t respond to their comments, and don’t recognize their presence in any way.

The common wisdom is that no matter how you respond, trolls will find a way to keep flaming you or trying to get a reaction out of you. And even one small outburst or negative comment is enough to keep them going.

Take the High Road

Occasionally, simply ignoring your trolls is not enough to deal with them. If they are not getting the attention they want, trolls may try to up the ante by making even more inflammatory or offensive comments. This will create a negative presence that will either reflect poorly on you or it will draw in other readers or fans to respond, which could escalate the thread.

If you feel that ignoring the troll will not make him go away, respond with neutral or positive comments to try to discourage them. Simple comments like, “Thank you for your feedback,” or “We appreciate you taking the time to share your opinion” should be enough to let your troll know that you won’t be baited, but not enough to give him more material.

Have a Sense of Humor

If you can’t get rid of a troll, you can try beating him at his own game by responding with humor. Don’t sink to the level of the troll and insult him or use derogatory humor. Instead, use levity to show that the comments do not have their intended affect and to dismiss the childish antics.

This is a risky strategy, as you must be sure that you can best the troll. Sometimes, humor can backfire, and you will be the one looking more foolish. Be sure you can win before you try to play the troll’s game.

Ban or Delete

If all else fails, you can delete your troll’s comments or ban him completely. Most Internet users are against censorship of any kind when it comes to comments and posts, so think carefully before you resort to this tactic. If you do decide to delete comments or ban a troll, try to do so before the troll gains notice. It is easier to quietly dismiss a troll without an audience than it is to publicly censor and remove dissenters from your page.

Remember that not all negative commenters are trolls. Some are genuinely disgruntled customers or fans, and you should carefully assess comments before you decide to dismiss them as the work of a troll. If you are dealing with a genuinely aggrieved customer, take the opportunity to publicly resolve the complaint to show your dedication to your customers and win over more fans.