New: The LedZeppelin Guru Blog

We are pleased to announce the launch of the NEW LedZeppelin Guru blog for Enzepplopedia Publishing Inc.

Please visit: http://ledzeppelinguru.wordpress.com/

ROCK ON!

Web2.0 Tools: Viralheat Adds Location Data to Social Media Tool

Viralheat – a social media measurement product that crawls social networking and video sites such as YouTube, as well as blogs, web sites and Twitter – has been updated to filter content by location, to help marketers drive regional marketing and monitoring campaigns.

Viralheat enables brands, agencies, marketers and content producers to monitor content to identify key trends, understand community engagement and perform competitive analysis. Users can create profiles to track an individual’s name or company across around 30 video and social media sites.

Its new feature can be used to search by geographical location including city and zip code. This, the firm says, can help marketers determine which areas are creating the most ‘buzz’ about a brand or event.

The platform also includes advanced analytics for Tweets, which are ranked on influence determined by the number of followers a user has. Using this metric, Viralheat will also determine the ‘top influencer’ based on the number of mentions and re-Tweets.

There are similar services, including Radian6, Visible Measures, Omgili, ScoutLab, and Omniture , that offer tools to monitor blogs, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and other social media sites for mentions of a company or individual’s name. But the differentiating factor for Viralheat is its price. The site is affordable—for $10 per month, you can track 10 profiles on the site. For $40 per month, you can track 50 profiles. From big companies and brands to small businesses, this price is manageable.

What If What Next has developed a relationship with Viralheat. Our current plan is to offer a joint webinar on the use of Viralheat as a feedback mechanism and tool to optimize your programs to promote your brand using social media. We welcome your questions on implementing brand focused social media strategies and programs to help build the content of the webinar.

Web site: www.viralheat.com

Why Twitter is a Question Mark ????

1. The more social networking sites (Twitter, Facebok, Myspace) we enlist in the more time is spent in front of a screen and the more time we spend disintegrating the importance and quality of live human interaction.

2. Fans go on Twitter to keep in contact with their favorite celebrities and attempt to talk to them. Celebs never really answer which decreases a fans interest, adoration, and respect for these individuals making twitter counter productive for celebrities.

3. Celebrities go on twitter to talk to other celebrities who may not necessarily answer them. Thus leaving a whole lot of people dealing with online rejection and the politics that follow it.

4. In this day and age people are becoming lazier when it comes to writing. Online vocabulary consists of ever accumulating abbreviations such as brb, ttyl, gtg, ttfn, ily etc. The shortness of the messages on Twitter makes people even lazier when writing things on the internet. All you need to express yourself and keep in touch is a sentence.

5. It’s often hard to tell what celebrities are really twittering and which ones are simply run by a PR team or an imposter looking for something to do.

6. Twitter is a convenient tool for stalkers and serial killers.

7. If you’re following what someone else is doing, you aren’t focusing on what you are and could be doing.

8. Even the obnoxious teen sensation Miley Cyrus has left twitter. In a rap song she explains her reasoning “I stopped living for moments, I started living for people. . . I want my private life private” If she of all people gets it why doesn’t everyone else?

9. How do you know people actually care or a re reading what your posts (aside from @ reponses which don’t happen to every post)? Who are people even talking to when they post on Twitter? It could just be a waste of time.

Rachel Oliver
What If What Next™ – Web 2.0 PR
905-709-8582

Start Using Twine….

Some Fun

Ok mom, that’s not me…..

Social Search Engines

Several social search web services are available:
- SocialMention searching Technorati, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Youare, Rejaw, Friendfeed, Jaiku, Brightkite, Diigo, Clipmarks, StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, Mixx.
- Whostalkin searching Facebook, Friendster, Last.FM, MySpace, Linkedin, Netblog, Ning, bebo, Xanga, hi5, Delicious, Blinklist, Reddit, Metafilter, MyWeb and more.
- Spy searching Twitter, FriendFeed, Flickr, BackType
- SamePoint searching FriendFeed, MyBlogLog, Twitter, Blogger, WordPress.com, Diigo, Digg and more.
-VeryRecent searching Twitter, Ask.com Big News, Blog Pulse, Google News, Flickr, Wikio, YouTube, Digg,
Bloglines.
- Yauba This is a generic search engine that allows to specify the media: Real-Time, Blogs, Social Networks.

We have been trying out all of these over the past week. www.whostalkin.com is the clear winner for business users. We have also taken a subscription on Viralheat.

End of the Month Sales Crunch

Question for the universe: How do you use social media to push some last minute sales through to attain your quota. Do social media have a place as a tactical sales tool?

Very Large Complex Project Management

I left a comment on an interesting blog site that dealt with the issue of social project management in large projects (http://www.liquidplanner.c what is this om/blog/2008/06/23/social-project-management-in-large-projects-2).

The author maintains that large projects are not significantly harder to manage than smaller ones, with the tools in place to scale and facilitate. Not true! Very large projects have parameters, mostly around bottlenecks stemming from sorely underestimated scope and scale of coordination, that makes them a different beast entirely.

Traditional project management tools do not deal effectively with these coordination issues issues. Heroic managers brought in to save the day cannot either when they are not addressed.

You might want to look more sophisticated approach to very large project management that I found on a white paper from ePM: http://www.epm.cc/downloads/other/CIFE%20Working%20Paper%20073.pdf.

The company has a product called SimVision® that is very intriguing. SimVision® is ePM’s patented organization modeling and simulation technology. They use it to optimize the fit between an organization and its work, similar to the way engineers use a wind tunnel to optimize aircraft designs:
Measure how well the organization will perform
Uncover and fix design flaws prior to implementation
Explore ways to improve reliability and performance
Maximize the client’s return on capital employed.

The tool is very powerful for midlevel managers in dealing with the extra coordination required for very large, complex projects. It is a highly evolved social management simulation that goes well beyond typical project management tools. It’s just not enough to say let’s use the small is beautiful approach when you’re spending $1 billion.

Scalability and roadblocks are two issues that I’m interested in. The white paper was an interesting read for a day where thunderstorms threaten sailing activities. I know I could incorporate some of the ePM thinking into our WebVoyaging® process

Dictation and Blogging

A few months ago I upgraded my laptop to a spanking new Dell Latitude E5400. At the suggestion of my friend Jack W, I also purchased a copy of Dragon 10 Naturally Speaking from Nuance. The power of my machine allows Dragon to work beautifully. I use it extensively for copy writing saving my abused fingers from long days at the keyboard. What surprised me about going back to dictation, of course dictation was a common thing in the time when we all had secretaries, was the natural voice that emerged from the act of dictating. What makes Dragon different is that you see your text as you talk which is not the case in traditional dictation. It is instant feedback and the ability to edit on the fly with the final product. Very efficient!

What I want to get at here is that “Dragon dictation to text” is the real way to go for blogging. Blogging has a spoken word feel. You’re getting immediate crisp writing that feels like someone’s talking to you.
You’re also presumably engaging people in the conversation with you on the blog. So, what could be better than facilitating that interaction with the blog piece that is in fact conversational?

Getting Your Head Into Web2.0