MarketMe 2.0

Social news site Digg.com, a perpetual target of acquisition rumors, is in “final negotiations” to sell itself to Google for $200 million, according to a TechCrunch report Tuesday that cited multiple sources.

The two companies have been in talks to bring Digg into the Google News group, but it could be a few weeks before the deal closes, if it closes, according to the report.

Representatives for Google and Digg did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Usually a “no comment” or the like is the corresponding response to questions about rumored acquisition negotiations, but that was not the case in March–when the Digg takeover rumor mill was in full swing.

Rumors that the social news site might be purchased by Google, Microsoft, or two major media companies had whipped a sizable number of Digg users into a panic. Digg CEO Jay Adelson, perhaps in an effort to assuage those fears of having a corporate owner, posted a blog that seemed to go a little above and beyond the call in denying the rumors.

“Normally our policy is to not comment about things like this,” Adelson wrote, “but this morning’s rumors about a bidding war involving Google and Microsoft have created such a stir we feel compelled to tell you all directly that they are completely inaccurate.”

He continued: “Sorry to burst any drama theories, but they aren’t true. We remain focused on improving Digg and rolling out great features.”

So the silence this time around is a bit curious. Digg users, meanwhile, were more vocal with their opinions. In addition to how much compensation founder Kevin Rose and others in the Diggnation would receive was bandied about, some Digg users expressed relief that Google appears to be beating out Microsoft in this race.

“I would rather have Digg sold to Google than to Microsoft,” wrote one user who goes by the name neil1492. “Although it’s odd how Google is buying up almost everything on the Internet. What gives?”

Meanwhile, the Regular Geek blog welcomed the prospect of a takeover, arguing that it would give Digg some of the Google cachet.

By becoming a member of the Google family, they instantly get put on the mainstream fast-track. Google also gets a property that can compete with Yahoo Buzz. The biggest problem current Digg users may have is the flood of new users to the service. Digg is not overly welcoming so it would be interesting to see how that progresses.

Will the rumor prove true this time around? Stay tuned.

CNet News

PUYALLUP, WA – This past May, six Puyallup business owners traveled to Colorado to hear business growth guru Jon Schallert share ideas to grow, market, and promote their businesses. Shaun Nestor, of Coffee Bar in downtown Puyallup, was one of the attendees and wants every area business owner to hear what Schallert has to say.

“Jon shared some excellent tips on how to build a business worthy of becoming a ‘destination’.” Nestor says. A destination is exactly the goal Nestor has for downtown Puyallup. “People will drive from Puyallup or Tacoma to shop at the discount stores in Centralia, we can have the same draw to downtown Puyallup. I can imagine people getting on the Sounder train to come to downtown Puyallup for a day of shopping.”

Schallert has arranged to come to Puyallup and speak for 90-minutes to area business owners and marketers who were not able to attend his 3-day seminar in Colorado. The shortened seminar, entitled “Increase Sales & Profits with Branded Marketing”, will cover many of the topics he covered in Colorado, internet marketing, employee shareholders, customer loyalty, and how to get free publicity.

The seminar will take place on August 13th at the Liberty Theater from 8:00am until 9:30am. Schallert’s presentation is co-sponsored by the Puyallup Main Street Association and the Puyallup/Sumner Chamber of Commerce. Admission is $15 per person for PMSA and Chamber members, and $20 per non-member attendees. Anyone interested reserving a seat or in meeting with the BootCamp group contact Dave Eatwell at (253) 840-2631.

I’ve spent the past few years on Facebook and various social networks. While I had been using the internet daily since middle school, social networks were really what helped me increase my ability to stay in touch with the everyday person I interacted with. In college, you go out to a party and thanks to the brief interaction you have with somebody, they instantly became your Facebook friends.

The Path to Hyper Connectivity

Then the real world entered and suddenly I had to remove some of the photos and monitor what people were posting. Unfortunately there weren’t any tools developed yet to filter out your contacts’ access to information based on granular privacy settings and friend lists. Within one year of graduating from college though I was already way too plugged in and had more contacts than I could handle.

Within a couple years thanks to being “hyper connected” contacts lists became practically unmanageable. That brings us to today where the problem still exists and goes unresolved. It took us less than 15 years to go from the mainstream adoption of email to people being overloaded with communication. Throw in instant messages, phone calls, social network messages, SMS messages with your email and suddenly you feel the pain.

The Primary Cause

If you ask me, I would say that one of the primary source of hyper-connectivity and information overload stems from my social networks. Email is obviously the 800 pound gorilla in the room but a large number of people wouldn’t have knowledge of my email without being connected to me on Facebook or LinkedIn or one of the many other social networks I am on.

Do you think the guys behind Friendster or even Mark Zuckerberg knew what would eventually happen thanks to people being able to contact me so easily? It’s hard to imagine that Mark Zuckerberg would have the foresight to know where Facebook would be today when he was hacking away in his dorm room at Harvard.

Whether he or anybody else knew where this was going, the combination of my social networks with all my communication tools have made things difficult to maintain. Occasionally I want to break free from it all. This is my job though so I expect no sympathy from any readers. What I do expect though is that readers of this article and other can relate to the challenges of being hyper connected.

What’s the Solution?

So the billion dollar question is how do we effectively manage being hyper connected? One way to figure it out is to ask people that spend their lives answering these questions (like Jared Goralnick). I think that the primary people responsible for answering these questions though are the ones that helped make us hyper connected in the first place!

Why doesn’t Facebook have a more efficient messaging system? Why don’t they provide tools that enable me to access and sync my contact list everywhere I go? Finally, why don’t they give me a way to store contact information of the people that have not yet accepted my “friend request” yet? While Facebook can’t be everything to everybody, they sure as hell can make life easier for people that are using their system.

LinkedIn, MySpace, Bebo, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL Mail, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, Microsoft Messenger and many others are responsible for the overload that people experience daily. Why aren’t they doing anything about it??? If any of these companies are going to be worth the ridiculous valuations they’ve been hyped up to be, solving the problems of the user should be in there best interest and their number one priority!

Conclusion

The bottom line is that I don’t need nor do I want to have my contact information in 30 million places. I also don’t want to have all of information exchange with people tracked in 30 billion locations. I want one singular place to track all of my contacts with people. I also want that information to be accessible anywhere. So how can anybody do it and why haven’t these companies solved the problem yet?

Social Times

Looking for funding for the next hot Facebook application? You aren’t going to find it. So claims Nicholas Carlson who quotes an executive at one of the Facebook application firms as saying “It would be insane for a new developer” to begin creating new apps on the platform. This exact same issue was brought up at Graphing Social Patterns East back in June when one of the large developers suggested that somebody ask Facebook how they expect a new developer to launch on the platform now?

Honestly, I think there is still an opportunity for well designed applications to succeed on the Facebook platform but it has definitely become a lot harder for them to. Additionally, I have spoken with numerous investors that are no longer betting on the Facebook platform. Even Facebook’s venture capital fund has had some issues with finding good applications to fun (although there is buzz that a few of them are about to receive funding).

Whatever the case, as Facebook makes significant adjustments to their platform, it becomes much more challenging to build a sustainable business. Also, in contrast to Windows where old systems remained functional as is until upgraded, Facebook will be forcing the new user profile to everybody. That makes it much more challenging for developers in the long run. Valleywag suggests that all of these challenges are going to result in companies like Zynga and SocialMedia being unable to find funding.

I’ve heard buzz about one of the companies facing some challenges raising money but no word on others. In my own opinion I think Facebook Connect is going to change the whole dynamic and move much of the platform beyond the Facebook domain. It will be interesting to see how the next few months pan out!

AllFacebook

Many companies are intrigued by the concept of social media, but have no idea how to actually integrate it into business practices. In an earlier post, we explored one approach to putting a simple social media plan in place.

Changing employee behavior is challenging, and social media participation is often looked at as an additional burden rather than leveraged to improve the efficiency of a current task. Unless traditional communications are replaced with social media infused conversations though, it’s difficult to seed corporate adoption of these new tools.

Here’s a list to stimulate ideas for better social media integration into traditional business practices, which we’ve broken down by department:

Human Resources

Introducing New Employees. Many companies ask new hires to send an email introduction to their department or to the entire company (depending on its size). Instead, start an internal blog or social network where new employees can post their introductions and connect with other employees that share their interests. Dow Chemical is one large company that launched an internal social network.

Employee Newsletters. Replace the monthly employee newsletter with regular updates to an internal blog. Use tags or keywords to categorize the content, which gives employees a searchable database of information about the company rather than a folder full of emails that are cumbersome to review. Then when employees contact HR with questions about 401(k) contributions or sick days, direct them to the appropriate post on the blog. Employees can also pose questions and HR will be able to answer them once for everyone to see.
Training. Depending on your business, consider leveraging one of many virtual world environments for training purposes. For a business that deals with customers, create a replica of your store or office where new employees can engage in a variety of real world scenarios, from responding to customer questions to learning where to find inventory and supplies.

Sales

Sales Collateral. An internal wiki allows sales teams scattered in various locations to create, collect, share and download the most updated sales material from one location. By limiting the exchange of PowerPoint presentations, product sell sheets and other support collateral to one place, management eliminates a significant amount of heavy email storage and ensures everyone has access to the most updated information in real time as well as improves the ability to track edits and updates by team members.

Lead generation. Many business people create profiles on popular social networking sites Most-Networked-Executives like LinkedIn. However, few use it for more than a contact database. Sales teams can leverage their vast network of contacts to generate sales leads, secure new business introductions and demonstrate industry knowledge. Sales managers can incorporate social networking challenges into sales goals.

Management Communications. An internal blog run by the sales leads is an ideal platform for team communications. To ensure participation, ask each sales team member to leave a comment confirming they read the post.

Marketing/Communications

Public Relations. With an external facing corporate blog, the communications team can engage its publics (customers, media, analysts or other audiences) in brand conversations. Blogs can extend the conversation beyond the press release, provide a platform for thought leadership, and in the case of a crisis, prove an invaluable channel for direct community communications.

Interactive Newsroom. Create an interactive newsroom where traditional media and bloggers can find links to the company’s social presence. This may include high resolution product photos hosted on Flickr, a link to the company’s Twitter profile, a bundle of RSS feeds for the company’s blogs, a searchable repository of podcasts, or even social profiles for media contacts (AIM/Skype/Avatar).

Better Customer Engagement. Several companies, including Starbucks and Dell, have created social networks where customers can provide direct feedback on products and services as well as interact with each other. This two way channel allows for improved customer relations and a much quicker feedback loop with the company’s most loyal customers. Even in the B2B space, a blog or social network created exclusively for a specific customer set demonstrates a commitment to customer service and illustrates your company’s efforts to get as close to your customer as possible.

Thought leadership. A CEO can submit an op-ed piece to the Wall Street Journal What-Murdoch-Must-Do-With-Dow-Jones or Inc., but those opportunities are few and far between. Supplement traditional thought leadership pieces with a monthly or quarterly podcast, where employees can discuss industry trends and company views to a wider audience. These podcasts also become sales engagement tools and can be posted to internal employee blogs as well. And you don’t have to be a big company to host a successful podcast, as this example illustrates.

Product/Design Group

Customer Support. A staple of many technology companies, support forums are searchable threads of conversations where engineers or product designers can answer questions and help troubleshoot issues. The best part is that once a question is answered, the link to the discussion thread can be shared with others who have the same question, eliminating duplicate efforts.

Product Prototypes. Creating prototypes is an expensive endeavor for many businesses. Furthermore, it’s difficult to share prototypes with teams spread out around the world. Virtual worlds allow for teams to collaborate in real time with 3D models, which are less expensive to create and easier to discuss during the development phase.

Innovation. An internal platform where engineers or designers are encouraged to share their most outrageous ideas, pet projects, or passions often helps foster creativity. This in turn leads to new products and a greater sense of community at every level of the company.

Conclusion

There are many more ideas than just those listed here. If you have tips on how your company uses social media to improve productivity or otherwise improve the flow of information between groups, please share them in the comments.

Mashable

A few hours ago at 11am ET one of the better domain extensions to debut in recent memory - .me – went on sale at GoDaddy for $19.99/yr. Since then, chaos has ensued, as apparently purchases are either not going through, or going through but the domain name remains available for others to buy. As an illustration of the problem this creates, according to the Twitter message below, at least 8 or 9 people are claiming to have receipts for the domain name aweso.me.

It’s not surprising to see a huge rush to register highly desirable .me domain names, but it appears GoDaddy is buckling under the pressure and is about to have an ugly mess on its hands. We’ve contacted the company to see how they intend to deal with the issue and will update accordingly when we hear back

The latest numbers are in, and they’re showing that June was a big month for at least two of the top social networking Most-Networked-Executives sites. According to Nielsen Online, Facebook swelled to 29.2M unique visitors in the US, up more than 10 percent from May. Meanwhile, professional social networking site LinkedIn grew more than 20 percent month-over-month to 9.5M uniques. Year-over-year, that represents 77% growth for Facebook, and 187% for LinkedIn, respectively.

Meanwhile, it would appear that MySpace has officially hit a plateau in the US, though it still more than doubles up on the competition. Its 59.4M visitors in June represented zero growth over last year, and was a marginal decline from the 60.6M reported by Nielsen in May.

Elsewhere, Ning debuts on the charts with 2.2MM unique visitors, up 326% from last year when the create-your-own-social-network site was just getting off the ground.

Remember that annoying question mark that would show up when somebody didn’t want to upload their picture? Well, worry no more because Facebook has now changed the default image for a user from a question mark to a more gentle silhouette. Now for those people that you may or may not know what they look like, you can at least know that they are in fact a human. Well, maybe not completely human because it appears that the new default icon does not have any ears.

So how will the person hear you? Fortunately you don’t have to worry about that because pictures cannot hear no matter what they look like. In my own opinion, I would imagine that the new default icon does not ‘incentivize’ a person to switch their avatar too quickly. Previously, the bold question mark was so annoying that a user would immediately feel compelled to switch their image.

Apparently it wasn’t too compelling though given the new shift. My guess is that after the designers completed their design of the new profile they got bored and decided to switch the default icon. Now millions of photoless users can now sleep soundly knowing that they too have at least a silhouette and not a question mark.

AllFacebook