#FollowFriday is a popular and useful Twitter meme that allows tweeters to share valuable contacts with their followers. I’ve discovered so many great resources from those I follow, so I’m starting a twist on #FollowFriday. In addition to suggesting people to follow, I’ll provide a roundup here with helpful links and insights I got courtesy of my Follows. In a week’s time, I often find several dozen links that look interesting; here are the ones that resonated most with me. You’ll find me on Twitter at @beccataylor.

• 7 Bad Writing Habits You Learned in School (via @copyblogger): Finding your voice as a blogger is perhaps one of the hardest things when you start out. For better or worse, many of us learned very prescriptive writing rules in grade school. Morrow (@JonMorrow) reminds us that writing humanly is more important than those outdated strictures.
• What “Tweet” Needs to Become: To Share a Moment: John Battelle’s thoughts on how Twitter could expand its reach and become even more relevant to the evolving nature of social online communication. What do you think? Should Twitter move beyond its 140-character limit?
• What businesses can learn by listening to Air Traffic Control (via @skydiver): Some of our most powerful business and life lessons come from the most unexpected places. Shankman uses air traffic control communication to reflect on important aspects of project and business management. Don’t miss this one!
• The Time I was Written Up for Blogging (via @tacanderson): Tac shares an awkward lesson from his time as a blogger at HP. His experience goes to show you that keeping informed of your company’s rules is just as important as knowing your subject matter.
• Your Company May Own Your Tweets, Pokes, and YouTube Videos (via @jowyang): A caveat for those of us who are very active on social networks both at work and at home.
• All Things WOM (via @womma): Not a specific article, but a new blog I ran across this week. Insights and resources from the Word of Mouth Marketing Association.
• Twitter – The Art of Influence (via @problogger): The 80/20 Rule also applies to social networking—extend your influence by talking more about other people and topics instead of yourself. Nathan Hangen’s (@nhangen) guest post on TwiTip reminds us how important that is.

#FollowFriday is a popular and useful Twitter meme that allows tweeters to share valuable contacts with their followers. I’ve discovered so many great resources from those I follow, so I’m starting a twist on #FollowFriday. In addition to suggesting people to follow, I’ll provide a roundup here with helpful links and insights I got courtesy of my Follows. In a week’s time, I often find several dozen links that look interesting; here are the ones that resonated most with me.

• Want More Clicks? Tweet Less: Dan Zarrella (@danzarrella) has been analyzing why people choose to retweet and ran across an interesting discovery: the more frequently you Tweet links, the fewer clicks you’ll get.
• Chris Brogan on Better Blogger Pitches: Relevance, personal attention, and brevity—no big surprise but still widely overlooked by marketers who pitch bloggers. Maybe one of these days, we’ll all learn and abide by these lessons!
• How Social Media Can Actually Work: Basic overview but the 4th tip really stood out. “Blend the personal and the professional…Consumers are savvy; they want a well-balanced mix of salesmanship and personality.”
• 6 PR facts every marketer must know: The line demarcating PR and Social Marketing is blurring more and more every day. Use this opportunity to learn a little about some basic PR block-and-tackle tips. I guarantee you can apply them to your social marketing activities.
• Create shared experiences: My BlogWorld Expo 2009 takeaway (#bwe09): BlogWorld Expo 2009—I’m so sad I couldn’t go! Thankfully BWE attendees are highly connected, so it was easy to get a view of the event via online commentary. Daniel Honigman’s key takeaway jumped out at me like bright, blinking lights: “A shared experience is the best way for brands to create real relationships with consumers.” Connection matters!
• The Royal Order of Adjectives: And because writing matters for bloggers and tweeters, here’s a short lesson on adjectives.

You’ll find me on Twitter at @beccataylor.

I just ran across slides presented by Vanessa Dimauro at Podcamp Boston 2009 on “How to Build and Enterprise Community.” My organization has devoted a lot of time and effort investigating enterprise communities, and like many others, we’re still figuring out the details.

Launching a community is hard enough; launching a successful B2B community is harder; creating a coherent strategy for B2B communities  in a huge company is even harder. What one business group needs is not the same as another group, so there’s the monumental task of compiling and prioritizing everyone’s requirements. You’ve got the vendor selection to worry about. Once the vendor is selected (after who knows how long, since large enterprises are notoriously slow), there’s inevitably some reprioritization and shuffling of resources prior to launch. Depending on where you work, your IT department will either be an ally or a saboteur throughout all of this.

I wish we had Dimauro’s presentation when we started, though! It won’t help you wrangle IT or negotiate corporate politics and pitfalls, but it will make your business case much stronger with a better chance of surviving the process. Of particular note, be sure you go over slides 16 (risk factors and mitigation strategies), slide 17 (sample metrics), slide 19 (governance structure), and slide 20 (methodology). Arming yourself by addressing those issues will help answer much of the executive resistance to communities (and any other marketing project, for that matter).

When I got to slide 22 I wanted to stand up and cheer about Dimauro’s answer to “what characteristics do businesses have to have to benefit from developing an online community”:

1. Community must accelerate a business process or solve a business problem,
2. Must directly reflect the needs and goals of the member,
3. Must offer thought leadership or a POV,
4. Have an active customer base of a sizable nature, it’s to some degree a numbers game
5. Openness to dialogue and commitment to change.

That should be her opening slide: if you can check off these 5 criteria, you’re ready to start your planning. I might tweak #3 to be “Must offer a tangible or compelling benefit to the member.” I’d argue you don’t always need thought leadership or strong POV if your primary objective is support, for instance.

All in all, a fine presentation and one I will definitely share with my colleagues.

 I’ve been a HootSuite user for several months now, primarily because it allows me to manage several profiles in one tool. Today they launched the public beta of the new HootSuite 2.0. What’s new and cool?

New view with multiple columns and tabs
Right now I use HootSuite for four accounts and it seemed like I had to scroll endlessly to see my dashboard in the old version. Now it’s all right there with tabs! You can reorder the tabs with a simple drag-and-drop. I can see potential here for more robust searching and monitoring with true dashboards.

The new multi-column view makes checking your dashboards so much easier. By default, HootSuite 2.0 created a tab for each of my four accounts. On each account tab, it defaults to my home feed, mentions, direct messages, pending tweets, and sent tweets. But it’s super easy to add another column with profile, keyword, search, or groups. Plus, you can reorder columns with a simple drag-and-drop, as well as re-size the columns to fit more or fewer on your screen.

Groups
The one reason I sometimes wondered if I should go back to TweetDeck–groups! So I was excited to log in and test the groups function. It works, though I recommend a couple of enhancements to make it easier. Foremost is that you have to manually type user names and add them individually. Ease of use would be greatly enhanced by a drag-and-drop feature here. Or at least present me with a list of the people I follow so I can select from the list.

Other features

• As you’d expect, the columns and tabs auto-refresh.
• There’s still a central posting box that allows you to quickly post a tweet from one or more accounts.
• Favoriting, responding, or retweeting is easy–just float over the tweet and a menu pops up right there.
• Handy search box on every tab.
• Manual refresh button on all tabs.

And I love using tools that bring humor into the tasks:

All in all a great improvement to the tool. I plan on playing with the tabs even more to see what types of dashboards I can create.

Here’s another compelling reason to educate all companies and their employees on why every single customer interaction matters.

Even CNN covered it!

Then a fellow YouTuber and musician from TakeLessons.com cancelled his United flights and offered Dave Carroll the use of his Taylor guitar.

Who’s the winner here? TakeLessons.com and Dave Carroll. The loser? United.

Official scoring:
SoMe: 1
Big Faceless Corporation: 0

As a marketer, I’m somewhat jaded about advertising–it takes a lot to truly engage me as a consumer. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve mentioned this ad to a friend or colleague. I actually rewound my TiVo broadcast the first time I saw it. Pure genius from Intel. I love how this ad appeals to the coolness of technology and how it brings a technology that’s taken for granted to the forefront. Man, I wish I’d thought of it first!

I’ve been lurking for a long time but I’m back! I’m getting ready to leave Las Vegas after spending a week seeding social media coverage at HP Tech Forum. There’s so much more to say than that, but for now I wanted to post links to a couple of articles that caught my eye as I was cleaning out my Google feed tonight.

Block Retweets For More Effective Twitter Searches: Perhaps removing “RT” from Twitter search strings sounds obvious but reading this short, but useful, tip has immediately paid off for me.

Why (Digital) Small Talk Matters. Really.: Hands-down, the most frequently asked question I get is “how do I demonstrate ROI for my social media activities”? Well, if you find the definitive answer let me know. This is where traditional tactics clash with new media–does our traditional notion of ROI apply to social media? I’m not convinced it does.

What’s the Best Way to Pitch Bloggers?: This article is definitely one you shouldn’t miss. Do our traditional notions of PR apply in social media? Again, I wonder if we marketers are trying to impose our “old school” tactics to a medium that just doesn’t support them. I’ve been actively working on fostering deep relationships with several bloggers since April, and I can’t count the number of times they’ve mentioned how a PR rep has sent them a pitch that had absolutely no interest for that blogger. When relationships matter, why would you send a generic press release and expect a blogger to write about it? I cringe just thinking about it.

So the Coca-Cola corporation discovered that their brand, Coke, was THE biggest fan page on Facebook–and Coca-Cola wasn’t even the owner of that page! Big companies are notoriously territorial about their brands. They could have contacted Facebook, who would have yanked control of the page away from the founding fans. But three cheers for Coca-Cola! They realized that usurping that page would have been the biggest, meanest way to take back control of their brand.

So what did they do? They worked directly with the founding fans to relaunch the Coca-Cola page. Then they invited the fans to the Coca-Cola headquarters, treated them like VIPs, and let them take a starring role in the transition. Masterfully done.

View the “We made a Facebook page” video from Coca-Cola.

I’m very pleased to see that Laura Ramos, of Forrester Research, has started her own blog on B2B marketing. I’ve had the pleasure of speaking to Laura several times and I’ve followed her Forrester research for a year or so. I always learn something exciting and relevant, so I’ve wished several times that she had a blog! She has a lot of good stuff to say about B2B marketing.

Click here to read B2B Marketing POSTS by Laura Ramos

I consider Jeremiah Owyang, of Forrester Research, to be an industry-leading expert on social technologies and online communities, and how companies can incorporate them into core marketing programs. He recently posted a recap of his body of work on his blog. Spend some time going over his work—I guarantee you’ll find it useful and interesting.