What?
Woodward Dream Cruise 2010
When?
August 21, 2010
Where?
Pontiac, MI
Why?
Take a look at my video and tell me…

Foursquare is an interesting new tool to get social with online or via a smart mobile phone. Several of my networking group members have expressed interest in getting an overview of Foursquare, so I will present it on Thursday, September 2nd in Ann Arbor. Follow the link to additional information. http://professionalconnections.eventbrite.com

Meanwhile, I found a wikiHow article that may be of interest to the masses. Check it out and let me know what you think.

How to Use Foursquare

from wikiHow – The How to Manual That You Can Edit

Foursquare is a way of staying in touch with friends in real time by leaving messages about where you have been, along with your recommendations, likes, dislikes, etc., to alert your friends to what they might like to do or avoid doing in the same locale.

Steps

1. Download the Foursquare application to your cell phone. You will need to have joined first (see Join Foursquare. You will also need to have a phone with internet access (a smart phone) for the application to work. Information on downloading for current smart phones is found at: http://foursquare.com/overview.
   • An iPhone application for Foursquare can be downloaded from the App Store.
2. Install the downloaded application. Once downloaded, you can link to your address book, Twitter, and Facebook accounts. This will let you find where your friends are “hanging out” and you’ll be able see if they’re close by.
3. Start letting your friends know where you are or have been. When you check in at one of the many places listed, the GPS location will let your friends know where you are. Don’t just visit though, as the idea is for you to leave details about the place, its activities, things worth knowing, etc. to help others make the most of visiting those same places. For example, you can tell your friends which doughnuts are the best, which clothes to try on, or which books to browse. Or you can tell them what to avoid, if needed.
4. Add places you like that aren’t yet listed. You can add places and use the application wherever you go, whether you’re on the bus, in an art gallery, or at the mall.
5. Look for your friends’ tips. See what they’re enjoying or avoiding around town. And you don’t have to limit yourself to their tips alone – you can also see the tips of other users on Foursquare and benefit from their advice also. If you don’t know what to do, eat, watch, etc., see what others are recommending.
6. Collect your rewards from businesses. Foursquare keeps a record of your recommendation levels and awards you with points and badges. You can keep track of these on the Foursquare website. If you manage to recommend or check into more locations than anyone else, you can become the “mayor” and receive rewards from participating businesses by way of appreciating your loyalty.

Video

The video shows you how to use the Foursquare app. It explains how Foursquare recognizes your location and gives you suggestions for great places around you so you can discover all the awesome things your city has to offer.

Tips

• If you don’t have internet access on your phone, you can use text messages to access Foursquare if you’re in the United States.
• Foursquare users will often be sent specials from relevant participating businesses; you can take advantage of these as they are communicated to you. It is likely that these offers will grow over time.

Things You’ll Need

• Smart phone
• Internet access
• Downloaded Foursquare application
• Friends drawn in from Facebook and Twitter

Related wikiHows

• How to Join Foursquare
• How to Build a Social Network
• How to Build a New Social Network As a Young Professional

Sources and Citations

• Foursquare, http://foursquare.com/ – research source

Article provided by wikiHow, a wiki how-to manual. Please edit this article and find author credits at the original wikiHow article on How to Use Foursquare. All content on wikiHow can be shared under a Creative Commons license.

A “must read” for every business owner, who would like to keep a positive image online.

Business Owners Can Now Respond to Reviews on Google Place Pages.

How to Develop a Strategic Social Media Program for Business

from wikiHow – The How to Manual That You Can Edit

Social media for fun does not require planning. You go with your guts and emotion and start joining places where it feels right for you. However, social media for business is at the other extreme, and to succeed there is a real need for proper planning before the execution.

Steps

Starting with a Strong Purpose

1. Know your purpose. Like any good corporate program or initiative, a strong purpose and a good set of objectives is important. This set of purpose and objectives has to be relevant and aligned to your other corporate objectives.
2. Know the limitations. It is important to know that not all objectives or purpose can be served by social media and it would be foolish to assume so, just because everybody is in social media. Social media is effective not only in PR, marketing and brand building but it is also effective when use for innovation crowd-sourcing, building corporate culture and market engagements.

Knowing Your Social Media Landscape

1. Know the landscape. Before engaging social media for business purposes, it is important that the people involved in the social media initiative have a clear understanding of the attributes of the field they will be playing in. Know the landscape before you start constructing. The social media landscape generally consists of the following attributes that should always be in the mind of social media strategist or planning team:
   • Community-driven where people not only listen or view ads and news but they participate in this new media.
   • Conversation is the new content king aside from videos and images. As David Armano said “It’s the conversation economy”.[1]
   • It’s viral where people spread, shared and transmit content readily. That’s what makes social media contagious.
   • Personal spaces are even more pronounced, if you got no permission don’t enter. Nobody wants to be spammed or get ads-bombed.
   • Authenticity is what makes social media real and human. Don’t bother with high cost production houses; real is soul here.
2. Build relationships. At the end of the day, these attributes are what builds relationships among friends. Get acquainted with people who were previously a stranger to you. These attributes build a strong fan base for your brands and business. Small businesses and unknown musicians become famous because of them too.

Build A Road – The 4Es of Social Media

1. Build a road. After you have understood what social media landscape attributes are, you will need to build a road before you can travel to your destination. The road here is acquainted to the 4 primary social media strategies that your company can deploy in your social media initiatives. These are the 4Es of social media:
   • Education Strategy – Enriching your target community’s knowledge with information and resources for them to better understand you.
   • Entertainment Strategy – You create fun, sticky and memorable content that allows them to associate the image or message to your brand or business.
   • Engagement Strategy – Your purpose is to engage the community by recognizing their presence, contributions and inputs.
   • Empowerment Strategy – A space and role is created and provided to your target community to play an active role in what you are doing.
2. Tailor to your size. If your company is large enough, you can opt to deploy all at the same time (hey! you got a super highway) but if your company is small choosing the most relevant and effective route will be your best investment and keeps your resources focus.

Build, Hire but Don’t Steal A Vehicle

1. Build slowly. You need a set of wheels to move forward. Once the road is ready, in order for you to move forward you will need a set of wheels. Depending on the size of your company, it would mean a bicycle, tricycle, motorcycle, car, F1 sports car etc. The set of wheels here that we refer to are the social media tools and widgets that you will need to decide on what to use, how they can work together and when to use it. There are thousands of them around and there are few that are most popular like Hubpages here. In general the sets of social media tools can be divided into 4 major categories:
   • Networking tools – blogs, microblogs, social networks, etc.
   • Collaboration tools – wikis, social news, social bookmarking, etc.
   • Multimedia tools – videos, images, interactive contents, etc.
   • Entertainment tools – virtual worlds, online gaming, etc.
2. Select according to need. Selecting the right combination of tools is important and helps you build expertise on this tools over time, because frankly you don;t want to be managing 20 social networking sites at one go.

Guide Your Journey

1. Set up road signs. Whenever anyone goes on a long journey or to unfamiliar places, one of the most important thing to have when he/she is travelling is to be able to refer to the roadsigns on the side of the road. It tells you your destination, the dangers, and other necessary information to make sure you don’t get lost or end up in a road that has no gas/petrol station. The same logic applies to social media. It is important that your social media initiative has a good set of metric or measurements that will tell how you are doing at any one time. Nathan Gilliatt of Social Target LLC categorizes measurements into 4 distinct types:[2]
   • PR/media measurement – Viewing social media as media for their ability to reach an audience.
   • Word of mouth measurement – Viewing social media as online interactions among people.
   • Web analytics – Interested in people’s usage patterns, as both audience and customers.
   • Opinion research – Mining online opinions as the world’s largest focus group.
2. Translate into equity. All these are important to consider but even more important to actually measure is to be able to translate the measurement information above into what we called the “Social Media Equity”, a set of fundamentals that are important for companies to make decisions about their social media investments.
   • Strength of relationship (size, quality, relevance of type of activities etc)
   • Degree of familiarity (with your business, brands etc, not just awareness)
   • Degree of efficiency (where and how efficient is your viral logistics)
   • Value creation (are there any?)
3. Be aware that measurement via loyalty is but one aspect. Loyalty without social media equity nailed down, it is hard to say whether your investment in social media has actually work or not. This is because having 100,000 readers in your blog only says so much as 100,000 eyeballs of awareness but is this sufficient as a measure for performance?

Don’t Forget the Fuel

1. Get going. So you understood the terrain, you got yourself a road/highway, bought your wheels, set up the roadsigns, so let’s move it. Hold on a sec! Have you fueled? Fueling your social media initiative is no small task because when your company wants to take social media seriously, you got to really invest in:
   • Time – yes, time to know how to use the widgets, set up your blog, create content, filter content, participate in conversations, spread your virus.
   • Fresh Content – needs to be cooked up periodically whether it is from your company or from other sources. Social media is not a corporate website where you can stick up one article and let it stay there for time immemorial.
   • Dedicated Team – yes, social media is no part time job for your HR manager, corp comm or PR or marketing team. If your guy has a business card that reads:
     • Mr So and So Sales, Marketing and Social Media Manager; your fuel is going to run low real soon.
   • Creative Juices – to create value relevant content and conversations. Creative here does not necessary equate to fantastic designs but to content and conversations that delivered in ways that are of use. If you can put aesthetic make-up to that, this is even better.
   • Good Design – because nobody wants to stick around a 1.0 design site and initiative.
   • Widget Familiar – This is given. Anybody that wants to be in social media has to get themselves familiar with at least 10 to 30 different widgets and how they work and inter-work with each other.
2. Get involved; be active in getting it moving. If your plan is to ask your IT department to hook it up for you via a memo or official request and then put that task to a queue of other stuff that the IT department has to attend to; that is really not going to work.

The Take Back

1. Always be aware that there is nothing to lose when social media is done for the fun, but in business a lot is at stake and you certainly don’t want your company, brand or initiative falling short.

Tips

• Start with a purpose
• Know your social media landscape
• Build the road
• Get yourself a set of wheels
• Put up road signs to guide your journey
• Don’t forget to fuel

Things You’ll Need

• Original source of article, Strategic Social Media Program Design: Step by Step Guide

Related wikiHows

• How to Come to Terms With Social Media
• How to Strengthen Business Relationships
• How to Manage Multiple Twitter Accounts With Splitweet.Com
• How to Write a Better Twitter Headline

Sources and Citations

1. ↑ http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/apr2007/id20070409_372598.htm
2. ↑ http://net-savvy.com/executive/measurement/measurement-silos-are-you-measuring-media-or.html

Article provided by wikiHow, a wiki how-to manual. Please edit this article and find author credits at the original wikiHow article on How to Develop a Strategic Social Media Program for Business. All content on wikiHow can be shared under a Creative Commons license.

In the heart of the Brighton, Michigan business community is an area where local business owners can experience serenity over lunch, after work, or whenever they have a need to get away from daily stresses of life.  It is the Brighton Mill Pond. 

A few days ago, I was in the area and decided to capture it on video.  I am passing it along for you to enjoy.

While enjoying my Saturday with friends at the annual Hot Air Balloon Festival in Howell, Michigan, I have watched local businesses launch above our heads… In hot air balloons that is. First-timers observed intently, as I gazed into the sky, then at balloons still on the ground, ready to sneak into one of the baskets and tag along.

My desire to experience the floating phenomena stemmed from seeing the movie “Around the World in 80 Days” as a child.  Ever since, I considered giving hot air balloons a try.   Perhaps, next year…

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http://domainmat.com

Melissa Hanks and I will be presenting Social Media for Realtors workshop on Tuesday, June 15th. All local realtors are welcome! All you need to do is RSVP below. We will need a count of how many are coming to order lunch.

I’ve been a loyal Windows based PC user for over a decade now, however, after trading up to the iPhone last year, I have been toying with the idea of my next notebook being a MAC. After all, the iPhone has become my indispensible companion. I travel, eat, and even sleep with it. With its simplicity, reliability, and thousands of apps I could use (although have no time to explore), it delivers convenience light years beyond my expectations.

Just came across an interesting post this morning; not sure if these rumors are accurate. Is Google really ditching Windows for Apple / Linux operating systems? Anyone with additional information is welcome to comment.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/d2f3f04e-6ccf-11df-91c8-00144feab49a.html