Not to fear, on Thursday, November 18th at 2:00p EST (check your local time), I will be hosting a free webinar with Isaac Hazard from Mzinga to discuss moderation and how it can help you to protect your brand.  Heard enough? You can register now!

If you need a little more convincing, read on for the webinar description from the New Marketing Labs website.

Every day, more and more brands are engaging people in online conversations-conversations that often make them smarter, more relatable, and ultimately more effective in how they go to market. But with this newfound transparency, you can also encounter unexpected risks and liabilities. To be safe, you should be as proactive about moderating and monitoring those conversations as you are about fostering them. This upcoming webinar will help you get started and will outline how online moderation will help your company maximize-and safeguard-your social marketing investments without hampering your style.

During the webinar we will cover:

1. Defining your overall moderation strategy
2. Establishing your Terms of Service and Code of Conduct
3. Determining your moderation technology options
4. Understanding the key roles and responsibilities of a moderator

I hope you’ll be able to stop by on Thursday at 2:00p EST to join our webinar. Even if you’re not going to be able to make it, do register so that you’ll get an email when the webinar archive is ready.

Register Now!

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As engagement and sharing on Twitter, Facebook and other social tools continues to increase, many bloggers are noticing a sharp decrease in comments on their blogs.  Of course, that doesn’t mean that interest is declining.  RSS and email subscriptions, site traffic and social sharing may all be continuing to increase.  These are tracked through a variety of tools and even popular commenting system Disqus scours social networks to find blog posts being shared and displays those as “interactions”.

Increasingly bloggers are concerned that even though they know that their posts are being shared through other channels, that their communities still aren’t commenting on their posts.  It’s a completely understandable feeling.  You work hard at putting together a thought or position, flesh it out, find an engaging photo or video to help enhance your point and then publish it to the world.  A comment makes us feel good and/or helps to extend the post itself.  Sometimes the comments are even better than the post.  So, when a blogger begins noticing a decrease of comments on their blog, it can be depressing.  It can cause bloggers to start rethinking their content strategy and possibly even considering whether or not they should continue blogging.

Every time I’ve been asked whether or not a blogger should be discouraged by a decrease in comments, I immediately ask them whether or not they’ve looked at the sharing of their post through other channels and what the feedback from those channels are.  Usually they tell me that their seeing their content being shared online but they still wish they were getting the comments on their blog.

I’ve been thinking about this often.  Admittedly, I comment a lot less than I used but I share tons more now.  Google Reader trends tell me that I share around 30 articles per day through there.  I also regularly share tons more through Twitter and Facebook throughout the day.  But, I probably comment on about 75% less blogs than a year or so ago.  I know, I need to improve on that.

However, as I’ve been thinking about this, I’ve been considering whether or not the decline in commenting is actually a bad thing.  If you stop by and comment on a blog, you may extend that conversation and/or let that blogger know that you appreciate their work.  Both are great.  Consider though that the conversation will only be seen by that community which is limited by the number of subscribers and the number of visitors to that blog.  But, if you share that blog post with your community on Google Reader, Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn, then you’re promoting that content to your social graph thus extending the total overall reach of that post.  By sharing that post with your social graph, it will extend the number of eyes that may be seeing that blog for the very first time.  Or, if they’ve ignored other content from that blog, it may be that post that pulls them in and triggers them to subscribe or share it with their networks thus continuing to grow the overall subscriber base and reach of the blog.

You may think that I’m suggesting that comments are dead but I’m not.  I love comments as much as the next blogger.  I appreciate everyone that takes the time out to share their thoughts.  I also value everyone that shares my content with their social graphs because it helps to get my content out to more people.

It’s just something I’ve been debating in my own head lately so I figured I’d spill it out into a blog post and see what you had to say and where you may choose to say it.  So, what are your thoughts?  Do you prefer comments, social sharing or a combination of both as a measure of the engagement on your blog?

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Photo Credit: premasagar

The site has a simple goal: turning your ideas into reality by providing the resources necessary to make that happen.  As they describe on the website:

The Bain Capital Ventures Innovation Center is about you and your startup. We want to provide entrepreneurs with a suite of resources to help them with the burning issues that they have when starting a business, including among other things: vetting a product or service concept, raising capital, building the right team, finding the first customer, networking to other entrepreneurs, and working with the right partners.

Some of the many resources that the Bain Capital Ventures Innovation Center is making available to entrepreneurs includes:

• An events calendar with a hand-picked list of events in New England and New York that are geared towards entrepreneurs.
• An opportunity to network through Bain Capital Ventures with companies in a range of vertical including: media, retail and restaurants, healthcare, financial services, and information technology. Also, groups and associations such as Cambridge Innovation Center, DartBoston, TechStars and many more.
• An array of partner companies that provide services that may be helpful as you build your startup that the BCVIC help make an introduction to including angel funds, early-stage venture capitals, accounting firms, banks, law firms and recruiting firms.
• A Startup Toolkit that has a variety of how-to guides, resources, data sheets and other useful resources for entrepreneurs.
• The ability to submit a request for team members such as a co-founder or a CEO so that the Bain Capital Ventures Innovation Center can help match your with those of someone looking for help or if you’re looking for a new gig, matching the requests with your capabilities.
• Office hours every Friday from 3-5p at both the VentureCafe at Cambridge Innovation Center and at the Bain Capital Ventures offices where you can schedule time to get help with your business plan, ask general questions or any other help you may need.

Besides an awesome website, there is also a BCVIC LinkedIn Group and a Facebook Page that you can join and begin networking with other like-minded entrepreneurs, start-up junkies and those looking to help.

I’m really excited by the BCVIC and look forward to seeing how it will continue to evolve. The possibilities are endless.

What say you about the BCVIC launch?

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While jumping around YouTube testing out the new mobile HTML5-compatible version that was launched today, I came across an experiment that YouTube has launched along with executive producer Ridley Scott and Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald. The project is being called “Life in a Day” and its goal is to document a single day in the life of the world.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to capture, on video, an aspect of your life on July 24, 2010 and upload it to the Life in a Day YouTube channel before July 31st. If you’re video is selected for the final cut, then you’ll be credited as a co-director and will even have a chance of attending the premier of the Life in a Day film at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival.

The Life in a Day crew has created an introductory video and also have posted the official guidelines.

This is a cool concept and it will be interesting what the response from the community will be. Will you participate? If so, what aspect of your life are you going to capture on July 24th?

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The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama’s Historic Victory

Want some more explanation?  David Plouffe was the campaign manager and chief architect of the Obama presidential campaign.  Over the course of 2 years the campaign raised more than $750 million, had a staff of almost 6,000 people and an army of volunteers that totaled into the millions.  The Audacity to Win (Amazon affiliate link) takes you closer than any other account of the Obama campaign has.  There are many business, marketing, community development and time management takeaways in addition to the granular level detail of what it takes to run a presidential campaign.

As usual, I shot a quick video with my thoughts on the book.  If you can’t view the video, check it out over on my YouTube channel.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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So, I’m about to walk on the stage at my first international speaking engagement.  It’s a pretty damn big deal to me.  I mean, I’m a nobody.  Our company has not even reached it’s first birthday, dammit.  I’m just some dude that is ridiculously geeky and is passionate about social justice.  I’ve been attempting to construct a business amalgamation of these two loves for almost a year, and bam, here I am in London, staring at a room replete with hard core NGO fundraisers.  They brought me over because of an exclusively web-based project we lead to build a school in Leer Sudan earlier that year.  We raised over $100k.  We had no budget.  We had no HQ.  We had no staff.  We broke ground.  They’re looking at me. Craving. Lusting.  I know what they want.  They want me to proclaim the “Social Media is the golden ticket” gospel, that if you do A, B and C you too can raise $100,000 on Facebook.  They want me to tell them that they can hop on Twitter and in a Midas minute, they’re every tweet shall deliver gold.  Then they want me to sell them a $29 5-point pamphlet to Online Fundraising Success…  And then there’s me.  I’m about to drop a Manhattan project style bomb on these blokes (wait that’s British, right). A paradigm that is well understood in geek circles, but is uber au courant in this neck of the woods (Old School Non-Profit World). The Social Web is more about humans and less about tech.

The session actually went pretty well.  Based on my experience perusing blooper reels of British Parliament on YouTube, I thought there was a better than average probability that I would either get booed off stage or punched in the face.  After the talk and the glad-handing, Melissa and I went to nab some lunch.  A lady, who’s name I cannot for the life of me remember, asked if she could join us.  She was in the session and wanted to delve deeper into the subject matter presented.  We chit chatted a bit.  At one point, I said “Well, it’s not about what you can acquire with social media, it’s about the connections themselves, they are the value”  Then she looks up at me, with what seemed to be half of her salad in her mouth, and inquired, “Well then how do I use social media to raise money?”

It hit me, while speaking about the social web and it’s inherent ability to connect with supporters, collaborate with and mobilize them I was using phrases like “use the social web” or “leverage the social web”.  But by using this vernacular, I was depicting an image of the Social Web that made it more like a handy dandy, shiny new Tool that can you can use to get stuff and less like a new opportunity to connect with people who are impassioned by the same things as you are.  I was like an artist that pulls out a canvas and tries to sketch his best friend, but ends up drawing a robot.  You don’t use your friends.  You don’t leverage your friends.  And if you do, you are most likely an asshole, and your “friends” know it.

I hear people say it all the time while speaking about social web technology, “these are just tools”, and they are right.  ”Twitter, Inc” is just a pile of servers and a repository of complex code, but Twitter is useless save the people that embrace and uphold it.  Although the technology is the glossy exterior we see, the people, the community, the relationships, the friends, the connections, the human interaction…these are the “real” elements, the “real” value, without which Twitter would be relegated to obscurity at worst and a tech geek circle jerk at best.  The “tools” empower relationships.  And these relationships are not to be “used”.  They are not to be “leveraged”.  You don’t use your friends.  You don’t leverage your friends.

You share with your friends.
You collaborate with your friends.
You are honest with your friends.
You empower your friends.
You listen to your friends.
You partner with your friends.
You ask your friends for their advice…maybe for their help.

The idea is to embrace the social web not use it.

I know it’s only a matter of semantics.  But you know what, salad mouth lady taught me that semantics kinda matter…

In reality what matters infinitely more, just as in personal relationships, is motive.  Those that approach the social web seeking to “use” and “leverage” are not so different from the MLM‘ers of the 80′s that sought to take advantage of every relationship they possessed to make a buck.  They are no different than the televangelists of the 90′s that sought to take advantage of every network in which they maintained authority in order to raise a buck.

Chris Brogan calls it the Human Web.  He’s right.  That’s it.

It’s not Web 2.0.  It’s not the New Web.  It’s not even the Social Web.  It is the Human Web.  And as it continues to evolve and transmogrify, we should seek to inform those that are new to the party, that although what has happened may appear to be a story of technological advancement, it is most certainly not.  It is the same story it has always been. The setting has changed.  The backdrop may be all helvetica font, and lime greens and sky blues, and sleek UI’s, and cute looking birds, and iPhone apps.  But it’s the same story it has always been, humans finding new ways to connect with each other.

How do you describe the New/Social/Human Web?

Is motive as important in the Human Web as it is in “real life”?

Check out Gary explain what he means by that statement and why YOU should be treating everyone like a goldfish as well.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I completely agree with Gary and think that his analogy is perfect.  This is what Gary lives by each and every day and one of the reasons why he has such a dedicated group of friends, fans, and supporters.  Sure, it’s hard to scale that as an individual but as long as you’re connecting as often as possible with as many people as possible, others notice and are appreciative.  Also, it doesn’t have to be long connections.  Just a simple “congrats” can make someone’s day (trust me, I know)

But, I think you can and should take it one step past Gary’s concept.  Instead of just connecting with someone like they were a goldfish in a bowl by themselves, how about connect with them and if possible, help them jump into a fish tank where they might have an opportunity with other fish that they may not already know.  Be that connector and help others with no selfish reasons behind it.

You know who does this really, really well?  Gary definitely does.  But, also, others like Chris Brogan, Jason Falls, Amber Naslund, Brian Solis (all of whom YOU can connect with at the Inbound Marketing Summit) and many, many others, who spend most of their time connecting and helping others just because.

Are you treating everyone that you’re lucky enough to have the opportunity to connect with like a goldfish?  Are you connecting with and helping your network as often as possible?  Know someone that is doing it really well and want to recognize them for it?

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Photo by: a_trotskyite

One of the key ways of accomplishing this is through a Facebook Page.  As being someone that manages multiple Pages and Groups on Facebook, I was very interested to watch this interview.  Even though I spend hours each day on Facebook, there is so much development taking place by both Facebook and application developers that it’s hard to keep up.

Check out Robert’s interview with Caitlin:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Two resources that Caitlin pointed out that I didn’t know Facebook provided were the Facebook Influencers and Facebook Marketing resource pages.  I’m going to spend a little time poking around there for new ideas, best practices and to see what some the featured pages are doing.

Caitlin definitely left me with a list of ideas I now have for updating my fan pages and groups.  It was also a nice prod to get in there and maintain interaction in the various pages.  I think one of the normal things that happens in a lot of social networks (at least it happens to me) is that you set up a page, group, or forum where you want to build a community.  But, because of other work, home or other page responsibilities, the pages, groups or forums don’t receive the level of attention that they deserve.

Remember when you build these communities you have to stay active in them.  You have people that join them beacuse they care about the subject or brand that the community is based around.  Be that community manager that they need and want whether it’s Facebook, LinkedIn or any other community you may be a part of.

If you want some more information on Facebook Pages, check out this excellent and comprehensive whitepaper by C.C. Chapman and his team over at The Advance Guard: About Face

If you’re so inclined, jump onboard my two main pages: Caminito Argentinean Steakhouse and Inbound Marketing Summit.

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Thank you for all that I learn and the friendships that I continue to make.  I hope that I’m helpful to you as well.

Note: This mosaic is a list of approximately the first 400 people of my Twitter list.  If you’re not included here, you were not left out on purpose.  I value that we get to interact.

If you’d like to build a similar mosaic, you can grab the code from Twitter Mosaic.

#journchat was started by my friend and PR superstar, Sarah Evans.  As Sarah describes, she started #journchat because

…I believe there is a need in this evolving world of media and public relations for some major dialogue between those who can make it happen.  The mission of #journchat is to keep an ongoing, open dialogue between journalists, bloggers, and public relations professionals…

It turns out that Sarah was right about her belief that there was a need for dialogue between PR and journalists.  As of this week’s discussion, #journchat has become the #1 trending topic on Twitter for 10 weeks in a row during the discussion.  What is really amazing is the speed at which it becomes the top trending topic.  Within minutes of starting each week, #journchat pops up in the trending topics on Twitter Search.  Not long after that it takes the top rank.  There are literally a couple thousand tweets sent during the #journchat discussion.

If you haven’t popped over to #journchat yet, it happens every Monday from 8p to 11p ET on Twitter.  To join and track the conversation, you can use Twitter Search to monitor what’s going on.

I think this concept could be replicated in many other communities.  What I like so much about it is that it uses the existing tools to bring together this particular community regularly each week.  The conversation then continues throughout the week on Twitter as well as on the #journchat Facebook fan page.

Have you tried #journchat yet?  What did you think?