This week has been interesting in Social media.. I think it already deserves a bullet point blog (its only Wednesday!?!)…

#1 Old spice Started having their spokesman respond to tweets via Youtube its working

Just one 1 of the many Videos

Twitter followers as of 12:30pm PST

#2 Ben and Jerrys decided to kill E-mail marketing and step into Social Media instead. Don’t get me wrong I love Social Media but this seems a little extreme to me. Its almost as if they have decided to stop doing print ads for TV… maybe budget issues were a concern.

#3 Facebook is extending their open graph to the mobile world. It looks like facebook is going to get into the Geolocation war at some point.

#4 Studies show that teens have Facebook fatigue but the site still experienced the highest traffic ever… This probably means that Grandmas are joining the site at alarming rates… or it was just par for the course.

#5 Twitter has decided it is going to make even more money with @earlybird. It is now apparent that while Facebook may have the users Twitter seems to have the dollars!

I was going to write a snarky post about this Onion article and how I’m totally sick of the tired old copy about how “it’s a new way to connect in meaningful ways! Content! Connect! Blah blah blah!” and how I would like one of these new social network upstarts that claim to be revolutionary and provide real-world results to do something that actually translates to the real world…

But then I saw this HILARIOUS book trailer for Meg Cabot’s new novel, Insatiable, and my snarky mood vanished! The trailer manages to describe the plot of the novel while making fun of itself and the genre of teen-hormone-fueled vampire fiction spawned by Stephenie Meyer and her (bloodcurdlingly awful) Twilight Saga. This trailer does two HUGELY AWESOME things for me:

1. It makes me want to read the book. And I haven’t read a Meg Cabot book in 10 years (sorry Meg, I burned out on Princess Diaries).

2. It makes me believe that publishing is not dead. People will want to read this book. They will buy it. Hardcover, paperback, Kindle, iPhone, iPad, Nook, and every other format you can think of. They will buy it. They will read it. And they will want sequels.

So what’s the problem? Why are you worried?

Because so few people are seeing them and even fewer books are using them. If publishers spent more time and energy creating deliciously exciting, funny, enticing things like this, and empowering their authors to do projects like Cabot’s crowd-sourced zombie-couture Fashionably Undead audiobook (co-written by the author and 50 of her Twitter followers, for BBC Audio), instead of having conference after conference bewailing the end of the industry as we know it, they’d be doing just fine. Readers would be excited and engaged, and above all, they’d KNOW about the fabulous books being written ALL THE TIME instead of drooling endlessly over Robert Pattinson fansites.

And now, for your viewing pleasure, some FANTASTIC transmedia projects, book trailers, and crowd-sourced book clubs:

It’s a Book! Trailer, explaining the difference between books in dead-tree vs. ebook form.

Neil Gaiman’s Instructions trailer, narrated by the author.

Meg Cabot’s magnificently insightful blog entry about her Insatiable trailer.

Meg Cabot’s celebratory online Dracula reading group, working up excitement for the new book, complete with prizes!

My personal favorite, the #1b1t discussion group, the first Twitter-wide book club, currently reading Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, started by Jeff Howe, the inventer of the term “crowdsourcing.”

Hear that, publishers? Quit sending your people to nonsense conferences and quit writing articles about how the industry is dying and DO SOMETHING TO SAVE IT.

Or get Zach Galifinakis to be in your book trailer.

Today at the facebook conference F8 an attempt to take over the world went on display. Today it became crystal clear that Facebook doesn’t just want to dominate social they want to dominate the web!

It seems like Facebook wants a like on every web page… personally I cant help but wonder how the IRS will fair on that front.

Facebook wants to eliminate Google as a search tool. This probably indicates a consumer e-mail format in the near future.

Facebook announced a very interesting collaborative effort with Microsoft… Docs.com. This is a full  attack on Google docs. Offering real time collaboration and document sharing online, the age of the cloud is very close.

Facebook connect is gone… now you just sign in with Facebook, and this has been extended to much smaller sites.

The days of being a fan are over…now everyone just likes stuff. As a result I will have a hard time following celeb pages. I can see it now “Mike likes Kobe Bryant” awkward….

If you paid attention a few months ago Facebook signed a partnership with Paypal… which will likely make them a huge player in the e-commerce biz.

The current make up of the digital landscape feels like this

Facebook V Google ::Google V Apple :: Microsoft V Apple

Apple V Amazon :: Microsoft V Google :: Google V Yahoo

Microsoft V Yahoo :: Yahoo V Facebook

Making Twitter::

This could be World War 3 depending on where you stand!

I’m going to repost something I put on my personal Tumblr…I’ve been trying experiments with my personal (not affiliated with Nostrum) blogs to see which I liked better, Tumblr or Wordpress or what, and here’s what I’ve come up with so far, for my needs as an individual blogger. For Nostrum and our purposes as a multi-writer blog, I definitely like our current system of a WordPress blog with all of us writing and a Twitter feed for the little spur-of-the-moment things. For individuals, however, I’m thinking Tumblr will come to play an increasingly useful role, although for the moment the point is kind of moot since so few of my friends are on the site!

Repost starts now:

“Okay, I’ve tried it. I’ve decided to stop linking my Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr feeds. It’s waaaay too crowded. What feels like a totally normal amount of communication on Twitter seems excessive (embarrassingly excessive) on Tumblr, and just AWFUL on Facebook. Some people may be all about the integration and the one-stop-shop publishing, but it seems to me to be completely redundant. Why would a reader go to 3-10 different platforms to read the same information? A little cross promotion to alert followers form different venues that one platform has been updated is one thing…the same thing all over is just lazy.

I guess this makes sense considering what I use each service for. Wordpress is for really long, drawn-out, detailed posts. Tumblr is for medium-sized notes. Facebook is for communicating ONLY with people I know in real life. Twitter is for stream of consciousness posting of things I find interesting, fan-girl worship of authors and comedians, and Etsy/craft madness. It comes as no surprise to me that Twitter is still the one I like best. Call it a symptom of modern ADD or whatever you like, but I like being able to catalog the things that strike my fancy at a particular moment. Honestly, I sometimes find it the most useful to go back and read what the hell I was thinking about this morning at 10am.”

In essence, what I’ve discovered (I always knew it intellectually but actually remembering NOT TO DO IT is a totally different thing) is that publishing the same content across every single one of your platforms is a BAD IDEA. Cross promotion is good and useful, but the same content on every site makes it pointless for a user/follower/friend to go to more than one platform, and therefore you’re likely to cause your readers to miss something when you DO post something new on one site and not the others. In other words, keep it fresh. Don’t be redundant.

Following up on Mike’s previous post about Google Buzz, I totally get the furor about it. The service definitely needs work, and Google has definitely made a whole lot of big mistakes.

But hey, it’s new. That’s the downside of a service being released by such a huge, publicly visible company. Twitter and Facebook were NOT famous when they were released. They weren’t globally famous for years after they were founded. They had plenty of time to make changes, fixes, and tweaks based on quiet user feedback. Google Buzz had the disadvantage of going very public, very quickly. It wasn’t finished. And it got slammed. Now I wonder whether Google will have enough time to fix it and realize its potential before it gets laughed out of existence.

I think it would be nice if Buzz went back to beta. Google definitely needs more time to tweak it, and they need a setting to get real constructive criticism instead of media snarking. I still think the service has a lot of potential. I like Pete Cashmore’s take on it. If you insist on using an analogy to define Buzz, try this one. Think of Facebook as the local bar, where you go to hang out with your friends, play some games, and just shoot the breeze. Think of Twitter as the village square where you get all the news and have public conversations. It’s a public forum. Then you have Buzz, which SHOULD eventually become a place to focus detailed conversations on IDEAS. Not news, not people, not “what are you doing” or those awesome photos you took on your trip to Cabo this spring, man. It’s a platform to talk about content and have major brainstorming sessions about concepts and projects.

If Facebook is the local bar and Twitter is the town square, Google Buzz (I hope) will be the local college campus.

I’ve said before that I like Google Wave as a productivity tool–an easy way to keep work projects neat, tidy, and collaborative at the office. I don’t find much utility for connecting with friends about random things. It’s a business thing, and I like it that way. I think Buzz will end up being sort of similar in market, although I hope more concept-oriented and less business-y.

If it lasts that long.

If you don’t get Google Buzz that’s ok because most people don’t. The network has merit and is important but you have to know what to expect.

Below is a list of things Google Buzz is not.. (Even though everyone is trying to say it is)

Buzz is not…

If you think you are joining another twitter you might be disappointed.  Twitter is great for engaging on conversations. On buzz conversations happen but in a different way. I have read the hundreds of blogs that say Buzz is Twitter+FriendFeed but they are wrong. I understand how the mistake can be made. To be honest I made the mistake and I was wrong.  Twitter is about short quick conversations happening at a rapid pace, it is a much different experience than having long engaged posts about content.

Buzz is not…

Facebook is a network that is locked down tighter than your grandmas lawn chair. Facebook is all about Privacy privacy privacy and more privacy! If you want to be found by only people that know you than this is the network for you. There are almost never any surprises on this network. You have your people that play games, the people that use it to post links only, the people who engage in conversations about how much they like sunglasses. Its a network of people who share stuff going on in their lives… that you know!

Buzz is not…

Sorry everyone that would declare buzz and friendfeed the same thing… they are not. Buzz may share some elements but it is something different. If you don’t use Google reader often/ don’t share stuff on it than this knock might not make sense. Google reader is what sets Google buzz apart. Google buzz has the best RSS integration ever. I can literally see the best of what people are reading in their RSS readers because they share it. I don’t have to find the links or blogs they are come to me.

Dont get me wrong buzz shares elements with these networks…

Open searches like Twitter

Full comment threads like Facebook

Buzz can even be a hub of Social media like Friendfeed

But to say one is like the other isnt really fair… In time people will figure out that Buzz is different… sadly that will take some time. If I were to point to any social network that buzz would be closest too I’d have to pick…

Or

More on that next time!

Google buzz is out! It was out yesterday however I didn’t have access until today. As with any new social network buzz is going to take time for it to find its place and function. Keep in mind that Google buzz is still a very young network (like 2 days old) clearly this means that it is not the final product. After using the product for about 15 minutes I think there is huge opportunity for business. However buzz is going to require engagement on the next level! Without a search feature you are going to need to be interesting to gain a following.

Some notes on Google Buzz

1. Google buzz does feature twitter “integration”. I put that in quotes because it will post your tweets to your buzz account. However buzz doesn’t use the O-auth or function like an API. Im not a fan of this because I always have and always will dream of the world when everything I want is on one dashboard… (I know there are a few sites that try but they are laggy and frustrating).

2. As far as I can tell google buzz lacks a searching feature … like twitter search which is ironic Apparently buzz does offer a twitter search look in comments blow great tip..

3. This is a network that will take some time to generate momentum… while this point may seem obvious… Google has millions of gmail accounts so some might assume an instant hit. However when you look at the bell curve gmail is nearing the laggard phase of adoption. That means many users are going to ignore it until everyone else figures it out.

4. Some evidence suggests that the product might be getting released a little ahead of schedule because of the so called “Facebook Titan project”. (Gmail v Facebook) This could be the reason why google buzz noticeably ignores Facebook as a social component.

5. There are many people suggesting that Google buzz will turn into a Digg or Reddit personally I cant imagine that google would have made such a large investment if that was the goal. The digg conclusion doesn’t seem logical because Google probably would have just purchased a company like it… (hipstr has been toying with selling for a while now)

If you are still wondering what the heck Im talking about here is a quick video about Google buzz…

In case you missed it the Grammys were on CBS last night. I say in case because not many people missed them, the ratings were up 33%… I was part of that 33%.

My wife and I weren’t going to watch the Grammys, neither of us ever have. In general we are not huge fans of award shows and our dial rarely ever goes below Channel 4.  However last night something happened. As we were on twitter and Facebook we took notice of all the post’s talking about how crazy this Gaga person looked. Other posts were highlighting how amazing the Black Eyed Peas did, and still others that poked fun at every opportunity.  It was at that moment we realized we had a choice watch the Grammys or find ourselves irrelevant.

Last night CBS added eyes via Social media are you?

We’ve all heard the case studies (mostly done in-house) touting @comcastcares as the future of customer service. How it would change the negative image of cable companies…how Comcast customers wouldn’t be so cranky.

It hasn’t worked so far. A few individuals got good service, but were still annoyed. Not ever having been a Comcast customer, I can’t judge too much.

But other cable companies have jumped on the bandwagon as well. And that’s what I do have experience with–I recently canceled my account with Charter Cable. And they didn’t like it, not one little bit.

Here’s the back story–I was moving out of my apartment and didn’t want to transfer my account to my new place. I called May 17th and arranged to have my account stopped on June 10th. All good. I moved out of my apartment at the very end of June, all paid up and good to go. I returned my equipment. Good. I thought I was all done with Charter. Peachy.

So imagine my surprise when I got a call in November. From a collection agency. Saying I owed Charter $130. BIG SURPRISE. So I called Charter customer service and got no help. They were very polite and looked up my account. And they saw that I had paid out and closed the account (I had actually overpaid) but they couldn’t do anything. I was going to have to drive forty miles to the local office and beg them to call off the credit agency and fix my credit score. I was NOT HAPPY.

Naturally, in order to relieve my feelings, I took to the web and made some very angry Tweets and went off to bed. After which, cue Surprise Number Two: when I woke up, I found an @reply from @Umatter2ChrtrG asking if he could help. I explained my situation to him in both tweet and email form, and he connected me with @Umatter2Chtr2. A couple hours later, I got a phone call from @Umatter2Chtr2 (aka Josh). He listened, asked me to wait while he called the billing department, and called me back shortly with the news that the bill had been reversed, the money I overpaid was on its way, and the problem hadn’t even been put on my credit record.

Score. The problem got fixed. After a lot of freaking out on my part.
So, many thanks to Josh at Charter for his help. But that doesn’t negate the months of screw-ups while I was a Charter customer. If all the customer service I received had been that good, I’d still be one.

Conclusion: having a social media VIP line won’t keep your customers from hating you if all the rest of your customer service is terrible. Customer service and product quality should be the priorities, not afterthoughts and Band-Aids.

This is just a short post to say:

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY!!! You can now report spammers on Twitter with just a click–in the actions tab on any profile you can report the profile as spam! YAAAAAY!!

The details are available on the official Twitter blog. On the one hand, ABOUT FREAKING TIME! On the other hand,

YAAAAAAAAAAY!!

Now Graham Spam Spam Spam Chapman can finally have his breakfast without spam.

This Mashable compilation of hilarious Twitter spoofs brought me back all the way to my very first blog post with Nostrum, way back in March.

The Jon Stewart one is still my favorite…and I still like Twitter.

Is it possible for a sports team in a non-traditional market to have one of the worst records in their league for almost 10 years running and continue to have great fan support? The Los Angeles Kings certainly seem to think so.

I realize I am talking about Hockey in LA in September but I think the Kings are on to something that other leagues and teams should learn from.

Fans+ Social Media =Power… Power = tickets sales

Things the kings have done several note worthy things with social media

1. The L.A. Kings list fan sites on their official site official web page (the Kings don’t control these sites but they are send people there anyway)
2. The L.A. Kings engage random fans on Twitter regularly
3. The L.A. Kings/NHL allow their players to have blogs and twitter accounts. This provides a great inside look which is what fans really want anyway.
4. The L.A. Kings have posted a link to an unofficial fan pages on Facebook and Myspace
5. The L.A. Kings even have a blog they link to that is written in Spanish

With an average attendance of 89.1% the Staples Center was often filled in 2008-2009. Kings fans still went to games despite seeing a team that has missed the playoffs since 2002 and missed it again in 2008-2009.

Could it be that Kings fans are just better because they are empowered?

Where are your Fans?

Do you give them a seat at the table?

A few weeks ago we wrote about Twitter being sued by MLB’s Tony La Russa

Today, TechCruch is reporting that LaRussa has dropped the suit outright and no monies have changed hand by either party.

Thank the Lord - someone finally came to their senses.

Over the past few weeks there has been some stuff going on with celebs and their obnoxious ego driven suits to get Twitter to reel in celebrity impersonators on twitter.

Ok I get the need, but to reiterate from my earlier post - lets work at this together instead of suing.
Twitter took that to heart and will soon be offering verified accounts to a select group of high profile users. A very well thought out and respectable solution based offering.

What do you guys think??

Yes you read that right: An inanimate technology is being sued by The St. Louis Cardinal’s Manager Tony La Russa - WTF?

Come on Tony and his team of crazy MLB lawyers and advisors…
Why the hell would you sue twitter? just the stupidity of lawyers and people who don’t understand that technology isn’t the culprit, its dumbass people…

Tony - I’ll give you that it honestly sucks that someone is “impersonating you” but why not do what all other celebs and others do and “ask twitter to take it down” and all will be good…
Not that hard? Pick up the phone or email them and explain the situation? if they don’t take care of it, then by all means- sue your ass off…but a bit of diplomacy goes along way in this type of environment.

So hate this kind of stuff!!! Greed is always at the heart of this kinda stuff….And we hear Bad publicity is as good as any…It’s BS…
Have some dignity and make a concerted effort to recityf the situation before you go around suing people and screwing up a good thing….

Have to show one of the most pertinent and thought provoking comments that @KW2P posted:

“”What’s next? Suing Yahoo because you don’t like the content of an email you received?
If I make a telephone call, impersonate La Russa, and do some harm, you don’t sue the telephone company. Or maybe he would….
I hope the judge throws it out for the frivolous suit it is and makes La Russa responsible for all costs.
This nonsense is another example of why companies like Twitter, Yahoo, Google, should get out of the United States and base
themselves in countries where swollen-head celebrities can’t bring frivolous laws”

Irritating - What do you think?

Lakers haters take your seats and embrace yourself.  Maybe you should just take a vacation because not only is the premiere of Kobe’s documentary this Saturday, but the Lakers are going to crush the Rockets on Sunday.  It’s a big weekend for a few NBA teams, with some Game 7s determining who will move on and a unique feature on one of the NBA greats.

I have faith the Lakers will demolish the Rockets at home on Sunday  and that Orlando does the same to Boston. But before all this happens, the premiere of Spike Lee’s Kobe Bryant documentary, “Kobe Doin’ Work: A Day in the Life” airs tomorrow, 5/16 at 5 PST on ESPN.  The footage was taken in April of this year at the Staples Center when the Lakers were matched up with the Spurs and it was one impressive Lake Show.
On another note, did anyone tweet with Derek Fisher in Game 3  when he was suspended due to a foul in the previous, very physical Game 2?  Great use of Twitter by the NBA, but if you check out his page now, he hasn’t tweeted since then.  Although his last post is “This is the 1st and last in game post…” it will be disappointing to Twitter members who find D. Fish on Twitter only to see his last tweet was May 8th.  I don’t blame Derek, he’s part of the Lakers and they are all great…except for Walton but that’s another post. Someone needs to figure out the purpose of his page now. Should D. Fish be more active on Twitter, remove the page soon, leave it as is or cancel the account?  What do you think?  You don’t need to let us know that the Lakers are going to be the 2010 champs, we already know this, but what do you think should happen to Fisher’s Twitter Page?

This may be the coolest thing I’ve ever blogged about. Astronauts are giving us poor earthlings a taste of what it’s like to travel in outer space. Mike Massimino is a mission specialist on the Atlantis Space Shuttle mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. And he’s using Twitter. In space.

Massimino is tweeting as @Astro_Mike. Granted, his tweets are very few and far between, because, well, he’s kind of, you know, busy. But the principal of the thing is still really exciting. And besides, NASA is keeping us abreast of how the Hubble repairs are going.

More talkative, in terms of Twitter, is Mark Polansky, who will be going up shortly on the STS-127 launch on June 13th. He’s doing a great job of keeping the curious abreast of what it takes to be an astronaut, and the grueling preparations you have to go through to get in on a shuttle launch. Follow him @Astro_127, and send him a YouTube video of yourself asking him a question, and he might just answer it from space!

Maybe it’s nostalgia in the face of the fact that we’re looking at some of the last shuttle launches ever, as the Shuttle is going to be replaced by Ares carriers, or maybe it’s my childhood desire to be an astronaut, or maybe it’s just the universal human obsession with wondering what’s out there, but I can’t help feeling that these tweets from space are the most exciting thing I’ve ever seen come out of social media.

Kind of puts the Ashton Kutcher-CNN contest in perspective, doesn’t it?

How many times have you heard: I don’t understand twitter?  Or, I have an account and i tried using it but I just dont get it, so I gave up on it?

Well if you’re like me or you work in the new media biz - a hell of a lot of times.  But that doesn’t mean that just because you don’t understand something you give up.  I use twitter all the time for both work and personal things.  Yes I will admit some of it is for  mundane things like updating Lakers Scores while sitting at Staples or just tweeting out where or what i’m doing at some random time.  But that is only one small facet of what i use twitter for.

The main purpose of my twitter usage is for research and connecting to the best and brightest of the digerati set in real time.  Tapping into the minds of people like david armano and charlene li is something that the most privileged only got to do during their stints at Harvard or hearing them on the lecture circuit.  With Twitter, I can literally cherry pick thoughts and concepts and interact with them on a second by second basis.

Do they know me - Not from Adam.  Do they care about me - not really.  But does it build a relationship - most definitely.

Its a hard concept for people to truly grasp but i do believe the more you explore and participate with Twitter (or other Social Tools) the more you will see their true value.  Look at this to see how ” real people” are opening the twitter-universe to make it work for their lives.

Tweet us your insights and let us know how you use twitter: @nostruminc

Now I know that I’m nowhere near the first to report this, but Marina Orlova, aka hotforwords - http://twitter.com/hotforwords and www.youtube.com/user/hotforwords - is a master marketer.

The Russian-born Los Angeles resident has parlayed her educational background as a philologist (a linguist who also engages in literary studies) and an etymologist (someone who studies the roots and history of words) into over 100 millions views (views attached to $$$ - mind you, as her video feature banner ads) on YouTube. She records videos with an average length of about 1:30 on the history of a given word or phrase, which is requested by her fans on YouTube, Twitter, and her website hotforwords.com. Now of course not just any philologist could create the online empire that Ms. Orlova now rules, and yes, the factor that allows her to do so is her physical appearance. And there is exactly NOTHING wrong with this. She is bombarded with crude and insulting comments on YouTube, yet I’m sure she gets the last laugh. Read the rest of this entry »

Imagine you were completely paralyzed. You couldn’t speak. You couldn’t move your hands to write or type. You could barely blink your eyes. But in spite of that, your brain was working normally—you were totally cut locked in and cut off from communicating with the rest of the world.

Then imagine someone gave you a voice.

Adam Wilson, a doctoral candidate in biomedical research at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, is trying to do just that. He and his colleagues have been working for a long time now on developing an accessible means of communication for victims of “locked in syndrome.” These are people whose brains function normally, but they are trapped in bodies that cannot move or speak due to illness or injury. They could be suffering from ALS like Stephen Hawking, or they may have suffered a stroke or high spinal cord injury. Some have found slow, painstaking ways of communication, involving eye blinks or the like, but Wilson and his labmates are trying to make interacting with the rest of the world easier. Until recently, it seemed that such technology was at least a decade away—but then Wilson and his supervisor, Justin Williams, had an epiphany. Read the rest of this entry »