Currently, the FDA’s site likes to direct users elsewhere. For example, let’s say you were a Medical Device company. You’re redirected to the HHS (Health & Human Services) website. While the HHS has taken the time to create a Social Media Policy, it isn’t actually a Social Media Policy, but instead a link to various other government sites and their social Media Policies.

But wait, what about the Web Content Managers guidelines on the USA.gov website? Great you should mention that as this page directs visitors to find additional information to individual services and references the website Apps.Gov; a government site that lists internet (cloud, social media, etc.) and localized based software applications approved for use by government agencies.

Of course for the many in government who just don’t have a clue about technology, generally anyone who has been in any elected office for more than two years and anyone in office over the age of 28, there is the government ran HowTo.Gov, a hilarious website outlining the common sense practicalities any high school senior has become aware of since the invention of MySpace and Sex’ting.

Of course not all government agencies are inept. After doing some digging I came across this government referenced, but not government ran site offering direct links to many Government Agencies Social Media Policies. It’s great to see that our Navy and other military branches have taken the time to come up with some social media policies and guidelines while fighting several wars, yet the people on Capitol Hill who work mostly at the golf course and behind a desk, can’t seem to find the time.

Shame on you FDA.

Google has done a lot of things very well. They launched a search engine in 1997 that changed the way we find information. Between 2000 and 2003 we saw the launch of Google AdWords and AdSense, which gave many websites some coin in their purse. In 2004 they gave us Gmail, a free unlimited email and over the years it has allowed it’s users to utilize its web interface, POP3 or IMAP functionality. All great technical achievements.

Unfortunately, Google’s development team doesn’t seem to understand social media, and maybe even the basics of human interaction. In 2004 Google launched Orkut, which is still popular in Brazil according to Wikipedia. Orkut was a social networking service that’s interface was very similar to Bebo and Hi5, which have now become little more than obscure social gaming sites. While it currently resembles MySpace without the customized pages ability, it lacks any niche, such as MySpace’s musician base.

In 2009 Google Wave came and went with barely a spark. Like Orkut, the product was never pushed and few people outside of the social media development interests groups knew or cared about it. Barely a year later Google stirred up some Buzz, which seemed to try and combine the likes of Twitter with their Gmail service and ended up just alienating users of Gmail and causing a series of privacy concerns to spring up.

And now we have Google+, which is definitely the company’s best attempt yet at making a decent social networking platform. For the most part Google+ is a clone of Facebook, though with the standard minimalist Google interface. You have a Stream which works like your Wall, Hangouts which work like Groups, and Sparks which work like Interest’s Pages and everyone can now utilize the Google +1 buttons just like the Facebook Like button. The only real difference is Google’s Circles, which are a great idea, but implemented poorly.

What’s my gripe?

Having to manually sort through all of your contacts and drag them into Circles is functional, but if I am already using Gmail and have multiple contact lists set up, it should be a no brainer that I be provided an option to convert the contact lists into Circles. This is especially annoying for people like me who may have several hundred contacts. Likewise, there should be a better way to manage contacts if I want to pull in lists from Orkut, Wave, and Buzz. And what about Fans and Followers from YouTube – does no one think about big picture expandability and application synergy at Google?

Another issue I have is that to make a suggestion to the Google Development team I’m linked to Google+’s Facebook page – no really, I’m supposed to use the number one social networking site to offer suggestions on how to make a competing social networking site better.

While Google announced they are rebranding Picasa and Blogger soon, Google quickly has made itself a jumble of tools that all share some mediocre interactions with each other but ultimately are an awkward and tangled web of applications. And what of my Google Profile, the public info that is supposed to be the umbrella of my Google experience, what will become of that?

All in all it’s clear Google is trying very hard to get into social media, but the developers at Google are apparently just not savvy when it comes to the social interactions of human beings. They’d be better off looking to gather input from young non-college graduates instead of relying on their technically brilliant, but clearly socially retarded programmers.

While I have a less than favorable view of their new service currently, as a Gmail, Checkout, AdWords, AdSense, YouTube, Picasa, Google Search and Chrome user I hope they’ll take the Facebook suggestions to heart and improve their service, though given their track record of releasing interesting social media related tools and ignoring them, means I won’t be holding my breath.

Today I spent an hour playing with the Bloomfire Alpha. Without going into specifics that might change during testing, the idea is a content distribution outlet for companies, though technically individuals could use it as well.

The idea isn’t new, just a retooling of other services out there. You log in and create a “community”, the concept reminded me of Ning, though the UI is completely different. You can post Q&A’s, upload videos/presentations, include white papers, etc. As an admin you have control over who is allowed to participate in your community similar to any type of forum/group setup via a subscription base.

Something I thought was interesting is that they offer you the ability to charge subscribers of your group. My initial impression was that this could be a potential revenue stream for artists as you can set the rates as low as you want. So a popular artist who has 6,000 subscribers paying $1.00 a month could actually quit his day job. A neat idea, though I don’t know how feasible that really is. Personally I’m a cheap bastard so I wouldn’t bother.

This led me to another page where my interest waned. The problem I have with it, which is something that surprised me as there was no mention about this in their initial pitch to me, was that the cost to use the Bloomfire service has a pretty hefty monthly fee.

Prices are currently free during alpha, but the pricing plans available as of today start at $99 for 10GB storage, 10GB downstream and the ability to have an unlimited amount of members. The next tiers are $299 and $499, where you have up to a maximum of unlimited features, though the downstreams are capped at 50GB and 100GB.

Clearly this platform is targeting larger commercial entities that are looking for another outlet for their content distribution, though from my personal take, I don’t see the cost value. Sure on paper with enough subscribers you could create buzz and produce a direct profit. On the surface this would look like it’s better than having 10,000 freeloading Facebook fans, but realistically, how many of those Facebook fans would be willing to pay $5 a month to subscribe to another content distribution site?

I could probably see a company like Blizzard pulling it off as they could offer special WoW in-game items to subscribers of their Bloomfire group and given their multi-million count subscriber numbers, if only 10% of them opted to pay a $1 a month fee they’d make hand over fist. So who knows, maybe this will be another outlet for MMO micro-transaction games like DDO and LOTRO.

But in either case, it’s something that is going to only interest a niche group of users. I’ve been trying to think of a way this platform would benefit the non-profits I work with, but with those price tags and lack of physical or virtual profits, I think we’ll end up sticking to just relying on our website, Facebook and YouTube.

I chuckle inside.

He’s right in that no one form of online media has replaced print, but that’s not really how the internet and online technology work. We have news sites which distribute up to the minute news; we have blogs that spout out everything from opinions on facts to celebrity gossip to fabricated stories. We have social media sites which connect individuals to these stories, and we can do all this from our mobile devices. At this point email seems to be an old hat tech. The only real piece to hold back online information from print is the typography and design aspects associated with migrating printed material to the web, assuming you’re not counting PDF or flash readers.

Of course online text hasn’t always been as easy to manipulate as printed text, ask anyone who has worked as a designer with your major Adobe suite tools like Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign and tried to convert the text to a readable, non-image format. It’s a significant challenge at worst and an inconvenience at best. But today I see our savior has released their Font Preview web typography tool, which allows designers to easily, from a visual perspective, adjust the kerning, tracking and shadowing of their fonts as if they were adjusting it in any other print tool.  Granted the terminology is different, as Google prefers to refer to tracking and kerning as letter, word and line spacing – but it’s a small price to pay to create great looking online text on the fly.

So I hate to call out the white elephant in the room, but, Print…uh…you’re still here?

John Doe is following 4 people / 1,002 people are following John Doe

On one hand you have celebrities, who follow only their close friends, if any, perhaps a business associate as well. While they’ll interact with their audience they won’t follow them back. This is also a popular trend among people who have signed up for Twitter to chat with friends, or some other personal reason, and are not seeking to leverage it for business, though their followings tend to be celebrities, news or entertainment.

Jane Doe is following 2,876 people / 2,893 are following John Doe

The other side is people who have an affinity to be social online or perhaps are marketing and public relations professionals who desire to connect with everyone they meet. While there is arguably more interaction on these accounts, they don’t boast the clout that celebrities or the one way street folk seem to have.

But lately I’ve discovered a third.

A while back, before Twitter updated its policies to fix this, there was this desire and belief that if someone followed a lot of users they in turn would get followed back. This was somewhat true and it led to the creation of many tools that automatically do this for you. From a viewers standpoint it also gave the appearance that the account was spam, regardless of what was posted. Ultimately the rule has become that one never wants to follow more people than are following them.

I’ve found an exception that I think works.

Over the last few months I’ve been working with my city’s Convention and Visitors Bureau, the organization responsible for helping to bring in shows, conferences, exhibits etc. to our city. One of the many things they do is also connect visitors to local businesses and from a social media standpoint, promote local businesses to visitors and locals.

The way we did this was to ensure that any restaurant, bar, nightclub, attraction, cultural venue, etc. was followed by our CVB’s Twitter account. But we didn’t stop there; we also decided to follow as many local San Jose folks as we could too. The purpose for this was so we would have a stream of information coming in on our side that we could spot check to see if there were any trends developing in the dialogue of both locals and businesses that we could bring together.

The ultimate goal here is that we will be able to connect locals and visitors with businesses who have something that will interest or benefit them. The result is that we have used our Twitter as more of a data-mining and connection tool than a content distribution tool.

For those who haven’t jumped on the new social bandwagons there is a group based here in San Jose known as the Silicon Valley Tweetup. It’s based around a group of Twitter power users who group together once a month, the third Wednesday of each month, in order to raise funds for a local charity organization. The past meetup was hosted by Rosie McCanns for Relay for Life and by 7:30pm the venue was overflowing with Twitters.

The format is pretty simple. The group contacts any venue that can hold between 10 to 250 people peek and has their meeting there. On arrival guests are asked to donate $10 at the door to the charity being highlighted that evening. Flyers and workers of the organization are available to discuss what the organization does and how they help different groups. At this last event I learned that Relay for Life is a group dedicated to helping those going through Chemotherapy and Radiation live healthier lives through exercises and diets appropriate for those dealing with cancer. They also have post-remission based groups that help those who currently do not have cancer and want to curve the risks of any re-occurrences.

While the donation is optional, it is usually worked out with the venue that those who donate get their first drink free. All of the money at the door goes to the charity group. Once inside various sponsors, companies and individuals are invited to have their booths within the venue or speak during the brief thank you portion of the evening. The event lasted from 6pm to 9pm and around 7:30pm is when the founders of Silicon Valley Tweetup thanked everyone for coming and allowed their sponsors and Relay for Life to talk briefly about what they do.

From 8pm until 9pm it was mostly a mixer, with the venue reaping the benefits of the Food and Beverage purchases of their guests and many of the Twitter users mingling and exchanging contact information. During my time here I was able to meet a man named Arvin (not sure if I am spelling his name correctly), while he had never experienced cancer first hand he had many friends who had been affected by this disease. I was able to meet with a couple of the sponsors, visual search engine provider LeapFish and a financial organization offering 401k and IRA information. There were others from Cisco, Tumble and Robert Mondavi as well.

I left a little early, around 8:30pm as it was a work night for me and I had an early morning meeting the following day, but in my brief time here I was very impressed with the turn out and how social media is being used to help make life better for others. As someone who uses social media mostly as a way to push out information or connect businesses to customers, it was refreshing to see an alternative use that benefits others.

That said, here is why you should care about Facebook’s new “Like” button.

The Like button is a great feature to offer your website visitors as it allows everyone who visits your site a one click opportunity to promote your site to their friends. It takes no effort on their part, and from a web facilitator it takes very little effort on your end to offer this.

But Mike, I don’t have a Facebook account so I don’t care about Facebook!

That’s fine if your company or you don’t have a Facebook page, it doesn’t change the fact that many of your visitors more than likely do, and why wouldn’t you want your visitors to promote your business? If it helps, think of the Like button as Social Media outreach for dummies combined with an Affiliate system that doesn’t require you to pay anyone and you’re on the right track in your thinking. If it really matters to you, you can add in the code and still not have a Facebook account.

But I looked at their developer page and saw the word developer in the title and got scared because I don’t code!

While Facebook has given many sites a ton of features that integrate anywhere from fully to not really, you don’t need to be a code master to add a Like button to your website. Below is the code from Facebook’s Developer page.

<iframe src=”http://www.facebook.com/widgets/like.php?href=http://example.com”

scrolling=”no” frameborder=”0″

style=”border:none; width:450px; height:80px“></iframe>

Simply paste this anywhere in your site to have it show up and work. The only change you need to make is changing the bold sections for the URL and the Style. So change http://example.com to the URL you’re trying to promote. For a blog like this I just use http://www.michaelghurston.com as I have this code above my sidebar widget on every page. For places like SanJose.org it makes more sense to personalize the URL a bit more such as http://www.sanjose.org/visitor or http://www.sanjose.org/meetings The width and height can be adjusted as needed. If you’re unsure what 450px versus 300px wide is, simply keep playing with it until you’re happy.

The only downside I’ve come across so far is the widget likes to show a white background (no matter how I change the code) in IE. Safari, Firefox and Chrome all display it fine though.

But I don’t want to support this as Facebook is just going to turn into a giant scary entity like Google and the Borg!

Resistance is futile.

I’ve probably over simplified it, but essentially you now have the option on your Google Profile of sharing information from your other websites with people you frequently email. This allows your Google Profile to work much like FriendFeed in that you can include your feeds from Flickr, Picasa, Twitter, a Blog, etc. In addition, the people who you email most often can choose to “follow” your profile and you in return have the option to “follow them back”.

So why is this added into Gmail’s interface instead of Orkut’s? I have no idea.

What I can tell you though is I’m already annoyed that Buzz needs to open everything I click on in a new window or tab. I log into Gmail, click Buzz, a new tab/window pops up, I want to check one of my friends links or posts, a new tab/window pops up, I want to edit my profile, a new tab/window pops up…

While neither Gmail or Google Profiles are new, Buzz is and while it has given me a desire to make sure I take the time to update my Google Profile to include correct and shareable information on the web, I can’t help but feel I didn’t really need this from Google unless they were going to merge these features in with Orkut.

Of course I just opened up a whole new question with that, what are Google’s intentions for Orkut moving forward. With this revamp to Profiles and Gmail, are they giving up on Orkut or will they eventually merge features into each other?

Whether you’ve mastered your social media outlets and are conversing with thousands or not interested in checking out Facebook and Twitter just yet, you’ll want to take a look at these three sites.

More importantly, you’ll want to make sure your customers are looking at these sites:

Yelp.com

Yelp is currently the most popular online review site, from restaurants, to convention center facilities and everything else. If a business or facility exists, someone can write up a review on it for others to see. I’d recommend that anyone who has friends, family, colleagues or business partners that have visited one of our managed locations be asked to post their remarks on the site.

Google Reviews

While this site is a little clunky to those who don’t constantly explore the world of all things Google, every time a location is mapped via Google Maps you have the option to review the facility. For example if you mapped the San Jose convention center, you can select on the highlighted space “A” and choose “Write Review” from the information bubble that pops up.

ECompliments.com

This site is my least favorite of the three, but may be a place some of your clients may already frequent. While all reviews on this site have to be complimentary to the business in order to be posted, it’s still worthwhile, especially if you’re looking for people you may want to contact for testimonials.

Niche Social Media Sites for Business

While many Social Media sites will talk about why you should be using Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter I wanted to bring attention to a few minor niche sites that are specifically geared towards businesses and their owners.

The first is Merchant Circle; a site I find very promising. While its user base has only recently broken the million member mark it offers businesses a place to connect with other local businesses in their area. More than this though, it gives you the opportunity to connect with customers in your neighborhoods and allows for Q&A’s from those looking to learn more about your business. A great social media tool that really helps to qualify your followers rather than just hoping that the exposure you have is really interested in you.

Another one you may already be familiar with is Plaxo. While my personal preference is LinkedIn as I believe it offers more tools and definitely has a larger user base to connect with, many people enjoy Plaxo as it offers the same professional networking, but with a smaller pool of people. It’s definitely easier for those starting out in the social media world to get noticed here.

Another site similar to LinkedIn is Fast Pitch! Networking, which focuses more on user profiles promoting their business rather than just their expertise in certain areas. Because of this, the site includes a lot of built in marketing tools for its users to use including press release, classified, event and video pages for your profile. I really think this site has a lot to offer and I’d keep an eye on it, even if you aren’t ready to join just yet.

Paid Services

I’m a big fan of free resources, and I believe there is much you can do with the online resources available that do not come with price tags. However, if your budget has room, the two following sites may be something worth looking into.

The first is QAlias, which allows you to create an online profile for your company, you and your employees. While this alone doesn’t justify the $9.95 a month charge, what they also include are Google Ads for your profiles. This can help whether you’re already running a Google Adwords campaign or don’t have the time to set one up on your own.

The next site is BizNik, which is strictly for Business to Business networking. While they offer a basic membership that is free to create your profile and connect with other businesses, you’ll find you won’t be able to really network with anyone until you pay for their “Pro” or “ProVIP” services which start at $10 a month.