CNBC Doc Helps Your Business to 'Get On Oprah!'

A new CNBC documentary called The Oprah Effect airs tonight and will give inside tips on how to get on Oprah Winfrey's TV show to help your clients and businesses try to get that magical Oprah lift. Read more about it and watch a clip at the press release page here.

(via Mediabistro's PR Newser)

Social Media Around the Blogosphere

So many good social media items to share with you today from around the blogosphere:

- B2B Web blogger Aneta Hall, Pitney Bowes' Manager of Emerging Media and Corporate Marketing, shares the five responses to the question: “What can social media do for your business?” #1 - Social media can help you identify and engage your brand ambassadors. Click through for the others. (via Marketing Profs)

- Overwhelmed with the information onslaught? Simplify Your Social Media Routine. (via Mashable)

- Getting excited about the June 6th launch of the Palm Pre? If so, check out this recap of an AllthingsD session today with the key Palm guys behind it.

- Alltop gives you Twitter News, alltop, all the time.

- Google waves to the world about real-time communication and the world jumps out of its seat. (via Mashable)

- Here's something brewing - twitterizing local Tweet-ups, as in Chicago tweeple, New York tweeple, Phoenix tweeple.....hmmmmm - who's working on this, does anyone know? Check it - cityname+tweeple on Twitter as in @phoenixtweeple, @newyorktweeple. Curiouser and curiouser.

Twitter TV - FAIL

From the Hollywood Reporter newsvine...

"Reveille and Brillstein Entertainment Partners on Monday announced they have partnered with the social-networking and micro-blogging service to develop the first TV series that incorporates Twitter into the action of the show.

Created by novelist Amy Ephron, sister of Nora and Delia Ephron, the show will feature ordinary people competing while on the trail of celebrities."


God Help Us All.

Friday Folly - The Death of the Shopping Mall?

Off the tech-web beat a bit on this Friday, let's look at shopping malls. Have you been in one lately? I went to Phoenix's Paradise Valley Mall during the week, and it seemed slow go. In fact, The Wall Street Journal likened some national malls to 'ghost towns' - indeed, malls have a lot less foot traffic these days.

"The severity of the recession is turning some malls that were once viewed as viable into potential casualties. "Any mall that's sitting on life support is probably going to get its plug pulled" as the economy stalls, says Michael Glimcher, chairman and CEO of Glimcher Realty Trust, which owns 23 U.S. properties, including Eastland Mall in Charlotte."

That's what happening here in Phoenix too. The Wall Street Journal wrote about Nordstrom's decision to put a store at CityNorth on the backburner, as developer Related Cos. seeks cash and financing to finish CityNorth's $570 million second phase. And City North is also losing a few more retailers in the next weeks - both the White House | Black Market and Chico's stores are closing in mid-June, I learned. Both brands are owned by Chico's FAS, which announces quarterly earnings next week.

AZ Central this week wrote about some of PV's outside tenants having difficulties, but a new Costco is on the horizon, so there may be good news forthcoming to the current miasma surrounding shopping malls.

Maybe there's one upside - less traffic for the mall walkers? Or more news for Deadmalls.

The Social Media Bible

Congratulations to the Phoenix-Scottsdale social media team behind the recent release of The Social Media Bible - Lon Safko, Steven Groves and David Brake.

The men have put in a lot of hours and up-to-the-minute work to bring the Social Media Bible out at perhaps the best time in the history of the universe for it. If timing is everything in publishing, then these guys nailed it. Not a day goes by without someone asking me about MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Ustream videos and more. There is so much interest in social media right now from individuals and business. The book should be a help to all who are seeking the... um,..truth... :-)

Since the book is in printed (acid-free paper!) form, and social media changes daily, the team have put up a Ning site to stay current and continue their publicity efforts online - click over to it at Social Media Bible. Plus, there are plenty of Lon's podcasts over at YouTube from his interviews with key influencers.

Social Media Stories 2.0

Social Media Stories 2.0 was presented today in NYC at the Social Media Bootcamp by Seth Goldstein, a guy I used to work for back in the day.

Seth is now CEO of Social Media, a key advertising platform for social network applications. This presentation is fun to look at and interesting to read on how and where social media is headed for people and brands alike. The presentation is below from SlideShare.

Social Media Stories 2.0

View more presentations from Seth Goldstein.

Cision Helps Us Find-Follow Local and National Media on Twitter

The media database firm of Cision has launched Journalist Tweets, a streaming feed for PR pros and other media-centric types of what journalists are tweeting in real time. Cision's blog post announcing Journalist Tweets writes...

"Twitter’s most brilliant move was to make their application open to third-party developers. These developers are now creating websites outside of Twitter that filter the Twitter voices that matter to specific audiences. These new sites will help a number of people find their audience and information that is truly relevant to them. (For example,) Twitter, Microsoft and Federated Media teamed up to create ExecTweets.com, a directory of top business execs on Twitter. (And) Twellow.com, WeFollow.com and JustTweetIt.com allow you to search for Tweeters by many different categories. At Cision, we realized that PR professionals and journalists want to see what other journalists are saying on Twitter. Cision has done the dirty work of sifting through these journalists and tagged each one by region, industry, and by which ones are “top tweeters”."

Nice work, I say. I think this could become valuable quickly, and I think it actually takes the 'conversation' one step further than HARO (HelpaReporterOut), which is kind of a one-way between journalist needs and responding PR pros' interest.

ValleyPR Blog's Len also has a good take on this, but seems to think it may all be too confusing in the long run, without categories or local filtering. But I think checking this feed daily could assist with larger pitches for PR pros and for gauging sentiment on larger national issues to produce locally targeted pieces.

It's Social Media Tuesday

Here's real-time on a few interesting social media gatherings and panel conversations going on today.

Here in Phoenix, there's a morning symposium going on at the Heard Museum and hosted by the Arizona Small Business Association - some interesting chatter and compliments going on at separate hashtags - one here at the bit unwieldy ASBASMS09 and one here at the slimmer, cuter #TSMB.

Here's another event that happened earlier - hashtagging at #socialmedia - lots of great links and insightful musings.

How John Adams uses Social Media

John Adams is a Phoenix area radio host who interviews local and national entrepreneurs & small business owners on Friday mornings on KFNN. More and more lately, as John's guests have talked about using social media, John himself has started to get more involved in using social media online. In the clip below, John talks about some of the steps he's taken to make his business more visible on Twitter, Facebook, Ping and Plaxo.

Welcome to the Statusphere

"Welcome to the Statusphere...the new ecosystem for sharing, discovering, and publishing updates and micro-sized content that reverberates throughout social networks and syndicated profiles, resulting in a formidable network effect of movement and response. It is the digital curation of relevant content that binds us contextually and through the statusphere we can connect directly to existing contacts, reach new people, and also forge new friendships."

I've not read a better definition that that above by Brian Solis of PR 2.0 of where we are and where we are headed in the online world. Wow. Click the link to read more.

Why did he write that? Oh, well, just small news that Twitter is more popular than Jesus.... or something like that.

Using YouTube Search

A quick post on search capabilities at YouTube - this is good insights into sharpening your video search savvy.

From CNET's article 'An Expert's Guide to YouTube':

"YouTube's search engine works a lot like Google's. In fact, it uses the same search operators to let you tweak your results. Here are some worth remembering the next time you're looking for a video:
• Limit to words in the title. Putting "allintitle:" in front of your search keeps YouTube's results limited to those videos with the matching words in the title. This is great if you want to keep it from searching through descriptions or tags. Not so useful if the video you're looking for has a misspelled or misleading title.
• Exclude a term. Add a "-" then the word you want to exclude will keep it out of the results. So if you're searching for explosions but don't want to see videos with diet Coke or Mentos, you'd type in "Explosion -diet -coke -mentos." Be sure to add the "-" in front of every word you don't want.
• Play the wildcard. If you're too lazy to type a word, or think that YouTube will figure out the words you're leaving out, you can just put in an asterisk in place of that word. In practice, this means that searching for something like "Fallout: Broken Steel" you could just type "Fallout * Steel" and have it guess the word in the middle."

Read the rest of the piece here.

How Twitter Search and social media impacts SEO

One of the great things about Twitter is its search capabilities. When you head over to its search page, you are able to search for real-time mentions of people places and things. Or brands and products and names. It's brilliant, fast and lets you into what people are talking about a particular subject, as it happens. No wonder that's why so many branded marketers are jumping into Twitter with both feet without thinking much else about it. Just knowing what customers are saying about your brand is an essential tool in any corporate marketing dept's. hands.

And that's why Twitter is emphasizing that aspect of its existence. In fact, as CNET reported, Twitter Search will soon be able "to crawl the links included in tweets and begin to index the content of those pages." That's pretty exciting stuff.

Twitter (and Facebook, and all other social media properties) is changing the face of search engine optimization. Only a few years ago, having your product, business or existence high up on Google search pages (paid and organic) was all that mattered. But now, as DuctTape Marketing writes... "search engine optimization and social media are now undeniably intertwined. It has become extremely difficult to achieve any measure of success for important keyword phrases without the use of social media." Absolutely.

The key takeaway for small to medium-sized business looking to energize its online existence and customer interactions? Get on social media. NOW. :-)

(image above from DuctTape Marketing post)

Why Gary Vaynerchuk Rules

Why Gary Vaynerchuk rules:
- he's a fast thinker (see my blog title?)
- he's a quick talker
- he blows almost no smoke, and the smoke he does blow is just the right amount
- you almost never hear words like "problems" "circumstances" "recesssion" and other downbeat words come out of his mouth
- he's charming and effervescent - that's why he's gonna rule on TV in the future
- I'm met him in person and he's the same rad dude on the stage and in the crowd
- he's among the best living examples of the modern American dream (non US-raised from immigrant parents) I've ever known.
- he crushes it.

Watch Gary Vaynerchuk tell you in less that two minutes why Twitter can rule for your brand and business, if you'd only get out of your corner office to take a peek: