Facebook Worth $23 Billion? and Other Questions

Is Facebook worth $23 billion or $12? Whatever Facebook is worth in the end- those are some really big numbers...

Twitter Places is targeting Foursquare and Gowalla (again). I haven't seen the benefit of location based social media. Although I do have a Foursquare account, I haven't used it much. Do you use it regularly? What do you get out of it?

Worried about a large asteroid hitting the earth and wiping out life as we know it? Don't worry, the Russians have our back.

My agency was just selected by TerraGo Technologies to provide integrated public relations and social media services with the goal of increasing awareness for TerraGo's software solutions among decision-makers at government agencies and industrial organizations. TerraGo is a really cool geospatial data company that delivers software applications that extend the access and application of maps and images for non-GIS users and customers. I'm psyched we get to work with them.

Lastly, take a moment to vote for Ryan Zimmerman for the All-Star Game this Monday. Not convinced? Click below to see the video of him hitting a walk off home run last night...

Braun Jones of WWC Capital Group, latest on Straight to the Point Podcast

For as long as I've been recording podcasts for the Straight to the Point series, I've been focused on how marketing executives have been addressing larger business problems from a marketing perspective. I've been really lucky to sit down with some outstanding professionals from Microsoft, British Telecom, Socialware, BearingPoint and others.

Last week, however, I shifted gears a little bit and interviewed Braun Jones. Braun is a principal at WWC Capital Group, which is an investment banking and private equity firm dedicated to serving middle market companies in need of capital or seeking advisory services to complete a sale or an acquisition. I wanted to sit down and pick his brain about economic and market trends that affect the environment that marketers have to operate in.

What did we cover?

• What does the economic outlook look like right now? Five years down the road?
  
• How does he make transaction decisions?
• What kinds of start ups are getting investments now? What technology trends are "hot"?
• Is the government contracting market ready for another round of mergers?
  

Listen to the show on BlogTalkRadio...

or just click play...

Listen to internet radio with JeffMajka on Blog Talk Radio

Congrats to Tandberg on Social Media Award

I spent a fun evening at the K Street Lounge last night. No, I wasn't there to see and be seen with the cool people here in DC. One of our clients, TANDBERG, now part of Cisco, was there to receive an award from the Northern Virginia Technology Council (NVTC)- "Best Use of a Corporate Blog."

The blog, "Break Down the Walls," has evolved greatly from an experimental pilot project to see if a blog could help support its public sector telepresence business to a successful social media portal integrated into the overall sales and marketing infrastructure. The Strategic team member who leads the account for Strategic wrote a post about working with TANDBERG back in March- read it here: http://cparente.wordpress.com/2010/03/16/breaking-down-walls-with-tandberg/. Here is a quick but illuminating quote:

Social media initiatives must demonstrate measurable value to earn their place in marketing budgets during tough economic times. Grounded in strategy and executed properly, social media can build audiences that directly support the bottom line of an organization.

Hear, hear. And I'm happy to see that strategic approach validated and recognized by local tech community...but its really a great pat on the back for the TANDBERG marketing team for taking a "risk" on social media and seeing it through to success.

Follow them on Twitter- @TANDBERG_FED

Should I Automate My Social Media Marketing?

Well, are you stupid? Then by all means.

If you aren't, then you are going to have to think deeply about what kinds of activity is value added by the fact of its being non-scalable. A lot of social media stuff (tweets, posts, etc) can be scheduled in advance, especially the promotional type actions. But the core value of a social media marketing campaign is the content you create and use to connect with and build your audience.

There are no short cuts. Spamming or posting meaningless, valueless marketing content will not generate you a credible audience of the right kind of targeted individuals.

Content creation is expensive and time consuming. Yes, you can re-purpose already created content. Yes, you can and should aggregate content you create with that you find through your network of peers and on the Internet. But the core of your social media marketing program has to be the entertaining, engaging and educational content you create yourself. And it can't suck.

All marketers need to start thinking like publishers.

Light Reading for Upcoming Gov 2.0 Expo Attendees

With the Gov 2.0 expo coming up soon (May 25-27), I think it is probably a nice idea to share some the blog posts and news stories I've been reading about the subject.


BtoG Communities Now Online - Q&A with Strategic's Marc Hausman
BtoB Magazine (5.10)
As president-CEO of Strategic Communications Group, Marc Hausman works with b-to-b and business-to-government companies on social media strategies. The company, which was founded 15 years ago as a public relations consultancy, began to focus on social media about three years ago. Today, 90% of Strategic’s revenue comes from social media communications. BtoB recently spoke with Hausman about the best ways to use social media for reaching government buyers.

Monster Government Solutions Unleashes Web Site
BtoB Magazine (5.10)
Monster Government Solutions faces a particular challenge in marketing: It wants to deliver a complex, targeted-solutions message about its software and technology, which powers online career communities such as USAjobs.gov—all without diluting Monster Worldwide’s corporate branding and marketing efforts. The answer to that question turned out


5 Ways Government Works Better With Social Media
Alexander Howard, the gov 2.0 writer for O’Reilly Media shares five real world ways government agencies are rolling out social media or networking programs. "The simplest way of describing government 2.0 may be any technology that helps citizens or agencies solve problems, either for individuals or the community, and enables government to operate more efficiently or effectively."

Open Gov Transcends Technology – The Case for Interoperable Business Practices
Stuart McKee, Microsoft State & Local Government National Technology Officer, shares his view that open government should mean more that posting raw data on a website. "Simply put - data alone is meaningless, organize it and it becomes information!"


NHIN Direct: Open Healthcare Records and Government as a Platform
Tim O'Reilly shares his ongoing experiences working with government leaders building an open health care records system. Follow this fascinating passage- it seems obvious that private sector software developers are driving the progress of this program...

I was swept from my meeting with Dr. Blumenthal into a planning meeting for NHIN Direct, an open system for interchange of patient records between physicians (and ultimately patients themselves), where I heard much the same message, which was summarized so eloquently by Dr. John Halamka on his blog yesterday morning:

The NHIN Direct effort philosophy is expressed in design rules

The golden standards rule of "rough consensus, working code" will be applied to this effort.

Discuss disagreements in terms of goals and outcomes, not in terms of specific technical implementations.

The NHIN Direct project will adhere to the following design principles agreed to by the HIT Standards Committee from the feedback provided to the Implementation Workgroup

Keep it simple; think big, but start small; recommend standards as minimal as possible to support the business goal and then build as you go.

Don’t let “perfect” be the enemy of “good enough”; go for the 80% that everyone can agree on; get everyone to send the basics (medications, problem list, allergies, labs) before focusing on the more obscure.

Keep the implementation cost as low as possible; eliminate any royalties or other expenses associated with the use of standards.

Design for the little guy so that all participants can adopt the standard and not just the best resourced.

Do not try to create a one size fits all standard, it will be too heavy for the simple use cases.

Separate content standards from transmission standards; i.e., if CCD is the html, what is the https?

Create publicly available controlled vocabularies & code sets that are easily accessible / downloadable

Leverage the web for transport whenever possible to decrease complexity & the implementers’ learning curve (“health internet”).

Create Implementation Guides that are human readable, have working examples, and include testing tools.

That should be music to the ears of any Internet developer, and should raise some serious doubts in the minds of any of you who have been swallowing the idea that somehow the Federal government wants to take over the medical system. There's some fresh thinking going on here, influenced by the best practices of open standards and rapid internet development, about how government can use interoperability to stimulate market activity to improve the medical system.

Take a moment and share with me what you have been reading about gov 2.0 and would recommend...