A lot happens in the social media industry each week. Here's what we at
Social Media Users Want to Be Heard
…from eMarketer 12/17/09
Here’s some valuable data for brands with an online community, whether a public network like Facebook or a private niche community site. In short, consumers want to be heard. In terms of user generated content, this is important to keep in mind.
10 Rules for Increasing Community Engagement
...from Mashable 12/16/09
Here’s some excellent advice for marketers looking to enhance user engagement with their community. Many of these tips go back to the need for social media users to be heard as noted above. We agree with all of these tips especially: cross promote with existing social networks, empower your users through UGC, profiles, and recognition, make it easy and interact.
Three Best Ways to Use Social Media
…from the Wall Street Journal 12/16/09
This article offers three good tips for small businesses looking to participate in social media. The best tip in our estimation is to identify your goals and how social media will help your business achieve them before you jump on the bandwagon.
Future Differentiation of 'Social Media' from Collaboration
…from ZDNet 12/14/09
Consultant Oliver Marks begins this insightful article with the following words…”Social media seems to be becoming even more of a hindrance to the successful application of 2.0 technologies to solve specific business problems as time goes on.” Need we say more? A good read.
Turning Our Customers into Colleagues
…from HuffingtonPost 12/14/09
We love learning about the strategies employed by social media marketing leaders such as Dell. In this piece, Dell’s Manish Mehta compares Dell’s social media thinking to that of a “mom and pop” shop. Interesting…and effective.
Welcome to the Family!
As a social media technology company, Spotlight's socialization features are particularly dear to us and we think you'll appreciate them too. With built-in ratings, deep tag commenting and user generated content capabilities, you can socialize the video content you distribute and build micro video communities and mini viral campaigns right in your distributed players. It's an easy way to encourage viewers to engage in conversation and create community around your brand and content. And, you can quickly enable these features without the need for a developer.
The 2009 ALMA Awards, celebrating the outstanding achievements of Latinos in entertainment, will air today, Friday, September 18 from 8:00-10:00 p.m., ET on the 
Reality Digital customer, 
Starting today, NASCAR fans will get the opportunity to recount their favorite moments and memories from one of the sport’s premier stock car racing teams, 
As NASCAR’s audience demographic and consumption patterns evolve, major brand sponsors like Pepsi are increasingly adopting social media technology to reach the 75 million NASCAR aficionados who are consuming the NASCAR brand more and more online. Here at Reality Digital, we’re seeing more of these major brands use their presence on public social networks like Facebook to drive massive traffic to branded social media contests and online community destinations where fans can more deeply engage with a niche fan base and content. 
YouTube Channel Sponsorship
I don't know what HP's goals or success metrics are, but given the momentum above, the You On You Project looks like it could be a huge success in driving branding and product marketing. It's also interesting to note how HP is (and isn't) marketing the social media contest itself and what the ambient noise is on the Web. Here's what I found at a glance: 
The definition of user generated content is rapidly evolving from "look what I made", to complex collaborations developing between users, artists, and publishers. The notion of sampling, collaborating and remixing content in the high-end studio has now reached the mobile handset. Check out a cool new initiative straddling the music, mobile and social media spaces.
We worked with Moderati to develop a complimentary interactive music community called "Romplr.com" (
You could say online social networking sites have given us back some of that time by making it easier for us to keep in touch with more friends and family and replacing lengthy, time-consuming, in-person dialogue with a Facebook update here, a short little Tweet there. But man, it takes time to scan through three pages of activity stream updates and examine a hundred image-less, 140-character posts. 
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