Honesty. I believe that to create and maintain a relationship with your market, you need to be honest in all of your interactions. This creates trust which is no less important in this virtually connected world than it is face to face. It may seem useful to fabricate an image or a persona on a platform such as MySpace and use it to advance a portion of your goals, but this fragmenting actually leaves you with less of a foundation to stand on.

You or your company’s personal brand is what needs to be marketed from the beginning. Social media marketing is a slow process and, if for no other reason, you should avoid dishonesty as it takes time and effort away from growing the “real” you, the one that your audience will inevitably find out about anyways.

In a supporting vein, Harry Hoover with THINKing proposes “to thine own self be true.” Here, here Harry!

The inspiration for this post is credited to Mitch Joel’s Six Pixels of Seperation - The Twist Image Blog. Check out his challenge to come up with social media marketing’s best practice.

In an news bite by Andy Patrizio on Internet News, we find out that Google’s new Internet browser Chrome has lost market share - and quickly. Dropping from 1.7 percent to 0.75 in the week since its release, things aren’t looking so good.

Patrizio speculates that this may be due to the initial downloading rush, but who knows. New tech often takes time to catch on, especially something used as often as a browser. Granted, Chrome has a few issues that set it apart from current favorites like Firefox (such as not offering a Mac version till late) and one in particular that stands out like a sore thumb to those valuing privacy - Chrome records the keystrokes made in the omnibar and sends the data back to Google.

Granted, this last feature can be turned off, so perhaps that will encourage more users to make the switch. It does have some impressive safety features such as auto-referencing blacklists for phishing or malware, and the use of a safe mode so you can back your data up.

With our desire to connect to information sources at a faster and faster rate, I think we will continue to see more improvements, newer browsers and their mutations for as long as the Net is around…try them all, just realize that there will be a better and bigger one just around the corner!

Five months after the announcement of the new MySpace Music site, this optimistic social networking tool’s CEO and co-founder Chris DeWolfe has unveiled plans for bigger and better music-related services. They are working with Google Gears to enable user profiles that can be cataloged and saved - meaning you can have your profile for “bunnyboy2″ as well as the one for “mainmandork” saved on your hard drive where you can pull one or the other up depending on your mood.

Working to compete with both iTunes and Amazon for top MP3 service, MySpace has some high aspirations. Their ad-supported streaming music system will also include access to ring tones, something sure to appeal to the tween set. Pandora, the current favorite for streaming media, doesn’t have that option. MySpace also plans to include an option to buy concert tickets and memorabilia such as T-shirts. The question is, will this enhance the MySpace name or simply add to the clutter?

The MySpace site isn’t the prettiest, the cleanest or the most stable social media platform, but its popularity continues to soar so perhaps they are on to something.

As of today, the launch date for these new services hasn’t been unveiled.

In an interesting move, HBOlab, an online-focused offshoot of HBO, has created a Web-based reality show out of some popular YouTube personalities. By banking on the character’s existing virtual stardom, they are hoping to promote the Web series in some of the primary social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.

The show is called “Hooking Up” and will feature well known YouTube entertainers such as “lonelygirl15″ and “sxephil”. If you don’t know who these people are, you are part of the Internet minority, or so the show’s producers would like you to believe. Sensations like Tila Tequila have already made the leap from social networking to mainstream celebrity and with “Webisodes” like this one, we look to be entering a whole new realm of online marketing.

Not only is it more cost effective to create and promote shows online through social media, it engages an entire Web-based community that is spending more and more time cruising sites such as YouTube and Twitter to get the latest news and determine who has the goods to become the next big celebrity.

If you want to view it for yourself, Hooking Up will premier on October 1st. Check it out at hookingupshow.com.

HP is launching a Web browser with Mozilla. It will only be available with HP’s new Compaq dc7900 desktop series and perhaps this will help them to spice up their less than stellar PCs.

The browser has some interesting benefits - it runs our of FireFox’s sandbox where it will store all of your downloads, cookies and added applications. This means that you won’t lose your information if the browser crashes and needs to be reinstalled. Much like how the Mac operates, this Web browser will be able to be reset to a safe mode where you can relaunch everything from bookmarks to add-ons.

Called a “virtual browser” this HP-Mozilla brainchild should greatly decrease your chance of falling prey to malicious software as you can keep everything from malware to trojans separate from the rest of your PC.

HP plans to eventually provide this feature to all of its PC systems. Until then, you’ll have to decide if this safer, sturdier browser makes the purchase of a plain ol’ desktop worth it.

While executing a social media marketing campaign you begin to notice how you can start shifting the target conversation of the campaign.

When starting a campaign you should pick a topic or a conversation that you are hoping to build a presence in.  This topic should be a key word or key phrase that represents where you would like to be.  You can also further define the conversation using a more refined list of keywords similar to a online marketing campaign.

Pretty soon you will start to find topical areas where your message is better received and drive the kind of traffic you desire to your media, profiles, blog and Website.

It all takes paying close attention to the conversation and considering new keywords or phrases that could drive your social media marketing campaign to achieve the results you are looking for.

I have been reading more and more about the topic of virtual assistants out there in the blogosphere.

Virtual Assistants, are business owners who provide professional administrative, technical, or creative (social) assistance to clients — usually other independent entrepreneurs and consultancy small businesses. Virtual Assistants work from their own office (hence “virtual”), thus making it a fairly popular (and growing) profession in centralized economies with “fly-in, fly-out” (FIFO) staffing practices. It is estimated that there are as few as 5,000-8,000 or as many as 35,000 Virtual Assistants worldwide.

They are providing a wide range of services from administrative assistant to blogging for companies.

We are intrigued by this because this is the same type of contractors we use here at Social Media Squad.  We have been crowd sourcing our campaigns since the beginning.

I have found a couple of Virtual Assistant Directories, but they were not that substantial.  I would like to ask anyone who offers their services as a virtual assistant list their information here.

So go ahead and place a comment with your Name, contact information and anything else you would like to tell about yourself:

Part of my daily routine is checking out Digg to see the recent popular news.  With the ongoing / upcoming election it’s no surprise that there is a lot of political news. I personally am not big into politics but I can accept it and I like to see the occasional article so i can keep up somewhat with the issues.  One trend I’ve been noticing lately is the incredible amount of attack articles that are popular.

Right now out 15 articles on the front page of Digg 7 are negatively base towards one candidate or the other.  Add to that 8 of the top 10 are negative articles as well (granted many of them are the same as on the main front page.  Actually let’s just put it out there - they are all attacking McCain or his choice for Vice President Palin.

These articles include:

• BREAKING: Bristol Palin Pregnant Right Now
• Palin booed
• Cheney Offspring Bursts From George Bush’s Chest (PIC)
• Palin’s LIE repeated 4 times on MTP
• John McCain voted against Katrina relief multiple times
• Critics: McCain’s VP Palin used ‘Bridge to Nowhere’ for gain
• Palin thinks Pledge written by Founding Fathers
• Palin belonged to Alaskan Secessionist Party

There are a couple issues this bring up for me.  If you read through any of the posts regarding McCain’s use of negative ads you’ll see the overwhelming response suggesting how poor it is… Yet the same scene of people have no problems promoting negatively slanted articles right back at him.

Another issue this raises to me is the question of if Obama’s official campaign is behind this.  Everyone already knows Obama has a very savvy social media campaign in action so is it that hard to believe that they have a digg brigade that promotes these stories?

What are your thoughts?  Is it ok to complain about negative ads while at the same time promoting negative articles?  Is Obama’s campaign directly behind this?

Lately we have been receiving a lot of requests for in-house social media marketing trainings.  Clients are requesting that we come on site to assist them in developing a social media marketing campaign strategy.

The downturn in the economy has really hit small businesses and they are looking for new ways to find and retain customers.  Social Media and Social Networks are a great avenue for finding new customers and maintaining the relationship with your existing customer base.

We are always working to provide new white papers, case studies and operations manuals for social media marketing campaigns in many different industries and conversations.  These materials assist small business owners who may not be able to afford a full-blown social media marketing campaign.

Social Media Squad has been assisting businesses and organizations on-site with the following:

• On-Site social media marketing strategy needs assessment and development
• Social media marketing campaign setup, oversight process, and reporting / metrics
• In-House social media marketing campaign training and monitoring
• Custom social media marketing materials development

This new in-house social media program is really helping businesses cut cost and realize a social media marketing campaign for their business.   They are able to utilize existing staff and resources as well as outside professional social media marketing resources to achieve their online goals.

Stay tuned for more blog posts, white papers, and programs on in-house social media marketing campaigns.

While some have argued that the internet isolates us, internet users know it has a remarkable ability to bring us together. Through forums, blogs, and other social sites, it’s possible to connect with thousands of people all around the world who share your particular interest. However, when that many people are brought together it’s inevitable some tensions will develop.

In a group that large, there will no doubt be a great mix of characters and personalities, including those who are highly sensitive and those who are highly insensitive. The laws of the internet dictate that these two types of people will find each other, even be drawn to one another, and tensions will erupt.

After spending time on social sites, I realized that the rudeness, angry volleys (sometimes called “flames”) and general jumpiness was far too widespread to be coming from simple misunderstandings between people on different ends of the sensitivity spectrum.
We’re all pretty well aware of road rage by now, and it got me to thinking if the web-rudeness I was experiencing was linked to this kind of anonymity-driven hostility on the road.

I quickly found that web rage is a documented phenomenon which stems from something called “online disinhibition effect.”  The online disinhibition effect means that posts turn to nasty flames because the writer is unable to gauge the target’s response, or in many cases decipher the true motive in the first place. In real life, we “read” someone according to their body language, tone, pitch, all the things that are impossible to decipher online. In fact, in real life words account for only 7% of our communication.

It took millions of years for humans to develop our complex communication techniques, so it makes sense that when you take away 93% of what we use to get our message across, the messages often get lost or misinterpreted. Whether behind the wheel or behind the screen, we need to find ways to adapt to help our desired messages get through without causing more harm than good.

Some tips to combat web rage:

• To cut down on misunderstandings, use smileys or emoticons to give emotional cues to your message.
• Don’t waste time on “trolls” (people who scan through social sites looking for arguments) or flamers. If you feel the need to clarify an original post, simply do it and excuse yourself from the discussion.
• Before taking offense and firing off a nasty remark, take a moment to imagine the person behind the post. In all reality, it could be someone you know. Imagine if a friend or family member came to you with the same statements. How would you respond to them?
• If it is someone you know, pick up the phone or ask to meet in person. The extra cues from hearing their voice on the phone or meeting face to face will help you deal with the situation much more effectively.
• Last but not least: learn proper web etiquitte and teach your children.