Just moving into a new townhome, I just went through the pains of visiting and searching place after place before finally finding one that matched my taste.

During the process, I had a daily routine of watching Craigslist for the latest posting and the struggle of determining from a few words and pictures whether it was worth a visit. I set up appointments, visited, and realized quickly that most places were a waste of time by the time I rolled up. For the most part- it was hit or miss.

However, in an article I crossed, this same frustration has inspired real estate agents to respond – offering YouTube as a solution.

By creating “virtual walk-through” videos to sell houses, real estate agents can serve clients faster and more efficiently by giving a real view of a property. Only the extremely interested will proceed further. Not only does this save time for people like me, but it can also help real estate agents close faster.While still in it’s infancy, I expect to see this to be a differentiator in the competitive retail environment, and a much needed development in real estate advertising.Perhaps as this develops further there will be a better integration with YouTube and Craigslist to facilitate the search. At least, that is for me to hope.

A couple days ago I ran across this video of an 8 year old dominating the game Guitar Hero. Of course I heard of it through my brother, whose friend showed it to him, and so on, as the pattern of most YouTube videos that “go viral”.

The thing that struck me about this video is that it reaches into the heart of social media. It is a relatively low-quality home video that was posted and offered up to a community of viewers, and, it captured my attention and curiosity enough to watch over and over in amazement.This little video of course got me thinking about www.guitarhero.com. What were the makers of the game doing to tie into this and other videos like it? Were there discussion forums to participate in or gamer tips to share?As I went to the site I realized that I was entering a site Guitar Hero’s newest game, “Encore, Rocks the 80’s” front and center with a “Buy now” button. Snooping further, I was introduced to the product by an embedded video that painfully streamed a commercial of the game, with extra information to read about the tracks, characters, etc. Somewhat dissatisfied, I went to the “forums” to see if anybody was talking about the game, promoting their favorite parts, or just talking about scores or tips. But I was greeted with an”authentication required”message. Lets just say Ctrl+Alt+Delete was my only way out. It was a painful experience.So – in essence, Guitar Hero “went viral” without the company even acknowledging it or responding to it on their website . Here’s a tip: if people are talking about you – you need to join the conversation or at least provide an area for discussion and sharing. Show potential customers the experiences other customers are having with your product. Capitalize on the conversation.

Instead of a custom-made product introduction video with quotes from USA Today, the website could have streamed in YouTube videos showing two dudes playing guitar hero, or expert players using the new Encore tracks. And instead of making my computer lock up, the forum should have encouraged and allowed new users to start talking with Guitar Hero fans about the new features of Encore, and the other Guitar Hero products.

So the simple lesson in all of this is: become involved in the conversation. Viral marketing campaigns are hard if not impossible to replicate. You can’t afford to miss out.

After reading Brad Fitzpatrick and David Recordon article – Thoughts on the Social Graph – which is about social networking portability, I had an idea of my own.

As the web guy of the Environmental Health Perspectives – an Open Access journal – I was thinking about DOI (Digital Object Identifiers) and how it could work with social networking.

DOI utilizes CNRI Handle System – a general purpose distributed information system that provides efficient, extensible, and secure identifier and resolution services for use on networks such as the Internet. It includes an open set of protocols, a namespace, and a reference implementation of the protocols. The protocols enable a distributed computer system to store identifiers of arbitrary resources and resolve those into the information necessary to locate, access, contact, authenticate, or otherwise make use of the resources. This information can be changed as needed to reflect the current state of the identified resource without changing its identifier, thus allowing the name of the item to persist over changes of location and other related state information.

Why use the Handle System? Think about keeping track of a person. People are listed in a telephone directory by name. If you look up a person’s name, you will find his address. If he moves across town, his address will change but not his name, so you will get his new address when you look up his name. If he didn’t have a name, was known only by his address, and he moved, you’d probably lose track of him. If you tried his old address, he wouldn’t be found. He’d have to tell everyone his new address, and hope they kept it. If he had a lot of friends, that might work, but it would take a lot of effort.

Similarly, if your digital content is only known by its location, and that location changes, it will be hard for users to find it. If you give each object a unique name (an identifier), and associate that name with the object’s location using the Handle System, you’d only have to update a single record with the new location, rather than notify everyone who might want to find the object, even if you could arrange to do so.

Wouldn’t that work great for Social Networking Portability – update a single record instead of multiple logins at mutiple website.

So here is my idea in a nutshell:

• Social Network ID website (Non-Profit, Open Source)
• Create Master Login (Identifier) – this would be your only username for all of your social network sites
• Input all your Social Network account information plus whatever other tags you find important (location, website, phone number)
• Easily add/remove your friends
• The Social Network ID website verifies all your information
• One spot to update your information
• And of course, ditto what Brad wrote – More important is that any one of these sites shouldn’t own it; nobody/everybody should. It should just exist.

So there you go, it’s basic bullet points but it’s a start. There are a lot of other ideas on Social Network Portability but not utilizing the Handle System. Do some research, think about it and give me some comments.

If you haven’t tried Twitter, it will probably confuse you at first. Using 140 characters or less, you update on what you’re doing at that moment. You’ll immediately wonder why anyone would care, but it’s surprisingly addictive. People choose to follow you on Twitter, and they get your updates and many others.

So how is this a marketing opportunity? I saw a neat idea last night on a blog (can’t remember where, but it wasn’t my idea) that restaurants should Twitter about their daily specials. Fans of that restaurant could follow those “tweets” as their called.

Total cost to the restaurant = $0.00. Total time to update daily: 1-2 minutes.

Part of what you need for social media marketing is a mindset change, from “This is dumb, what’s wrong with 16-year-olds,” to “Lots of people are using this stuff, much of it is free, how can Iuse it?”

There’s one idea…

An article I just read in Business Week has revealed that while most sites like Facebook and MySpace aim to get a large number of members, there are smaller, more niche sites emerging.

Interestingly, some of these niche sites are focused on keeping the numbers small and placing restrictions on new member growth. One such site is called aSmallWorld (aSW), a site that only selects new, elite users from an already established member base.

According to the article, the founder, Erik Wachtmeister stated, “The site is not very valuable if it is polluted by people you don’t know.”, and then stated his goal for the site was “to create a private place where people could be much more forthcoming with information”.

Since I’m part of the “pollutant” middle class that cannot join the network, I’m a little skeptical of the site. For one – will it be successful in its attempt of social networking snobbery? How will it successfully choose its members and make it a worthwhile network?

There is something about joining a network with your friends that makes social networking personal and private, and a place where you can become comfortable disclosing information and exchanging ideas.

While the allure of being part of a select group will certainly influence the elite to join, I don’t expect it to be a place of disclosure and transparency, but rather a site dedicated to preserving and maintaining member’s reputation and status. Sounds like a virtual country club to me. I can imagine it is stuffy, pretentious, and boring.

No thanks aSW I think I will stick to my own world on Facebook.

Did anyone else see the article, “Ick, old married guys on Facebook”? In it, CNet’s 17-year-old intern bemoans the creepiness of 40-year-old guys trying to “friend” her. And, yeah, that’s creepy. I have no interest in friending young Sabena online anymore than I’d want to hang out with her at Abercrombie & Fitch.

But I am 40, happily married for 14 years, father of three kids, and on Facebook. Sure,I’m competing with some of my other 40+ friends for the lamest profile online, but it’s pretty impossible to do what I do for a living and not be on Facebook.

The power of any social network, of course, is directly proportional to the number of people you care about who are on it. As of right now, only 5 of my high school classmates (out of 437) are on Facebook, none of whom I’ve spoken to since graduation day June 1985. (Most Facebook addicts were born in 1985.) Only 28 of the roughly 1,500 people I graduated college with are on Facebook. (I vaguely remember four of their names.) Nobody in my family. Few people I work with.

One of my co-workers awhile back asked why I even had a profile. “You’re a grown-ass man,” she said—a rather eloquent and pithy summary of her feelings on the topic.

Don’t get me wrong. I admire Facebook. What they did opening their API was brilliant. I think social media and social networking are disruptive technologies. I get that the 40-year-olds in the Valley are on Facebook like ants crawling over the fruit snacks my kids drop daily. I know I could search my address book and find others to friend—but that’s sort of a pain in the ass.

I joined LinkedIn 3.5 years ago and felt like I do now about Facebook. “Ok, I’m here… Where is everyone I know?” For more than 2 years there was no answer to that question. Suddenly, everyone’s on LinkedIn, and it’s become a pretty solid tool.

For now, I’ll just hang out over here, not friending, not poking, not trolling for college-aged kids. Who has the time for that nonsense? When the rest of you old folks get here, let me know. It’s sort of boring without you.

Today I happened to run across The Herald Sun, an Australian newspaper with the headline “Facebook net cost to employers $5b”.

The article raised “productivity” concerns of social media, in particular the concern of social network Facebook entering the workplace. The article quoted, “Facebook, the latest global social networking craze, could cost employers up to 5 billion a year in productivity”.

Upon first glance, I thought “Wow, that’s a lot of money”, but on second glance at the article, I can’t help but to think that it is a shortsighted projection.

It’s shortsighted because it assumes a theory that businesses have adopted : social and personal life exist outside of work. If any of these elements enter the workplace, productivity is jeopardized.

It is because of this attitude that companies monitor email usage, restrict users from particular sites, and we will begin to see policies against blogging and usage of social networking sites. This mentality frustrates me because it shows just how far we have to go to show the importance and need of social media. Other than another attempt to “reach their customers”, many companies still don’t get how it can be used.

And while I’m aware of the truly unproductive uses of social media within the workplace, I believe productivity could be accomplished if companies fully embraced and encouraged its employees to use social media as a tool to better perform their job.

How about encouraging users to use LinkedIn as a way to network with other professionals and generate new business leads? Or what about making tools available for employees to collaborate and formulate ideas on a blog or wiki?

If companies don’t realize these applications, social media could have the possibility of being banned from the workplace. In my opinion, this could be more costly.

The uses of social media are limited only by creativity. We’re located in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area of North Carolina, and a nearby Sheriff’s office has turned to blogging to catch deadbeat dads. According to the website, at least one of the “gentlemen” on the site as of today shows as captured.

The deputy in charge, Sargent T.C. Yarborough says his case load has reached 1,000, but the blog has helped him catch 50 criminals.

The site, called “Find Deadbeats” is getting good local attention. This picture allegedly pictures the worst deadbeat on the site right now. The Sheriff’s office says that James P. Tyner owes his child(ren) $19,318.00. He seems broken up about it in this picture.

Some good lessons for all of us:

• Think creatively about social media applications;
• It’s significantly easier for the first person to do something creative to get news coverage than it is for the second person, so don’t wait;
• Social media unleashes the power of crowds, and people will help you do your work if you make it interesting to them.

With $1.1 billion owed in delinquent child support right now, a lot of people think finding deadbeats like these is interesting.

When you run a social media agency, and are in the midst of writing a book on using social media for marketing, you end up reading more than you ever thought possible. More and more I’ve begun to stumble across posts and articles that are using the term “social marketing” as shorthand for social media marketing.

Given social media’s rapid evolution, there’s no doubt that it will create a new lexicon (blogs, podcasts, RSS, etc.), and people are coining terms, most famously Web 2.0.

All that is fine, except “social marketing” as a term is already well-established. In a nutshell, it means applying best practices in marketing to impact behavior change. Anti-smoking TV spots are among the most famous examples, including this one, which won as the best social marketing spot in the U.S. about two years ago. (Full disclosure: The spot was done by Brogan & Partners which is actively incubating Ignite.)

We’re all for social media marketing. It’s all we do. Just don’t call it social marketing. That term’s taken.

For whatever reason this morning I searched to see if there was room to contribute on Wikipedia. I’m not really sure what prompted me to do it, but I guess I felt compelled to give back, to become a better “social media neighbor” I guess you’d say.

Shortly after I coincidentally ran across an article in Wired , which revealed that a Caltech graduate student, Virgil Griffith has built a search tool entitled Wikipedia Scanner. Evidently this tool makes it possible to automatically trace Wikipedia entries back to the IP addresses of those who have made changes.

So in other words, an anonymous post, is well, not so anonymous anymore. Every edit can be traced back to a digital footprint, matching a database of 34.4 million edits with the 2.6 million organizations and individuals that performed them.

Call me a social media idealist, but the article made me face the reality – that while most of the edits on Wikipedia are harmless, Wikipedia Scanner offers a way to track companies who have manipulated the site by adding or deleting content to better fit their interest.

This tool is proof that ethics within social media do exist. Users, like me, want information they can trust. It’s only a matter of time until more tools are created to better detect and further prevent manipulation.

I have a feeling this is only the beginning. In the future, corporations attempting to game social media will have to work a LOT harder…