Mark Zuckerberg introducing Facebook Connect: Shot at f8

Source: PR 2.0

Facebook Connect is connecting people across the social graph to fresh content and furthermore it’s channeling outside Web events into individual lifestreams. Essentially, Facebook is solidifying its position as not only your primary social network, it’s also a emerging as a central hub for your attention, updates, news, promotion, and enlightenment.

Now, Facebook is extending its network to the World Wide Web, allowing brands and personalities who have or will host Fan Pages to embed a widget version of the page directly into Web sites, other social networks, social networks, and blogs. This builds a bridge between the 200 million strong Facebook network and outside visitors to strategically concentrate on promotion and community building.

For example, here’s a sample widget of the Facebook Fan Page for my new book with Deirdre Breakenridge, “Putting the Public Back in Public Relations.”

Interactivity is key and by embedding the Facebook widget, site owners can augment, eliminate or reduce reliance on custom brand-building and attention grabbing site development while still amassing a significant following or fandom.  It also extends the updates and content live, providing site visitors with the latest activity from inside the network to wherever the widget is placed.  It’s a simple matter of adding a bit of automatically generated code to the site, not unlike how we embed YouTube videos or Flickr pictures today.

Visitors to outside branded pages can securely login with their Facebook credentials to interact with the widget to comment, become a fan, and view the latest pictures, videos, posts, etc. As fans participate, their activity is simultaneously shared within the Facebook community, further promoting the branded content within the personal “News Feed” for Facebook friends and contacts to potentially view and click through.

Here are a few examples of the Widget in action:

Lance Armstrong

BlackBerry

World Wildlife Fund

NPR

Kings of Leon

Lenny Kravitz

Roger Federer

Newsweek

ABC News

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Read more from Brian Solis:

Blog: PR 2.0
Book: Putting the Public Back in Public Relations
Social Map: The Conversation Prism

by Brian Solis, via PR 2.0

I recently visited the gorgeous San Francisco offices of Loic Le Meur and Seesmic to discuss his company’s roadmap, photography, how to build online communities, as well as my new book with Deirdre Breakenridge ,”Putting the Public Back in Public Relations.”

Loic suggested that we spend a few minutes discussing the book on camera to share with the Loic.tv community. It was an offer I couldn’t refuse – after all, Tim Ferriss had occupied the same chair moments before I arrived.

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words and pictures by Brian Solis

The Conversation Prism by Brian Solis and Jesse Thomas

The Conversation Prism debuted in August 2008 to provide a visual representation of the true expansiveness of the Social Web and the conversations that define it. In this short time span, over one million people have crossed its path.

When Jesse Thomas of JESS3 and I initially mapped “the conversation,” we recognized that the act of categorizing social networks within a visually rich graphic would be momentary at best, demanding endless iterations in order to accurately document evolving and shifting online conversations as well as the communities that promote them.

My goal was to observe, analyze, dissect, and present the dynamics of conversations, how and where they transpired.

We’re proud to introduce version 2.0 of The Conversation Prism. We’re also excited to release a version that traverses the online realm into the real world with the release of a full color 18” x 24” poster to prominently display in the workplace, classroom, home office, or at events. Please visit www.theconversationprism.com for details, embed codes, and additional insights.

Please read the full post at PR 2.0.

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by Brian Solis

Zappos boasts one of the most loyal and enthusiastic communities of customers on the Web. Prior to SXSW Interactive, Steve Rosenbaum of Magnify.net, Stephanie Agresta, and I brianstormed ways for ecstatic customers to capture and share the happiness that Tony Hsieh and the Zappos team have worked so hard to package in every box.

The idea debuted at SXSW. To kick things off, we invited several of our friends to help mark the occasion by ordering something special from Zappos. We shipped the boxes to Austin Texas where they allowed us to capture their BoxBreak on camera. Guy Kawasaki, Tara Hunt, Kevin Rose, Erica O’Grady, Frank Gruber, Erin Kotecki Vest @queenofspain, Chris Brogan, Cathy Brooks, Shira Lazar, and others shared their happiness with us and now we’re hoping you’ll do the same.

The video from the event is currently hosted on Zappos.tv

Introducing Zappos BoxBreaks…

BoxBreaks are an emerging phenomenon on the Web that features video of someone opening a box using a simple Web or Flip cam and sharing what’s inside the box with everyone on the Social Web.

In honor of the successful debut at SXSW, Magnify.net and Zappos partnered to host a BoxBreak contest for ALL Zappos customers. Just shoot a video of you opening your Zappos box and share it at Zappos.tv. The contest is already underway and ends on April 30, 2009. Results will post on May 1st.

Enter here.

Rules here.

Long live Zappos and the Zappos BoxBreak! Share your happiness with the world!

Pictures from the live BoxBreaks at SXSW in the TechSet Windws Mobile Blogger Lounge…

Chris Brogan

Guy Kawasaki

Tara Hunt

Erica O’Grady

Tony Hsieh

Additional pictures are on Flickr.

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by Brian Solis via PR 2.0

Recently, I reviewed Twibs, a directory that lists all brands and businesses currently using Twitter.

Electric Artists released a new app that is a real-time listing of the top brands, media, television, entertainment, and celebrities that the team is currently following on Twitter.

While this service offers appeal as a directory for consumers seeking their favorite brands and personalities on Twitter, it’s much more promising as a real-time monitor of how businesses, media properties, and celebrities are using Twitter – for better or for worse.

The directory includes notes next to each account, although I’d suggest that it’s far more effective to simply click through and view their update history on Twitter to get an idea of how they’re interacting with the public and also identify promising patterns. Also open up an additional window and run each account through TwitterFriends to get an overview of how they score according to their tweeting behavior.

For example, @comcastcares is listed as a recommended brand, so let’s take a look at the work of Frank Eliason and team on Twitter.

As you can see, @comcastcares is the definitive example of how to participate on Twitter. He’s active, engaging, helpful, and resilient. The stats on TwitterFriends echo this sentiment based on an analysis of the collective tweets and @’s.

Perhaps most notably, @comcast cares boasts high marks for the metrics that count for service-minded brands, strong @ replies, high Twitter Rank, an engaging conversation quotient (CQ), and a supportive community. The only opportunity for improvement is the bridging of the gap between incoming tweets and outgoing responses.

Using Tracking Twitter or Twibs as a looking glass into brand adoption of and practice on Twitter can only help you garner intelligence, ideas, and effective engagement strategies.

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by Brian Solis, sourced from PR 2.0

Loic Le Meur asked for it and now we are the beneficiaries of his request. Jon Wheatley and team spent roughly 12 hours creating Twitority, a new service that that facilitates the search and sorting of keywords in Twitter by authority (read: popularity).

Without getting into the minutiae of the debate between popularity versus authority, Twitority is a simple, yet helpful service that will help brand managers, community managers, and communications and customer service professionals tier research and response strategies and programs. It’s also helpful to identify and measure potential opportunities and new trends based on the weighted discussions surrounding relevant topics.

Over the weekend, Sean Percival and Ryan Sit also developed a search engine based on authority popularity, with a twist. Twithority provides side-by-side results ranked by authority and also time/authority.

Read more about it here and give it a test drive here.

For more on services available for Twitter, please read, “Twitter Tools for Communications and Community Professionals” on PR 2.0.

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by Brian Solis, portions sourced from PR 2.0

This week, RadWebTech released Scrapplet, a new solution aimed at aggregating social presences and brands into one central, and portable, domain.

Scrapplets are customizable online canvases that break down Social Media walls to help everyone create, consolidate, and share their Web, their way. This is especially important, now in the future, as the social Web encourages us to proactively steer and manage our personal and professional brands as well the content we produce, discover, and distribute.

Unlike everyday, do-it-yourself (DIY) Web site builders, Scrapplet is a customizable slate for centralizing social profiles, the relationships maintained across each network, as well as a showcase for ideas, thoughts, experiences, and expertise.

Here’s my Scrapplet.

It started as an application for Facebook and quickly evolved to provide seamless integration with MySpace, Twitter, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr and more. Now as a standalone Web service, Scrapplet makes it easy to drag and drop content and functionality from each network, tying distributed connections together, while creating a new kind of virtual website.

Scrapplet users can instantly add their friends, pictures, videos, music, widgets, and entire web sites to their Scrapplets to create a central HQ for sharing, updating, and communicating with friends, family and associates. Each microsite is also portable and can be placed within individual social media profiles, Web sites, blogs, and wikis, to showcase a complete, consistent experience.

At the very least, Scrapplets empower creativity and can scale with individual imagination. Each canvas offers tools and default objects to add and create news feeds, flash objects, mashups, animation, sliding panels, custom menus, special effects, and more. You can even embed Websites and third-party widgets directly on a page.

Each Scrapplet automatically generates site maps, navigation, security, search engine optimization, tracking, and also supports data portability, a privacy standard that enables users to control, import, and export personal information between trusted networks.

For those who dread the thought of creating yet another site login and profile, Scrapplet supports logins from Facebook, Google, Yahoo, AOL, OpenID, Blogger, Flickr, WordPress, LiveJournal, Verisign, MyOpenId, among others.

According to RadWebTech’s CEO Steve Repetti, “The response to the simple question ‘where can I be found on the web’ involves a long list of social networks, websites, blogs, feeds, tweets, life-streams, etc. Scrapplet does not replace this diversity – instead it provides a means to extend it and bring it all together in one virtual place where content and the social graph can be mixed, matched, and enhanced without limitation.”

Scrapplet is not just only for personal use; it’s also designed for business and application development. RadWebTech is a member of the OpenAjax Alliance and CEO Repetti sits on the board of director’s of the International Data Portability organization. These themes are embodied in the framework of Scrapplet and provide an extremely robust platform for business and developers as well as providing resources for the creation, hosting, and distribution of web applications, widgets, and mashups. And, to protect owners of copyrighted material, Scrapplets include embedded source information that can be used to track, monitor, and remove unauthorized copyrighted material if necessary.

Scrapplet is free and includes personal web address and a half dozen pages ready for customization. Additional pages are available for free through point acquisition. Points can be earned by referring additional users as well as getting great ratings for pages. Free pages include limited contextual ads. Scrapplet pages and premium content are also available for purchase as is Premium and Professional non-ad memberships for as little as $2.95 per month.

Version 1 may not be intended for the masses just yet, however, the vision and mission for Scrapplet is to ultimately help everyone more effectively manage and present their distributed brand and persona, regardless of technical prowess. For those who can’t wait, just view the tutorials and explore the options and menus – everything quickly comes into focus. With a little ingenuity and creativity, you’ll find the options almost limitless for creating and sharing a more engaging and centralized online presence.

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by Brian Solis

New services launch seemingly every day. Where do you need to be? How can you be everywhere at once? As with all social communities, we will go where our friends, peers, and professional contacts congregate and communicate with each other.  But until we get around to creating an account in each network, which to date has proved to be an elusive process, how do we beat others who may wish to use the same username or those cybersquatters who horde brand names as ransome?

In the era of the socialized Web, brand and reputation management is now integrated as systematic process in our daily routine. We ARE responsible for our personal brand as well as the corporate brand we represent. Securing that online brand and investing in and cultivating an impeccable and influential reputation is critical to establishing and maintaining a consistent, strategic, and complementary presence from network to network.

Lucky for us, there is a helpful dashboard now available for to streamline the process of obtaining and creating online identities.

UserNameCheck cross references every major social network for the availability of your desired username. The results are displayed in one master dashboard, providing you with the ability to determine which networks require your attention and also a direct link to secure the username.

For more on the subject of personal, professional and corporate branding and reputation management, please read “In the Social Web, We Are All Brand Managers” over at PR 2.0.

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