I am not a big holiday guy. Yes I believe each and every holiday is a wicked scheme designed by Hallmark to extort more money out of me. April first is an especially loathsome “holiday”.

First of all April Fools Day or All Fools Day is the quintessential waste of my time. All the tech news will be useless and you can’t trust any commentary you read. Everyone is trying to get one over on someone.

That isn’t the worst of it though. Since everyone is expecting everyone else to act like a fool on April first, people are starting to unleash their ridiculous schemes on March 31st instead. Because of course we are not intelligent enough to realize that tomorrow is April first and they are springing the pranks early.

What seems really sad is that the pranks have gotten to be so outlandish that they don’t really seem to fool us anymore. It turns out that they are so bad in fact that it reflects on how uncreative the person is who is attempting to convince you that their prank is real.

Maybe next year I will just begin posting wanted posters on flickr for all the uncreative unimaginative people that attempt to convince me that their ridiculous pranks are real.

I picked this up from a tweet by Robert Scoble. This is an interview conducted by Shel Israel on a social media campaign run by SeaWorld.

I have explained this to my customers hundreds of times. It’s nice to see a large company that gets it. More companies should be conducting these types of social media campaigns as an integrated part of their marketing plans.

Picking up where del.icio.us fell down is Diigo.  They have received a little buzz recently for their V3 beta release.  It is a very impressive application.  To call Diigo a social bookmarking site would be to limit it to a box that it has grown beyond.

This application gives you everything you would expect from a bookmarking application.  You have tags, toolbar, bookmarklets, widgets and a ton of other tools to make life easy.  You can share bookmarks and connect to friends and even communities.  And it all works fantastic even if this was all it did.

Diigo goes beyond all of that.  You can comment on links, thus enabling conversation.  This is sorely missing from del.icio.us and it is weakly implemented in Mag.nolia.  You can schedule a link post to your blog or simply post a link directly.

As if enabling a conversation on a link wasn’t enough you can actually highlight passages or add annotations right on a page.  All of which can be shared.

Though most will likely give a collective groan to a new bookmarking site, if you aren’t using Diigo you might as well be living in a web 1.0 world.

Diigo does have a couple items I would like to see worked out.  First of all they didn’t get the memo that we have reached the mobile tipping point.  I would love to see an iPhone version of this so I can use it on the go.  Where is the API?  How can you have a service in today’s market place without an API.  Finally, trackbacks.  Let me carry the conversation back if I can.  So many social sites don’t implement this and it seems vital to enabling a conversation.

I know all the A-listers have glazed eyes over friendfeed right now, but they are really missing out if they don’t try Diigo.

Marketing is changing.  If you have missed the boat on this you might want to catch up.  Traditional marketing is a sinking ship and all that cash is bailing out to more fertile pastures of the online world.  So what is the key to interactive marketing?  I think a lot of people would say its PPC and I think they would be wrong.

Don’t get me wrong.  PPC is the cheapest form of online advertising you can get.  Cost per acquisition is minuscule. This makes it an important interactive tool, but the one you might be missing out on is social media.

Social media is a big change in the way we think about marketing.  Social media is about finding, and more importantly building, clusters of highly qualified potential customers.  Once you have a customer cluster you can drive home your marketing message in a personal way.

I have two great examples of this recently using Twitter.  The first example illustrates a way to build a customer cluster, the second illustrates how to push a customer cluster to your product.

A few days ago, Jason Calacanis, CEO of Mahalo, announced on twitter that as soon as he reached 20,000 Twitter followers he would give away a free MacBook Air.  Watching his numbers grow is like watching a gas gauge in a SUV go down.   For the price of a MacBook Air he is going to have a customer cluster of 20,000 that he can now continually push to Mahalo.  Cost per acquisition is around 9 cents a person.

Today I read about (via a Scoble Tweet) a site named Wine Library TV.  This is a video site about, you guessed it, wine.  But the interesting thing they are doing with Twitter is offering Twitter exclusive deals.  Anyone following Santa GaryVee in Twitter will get the chance to receive free shipping, discount codes, and other deals on wine and wine related products.  Thus building his customer cluster and driving highly qualified traffic to his products.

John Tropea gave a talk on Knowledge Management as an ecosystem. If you are like the company I work for and others I have heard about, knowledge management is a big push recently. With all the collaborative tools coming out, it appears to be hitting it’s tipping point. Here are the slides from John Tropea’s talk to get you started:

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I really hate how spammy this sounds, but it’s a good use of Twitter to drive traffic to a product, in this case Mahalo.

Jason Calacanis, a master technology marketer, has announced that he will be giving away a MacBook Air to one of his twitter followers when he reaches 20,000 followers.

If you haven’t used Twitter before now is your chance to give it a try with a little incentive.  You might even want to check out Mahalo, a human powered search engine.  To follow Calacanis on Twitter just go here @JasonCalacanis

This is not an advertisement.  I just thought a clever idea deserves mention.  Besides who doesn’t want a MacBook Air?

Squarely in the dazed and confused column, AOL acquired Bebo today.  I find this acquisition to illustrate that a company can exhibit a psychological illness.  AOL is clearly, schizophrenic.

Everyone is trying to get their hands on a social news site like Digg.  AOL has one that is far superior to the Digg technology, Netscape…er…Propeller, and they are, without a doubt, going out of their way to kill it.  Here is a company that does not comprehend the social media landscape.  Frankly I would consider AOL a dying brand, maybe not dead today, but they are certainly fading.  Now they go and get themselves a social network.

Clearly this is a company in need of, well to be blunt, a clue.  I hope that Bebo can survive, but if AOL’s treatment of Netscape is any indication, Bebo will fade into irrelevancy within a year.

On the bright side, it’s nice to see the relevant social network space getting weeded out.

Research conducted by Duncan Watts and now CNET Networks would lead you to believe so.

Here’s the catch. Duncan Watts is an academic, a sociologist. Neither he nor I should ever come into contact with each other according to his theories. Yet I am now connected to him, albeit in an ancillary way, yet connected enough to have read his Fast Company article and his book Six Degree’s.

How is this possible? It turns out that Duncan Watts, in order to reach a greater audience, got published in an online magazine that is trusted and highly connected to the technology world. This in turn got him noticed by Guy Kawasaki. It turns out that Guy is also a trusted source of original content and he is highly connected to people via his blog. He is the very definition of an Influencer or to use Malcolm Gladwell’s terminology he is a connector.

Sure these connections are not strong ties as in a familial tie, but weak ties (the topic for another blog post). Enough of a connection exists that someone living in north eastern Wisconsin (virtually the middle of no where, serious it just down the road) is connected via a connector in California, to a Academic at a college in New York.

This very connection seems to imply that something may not be entirely correct about the interpretation of Duncan Watts’ work.

It’s interesting how a passing thought becomes a blog post. John Tropea microblogs about the 90-9-1 rule, which leads me to the idea of participation inequality, which in turn makes me remember Jason Calacanis blogging about creatives, contributors, and consumers. This finally leads to this post.

In a nutshell participation inequality, or the 1% rule, basically states that 1% of your community members will create the content, 9% are moderate producers, and a whopping 90% are lurkers. I don’t see a problem with this when building communities, but the interesting question is, “Do you know who the 1% are?”

I have a customer with a very active message board based community. We measure the normal variables: New subscribers and posts per month. The problem with this is, it doesn’t identify our 1%.

It’s important to identify who are the creatives (1%), contributors (9%), consumers (90%). Track these and find out is the community growing. If your total creatives are growing, that is a good sign. The top 10% are the people you need to get to know and they are who you spend your time and effort. It’s likely that these people are the ones with some social capital to expend and with a little care and feeding will do so for your brand.

Measuring the health of your community is important. Getting the right mix of creatives, contributors, and consumers is important. Getting the contributors (1%) to work on behalf of your brand is the ultimate goal.

Today we have access to a river of data bombarding us from all angles. I used to send coworkers links via AIM or e-mail if I thought it was something that was useful for their job, a project we were working on, or if it was something I knew was of particular personal interest to that individual. That is fine but it’s a time consuming interruption for me and for them.

I decided to use some of the tools I have hanging around to streamline this flow of good information. The bulk of the links I wanted to share come in primarily via RSS feeds. Since I use Google Reader for all my feeds, and it has the ability to share posts, I thought this would be sufficient.

But it turns out that this solution isn’t ideal. Although I can share posts through my shared feeds url, I can’t tailor them for the different individuals I want to share with. Everything is rolled into this one feed and it’s up to them to sift through it. If you make it difficult it loses it’s value.

Instead, I decided to use del.icio.us because it gives me the ability to tag each item. So I tag an item with my company name if it would be of interest to the company or to an individual if I think it will be of interest to a specific person. Now all that has to happen is each person subscribes to the feed for the tags with their name and the one for the company and they get a highly tailored stream of interesting articles. The added bonus to this method is that if they ever want to revisit a link later, they can just go back to del.icio.us with their tag and find the link.

This is a good solution but a better solution, which I have yet to find, would enable me to add my friends list (like FaceBook), it would be my feed reader (like Google Reader), it would let me tag (like del.icio.us), but would add the ability for us to comment in a threaded way. If I only had the time this would be a great product to build. Basically it is what I was hoping Spokeo would morph into and with the latest changes they have made, who knows they might get there.  Maybe Digg or Propeller are closer to this but nothing I have found is right on yet.