The thing I like best about Gmail turns out to also be my biggest source of frustration, e-mail threading.  Gmail will thread messages and responses together to give you a conversation.  This is great, the entire conversation is collected together both messages received and sent.  Only one flaw…the subject has to remain consistent.

If you are like me and most of the people you know are still stuck in the inefficient medium of e-mail for communication then you may notice that, for some reason, subjects begin to evolve over time.  Take this image of three different subjects for the same conversation from my inbox.

I auto label based on who I receive the messages from so the get one set of labels based on who I received it from and those labels will aggregate as a conversation grows.  But notice that these three messages are really the same conversation, but for some reason the subjects take on a life of their own.

It would be nice to have some way of merging conversations together within Gmail.  As far as I can tell, this just isn’t possible.  Google, add this to your list.

This is a list of ten things you didn’t know about Facebook posted by Guy Kawasaki a few days ago that I found interesting and I am just now getting back to them.

Here is his list:

1. You can syndicate your blog.
2. You can post images and set your status via your cell phone.
3. You can post “Polls,” or “Surveys” to different demographics.
4. You can track available demographics directly in Facebook.
5. You can track your friends’ statuses via RSS.
6. You can post Flash and HTML directly in your brand’s Facebook Page.
7. The largest demographic on Facebook is the 25 and older group.
8. Through a Facebook Page, you can track the traffic of a brand’s Profile.
9. You can tag anyone in a posted note, video, or photo.
10. Give others an easy-to-remember link to your Facebook Profile.

Guy does a great job of expounding on each of these points.

I have to say I am not certain that number 10 belongs in this list but I do see the benefit, but I wonder if you don’t already have that within Facebook itself.

1. Presence
2. Personality
3. Patience
4. People

Seems easy enough.  But so many marketers just don’t understand these four things.  If you can’t get these four things right, you stand to have a social media campaign failure on your hands.

Presence - Anthony LaFauce, the author of the Social Times post, made this profound statement “Presence is more than just being on social media, you need to have an actual presence in social media.”  This means you can’t view this as a banner or PPC campaign.  You have to have a real presence.  It takes time, care, and feeding to make a successful social media campaign.  You can’t pay your insertion fee and forget about it while it runs.  You need to be engaged.

Personality - This one is simple.  You have to believe in your companies product.  You are an evangelist for the company.  If your attitude is artificial, like one of those guys in an infomercial, no one will believe you.  You will sound like a shady used car salesman.

Patience - I would go so far as to use the term Perseverance.  Community building is not a project, but an extension of your company.  A community is not built overnight, it takes time and lots of care.   If you aren’t dedicated to building a community from the start, then don’t waste your time and money.  You need to be in it for the long haul.

People - Basically this point is just building on the rest.  Engagement of real people can only happen from a real person.  Putting up a message board and then never posting to it yourself is not going to build a community that you want.  You need to be involved, honestly and passionately.  You might want to read about Participation Inequality to help you understand the type of people that get involved in a community.

I encourage everyone to read the article on the Social Times site for more perspective.

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 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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

I am a man of many hats. By day I am a technologist, community marketing evangelist, interactive marketer. When I leave my day job I am a second year psychology student. How does this matter to the topic at hand? Well it turns out that we all have an innate need to belong to groups. We search out groups in which to belong. Being in a group is how we define ourselves. We need what is called an ingroup, “a social group towards which an individual feels loyalty and respect, usually due to membership in the group.” It turns out that a brand tends to become an ingroup for us.

Certainly everyone knows of the Microsoft and Apple ingroups. In general, most of us fall into one of these two ingroups whether we have done so consciously or not. Being a member of an ingroup leads us to develop what is called an ingroup bias. Ingroup bias simply means that we favor our own group over another group. If you know of the Microsoft and Apple ingroup’s you certainly have seen how passionate members of each group can get.

By seeking out and fostering these natural ingroups that form around your brand you can develop a stronger ingroup bias. This causes the people actually using your products to recommend your brand more often to those making purchasing decisions. The more often your brand is recommend the more likely a business is to purchase.

B2B companies may not sell directly to consumers, but consumers are the one using, and more importantly recommending, your products. Using social media to strengthen your brand affinity is a fantastic way for a B2B company to market their products.

First, we need levels of friendship.  Some people I am acquainted with others I am friends with.  Acquaintances want to follow me and sometimes I want to follow them.  But friends I want to keep in touch with much better than an acquaintance.  Give me a variety to choose from and allow me to tweak how much I want to follow the person.

Second, search.  Didn’t we figure this out in the 90’s?  If I search for George Jetson I don’t want to wade through a list of George Jone’s.  I want search to be relevant not filled with irrelevant people.

I guess I have these issues with nearly every social network.   Why does simple stuff like this seem so obvious, yet so ignored?