Step 1. Open account on Flickr if you do not have one.

Step 2. Upload photos from your event and group them in one set on Flickr.

Step 3. Sign up for free service with Animoto.

Step 4. Create free 30 seconds video using your photo set from Flickr.

Step 5. Export newly created video right from Animoto to YouTube!

Easy! Do not forget to tag it on YouTube!

Here is my first test video:

Bay Area Executives Meetup – it contains photos of some of the presenters from Bay Area Executives Meetup.

Good luck!

While the following examples are based on the experience with the social business applications from Xeesm, it demonstrates in an interesting way how businesses can leverage social media today, way beyond blogging and tweeting. The following use cases are grouped by 8 categories including Sales, Marketing, Partner Collaboration, Product Management, Logistics & Supply Chain,  HR and the executive bench.

(1) Sales Contact Management
Sales teams use Xeesm to keep all their clients in one place. Like the old address book where they had street address and phone number, the modern day sales people know the LinkedIn profiles, Twitter names, Facebook pages, Slideshare Accounts, YouTube channels, Bookmarks and more about their clients to truly socialize.

(2) Outbound Call Centers
Sales teams also use Xeesm as a replacement to the old cold calling processes. Instead of calling 100 people a day, being able to leave 20 voice mails and reach 3 people, the social sales outreach connect with people in the social web, connect and develops a more social and therefor more successful relationship.

One of the most interesting aspects of collaborative strategies and tools is the promise of co-creating solutions with customers, partners, citizens and anyone else that your business or government agency interacts with.  The promise, of course, can only be achieved when goals have been clearly defined and articulated to all involved.  Success is not guaranteed, hard work and careful planning is required.  For those who have their act together the benefits will be seen.

You might be asking yourself, what is John talking about when he says, “Ideation”.  Simply put, ideation is a strategy, leveraging appropriate tactics and tools, whereby the company/agency collaborates with its customers/citizens to decide what products, features, services, are needed and the relative priority of those needs.  Ideation can be accomplished on a small scale through customer advisory groups or on a large scale as the US Federal Government is doing with it’s Federal Agency dashboard (http://www.opengovtracker.com/).
 
While there is no one-size-fits-all solution the high-level approach will look something like:

2010 where have you gone!

One of the great highlights for me so far in 2010 has been the opportunity to collaborate with two great industry friends and SNCR colleagues - Tom Foremski and Vanessa DiMauro.

Tom is a well known blogger who left the Financial Times about six years ago to be a full time journalist blogger. For the past six years he has built a loyal following of 60k+ people who subscribe to his popular blog Silicon Valley Watcher to read his keen observations and straight shooting analysis on the important trends in business, technology and media driving Silicon Valley. (Tom is also credited with defining the term “Every Company is a Media Company”)

1. Set up your communities wherever your target audience is;
2. Outline and reinforce rules: privacy; spam control, content, etc..
3. Understand your community maturity phase and deploy the appropriate development strategies;
4. Running communities is a commitment – allocate enough time and resources to run them;
5. Set up clear business goals for each community/channel; measure how you are doing against them and adjust your strategies if needed;
6. Create content strategy for each community/channel and overall integrated content strategy;
7. Monitor the space – new channels, new tools emerge – make sure you evaluate them and incorporate if it makes sense;
8. Create community partnership strategies – complimentary communities,  engagement model working with them;
9. Do social networking analysis of your communities to make sure you are building a sustainable community space: right balance of question/answer people, etc…
10. Rewards, recognitions – find ways to encourage good community behavior: level and quality of contributions, frequency, etc…

Some of you may have heard of the Social CRM Accidental Community if you’ve been following Social CRM. Most of us met on Twitter early last year using the hashtag #SCRM – and while it’s a challenge having a real conversation on Twitter, we somehow figured each other out. Since then, we’ve actually developed strong relationships with each other, ultimately meeting in Herndon, VA for the first Social CRM Summit (#scrmsummit).

It came to a point where we felt a need to move on from Twitter due to it’s inherent social weaknesses. Social relationships can’t be maintained in 140 character, unthreaded, sound bites.  So, we tried Google Wave.

Google Wave

I had high hopes for Google Wave. Unfortunately, it was too slow, some said it was too threaded (threading 2.0), some said it wasn’t threaded enough, real time group conversations were impossible to follow and it had no email notifications (that one has changed).

In the first post of this series, we talked about listening for what people are saying about you, your brand, your market, your products and services, or market needs that your organization has an answer for. I intentionally didn’t dig into all the things you can do with that data – some are passive and some are active. The important part was listening. Turning that data into actionable insight is where the real magic can happen, but that’s a post for a different day.

A couple of weeks ago, well known social superwoman blogger Amber Naslund sent this surprised tweet out:

It is very interesting indeed. But I think I have a good idea of where that hiring company is going.

Today, I’m going to turn our attention to the second required role for your company: The Social Anthropologist.

* Which customers or collaborators can help your business grow?
* Decision makers, always in the market for quality information.
* As long as it’s relevant, clear and concise. Really concise.
* Don’t expect them to read wordy, derivative articles or blogs.
* Or hang around networking events and flaccid Facebook pages.
* They demand real value, in messages that’ll fit on iPhone screens.
* Offer them bite-sized solutions to business problems and challenges.
* Excellent concise content can transform leaders into your followers.
* They’ll read articles like this on Twitter, posted one line at a time.
* So your messages will help business succeed for years to come.
* Just keep the messages short and sweet. Tweet tweet.

This is an interesting question that I see cropping up of late, since the news about the arrival of the new kid on the block - Social CRM - is reaching new ears. Is it just old wine in a new bottle or is it something more disruptive? I have been asked this when I meet people & strike a conversation around Social CRM, mostly from the CRM folks, who have just heard about it. The technologists are fine with it, its just another channel to be integrated to CRM, like an email or a call center, and they are happy if you give them the specifics on the integration modules.

But then people who are not too deep in CRM technology or who are involved with CRM from a business perspective (the later I have been interacting more only in the past couple of years), are not too happy with yet another prefix to CRM - it brings to them memories of the previous attempts like eCRM & mCRM.

Not that I want to open up with a cheesy line from a film or anything, but as I’d been thinking about what I wanted to write about today, what keeps coming up over and over and over again, is: “If you build it, they will come.” The popular line taken from 1989 hit film, Field of Dreams…starring Kevin Costner, is something that often comes to mind when I am wondering about an idea, thinking about what to say, putting something out there…whatever.

I’m a big dreamer/thinker. I believe people can do anything they want to if they put true intention behind it. I’ve been that way my entire life. I’ve heard people say I’m crazy, or unrealistic, and I’ve always thought to myself, “They have no idea who they’re dealing with,” or “It must be so sad to be so closed-minded and un-ambitious.” The list could go on, but I’m sure you get the point. This could tie into one of my favorite quotes by Oscar Wilde: “Those who live within their means suffer from lack of imagination.”