The DLD 2012 conference in Munich was a great place to mingle and network with social media super stars and online entrepreneurs.  At the conference I had the opportunity to speak with Casey Fenton, CEO and Co-founder of CouchSurfing, who sat with me and discussed his company’s completely unique business model.

The idea of CouchSurfing was fueled by Casey’s own experiences while traveling the world.  Casey found  that by networking with people all over the world, he could rely on their hospitality and vice versa.

CouchSurfing is a community, and as such it focuses on spirit of trust and hospitality.  Members of the CouchSurfing network offer their homes to fellow travelers in order to help facilitate a truly genuine experience, from the perspective of a local.

Casey shares some of the crazy experiences he has had over the years using CouchSurfing.  From the Galapagos to Scandinavia, his stories are pretty amazing!

For the last few days I’ve been checking out Google+ and I must say I am quite impressed with the interface, real time updates, and of course the circles. When you go into the platform, you almost need to double-check that you’re on Google+ and not Facebook as the interface looks very similar. But has a lot of cool funky additions as well which I will go into more in detail below.

So here are my top 10 insights as far as Google+ so far:

1) Google+ came to take the place of Facebook and Twitter, no doubt about it. And it may just do so. This has happened before. But it won’t happen so quickly or easily. It will take a long time to capture the hearts and minds of 750 million users.

2) It’s completely ridiculous that Google Apps doesn’t currently work with Google+. Yes I know it’s coming. But to launch Google+ like this, in my mind, is not savvy at all. End of story, no debate (as my buddy @GaryVee would say). Think about it: Who uses Google apps? Google’s clients and power users. Yeah, let’s disable them from using Google+. That makes a lot of sense.

3) With Google’s search capabilities, Google+’s search is going to be outstanding. Facebook must start working on its search capabilities and quickly.

4) Google+ is rolling out its messaging functionality slowly, so not everyone has it yet. However even for those who have the feature, they will find that the messaging system lacks basic email features which Facebook already has (i.e. attachments).  I am certain that at some point Google will find a way to integrate it’s Google apps for businesses and Gmail for the rest of the users with outstanding mail capabilities built into the platform.

5) Users have always complained about the inability to separate their professional and personal identities on Facebook. Google+ enables users to share different information with different circles. So you can share a funny video with your friends, a professional article with your work colleagues and a photo of your newborn with your family. This is the reason that makes Google+ Circles a more user-friendly tool for the workplace as well, in comparison with Facebook.

6) Google could very easily enhance its Android offering with specific perks and features only to be provided on Android devices.

7) There are currently no commercial brands that I came across on Google+. No form of advertising either, though I am certain that it’s coming.

8 ) On Google+’s mobile version, there is the ability to check out Nearby streams. The fact that users can receive an organized stream based on geo-location is a killer feature.

9) Hangouts (pictured right) is also a stellar feature. Google+ makes it easy for users to watch Youtube videos together with their friends and we can think of a million and one ways that Google will develop this feature even further.

10) With so many top entrepreneurs snooping around Google+, it’s hard to overlook its potential.

Here’s just a short list:

• Larry Page, +Sergey Brin – Google
• Mark Zuckerberg – Facebook
• Tom Anderson – MySpace
• Pavel Durov – VKontakte
• Evan Williams – Twitter
• Reid Hoffman – LinkedIn
• Paul Buchheit – Friendfeed
• Chad Hurley – YouTube
• Michael Dell – Dell
• Mark Pincus – Zynga
• Caterina Fake – Flickr
• Adam D’Angelo – Quora
• Anne Wojcicki – 23andMe
• Drew Houston – DropBox

Kudos Google. You impressed us plus one.

Quick tip: If you’re on Google+, you probably noticed your ugly URL with lots of digits. This is Google’s way of avoiding letting spammers get a hold of your email details. But alas! You can already get your vanity URL using the gplus.to tool. I’ve already gotten my URL.

Many people are tired of Facebook and happy to embrace a new platform, although many believe that Google+ will not succeed because people don’t want to work hard and start adding their friends, relatives, colleagues to Circles.

It will be interesting to see how Facebook responds to all the buzz around Google+ (no pun intended). We hope that Facebook is up to the challenge and will give Google a strong fight:

Starting tomorrow, each Tuesday, a different Blonde 2.0 employee will publish a guest post and share his insights. Posts will feature new apps, add-ons, reviews, tips and tricks and much more. You’ll have the pleasure of hearing many different views on the most innovative social media tools from the social media experts themselves.

Awesome new app? We’ll let you know about it. Cool internet add-on? We’ve got you covered. New search engine you need to try? We’ll direct you to it. Besides providing exposure to the most up-and-coming media services, the Blonde 2.0 team will be providing a plethora of information about the best social media marketing strategies. Get ready for some seriously exciting social media talk. Enjoy!

At the beginning of the month I was asked to speak at a panel that discussed Social media, Social Networks and What’s Coming Up Next. In research for this discussion, I came up with a few insights on what I foresee coming up next in the world of social media. Here are my top 10 insights:

1) The physical and digital worlds will be more highly connected than ever before – already today we are able to run in the park and track our progress online while sharing it with our friends or track our weight loss, or even our ovulation (well, some of us, that is) with iPhone apps that connect to our Facebook and twitter profiles and enable us to keep track of our progress as well as share the data with our friends. Robert Scoble had a brilliant presentation on this topic at the last TNW Conference in Amsterdam. You can see it here.

2) Facebook, Twitter and other major social networks will become increasingly what Fred Wilson coins “Social Dashboards”. In essence, Facebook and Twitter are social channels on which other companies can grow and develop their own technologies and businesses. Both Facebook and Twitter have created economies far larger than many nations. Take for example, companies like Stocktwits, Tweetdeck and Zynga, (amongst others) that have gained huge profits “piggybacking” on these two platforms.

3) Until now, brands have been very concerned with bringing as many people as possible to their pages. Consumer brands can now finally reap the fruits and build social commerce stores where Facebook users (all 700 Million of them) can purchase products on their favorite social network without needing to go to any destination site. Facebook will become one of the major channels of future online shopping.

4) Companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon are currently collecting information about each any every one of us: Our likes and dislikes, our interests and disdains. Soon in an age of Web 3.0, an age of Semantic Web, we will no longer need to search for information on the Web as information will find us based on all this data which companies are collecting. The right information will be served to the right people at the right time, saving us all a lot of time, effort and energy.

5) Mobile technology will become more dominant and NFC technology will be developed further enabling it to offer us special promotions, coupons and tips based on our geographical location and the interest graph we discussed in insight #3.

6) Human Relationships will no longer be as physically dependent and we will befriend and hang out with people from all over the world and all walks of life, all ethnicities and all beliefs, creating a worldwide melting pot.

7) We will no longer be passive media consumers. Media will interact with us in dynamic ways on all platforms. Just like gamers playing WOW today, we will all become a part of a virtual world unknown to us yet where we will all be avatars in the game of life.

8 ) As the Web is overloaded with more information, the content that we are exposed to will become more and more customized to our needs as companies will large sums of money to companies like Facebook and Google, making sure that the information we are exposed to is highly targeted to our interests. Rather than experiencing information overload, we will actually experience the opposite effect.

9) Companies will understand better how to measure the “ROI of social media” and realize that social media is not about the number of people brands have in their communities but rather the amount of engagement that they see on their page and the overall online sentiment they faced this month as opposed to the last. See Gary Vaynerchuk’s response to how companies should measure the ROI of social media in the video link above.

10) Services will become increasingly crowdsourced. Whether it be the way that we get from point A to point B (Waze), the way that we find answers to our questions (Quora), the manner in which we test our Websites (uTest), the way that we get things done (Fiverr) or the way that we share information (Wikipedia).

All of these insights are of course complete speculations based on my years of experience in the world of social media and following of trends occurring all over the digital space. Do you agree with these speculations? Is anything missing? What do you think is coming up next in social media?

This post was originally posted on socialmedia.biz on October 14th.

There is little doubt that brands today have realized the critical value of social media in developing powerful brand awareness. So now the burning question is how do we effectively engage the people we wish to connect with in a way that creates real, tangible and effective results for the brand.

uTest specializes in software testing services through its community of 30,000+ professional testers from 165 countries around the globe. Companies – from garage startups to Fortune 500 software giants – have used uTest’s services to test their web, mobile and desktop applications.

In the last few months, Blonde 2.0 (part of the Socialmedia.biz network) has worked with uTest to create a social presence for the company, nurturing current clients as well as reaching out to potential new clients,while developing a central hub for their community of testers.

We began by working on bringing testers closer together through social media channels. By doing this, testers could connect with one another from around the globe; chat; share notes and join in the uTest community experience. In addition, it created the perfect opportunity for uTest to recruit new and raw talent, enhance brand awareness and create a virtual meeting point for other companies to learn about uTest’s services.

uTest had already developed a solid online presence with a powerful website; a nice Twitter profile; blogs with pertinent posts relating to software testing and mobile app testing as well as forums to which community members could subscribe. uTest had already built the foundation for a Facebook page and called on the Blonde 2.0 team to find creative ways to increase its brand awareness while encouraging interactivity with the audience.

Everyone went in with expectations of gradual growth as is common with most brands that initially hit the Facebook sphere. Growth on a Facebook page is usually gradual and requires patience to achieve significant results. The build-up of fans can be a challenge. The fruits of our creative brainstorming and collaboration brought to life our “Bug of the Month” competition idea.

We’ve all encountered bugs and error messages while using software apps or visiting a website. To celebrate the joys and pains of this experience we asked members to share the funniest, craziest or scariest bugs they could find during our “Bug of the Month” contest. Members were asked to capture these technological freaks of nature with a screenshot or video and then to share it on the uTest Facebook page along with a caption of which site/app they were using and what they were trying to do when the bug “bit” them.

And then the clincher … members were asked to tell friends, family and colleagues to help out, as the screenshot with the most likes would win the grand prize of a stylish iPod Touch.

The results of our efforts were overwhelming. Members kicked their campaigns into high gear and “likes” for the bugs were spreading like wildfire. The campaigning was fierce and far-reaching and often it felt like our bug hunters were running for office, pleading to all for votes.

Let’s have a look at some of the numbers: At the start of the competition, the page had approximately 1,140 members. After 20 days and 36 posted bugs later, more than 4,800 likes and new members joined the uTest page – thanks to the creative and exciting dynamic of the competition. The contest was intense and after a very tight finish, the winner of the competition garnered 1,844 likes and went home with the iPod Touch. So overwhelming was the response, that the uTest team decided to add a second prize (iPod Nano) for the second most “likes” (with a total of 1,413) as well as a Judge’s Choice Award (the honorable title, coupled with a iPod Shuffle) that went to the most creative and unusual bug. The competition was not only a success for those who won but also a win for the entire uTest community. Members shared on the page how much they enjoyed the competition. Michael John A Gonzaga posted on the page: “We’re happy because the fun and excitement is always there, win or lose. Thank you uTest.”

As brands turn to social media for better ways to engage with their audience, there is no question that uTest is leading the way in building a loyal and active fan base. Who knew BUGS could have created this much excitement on the Web?

The uTest contest was a success because it was simple to explain, easy to participate in and strongly tied to the brand’s messaging. A social media “lesson learned” from this campaign is the importance of knowing where your audience lives. The uTest audience – testers, potential testers, developers and web and mobile app junkies – really connected with the campaign because it spoke to them and the world they revel in. In turn uTest was able to increase its brand awareness in a way that was both engaging and meaningful as the contest got its participants to do what they love to do.

The uTest competition clearly shows that with a strategic approach to social media engagement, a brand can achieve phenomenal results in a short period of time – it’s just got to bug you enough to get there.

This post was originally published on The Next Web on September 8th.

As a social media agency, it’s important for us to always be up to date on what people are saying on the Web regarding the brands we represent. I was introduced to UberVU at SeedCamp Paris last year, by their founder Vladimir Oane. UberVU collects all the conversations happening around your brand from blogging platforms, microblogging, social news sites, forums and social networks, and makes music by stringing it all together in a highly intuitive interface. Some of the sites that UberVU covers:

UberVU includes simple graphic indicators in their insights to give you an overall view of the kind of buzz or “the sentiment” your brand is generating in the social sphere. Basically you now have the tools to determine at a glance whether people love you; find you about as pleasant as a bad rash; or somewhere in-between. The question remains whether UberVU can pick up on the subtleties of syntax – meaning, do they understand sarcasm, metaphors, short hand and the like. Especially in the communist world of 140 characters for all twitterers regardless of class or station, the ability, or lack thereof, to pick up on such things can make a big difference in the size of the discrepancy between assumed public brand sentiment and reality. This is why UberVU wants to get smarter and is now asking users to help train its sentiment meter. If you ever find a mention in your stream which was incorrectly assessed by their sentiment measurement feature, you can now “teach” it otherwise.

UberVU’s services are divided into a few categories:

Data Collection

The way UberVU works is very easy. You just pick your search term and voila, you will receive all this information either by going to the site or signing up for email alerts. You can decide how often you’ll receive alerts regarding new mentions about your search term/s.

And now look out James Bond, I believe we have ourselves a corporate espionage feature. UberVU allows you to keep track of  the sentiment around your competitors and see exactly how it compares to your own; where are they stronger; where are their weak points – Perhaps the 3.0 version will feature an ejector seat where you can launch the competition out of their desk chair and into the roof of their startup garage, if you get the urge.

Analytics

You will receive all the reports and charts that you ever dreamed of. The uberVU charts are interactive – you can drill down to specific days or zoom out as much as you want. You can filter information by platform (i.e. twitter, Facebook), language, location and even sentiment.

Interaction

You can reply to people’s comments right from UberVU. UberVU also offers translations for mentions because not all mentions will be in your native language. All mentions can be translated into your language of choice, or even filtered to arrive directly in your own language, allowing you to respond to tweets, posts and comments immediately without having to cut and paste to a third party translator. The significance? You can now have conversations with foreigners. Not correspondence, conversations.

Exporting Data

UberVU also includes seamless report making features for charts, PDF’s and the like. Reports like this can really come in handy when you want to show others in your company some of these beautiful analytics.

UberVu recently unveiled three new features; Geolocation, Share Of Voice (SOV) and the Daily Sentiment Breakdown:

Geolocation allows you to see exactly where in the world people are talking about your brand and provides you with a very cool visual heat map:

SOV shows you specifically on which platforms your brand is being talked about the most (i.e Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, etc).

Daily Sentiment Breakdown is really an add-on of UberVU’s core sentiment feature, only now the results can be broken down across a 24 hour period. What this allows for is the tracking of specific daily initiatives so that users can make incremental adjustments to the tone and direction of campaign strategy – slowly turning that frown upside-down.

In a world that’s trying to assess social media’s ROI, there is no specific platform yet which provides a complete, comprehensive measurement tool. However, I have to say that UberVU is one of the best tools out there right now. For anyone managing a social media campaign, both third party and in-house, there are a couple of social media conversation monitoring services – the most expensive of them being Radian6 and the cheapest of them being Google Alerts, which is free. There’s also an Israeli solution called Tracx. However, for the relatively small price UberVU costs, it is able to provide as comprehensive and insightful a solution as you’ll find out there at the moment.  Stay tuned for more cool features coming from them soon.

As social media continues to win respect and legitimacy in the hearts and minds of executives across the world and more companies than ever are looking to open up a Facebook page to take their brand “social” -a question that is repeatedly asked by brands is: What is the value of a fan? (or a “liker” in today’s terms).

This question is often asked by two very opposing camps. For those against social media, there is an inherent derogatory tone and a cynical smirk they like to use when they ask this question,  however when discussing old media outlets, they never raise this question.

Allow me to explain: When a prospective client wants an indication of the value of a commercial time slot on a given network, the network will generally provide him with viewership stats, meaning, on average, how many viewers of a prized demographic can the client expect to reach during their 30 seconds of air time. These statistics are gathered and measured against market demand, and translated into a monetary figure. Major Television events, like the U.S. Super Bowl, can reap more than 1 million dollars for a few seconds of airtime.

When you take that criteria and transfer it to Facebook, it’s quickly recognized that demographics and numbers are already a feature which the client gets automatically as soon as he begins his social media path . The demographics are super targeted as members have to opt-in to become “likers” and the numbers are plainly visible for all to see. Yet for some reason, because these “viewers” (to borrow a term from television) are not viewing the commercial (post) during an actual television program, their value is presumed by social media naysayers to be less significant. If anything, the interactive nature of Facebook fans should make them more valuable, not less so. For old advertising to assume that stats and demographics are not enough information to warrant a value estimate for social media, is a clear double standard and downright hypocrisy.

“That’s right!” champions of social media will chime in, “Facebook fans far outweigh the value of any television viewer”, and thus you see such value estimates floating around the blogosphere ranging from $3.60 to $136 for the average Facebook “fan”.

The first value is based on a calculation put forth by Vitrue which takes the number of fans and multiplies them by a presumed average of 2 Facebook posts per day. You then take the resulting number of impressions and divide it by an estimated CPM model, meaning Cost per Measure – or 1000 impressions. Vitrue performed their calculation based on a fan page of 1 Million members with a very conservative $5 CPM value to come up with $3.60/ fan. I decided to see how Blonde 2.0′s fans’ value would measure up. Taking our own fan base of 4,270 members X (2X30) = 256,200 impressions per month /1000 X $11 (the average CPM value according to ClickZ) = $23.24 X 12 months = $279 /4,270 = $0.065 representing Blonde 2.0’s average fan value per year based on this formula.

I can tell you, being intimately familiar with Blonde’s fan value, that this figure is not anywhere near the vicinity of being accurate. Our fans are our greatest ambassadors and much of our business is generated though their word of mouth. Now how do you measure WOM? Vitrue’s model falls short in accurately predicting fan value for many companies and this makes sense given that CPM models are generally used to price traditional media ads which represent only a monologue selling a specific product and are not customized to measuring the overall value of social media. Facebook “impressions” are a completely different kind of media where more often than not, the post should be as divorced as possible from trying to make a sale and are more about creating dialogue, brand awareness and positive social conversation which indirectly leads to higher sales.

Then there is the second value model based on a report compiled by Syncapse. They are the ones who came up with the $136.36 figure stated earlier. To get this figure, Syncapse canvassed 4,000 fans from 20 major brand pages on Facebook to find out why they were fans in the first place and how they would describe their purchasing behavior. They used the accumulated data to estimate the fore stated value. The problem with this study is that individuals are notorious for inaccurate self depictions. Compound that little snag with the fact that much of advertising and branding is subliminal in nature, leaving the brunt of its effects to go unnoticed by the viewer, and what you have in the end is a very tenuous figure at best.

So, if these figures do not represent the true value of a fan, what does? The problem with answering this question is that it assumes there is some sort of generic value that every “fan” has. The truth is, there are different types and qualities of fans. There are diehard fans who are dedicated to the brand and would do all they can to promote it and there are passive fans who basically just like to be updated on what your brand is up to – and everything else in between, making a generic figure next to impossible to conjure up at this point. Nontheless, it should be noted that all Facebook “likers” of your brand are more valuable than TV viewers or any other old media audience because they themselves opted to be your fans and part of your community whereas in other media channels they were “forced” to view your brand’s messaging because they fit the criteria of your target audience.

Another important point to emphasize is that the kind and quality of likers that your page attracts is, in large part, within your sphere of influence and control. Through expert social profile management, careful cultivation of budding fans, well timed campaigns and well placed media – likers can be converted from passive viewers to your most active cheerleaders in a few short months. The operative word here is “expert”. Many companies are hearing all this buzz about social media, and fall under the impression that the mere act of opening up a Facebook page will bring in adoring fans like Kevin Costner’s Field of Dreams. The truth is, it is far more complicated than that, and takes acquired finesse that only develops with time, experience and expertise.

The value of a Facebook fan is more than just a number. It is equal to the same value you would place on someone who has agreed to become a part of your brand’s daily on-going activity for the long term and even promote it to his friends and family on occasion. The value of a Facebook fan is the same value you would place on someone who actually cared enough to show you he likes you or your actions. The value of a Facebook fan cannot be measured using the same measurement system as old traditional media. It calls for a new form of measurement which takes into account a whole new set parameters including the “liker’s” level of engagement with the brand, duration of being a “liker” and more. The value of a fan in my mind, well, is priceless.

I have heard numerous stories of companies that checked up on potential job candidates and dismissed them based on information the companies found about the candidates on the Web. This age of openness where anything and everything can be shared has created a whole new more careful and cautious breed of social media users. Or has it?

A quick search on Google of people who have been fired for social media revealed this shocking and reasonably comprehensive list of people fired due to blogging, Facebooking or Tweeting.

The length of the list is shocking yes, but not scary. What is scary is what’s been happening lately in terms of social media affecting national security. The case of an ex-Israeli soldier is nothing compared to what happened on April 5th, 2010. WikiLeaks – the website that publishes anonymous submissions and leaks of sensitive governmental, corporate, organizational, or religious documents – leaked footage of a US Apache helicopter attacking civilians in Iraq in 2007. WikiLeaks again sparked controversy on July 25th, 2010, by releasing thousands of documents called the Afghan war diaries, which went into classified details about the state of the US war in Afghanistan.

The debate on how far freedom of expression should extend is an old one. Yet social media appears to be adding a whole new set of factors to be considered in this discussion. The ability to instantly disseminate information in a viral fashion has created a very real dilemma for institutions and countries that require a degree of discretion to survive. The problem stems from the fact that it is not possible to police and control the entire internet nation. Furthermore, in a nation without borders, who would be in charge of such policing?

As it is with all new and powerful tools, it will take time for the rules and regulations of social media to work themselves out. However it is obvious that democratic countries now face the issue of whether or not they will enact some sort of measures which will keep social media users from jeopardizing national security.

The fact that social media’s mandate will have to be defined by governing bodies in some manner over time is a certainty. Social media is one of the most powerful tools out there today, with great corporations, and even political trends, bowing to the power of its collective force – but in the great words of Spiderman’s uncle Ben: “With great power comes great responsibility. ” Most of these instances of social media run-a-muck can be avoided with users utilizing some sort of common sense. For example, if you’re serving in the military, it might not be a good idea to check-in on Foursquare. The same unwritten laws of human decency, courtesy and responsibility, still apply even after the birth of social media. In an age where “sharing is caring” – how much sharing is just too much sharing and how should institutions/countries control this endless sharing of information without becoming dictatorships?