Apple’s iPad is falling victim to the hype machine, creating fanboys and detractors each day. The bottom line is, that like the iPad or not, we need this type of device to support societal changes that are already beginning to happen. This tablet device category, in which the iPad is one of many emerging devices, doesn’t aim to replace your laptop or desktop, not even your netbook. The iPad is gunning to make paper obsolete.

In thinking a lot about the potential of the iPad and other like tablet devices as well as what is happening in our world today, a specific use case for the iPad came to mind. Today I am sharing it with all of you in the hope that we can make it a reality.

One of the most antiquated pieces of paper right now is the resume. People talk about how computers and technology have become a critical component of of most jobs. If this is the case, then why are most of us walking around with paper resumes and no way to actually showcase the work we do?

Lets change this.

Now Is Finally Time
I believe that this is a problem that hasn’t been able to be solved before, because we didn’t have the technology to solve it. Companies like Visual CV have tried. The problem is that these service besides lacking important features, were meant to be consumed by someone in front of a computer. Computers aren’t around in most job interviews.

What If Every Job Seeker Could Present Like Steve Jobs?
The biggest issue with LinkedIn and Visual CV some of the most popular digital resume services, is that they have no presentation aspect. When Apple unveils a new product we are all in awe of the presentation and the fan fair of this new invention. What if we could all be Steve Jobs when we present our most important product: ourselves. The iPad gives us that ability.

This idea started after seeing what Wired has planned for the iPad.

Changing The Employment Game
Imagine if you walk into a your next job interview and instead of unzipping a folder and pulling out a paper resume, you took out an iPad and your resume looked something like this:

Imagine with me here that you walk into a job interview. First you introduce yourself. Next you take out an iPad and set it on the table between you and the person interviewing you. You turn it on and your resume appears, but this isn’t the same boring text resume that you have always used (though it is there if they want to see it) Instead they see a clean screen with different skills sets they had identified as being important to the job.

You touch an icon that is about communication skills and it opens video of you giving presentations, along with slide presentations that you have used in the past. This completely changes how people get to present themselves. Imagine that you are an accountant and could open a spreadsheet to show an example of an important problem you solved with just one touch.

If someone walked into meet with you and did this, wouldn’t you hire them? I would. Better yet this information actually tells us what the person can do, unlike an hour of idle chat and trite questions.

Whose Coming With Me
It is up to us, the early adopter community to help make this a reality. This couldn’t be done before. The iPhone is to small and laptops are too clunky. The time for this solution is now.

Do you want to help make this happen? Then e-mail me: kipp.bodnarATgmailDOTcom Do you want to use an app like this in the future to help land a job? Then please leave a comment below.

Clay Shirky: How Twitter can make history | Video on TED.com.

Great video. Must watch. I suggest showing to anyone who doesn’t understand how media is changing.

Social media marketing and social marketing are often confused for each other.  Social marketing as long been a synonym for cause marketing.  In thinking about how these two terms often get confused I realized: they are the SAME thing. We have fought to separate the two and make them out to be completely different. One that uses “technology” and another that “helps” people.

Today I argue that all good social media marketing is social (cause) marketing.  Cause marketing has always been about organizing a group of people in support of something: quitting smoking, fighting cancer, saving the environment, healthy eating etc. How is this different from the most popular social media marketing examples you’ve seen spewed by every “consultant” on Twitter?

Zappos
The idea for this post came from watching a video of Seth Godin speaking at TED. Here is the video, well worth taking 20 minutes to watch it:

Zappos has long been touted as an example of social media marketing for the way that it encouraged its employees to use Twitter to share information with each other and customers. The common questions that revolve around the Zappos example is: How did they do it? Why don’t other companies do it?

Other companies can’t do it. In fact Zappos could only do it because Tony as a leader has created a culture around the idea of surpassing customer expectations. Because his employees have bought into the idea of going above and beyond, Twitter was an easier sell.  This is why Tony can do it at Zappos, but other companies fail at even getting one person to use it for work.  Zappos using Twitter is not a social media marketing example it is an example of leadership and the willingness of employees to support a cause:  customers who love shoes.

Dell IdeaStorm
Dell’s IdeaStorm platform has long been considered the best example of using crowdsourcing to develop and market products. IdeaStorm isn’t marketing as much as it is a place to collect ideas that were flooding in by e-mail taking up valuable staff resources. IdeaStorm serves a cause.  It serves a group of people that want better technology: hardware and software. Dell’s simply helped them organize and in the process has an invaluable way to determine the demand for a new product in the market place.

Wine Library TV and Gary V
Gary has long been the poster child of social media marketing and personal branding. He has done a great job. He is interesting, polarizing and often over the top. Sure all of those traits help to get 80,000 people to watch a daily online video of wine reviews.  If you think it is Gary’s amazing personality that won everyone over, you are wrong.  Watch the first 100 episodes of Wine Library TV, they sucked. Gary’s secret just like all other social media success stories was his ability to build a community and unite them them through a cause.

The secret to his success is not his crazy reviews instead it is how he closes his show. “You with a little bit of me. We are changing the wine world.” That is a powerful and empowering quote. That is the sentiment that a leader uses to rally a community or as Seth would say a tribe.

Social Media and the Hedgehog
One of my favorite and also probably one of the best business books ever written is Good To Great by Jim Collins. In it Collins look at good companies and how they became great companies. He asserts that all of the great companies share similar traits. The one trait that always resonated the most with me was his idea of the Hedgehog concept. In short it is the one goal that you can be the best at that will lead to the success of your organization.

I think of the hedgehog concept as it relates to social media is critical. What is the one “thing” that you can do to effectively lead your community that will result successfully reaching your goal?

Social media marketing and casue marketing are the same, but regardless what you call it you have to have the right leader with the right goal.

Last night I had the honor to moderate a panel as part of Triangle Tweetup. The event welcomed nearly 300 Twitter users from the Raleigh-Durham area to Bronto Software in Durham for food, fun, and great networking. As part of the event we held a mini-panel to discuss how some local organizations were using Twitter. The entire panel discussion is on video below. I hope you will join us for our next Triangle Tweetup or host a similar event in your city!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Note: This post was written prior to Facebook’s formal announcement detailing which data sets will be accessible by third party developers.

The web is flooded with news everyday, most of it trivial, but every once in a while we get a day that is a true game changer. Today is that day for all marketers. Today Facebook will announce changes to its API allowing third-party developers to access user submitted information from Facebook for use in their applications. You are asking yourself right now, what do geeky API calls have to do with marketing? Everything.

Now that you have read my previous post about API marketing, I hope that you are beggining to see the implications of Facebook’s announcement. Facebook with more than 200 million users is the largest social network on the Internet. API data has gone primarily under the radar until now because most applications offering APIs had much smaller user-bases. Twitter is the application that made API’s popular.  It has more than 3,000 applications built on its API but it only has around 13 million users. Facebook in addition to having a huge amount of users also has a vast variety of data from text, images, videos, etc.

Opening The Walled Garden

Until this most recent announcement of API changes Facebook as been considered a walled garden in which you had to be a member logged into Facebook to share information and once logged out the information was not accessible. Companies have had access to most user submitted information.  This includes information on sites like Twitter, Digg, message boards, and niche social networks thanks to tools like Google Blog Search, Filter Box, Radian6 and other tools built to monitor user submitted data. However, Facebook and its mountain of data remained the kid by itself standing in the corner.

Why is Facebook doing this?

Understand that these changes to its API offers Facebook the greatest potential for monetizing of their platform. Their has long been discussion about the lack of effectiveness of advertising in social networks and Facebook knows this. Lets be clear, really brilliant people work at Facebook, they know what they are doing. They understand the true value they have is in the data not eyeballs. I have said this before but it is worth repeating.

The social web economy is about data and relationships relationships not about eyeballs and impressions.

That being said this API announcement is the first step for Facebook to monetize its data. For example, Twitter users that use desktop applications are currently allowed 100 API requests per hour. Sending a tweet, looking up a profile, doing a search, are each one API request. Facebook could potentially set a free level of API request activity and then charge developers for additional API requests. This is a simplified monetization strategy but could be the foundation for the approach they take.

Implications For Brand Marketers:

If you are a marketer, your job changed today.  Today Facebook gave you the keys to a luxury sedan of consumer insight and data. Most commentary surrounding Facebook’s API changes will be detailing what developers can do with the new API. Their will also be discussions about the validity of building a business on another company’s platform. This post though is for marketers, especially the non-geek marketers, the people that may not even know what an API is.

Marketers have spent years trying to determine what their customers want and what triggers actually lead a consumer to by a product. This has been done through market research, focus groups, surveys and a host of other methods used to collect customer data. Today the social web has flipped that process because now consumers are freely submitting their own information onto the web and the organizations that can effectively collect and analyze it and use it to build positive relationships with consumers will be successful.

Facebook has opened the spigot on the web’s most robust source of social consumer data. Here are some examples of how this data could be used by brand marketers:

• Incorporate Facebook data into existing social media monitoring systems for added insight
• Company’s like Ford that have dealers that sell their products could build applications that sort by location consumers talking about buying or needing a new car and what they are looking for. This information could be used to provide insight to the dealer on local customers as well as their opinions of dealer’s advertising and marketing.
• Create an extensional of current CRM sales tools that incorporates individuals Facebook updates and data into their CRM profile in real-time. This could be used to make more relevant sales calls, meetings and help build relationships.
• Aggregate and display how consumers are currently using your product to showcase uses to potential consumers from a trusted third-party.

Above are only some quick thoughts and more possibilities will be known once Facebook releases its updated API documentation later today. If you are a marketer you must realize that user generated data is key to future consumer insights and building brand advocates. Today Facebook has handed you something you have long been looking for…

As the social web grows up, their is a lot of discussions on making money, but not a lot of specifics discussed. Better yet, few examples of companies innovating to increase sales in new ways. E-Commerce is nothing new to the web, but has the web gets social it to has to change.

I stumbled across a great example of a using wisdom of the crowds and the spirit of competition to promote and sell products. Amazon, an e-commerce retailer who has long been know for innovation and its willingness to try new things has started something new with its MP3 download service and its use of Twitter.  If you take a quick look at the image that leads into this post, you will see that Amazon MP3 has started using its Twitter feed differently. Until recent the service’s Twitter feed was only a listing of its daily music sales. This week that changed when they announced #bandbattle.

For #bandbattle Amazon picks two bands and then has followers tweet @ replies for the band they like the most. The band with the most replies will have its records put on sale on Thursday by Amazon.   I love this approach to using competition to determine special sales and the big upside is that with Twitter’s ability to spread word-of-mouth makes it a great promotion platform for the bands. I am not sure if Amazon is taking the loss on the sales, but if it is, it should work to partner with bands for the sales so it can reduce losses as it is providing marketing support.

Check out which band is getting the most votes.

Can this approach work for all companies? Probably not, but is can certainly extend well beyond the music business.

What do you think?

Tweetie has long been mine and many others favorite Twitter iPhone application.  Today its developer released his long awaited desktop version of Tweetie for Mac OS X. So how does it stack up. It is good, really good. However, it is also different, it isn’t a take over your screen application like Tweetdeck, Nambu, and Seesmic, but that shouldn’t stop you from using it. Unlike the other apps, Tweetie has a straight forward strategy for making money. It is free to download, but you will be served in-line advertisements or you can pay $14.95 and register the app to remove all ads from being served.

I have included a full video review of Tweetie:

Click here to view the embedded video.

One feature I did forget in my video review is the ability to open searches in new windows. If you do a search in Tweetie and then click the windo button and click the open in a new window then your search will open in a new window, but you still can save search terms yet as in many popular desktop applications. Tweetie also has a great browser bookmarklet worth checking out.

The beauty of the self publishing platform that is the Internet is that most bloggers and contents creators start out at zero: 0 readers, 0 posts, and 0 everything. This is also the major reason that many blogs don’t get thousands of readers. Blogging, writing, and hell even life is about expectations. When you right blog posts that you think no one will read, they most likely will suck and you will be inclined to write less often then you really need to inorder to build an audience.

What If You Had 10,000 Readers?
If writing for no one makes you a crappy writer then shouldn’t writing for thousands make you better? Yes, it is all about competition and exceptions. First you need to make sure that you really do care about what you will be blogging, vlogging, tweeting, etc. about, because if you don’t care you will be worse then boring.

What if you:

• pretended that  10,000 people we going to read whatever it is you are writing about. Would that change what you were writing?
• asked yourself “is this really interesting, would I read it?”
• made it a competition i.e. have X number of readers in 30 days. X number of subscribers in 90 days. etc.
• asked yourself “is this really how I sound? Am I covering up the real me because I think people don’t want to hear it” Stop doing that NOW

You Don’t Have To Know It All
Ignore people that talk condescendingly about blog SEO, blogrolls, and all of the other things that you MUST know about blogging. Honestly those things are really nice to do and can help a lot, but trying to learn it all at once will be confusing and stop you from actually creating compelling content. You will figure it out, it really isn’t that hard. We all want it to be cool, so that we can be cool, but the truth it is good writing which is nothing new…

Winning in the emerging social economy is about taking action. It is not about having 10 great blog post ideas, instead it is about publishing one great post. The social web is kind of like Darwinism for hustle. Those who hustle and take action; win. Those who sit around and talk about their “great” ideas lose. Chris Brogan, isn’t the smartest person on the web, but many think so because he is disciplined enough to publish frequent content that is also thought provoking.

Being First Is Better Than Being Better
Individuals and companies need to get of the idea of “waiting for perfection” out of their thick skulls. The web is about revisions. Online, it is quick and cheap to edit or change something almost anything. Failing to realize this will only result in failure.

Take a look at Twitter. By traditional business standards it would have been a complete failure. Here is a company that doesn’t have a model to make money, a service which was down and unusable through much of its start up phase, and an inferior technology platform.  All of those things are true. Services like Pownce, Rejaw, and Identi.ca were all better services that were more stable.

So how did Twitter succeed? They were first. Now Twitter is the only word you hear on the TV and Pownce doens’t even exist. If you don’t think this applies to traditional businesses doing business online, then you are fooling yourself and your employees.

With Action Comes A Plan
If you have read this far then you must agree with me or must be a complete sadist. If social media is about action then every person or organization should then have an action plan right? What would that look like?

Keep it simple. I use a plan that works like this (though I use different numbers and have some added layers):

Each Day Do The Following:

• Publish 1 Blog Post or Video
• Leave 5 comments on relevant industry blogs
• Learn 1 new application
• Share 20 links that you think will help others
• Offer to help 1 person with a project
• Read one piece of in depth research or information that is longer than a blog post.

Sure it is a lot, but it works. This is only a mockup of a plan, I suggest you create one that works well for you.

Now tell me, how do you hustle?

In the toady’s 30 second attention span world, we spend much of our time asking each other what is next. In marketing it was the web, then search, then blogging, then social media, but what really is next? Last week David Armano, made a big announcement that he was going to join Jeff Dachis and Peter Kim at the Dachis Corporation to focus on social business design. After reading David’s post it spurred me to write a post I have been kicking around in my head about the “future” of marketing.

Companies have always needed a platform to communicate with their customers. In the past that platform has been many things: media, billboards, advertisements, blogs, fan pages as well as a a host of others that I am forgetting.  Social media has been a breakthrough for many organizations because it removed the gatekeepers from the marketing equation and allowed them to publish their information directly to their customers on their own schedule.

In a world without media gatekeepers where does marketing go next?

API’s Are The New Marketing Platform

If I was a CMO, I would take some of my marketing budget from traditional media buys and creative work and use it to hire a small group of extremely talented web developers that have experience using API’s to develop simple and easy to use web applications. API stands for application programming interface and it serves as a platform for web applications to interact and share information with other applications. A practical example of this are Twitter clients like Tweetdeck and Seesmic, though they reside on a desktop, they use the Twitter API to send and receive tweets, which means that you don’t have to go to your Twitter.com page to use your account.

The future of marketing is about companies developing useful applications for their customers that extend web services that the customers are already using. This replaces the current model which is to use web applications to communication with customers.  The problem with current social media marketing is the noise. A company is one of thousands, sometimes millions of users and it is easy to get lost. Developing applications via API’s provide a way for companies to break out of the crowd and at the same time create value for customers.

Brands will need to become conduits that facilitate consumer communications instead or interrupters that intermittently drop in advertisements.

Imagine if Pepsi had built the first great Twitter desktop application instead of  Tweetdeck or Twhirl and millions of people were using the company’s application to use Twitter. This transforms Pepsi’s role from a company that is trying to communicate amongst millions of Twitter users, to instead providing one of the handful of major applications used by millions.

I mention Pepsi, because they are a company that has began to create web applications using APIs. An example of this is the Pepsi Zeitgeist which used the Twitter API to aggregate relevant tweets at SXSW 2009.

Today’s economy is putting web startups in difficult positions, the demands have never been higher to produce great applications with less development staff.  This provides a golden opportunity for brands who have money to spend in the form of  marketing budgets. If brands use a portion of their marketing budget to hire API developers then they have the power to partner with developing web companies to help them improve how consumers use the service while in tandem changing consumers’ perception and awareness of the brand.

Marketing As A Service

Developing third party applications based on API’s is the extension of an idea that has long been kicked around often referred to as “Marketing As A Service”. Brands have been trying to execute on the idea of marketing as a service on the web, but normally it is with small stand alone applications that are developed as widgets or are a component of a campaign microsite. This isn’t a bad approach, but developing and extending existing web services through API’s offers much more opportunity. Plus these services already have a predefined and organically growing user-base.

The ROI of API’s

What is the ROI of this? The biggest appeal of using API’s as a marketing platform is that brands have a mountain of data at their disposal. Instead of knowing that a customer came to a sales page, brands can know what type of information customers are interested in, how they like to communicate with their friends, keywords that cause them to take action, and countless other data points that would render the best market research obsolete.  Data is just the beginning. The long-term brand awareness that is driven from positive user experience can build stronger brand advocates.

Flip It And Reverse It

Developing on the APIs of existing web services is only the beginning. We live in a world that now has expectations of open and available content. The natural extension of this will be for companies themselves to release their own API’s to allow their customers to create and develop applications. This goes against most current thoughts on inbound web marketing, but understand that empowering customers with information, empowers word-of-mouth marketing. This approach applies to all businesses not those that are web-based, but rather anyone who has a web-based tool or component for their organization.  Obviously this concept will have many hurdles for some organizations, especially from a legal standpoint.

Not A Replacement

Developing on API’s and using other marketing as a service approaches is not a replacement for social media marketing or even traditional marketing, instead it offers the ability to provide consumer value in a more meaningful and complementary way then other current forms of marketing.  It would be difficult to leverage API’s as a marketing platform if brands did not have other traditional marketing resources to help drive exposure and users to the applications that have been developed on the APIs.

Looking Back At The Future

The ideas discussed in this post aren’t new ones, they have been at the heart of successful marketing, the Web simply provides a cheaper and faster way to execute these ideas. In the way that software as a service (SAAS) businesses are changing the software industries business model and increasing profitability, marketing as a service on the web has the same opportunity to improve ROI and change the industry.

I challenge you to think about the roles APIs have for your customer-base. Would this approach work for you? Do you think this is the future? If not, what is?