When asked in an interview with Sarah Palin on FoxTV, her first public interview after the election, if there were false allegations made that needed to be addressed, and Sarah Palin blames the media, with a minor slap against bloggers that is making the rounds of the blogosphere.

…if the media had taken one step further and investigated a little bit, not just gone on some blogger - probably sitting there in their parent’s basement, wearing their pajamas, blogging some kind of gossip or lie regarding, for instance, the discussion of who is Trig’s real mom…and that was in mainstream media, the question that was asked, instead of just coming to me and setting the record straight. And when I tried to correct that - that yeah, I’m truly Trig’s mother - to take days for everything to have been corrected…

Rumors are flying around that she is attacking and judging bloggers. While she does make a sweeping generalization about bloggers, one that we bloggers deal with daily, her point is to actually take the media to task for using blogs as a source of fact and fiction. read more

In “Duke DesRochers: Future Social Media Renaissance Man,” I introduced my cousin, Duke DesRochers, highlighting his fun cooking show audition tape as a great example of how to market with social media in mind.

With the advent of blogs, YouTube, podcasts, and online social media tools that allow anyone to publish anything they want within the law, everyone could become their own entertainment production company, putting the masses in charge of not only being the entertainment, but providing it.

With inexpensive video equipment and software, and an innate sense of comedy, drama, and style, Duke DesRochers has an intuitive way of bringing the “common man” into his audition video that I hope will gain the attention of the judges. It’s time to go back to the real people, rather than the exaggerated people, to find the humility and fun in entertainment. We need to get people thinking, “Hey, that’s me! I can do that!”

Another part of Duke DesRochers I want to celebrate with you is how he took two fairly diverse passions, and molded them into one specialty to totally redefine himself for this video audition for the Food Network: handyman in the kitchen.

As part of this ongoing series on Exploring Social Media, I want to talk a little more about the important points that Duke’s Food Network audition efforts brought up: getting personal and brand identity. read more

Have you heard of Motrin? The pain reliever? If you hadn’t before this weekend, you probably have heard plenty about it now, especially on Twitter this weekend.

The debacle is described best in the article Advertising Age, “How Twittering Critics Brought Down Motrin Mom Campaign,” which explains how the Johnson & Johnson product offended mothers and fathers with an online and print ad for Motrin which claimed that some moms carry their babies around with baby body carriers as a “fashion statement” and summed it up with “Supposedly it’s a real bonding experience, but what about me?”

The outrage rocked the social media world. Twitter tweets on Motrin went berserk as people were outraged at this slam against parenthood and parent/child bonding. Within two days of mass online social outrage, the ad campaign was pulled and the Motrin’s website featured an apology saying: read more

Ping.fm is fascinating. It is a one-size-fits-all social media service, a kind of one-stop shop of social media tools. While a time-saving service, it is really good for only one thing: Starting the conversation.

Joseph Thornley quoted Jacob George, Manager, Corporate Marketing and Communications at The City of Calgary, recently on Twitter saying:

Social media must be part of a larger strategy to get the most value from it. It should not stand isolated on its own.

Just as one tool doesn’t do everything, not every tool is the right tool for the job. Ping.fm is a great service for broadcasting your news across many channels, but it isn’t the place to get personal and social. If you just want to send out a message, it’s great. When it comes to building a relationship, you have to dive into the specific social media tool that best serves your needs and the needs of your audience. read more

In Exploring Social Media: Social Media Tools, I featured a list of what other social media sites and experts recommend as their social media tools. Let’s take a step backwards and explore the basics you need to have in place as part of your core social media tools for bloggers and businesses as part of this ongoing series on Exploring Social Media.

While the concept of social media and social media tools confuses many, the basic social tools are ones you probably already have and use. You might not think of these as social media tools, but they are crucial to today’s communication strategies.

You probably understand why you need these, but let’s review the reasons you should have these basics in place to start your blog, online persona, business, or media campaign. read more

Why do you participate in social media services and networks?

When people talk about Digg and co, very often they are discussing a traffic tactic. You can get a healthy spike of thousands of visitors with a front page link, which is cool, but …

Are bloggers killing social media? read more

A lot of early web adopters understood community right away. It’s the chance to reach hundreds, thousands, no - millions.

Unfortunately, most got it wrong. A web page isn’t like a television ad, reaching out to million of viewers at one time. A web page speaks to the one, a single representative of a community.

A community doesn’t start with millions. It starts with one. If you serve the one, the one will tell one, who will tell two, who will tell six, and so on and so on. If you don’t serve the one… and each one after… bye bye, community.

Social media is about the social as well as the community. This means that you have to service the individual’s needs for them to come together as a whole.

Today’s businesses have to do a total rethink. It no longer is about serving their market, it’s about serving the like-minded individuals as a collective. read more

In the early days of the telephone, you had one choice. It was big, black, and usually screwed to a wall. As the telephone grew smaller, it left the wall and sat on a desk, then moved from the desk to a bedside table with the popularity of the Princess telephone in 1959. The spinning dial was awkward to use, and the phone changed again with the introduction of buttons known Touch-Tone, the birth of today’s button pushing communications world.

Today, there are hundreds and hundreds of telephone choices, from corporate telephones with video and conferencing abilities to micro-mobile telephones that fit in your ear.

If Alexander Graham Bell walked into one of today’s Radio Shacks or telephone buying shops to see all the various choices in telephones, he’d be impressed but seriously overwhelmed. When you go online to explore your social media tool options today, you are overwhelmed, too. read more

Speaking of successful social web apps in the blogosphere, ReadWriteWeb runs a story about StumbleUpon starting to ban users. Apparently they’ve heard from “a handful of users” that they’ve been banned, without any word from StumbleUpon it seems. The comments adds to the mixed picture that’s being drawn up in the story. Fact is, there’s just not enough to go on to really know what’s happening here.

Do you know? Have you been banned from StumbleUpon, or do you know anyone who has?

Now that the US Presidential Election is officially over, with Barack Obama taking up the reins for the next 4 years (in case you missed that), the social web will be back to normal. There has been a huge focus on the election the past few months, and before that as well, which might leave a lot of blooming and booming services in a slump. After all, social websites don’t work if people don’t have anything to talk about.

Take Twitter, who really pushed the election with a special page and all. Will they see a slump now, post-election? Surely the massive growth of Twitter is partly because of the election, and the fact that people want to talk about it? After all, even the debates made an impact on the stats, much like the Apple events use to do. The difference is, a presidential election can potentially engage a lot more people. read more