One of the more raging debates and discourse you’ll hear in marketing and business circles is the value, the return on investment of social media. While there is no doubt that social media is a trend, but rather a distinct movement towards active consumerism, measuring the value to a company’s bottom line is much more complex. This week, the good folks over at MDG Advertising created a compelling and easy data visualization focused on the ROI of social media.

Infographic by MDG Advertising

It’s a New Year, and we want help you know how to take the basic steps in social media. So this whole month, we’re going to post a how-to social media series: Get Started.  Most of us procrastinate until we get past the first step and learn how easy it can be.

So we’re starting here, in WordPress, one of the most popular blogging and web platforms around.  If you’re considering a new website for your business or your blog, it’s the platform we recommend.  But once you’ve got the site, how do you create a new post?  Here are 8 easy step-by-step instructions on how to post on your WordPress blog/page:

1. Go to http://www.YOURWEBSITE.com/wp-admin/edit.php

2. Enter the username and password

3. When you get to the homepage, look on the left side, click on Posts, Click on Add New

a. Now you’ll see the page where you’re going to enter your content

                i. Enter your headline (think keywords here and keep it as short as possible)

ii. Enter the body of your copy (It’s a good idea to write it in Word and spell check it)

b.  If you want to add any visual or attachment:

i. Click on the icon at the top of the place where you put in the body of content, you’ll see “Upload/Insert” and a few icons

First icon is for a photo

Second icon is for a video

Third icon is for music

Fourth icon is for “media” which could be a PDF or other file

(Okay, you’ve got the content in – great!)

4. Right hand side of the page, enter in the Post Tags

a. These are your keywords, so think search engine kind of phrases here

5. Under Tags, you’ll see Categories

a. Select as many of the categories as this post applies to, e.g. events

(You’re nearly all done)

6. At the top right is the Publish section, y ou can “Preview” the post to see how it looks

7. You can publish “Now”

a. Or you can pick a previous date, time or future date, time

8. Ready? Click “Publish”

Ta-da! That’s the easy basics, it really is that simple. Now send us your first post. Or send us feedback on a few steps you might add in the mix.

We’re big fans of TED and thankful they share the videos from their incredible roster of speakers.  This talk from Nicholas Christakis discusses the influence of  our vast social networks of friends, family, co-workers and more. He tracks how a wide variety of traits — from happiness to obesity — can spread from person to person, showing how your location in the network might impact your life in ways you don’t even know.  After watching the video, we were left with two questions: what’s the influence of our own network? are we even aware of its influence on us?

What do you think? What’s the influence of your network?

We originally created a list of a dozen upcoming social media conferences and events in Atlanta.  Since that posting more than a month ago, we updated, revised and added to the list ending up with 17 events.  Rather than continuing to update a dated post, enjoy this fresh post with the 13 upcoming social media conferences and events, from today to the end of the year, happening here in the ATL.

If you are coming to any of these conferences or headed to Atlanta for the first time, let’s be social and connect while you’re here.  And the * notation? Consider it a disclaimer because we’ll be presenting.

(Know about a conference we missed? Send us an email and let us know.)

When describing the thing you’ve built for the last five years, you’d be amazed at how tricky it can be.  When I started CloudSpark in 2005, I was determined to work with clients I believed in and to create work that was focused on building our clients’ brands and bottom lines. Nearly as important to me, I struck out to create a new kind of agency.

I started as a solo practioner – taking on clients and work, partnering with other talented solo practioners or freelancers when the work required it.  With hard work, clients I called partners, and a few well-placed risks that earned us accolades, I found more work than I could handle. I leaped over the hurdle and made a hire.  Now a couple of years later, we’re rockin’ it as a small team, and I’m focused on creating a better agency experience for my team of Sparks and for our clients.

But I kept running into the same barrier – how do I characterize my agency in an industry that loves to categorize (and rank) itself around size and affiliation?  I’m no longer a true solo practioner. We’re not a boutique PR agency, that label is typically used when an agency specializes in one industry. We’re not an independent agency which has a huge variance in team size, but really could be any agency that’s not part of the eight largest agencies in our industry.  And well, the term agency, just seemed too generic…like a bad sweater some relative sent you that’s a size too big. And scratchy. 

So what are we?

We’re a microagency.  We’re a small core team of experienced, deeply talented, and hard-working communications professionals.  We scale up by bringing in freelancers or experts as needed to serve our clients.  We’re not tethered to a single address, instead choosing to work virtually.  When we need to, we meet on a regular basis at a beautiful office in an upscale  glass and steel building in a nice part of town.

I’ve spent the past month testing out the label with my team, but also with people I meet. It seemed to intrigue them and just as importantly, it seemed ‘right’ to me. So today, I’m putting ink to paper, pixels to screen, and declaring it for the world to know: we’re a microagency.

Inspired by Mashable’s 100 Upcoming Social Media and Technology Conferences list, we cracked open our planners and decided where we could invest our time in learning this fall. We decided on a few national conferences, opted for a few marketing, technology, and PR meetings, but when we got to the topic of social media, we were nearly crushed with the options. While we’d like to go to BlogWorld and APPNation, we needed to consider just how much time we could spend out of the office and our carbon footprint (Jenny’s traveling to speak in Houston at IS Conference and in San Diego at LavaCon). To save on time, we considered only social media conferences and events in Atlanta. To our surprise, we found a dozen* (this post started as 12, but with your input, it’s now at 17) social media conferences and meetings in Atlanta happening before the calendar flips to the new year. What’d we find? Take a look:

 While we’re narrowing down our options, reviewing speakers, and the value we’d get for our time out of the office, tell us how you decide on what conferences to attend? If you are coming to any of these conferences or headed to Atlanta for the first time, let’s be social and connect while you’re here. (Know about a conference we missed? Send us an email and let us know.)

*Thanks to Scott Lockhart (@scott_regator) for sending us the info on Mashable’s Atlanta event on Sept. 30; to Lane Bailey for sending us info about REBarCamp on Oct. 1; to Brandy Nagel (@benang) for the info on TedxPeachtree; to Stephen Boyd for sharing more about the digital/social media track at the IABC conference.

 We knew this town was busy.

Earlier this week, we shared a small social experiment – we were able to discover key details and specific information by browsing the social media profiles of four people we recently met at a local networking event.  The results surprised us and got us thinking more about how casual people tend to be in very public places online.

Are you careful about what you say in public places? Do you ever really know who you’re talking to at a party? Do you mind if people eavesdrop your conversations at Starbucks? Do you let people read your laptop screen while you sit on the airplane? You’re probably socially attuned to all of these and careful about information that you’re revealing when you’re interacting this way in the real world, but you think differently about privacy in the online world. People tend to have this inflated presumption of privacy and they’re less careful about what they reveal. If fact, your privacy expectations and behaviors may be altered if you begin to think about a reality analog to the different types of social situations that you’re encountering through social media. You would probably be surprised how much people can learn about you because of the way you’re treating the online world differently than you act in the real one.

Let’s look at real-world analogies of the most common social networking sites and see how it might make you think differently about your privacy expectations. When you interact with people on Facebook, think of it as how you might act at a wedding reception. You either know everyone there or you have met a lot of them or, at the very least, you trust that they’re ok because the bride and groom invited them there. So you can let your guard down a little bit, share pictures, even drink a little too much and say stupid stuff. But you don’t really know everyone there, do you? You can’t be sure that everybody there was invited to the wedding. So you can’t completely trust everyone there, but on Facebook you pour your heart and personal information out on the table for everybody to sort through it.

If Facebook is a wedding reception, then Twitter is neighborhood bar on a Thursday night. You know a couple of people there, maybe even some good friends, but you have to assume everything you do and say in that bar might be heard by anybody. And you have no idea who those people are or if you can trust them. And who is the creepy guy that’s hanging around and listening to everything you have to say? You might reveal some personal things to your friends, but other people are listening.

If Twitter is a neighborhood bar, then social sites like Chatroulette or adults in MySpace are a shady nightclub downtown. You can’t really trust anything you hear or see there, but you might go there to let loose and have fun sometimes. Or maybe you just go there for bands that you like. You’re definitely going to see a different crowd at that nightclub then you might at the wedding reception last weekend, so you probably are going to put your guard up a little bit. You definitely can’t trust much of anything you see or hear there, and there might even be illegal things around. Plus, nightclubs never seem to stay open for very long.

If you don’t go to bars, then LinkedIn is much like your last professional networking meeting. You go to those types of events to meet like-minded people and to make contacts for business development, job searching or to just grow your network. You have casual and professional conversations with people and hand out business cards, but you don’t normally walk around handing out resumes. But that’s what you do on LinkedIn, right? Except on LinkedIn, the whole world can read all of those details, not just the self-selective group at your networking event. And again, these are people that are a step above strangers off the street, but you’re still not going to reveal tons of personal details to them until you get to know them, or when you run into them at a wedding.

If people thought about these real-world situations a bit when they are interacting socially in the online world, perhaps they would reveal a little bit less. Would you walk in a bar and tell everyone all of that?

If you’re on social media, guess what? You reveal more than you know.

The debate on privacy in the social space took another huge leap this past week. The Wall Street Journal’s ran an in-depth, investigative series titled, “What They Know.”  The eye-pooping, jaw-dropping insights in the series (here, here and it continues here) left little doubt that your digital footprint is easier to track and identify than you might realize. But The Wall Street Journal has a big staff, time to investigate, and an editorial directive to find the story.

What could a person like me find out about, say, some people they met at recent networking events?

From a recent handful of business cards I gathered at a networking event, I poked around on social networking sites to see just what people reveal about them to the rest of the world – without cookies, spyware, or other data-gathering tricks. This was a simple search to see just how much I could learn about four people.  What’s surprising is that I found a lot of details that I’m not certain these four folks know just how much they’ve put out there. Among the details, I learned:

• where they went to college
• where they went to high school
• how old they are
• where they live
• where they were born
• what nationality they are
• what religion they are
• everywhere they’ve ever worked
• how many kids they have (I even got to see photos and videos)
• what their spouses do for a living
• who they voted for in recent elections
• what their primary hobbies are
• what movies they had recently seen
• what bands/music they like
• what books they’ve read in recent months
• what restaurants they’ve been to in the last month
• and where they’re traveling to right now

Remember, this was just me, looking at public info they’ve posted on social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and others. 

So what are you opening revealing about yourself? Perhaps more than you know.

This fall, I’ll be speaking at LavaCon in San Diego on generations and the social experience.  The popular conference is focused heavily on the digital and social media experience. The way they phrase it, they’re focused ‘on how to develop, manage and publish digital content that enhances the customer experience, reduces production costs and promotes your online brand.’  Who’d the conference really for? Marketers, public relations pros, brand managers, project managers and anyone with a hankering to learn more about making digital and social media work well for their brand.

And here’s the better part: you can save $50 off of registration by using the discount code CLOUDSPARK. Register by July 9 and take advantage of early registration rates. (Psst, wanna know what we’re doing with our $50? Sneak a peek!)

If you decide to go, let us know, we’d love to meet up in beautiful San Diego.

“In the future everyone will have 15 minutes of privacy.”

For now, Facebook efforts to own the new social web are facing  a backlash from its blatant invasion of your privacy (and the privacy of your friends). The company has made it ever-challenging to keep control of personal data on the side of consumers using its services. With changing updates coming in rapid succession, defaults set at opt-in, it’s easy for consumers to not know, or be confused about, what they are agreeing to share and to disclose.  For Facebook, their trappling of privacy is another rung in their effots to control data, remember it wasn’t that long ago that Facebook asserted content rights over nearly all data: writing, photos, art, etc.
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