We’re calling that rule Step Zero.

Step Zero: If businesses become operative within social media without regard to their community, they become irresponsible and oppressive.

"Laptop Megaphone" by jj_pappas423 on Flickr

We’re aware of these boundaries in the real world: an overzealous sales associate who stalks each new customer with nonstop pleas for service:  “May I help you?” “Would you like to try that on?” “What are you looking for today?” A customer is likely to walk out of the store every time. But in terms of the web, it takes a different form: countless fan page requests, despite denial time and time again.  And then there’s the megaphone effect, when businesses use social profiles as a megaphone to broadcast their message, without actually participating in the community.

All other subsequent “laws” hinge upon this idea. We often forget that real world rules and courtesies apply within the web. Bombarding social profiles with requests and suggestions is no way to earn business. Once this intangible, invisible line is crossed, marketing efforts become oppressive.

People are generous to extend some level of accepting interruptions. By connecting with businesses online, customers are granting permission for marketing purposes, but don’t take advantage of this generosity. If business exceeds this level, the community will regard it as being socially irresponsible and insulting.

Google Fiber promises Internet speed up to a one gigabit per second – that’s three hundred times faster than typical home broadband service. The real coup of winning a bid for Fiber, though, would be that Google plans to take this service to every home and business in the chosen communities, regardless of the neighborhood’s commercial potential. An investment of that magnitude could transform an entire city.

So where do you come in? If Memphis wants to be a real contender, then Google needs to hear from members of our community. Memphis Mayor A.C. Wharton wrote in his blog ways that we, as Memphians, can help the cause. The first step and one of the easiest (but most important) things you can do is to fill out Google’s web questionnaire for community members, stating your support for Memphis, Tennessee.

Filing the questionnaire is simple. If you don’t have a Google account, then just click here to sign up. If you do, then go ahead and Nominate Your Community. When you are finished, press “submit.”

And if you’re looking to get more involved, there are other ways to help. The city is gathering video testimonials, written letters of support, web content and links to Memphis supporters’ Web sites this week only. You can help by making a one to two minute video of you or your friends talking about why you believe Memphis is the best city for Google Fiber. It doesn’t have to be anything over the top or expensive — even a cell phones video stating the case would make a difference.

E-mail the video file once it’s done and it will be posted to the city’s YouTube channel for Google to review.

Let’s not let this opportunity pass us by, Memphis — we want Google Fiber and we can be the ones to help make it happen.

And sure, there are plenty of benefits to real-time search. It’s got lots of sparkle and shine to it – the idea that you can search literally everything that’s being said about a given topic on the web right at this instant. It’s a fascinating innovation, but it comes with huge risk factors.

"Annoying Noises Prohibitted (sic)" by BarelyFitz on Flickr

As businesses become aware that their Facebook page – which may only have a hundred or so fans – is being indexed by Google, the temptation will be great to deck out updates with SEO-friendly terms and inundate the stream to grab that coveted top spot in the search. With search results automatically updating in real time, one post a day isn’t going to cut it. If you update about tomato soup in the morning and someone searches for tomato soup in the afternoon, your update likely won’t appear – it will have been pushed down by all the other people who’ve raved about tomato soup since 9 a.m.

Ultimately, while businesses can benefit greatly from being involved in social media, these platforms were not created for businesses. They were created for individual users. Still, very often a business’s presence on Facebook is a good thing for those individual users – as fans, they get benefits like exclusive deals and discounts and they can keep up with events at their favorite local venues. But Google is dangling a pretty tasty looking carrot in front of businesses with real-time search; if they bite, the utilities of social sites for individuals may soon be overshadowed by superfluous, constant updates that are a huge turn-off for most every user.

It’s certainly not surprising that a business would go to great lengths to nab the No. 1 spot in a Google search. Before now, that might have involved expensive SEO consulting and tedious copy writing to try to get in good with the algorithm. Real-time search is like a secret passageway, letting them bypass the algorithm entirely simply by having a social media presence.

But for those of us hanging out on Facebook, and not on the Google results page? As the Grinch himself once said, all the noise, noise, noise, noise, noise! We’re going to see much more of it on Facebook and Twitter. We may soon find businesses posting anything and everything to up their search rankings. But is that ranking more important than genuine fans or followers who are interested in your message or your product/service? If it’s the Google ranking, eventually those fans may go by the wayside, either by removing your page entirely or hiding your updates from their feeds.

There’s a fine line to walk. It would be foolish to ignore the possibilities of real-time search. You shouldn’t completely throw SEO principles out the window. But this does inject one more artificial aspect into the conversation that may push people away if not handled correctly. If it weren’t for the people using these networks, they wouldn’t have any value. If businesses turn up the noise too much those users are going to retreat. The back channel will have truly gone mainstream, and the value for the individual will wane quickly.

As for Google’s motives with this, we can’t help but feel like we’ve run into another snake-oil salesman. Hey, Facebook and Twitter and MySpace! We’ll give your sites lots of search love by listing real-time web updates in our search results. Sound good?

On the surface, it does. But if this results in increased noise, it may eventually be a detriment to these social sites. The habits of traditional marketing are hard to kick, and it won’t take long before businesses start picking up their megaphones. Our word to businesses? Be careful. Be smart and be savvy — you don’t want to get left in the dust — but be careful.

As of Sept. 24, iPhone users can access comprehensive calendars to find arts events in the city, Google Map the destination, get tickets and post a review of the event all with the newly launched ArtsMemphis app. And if you can’t get out to see the real thing, you can watch ArtsMemphis TV for a helping of local culture from pretty much anywhere.

Lucky for us (and hopefully you), Lindsey Coates, ArtsMemphis manager of marketing and communications, will be the featured speaker at our upcoming breakfast. She’ll be able to fill us in on the development process for the app — on which ArtsMemphis worked with local developers ResoluteGames — and also how ArtsMemphis is using its new iPhone connections plus Twitter and other web 2.0 functions to reach arts lovers in and outside of Memphis in a totally new way. Plus, as a non-profit, ArtsMemphis faces its own unique challenges when it comes to web marketing and social media. Coates will address those challenges and how they’ve been working through them during ArtsMemphis’ 18-month process of establishing a social media presence.

As usual, we’ll be at the University of Memphis Holiday Inn at 7:30 a.m. Wednesday, Oct. 7, with breakfast and casual conversation before the presentation and core conversations afterward. Please RSVP at the Social Media Expedition Meetup page, and do so quickly; we do have a limited number of seats available.

Dave Barger and Roundtable Attendees

Dave was able to share his insight into Social Media, not as something that can be broken down into check boxes with “power tips,” but as a philosophy and a conscious decision made by a business organization to provide transparency where there were once barriers. He discussed the tendency by Social snake oil peddlers to oversimplify and invent formulas for something that should never be reduced to mindlessly executed tasks, but should be a sincere attempt to create relationships with your customer base.

He mentioned that businesses must consider the time investment that it takes to do Social Media well, and start small by finding out where their customers are and creating a presence there instead of trying to do everything at once.

It was a great turnout and plenty of excellent questions from the crowd after the presentation. You can look for the full audio and video to be posted on the Society of Entrepreneurs site in the near future.

Earlier this week, several administrative accounts at Twitter were hacked, revealing several internal documents along with revealing a good deal about Twitter’s corporate culture – things like which programs they use for creating work documents, plans for a reality show, and the fact that they use weak passwords – one of which was the word “password.”

While you can be sure that the social network’s popularity makes it a target for hackers who know how to execute sophisticated attacks, it seems that Twitter’s biggest vulnerability was a lax attitude towards their own security.

It should be noted that, as far as anyone knows, this doesn’t open any security vulnerabilities to the end user.

We all need to take this as a reminder that we should periodically change our own passwords, especially those for online banking accounts and for anything containing information we really care about – our Facebook accounts, for example, contain much information that helps define our identities to the outside world.

Our online passwords are frequently our best – and sometimes our only – defense against identity theft. It is crucially important that these passwords are secure. (Yes, that means using a password other than “password.”

National Public Radio’s All Things Considered did an interesting story in May called “The Search for the Perfect Password.” It contains a lot of useful advice for creating good passwords and some amusing anecdotes about bad passwords.

Some things to avoid when creating new passwords:

• Simple dictionary words, spelled as such
• Family information (birthdays, anniversaries, children’s names)
• Using the same password across services
• Using only letters or only numbers
• Leaving the password written on a Post-It note on the desk next to the computer.

Now, we understand that keeping track of a lot of passwords, especially when you’re throwing new ones into the mix all the time, can be daunting – especially if you’re avoiding the Post-It note method, but there are several useful tools to track your passwords. Firefox has a built-in password manager, while there is a piece of software for Mac computers called 1Password that does the same thing. The NPR story above earlier contains many helpful links to solutions such as those.

While things change and people grow up, there are always a few people who manage to hold on to this mindset as they step into their professional lives. The rules are irrelevant to them and the rest of us get left in the dust. Social Media has been riddled with spammers and even legit companies trying to get ahead by circumventing the rules of the platform.

"Don't cheat" by quinn.anya on Flickr

LunaWeb has fallen victim to one of these social delinquients as of late in the flurry of excitement surrounding Facebook’s new vanity URLs.

When the URLs were first released they were only available to individuals and Public Profiles with more than 1000 fans. While we weren’t huge fans at being left out of the loop (we don’t have 1000 fans but we’d love it if you were one) we bade our time until Facebook allowed the smaller pages to start claiming URLs.

This past Sunday night we logged in at the appointed time to claim our vanity URL at long last, only to discover it had been done several days before by an individual profile from a person suspiciously named LunaWeb Agence. Apparently a French company of the same name created a fake profile for the purpose of snagging the URL before anyone else did.

You can bet we’ll be taking this issue up with Facebook and we’ll keep you posted on what happens. Until then… play fair.

At first glance, it might seem that ReadWriteWeb jumped the gun and will take some credibility hits. However, the abstract nature of written specifications prevails and thus they are naturally discounted, even ignored, when there are hands-on opportunities to observe the (specified) behavior.

This makes the case for prototyping. To some, it may also substantiate a process involving hands-on interface and functional development before expending effort on detailed specifications (and given the situation, to question the utility of detailed specifications at all).

The argument for or against detailed specifications will never end.

Arguably, in verifying their source, ReadWriteWeb did what comes naturally (and even made a screencast video of it to further communicate the functionality).

It’s those connections – both the personal, friend-of-a-friend connections, and the you-like-what-I-like connections based on interests – that make networks like Facebook possible in the first place.

Zuckerberg says in this interview that these connections really drive Facebook’s movement towards a decentralized network – one that behaves less like a website and more like a platform.

Facebook’s great opportunity lies in the vastness of information that people are putting out there – “Through tools like Facebook,” Zuckerberg says, “you can control that.” Facebook’s future is about privacy and having a say in what information people can see about you. He also notes that he believes that “the real thing that makes up a person’s identity is the set of people they’re connected with.”

Using tools like Facebook Connect, people can offer up selected information about themselves – and businesses can begin to tailor their products and services for the people who are coming to them, based on the information they’re recieving about the interests and identities of the people who are coming to them. The interconnectedness that this creates allows for real bonds of trust to be created between people, and softens the cold anonymity of a Web 1.0 world.

Facebook’s goals for the future have a lot to do with the concept of a “social graph” that illustrates the whole interconnectedness that Zuckerberg has been interested in. “Being able to map out all those things in one graph is going to be really valuable for understanding what all those people and things are, and what they’re doing.”

Zuckerberg says that Facebook is moving away from the old school model of value being centralized on one site, based on their experience with the application ecosystem – all of that value lies in the long tail – many applications, with small audiences, bring in far more value than one widespread application.

Having Facebook’s capability for helping users build their identities spread out over many sites will help them capitalize on the long tail of the internet. What’s fascinating about this is that Zuckerberg seems to have learned the lessons of Friendster and MySpace: rather than allow a closed ecosystem like this to suffocate and wilt over time, Facebook is looking out toward the long tail.

By making sure that the system’s vitality is not linked to one site – which may well come in and out of fashion faster than Beanie Babies – Facebook is turning its vitality into longevity. And while collecting this kind of information seems, at first glance, a little Orwellian, Zuckerberg places just such a dystopian future on the opposite end of the spectrum from Facebook.

He believes that by allowing people a say in which information they make public, we can avert the loss of control over our own identities. Facebook really just wants to make it easy for people to integrate their internet lives, thereby making themselves a truly powerful platform for brand and personal identity management. But all of that is in the longer-term future, even if the groundwork is currently being rolled out.

The immediate future, of course, is rooted in smartphones. More people are opting to pick up phones like the Palm Pre or the iPhone that function as tiny computers, and smarter, more powerful applications for those platforms will be the immediate future of social networking.

It should be noted here that Zuckerberg stops well short of calling Facebook’s future a utopia. He has a charmingly grounded sense of Facebook’s place in society – when Scoble says offhand that everyone is on Facebook, Zuckerberg corrects him. “Well, 200,000,000 of them anyway,” he says, as if to say ‘well, it’s only something like 3% of the world’s population on Facebook. We’re not that big a deal.’

"Memphis Startup Weekend" by LunaWeb on Flickr

By the end of the event Sunday, Gamewav Media, MisterMenus, CheezyWeezy, Rezzie, and Roll Play all had their business plans in place, some with websites already up – one even had a great promo video.

Each startup is quite different from the next, which meant that each attendee was able to work on the project which most excited them.

A little bit more on each startup:

• Gamewav Media is a portal for online games, centered around a zombie theme.
• MisterMenus allows users to post reviews of local restaurants – at the individual dish level.
• CheezyWeezy allows parents to post cute photos of their kids, while they and other parents rate the photos based on how much it makes them smile.
• Rezzie is a real estate engine which aims to simplify the processes of home buying, home selling – even just finding a realtor to help you find a home.
• Roll Play is a resource for online role playing and collaborative story telling.

Some of the teams may be closer to a full realization of their ideas, but it’s important to remember that Startup Weekend is not a competition. No one team struggled to beat another in any way, unless it was in a race for the beer, pizza, barbecue, Red Bull, or Kooky Canuck burgers.

The real point of Startup Weekend is seeing what happens when a group of creative people get excited about completing a project, and are given free rein (with a little bit of time) to make it come to fruition.

It was fantastic to see so many people feeding off of each other’s ideas and the immensely positive atmosphere at Emerge Memphis. Though the teams spread out through the building, it was clear that the members still came together and interacted, over food, beer, coffee or energy drinks.

That collaborative energy bubbled into the very startups being worked on. It’s clear that the projects would be difficult to complete without a dedicated team of people figuring out how best to get it off the ground – and how to have it start making some money.

It’ll be great to see these startups develop over the next few months – somewhere about three or four months down the line, there will be a reunion, gathering these teams back together to see what it is they’ve done, and how their new businesses have developed.

It’s not just the energy of Startup Weekend that’s positive – there’s the impact that these new businesses will have on the Memphis – and worldwide – communities we belong to. The sheer positivity that drives these projects has to be a sign of some unbelievably good things to come.