Look around: These *are* amazing times. Who would imagine, in the “Summer of the Great Recession,“ that a digital content start-up and a phone company whose majority of customers pay nothing would be hot IPO news.  But that’s the point. These two companies shift the status away from the status quo.  And they’re heating up August, which is usually a quiet investment month.

Today Skype announced it would seek up to $100 million in its Initial Public Offiering (IPO).  This comes on the heels of last week’s S1 filing that content producer Demand Media seeks to raise $125 million. (You may recall that I predicted a digital IPO hot streak as a 2010 trend. So far, digital has been a hot spot in a largely cool market.)

If the name Demand Media doesn’t ring a bell, you may recall the lengthy feature in Wired that described them as a video content factory.  While I love video and at-scale content production, Peter Guber, Chair of Mandalay Entertainment and a board member of Demand Media, surely did not. During his INTA Keynote he explained how he helped counter this pejorative view through media outreach.

Demand Media’s genius is that it figured out that the things people are searching on aren’t necessarily what writers naturally focus on for fun.  That’s a breakthrough.  Imagine people searching for ways to get wasps out of their sheds, or how to draw a viking helmet.  But there aren’t many resources for such specific questions.

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I’m at the International Trademark Asosciastion’s annual meeting, where about 100 IP lawyers are listening to Anamaria Cashman, Assistant Counsel for Playboy Enterprises.

If your firm pushes business models and ethical tradition, it’s likely a high-incident target for compliance action. That compels firms like Playboy to be attentive to compliance strategy, as they expect to mount defenses for their business and brand.

Facebook:
Playboy Enterprises has 1.5 million friends on FB.  It is an important point of engagement.  But because of that, they’ve made the strategic choice of adhering to Facebook’s non-nudity policies.  They police content and quickly respond to notices.  The Facebook community then has links into the firm’s adult publications.

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This post originally came from Michael Gray, who is an SEO Consultant. He and the post’s writer, Garrett French, have generously shared their content — which, as you can see, has resulted in both links and a legit hat tip.

Link begging is the practice of identifying link prospects, usually through competitor backlink analysis, and then contacting each one of those sites and begging for a link. Link begging typically ignores the original context of the link, as well as the probable motivation of the linker. Not only that, it’s potentially destructive to an organization’s industry relationships and the link builder’s will to live.

Engaging the experts and bloggers in your space can lead to far greater returns on your time and effort. Engagement will also make you happier – it emphasizes community, participation and recognizing the good work of others. Here are four content models and outreach suggestions for engagement-based link building.

These are listed in a rough order of progression that should help to grow your publisher relationships.

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In the cloud, nobody can tell if you’re a web page.

In talking with people about the post The Siteless Web and the End of Brand Website Rule: Web 3.0, I found myself suggesting that online visitors will encounter us through three types of experiences:

1. Sites we control: traditional, publishing-based information distribution.
2. Sites others control: content and social networks that put our message under others’ control.
3. Applications: either as interface, such as Tweetdeck, or as aggregation point, such as Salesforce.

Of course, sites others control are quite likely driven by applications.  Facebook is an application; so is Google search. But they typically appear to users as websites.

The move away from a page-based user-experience to an application metaphor has been slowly approaching for years. The “portal” was said to break that metaphor.  Same with the idea of the application put on online and sold as a service. This has been a slow shift.  Video, AJAX, and data-driven services all exceed the page metaphor. It’s been hanging by a thread for some time.

However, there is a huge change happening in how people access the web. The move from “screen” to “hand-held” is the continental divide that will shift development away from the page metaphor.

• 75% of Twitter access doesn’t come through its web page at all. It’s through API-integrated applications, which provide a richer, easier-to-use application-type experience, particularly via mobile devices.
• Consider the proliferation of mobile applications for iPhone and iPad – the internet will be increasingly used as a medium for people interacting with applications, not browsers and HTML pages.

The Web Has No Pages, Really.
Web pages are not pages at all. In some ways they are still inferior to their printer counterparts.  Turning a page is instant; loading a page is still far from that. Viewing a page is consistent with the designer’s execution, while web pages render in a variety of ways, based on programming and browser technology.

As we move from the screen to hand display, we will consume ever more information through applications.  They provide more consistent, space-concentrated, responsive user experiences.  Web and application design will completely overlap.

Will Corporate and Brand Websites Still Have a Place?
Continued

Online changes seem to happen quickly, but their beginnings are often apparent years in advance. And legal factors provide signals to business about the stability of these new systems.

This is an idea I hope we can start to discuss in all the places we talk about the future of the Web.

It is from one of this blog’s first posts, in 2007, Web 3.0 – Envisioning the Web’s Next Big Change.

Here’s the idea:

Web 3.0 will be characterized by integration of the web into application-driven experiences. If user-generated content is a mainstay of 2.0 – then machine integrated content is the base of Web 3.0.

The result will be a web experience that at first is highly distributed and less centered on home pages. This, I believe, will easily transition to applications experiences that don’t rely on the conventions of pages, sites, or even being online.

This systematic integration is already changing the web.

• Its technical drivers include the use of XML, ASP business models, open id/federated identity, rich media applications and open APIs. (Think of Facebook, Salesforce, and Twitter).
• Its legal driver is section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. (Web 2.0 is enabled through this provisions subsidy of legal immunity for republishers.)
  
• Its market drivers include the desire to organize and unify (mash-up) information from distributed sources such as social networks to create consolidated user experiences (think Salesforce and Hootsuite).

In many cases (Web 3.0) won’t appear to be the Web at all. Applications will consume and produce public web content — but the user experience will be increasingly mediated. The online experience will be increasingly an application experience.

In a Web 2.0 world, brands built their own sites, and customers said what brands stood on them and on social sites. In a Web 3.o world, the concept of specific sites evolves into offsite experiences and mash-ups that integrate content.

The Web 3.0 world is less about place (or domain) than voice and identity.

Section 230 Protection Is a Root of the Siteless Web
As this is both a legal and tech blog, I should point out that most of the “siteless web” today is hugely “subsidized” by section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Our current connected network of application sites that aggregate or host ideas contributed by others would likely not exist without this legal structure.

Example 1: Brand Sites Don’t Frame Brands; Web Applications Like Search and Social Media Do.
Go type Modernista.com into Google. Click on the first result.

Modernista! doesn’t produce or promote a home website at all. It has created an interface to the web.

The firm’s customers make a considered purchase that is more influenced by what others say than how an agency describes itself on its brand sites.

The Modernista! site is an interface to a distributed set of links to other websites. Their “About Us” section is Wikipedia, Facebook, and Twitter. Their portfolio is on Delicious.  Their news section is what Google News and Google Blog Search say about them.

Their authority is not from the endorsement of these sites. It is from the ideas posted by those who use them. Modernista!’s credibility comes from the sites they don’t control — and ironically, those sites don’t control the content either.

The truth from outside the company can be rewarding and risky.

Did they just win an award, lose an account, post an idea? Customers know that truth and brand are in fact different things. Modernista! realized this early, and has managed to that new reality.

Example 2: Brands Migrate Off-Site to “Fish Where the Fish Are.”
Some businesses are choosing to skip building their own sites or to promote their off-site presences ahead of the brand website.

The kayak rental shop I went to on vacation decided to forego the work of building, maintaining, and promoting its own site.

Instead, it set up an easy-to-remember Meetup account and positioned itself where its demographic was already going.

In the past, brand sites have tried to build their own communities. Most failed. Brands aren’t naturally good at aggregating audiences, and most people are too busy to create multiple identities in what are essentially walled gardens run by beer companies, film distributors, or potential lawyers.

But what if brands were in social networks with their clients, and brought something of value to the party? It is easier to do this, and the market-reach results are greater.

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This Tuesday I had the challenge and opportunity to talk with a team of 20 legal marketers about how online experiences build and validate brands. It was a smart room; I’m glad to have been invited.

How Do You Make a Great Page?
Since my presentations are illustrations, you may get only the flavor of discussion. But you’ll also see some of the design and conversion tactics talked about through the presentation’s design.  This is also a big thanks to my RISD professors, fellow conference speakers, and usability pros who have shared their ideas with me over the years.

Toll Takers and Waiters: The Structure of Exchanges
There were familiar themes about putting people in front of brands.  But there was also lots of new stuff, like comparing the differences between broadcast ads and websites with toll takers and waiters.  I’d like to have said more about simplicity (the good manners of our age), and anthropology of web sites. This is the third time I’ve talked with this group, so I guess I’m already working on ideas for our next visit.  Hope you enjoy this!

Just yesterday CNET featured Twitter’s roll-out of its homepage, which has been redesigned for newbies.  One of the new features is a built-in view of the Tweetstream of a popular keyword.

When I logged in this morning, the featured word was “Moscow” — but all the Tweets it featured were pornographic images.

This may have been more a social hack than a technical one. But either way, it appears that Twitter’s newbie interface has been made into an April Fools’ Day Prank. Let’s hope newbies like nudity.

First off, I just wanted to thank Dave for inviting me to join in the conversation on Ghostwriting in Social Media. Secondly, I want to make something very clear before I stand up on my soapbox: I am a marketer—and founder & CEO of the interactive e-marketing firm ListEngage.com—and as a company, we do represent various clients and organizations in the social media space by helping them market their products and services on a daily basis.

As an organization, when invited to work with a client, although we may not initially feel one way or another towards, let’s say, the medical device industry for example—we do feel strongly about the real-life people, friends, and partners that we support with our efforts. So, when a client asks us to engage their audience because they don’t have the expertise, the resources, or “bandwidth” to execute their social media strategy, we lend a hand.

In my mind, this new “digital ghostwriting push” is actually nothing new: popular brands have been doing it for years—via customer service “response” letters, pre-recorded phone calls, emails and direct mail pieces. This is just the latest version of busy people outsourcing their surplus work to others who they have trained and who they trust.

Do you think that Teddy Roosevelt (or any President for that matter) really replied to every letter he received during his time at the White House? Do you think that the Beatles really penned back responses to all their swooning teenage followers?  Do you think that the President of Ford, Toyota, Coke, or (Fill in Big Corporation Here) always respond directly to letters, emails, or tweets that they receive? Do you “believe” that it is absolutely from them if it has their name on it?

Bottom line: the average person only has so much bandwidth with which to process and reply to the information coming at them—and if you’re @THE_REAL_SHAQ (a brand in and of himself), for example, there’s just no chance that you can reply to almost 3 millions followers’ messages and maintain any semblance of a life… yet someone is taking the time to reply to his fans every day…

Not only is it naive to assume that big names and small companies are executing 100% of their own Social Media—it’s also a bit silly to get offended if you find out otherwise.

Social media opens up avenues of conversations that customers and fans have never had before, but it also opens up the virtual floodgates to companies and people who are in the limelight, and if you don’t know how to manage this, don’t have the time, or the expertise—then you’re liable to get burned, unless you have the right (and properly trained) “support team” behind you.

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This response was originally posted on Shava Nerad’s blog Memesplice. It is used with permission.

This is a response to Ja-Nae Duane’s article, which in turn responds to Dave Weineke’s article, both on UsefulArts.us, Dave’s blog.

You should go read both.  But briefly, Dave thinks a blog article written by one person and posted under another name is a violation of ethics.  Ja-Nae, speaking as a client, begs to differ.

Let me, as a professional, explain why Ja-Nae is not only justified, but supported by a long history that should be admired and respected.

Those of you who know me in person probably know I come off better in print than I often do in public.  I’m not a stylish dresser.  I’m a bit geekish, and when I am not on a podium, my speech is overly-mannered and too fast.

But I can write.  And I have a terrific ear.

I have ghost written a blog for a Harvard professor and have ghost written speeches for a major figure in philanthropy and a number of politicians.  I have written articles for CEOS and professors that were placed in major publications, and ghosted an article by a major magazine editor when he was asked to write a guest column for Newsweek.

My name not on those works.  Not only that, but in many cases, I am contractually or otherwise professionally obligated not to list those works on my resume or mention the clients by name.

But I have to say, I was paid well by most of them (some of the political work was volunteer).

Is it ethical to publish an article solely in our client’s name?  It always has been.  We might be listed as staff on a publication, or a roster.  The thoughts we write are not, technically, our own.  We don’t really do much more than a radio journalist does when interviewing a public figure, cutting small talk, removing the um’s and ah’s, and re-recording and restating questions to better fit the time allotted for a story.  Oh, wait — you mean you didn’t know they did that either?

Even when ghosting is transparent, it has been quickly forgotten or overlooked by the public in the past.  Every American history reader knows President Kennedy said, “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country!”

But Kennedy only *said* those words, which are attributed to him in every reference work of quotations in the world.  A genius speech writer, Ted Sorenson, wrote those words for him.

Sorenson, an intelligent, intellectual, modest man, did what he did out of purpose and love, with a finely honed sense of language — and an intimate understanding of the man he worked for.

His words carried Kennedy’s authentic voice around the world.

The job of a ghost or speech writer is to get so far inside the mind and skin of her/his client that you are no more “faking” the person’s words, than a hairdresser is “faking” the person’s hair. Ideally, a professional makes the expression of style a natural extension of the individual. The client runs a comb through, and every word falls in place as though it grew that way.

Sometimes, the “fix” is obvious.  Did anyone think Sarah Palin solo’d her book?  Authenticity is transparent with or without a ghost (Lynn Vincent, senior writer for the Christian publication World Magazine).  The Christian Science Monitor estimates that 90% of politicians’ books are ghosted, Obama’s being a notable recent exception.

Some of us do this better than others.  We have, in the parlance of social media, been “delivering authenticity” for longer than any media workers.

Continued

Thank you for the opportunity to respond to yesterday’s post, The Ethics of Ghost Writing and Marionette Social Media.

As someone who does a tremendous amount of outsourcing, this is a topic that is near and dear to me.

Blogging:
I am a huge advocate of outsourcing my blog writing. Why?

Well, I have two reasons:

• Time: I am an idea person. I think of more blog posts that I can actually write. It sometimes inhibits my ability to even outline a blog post. With that being said, it is much easier to create a topic and a few key points that I want highlighted and then hand it over to someone I trust with “my voice” and who can deliver it to me in a timely fashion.
• Trust: Tina and I have been working together for a while now. She gets who I am, what I am trying to say, and how I want to say it. She was the one who took my notes, outline, and previous articles and assembled my new book, “How to Start Your Business with $100”

Because she and I worked so closely on something so personal, it was an easy switch for her to start writing my blog posts for my blog as well.

Social Media:
This is an area where I change my tune.

SM interactions have to be personal. Sure, you can have someone scan news and articles for you, but at the end of the day, only YOU know how you would respond to a comment or how you would engage an individual.

As a social media strategist, my team and I have had to take on personas more frequently than I would care to share. I make the recommendation to have us teach the individual how easy it is to engage in the social sphere, however, many people still feel that social media is overwhelming and refuse to touch it.

On the flip side of that, how would you feel if you were corresponding with someone who was not really that individual? Would you feel cheated? Would you care?

My experience is that people absolutely care. They want to know that they are reaching that individual and not a member of their staff. It completely changes people’s perception of that individual.

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