Last month I had the extreme privilege of being selected by NASA to report live at the launch of STS-132, the last scheduled mission for the space shuttle Atlantis.  After a thorough screening process I was issued press credentials and allowed 2 day access to the historic NASA Launch Complex 39 Press Site next to the Vehicle Assembly Building where they prep the shuttles (and the Apollo Saturn V rockets back in the 60’s and 70’s), put them on a giant crawler and move them out to the launch pad.  The funny thing is: I’m not a reporter.  But here I am at the final launch of Atlantis with news crews and media outlets from around the globe.  I’m meeting astronauts, NASA engineers and getting up close and personal viewing at the launch pad where Atlantis proudly stands getting final prepping for launch. How did I, a non-reporter, manage to trick NASA into giving me press credentials for a shuttle launch?  It’s simple: Twitter.

Space shuttle Atlantis blasting off!

I have a Twitter account and am an active participant in social media.  NASA recognized the value of social networking and how they can use it to reach a greater audience.  They also realize that people’s media habits are changing.  Reading a paper in the morning and watching the evening news at night is no longer the norm.  The internet is quickly replacing the older titans of media.  As proof, I confess I haven’t really read a newspaper in years.  I also don’t get a single TV channel.  I do have a TV, but it’s sole purpose is being hooked up to a DVD player.  I gather the bulk of my news and media via the internet – never from a single source, of course, but Twitter is one of those sources I use to know what is going on in the world around me.

Giving others special behind the scenes access can pay off big in social media. At the Tweetup, NASA gave us special access to the shuttle on the launch pad.

To reach people like myself who don’t rely on traditional media for our news and instead rely on a network of trusted sources, NASA turned to social media outlets such as Twitter to help get their message out.  They began hosting “Tweetups”, which is just Twitter speak for a meetup.  I was selected to be a part of the STS-132 Tweetup that they hosted at the press site, a two day event covering the day before launch and then launch day.  NASA selected 150 Twitter users for the event – as long as you could commit to being there and passed the screening process then you where good to attend.  An incredibly smart move by NASA, as us Tweetup members where paying our own way, more excited to be there than the paid reporters and sharing our enthusiasm with hundreds of thousands of combined network connections through Twitter and our various social networks.  Talk about ROI and maximizing your marketing dollar!

I talk to a lot of clients about social media and how effective it can be when done right.  The STS-132 NASA Tweetup was no doubt done right.  Granted they are NASA, launching people into space on rocket boosters, so it’s a little easier for them to generate buzz and a groundswell of support via social media than someone who is looking to promote their furniture store, for example.  Well, I guess if you tied a rocket to a La-Z-Boy recliner that would help get more attention, but it might also get you arrested or severely injured, so let’s stick with safer methods.   To get attention online you can use examples of what NASA did in whatever social media you participate in.

First off, NASA uses social media.  I mean they really use it and use it on a regular basis.  I can’t tell you the number of NASA employees and astronauts I follow on Twitter.  They have a huge presence on Facebook and YouTube too.  Websites and blogs plus Flickr accounts are also part of their online strategy.  As the owner of a small business, you probably don’t have the human resources that NASA does, but you don’t have to have the same financial resources.  Time is the main currency used to pay for marketing via social media, so if you can spare some time, you can capitalize to some degree on social media.

Close up photo of Atlantis the day before launch.

Second, NASA is consistent with social media.  It’s not an on-again off-again affair.  They have a social media mission and stick with their flight plan.  Inconsistent activity in social media will lead to inconsistent results.  If you have a blog and can’t keep up with the overly optimistic goal of one post a day you set for yourself when you started, then re-adjust your flight plan.  Maybe one blog post a week is better for you.  It’s better to to make a mid-course correction than burn out from an unrealistic schedule.

Next, NASA is an event.  If you have a furniture store, it may be hard to organize willing participants for a furniture store tweetup, but who knows, maybe it’s not such a stretch.  Maybe you have a loyal and local following online and you host an event you call the “Couch Potato Summit” where guests get comfy on their favorite seat in the store and discuss, tweet or blog a shared topic of interest.  Now you are hosting a networking event where people are tweeting about the event and mentioning “at Joe’s Furniture discussing politics and boy is this Camden sofa nice.”  This of course, is just an example, but with a little thought you can find a way to bring your network together in an entertaining way that helps you stand out from your competition.

Additionally, NASA used hashtags with Twitter.  Prior to the tweetup, I’ll admit to not using  hashtags that often with Twitter.  With only 140 characters to work with, hashtags just seemed like a way to take up too much valuable Twitter real estate.  Now I realize it’s a great way to segment content and to pinpoint a particular audience you want to reach.  I used a number of the event related hashtags throughout the tweetup, such as #nasatweetup, #nasa, #STS132 and #Atlantis.  This allowed me to reach a larger audience than just my normal Twitter followers, because someone may not have been following me, but they may have been following the hashtag of #Atlantis on Twitter to keep up with any news going on with the launch.  As a result, I had the highest number of retweets of my content I’ve ever had on Twitter – and many of those retweets where by individuals that didn’t follow me, but saw my tweet due to using a hashtag.  Many of those individuals are also now followers.

Astronaut Janice Voss was one of many representatives of NASA participating in the social media event.

Finally, NASA continues the dialog.  After the tweetup I attended, which was at Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida, they hosted a tweetup at Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, Texas and made sure to keep the KSC participates involved.  A special page was setup on NASA’s website to aggregate all activity of the tweetup participants and to encourage more interaction.  A month after the tweetup and I still get emails from the NASA team that put the event together.  This team also continues to use Twitter to communicate with all participants, including those that attended previous tweetups prior to STS-132.  Sometimes at the tweetup, it was hard to determine who was actually at the event and who was involved remotely, as so many people where engaged in the event.  Now as an alumni of the event, I keep up much more with NASA and look forwarding to future tweetups, regardless of whether or not I’ll be selected again as an attendee.  This is moving beyond being an event, to being a destination.

On a final note, I couldn’t help but notice how the launch of Atlantis related to launching a website.  All the behind the scenes activity leading up to the launch, the maintenance of the spacecraft, the monitoring of data after launch, getting media promotion, coordination of different technical processes, teamwork, etc.  While we at NetSource realize we are not launching rockets into space, it is a great feeling to be a part of events that generates so much excitement.

We all know about Twitter and Facebook – how could we not as they have been beaten into our brains over the last year.  Most of us are likely fatigued from the overload of media attention they have generated – Facebook this, Twitter that.  Yet if you use these tools to help promote your business, you know the importance of keeping up with any news related to these two social media giants.

On a smaller scale, Twitter and Facebook are not the only games in town to pay attention to as there are newer players on the social media field.  These newer players are helping to define the future trends in social media and networking.  Here are 4 trends to watch and the web apps that are behind them:

1. Screencasting:

Screencasting is the ability to share your computer screen with others for the purpose of a tutorial or business presentation.  If you have ever attended a webinar, an online meeting, or viewed a tutorial video on YouTube, then you have experienced screencasting.  Screencasting will continue to grow and become a part of the social media fabric for 2010.

Screenr - Screenr.com is an ingenious tool.  If you are familiar with Jing or Camtasia by TechSmith, then you will be familiar with the concept of Screenr.  Basically, Screenr allows you to record a screencast and publish it online using nothing more than your browser and microphone.  No downloading of a program required and Screenr hosts the file for you and even lets you send a tweet to your Twitter account to share the screencast video with your Twitter followers.  The web app is amazingly simple to use and get started with, although you won’t have editing abilities like you will get with a paid application like Camtasia.  A great use for the program is to create mini-presentations, such as talking through a PowerPoint presentation on your screen.  It is a free online service so take note that your recordings will need to be limited to 5 minutes.  You can also post your screencasts to YouTube or embed the screencast into another website or blog.

2. Social Media Aggregators:

With so many social media websites out there, it can get difficult to manage multiple logins and to remember to post information to all of your open accounts.  Much of the time the information you post on Twitter may be the same information that you planned to post on Facebook.  Social media aggregators put multiple accounts from various social media websites under one umbrella.  Via one login, you can make a single post that is shared over multiple social media websites.  Also, you can view all of the content posted to multiple social media sites that another user that you follow has posted – it aggregates, or combines, these multiple streams onto one timeline.  Think of a social media aggregator as a social media hub or command center where you can manage all, or most, of your social media activities.  While social media aggregators are not new, their popularity is set to explode in the months ahead.

FriendFeed – Some out there may question listing FriendFeed as a trend in social media.  After all, since being purchased by Facebook, the Friendfeed platform is almost dead in the water.  However, FriendFeed is (was?) an innovator in social media aggragation.  They are now owned by big money via Facebook.  The technology will be leveraged on Facebook and new FriendFeed competitors will build on FriendFeed’s innovation and fill the gaps that FriendFeed’s lack of development leaves.

Cliqset – If it can get a foothold, Cliqset is poised to be the next FriendFeed.  Cliqset has a FriendFeed-feel to it, but in my opinion, raises the bar a notch or two.

Flock Browser – What if your website browser was your social media aggregator?  It would be if you are using the Flock browser.  Firefox users have long been installing add-ons to give them more functionality and integration with social media websites.  Flock recognized this and built a new Firefox-powered browser that comes fully tricked out with every imaginable social networking feature and then some.  From the Flock browser you can Tweet, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, WordPress, Picasa, Delicious bookmark, Digg, follow RSS feeds and more.  Big deal, you think as you can do that from any browser, but with Flock, you login to the browser then you have instant access to all your online accounts.  Plus, all those accounts are available from a sidebar while you view other websites.  Online multitasking and social media aggregation at it’s finest.

3. Project Colaboration:

Social networking involves communicating and sharing content with others.  Combined with how it tracks everything on a time line, social networking is a natural for project collaboration. 

Google Wave – While there are many online project management tools out there, Google Wave is mentioned as it has had billing as a social media platform.  It’s true calling, however, seems to be in project collaboration.  It could be said that Google has made project collaboration a social media experience.  While not widespread as of yet, Google Wave has a lot of interest.  As more companies adopt Google’s cloud services, such as Google Docs, for business, expect those businesses to also experiment with Google Wave for client projects.

4. Analytical Tracking:

The first step for most in social media has been to simply get involved with it, to learn what it is and how to use it.  Now that the break-in period is over and acceptance has been reached, business users are wondering how to get the most out of it and to track what is working and what is not. While there are many analytic tools out there that can track anything under the sun, most of the free online apps aimed at tracking social media are geared towards Twitter.  However, watch for analytic tracking to expand to cover more social media applications.

HootSuite – While primarily a Twitter client for managing multiple Twitter accounts, HootSuite has built-in analytical tracking that makes tracking the success of your Twitter posts a breeze.  You can track how many clicks you get from each of your URL’s that you post in HootSuite.  By knowing how many clicks your posts get, you will get an idea of what content you share is of the most interest of your followers.  You can also determine if your activity on Twitter is paying off or if there is too little interest from your followers to legitimize the effort.

What trends do you see happening in social media for 2010?

Google is huge, no doubt, but one area they have struggled is in establishing a social networking platform to connect their huge user base.  The more time users spend with Google – the more opportunities for Google to monetize off of them.  Granted, they have a lot of cool and free tools to play with, but there is a reason Google Adwords appear in your Gmail inbox.  Having a social network that users can hang out on for hours at a time is the big nut Google hopes to crack, and Google’s primary social networking nutcracker for the last few years has been Orkut.

Orkut?

Yeah Orkut.  You may have seen it if you have a Google account, maybe even quickly stopped to find out “what is this?” only to realize it is yet another social networking platform.  Everyone you know is already on Facebook, so why bother with Orkut – ever get a friend request from someone on Orkut?  I haven’t either.  Why bother – no one else is.

But Google has resources – lots of resources – and is continuing to find new ways to tap into the social networking goldmine.  The most recent big splash they made has been with Google Wave, a revolutionary new platform that has the potential to move Google into the Facebook and Twitter dominated spotlight.  However, another product has been recently released by them that taps into the social media network and at the same time could have a very drastic impact on your website.  This product is called SideWiki.  Oh, and pardon me while I giggle, as the word “wiki” always does that to me.

What is Google SideWiki?

Google SideWiki is a browser extension that you install that enhances the functionality of your Firefox or Internet Explorer browser (Chrome version coming soon).  With the SideWiki installed, you can now comment on any website that you visit and read the comments of other SideWiki users. Everything from SideWiki displays in a separate sidebar.

Is that it?

Basically, that is the gist of it.  My first thoughts were pretty underwhelming.  I mean we have tons of websites now where we can rank and review other sites.  I can bookmark a site in Delicious.com and write a review that other Delicious.com users can read.  I can put a StumbleUpon thumbs up or down review on a website I am visiting that other StumbleUpon users can see.  Seemed like more of the same.  But then it occurred to me that these comments and reviews are not happening on a third party website, they are happening on the site being visited.  This is important in that although I can moderate the comments posted on this blog, I can’t moderate the comments made on SideWiki.  I can also opt not to list comments on this blog, but I can’t opt out of having SideWiki users commenting on this blog.

But isn’t SideWiki a separate application that is part of a browser sidebar – not on the website itself?

Yes, and it can also only be seen by other SideWiki users – not visitors to the site that don’t have SideWiki or are not logged into their SideWiki account.  But it is still content that is displaying side-by-side with your website whether you want it there are not.  It would be like have an office building that Google puts up blank signs right next to and allows random people to come along and spray paint messages about your company on.  Some comments may be from satisfied customers  (great), but some may be from less than happy customers (not so great), some may be from competitors (uh-oh), some may be spam messages for Viagra (oh great) and some just may be juvenile drivel (yuck).  You paid good money for a nice website, why should it get junked up with user graffiti and framed in with content that is out of your control.  While the word “wiki” may make you giggle too, SideWiki could very well be no laughing matter for owners of business websites.

Now that I have (spray) painted a scary picture, not all is horrid.  Google SideWiki can be a nifty tool to communicate with your site visitors.  At the same time, I don’t see it becoming mainstream anytime soon, so most visitors will never see those SideWiki comments anyway.  Right now, SideWiki is just a trend to be aware of.  Google has the resources to push it hard or to repackage it into another yet-to-be-invented social networking tool that shows up a few years from now.  And what Google does, other developers will mimic and implement into their bag of tricks too.  So even if adoption of SideWiki is slow, you will see more of these types of tools in the near future.

So, you’re still thinking this whole blogging thing is silly? Yet you want your website to rank well and bring a lot of visitors to your website?

If these two statements apply to you, then truth be told, you’d be silly not to consider a blog.

Think of it this way – if you have an average sized website, say 10 content pages, then you have 10 pages that have a chance of being ranked in the search engines. Now, it is difficult for any page to effectively be optimized for more than a few keyword phrases – 3 is reasonable, although some would argue that even that number is high. That gives us 10 pages and 30 keyword phrases. Now, add in the fact that the search engines like active websites, so if your site is static (only updated once every year or two), then your site is not keeping the search engine bots interested.

Now, let’s take those 10 static pages and 30 keyword phrases and add in a blog that you update only once a week with a new post. This adds 52 new pages over the course of a year and 156 keyword phrases that can populate the search engines. Plus, as an actively updated blog, the search engines will be eager to visit it on a regular basis and quick to list any new content that you post. When you launch a new product, service, sale, coupon, marketing campaign, promotion, job listing, new office location, event or other news worthy item, your blog post about it will show up immediately in the search engines for searchers to find it. If your site has been static for a year, and you update the site to reflect a special sale coming up next week, it might not make it to the search engines in time – whereas, it may only take an hour for the blog to get listed.

Blogs are a “force multiplier”, to borrow a military term. Use all the artillery available to help you succeed with your business online.

Yep, that is my predicition.

In 2009, while our economy continues to slug along, those that do a good job of marketing themselves online stand to have a very good year. We’ve all probably heard stories of how a lot of people became rich during the Great Depression – because it is true. Those that keep their eye on the ball when everyone else is distracted will continue to hit home runs – it won’t be as easy as it was before, but it will still happen.

Markets are shifting right now. While mainstream for quite some time now, the internet is now starting to subplant other channels of distribution and marketing. Newspapers are struggling, some either are, or are planning to go to internet-only distribution. Video, which had the exclusivity of TV delivery, is now more popular than ever online (even traditional TV’s might be hooked up to a PC or Apple TV), Google searches are replacing Yellow Page look-ups, users are carrying around internet-enabled cell phones loaded with mobile apps that connect to their online accounts, businesses are advertising online with pay-per-click advertising. While lower than before, the spikes in gas prices over the last few years has more people getting used to the idea of staying at home where they can spend more time surfing the web. A new generation is growing up not knowing of a world prior to high-speed internet. Social networking is redefining public relations for major companies and public figures.

There is a fundamental shift that is taking place – while we thought we have already seen the impact of the internet on our lives, we are now realizing that the last 10 years was just a slightly advanced stage in it’s infancy. A major growth spurt is coming in 2009 and a lot of companies that thought they had a “web presence” are going to get left behind, while a lot of companies that are “plugged in” to the coming changes will reap great rewards.

So, what are the nutshell nuggets of knowledge to pull from all this?

First you can’t be just a “web presence”. You can’t be “static” online. You can’t think of a website as the beginning and end of your online efforts. Sure, it has worked in the past, and in many cases working still. But at some point it no longer will.

Second, change the way you think about the internet – almost consider it a parallel universe. 20 years ago, they called the concept “virtual reality”. It made a lot of buzz but died down as the real world realities of the internet’s limitations at the time softened our vision of this “cyber-space”. Now we are seeing virtual reality slowly coming about. Sure, it’s not a funny headset and Tron-like graphics, but the internet is becoming another place that we exist, or more importantly, where your customer’s exist. They are not just hopping online to do a quick search with a keyword phrase to find your product or service and then signing off, they are living much of their life there. So, you will need to be “plugged in” to where they are, what they’re doing and how to get their attention.

We are already seeing this shift in our business. We are not a website development firm anymore, despite my old-habits-die-hard habit of calling us that. We are actually an interactive agency now. Developing the site for your web presence is no longer the beginning and end of our involvement. Throughout 2009 we will be asked to build the “main” site, setup the blogs, create sub-sites, recommend lead tracking solutions, secure advertising, handle marketing campaigns, develop a social media strategy, manage company brands, oversee public relations, broadcast online call-in radio shows, produce video, write copy, record podcasts, program applications, create training materials, research keywords and provide consultation services.

By being prepared for changes in 2009 as the internet leaves behind it’s infancy, you can be a part of it’s growth spurt.