I am not a lover of standard email newsletters as my inbox is already too full and therefore have been looking for innovative ways of producing promotional materials or even turning my blog into an ebook. So was delighted when I came across RSSzine. Here is what Penny Haynes says about the site

“RSSzine.com lets you create promotional materials and salable ebooks inexpensively and quickly.

Turn your existing blog or podcast content into a professional looking PDF ebook (all you really need is your blog or podcast RSS feed and a date range of posts).

Then RSSzine offers a service to take that (or any) PDF and create a Turning Page book out of it (an online version or a downloadable version that can be burned to CD/DVD).

RSS to PDF is only $25, and PDF to Turning Page is only $50 for either online or downloadable versions (you can get both versions for only $75).

Grand Opening is June 25th, and Penny Haynes is looking for affiliates to make 20% 1st tier commissions, and 5% 2nd tier commissions. And any affiliate who brings in at least 1 sale on Grand Opening Day will continue to receive a 20% rebate on their own sales from then on.”

I think this looks a fabulous product - see what you think at Rsszine I love it but would love to hear your thoughts.

Scribd has just launched in beta the Scribd Store, which is to documents what iTunes is to music.

Scribd store is described on the site as

“Imagine a place where anyone—from professional publishers and authors to students, scientists, and artists—can sell written works to a potential buying audience of more than 60 million.

In the Scribd Store, sellers benefit from:

• Generous Revenue Split: Keep 80% of revenue, with no monthly membership fees
• Flexible Pricing and Preview: Make real-time changes to pricing, preview, and download options for your works
• Instant Analytics: Receive sales data immediately
• Built-in viral marketing: Share previews of your “for sale” items quickly and easily using Scribd’s social features
• Multi-platform distribution: Ensure your works are available on most future mobile and e-reader devices”

This service is in beta and is only applicable to US consumers at the moment. Social media is wonderful at breaking down the walls of selling, of how to reach consumers. This is another tool worth looking at in terms of two reasons

1. Making money online
2. Marketing awareness for your service or product.

This is something anyone who any sort of intelligence about wireless communications knows - they don’t really interfere with the navigation system like we’ve been told all these years. Now that Delta, American Airlines & Southwest are trying out satellite-based wifi systems, the concern is more around annoying the other passengers than it is about any navigational system.

The spokesperson for Delta Airlines is quoted in the New York Times:

“…said the airline will keep track of how customers use the Wi-Fi technology, then decide whether to set limits on how customers can use the Internet. Airlines can and do block access to pornography sites, for example, and Delta, like American, is blocking access to sites that offer Internet voice services.

“A lot of it will be self-policing,” he said. “If you’re not aware of it, your seatmate will make you aware.” [source]

So, ok, you might annoy other passengers, but what happens when wifi is everywhere, and your flight, which used to be an untouchable block of time, becomes office hours, in which you’re expected to work, rather than relax, read, nap, or like I’ve been known to do, watch a movie or write offline.

Here’s the other hitch - which airlines might be looking at inflight wifi as an additional income source, is it really going to make that much of a difference to the bottom line? The Times piece did some of the math - if every passenger on board a flight paid $12.95 for the 3+ hour trip, they’d make approximately $1500. Great, but will every passenger buy? My guess is no. Sure, some will, but I’d estimate that’s probably less than 1/3 of the passengers.

The others are going to be of the mind that I am for the moment - unless it’s free, I don’t really need to be online that badly, and even then, there’s got to be someplace in the world (or above it in this case) where I don’t have to make an excuse or provide a reason why I’d like to be offline.

I’ve been thinking about the whole traditional media/new media thing - everyone trying to figure out will happen to traditional media in the future. I’ve been mulling over thoughts around this for a while now, but haven’t been able to gather all my thoughts into one cohesive post. And then, I came across Chris’s post entitled All Tomorrow’s Armies and realized that Chris managed to coalesce all my thoughts!

Stay with the old at your own risk. All tomorrow’s armies are equipped and ready to embed. We don’t need to gather. We have our own dial tone. We connect and disband the way waves shape the beach. [source]

Now,  although Chris does go on to say that we might also might not be or do all of those things, but I have a very good feeling that this really will be the way of the media world. If traditional media doesn’t get involved in the social media world, they’re going to get left in the dust.

The New York Times has recently realized that the aggregation of and links to things the paper didn’t produce in-house improves the audience experience and they have begun to provide additional information written by bloggers and in some cases, even their direct competitors. [source] While this isn’t anything new for those of us who are used to the social media world, it’s very cool to see the New York Times embracing our world.

Steve Outing from Editor & Publisher has offered newspaper CEOS and journalists some ‘crisis advice’ in his most recent column. Chief among his advice includes hiring a Social Media VP.

Most newspapers have a vice president of circulation in charge of print distribution. Today, you need a “circulation VP” for the Internet. A more appropriate title: vice president for social media.

A key tenet in the digital media world we now live and do business in is: Be everywhere. Any newspaper company that thinks that its Web site or sites (and maybe a few other services like e-mail newsletters, RSS feeds and mobile-phone alerts) is enough is sadly mistaken. [source]

Today’s newspapers and media outlets have got to adapt. They need to get involved with citizen journalists more, get the reporters blogging, start covering hyper-locally,  and be everywhere on line, absolutely everywhere. Check to make sure that your brand/user name isn’t being brandjacked.

In short, get on it, hire your VP of Social Media (I happen to know a few good candidates) and get started before you go extinct.

The US Army has declared Twitter a potential tool to organize a terrorist attack. They’re basing this on the fact that news spread rapidly about the July earthquake in LA - much faster than news outlets could report the news. Activists at the RNC in Minneapolis apparently used the service to provide information on police movements.

So, ok fine. Yes, those of us who use Twitter spread information and news rapidly. Much of the breaking news that I become aware of comes to me through Twitter. What I’m having trouble with is what seems like paranoia over the tool.  As Noah Shachtman, of Wired’s Danger Room points out with his hilarious graphic, this just seems way too  reactionary.

“Twitter has also become a social activism tool for socialists, human rights groups, communists, vegetarians, anarchists, religious communities, atheists, political enthusiasts, hacktivists and others to communicate with each other and to send messages to broader audiences,” the intelligence report said.

“Terrorists could theoretically use Twitter social networking in the US as an operation tool,” it said. “However, it is unclear whether that same theoretical tool would be available to terrorists in other countries and to what extent.” 

What do you think? Are we all being too dismissive about this?

Good blogs are hard work, but they’re also the ones that keep people coming back, keeps readers engaged.My favourite part of the entire article is Point #6:

Good blogs are weird. Blogs make fart noises and occasionally vex readers with the degree to which the blogger’s obsession will inevitably diverge from the reader’s. If this isn’t happening every few weeks, the blogger is either bored, half-assing, or taking new medication. [source]

 I’m just not sure there’s a ton of controversy in Social Media, public relations & the intersection of business. Makes the part about being weird enough to qualify for “good” kinda difficult sometimes.

I write on at least two sites (right now at least), six or more times a week. Sometimes, it’s hard to find the inspiration to keep going.

There’s a couple of ways that I’ve found to do this. I used to find it a bit tricky to rely on daily motivation for BuzzNetworker, until I started utilizing the Google Reader starred items feature along with the offline feature.

You can see above that I’ve been collecting posts from all sorts of different places, but I tend to frequent Chris Brogan, Jeremiah Owyang, Andy Beal, and Mack Collier for BuzzNetworker, and a host of liquor and wine blogs for DrinksAfterDark.

If I don’t find something that immediately strikes my fancy and that I have an opinion about, I dip into my starred items – whether I’m on, or offline – and remind myself what caused me to save the post in the first place.  Essentially, I’ve been keeping a gold mine of potential posts in my Google Reader.

The other thing that I’ve done, which I find immensely helpful, especially where Drinks After Dark is concerned, is create an editorial calendar.

Now, I personally find this easier to create for Drinks After Dark than it is for BuzzNetworker. I just think I haven’t put enough thought into what I want to do with BuzzNetworker yet.

Where do you find the inspiration to keep blogging?

MyPicks Beijing is a new application for Facebook, that lets people compete with their friends online by predicting medal winners throughout the Beijing Olympic Games.

The application allows players to pick Gold, Silver and Bronze medal winners for each event during the Games and win points for their country with each correct prediction.

MyPicks Beijing was created on the world’s first “social programming environment”, Zembly, which was specifically designed for creating and hosting Facebook applications.

Zembly allows developers to build Facebook and other social web applications without the cost and complexity of hosting and managing the application themselves.

Zebly helps people:

• author social applications using your browser
• participate and collaborate with others around live, editable code
• use the richness of popular web APIs to create your applications
• publish your social applications to multiple social platforms with a single click

On one hand, I think this is very cool, because it opens up the social application development to everyone. I had a couple that I wanted to create for a couple of restaurant clients and they were cost-prohibitive. That barrier has been removed now, for the most part.

On the other hand, this concerns me a little bit because now we’re going to have more zombies, more vampires, more bunnies and goofy growing gifts. I guess we’ll see what happens!

Um. No. And yet, Jennifer Leggio, a dear Twitter friend and an uber smart security chick, had to point that out to people on her ZDnet Blog.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I completely agree with Jennifer, as well as with Al Krueger from Comet Branding whose post, “Regurgitator or Originator”, is what brought the whole Copy+Paste+Publish phenomenon to light.

Copy+Paste+Blog is when the blog author does one of the following:

• Posts only snippets of another blog with a link to said blog, sometimes posing a question but rarely offering additional ideas
• Using a blog solely for research and referencing that blog without doing the background work on his or her own 

Yes, I totally cut and pasted that from Jennifer, and like she said, if I wanted to just C/P/P, I’d ask you what you think and sign off. But that to me seems like lazy blogging. Where’s the author’s own opinion or voice here? If you just cut+paste+publish, why are you even bothering to blog?

I read blogs for the opinions and information offered by the author. Sure, I use a good number of blogs as source information, but I also make sure that I track down additional news stories, the original blog articles and additional opinions as well so that I can add to the conversation, not just regurgitate other people’s words. And if I can’t find something that I want to add to the conversation, then I don’t bother blogging it. There’s tons of other things in the world to blog about.

If you want to make sure that you’ve got your own thoughts out there – there’s some things you’ve got keep in mind, particularly the tenets of traditional journalism. To me, these were no brainers, but then I come from a PR/Journalism background. It’s just a given to me to follow the trail and find out what I can before posting madly.

If you remember these two things (well, ok it’s kinda three or four things in two points, but you’re smart. You’ll find it all), you should manage to avoid the majority of the problems Cut – N – Paste blogging presents:

• Don’t bandwagon jump – climbing onto the “me too!” bandwagon is only going to stir up the waters more, instead of adding to the conversation.  If you haven’t experienced something for yourself, and you don’t go tracking down the original information, then shush.
• Which brings me to: Find your own sources. Yes, absolutely, use the blogs you read as inspiration, but make sure you’ve got the true story and also that you formulate your own ideas, opinions and sources.

(image source: Vinyl Pulse)

The following is a guest post from David Mullings of Realvibez Media and Co-Founder of StartupToons.

Social networking is all the rage right now, and yet many business people are not totally sold on the idea or can’t figure out how they can leverage these networks for their businesses.

It’s vital to think of these networks as additional tools in your box of tactics rather than anything big and scary. I set out to build my personal thought leadership brand via Facebook because I believe that personal brands can fuel corporate brands. Since the age of 15 I have been working to become a positive role model for young people around the world and I saw an opportunity to continue this.

I joined Facebook in June 2007 and to date I have managed to accomplish the following:

• Asked to endorse a book on entrepreneurship by a frequent contributor to CNBC’s The Big Idea
• Been introduced to a venture capital firm
• Received an introduction to an angel investor who is now an advisor
• Interviewed for a book by an Inc. Magazine Contributing Editor about Gen-Y entrepreneurs
• Interviewed about effectively using Facebook to network for business
• Paid speaking engagement at Boston College to present to the Entrepreneur Society and major article in school paper
• Landing a mention for a new venture on Inc. magazine’s staff blog on the day of launch
• Asked for quotes for a major magazine article on social media and the Caribbean
• A feature on CollegeMogul.com, a popular blog focused on gen-y ventures
• Built a fan page for the country of Jamaica that has hit 1600 fans in less than 3 months with no money spent

So, how, within just under a year, did I accomplish this?

Read more