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In today's networked world, connecting with customers has never been easier. Savvy marketing professionals know that they must engage with individuals directly on the Web, and smart businesses know that their customers can be their best friends--with benefits. Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo cover all of this and more in their new book from No Starch Press, Friends with Benefits: A Social Marketing Handbook.

A friend of mine, who has achieved repeated success in high-tech startup land, said that if you want to be successful, focus on segments where <10% of the crowd currently adopts the solution, and by virtue of dramatically simplifying the approach, you can toggle adoption rates to closer to 90%. Enter Posterous, a micro-blogging tool (it's free) that does a few things really well.

Social media expert Tamar Weinberg cuts through the hype and jargon to give you intelligent advice and strategies for positioning your business on the social web in her new book from O'Reilly, The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web. In this excerpt adapted for the web, Weinberg discusses what power account holders should do to build credibility, establish identity, and make them memorable among the community. Weinberg offers 10 easy to follow rules. "Anyone, however, can follow these rules on social news sites to become a respected and valued participant of the service."

Social networking sites face a unique economic challenge when it comes to monetizing the value they create. Any attempt to capture a piece of the value they create inevitably damages that value.

Presenters at O'Reilly's Twitter Boot Camp, held June 15 in New York, offered a variety of best practices and case studies revolving around Twitter's business, marketing, branding and advertising opportunities. Presentations include Tim O'Reilly's Keynote, "Create More Value Than You Capture" and Steve Rubel of Edelman Digital's presentation, "Using Twitter to Market Your Corporate All-Stars." Other slides from the day's presentations are available for viewing.

This week, we talk to Tim O'Reilly about how Twitter has dealt with the Swine Flu panic, Make publisher Dale Dougherty about the new interest in the Maker culture, and our usual podcast quiz question....

There's a Twitter "backlash" at the moment as news organizations like CNN start to react to the way people are communicating about the Swine Flu on Twitter. What is behind this reaction, and is it valid? Is Twitter a "petri dish" for hysteria and insanity? Or, is it a useful tool for the distirbution of public health information?

A quick update on the Twitter Awareness numbers for the Swine Flu. As of Monday @ 1:57 PM. Swine flu accounted for 2.68% of all Twitter activity, and the @CDCemergency Twitter account continued to experience rapid growth posting a 300% growth over the last two days. In addition to these trends, there have emerged unofficial Swine squatters, do these additional sources of information help or hurt the official effort to distribute public health information?

In Foreign Policy, Evgeny Morozov writes about Twitters power to misinform in the context of the emerging Swine Flu crisis. In his article he brings up concerns about the use of Twitter to spread misinformation and makes some broad generalizations about the motivations of the average Twitter. In this article, I response to some of the things Morozov has to say about the validity of analyzing Twitter trends.

As the Swine Flu story develops, Twitter is an invaluable, open-platform for gathering data and graphing trends of awareness. As the CDC investigation into this emerging virus uncovered more cases in CA, KS, TX, @CDCemergency experienced a rapid +85% jump in followers as Twitter became a conduit for critical public health information. While the government tries to get the word out about prevention stragies and instructions for care for the sick, services like Twist and Twitterholic can be used to measure the impact and reach of these public health messages.

The Centers for Disease Control and the Red Cross are using Twitter to get the word out about Swine Flu. Can something as simple as Twitter make a difference when fighting a potential influenza pandemic?

I'm looking at the work of a potential non-profit client now. They have a fine website: recently redesigned, it looks good and gives off the air of elegance that they want to project. The client is world-renowned, rich in history and staffed with some fantastically-creative people, yet the website feels more boring than you would think it should. With the rise of the real-time update streams being popularized by Facebook, Twitter and FriendFeed, users are becoming accustomed to a constantly-changing flow of pictures, videos and new snippets. Even actively-maintained websites seem locked in languid stupor in comparison.

I will be presenting Psychotronica: Exposure, Control, and Deceit at the Hack in the Box Conference in Dubai (20th - 23rd April 2009).

The "status update" has become the ultimate social gesture (ala Twitter tweets). Now, imagine Status and Location as application ingredients that can be combined together to create new application compounds using social ingredients, like People, Places, Localities, Times, Topics and Events. The composite that results is what I call "Right Here Now" services, and the focus of this post.

There's a debate over the boundaries between open source communities and the business that tend to develop around them. Hang on readership, we're trying out a new idea: Twitscan. Many of the conversations that matter in technology are happening in and around Twitter. Some of these stories will include twitter exchanges, others will just follow a thread of responses and point you to some interesting individuals and conversations that are happening, right now in the "Twitvironment". This post covers some of the recent chatter around Open Core Licensing.

The Internet, ironically, has been abuzz this week with dire news about how the Social Media and the Internet itself is stunting our mental growth, is turning us into idiot savants, Aspergers and reverting our brains to a more primitive state. The first such statement came from Lady Greenfield, an Oxford University neurologist, baroness, and director of the Royal Institution in England, who warned that sites such as Facebook and Twitter were contributing to the decline of critical skills in children who used them heavily, claiming that repeated exposure could effectively rewire the brain.

Twitter is the only social media tool that has proven itself in the business arena. While some tools have serviced niche uses for specific industries, Twitter's global appeal to business and the amount of value it adds are unmatched. The irony of this situation is that any attempt to recapture that value necessarily destroys it.

The syndication model has long been a major facet of the way that the web works, but for the most part its been a largely single direction notification mechanism - you publish content, this updates a syndication queue, then...

Do you trust web based applications with your password? What about trusting a third party web application? Sometimes it's hard to avoid the temptation of using a third party application, and sometimes you may not even know you're using a third party application.