Either way, Stride gum’s new Facebook application can help (sorta). It’s called “Change Your Flavor, Change Your Life.” To promote new Stride Shift, a gum that changes flavors as you chew, this app goes beyond consumers simply clicking “Like.” You pick a new life, like adventure kayaker or ostrich jockey, and the app adds a photo gallery with pictures and stories that make it seem like you really are spending life riding rapids or large flightless birds.

People won’t just be talking about the funny photos – they’ll also be talking about how the gum changes flavor. Of course, ROI for social media isn’t easy to gauge so it helps to know what kind of return you’re looking for. As Stride marketing director Gary Osifchin says in BrandWeek:

“We’re really looking at it not just from the numbers, but also the quality of the conversation we see from our consumer. The more engaged and the more they talk with each other, the more affection they have for our brand and they’ll really become brand advocates.”

Looking at Stride’s new app, it’s easy to see that there are 3 keys to social media success:

1. Start smart. Know from the beginning what your goals and benchmarks are. That’ll help shape strategy and make it easier to prove to the higher ups that the campaign was a success.
2. Choose appropriate media. Where are your consumers congregating online? Which platforms make it easiest to share content?
3. Stay relevant. Make sure that conversations generated will include your brand and benefits, not just passing chatter about the marketing itself.

What social media ideas are you chewing on? Will their flavor last or at least morph into something different yet still impactful, like Stride Shift gum?

“You wake up and check your email on your bedside iPad — that’s one app. During breakfast you browse Facebook, Twitter, and The New York Times — three more apps. On the way to the office, you listen to a podcast on your smartphone. Another app. At work, you scroll through RSS feeds in a reader and have Skype and IM conversations. More apps. At the end of the day, you come home, make dinner while listening to Pandora, play some games on Xbox Live, and watch a movie on Netflix’s streaming service. You’ve spent the day on the Internet — but not on the Web. And you are not alone.”

But if the web is truly dead, just how are you reading this? Could it be that I am the only one shocked to not have seen more news articles, tweets, Facebook status updates, blog posts and the like about this war cry? Maybe I missed them because I wasn’t on the web that day. Then again we all know to never feed the trolls. What I found rather interesting about this article is pointed out by Gawkers Ryan Tate:

“Wired released its cover story package first to the Web, on Wired.com. You won’t find it in Wired’s iPad edition, and it’s not out in print yet. The death of the web might be the ‘inevitable course of capitalism,’ but it apparently pays better to deliver that news via a dying medium.”

The web may have been around for 20 years like Anderson noted, but how many of us have actually used the internet for 20 years? I personally did not have internet until 1996 when I started college. The reality is the web is still in its infancy in the grand scheme of things, and that’s coming from the real “inventor” of the web, not this guy….oh wait that’s the internet.

For most people, trying to figure out the difference between what is on the web and what is on the internet is an impossible task. For those of us who work in this medium, one thing is certain, a headline like “The Web is Dead” will grab attention, get people thinking and push the discussion further.

It’s also a fun read.  And it really is alive.  Right?

The company is led by founder Mark M. Edmiston, former president of Newsweek, along with a dozen of freelancers, hand-picked based on their areas of expertise. The team’s philosophy represents a timely, simple business model for digital media: readers pay a fair price for high quality, original and exclusive content to be delivered in a superior format to their mobile devices. Edmiston thought of the idea in the spring of 2009, before the iPad reached the market, but well after Kindle and other mobile devices began to steal readers away from print. The venture has been financed largely by friends, family and a crop of angel investors, and has raised $600,000 so far.  Perhaps for this reason, Nomad Editions sees themselves as a family, a business created from the ground up, and the management team wants the content creators to be well rewarded for success. Proving their commitment to this tight-knit company culture,  a percentage of Nomad’s revenue will be shared amongst contributors and editors alike.

The content contained within the electronic pages of the magazine will be based on individual interest, specified in advanced, within the areas of food, movies, surfing, and exceptional viral video. With designated quirky titles such as ‘Wave Lines: Your Brain on Surfing,’ Nomad Editions rant promises that each section will take approximately 30-minutes to read, seemingly designed for the average commuter. After a 30-day trial, Nomad Editions will be priced at a fair $24/year.  To make the service even more everything friendly, Treesaver, a new company that divides content into pages by automatically adjusting the layout to the size of your screen, is sharing some technology muscle to Nomad.  With Treesaver, readers can users use one web address to view the same content on their iPhone and/or desktop.

With similar digital magazines such as “Wired”, which sold an impressive 24,000 iPad apps in one day, it has already been proven that there is a huge market for an application like Nomad. “There is clear demand for good content on mobile devices as evidenced by the amazing growth of e-books and the terrific response to the magazine ‘apps’ launched on the iPad” Edmiston, Nomad’s CEO.

The service is set to go live October 15, 2010.  I’ll give the 30-day free trial a try.  Why not?

When businesses or organizations are looking to get into social media, they often feel overwhelmed and pressured to do everything at once, right away. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard “We aren’t ready for this type of project!” or “I’m too busy for this kind of thing.”

The reality is that social media should be treated like any other business process – research, vetting, development and implementation. You’re not flipping a switch and it’s all “ON.” You’re figuring out where your customers are, what they want and how to interact with them on your own time. Bottom line – you have to think about social media, whether it’s starting with something small or going for it all.

The Piehead strategists have put together a four step guide to help make social media manageable. The guide will be delivered via this blog throughout the next several weeks beginning with this Starter Kit:

Step one: Figure out why you want to be in the social media landscape. Having an online presence these days is a basic to-do, and while websites are the default – giving consumers a landing page – there are other channels and communications tools one might use to target a specific group.

Are you trying to increase sales? Have a better relationship with your customers? Attract a new demographic of potential new customers? Figuring out why you want to be in social media will go a long way in determining how to do it and when.

Step two: Now that you know you want to participate in social media, the key is to figure out where. The ability to locate your target audience and develop the necessary tools to engage them is one of the key differentiators between success and failure. You may have a preconceived notion of where your customers are online, but the truth is, you could be terribly off-base (no offense!).

For example, if you’re a company selling minivans and looking to target soccer moms, then Facebook may be the right place to be. Why? Recent statistics show that one of the fastest growing demographics on Facebook just happens to be women between the ages of 35-50.

Step three: So you know where you want to be online. Congrats! Next, it’s time  to figure out who’s going to design, develop and implement your idea. Often you won’t have the resources to do it yourself, so look to an interactive agency (shameless plug) to help you out! This type of agency can design, develop and distribute just about anything you can come up with, and maybe even give you an idea or two. Step Four: Now that you know where you want to be and have the channels created to reach your audience, you need some strategy. Basically, you need campaigns that will leverage those channels to create buzz and momentum. By directly engaging consumers via the newly created channels, you will be able to both solidify loyalty and attract new customers.

For example, the company who has set up the Facebook page to sell their minivans to soccer moms can now create a campaign to leverage a Facebook application. The application is a minivan check-list that allows moms to make sure they have everything they need for their daily activities, and is accessible via their smartphones. The idea is to give the consumer something they need, but also motivate them to share the application with fellow moms (and your potential customers).

Step 4: Measurement should follow any campaign. Determining what works and what doesn’t work is important to figuring out your future social strategy campaigns.

The reality is that anything that is online is moving at a million miles an hour, including audiences. While Twitter may be “hot” now, it could be “dead” in a week.

So what’s it going to be for your brand – is your brand creating relevant, likeable content with pass along value like the Old Spice bodywash campaign? Are you delighting customers with jingle jangle instead of punishing them with jangle jingle?

It’s a well known fact that Facebook and Twitter are primary internet destinations for many consumers. Facebook itself just recently announced that it has reached 500 million global users. With millions of consumers spending their online time within these networks, delivering content and engagement tools is a hot topic for brand marketers. Creating a strong differentiator among competing brands may be the key to success or failure.

Interactive agencies just might have a background in design and development to create those engagement tools and vehicles for content, in addition to including the strategy usually offered by traditional agencies. A recent Forrester report confirms this assumption as it points to the changing roles of agencies as they adapt a broader set of services for clients. For example, you want to have a presence on Facebook as well as create viral buzz to grow the community. While a traditional communications consultant or agency might be able to map out how to do this, most don’t have the capabilities to design, develop and promote the campaign. An interactive agency can design, build and promote the page, customize the HTML on the tabs and create a widget that is sharable amongst friends- all while monitoring online conversations and swiftly adjusting the strategy based on consistently measured results.

A great interactive agency rises above the noise by insisting on a creative partnership with its clients, and is constantly cultivating new ways that they can take advantage of online technology to better reach their customers.  Some traditional communication consultants and agencies do offer interactive solutions for design and development, but offering tools and technology is not enough. Strategy is no longer only for agencies or consultants; it’s everywhere –especially the interactive space.

Through this acquisition, Google and Slide plan to build a community where virtual goods can be created and distributed. The virtual good market could reach up to $835 million and possibly even into the billions, according to Inside Network. Additionally, marketers are excited because users can be manipulated more within social gaming than traditional search engine advertisement. No doubt  as a result, rumors have suggested that Google may be teaming up with Farmville creator Zynga, which boasts of 60 million users on Facebook, and growing.

The deal comes at great time for Google given the recent flop of Google Wave, not to mention the buzz Google Buzz failed to generate.  This move foreshadows the opportunities in the growing Andriod mobile market, which recently dethroned Blackberry as the #1 OS in America.  Ovum, a Datamonitor company, claimed that by 2015, users could be downloading more than 21 billion apps in a year, a staggering jump from the 2 billion downloads in 2009. The fact that Slide and Zynga boast of over $600 million in venture capital from high-profile investors like Khosla Ventures, Mayfield Fund, BlueRun Ventures and Founders Fund, seems to support such a prediction.

Some are a little weary about Google’s purchase of Slide because in 2008, Slide was estimated to be valued at $550 million.  Most are wondering why the price was so low, considering Max Levchin, Slide’s CEO and co-founder of PayPal, has always stated that to him, success would be marked when Slide becomes bigger than PayPal.  Though Levchin may not have achieved  this goal, he is happy about the future of Slide and Google as reflected in his recent comments on the transaction: “Google is committed to building new, open and better ways for people to connect with others.  At Slide, we have been focused on building online communities that foster self-expression, creativity and engagement across multiple platforms. Given our shared vision and values, this is a tremendous opportunity for the two companies to come together to change the way people socialize on the web.”

Social networks and online games account for about 33% of the time spent online in the US, according to a Nielsen study, and Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google Inc.  In a recent interview Norvig said, “I can’t speak for the whole company, but I guess not embracing the social aspects [was Google's biggest mistake]. Facebook came along and has been very successful, and I may have dismissed that early on.”

Like Facebook’s Mafia Wars, Google is building a social gaming army ready to attack and attract the public, and it wants you!

Problems with the phone began early on, and were simply Microsoft politics.  Engadget reports that the initial conflict arose when Microsoft’s J Allard began to support Kin (or Project Pink as it was called at the time) in 2008.  Allard, who also championed Xbox and Zune, saw loads of potential in Kin’s software: yet, during this time Windows Mobile 7, a more traditional and promising product, was also being developed. This is when things got…dramatic.

Andy Lees, the chief of Windows Mobile, was apparently never a fan of the Kin project,  as he felt that it impeded the development of Windows Mobile 7. As a result, the Kin was retooled and its release date was moved to work better with the Microsoft timeline. The whole situation, with all its badmouthing and competition, was not unlike an episode of The Hills, though perhaps less well produced (not that I’ve ever seen it).

With corporate politics running amuck and an unexpected rehashing of the phone’s Verizon plan, the Kin had the odds stacked against it to say the least.  And just when things couldn’t get any worse, Microsoft’s branding team put the final nail in Kin’s coffin.

In an attempt to reach younger consumers, Microsoft did what many companies are doing today – it took advantage of the growing influence of hipsters.  With their blasé attitude, skinny jeans, and rock and roll lifestyle, Microsoft saw these urban twenty-somethings as their key to success.  Yet, there was one problem – Microsoft failed to recognize that what makes hipsters “hip” isn’t just their obscure iPod playlists- they are actually hip to many of the mass marketing ploys now geared towards them, and it utterly offends their very “I’m-different -just -like -you -are” sensibilities.  A writer from Gizmodo explains, “Kin’s models look like caricatures of those kids, from that neighborhood, in pretty much any city, as drawn by marketing executives.”  Not cool.

Personally, I couldn’t agree more (thus the writing of this blog).  Having lived in the hipster Mecca of Montreal for some time now, I can confidently say that this type of association is laughable to say the least.  Young consumers don’t care if their phone has trendy ads.  They don’t need their phone to “like” fixed-gear bikes and bands they’ve never heard of.  What is truly important is the functionality of the phone – and that is what Microsoft ignored.  Regardless of how cool they tried to make the phone look, consumer feedback was unanimous – user experience was terrible.

And it wasn’t just the phone that met with disapproval.  The fabricated youth culture portrayed in those ads also lent to loads of criticism.  Not only were young people not taking the bait, but older, more traditional audiences also had a bone to pick.  In one of Kin’s commercials, it was suggested that the phone would be great for sending nude photos to your friends (at least it does something well).  The controversy from the ad could have perhaps scored with younger consumers, but once again the poor performance of the phone couldn’t be ignored by the audience it targeted.  In the end, the ad only created another hurdle for Microsoft.

All in all, we have learned some important lessons from Microsoft and the Kin.  First, don’t let your office dramas get in the way of your product’s success.  Next, remember that technology becomes hip when it is functional and user friendly – not because ad execs tell you it is.

Rural communities in the United States have notoriously lacked Broadband infrastructure. Places like Clarksville, New Hampshire; Sherman Mills, Maine; and Enosburgh, Vermont, may be behind in the Information Age, but this does not necessarily mean all are purposefully living “off-the-grid.”

Social Media and smartphones are just two examples of how new technology is being embraced by rural areas to broaden communication. Farmers now use smartphones to check the weather forecast, send photos, check the market, or socially connect their farms to the eaters of America, and some even use Twitter to communicate and market their “brand.”

Even Corporate America is joining the cause, as evidenced by Frito-Lay’s recent use of social media to strut the power of the company’s potato farmers and provide them with greenhouses. A big tip of the cowboy hat to this big brand for raising awareness of social media within the farming community by bringing farmers, consumers and social media together.

The tech-savvy generation is an important factor and can help by mobilizing and donating its collective digital talents to create so-called cooperative websites with built-in social networking tools. For example, Becky McCray, located in Oklahoma, helps share the wonders of social media with farm communities, small businesses and rural causes throughout the country and entire world.

The importance of social media needs to continue to be promoted, especially in rural America, on farms, in community centers, shelters, soup kitchens and food banks. Doing so enables each cause to reach hundreds of thousands of people instantly, opens communication and helps spread a message, whether that message is that of a large corporation or an underrepresented community.

Get involved! Make Social Media happen! Is there a rural area that you recently visited or read about that could benefit from social media? How about a charity right in your ‘hood? Think about it, each of us has the power to help. That’s why this works in the first place, right?

Jason Boucher is an Information Technologist at The University of New Hampshire by day and writer for Bouchermedia by night. He has 10+ years experience working with non-profit college & community radio and is involved with the local art and music community. Jason also hosts social networking meet-ups and is a member of Social Media Club New Hampshire.

Like a double rainbow, social media is an amazing phenomenon with uncertain ramifications.   We posed the obvious question – what does it mean? – to Slice Night attendees, and our stalwart team of summer interns recorded their answers.  The results speak for themselves.

Literally.  It’s people speaking.

Join the conversation.  What words come to mind when you hear the buzz phrase “Social Media”?  Share your answer below: