A summary from 239A

For those of you not lucky enough to sit-in on the three "how-to" sessions in 239A. Here are some take-away points:

Social Networking with Dr. Kaye Sweetser

• Facebook was started by Harvard students in 2004. It spread and spread and has now taken on the world! In fact, it currently grows at 1.3 percent per day and 30 percent per month.
  
• How can a business use Facebook? Don't do this: Target rounders
• Post your events on Facebook. They become viral.
• On Facebook, you can only set up the space for conversations about your organization to occur. Once they are set up, just leave it alone and listen.
• Hallett: "MySpace is the ghetto, and Facebook is suburbia."
• Twitter is a presence application, a form of micro-blogging. It like passing notes.
• A great way to use Twitter: send breaking news updates.
• On Twitter, your organization can track relevant phrases like "buying a car" or "donate blood."

Blog Monitoring with Josh Hallett

• RSS readers will sort the posts by date.
• When you are looking for relevant posts, search using your company's name, brand name, products and URLs.
  
• Important: Search for misspellings, as well as correct spellings.
• Use Flickr to do photo searches.
  
• Board Tracker
• These tools are great for showing where the problems are, but the PR person must find a solution. The best solution, just talk to the individual. Be human. It's hard to be rude to someone who is trying to make a personal connection with you.
• "Blog about them, and they will come."
• "folksonomy"- anyone can classify information using bookmarking sites

Corporate Blogs with Josh Hallett

• Notes during the session
• dark blog