As a media blogger, I receive a number of book review requests. It is quite endearing to receive emails from publicists writing if I would like a freshly printed copy. Of course am happy to receive a copy. I love to read and learn more about how others are using social media . Obviously, the risk and reward pendulum is something to consider before asking a blogger or media personality to review your work. You never know when a recipient will love it or hate it.

Blogging To Drive Business by Eric Butow & Rebecca Bollwitt is a thumbs up in my world for these  reasons:

1) It gives you the ABCs of blogging in a step-by-step easy to read concise and comprehensive format. Immediately right after the introduction the authors dive into the importance of blogs and its uses from promoting products and services, reaching people, pushing content, how to get people to read your blog, crowdsourcing and more. With proper implementation and resources to support the delivery process blogs can be a truly effective communication, marketing and people gathering tool. As websites are the epicenter of your brand’s existence – blogs are the epicenter of your communication strategy.

2) Peppered with examples, case studies and visuals. The authors made sure that each chapter is supported with examples. A ton of them! From successful blogs and varying applications to a variety of platforms and plug-in tools to choose from.

3) To have a successful blog, there are rules and methods to follow. Rule #1 Listen to your audience. Rule #2 Create a platform for two-way discussion — this is not all about you. Rule #3 Listening by sharing. Visual media is a great way to spark a conversation. Rule #4 Create tools for your audience to communicate with each other and you. Measure the the energy level of your readers’ engagement, experiment and make corrections along the way.

Blogging To Drive Business is a definite read for those who are considering to use blogging as part of their business communication strategy. As a social media and digital branding expert, I use this book to help educate my clients. Specially the small to medium business owners. Recently, it helped me close recent long-term new business.

On April 7, we released an advanced review of the Kelly Blue Book (KBB) Car Buyer’s App. At that time the free app was not available on iTunes. Finally approved by Apple on April 16 users can now download the app under the lifestyle category.

It is everything we said it would be in our previous review – pure Godiva for the eyes!  I was not at the preview so I download the app for the first time. Am not in the market for a car at this time, yet I think it could come in handy when I consider a second-hand purchase while in the West Coast for a few months.

Here’s why I think car buyers would be so into it:

• Easy and simple navigation options. In the market for a new car? Hit the “new” car icon and you’ll find a list of alphabetized automobile brands. Each brand is cataloged by make, model and year. Used car option is cataloged by year, then by brand. The app allows you to select a style, for example Hans recommended I check out the Mazda 3 2006. The app allows you to browse excellent photos, reviews, ratings and more! It makes it really easy even for a none-car enthusiast who is simply in the market to purchase a car.
• Prefer to buy through a dealer? Find a number of dealers in your area by brand.
• Kelley Blue Book video reviews are also accessible in the app. It even comes with search!
• Users can save, favorite and even share their searches with friends on Twitter.

I downloaded the Kelley Blue Book Car Buyer’s app because I think it will help me with my future car purchase. You can too – download now!

Kelley Blue Book Car Buyer's App now on iTunes!

Sir Richard Branson one of the international recognizable personalities of kiteboarding announced the partnership of Billabong and the BVI Kite Jam in 2011.

Kiteboarding as a recognized adventure sport has been around for a little over a decade. Once considered the most dangerous sport on the planet during its early years, today it is getting a second look from water, wind and outdoor sports enthusiasts. Why?

• The equipment and gear has improved through the years.
• Instruction for the sport is mushrooming in beach resorts from the coastlines of Brazil, Ecuador, Puerto Rico, Australia, Dominican Republic, Egypt, United Kingdom, France, Italy, Canada, Maui, Florida, Oregon, North Carolina and practically any place you can find water and consistent wind. Definitely a revenue source for the local beach economy.
• A sport dominated by men with noticeable growth in interest from women and teens.
• Kiteboarding is an all year-round sport and has grown into multi-categories including kiteboarding/kitesurfing, snowkiting and landboarding.
• After the investment in lessons and quiver (collective term for kite equipment) all you need is wind, water, snow or sand to enjoy the thrill of the sport.
• Travel is a huge component. Kiters are known to visit exotic places to kite and plan all their vacation around their sport.
• Once a kiter there is no turning back. It is a lifestyle sport.

The kiteboarding lifestyle attracts a certain personality type. It is not for the mass market since it requires time and dedication to get the basics. A single brand new quiver starts at $1,000 and up. While lessons can cost from $450 to another $1,000 and more depending on your learning ability. So who are the crazies getting into the sport?

Professionals who have an average income of $75K and up and high net worth individuals. The sport attracts people from industries that are usually high-stress, high-risk and high-reward including venture capital, finance, medicine, technology and entrepreneurs.

Technology and social media is a big component of a kiter’s lifestyle. Kiters with jobs that allow them to remotely stay connected with their professional organizations live a mobile kite life. Bringing their source of income wherever they go. Still considered a niche community of over 200,000 worldwide in 2006 and expected to grow 20% each year, the kiteboarding community is definitely a movement to watch.

Learn more about the new geek hobos lifestyle on Just Kite It.

The advent of social media as a way to deliver and consume information has lifted personal and professional barriers. We’re more social as a species. Technology has disarmed our inhibitions or given us the space to be less inhibited. Like anything new we experiment and test. Run a variety of use case scenarios to discover if this is something you’ll want to have as part of your life rituals and for how long?

Does it diminish the depth of our social connection simply because we know we can FB or Twitter people anytime, any day? Does it bring me closer to the world at large and say…oh wow I didn’t know thinkers like that exist.

I really don’t have all the profound answers. As much as I am a big consumer both on a personal and a professional level, I wonder about the real connection it creates. I wonder if we are on a feeding frenzy?  Feeding on each others’ ideas, maligning them secretly or are we truly helping and inspiring each other?

I am in places like Foursquare, Gowalla, Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and now Tumblr. Some of my close circle of friends asks why do you care or they’ll laugh at me having posted photos from the previous night’s event. I guess my simple answer is I just do.

Secretly I hope that those who are in these social networks do care enough to be there and contribute. How about a cup of coffee with that?

@mavindigital

IF you have not caught the Internet Week New York bug yet, here’s why you should:

Gain insight. Even when you think you know it all, there is a lot to learn. As an entrepreneur, big consumer and evangelist of everything tech, digital and social media it is important to stay current and filter what is useful and relevant for our clients and community. A few events that I think are key and if you can register  would include Beyond Facebook: How will the students of today use the web of tomorrow, The Future of Digital Cities and Creativity and Technology (I am at this one today!).

Be inspired. Admittedly my first time at a New York Tech Meetup event last night, I was inspired by the products showcased. Will certainly make this event a part of my monthly repertoire. My personal favorites:

• UpNext offers a 3D view and local search or your city (currently just New York). It is available on the iPhone!
• Centrl offers a new way of connecting with people on the go. Available on the BlackBerry and iPhone.
• Livestream formerly known as Mogulus. I believed in their product when I discovered it last summer. I didn’t realize how powerful the new Procaster tool – it is rad! I am so looking forward to dabbling in videos thanks to Livestream!
• Aviary bringing design and editing to the browser. I haven’t tried it, but will definitely encourage our team of designers to dabble in it.

Connect and reconnect. Internet Week New York creates an invaluable opportunity for people to connect and reconnect. Everyone who is passionate about the community, opinion leaders, entrepreneurs, VCs, techies and creatives are engaging and making the effort to support the events and programs. Personally met a number of new key contacts simply by getting indirectly involved with a handful of events and being present at a number of them. It is tough to leave your desk knowing you’ll be back in a few hours with a foot more of work before you left. Yet if you are aspiring to start a company or pursue an entrepreneur career in the future this is one of those city program events that you can’t simply miss. The time is now.

Learn about new trends in tech from kids. At the ContentNext event last Monday, June 1 10 Kid Entrepreneurs To Watch were showcased on flyers. Here’s the roster MyYearbook.com, Whateverlife.com, MobilEdu, Uno, FEE Entertainment, Courses, InternshipIN, Dynamik Duo, Teens in Tech, Eclectyk.

Celebrate the people who make it happen. By participating in the events and programs you are helping celebrate and support the people who work hard to make it happen.

Enjoy and have fun! Have you checked out the parties? Quite an impressive list difficult to decide which one to hit…I’ve been going from one to another the past two days.  Unsure if I can keep up the entire week! The list of the fun events are also listed in the Internet Week New York schedule.

Now get out there! If you tweet, the official hashtag is #iwny.

~ jessica ~

The application also includes an impressive feature called Nearby™, which enables fans to watch and exchange messages, photos and video with other NIN fans real-time from all over the world, powered by Google Earth.  By zooming in to a concert location, you can follow the localized discussion during the show while viewing pictures posted live from the venue.  Consider it a one-stop shop for community and content powered by the fans themselves and to extend the concert experience beyond the people actually attending the show.

So why should you care?  Well, for starters, NIN Access looks like everything that Web 2.0 promised to be for musicians, fans and frankly, anyone who embraces progressive technology — all wrapped up in an incredibly slick package.  It is, in a sense, the “ultimate resource” for the NIN community online: one that integrates seamlessly with services and technologies their fans are already using — Blogger, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, RSS, bittorrent, and dynamic playlists, with the next release of the app promising to incorporate Vimeo, Photobucket, MediaWiki, openID and Facebook Connect.  By doing this, Reznor has effectively brought together community and content, powered by fans themselves, while extending the concert experience beyond those actually attending the show.  Further, he’s deepened the interaction between artist and fan, and between the fans themselves.  And this, if done correctly, could prove to be a mighty powerful thing for musicians and marketers alike.

Eric Pilkington, Guest Blogger

As information sharing becomes more conversational, marketers are seeking ways to define the metric around the “noise” as it influences a call to action. Katie and Marc introduced the idea of conversation measurement based on the principles of social science and social psychology. The duo pointed out that the practice are not one and the same, yet in this instance are complementary metrics agents.

According to Katie, linguistic style offers rich insight and color into the multifaceted dimension of an individual. A conversation can be divided into four stratas: relevance, mindset, role and ecosystem. Traditional metrics measurement approach practices the black boxing of conversations therefore rich content and information is lost. She further elaborates that listening to micro conversations offers a layer of rich detail about your brand you may not have known before. What buzzwords do people associate with your brand? Marc chimes in that further metric detail can be viewed by looking at the network pattern of an individual. Individuals have roles to play in a network which Marc identified as follows:

1. spammers (often times not real people)
2. flame warriors
3. answer people
4. discussion people

For social media to work, a balance in the conversation spectrum must be achieved. He calls it “a collective spectrum that requires a balance of roles.” Marc demonstrated that by using NodeXL a tool that can analyze an individual’s social behaviour across multiple networks and weave the information into one digestible graph which helps determine their role pattern.

Why is this information valuable to marketers? Here are my thoughts:

1. Allows a marketer to test multiple messages across individual roles and networks
2. Specifically design based on a user profile’s degree of engagement
3. Measure the influence of an individual role across multiple networks
4. Determine the probable response of an individual type within a network to the brand. IF I do X, individual role X will respond negatively to this message
5. It offers the opportunity to access predictive data versus reactionary data
6. Identify probable brand ambassadors
7. Associates the impact of the message based on the buzz created and response to call to action
8. Metrics around conversations and number crunching of quantifiable data are useful ammunition to help support and/or correct engagement programs

Overall, I believe this type of data and insight is invaluable to marketers who are advocates for social media yet are finding it a challenge to implement within their organization. It also helps validate the impact of marketing and social media to the bottomline.

I’m pretty sure I missed a few points during the session, so please help add to this. Thank you!

Three client levels, including her royal icon Gwen Stefani, numerous Creative Directors (Five at least) and our rad developer teams co-working in multiple time zones (New York, Chicago, New Jersey and Europe).

My team and I built and launched Gwen Stefani’s L Lamb Fragrance in TWO WEEKS.

Find out how. Write jessica at mavin digital dot com

This project was very personal in many ways. It was what gave me the courage to start my own company now known as Mavin Digital, Inc. The same team that delivered L, Lamb Fragrance with me is behind our success and growth at Mavin Digital, Inc.

L, Lamb Fragrance was released in conjunction with Fashion Week and Gwen Stefani’s world tour. It received an impressive amount of traffic in the first few weeks and fashionistas raved. Sweepstakes and viral marketing was part of the package at launch and are now turned off.

Technology used include Action Script 2, After-effects, ASP.net and HTML.

We delivered this project in behalf of Dogmatic, Inc., MKTG (formerly US Concepts) and Coty, Inc.

Competition is heating up as hundreds of young start- ups and entrepreneurial teams across the country compete to land a spot in one of five “accelerator” programs, each with deadlines looming this month. At stake is seed money, access to leading experts and mentors, and the opportunity to turn an idea into a viable product, and a dream into a daily reality.

So, what does it take to get into one of these programs? And what should a team consider before applying in the first place?

To gain insight, I spoke with Buzzable.com founders and LaunchBox Digital 2008 alumni Satjot Sawhney and Ashish Kundra. Little more than six months after completing the LaunchBox program, Sawhney and Kundra launched, Buzzable.com on February 27^th, and have already seen the diverse ways in which users are utilizing their platform.  (For example, teachers in the Highered group are bouncing questions off of each other, folks in the Mexico group are having an asynchronous chat, and the Buzzable team manages and responds to ‘buzzable-related’ tweets in the buzzable support group.

We spoke about their experience applying for, and participating in, the 2008 cycle of the LaunchBox Digital accelerator program. In this blog post, the first of a two part series about their experience with LaunchBox, Sawhney and Kundra shed light on the application process itself, and the key questions and main mindset that lead to their acceptance into, and success within, the LaunchBox Digital accelerator program.

What made you decide to do apply for a program?

A combination of seed funding and the opportunity to work with people who would help the business grow. The truth is, cash behind you makes things easier. You don’t waste time over analyzing minor expenditures, and instead focus on product development.

Why LaunchBox?

They forced us to answer critical questions from the get- go. Even at our very first interview, they critiqued the crap out of our proposal in a way that was very specific to our proposed business. This was precisely the type of feedback we felt would be necessary to help us reach our maximum potential.

How far along was your product when you applied?

We were at a very conceptual stage when we applied for the program, and actually ended up changing our business completely.

Can you elaborate on the application process?

After submitting our initial application and participating in a phone interview, we were invited to DC for a face-to-face meeting. At that meeting, we spent an hour and a half with LaunchBox principals, really getting into the nitty gritty of the company and answering many tough questions, some of which we had not yet even considered.

We didn’t just wait around after the interview, either. We spent the entire week after our meeting in constant contact with LaunchBox, following up on all of the questions we had been unprepared for or unable to answer.

It was an intense period of dialogue, but we also saw it as an opportunity to learn as much as possible from the interview process.  Our thinking was, “We may not get in, but we are going to learn everything from these guys while we have their attention…”

What are the top three things entrepreneurs considering an incubator program should weigh in deciding whether to apply?

The first question is definitely, are you ready to climb the mountain? Are you willing to commit to working 14- 15 hours a day, alone or with a partner in order to see this thing through? Second, you should ask yourself whether you need the money. What will you use it for? Don’t just take it for the sake of taking it- have a use for it. Finally, figure out what attributes of a program are most important to you. For us, it was about the mentors, and about having advisors that would be willing to ask the tough questions.

Take some time to do some self analysis first, it will help you determine whether an incubator program makes sense, and which one would be the right fit for you and your team.

What personal attributes do you believe made you successful in applying and participating in the LaunchBox program?

Persistence, persistence, persistence.

I’d say that the interview process helps to narrow down who really has what it takes to go through the program itself.   It is sort of like college admissions in that sense—the partners WANT participating teams to succeed, and therefore use the vetting process to identify those companies they believe can manage the workload, and the up-and-down-roller-coaster ride of it all.

Do you have any final recommendations for teams applying to one of the incubator programs this year?

Be passionate and sincere. If you are serious and you think you have an idea that is going to be big- communicate that clearly. At the end of the day, they are funding people, not just good ideas. Show that you believe in your idea and your team without a shadow of a doubt, and that you have the drive and personality to keep pushing.

For more information on Buzzable, check out this article in TechCrunch, or follow @buzzable on twitter. Feeling inspired? Click here for details on the LaunchBox Digital accelerator program, or read-up on one of these other programs currently accepting applications: Amplifier, TechStars, Y-Combinator and DreamIT.

Alexis Rodich, MBA Candidate, Guest Blogger

For starters, the smartphone is contradicting a trend we currently see in the traditional desktop space. Whereas cloud computing and other technologies are shifting content from specialized applications into browser-centralized spaces, smartphones are being packaged with dozens of applications, and access to thousands more through the application marketplace (Apple’s App Store, for example, just topped 15,000 applications).

And so for this very reason, more and more advertisers view the mobile application as the new website. Today, mobile ad solutions and networks are gaining ground on their traditional online counterparts. By providing a high quality Software Development Kit (SDK) to application developers, companies like AdMob, Smaato, even Nokia, are enabling developers to monetize their applications with display advertising and sponsorship opportunities. From the advertisers’ perspective, there is more than enough volume to justify a buy, and since these advertising features are centrally built, the networks are able to provide rich ad experiences via SDK.

Another “big deal” factor: Consider the recent partnership between Adobe (maker of Flash) and chip-maker ARM (which powers about 90 percent of mobile phones worldwide). While it’s true that more and more phones can browse the Web, it’s also true that many mobile phones have only a limited ability to show much of the Web’s content. Video and Flash-heavy websites simply don’t work well, if at all, on many phones due to the software and hardware incompatibility. But this recent collaboration marks a commitment to bring more of the Web to mobile devices.

All of this of course, has an effect on how businesses and developers approach the mobile Web. With so many people from around the world accessing the web via mobile devices, smart companies and developers will need to:

1.  Understand that brands and access to critical information is always on. Brands today are expected to provide faster and more customizable experiences, more engaging content, and more opportunities for consumers to share ideas and opinions. And a lot of this is happening through mobile devices and applications.

2.  Extend website access to include mobile browsers. It’s no longer enough to test sites on Firefox, IE and Safari. Developers will need to develop and test their sites for mobile devices to see how they look and function there as well.

3.  Develop mobile versions of their websites. In addition to testing sites for mobile-compatibility, developers will need to start considering developing specifically for mobile devices.

4.  Focus on mobile applications. Mobile-compatible sites are good; mobile applications are better (just ask Apple).

5.  Consider sending mobile email and SMS. In addition to “traditional” HTML email campaigns, companies need to look at more effective ways to reach and engage their audiences. Like its websites, companies and developers should be testing HTML emails for mobile compatibility, while considering SMS and mobile-specific landing pages as a complement to these campaigns.

With the maturation and penetration of smartphones, businesses, developers and content providers can no longer afford to ignore users of their websites who happen to surf in on a mobile device. Luckily, it’s now possible to achieve a feature-rich, interactive, and visually impactful mobile presence that serves your brand, extends your community of users onto a new platform, helps make inroads into new user groups and demographics, and above all, positions you well in a rich media environment that is no longer a thing of the future but has, in fact, already arrived.

Eric Pilkington, Guest Blogger