Social media brings me closer to people with whom I ordinarily would seldom interact. Family, friends, colleagues. As my co-author Amber Naslund put it once “with social media, my relationships aren’t bound by geography or circumstance.” Exactly.

People always slam Twitter for people talking about “what they had for lunch” but the blending of the personal and professional is very attractive to me. I want to know what music you listen to, what you think is funny, why your cat is insane. When was the rule written that business had to be all-business? Life is so boring under those conditions.

I love that I can interact with clients and friends at any time, from nearly any place. The ability to make or consume social media from an array of mobile devices increases the convenience factor (and the pressure on my wi-fi router) immensely.

The reason I was originally a political campaign consultant (late 80s, early 90s), is the satisfying success metrics. You can’t get half elected. The day after an election, you’re either ebullient or morose. That’s what attracted me to online marketing initially, and why I made the jump to that career in the mid-90s. The tracking online (including social media) far outpaces what I had at my disposal when I was doing traditional marketing. The fuzzy numbers of TV, print, radio, outdoor and traditional PR drove me crazy. I like math and analysis and reality.

There’s literally never a dull moment in social media. Every day is different, and significant changes occur on a near weekly basis. Facebook’s gyrations alone are enough to keep you on your toes. I love change. I thrive on it. I simply cannot imagine working in an industry where status quo was the norm. I understand the appeal of certainly, it’s just not my preference.

I am compelled by the fact that the bottom line objective of social media is to add human elements to companies that have acted like inhuman, robotic cyborgs for the past 40 years. The anthropomorphization of business is an interesting, satisfying challenge because it runs directly counter to what most businesspeople have been taught, and their corresponding comfort zone. Social media is fun because it’s hard.

There are no right answers in social media, just answers that are more likely to be correct. It’s a benefit, not a drawback that (despite what others might proclaim) there is no social media playbook that can taken off the shelf and executed in rote fashion for all companies. You are free to make your own reality and script your own success.

Sure, we all talk about Facebook and Twitter and YouTube. But the rise of social media isn’t about technology and tools, it’s about power and people. Social media gives us some measure of control over our relationships that have been largely fractured by our always-on society.

Every church, ad club, Rotary, Kiwanis, Elk, Moose etc organization in the U.S. is faced with declining membership, because who has the time for a 2-hour lunch any longer? Even in a recession, our economic productivity continues to climb. How is that possible? Because we are working faster, longer, and more intensely, and the time for friends and family falls by the wayside. And socia media also gives us power over brands in ways we’ve never enjoyed. Social media is word-of-mouth on steroids, and our ability to praise or punish brands with a few keystrokes is satisfying.

I’m a gadget guy. I love it. My favorite part of our new home in Bloomington, Indiana is the in-ceiling speakers throughout that I can manipulate with a hand-held Logitech Squeezebox controller, so I can pick any song from my iTunes library and play it in any room in three clicks. A love for software and hardware and figuring out how new stuff can change behavior is a handy attribute in the social media business.

As we adopt social media to connect personally and with companies, businesses will need to respond. Business responded to the invention of the telephone, fax machine, FedEx, and email. But have businesses truly responded to the rise of social media? Largely, they have not.

That’s the premise of my new book with Amber Naslund, “The Now Revolution: 7 Moves to Transform Your Business with Speed, Smarts & Social Media.” It’s how companies need to change their culture, their people, their process, and their measuring sticks to succeed in real-time business.

I realize the gift you give me every day – the gift of your attention. I am incredibly fortunate to have readers and supporters that expose my work to a wider audience than most social media consultants enjoy. Your faith creates for me an opportunity to educate more and more marketers and the companies for which they work. I don’t take that opportunity lightly, and I hope I never take it for granted.

Why do you love social media?

(illustration by my friend Mark Smiciklas who writes a great blog with tons of cool info-graphics)

Thanks to a partnership with Vlingo, owners of Android 2.0 or higher-equipped phones can now check in to Foursquare and update their status on Facebook and Twitter simply by speaking into their phones.

To try it out, download the free Vlingo app to your Android handset.

Using your voice, you can then update your location status on Foursquare by saying “check into Logan Airport”, locate your friends with commands like “where are my friends?” and “who’s nearby?” as well as send shout-outs to your buddies (e.g. “shout at Logan Airport waiting to board a plane to San Francisco”).

That’s not all though. The latest version of the Vlingo app also lets users share the service with their friends with the click of a button and also update their status on Facebook, Twitter and/or Foursquare at the same time by saying “social update” and speaking the message.

Previous Vlingo features remain, too: you can still use the app to send text and email messages, search the web, use Google maps and more.

As for BlackBerry, iPhone and Nokia S60 users – they’ll have to be patient for a while before they can start updating their status and locations with their voice.

Vlingo says it plans to roll out this functionality to other supported platforms in a future release but didn’t mention specific dates.

Do you consider voice-driven applications to be an ideal way to interact with mobile apps on your phone? Why (not)?

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SAN FRANCISCO — When Steve Jobs was preparing to introduce the Apple TV, he called it “one more hobby,” and based on our first impressions, that’s a safe choice of words.

The new Apple TV is a major hardware revamp — one quarter the size of its predecessor. It’s a small black box with curved edges, somewhat resembling a hockey puck. The highlights: It costs $100, and it integrates nearly instantly TV and movie rentals, along with Netflix streaming.

The major limitation: For TV rentals, only two studios are on board to stream shows through the Apple TV — ABC and Fox. This isn’t an adequate replacement yet for cable subscriptions.

So calling it a “hobby” was right — Apple’s starting out small, and maybe it’ll roll into something bigger if more studios warm up to the idea.

I got some hands-on time with the new Apple TV and it is a promising start.

TV and movie rentals are really snappy and fast. After choosing to rent a movie or show, the Apple TV takes a few seconds to prepare a buffer and begins streaming right away.

Also particularly cool was internet integration. I enjoyed searching through Flickr streams. Select a photo and hit the Play button and it immediately plays a slideshow with music and fancy transitions. I’m too lazy to check my friends’ Flickr streams the normal way on Flickr.com, aren’t you? Plus, the photos look great on a big screen through the Apple TV’s HDMI connection.

The Apple TV’s remote is familiar: It’s got the same aluminum and black design as the current MacBook Pros. It’s also very similar to the current Apple remote that controls Macs — only it’s a little longer and the buttons have small bumps for subtle tactile feedback. It feels great in the hand and navigating through the Apple TV menu was really smooth.

As good as the idea sounds, you won’t be able to use your iPhone or iPad as a remote for the Apple TV (not yet, at least). Instead, there’s a feature called “AirPlay,” so if you’re using your iPad or iPhone to listen to music, look at photos or watch a video, you can tap an AirPlay button, select your Apple TV and boom — your content is streaming onto your Apple TV. We weren’t able to test that since this feature won’t be available until iOS 4.2 ships in November, but we’ll keep you posted.

You can also stream media from your Mac’s iTunes library by choosing the “Computer” option and selecting a movie or playlist. I tested that out too, and it worked fine, but do note that iTunes only supports a few formats for video (.H264, for instance). So if you prefer getting media through some alternative non-iTunes-compatible means, you’re still going to be doing a lot of file conversion before you can watch your videos on the Apple TV.

All in all, it’s a cool device, and for $100 it’s going to pose a serious threat to the Roku Netflix player. But as a TV replacement, it’s still not there yet. Maybe later.

See Also:

• Apple Takes Aim at Cable With Tiny New Apple TV
• Live Blog: Apple’s iPod, Music Event
• Apple to Live Stream Press Conference — to Apple Customers Only

Photos: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

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Apple on Wednesday refreshed its family of iPod products. The iPod Nano, iPod Touch and iPod Shuffle all received some compelling makeovers that should help Apple stay in the lead in the portable media player market.

The iPod Nano was the most interesting upgrade. It does away with the click wheel seen in previous models and is now more like a belt buckle with a multi touchscreen displaying four mini icons on the main screen — basically, a quarter of the size of an iPhone or iPod Touch.

The Nano is now 1.6 inches wide, 1.4 inches tall and just 0.3 inches thick including the belt clip.

One screen on the Nano shows Artists, Playlists, Genius Mixes and Now Playing. Swipe your finger and you get a few more apps: radio, photo, podcasts and settings. There’s no home button, so you have to hold your finger down on the screen to exit an app, which is simple enough. You can also rearrange the icons by holding your finger on an app until it jiggles, then move it to wherever you’d like — just like on the iPhone.

The question remains as to whether or not the iPod Nano is running iOS and if we’ll be able to jailbreak it to run different apps. Apple hasn’t disclosed whether the operating system was iOS, but it sure looks like it. Update: An Apple engineer told Wired magazine editor Mark McClusky that the Nano does not run iOS.

Also noteworthy is that the Nano does not include a camera, even though last year’s model just introduced one. I guess nobody cared about shooting video with the tiny device, which isn’t surprising.

What’s nifty on the Nano is the small integrated clip to snap the device on to your pocket or belt buckle. The entire body including the clip is made of aluminum so it feels nice and sturdy.

Moving on to the iPod Touch, this was a predictable but monster update. It’s about a millimeter thinner than the iPhone 4, even though it’s got most of the same guts. There are the front and rear cameras — the rear for shooting high-definition videos and photos, the front for FaceTime video conferencing.

The Nano now has an Apple A4 processor and the high-resolution “retina display.” Grip it in your hand and it feels really smooth and light.

I had a chance to test FaceTime and it felt even faster than FaceTime on the iPhone 4, though this time around Apple might have just had a better Wi-Fi connection.

Overall, the new iPod Touch is the same as the iPhone 4 but now we can’t really say, “It’s an iPhone without a phone,” because the Touch includes a video-conferencing webphone! That’s a major difference and should have an impact on video conferencing in general.

Last, and least important, was an upgrade for the iPod Shuffle. To put it simply, it’s another belt-clip iPod similar to the Nano, only with the traditional click wheel. On the top is an integrated button for VoiceOver, which enables you to dictate the playlist or artist you want to listen to. Example, if you say “Play songs by The Shins,” the Shuffle will obey your commands.

The Shuffle is puny — 1.2 inches wide, 1.1 inches tall and 0.3 inches thick. And it is so lightweight I could barely even feel it in my pocket, which should be ideal for athletes.

Photos: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Update: Corrected an error where I said the previous iPod Nano snapped photos, when actually it only shot video.

See Also:

• Hands-on With the New $100 Apple TV
• Apple Takes Aim at Cable With Tiny New Apple TV
• Live Blog: Apple’s iPod, Music Event
• Apple to Live Stream Press Conference — to Apple Customers Only

CMOs must approach social technologies in an integration fashion
Although social technologies have been capturing marketers time for over four+ years in corporate, they’ve often been operated in a silo as experimental, or a separate deployment from traditional marketing. Yet the savvy marketing leader knows that reaching customers is increasingly becoming challenging as their touchpoints continue to fragment.

To reach the fragmented customer, marketers must apply an integrated approach.  As an industry, we should dispel notions that social marketing and it’s subsequent tools should operate in a silo, but instead sit horizontally in the marketing organization as they impact so many different forms of marketing tactics, approaches, and mindsets.  Furthermore, this has considerable impacts as social media organizations are founded and lead as they approach hub and spoke models to serve a variety of internal clients, as well as connect with customers in real time.

CMO Matrix: How Social Technology Must Integrate with Traditional Marketing, a Horizontal Approach

Executive Recommendations: Shatter the silo and integrate social across all marketing efforts now. The above matrix demonstrates that social technologies are already being integrated in the overall mix, yet marketing leadership is at a standstill on how to integrate.  Approach the space in a pragmatic method, follow these three steps:

• Start by organizing your company in a Hub and Spoke, Dandelion, or Centralized model.  Our research shows that companies are organizing in at least five different models.  Whether you have a centralized team or a hub and spoke, develop a way for an internal team to assemble (often cross-functional) to share and learn, then serve internal stakeholders.  Companies must know the 43+ points to get social business ready, watch our no-cost webinar and slides to learn more.
• Cascade training and encourage sharing to reduce risk and decrease time to market. Social technologies are still new and come with high degrees of risk as brands continue to have misteps in a new form of marketing.  Yet to reduce risk, empower those that have already experimented to share with others, reward those that quickly fail and get back up, and provide a constant stream of training from external partners.
• Require marketing plans to consider a social technology integration –not be a last minute addition. Marketers are not in the mindset of combining social technologies in existing events, campaigns, or traditional marketing.  Instead of being reactive and adding this as a last minute consideration, enforce a line item in marketing plans to include social integration up front.

I look forward to your additional comments, perhaps I’ve missed some key integration touchpoints, please leave comments below.

Target just announced that it would be the first brick and mortar retail store to sell Facebook Credits gift cards. The cards will be available at Target stores across the country beginning Sept. 5.

Facebook Credits gift cards will be sold in increments of $15, $25 and $50. The $15 Facebook Credits gift card has been created exclusively for Target. This a big move for the social network’s virtual currency; which is expected to make up one-third of Facebook’s revenue in the next year.

Facebook has scored a number of deals with gaming companies to allow its members to use Facebook Credits to buy virtual goods through Facebook credits, including partnerships with Zynga, Crowdstar, LOLapps, and RockYou.

The social network also recently struck a deal with Malaysian payments company MOL Global (the company that bought Friendster) to sell gift cards for credits at retail stores in Malaysia and Singapore.

Zynga also made a similar move earlier this year.