This isn”t normally my kind of thing, but on the advice of my friend Paulie Sabol, I decided to check out InstantBuzz.com, the latest site/project/product from internet marketing gurus Mike Chen and Mark Joyner. With all the buzz about buzz marketing, the name alone caught my attention, and I was also pretty intrigued by the [...]

For any readers who are in Israel, I”m also appearing on a panel Monday, January 3.
The MIT Enterprise Forum of Israel
in cooperation with
The Leon Recanati Graduate School of Business Administration
The Virtual Handshake: Social Software and Online Social Networks
David Teten & Avinoam Ben-Zeev
Monday, January 3rd, 16:30-19:00
Kess Hamishpat Hall (ground floor), Buchman Building- Law [...]

I”ll be speaking Dec. 29 in Tel Aviv. If you”re around, please join us!
Tel Aviv University/Leon Recanati Graduate School of Business Alumni of Israel present
“How to Quadruple Your Sales with Social Software”

David Teten, CEO, Nitron Advisors
18:30, Dec. 29, 2004
Learn how to use “social software” to increase your sales:

• Overview of social network software, relationship [...]

Thanks to Cynthia Typaldos & Victor Grishchenko for this priceless tidbit. As Cynthia said:
This is an amazing document. It should be the warning label on the home page of every social networking website. Franklin’’s so-called “recommendation letter” is hysterically funny and reminds me of requests I used to get thru Spoke, where I [...]

Does blogging still have you baffled? Deborah and John-Paul Micek of Business Owner’’s Coaching Club have put together a free 10-minute video, Setting Up Your First Blog with Blogger.com. This is step by step, keystroke by keystroke, and it still only takes ten minutes! If you”ve been putting it off, watch this video [...]

Too funny…
Dilbert Builds a Social Networking Site (image)
Or, as my friend Cynthia Typaldos commented:

Great concept but I think it has already been done :-)
Tribe.net ?
Kidding aside, I don”t generally recommend sites like Tribe and MySpace as the starting point for people who are focused strictly on business networking. Nonetheless, I must say that I”ve been [...]

According to Newsweek’’s article, The Alpha Bloggers, the following bloggers comprise the A-list:
- Doc Searls
- Adam Curry
- Dave Winer
- Dan Gillmor
- Robert Scoble
Newsweek says these are the new thought leaders in the high-tech community:

The lesson is that there’’s a new force—spearheaded by people who work for no bosses and whose prose never sees an editor’’s [...]

Major media is catching on that real business is being done via social networking sites. According to last week’’s Wall Street Journal (subscription):

Making new business contacts is the third-most-popular feature of online networks — after contacting friends and looking for jobs — says Nate Elliott, an analyst at Jupiter Research, a unit of Jupitermedia Corp. [...]

In an intriguing turn of events, Time has named Power Line its Blog of the Year.
More like “Year of the Blog”. As Time’’s Lev Grossman writes:

Before this year, blogs were a curiosity, a cult phenomenon, a faintly embarrassing hobby on the order of ham radio and stamp collecting. But in 2004, blogs unexpectedly vaulted into [...]

Another promising-looking event… New Communications Forum, aka “Blog University”, is being held January 26-27 in Napa, California, and February 7-8 in Paris, France. Workshops and sessions include:
- Corporate Blogging: Getting Started
- How To Pitch Bloggers
- Writing for Blogs
- Forming Communities Online: Group & Conference Blogging & Wikis
- Using Blogs to Enhance Employee Communications
- The Blog’s [...]