Thank you for making the Buzz Bin a top 20,000 ranked blog on Technorati, a measurement based on how many blogs link to you. The top 20k ranking has been a goal since March, when the blog changed its name from Diary of an Ad Man to the Buzz Bin. At the time we were ranked at 300K+.

Yesterday on Now Is Gone we examined whether this has any real impact (hint: not much). But several people have asked me how we did it. So I will try to lay-out the steps taken to achieve this benchmark in the hopes that maybe someone else can get some value out of it.

Keys to Success

Approach: Stopped writing for me (journal style), and started writing for you. You became much more interested.

Experience: Used my background as a wireless trade reporter to build a hybrid trade/blog format with serials like Blogs of Fire and a weekly interview. This continues the general trend of blurred lines between journalists and bloggers.

Participation: Actively reading my community’s blogs and interests. Further, industry leaders are recognized through interviews.

Service: Buzz Bin content is written to serve social-media friendly PR pros and marketers (particularly local ones), trying to offer a valuable viewpoint and analysis. We don’t always write up the lastest meme, and instead focusing on thought leadership. Every Monday article attempts to serve in this capacity.

Google Analytics: By letting the statistics tell me what you care about I can deliver content that better serves your interests.

Social Networks: Social network participation in Twitter, Facebook, Pownce and SpinThicket yielded significant increases in traffic over the past three to four months.

Risk: Taking stands distinguishes your point of view, but it also requires risk, and a willingness to accept that not everyone will see your point of view. We also used case studies – opening ourselves to criticism. You have to accept that and not care.

Help: We got some breaks with several A-Listers who shined kindly upon us. One of the great things they did was bring attention to successes like our GeoCommons Social Media Release. Thanks to the friends who helped out.

SEO: Over the past two months, we had our very successful Viget Labs experience, which expanded SEO and calls to action on the blog. This expanded readership and certainly visibility.

What’s Next

What’s next for the Buzz Bin? A new template is critical to our success. The current one is not helping growth, so we expect to unveil this in the next couple of weeks.

In addition, we are adding the company’s first full time social media consultant this week. Larissa Fair will take over back end maintenance on the blog, and will also be participating in the larger PR and marketing blogosphere. She will have a weekly Wednesday column on social media, and Michele Capots will focus on public relations issues on Friday.

Lastly, we hope to break the top twenty on the Friendly Ghost’s PR blog rankings in the next four to six months. Wish us luck!

You got it, blog friends. We got a hot social media unconference coming to DC. Many more details will follow over the next couple of months!

Local blogging star Debbie Weil and I are planning Washington DC’s premier Unconference (more definitions here and here). Naturally, it’s called BlogPotomac.

Here’s our unscripted kick-off at a local Starbucks. We’re both Georgetown alums (Geoff is a CCT alum; I’m an IEMBA grad) so we’re hoping we can use Georgetown University as a venue. Tentative date: April 2008. Stay tuned!

Wendy Harman is a senor social media blogger at the American Red Cross and a speaker at the Era of Conversation (October 4, 2007 in Washington).She graciously agreed to do a Buzz Bin interview and talk about what’s new at the American Red Cross, including her new blog Red Cross Chat. This is the first time anyone’s learned about Red Cross Chat, so I think you’ll be interested! Wendy also talks in depth about the Red Cross’s Twitter efforts.

BB: Tell us about Red Cross Chat. What is it?

WH: Well, it’s kind of a scoop (if big nonprofits launching blogs is still considered a scoop)! We, the American Red Cross, have created a blog. Hello world! I’m posting to it regularly now but we haven’t “launched� it or otherwise told anyone about it besides you. Hopefully, it will become a space that welcomes honesty and transparency as well as community conversation.

The Red Cross is really made up of ordinary citizens trying to help out their neighbors, so I think there’s a lot of room for connections to be made. Hopefully, we will do more listening than lecturing (although you might still get a hefty dose of preparedness tips). Of course, it will also be handy to be able to talk to our stakeholders directly instead of through media gatekeepers.

Part of my job here is to monitor mentions of the Red Cross in blogs and on social networking sites. Hundreds of people choose to write about us every day, which indicates to me that there’s widespread passion for our mission. It’s amazing that so many people are taking time out of their day to post about their experience with the Red Cross.

I see lots of blood donation stories, lots of people encouraging their readers to donate time, blood, and money during disasters, lots of CPR training tales, and yes, even some people calling us out on inconsistencies in service. I do my best to connect with all of these people to acknowledge their contributions and to figure out any inconsistencies. I’d love to use Red Cross Chat to highlight some of these bloggers – they tell the story of the organization far better than I can from my cube in Washington, DC.

BB: I noticed the Red Cross has twitter blogs now. What will you do with those?

WH: This project is still in the incubator and hasn’t been tested yet – it’s the brainchild of your friend and American Red Cross Communicator Ike Pigott.

The idea is that the Red Cross Twitter channel (http://twitter.com/RedCross) will push information out and the Safe and Well Twitter channel (http://twitter.com/safeandwell) will pull information in. This technology can be accessed online and via mobile devices, so the likelihood that the public can get to it in times of disaster is increased.

For example, the information push through Red Cross Twitter might work if a family on an interstate evacuation route texts “FOLLOW REDCROSS� to 40404, signing themselves up for Twitter to find out where the nearest open shelters are.

The information pull through the Safe and Well Twitter channel is a direct complement to the existing Safe and Well website (https://disastersafe.redcross.org/). In the wake of a disaster, we see lots of people looking for loved ones in a bunch of different online spots. This is confusing and inefficient. After Hurricane Katrina, the Red Cross and several other organizations combined their resources and expertise to create the Safe and Well (https://disastersafe.redcross.org/) website, a place for evacuees to register themselves and a search tool for loved ones seeking information. We hope to use the Safe and Well Twitter channel to make it easier for people to register themselves on this site, even if they’re in areas where many lines of communication are down.

BB: The Red Cross is very pro blogging. How are you enabling your volunteers?

WH: The Red Cross is pro blogging. I think blogging and bloggers help achieve organizational transparency, and that’s something we strive for. I’ve certainly learned a lot about the nuances of Red Cross services through reading individual accounts of actual experiences. These stories appeal to me as a human being, but they’re also valuable to the organization because we’re able to pinpoint the beginning stages of trends. We can find out daily which initiatives are working in the field and which aren’t.

When I started last December I noticed that not many employees or volunteers mention the Red Cross in their online communications, even when it’s a large part of their lives. I think there is/was some fear. “Am I allowed to discuss my work?� “How do I protect the privacy of clients?� With this in mind, we thought about how to empower them to tell their stories without crossing any corporate boundaries. We came up with the Online Communications Guidelines. I hope these guidelines, along with the accompanying glossary of Web 2.0 terms, will help all 1 million plus volunteers determine how and whether to join in the fun.

BB: What do you enjoy most about social media?

WH: The offline benefits. I am an internet addict, to be sure, but the greatest value I’ve gotten out of social media is the ease of making connections with people I admire, old friends, new friends, colleagues, and people I never would have met had we not found some common ground or interest online. It’s just made the process of keeping up with friends and connecting with new people too easy to ignore.

This might be cheating, but I also truly enjoy the realness it encourages. I love the blurring of personal and professional personas, I love the democratization of media, I love the many gray areas it’s created in the world of intellectual property, I love its messiness, and I love the sheer gargantuan possibility for collective knowledge sharing. This is an exciting time. Plus, bloggers tend to be snarky and clever and funny and creative and I am easily amused by them.

In my capacity as a Red Crosser, I love being able to reach out and connect with others who also care about this gigantic humanitarian effort. It’s fun to see what they are passionate about, what irks them, and how much they get out of both volunteering and receiving Red Cross services.

BB: Have you had any negative issues yet from your readers / users of Red Cross social media?

WH: Honestly, I can’t think of a single one right now. We’re just getting started, though. As the old saying goes, you can’t please em all! I hope as we build a bigger presence in social media that we can take all the good and all the bad and help create a more effective organization over time.

As another old saying goes, the opposite of passion is indifference, not anger. I can think of many instances where I’ve read negative commentary on individual blogs or forums, but a passion about the Red Cross underlies that negativity. I try to acknowledge their frustration and put them in touch with someone who can help ease the situation. In pretty much every instance this philosophy has worked.

Here’s one example:

Andrew Ferguson

Naked Conversations: A Case Study of the American Red Cross

April 23, 2007

As you know, I took an American Red Cross class on Saturday that I felt was less then satisfactory. […] Someone there had found my blog post and brought it to his attention. My phone number is right there on the front page, so it’s easy to contact me (which is the point). I wrote about my thoughts on the class last night at 10:30 pm and now I was actually talking to real person who was trying to help me out. That is why this is so awesome. The American Red Cross cares about me as a person and they’re willing to go the extra kilometer make sure that I’m happy. […] In the long term, this gives the American Red Cross HUGE points. I can’t tell you highly I think of them now. I’d even venture to say that because of his call, I am now significantly more likely to take another class from the American Red Cross then I was before. And all it took was a seven minute phone call.

BB: What do you think of social networks like Facebook, etc?

WH: I like Facebook more each day. It’s a people feed. It took me about a month of daily use before I “got� how RSS would change my life, it took a little less to catch on to Facebook. Of course the groups and the causes have been big boosters for lots of charities – not necessarily in monetary donations yet, but in awareness and relationship building.

My previous work experience is in the music industry, so I’m intimately familiar with the power that MySpace had in giving independent artists an audience. Without getting too deep into that issue, I feel lucky to have seen how musicians leveraged free viral tools to gain audiences in an otherwise bottlenecked media landscape. Now, everyone is seeing this same value applies to them as well. Facebook is only making that leveraging easier to achieve.

Over 500 groups on Facebook have identified themselves as having something to do with the Red Cross. When the I-35 bridge in Minneapolis collapsed, 82 new Facebook groups were set up overnight to discuss the tragedy, raise money, and connect. Lots of those 82 also mentioned the Red Cross. The speed of that astounds me. You might even say it overwhelms me – I’m not sure what to do with this level of participation yet, but it feels really powerful.

When I read Doug Meacham’s blog post, “Collaboration and the Power of Social Networks” last weekend, it became apparent to me that this business was practicing many aspects of the participation ethos. So I asked Doug to come over here and tell us about it…

Collaboration and the Power of Social Networks

by Doug Meacham

First, I want to thank Geoff for giving me the opportunity to speak from his platform. As you will soon learn, this post is part of a little experiment which I hope will yield some big results.

Every day, we hear about the power of social networks to?

• share new ideas
• connect people with common interests
• enable long-distance collaboration
• make a difference through calls to action

A few weeks ago, I told my readers about a small Information Technology consulting business called Impact Makers. Started by Richmond, VA social entrepreneur Michael Pirron, Impact Makers is “competitive social venture,” a for-profit business model with a nonprofit mission. The idea is simple -

Create a company that works to make profits, but instead of being based on maximizing shareholder value it’s based on maximizing community value.

There are generally two types of social enterprise in the US today:

1. A nonprofit that generates their own revenue stream by operating for-profit businesses to support their service delivery to the community. The problem with this model is that most nonprofits lack the capacity and the experience to run a competitive business venture.
2. A for-profit business that gives a small percentage of their profits to fund nonprofits (i.e. Ethos Water or Newman’s Own). The problem with this model is that the shareholders can, at any time, decide to stop the program or sell the company.

Impact Makers has introduced a new model where a partnership is formed between one nonprofit entity (Impact Makers’ Management and IT Consulting Services) focusing on generating income in the for-profit marketplace, and a nonprofit partner who is delivering services to the community. Those non-profit partners must meet four criteria: They must be secular, nonpolitical, local and have a philosophy of helping people help themselves. For its first charity, Impact Makers chose Safe Harbor, a Richmond, VA-based advocacy organization for victims of domestic violence.

Impact Makers not only donates its profits, but also provides consulting services to the partner, allowing it to focus with greater effectiveness and efficiency on its core competency – delivering community services.

To my knowledge, this is a new and unique business model. It is a non-stock corporation overseen by a volunteer board of directors. Its books are open to the public, its officers and consultants earn competitive salaries but no equity, and all profits are donated to the non-profit partners.

Steal This Business Model, Please!

While Pirron wants prove that the model works through Impact Makers, his larger objective is seeing the business model spread. He wants people to take the idea, refine it, apply it to other types of business and create community value in as many places as possible.

After writing about Impact Makers and connecting them with some of my readers who also participate in Social Entrepreneurship, Pirron asked if I would help with communicating the company’s business model and concepts through social media. In other words, get the “conversation” started and that’s the objective of this post.

I started participating in social networks in 2005 and through them, I have met and had conversations with more interesting people from around the world than I ever imagined. As LinkedIn demonstrates, the real power comes the fact that the people in your network also have networks. I may have 100 friends but if each of them has 100 friends, then I potentially have 10,000 friends and this enables ideas to spread very quickly. Given that potential, I decided to take my extended network for a test drive to see what kind of buzz it could generate for Pirron’s business model.

Join The Conversation!

I asked readers to suggest ways to communicate the concept or to communicate it to people in their networks that might find it interesting or even actionable. I threw out some starters:

• Share the idea with people in your networks. Have a conversation about it.
• Interview Michael Pirron for your blog or podcast
• Connect Michael with other prominent bloggers/podcasters who focus on innovative business models or social causes
• Suggest ways to effectively communicate Impact Makers’ message to non-profits and academia

The response after one week has been good. Opportunities like being able to share the story on The Buzz Bin are exactly what I was hoping for and I anticipate that some of you will want to get in on the experiment as well.

I’d love to hear your ideas. Better yet, I’d love for you to share the story within your networks. Either way, let me know. You can reach me by leaving a comment on my blog or sending an e-mail. To learn a little more, take a look at my previous posts (here & here) as well as the Impact Makers’ website for a quick overview of the company. Then join the conversation!

Now is Gone is on Amazon.com and is available for pre-orders. Woo hoo!

Release date has not been officially set yet. And many have asked for autographed copies. We’re working out a way to make that happen. Details on these are forthcoming this week.

Social Media All-Star Brian Solis helped me shape the book’s direction, and wrote a killer introduction. Now Is Gone seeks to help businesses embrace Social Media intelligently. Readers can learn if their organization is ready, how to begin, the predominant participation is marketing approach that other businesses are using, social media marketing strategies, and general social media insights.

In addition to best practices, the book is laced with case studies that demonstrate corporate successes. This primer provides the quickest way for executives and entrepreneurs to figure out social media marketing.