{original post By Mark Riffey , 05-27-09 Flathead Beacon

Mistake # 1 - Where’s the fire?

This one is the easiest to commit so of course it’s one of the mistakes that can make your social media efforts far less effective – and perhaps a total waste of time.

You’ve heard the saying that it’s hard to drink from a fire hose. In the social media world, it’s also hard to read from one.

One of the easiest things to do - and most important to avoid - is the temptation to flood the place with automated messages.

Mistake # 2 – I don’t kiss on the first date

One of the most common mistakes I see in Twitter is the “Hey, thanks for following, want to buy my product?” direct message (in Twitter lingo, a “DM”).

Mistake #3 – I don’t care about your politics, grandma

Don’t assume that everyone wants to listen to your politics much less the F bomb.

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Neither shalt thou write on his wall
{original post by Philip Pullella, Reuters May 24, 2009}

You won’t get an e-mail saying Pope Benedict added you as a friend and you can’t “poke” him or write on his wall, but the Vatican is still keen to use the networking site Facebook to woo young people back to church.

A new Vatican website, www.pope2you.net, has gone live, offering an application called “The pope meets you on Facebook,” and another allowing the faithful to see the Pope’s speeches and messages on their iPhones or iPods.

The Vatican’s World Communications Day today is devoted to communicating the gospel with new technologies.

“We recognize that a church that does not communicate ceases to be a church,” said Msgr. Paul Tighe, secretary of the Vatican’s Social Communications department.

“Many young people today are not turning to traditional media like newspapers and magazines any more for information and entertainment. They are looking to a different media culture, and this is our effort to ensure that the Church is present in that communications culture.”

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Original Post Thursday, May. 14, 2009 by By Seth Godin

So, are you essential? Most of the best jobs will be for people who manage customers, who organize fans, who do digital community management. We’ll continue to need brilliant designers, energetic brainstormers and rigorous lab technicians. More and more, though, the need to actually show up at an office that consists of an anonymous hallway and a farm of cubicles or closed doors is just going to fade away. It’s too expensive, and it’s too slow. I’d rather send you a file at the end of my day (when you’re in a very different time zone) and have the information returned to my desktop when I wake up tomorrow. We may never meet, but we’re both doing essential work.

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{original post May 19th, 2009 | by Jennifer Van Grove from Mashable.com}

Lately we’re seeing business card applications for mobile phones, SMS, and the web sprout up faster than we can follow. We’ve got 8 fantastic options for the iPhone, and a super simple SMS option courtesy of Contxts, and now there’s something even easier for us Twitterholics.

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{original post by Chris Brogan}

We really can’t deny the fact that businesses are testing out Twitter as part of their steps into the social media landscape. You can say it’s a stupid application, that no business gets done there, but there are too many of us (including me) that can disagree and point out business value. I’m not going to address the naysayers much with this. Instead, I’m going to offer 50 thoughts for people looking to use Twitter for business. And by “business,” I mean anything from a solo act to a huge enterprise customer.

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Set to launch sometime this month, WolframAlpha (http://www.wolframalpha.com/) is a new kind of search tool. While traditionally search engines have helped you find pages that will give you the information you are looking for, WolframAlpha aims to give answers to specific questions that have been asked using natural language. That means questions like “What is the weather in London?” , “What is the world’s tallest building” or “What is the population of France”, will return actual answers, rather than links to pages that may contain the answer. That’s pretty impressive, and could potentially have a big impact on the way people search the web.

Read Stephen Wolfram’s blog post about the project:
http://blog.wolfram.com/2009/03/05/wolframalpha-is-coming/

Read more about WolframAlpha, how it works, and what it could mean to the way people search the web: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/08/wolfram-alpha-computes-answers-to-factual-questions-this-is-going-to-be-big/