Up to now Groupon has offered deals for local retailers and it’s been a boon to the niche businesses to get access to a bigger market. Even a tiny business can get a lot of bang for their buck out of a Groupon offer. With today’s offer from the Gap though, the game has shifted. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great for Groupon and it’s users, and I might even buy this one for my niece, but does it spell doom and gloom for the niche businesses it has served so well in the past?

It’s interesting that Groupon started to offer two coupons at once recently(see above) and we can hope that even if the main offer is a big brand that the little businesses will still be able to opt in to the service. Unlike their regular deals, the Gap deal is offered in a number of cities at the same time,

Rumors have it that Groupon is backed up with offers and that could be the big bottleneck to their growth since they only post one (now two) per day per city. If big brands start sucking up that premium space will there be room left for small business?

As companies like the Gap try on different social promotions like check ins on Foursquare group coupons Facebook and Twitter, it will be intrusting to see which they adopt.

Twitter announced today a new feature called “Twitter Tales“. The idea is to feature the stories of users and how Twitter has impacted their lives. The first story is about Natasha Badhwar (@natashabadhwar ) from New Delhi, who writes micro-poetry and stories that inspire and entertain as well as fragments of insight into her life as a mom, film-maker and self-confessed multi-tasker. Natasha uses Twitter as a place of expression and Since I’m a big fan of The Blogess on her blog and on Twitter and her blog, I was tickled to see the first humor post is about her. Another story is about the joys of commuting on Caltrain and tweeting the experience.

It may sound mundane but I think it’s a good example of how a site like Twitter impacts everyday lives in unexpected ways. Browse Twitter Tales and see if it strikes a chord for you. Who knows, maybe your story could be up next! Just email  tales@twitter.com and tell your story.

I had lunch today with a friend and we got to talking about creating a personal brand online. It was a really great discussion and I wanted to share some of it with you.

I don’t care where you work or how happy you are in your job right now, you still need to build your own personal brand online. That means separate from your identity as a business or even as the head of a department or your own company. Why? Because your reputation is being searched right now by somebody online who is researching your company, thinking of hiring you or making an appointment to meet with you. What are they going to find? Take a moment and go Google yourself. What is your overall impression of that person? It might need a little fine-tuning.

Life these days is incredibly transparent and if you’re not putting a public face out there that represents you somebody else will do it for you. Or worse yet, all people will find is a bunch of half filled out profiles and vague references to something you did in high-school. Is that how you want to be perceived?

I’m not saying you have to out your personal life–nor should you–but what you think about what is happening in your sphere of interest can attract a better job, an important partnership or connections that can teach you things you would have spent years to learn. Even if your field is governed by rules and regulations there is always an opportunity to speak out about something without your words becoming a liability. You’re smart enough to know your space and what is and is not acceptable to talk about.

You don’t have to blog

OK, so I know not everyone wants to blog about their life. Maybe that’s not your communication medium. What about pod casting, video blogging or becoming the curator of all things in your particular niche on Twitter?

You’ve got opinions, everybody does. Share them and share links. Listen to what other people in your niche are saying and support or respond to it on their blogs, Facebook pages, Linkedin groups, Twitter and forums. Start a discussion wherever you find something that interests you and you’ll find that your personal brand will develop naturally and people will begin to listen.

Once they start listening you’re in a better place to learn from each other and exchange information, and so your network grows and your brand adds value.

Speak with your true voice

Don’t put on an online persona that you wish you were. It’s not sustainable and if the facade cracks it will be very, very messy. Be true to what you believe in and the right connections will come your way. Speak out about what is important to you and you’ll create an extended network of connections with similar interests and values. That in turn leads to deeper conversations that are actually interesting to you and your network. Remember that your personal integrity is a big part of your brand.

Keep it simple

When you’re first defining your brand you can experiment with different areas at first until something clicks. Then you know you’ve got the niche you really can talk about because you care about it. Once you’ve defined that niche hone it down to a fine point and stay focused. It’s a lot easier to build a brand in a defined space than it is to say “EVERYBODY needs to know this”. Trying to maintain a brand that covers too much makes you look like you don’t really care about anything.

You can always branch out later. For now spend some real quality time exploring what really matters to you as a person. If it’s not what you’re doing right now don’t worry about that. Follow your passion anyway. You never know how it may turn into a life changing opportunity. Who knows, there could be somebody out there with the same passion who’s been looking for someone with your exact skills to start a business with. Or hire as a consultant.

Your brand isn’t what people think you are today

Only you can define what your personal brand really is, so don’t let people tell you what it should be. Whatever your brand is now can be changed by simply focusing on what you really believe in, what you think about, and what matters to you. Once you know what that is–and you follow your passion in whatever format works best for you–you’re well on your way to defining your real brand. You’re going to have to work really REALLY hard at this, but trust me it will be worth it and pay off in ways you could never have imagined. Look at what it did for Gary Vaynerchuk. Love him or not, he’s built an authentic brand and an empire. Like he said at TED, “Do what you love (no excuses!)“.

Take control of your brand right now. It’ll be the best decision you ever made.

Social media has had such a huge impact on small businesses, both to reach out to a global audience and to their own backyard as well. I love to see local business flex their social media muscles and offer specials to local residents, through innovative and fun marketing, deepen their relationships in their neighborhood and support the community as a whole.

That’s why I suggested this panel for next year’s SXSW, and I asked some amazing local business and social media folks to join me. Jason Sutherland from Peninsula Shops, Alejandro Reyes from Sacramento Marketing Labs and Ryan Kuder from Bizzy.com.

We’re not going to go on and on about how wonderful social media is. You know that or you wouldn’t be reading my blog. We’re going to talk about real cases and real action that local businesses can use. We want people to walk away thinking about how they take action right away in their own local area.

SXSW has a tradition of selecting panels by votes from the community at large. The entire list of panels that made the first cut are up for voting on their site. The ones that get the most votes will be finalists for selection in the 2011 SXSW. They got well over 2,000 panel submissions, and to make the cut we’ve got to get ours to rise to the surface and be seen.

So now we need your help to get the panel voted up on the panel picker. Take a moment to visit the panel picker and give it a thumbs up, and while you’re there browse the rest of the submissions and see what people are thinking. There are some fantastic panels proposed.

I’m sick and tired of social media and I don’t want to talk about it! Those were the first words out of my friends mouth the other evening. I’d just come back from a trip and we were re-connecting over drinks. Harsh words for somebody like me to hear since social media is interwoven pretty tightly in our lives these days.

She went on to rant about how social media was ruining her life. Her boyfriend constantly has his head down, texting and tweeting on his crackberry. She’s got an iPhone and checks in on FourSuare, Gowalla, MyTown and Yelp at every coffee shop. Her office uses Yammer for inter-office communications and we choose our meeting place based on reviews on FoodSpotting and UrbanSpoon. How could we possible avoid talking about social media?

So we decided on a little experiment. We’d spend the next hour or two with our phones turned off, and every time a social network or an iPhone app was mentioned the offender took a shot of Tequila (I don’t recommend this).

It started out bravely, talking about my trip visiting family and her job at a tech company. The food we’d had in Florida and the hot new San Francisco restaurant she’d tried. How’d she find it? Foodspotting of course. Shot 1.

I told her how I found an ATM  in the sprawling Miami airport with Gate Guru, an iPhone app she’d told me about. Shot 2.

We talked about Shirley Sherrod and the video. Of course we’d seen it on YouTube. Shot 3.

We lasted 15 minutes.

We switched to talking about local events and news I’d missed while out of town, but it really didn’t go any better since my Twitter network kept me on top of the Shirley Sherrod mess, Contador ‘s gaffe passing Andy Schleck in the Tour de France, the opening of the movie Inception and related reviews, even Nelson Mandela‘s birthday. Things degraded pretty quickly after the first few slips and then it just got laughable. And we did.

And then we talked about the things you don’t talk about on social media sites. Job issues, family squabbles and the things we share only with our closest friends.

I can understand the angst about social media and how it’s embedded in our lives. The family back home sighed often enough about putting down the iPhones to know everybody isn’t as deep in it (OK obsessed) as we are. But here, in Silicon Valley, it’s a way of life. That doesn’t mean we can’t take a little time off and really get to know the hearts of our dearest friends without putting it all on Facebook.

Fast Company has been a darling of the geek set since it first launched. The magazine is full of the coolest gadgets, the hippest companies and really good information and the website is a vibrant community.

So what went wrong with the “Influence Project”? The site which recently launched entices a user to enter their name and view their social media influence. Then it encourages a user to try to get their network to respond to a comment or post about the site to show how much influence that user has. The more people who click your link the more influence you have.

What do you get?
“Your picture could appear in the November issue of Fast Company magazine as part of an amazing photo spread. The more influence you demonstrate, the bigger your picture will be.” (oooh cool)

How is your influence measured?
“The number of people who directly click on your unique URL link. This is the primary measure of your influence, pure and simple. You will receive partial “credit” for subsequent clicks generated by those who register as a result of your URL.”

People are already gaming it by adding shortened links to the page with their user ID embedded so they get more influence rankings. It’s getting pretty bad buzz on Twitter right now under the hashtag #InfluenceProject from a broad spectrum of people.

What’s the big deal?
To many it sounds way to close to the old “Who’s Who” scandal where you get a message you’re been nominated to e listed in who’s who but first you have to pay to have your name featured. It’s a vanity call. It’s a pyramid scheme where nobody really makes money( except for Fast Company maybe by selling ads and magazines).

While the influence project doesn’t cost any money, it could cost in something more. Like Fast Company’s reputation. When they say there’s no such thing as bad PR Some of the most influential people in social media have 3-4 connections so far at best and many are not listed at all.

Even more interesting are the names who are not signing up. I did a quick search and many of the social media folks I most respect are not represented or have very few connections. Amber Naslund, Cathy Brooks, Chris Brogan, Liz Strauss, Aaron Strout haven’t been listed yet and I’m thinking it might turn out against Fast Comp nay in a way they haven’t expected.

Whoever has less influence on the Influence Project wins!

If you’ve got a great story it seems only natural for PR to reach out to bloggers in your space and get them to write about you right? Yeah…. well that seems to be the latest problem for bloggers who get tons of emails and press releases every day trying to get them to write about whatever product or service. So if you really want to connect with bloggers you need to read these best practices first. At least it might get you in the door, and maybe you won’t end up on the Bad Pitch Blog.

Create relationships before you need them
Take the time to get to know the bloggers in your area of interest. Comment when it’s relevant, re-tweet them on Twitter and share links you think they will find useful. I’m a lot more likely to write about your product if I already know you and we’ve been in conversation already. Besides befriending a particular blogger, get to know their network. Having a natural conversation among friends is a good way to share your latest information and you may find more than one in the group who will help get the word out.

Read their blog!
Know your audience seems like a basic idea but you’d be amazed how often it happens that bloggers see mass emails that have no interest for them at all. Resist the urge to broadcast send to nay and all in hopes of landing quality bloggers who are interested in you. Read the blog and see if it is a good fit. When you reach out, do so in the language of the blogger not press release sound bytes. Find out how they want to be contacted, if the blogger is the first point of contact great, but if they have an agent or virtual admin show some respect for their process.

Make it short and rich
Nobody reads press releases. Really, they don’t. Well maybe some read the PitchEngine releases, but bloggers? Not so much. It’s better to write a custom email with some quotable information and links to a video, images or PDF they can use for the story and distribute to their readership. Make it short and to the point and then tell them you’re happy to give them more info and your contact phone, email, twitter or whatever works best for you both.

Make it personal
Make sure you make it personal, comment on a previous post that relates to the topic at hand or you enjoyed. Tell them why their readers need to know about this and how it will add value to the blog and it’s readership.

Share the love
If a blogger writes about you make sure you share the link love with your network. That’s only a part of it though. Share links to great posts they’ve written without respect to your own gain. Be an honest supporter of smart bloggers and they may support you back.

Got a cause?
The Blog Action Day event is a huge success year after year. Why? Because they tell bloggers right up front that they are the center of the event. 13,606 blogs from 156 countries with more than 18 million readers responded with one or more posts and badges on their sites proclaiming their participation. You can’t beat return like that. Look carefully at what they’ve done and if it’s a good fit for you or not.

There are some really wonderful nonprofits out there that work to develop water resources in places where water is scarce. But what about when there is water all around but none that’s safe to drink? This is what’s happening in Southeast Asian countries. Sure there’s water but it’s not safe water. Top that with limited funds and resources for filtering systems or water purification plants and you’ve got a lot of sick families.

What if you could come up with a simple filtering system that would provide clean water with a handful of readily available ingredients that the villagers could make themselves? These filters can be made anywhere from materials easily found in most villages. Nothing to buy, no shipping or distribution centers needed, just good old practical know-how. In a short time water contaminated with pathogens can be safe for drinking.

About the founder of Abundant Water
The Abundant Water project was initiated by Sunny Forsyth, an Australian engineer and AW project manager. In 2007, whilst working as an Australian Government Youth Ambassador for Development, Sunny became aware of the lack of access to safe drinking water in rural communities in Laos. Click here to learn more.

Unsafe water causes 80% of all sickness and disease in the developing world and kills more people than war. Cholera, typhoid fever, amebic and bacillary dysentery, diarrhea, hepatitis A and E are all common illnesses in Laos contracted from drinking unclean water. YOU can help change that. Watch the video below and then go visit AbundantWater.org to see how you can help.

I was on a panel today at CFP entitled “Privacy, Activism, & Social Networking: Protecting Privacy While Running a Media Campaign in 140 Characters or Less” with Tamar Gubins, Deborah Pierce, David Roth and  Danny O’Brien and I’ve been going round and round in my head  about my own position on privacy online and looking at social media from the viewpoint of an activist who may have a deeper need for personal privacy for safety reasons.

I’m a bit more pragmatic than some of my co-panelists on what privacy we can actually have in this day and age. After all, if you own a home it’s likely anyone who wants to can search online tax records and find your address and more personal information. If you carry a cell phone you can be located by anybody who can triangulate the signal. I’ve been an active user online for many years so I’m pretty easy to find. I’ve always stuck to the “if you don’t want it public don’t put it online” philosophy. This is especially true when you are on multiple networks. Think of your online conversations as an aggregate whole and not just one network at a time.

Unfortunately you don’t always control what’s online about you so I’m a big advocate of setting up alerts in Google and Social Mention among others to get a heads up when someone posts something about you online. New York, Philadelphia and several other city police departments are monitoring Twitter to watch for trouble before it starts. There are stories of activists using Twitter to transmit summaries from police scanners to let protesters know what actions police are taking too.

I’m trying to keep my focus in this case on activists and their issues with privacy online. You can’t mention activism and social media without James Karl Buck coming up. As an activist and a blogger he’s very visible online and his one word Tweet “Arrested” made headlines around the world. His tweet activated his social network and word spread quickly. Buck was released, but it was quite some time before his translator was also released–due in part at least–to Buck’s nonstop reporting on Twitter about his friend’s plight.

This is one example of social media being used to secure the privacy of an individual. Blogging and frequent updates on social networks can at least let people know where you are and if the communications stop or radically change, your friends will be paying attention.

Being visibility can keep you from “disappearing” in remote locations. On the other hand it can make you an easily visible target too. Social media can be used against you personally or against the cause you are fighting for. Telegraphing the location of a protest can increase the opposition at the same location.

So, how can an activist use social media to promote their cause and stay safe at the same time?

• Set up those alerts for your name, the organization you’re working with and the opposition as well and monitor them frequently.
• Get a P.O. box and use it for all of your online accounts (not just social media).
• Set up an email account just for social media and don’t use it for anything private
• Get a Google number that forwards to your cell phone for any time you have to put a phone number in a form online
• Create an active social voice so you can transmit your ideas and keep in touch wherever you are
• Make sure that network is active long before you need it and identify who is going to speak for you on your behalf if something happens
• When using a public computer at a cafe etc, be sure to log off and clear the cache and delete cookies of the browser.
• When you join a social network you don’t have to use your real birthday. Change the date across all your networks.
• Use a service like Hushmail for secure email that is encrypted and virus scanned
• Use a USB device like StealthSurfer so data is stored on your USB instead of the computer
• I was told about this list of 8 things you shouldn’t give to social networking sites at CFP. Good stuff here too.

Bottom line? If you understand the internet and the privacy issues we face it’s your responsibility to help others see the issues too, advocate for privacy right sand then self police yourself. You have to take responsibility for what’s said out there about you and what you say about others that could put their privacy at risk.

If you don’t know about these issues start educating yourself. Start with CFP and some of the videos of sessions at this conference. Don’t put it out there if you’re not willing to stand behind it and watch what you say in aggregate form about yourself AND other people. Responsible use of social media is up to all of us.

Well I guess he sorta did. I went to the Ragan Social Media Summit event at Cisco #RaganCisco ) last week and I have to say Guy’s presentation was outstanding. He’s amazing and I loved it. Even if he DID call out a certain group of social media mavens as “social media Nazis”. Ok, and he’s right to some extent. There are loads of people who say the way Guy Tweets isn’t the “right way” to use Twitter, and you can’t blame him for being a little defensive about that. After all he built an amazing empire in Alltop by tweeting the way he does, and he’s very transparent about what he does and why he does it. I follow him and I read Alltop all the time. There’s great stuff here, and you can quickly scan the headlines in almost any category you could possibly think of.

So let’s look at how Guy Kawasaki uses Twitter and whether it’s right for what you want to do.

Auto-posting
He’s a big fan of ObjectiveMarketer and Twithawk and he and his team use it to point out fascinating, odd and often useful bits of information. He advocates posting the same post more than once a day, and scheduling posts for future release. he also feeds RSS Streams of information to Twitter and Alltop.

Upside

• This can be a very good way of building followers who enjoy wandering off topic into distraction land on occasion.
• Tweets like this get re-tweeted a lot and that boost your following
• Tweeting at different times of day reaches different readers so your absorption rate increases
• Every time that tweet goes out in increase your SEO value
• Feeding related rss streams to Twitter is just brilliant if you’re driving traffic to a portal
• If you’ve got a lot of followers replying to a hundred “thanks great post” tweets and re-tweets is time consuming

Downside

• Too many tweets will turn some people off (I have a column in Seesmic just for @GuyKawasaki)
• If your tweets get too far off-topic you can lose some keyword saturation and people (and search engines) will have no clue what you’re about
• Sometimes it’s just plain annoying to get duplicate posts
• Twitter doesn’t like duplicate posts. Maybe you could re-phrase it a bit for each iteration?
• Feeding rss streams to Twitter that don’t relate to what you want to promote is just noise

Auto Following

Guy says he follows everyone out of courtesy. And when you’ve got a following of over 244,000 people it’s a full time job to keep on top of who to follow! I’m of the quality over quantity camp here. I view every profile and look for people I want to talk to. Preferably ones that are smarter than I am. Anyway, here’s the pros and cons of auto follow.

Upside

• Auto-following will build your numbers faster
• Once people know you auto-follow you’ll get added to lists of people who follow back and your numbers will skyrocket
• You don’t have to view all of your followers and decide whether or not to follow them or not
• Some who you might not have followed could actually be lost opportunities

Downside

• This is how you start getting those spam direct messages offering you answer to problems you never knew you had.
• If you auto-follow you might be paying less attention to who people are in your network.
• It’s just so mindless. Social media is about being social, so if you auto follow go through the list occasionally and reach out to people.

Ghosting
Lots of outrage poured out on Twitter when Guy let the world know he wasn’t writing all this great content himself. DUHHHH people, he wouldn’t have time to do anything else! I don’t have any issue with using ghosts in social media and having multiple people feed the Twitter stream as long as there is transparency that you’re doing that. Lots of companies do it too and it frees the team up to actually engage with their followers. Besides, if you send a tweet to @GuyKawasakiodds are good he’ll respond in person and not one of his staff, so what’s the harm?

So, am I a “social media Nazi”?
Mebbe so. Mebbe not. I’ll let Guy decide. My goal isn’t to drive traffic to a portal of fantastic information like Alltop at least not on this blog. I like to filter things more. I wouldn’t ever say the way Guy tweets is wrong because it’s not wrong for some sites. If you’ve got a site that’s all about sharing information and you need to drive traffic, Guy’s techniques are a brilliant way to build traffic.

Do I auto-post? Not so much. I don’t follow everybody back and my network is relatively small, but I’m OK with that. I’m a quality and depth of conversation girl. But you can be sure I use his ideas and share them with my clients!

Want to learn more about how Guy Kawasaki Tweets? Here’s a link to the page on Alltop he uses in his Twitter presentation, and here’s an FAQ on how he tweets. Oh and if you ever have a chance to hear him speak, GO. I’ve seen several presentations. He’s never boring and you always learn something.