I recently participated as a panelist on a webinar titled “Your Brand Advocates- How to Find Them and What They Are Worth,” along with Kety Esquivel (from Ogilvy), Rob Fuggetta (from Zuberance), and Frank Eliason (on his last day at Comcast — he’s now with Citi). We talked about what a brand advocate is, and how brands can identify and energize them. Here are my slides along with a few thoughts and tips.

Brand advocates, at their core, are people who really like and care about a brand. They are the opposite of critics because they’re out there talking about the brand and recommending it to their friends  (aprox 150 if they’re sharing those recommendations online, according to Forrester). What they say actually resonates with others because there is a trust between friends and connections. These brand advocates cannot be bought, forced or created, so others perceive them as genuine fans of the brand.

Brand advocates are brand advocates because they’ve had good experiences with a brand and they are willing and able to share some enthusiasm. Of course, brand advocates aren’t always positive and they aren’t always the most vocal or social (as we might assume they are). They do expect the best from you… and that is a good thing. (more…)

You probably already heard about the fake @BPGlobalPR Twitter account that was created to criticize the tragic BP oil spill. The account pretends to be an official BP handle, and with a mere 138 tweets, it already has aproximately 85K followers (and it has been listed by 2095 users!) in just a few days.

Of course, the AdAge article and other media have helped spread awareness of the account, but the reason for its speedy rise in followers is mostly due to the severity of BP’s oil spill combined with the the cleverness and relevance of the tweets.

Humor goes a long way when it comes to Twitter. Fake accounts like this one are created all the time, but they rarely make much of an impact. We’ve seen fake Twitter accounts for everything from presidents dictators (ie. @ChavezCandanga_) to Star Wars characters (ie. @DarthVader), but the most effective ”fake” Twitter accounts are often parodies (ie. @BogusBogusky, @ChuckNorris_ @Nick_Nolte) or created by actual fans (ie. @PeggyOlson and maybe @BadPeggyOlson). However, @BPGlobalPR is going against BP with intelligence, and dare I say it.. strategy? (more…)

Sometimes, to gain perspective about how big the world is, and how small I am in it, I take my glasses off.. just to realize how blind I really am.

Let me back up a bit. I can’t see 20/20. When I take my glasses off, everything goes awfully blurry and it makes me feel lost and confused. The sensation of not being in control, of not being being able to do simple things like reading a sign that’s only a few feet away, can be really frustrating and intimidating.

When I was about 16 years old I started sitting in the front of the classroom to “see better.” Eventually a teacher told me to just get some glasses already (as if it was obvious to everyone but me). After going to the optometrist and actually getting my first pair of glasses, I realized that I had been needing them for a very long time. I just thought that everyone saw things the way I did, blurry and cloudy and dull. I remember wearing glasses late at night, and the billboards looking so much brighter, so much more colorful and alive than ever. For the first time, I was seeing the way I was supposed to.

Taking my glasses off today really made me think about a lot of the things that are happenning in the social web. Two things in particular concern me, especially because we bypass them with all the excitement about “social this” and “social that.”

The first is that people are becoming more and more self-centered. While we talk about a cultural shift towards sharing, openness, authenticity, and transparency, the shift sometimes has more to do with our egos. This shift should worry us a bit because if we keep calling “social” what is often anything but, we might end up with a bunch of anti-social narcissistic human beings who crave micro-celebritism and their own utopian so-called personal brands.

My second concern kind of ties in with the whole ego thing. For those of us working in online marketing and social media, the ego dillema translates into a mindset of “no one else gets it” and “we are ahead of the curve,” as if we had discovered America or something. (more…)

“My whole approach to making this film is similar to open source web development,” said Tan Siok Siok when I asked her about Twittamentary. On the most recent The Social Nerdia Show!, I had a conversation with her to talk about this unique documentary, which she referred to as a “project about Twitter using Twitter to make it happen, and the power of the real-time web.”

Listen to the entire conversation with Siok Siok on the Flash player below. You can also subscribe on iTunes, stream from mobile phones on Stitcher, and listen to upcoming LIVE shows on blogtalkradio.

Siok Siok explained that traditional filmmaking is “very secretive” because it is important to keep the idea away from anyone who could steal it. “What’s unusual about this project is that we crowdsourced it,” she told me. From ideas like a “meetup road trip” to mobilizing people to “generating leades for the shoot,” the Twitter community has made it possible for many to get personally involved. One such example happened in Denver, CO, where Siok Siok’s team was stranded at a bus station at midnight. Someone read her tweets and soonafter picked them up and let them stay with him for the night. “The film shows that Twitter works.” (more…)

Based out of Tenerife, Spain, Per Schmitz is the co-founder of DooID, a very promising digital contact card with privacy protection that is easy to use. If you’d like to easily share your social identities, and do so pretty quickly, check out DooID.

1. How did you get started?

When I accidentelly stumbled upon Tim van Damme’s virtual business card (http://timvandamme.com), I was blown away by its simplicity and usefulness. Tim’s card displayed all the important information about him in a stylish, easy to understand format. My first reaction was “wow, that’s the way I’d like to present myself to the world, too.” (that was in January 2009). The more I thought about how my v-card could be like , the more I wanted to build an application around the whole concept, to make it a service accessible to everyone. There were other services like content aggregators already, but the approach is clearly different: virtual business cards are reduced to the max, minimalism is the key. The main purpose is to show a person’s contact data – nothing more and nothing less.

2. Who would be interested in using DooID?

The platform might be interesting to everyone who uses a business card, e-mail or social networks – so almost everyone who has got a computer nowadays. This is by far the biggest challenge in developing DooID: the app has to be easy to handle for anyone, even people with very few computer knowledge. Many users are overstrained by the technology that surrounds them.

3. How are you better/different than competitors? (more…)

I had the very cool opportunity to speak at this year’s SXSW Interactive as part of the Future15: Diversity series, which was organized by Glenda Bautista. The presentation, titled “The Online Latino: A New Digital Native,” was all about Latin Americans and the web.

While it is a myth that Latin Americans are not online, only 30% of them are. The presentation went into the challenges (poverty, inequality, censorship, and the social/economic/digital divide), as well as what is changing (tech hubs, encouraging governments, businesses rolling out infrastructure, and a rapidly growing online community).

If you’re interested in learning more about what is happening online and offline in Latin America, including Streisand effects, citizen journalism, social networking, innovative start-ups, and stories about the people that are converting ideas into movements, check out the slides and videos below. Feedback (through email or comments) is appreciated :)

Thanks to Diego Contreras (aka Diegoliath) for helping me with the design, Jon Gipson for recording the video, and Kara Andrade for writing the original proposal with me and helping out with ideas, insights, and stats.

In case you don’t have a computer, you’re older than 83, or you have been sleeping non-stop… here’s a video of Twitter’s CEO Evan Williams announcing “At anywhere” or @anywhere as part of his keynote at this year’s SXSW Interactive.