Marcia Conner is a partner at Altimeter Group and the co-author of “The New Social Learning.” She blogs at http://learnativity.com/ and tweets as @marciamarcia.

The book is a good read for anyone interested in learning more about how companies can leverage social technologies and tools to become, well, better companies. I asked Marcia a few questions to go deeper into some of the topics on the book, and here’s what she kindly had to say.

1. If social learning is truly a competitive advantage, how can companies that are late to the game differentiate and compete?

The competitive advantage doesn’t come from the technologies themselves associated with social learning. It comes from the expertise and perspective your people have today that’s often never shared with anyone or put to use in the organization. Social media tools can provide venues for people to connect in ways they hadn’t before, differentiating an organization by the quality and brainpower of their people who now can build new approaches together that they couldn’t before.

2. In today’s culture of sharing, does it make sense for companies to publicly display real-time information about how they are performing and how consumers are talking about them on the social web?

Customer perception — heck, even employee perspective— has been posted on bulletin boards and user group meetings for years. If you don’t believe that, google your company then read 10 or even 20 pages into the search results to see all of the places where you’re talked about now. The trouble with many of those venues is that they are only from a narrow slice of your customers, often without additional insights from people within your organization who have additional information. By engaging with those people in those spaces… or better yet, creating venues for a healthy conversation about what you are doing right and what you need to improve upon, you are far more likely to learn from people’s experiences and correct misperceptions and give people with alternative (and possible more favorable) views a chance to weigh in too.

3. What is needed to inspire and create change at companies with an “anti-social” culture? (more…)

Google Buzz has created some buzz in the past couple of days. A Twitter killer it is not, but it is definitely the most exciting social web service I’ve seen since FriendFeed. Tim O’Reilly has said that Google has “taken the social media lessons of Twitter,” and Jason Calacanis thinks “Google Buzz 1.0 is better than Facebook after six or seven years.”

Not only does Buzz combine some of the best aspects of Google Wave, FriendFeed, and Twitter, but it’s also built into GMail. By adding the mobile component (so we can take it anywhere), and integrating feeds from Twitter, Flickr, Picasa, and Blogger (so we can pull outside content), Google Buzz starts to sound like a very promising service of its own, and not just another GMail feature.

But the question that everyone is wondering about is:  Can Google really create a new social network that people will want to use?

It is true that Google has failed at many, if not all things social in the past, but this time it seems different. From day one, Buzz already makes great use of multimedia, is open to anyone, makes use of @ replies (ie. @socialnerdia@gmail.com), and allows us to have conversations in real-time.

So, with early adopters rushing to test, criticize, and/or embrace Google Buzz, should companies be creating accounts just as they have done on Twitter and Facebook?

Traditionally, companies have been slow to join social networks. The idea of unproven and confusing new social services creates unwillingness to jump in until other companies have. But with a rapidly changing and increasingly social online landscape, it is essential to understand the things that people are doing. In order to really “get it” companies could spend months researching, brainstorming, and strategizing. Or they could just do what regular people do: Jump in and experiment.

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Web 2.0 tools and technologies, things like blogs, wikis, podcasts and RSS, are changing the way companies communicate and collaborate, both internally and externally with customers, partners and suppliers. In last night’s The Social Nerdia Show! I was able to speak with Michael Chui about how companies can successfully leverage Web 2.0 and social media. Michael, a McKinsey & Company consultant serving technology and telecom clients, has been co-leading research on emerging long-term technology trends and their impact on clients and some of this research can be found on studies published by The McKinsey Quarterly, including “Six ways to make Web 2.0 work.”

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

For the past 3 years, Michael and his McKinsey team have been surveying over 2000 executives on their use of Web 2.0 in the enterprise. “There has been an evolution; the number one thing that has changed over the years is continuing adoption and usage,” Michael explained.

As more and more enterprises experiment and deploy the tools, it seems like more of them are starting to realize their real value. Michael explained that the results are impressive because “two thirds of respondents actually reported driving real business benefits from the use of Web 2.0 in the enterprise, which is quite a powerful result.”

Some of the benefits discovered include an “increase in speed to access knowledge and expertise, increase in cost-savings related to communication and travel, increase in employee satisfaction, and increase in the effectiveness of marketing and customer satisfaction.”

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Everyone’s been talking about oneforty, a Twitter marketplace of sorts that was announced by Laura Fitton (“Twitter for Dummies” author) earlier today, and the buzz is well deserved. After a quick beta sign-up, a couple of emails and a long list of Terms of Service, the oneforty lets you into what may be the first decent Twitter app collection (or “outfitter“) out there.

oneforty is currently tracking about 1350 apps/services/shorteners/clients (and growing) with detailed info about each one, including press mentions, related tweets, and sometimes even screenshots. It even gives the ability to donate to the developers.

The site’s best feature is the easy-to-use reviewing system (1-5 star rating), which I’m assuming is what drives the “most popular” list that includes well-known services like Bit.ly, Tweetie and TwitPic. No surprises in the popularity list (same goes for the “essential”/recommended apps), but the idea of finding new services  is what will motivate users to check out a Twitter marketplace.

Here are 10 apps that I didn’t know about until I checked out oneforty:

TwitBlock (for Spam Blocking) helps you analyze a specific account to see if it is a “bot or not.” It also lets you find out if your followers are displaying signs of “spamminess.” This is useful since we all know that spammers are alive and well on Twitter. The coolest thing though is to try to see if any of your real friends are part-time spammers. My only problem with TwitBlock is that it is slow (too slow) and doesn’t let you easily block.

Who Should I Follow? (for finding new people) helps you identify people you might be interested in following. I was skeptic about this one, but the resuts were pretty good and seemed to combine people that had similar interests, followed the same people or lived nearby. Still, I’m not so sure the site deserves to have “should” as part of its name and it doesn’t help much with the following since I wasn’t able to do that without having to go to Twitter.

TwtPoll (for surveying) helps you create polls, along with a temporary short url like this one: http://twtpoll.com/3zvbti . The site lets you select different kinds of questions and determine vote allowances, and lets respondents retweet, comment and share elsewhere. (more…)

Facebook has finally done it. The company not only reached the 300 million user mark but it also achieved its positive cash-flow milestone last quarter (ahead of schedule), according to Mark Zuckerberg’s blog posting on Tuesday. Here’s a look at five smart things they did right  to get to where they are today.

1. Opening Up to Everyone

Facebook started as a social network for Harvard students in 2004. After signing up over half of the Harvard undergraduate population in one month, the site opened up to other Boston and Ivy League universities. The site continued to spread through schools around the nation (including my very own SMU) and opened up to High School students by 2005. Today, Facebook is not only open to anyone around the world, but it has also opened itself so that its users are searchable by nonmembers. More importantly, Facebook grew in both features and popularity by opening itself to others. Mobile web sites and apps are available on all major mobile OS platforms. Developers have created apps like iLike, Scrabulous and Fan Check. Companies like Apple and Microsoft have leveraged Facebook’s API to connect to the site through products like iTunes and the Xbox 360. Thousands of web sites like Hulu and blogs like Mashable have allowed users to leave comments using their Facebook accounts via the now multilingual log-in system that we’ve come to know as Facebook Connect. And let’s not forget that it was Facebook Connect that enabled the last push for Facebook to surpass MySpace’s traffic in the U.S.

2. Becoming the Anti-MySpace that Doesn’t Sell Itself Short

Michael Arrington once said that Facebook had become the “Anti-MySpace” by deciding to open itself up. Just as Facebook didn’t follow in MySpace’s paranoid footsteps (remember how MySpace was so threatened by PhotoBucket that it acquired it in 2007?), it also did not flirt with large corporation that would swallow it. With rumors of Friendster being interested to pay upwards of $10 million, the News Corp. acquisition of MySpace in 2005, and Yahoo!’s offer of up to $1 billion in 2006, Facebook must have felt a little tempted. Still, Facebook focused on its site and its users and Zuckerberg’s words on July 17, 2007 have been proven to be true: “We’re not really looking to sell the company… We’re not looking to IPO anytime soon. It’s just not the core focus of the company.” With 1000 employees and a predicted $500 million in revenue for 2009, it is clear that MySpace is history. (more…)

Netvibes is releasing “Drag and Follow” widgets today, July 16th at 9am PST.

I recorded my phone conversation with Freddy Mini (Netvibes CEO) so you could hear the news (and details) directly from him.

Press play below to listen:

[audio:http://socialnerdia.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/netvibes_dragandfollow_social_nerdia.mp3]

I gave it a test drive and I must agree with Freddy that it is very easy to use. A simple drag and drop from a hashtag or avatar on Twitter opens up a brand new widget so you can follow that topic or user.

Along with that, Netvibes is releasing a new version of the Facebook widget that has the real-time news feed, is “drag and follow” capable, and is “totally integrated with Facebook Connect“. The “drag and follow” widgets also work for MySpace if that’s your kind of thing.

Freddy told me that “if people love it, we can make it work on anything,” and he gave me an example of what that could be. Listen to the conversation for an example of potential uses around news and search.

By the way, the new feature will be automatically added to your account so you won’t have to do anything to try it out. New users will also find it available immediately. You can check out our Social Nerdia Netvibes page to get started.

Netvibes is trying to learn a few moves from the Amazon playbook by analyzing the widgets you already have and comparing them to others you might also appreciate. The company is calling it “Talk to Me” and it is basically a new feature that recommends widgets:

“Netvibes Talk to Me is the first widget recommendation and distribution engine that performs on-going, intelligent analyses of users’ widget behavior and the context in which widgets are used to deliver individually personalized and perfectly relevant widget recommendations.”

If you are on Netvibes and are yet to receive recommendations, you should be getting them by the end of the week. Keep in mind that all recommendation engines have their faults. So, if you don’t like one of the recommendations simply close it and kiss it good-bye. The good news is that Netvibes recommendations get better as you accept or reject them.

But what if you have so many widgets that you feel like it’s all getting cluttered? Netvibes Labs has a project called Spring Cleaning, which displays widgets you might not need anymore. (more…)