Lately in the office, I hear lots of people talking about FourSquare like it’s going to catch on.  The problem with FourSquare is that it’s not a business; it’s a feature.  While I believe that geo-location will be the next goal for social networks to conquer, building an entire business around that single concept will ultimately fail.  FourSquare doesn’t tap into your existing social networks but rather requires you to create an entirely new social network to invite your friends into.

I spend enough time on Facebook and Twitter.  Convincing me to slice off another piece of my time to dedicate to another social network is unlikely, unless it brings a larger network of my friends to the table.  Add in the fact that Twitter launched it’s geo-location feature this week and it becomes even more pointless.  When Facebook finally gets geo-location, I would imagine that FourSquare’s growth rate will fall rapidly.  Why would I want to connect to a social network of 500,000 people when I can connect to a network of 400 million.

Oh that’s right.  I can earn a pointless badge…

• You Haven’t Registered Your Custom Username Yet. Assigning a username to your Facebook page couldn’t be simpler. You type in www.facebook.com/username and click on “Set a Username” for your pages.  You would be surprised how many pages (small and large) neglect to make their brand page more easily accessible to someone typing in a URL.  And, unsurprisingly, the Google ranking for the page rises.

• You Are Letting New Visitors Land On The Wall. The great thing about creating a brand page is having the ability to direct new  Facebook visitors to another starting point rather than the wall.   By sending them to a simple tab that you design (with a application tool like Static FBML) , you can welcome them with elements of your website / brand rather than a stream of wall posts.  Even smarter, you can lay out a clear path to becoming a fan.  For Example:

• You Haven’t Designed a Custom User Picture. While Facebook is some what limited in design choices, you can work within the constraints of Facebook’s profile picture requirements to blend into the design.  Take a look at  5 Creative Ways to Hack Your Facebook Profile Photo to get started.  I’m a fan of simply placing your logo beneath the blue line and seamlessly blending into the page.

• You Overwhelm Your Wall With a Busy RSS Stream.  This is a terrible way to treat your fans.  Each post that you make shows up in their Facebook stream.  Sending 15 to 20 posts a day into their stream is rude and defeats the purpose of the wall.  Take the courteous route and create a separate tab for your RSS feed.  Send only your best content onto the Wall to spur conversations.

• You Are Missing From The Discussion.  The whole point of having a Facebook page to promote yourself or your company is to create an open dialog about your brand.  This means you need to join the conversation on a meaningful level.  A Facebook Page isn’t designed for a one-way discussion.  It’s not a page to blast out a press release and ignore the responses.  In order to truly build a dedicated, loyal fan base, you need to become active in the discussion.

Tackle these five aspects of your Facebook brand page and you will be well on your way to building a solid readership of Facebook fans.  Check out 8 Essential Apps for Your Brand’s Facebook Page to grab some great tools for building more functionality to your Facebook Brand Page.

I use several different tools to manage multiple Twitter accounts including Digsby and TwitterFox.  I’d love to get my hands on the beta of CoTweet to organize all the companies Twitter accounts, but no response from them yet.

When it comes to a workplace Twitter account,  I’ve tested a few different approaches.  With a couple consumer electronic sites, I use a low-key, targeted follower approach.  I only add people that appear to be interested in what I’m tweeting about.  For instance, I’ll use a program like Tweetdeck to run a search (continually updated during the day) for specific keywords related to the site.  I’ll add those users periodically and unfollow anyone who didn’t return the favor within a week.

This approach definitely doesn’t grow an account quickly, but the quality of the Twitter followers is fantastic.  It’s also easily to keep up with replies and direct messages in regards to followers of the site.  Personally, I have to keep up with a variety of PR people in regards to equipment reviews and this approach is quite superior to other methods in regards to managing communication.

I’ve also tried manufacturing popularity in order to boost the Twitter account.  For instance, by adding users that were guaranteed to follow me back, the account appears to be more popular than it actually is.  This provides two benefits:

1. The Twitter account will be pushed to the top of any directory listing. Nearly all Twitter directories, including the popular WeFollow, use total twitter followers when ranking accounts.  If your site has the most followers, the site ranks at the top within the category.  Over time, the higher ranking increases quality followers.
2. By appearing popular before announcing a Twitter account, I’ve discovered that people are more likely to follow you.  Very often, I’ve found myself balking at following someone with less than 100 followers due to a lack of popularity.

Unfortunately, manufacturing popularity has a couple major drawbacks.  Those early followers won’t give a darn about your tweets and their endless tweets dilutes tweets / replies from your quality followers.  At some point, I’ll probably use a tool like FlashTweet to mass unfollow the early additions.  The risk of being unfollowed is lessened as the majority of these Twitter “Power users” have at least 5,000 followers and it’s difficult for them to manage all their followers.

Finally, I’ve recently opened up a couple accounts as simple RSS dumps.  I use TwitterFeed to kick out updates of bargains and forum posts to the Twitter account.  It’s really nothing more than an attempt to tie into Twitters budding, real-time search function and drive more traffic to the site via Google.

When managing all the accounts while out of the office, Tweetie for the iPhone is an absolutely dream for 3 bucks.  It’s designed for Twitter power users as you can quickly pop in and out of different accounts. Managing followers, replies, messages, etc. is very simple with Tweetie.

As for my personal account, I often fine myself tweeting about updating Twitter accounts. That and all the wonderful mundane details of my life.  

For instance, I don’t think my co-workers on LinkedIn need to read about parties I attend and post about on Facebook.  To a similar fashion, my Facebookean friends likely don’t care about what I find intriguing about new trends in the online landscape or what I’m diving into at work.

Throw Twitter into the mix and I’m getting bogged down in massive customization of status updates.  I have one personal twitter account and three business related twitter accounts for the sites I handle.  While Facebook friends probably hear much of what I post to my personal Twitter account, I always phrase things differently.  Not due to the size restriction, but rather catered to the people that follow me.  The exchange of ideas is much more of a rapid-fire experience on Twitter than it is on Facebook.

The only use I can see for Ping.fm is a Facebook / Myspace crossover, but Myspace is nothing more than a glorified landing page for me.  I’m down to communicating with 1 person on Myspace and it’s barely worth checking anymore.

Getting back to customizing my status updates for the sake of certain audiences, it’s even more prevalent when I’m punching keys out to type up a new blog post.  I love having my own web address using my name, but it comes at an expense at the amount of truth that I can share in this space.  It’s the potential audience that I have to be concerned about.  It’s personal branding on the very smallest of scales.  It makes me second guess diving into controversial subjects like politics, religion or anything of the like.

So is that necessarily a bad thing?  I’ll let you know when I figure it out.

(BTW, my new goal for this blog is to post once a week.  Be sure to call me out if I don’t deliver!)

• 30 days ago, I was driving from South Carolina to Los Angeles without a full time job.
• 20 days ago, I was on my first interview at a social networking company in Westwood.
• 10 days ago, I was on my third callback interview with a tech company in El Segundo.
• 5 days ago, I had three different job offers in my lap.

Today, I finished my first week at a job I absolutely adore.  My co-workers are fantastic, my boss is extremely savvy, the company culture is awesome and the work is refreshingly challenging.  It’s the type of job that I’ve always wanted, but never been able to find on the East Coast.  So how does one manage to pull this off in an economy supposedly headed for a recession?

There’s one simple rule to always keep in mind before attempting this type of transition.  Stay positive, no matter what happens! Opportunities will always come your way and you will be able to see them with a positive attitude.  Seems like new-age mumbo jumbo, I know.  I never really understood that mantra until recently.

Before moving, research the area you want to live in.  That includes the type of job you are going after, the size of the city you desire, the cost of living, the weather, the nightlife, etc…  Research it for weeks, perhaps months.  Call anyone that you know in the city to get personal opinions about the best areas to live.  Start building a network of friends through Facebook or another social network.  Post questions at the City-Data forums to get ridiculously detailed answers from locals.

Build up a sizable pile of cash before leaving your current part-time or full-time job; 3 to 6 months of living expenses.  If you have a hard time doing that, redefine what it means to sustain yourself.  Can you live on Ramen noodles or Mac & Cheese for a couple months?  Can you live with a couple roommates in a shoddy apartment for a month or two?  Plan out exactly how long your savings can last before you have to take a job that you may dislike.

If you are moving to a city like San Fransisco, Chicago or NYC, ditch the car if you own one.  Public transportation is obviously more efficient.  If you are moving to a city like Los Angeles, Seattle or Miami, you need reliable transportation.  I’m not saying that a bicycle is out of the question, but you really need a car for interviews in large, spread-out cities.  Figure out the logistics of driving the entire way versus flying.  Flying may be faster, but you can take vastly more belongings by driving.  Plus the road trip is a fantastic memory that you will relish forever.

Stock up some technology before you make the trip; a laptop, a smart-phone and a GPS unit specifically.  Turn-by-turn directions from a cheap GPS unit is INVALUABLE in a new city.  A smart-phone, like an iPhone / Blackberry, is going to be very helpful when it comes to keep track of contacts / email.  A laptop is vital for a mobile online job search when you arrive in the city.

If you don’t know anyone personally in the city, hit up Craigslist and start perusing the listings.  Search by the areas of the city that you know to be safer.  Use Walkscore.com to identify the listings with nearby stores.  Look for situations that don’t require a lease signing.  There are plenty of these in the temp housing section of CL.   You could also try marketing yourself as a potential roommate in the Housing Wanted section.  It’s a great way to land leads for roommates that haven’t even listed their place yet.

Be aware that you may have to end up living with a bad roommate for a month or two.  If that person has to find a potential roommate that’s 2,500 miles away, odds are that everyone else has turned them down.  Try to set up multiple appointments to look at places when you arrive.  Target furnished places without a lease.  Odds are that you will want to move after making friends in the city.

Before driving / flying across the country, go dish out the best $20 that you will ever spend and pick up Guerrilla Marketing for Job Hunters.  You may not use any of the alternative techniques in the book, but it will put you into the mindset of an aggressive job search.  Read it from cover to cover.  Every single iota of advice in that book is utterly brilliant.

So you’ve arrived in the city and need to start looking for a job.  Grab that laptop and hit the streets.  I typically spent a couple hours in the Coffee Bean (local coffee chain) and the rest of the day in a branch of the public library using the free wi-fi.  It’s a perfect place to work diligently in peace and quiet.  Dress for an interview every day of the week.  I was called to a few same-day interviews, some within a couple hours of the call.

As far as my job search went, I only targeted jobs that I knew would interest and challenge me.  I made small alterations in my resume to cater it to the job in question.  I sent detailed cover letters within my email message and included a letter of recommendation with each query.  I probably sent out my resume 30 times over the first two weeks and landed an opening phone interview 15% of the time.  I skipped all the major job sites like Monster and Careerbuilder.  I actually only used Craigslist and local company sites that listed jobs.

Some people hate going on an interview.  I’ve come to relish it.  I’ve been on so many in the past month that I feel like a professional interviewer.  The key to being successful in an interview is asking questions.  That’s it.  That’s the big secret.  Do you still have to be savvy? Yes.  Do you still need to relate your experience to the job in question? Yes.  But asking questions is your chance to shift the balance of power and grill the interviewer.  Don’t wait for them to ask “Well, do you have any questions for me?“.  Just fire away whenever the topic strikes.  Find a question that they can’t answer and they will remember you.  Go to Barnes & Noble and read a book listing interview questions if you can’t come up with anything.

Following up after the interview with a thank you is key.  I’m old school.  I like the hand-written note.  I interviewed with nearly all tech companies.  I’m sure a thank you email through have sufficed, but I’m also of the opinion that my note would stick out over other candidate’s emails.  It’s more personal and certainly more time consuming than tapping a few buttons on the keyboard.  Mail them out within 24 hours of your interview, no exceptions.

Finally, try to stay patient during downtime.  It’s easy to let the mind worry about the future after several interviews.  Offers take time to put together.  Keep plugging away at sending out the resumes and wait for the offers to come in.  If you nailed the interview and followed up with enthusiastic interest, it doesn’t matter if you aren’t the perfect fit based on experience.  When you get an offer from one company, let the other companies considering you know immediately.  It will speed things along in the process.  Be gracious

So that’s pretty much the truncated version of the past 30 days.  Life is good and it’s getting better every day.  Now I just need to take some surfing lessons.

Electronic Arts sells ad space on digital billboards within the game. When gamers hop online to play a little Burnout Revenge on the Xbox 360, they will see advertisements that have been digitally uploaded to the tracks. It’s a relatively new form of advertising and brand new to the campaign front. Pop it in today and you will see an advert for Barack Obama’s campaign.

Putting all political-position squabbling aside, it’s obvious to see that one campaign understands how to incorporate new forms of advertising to reach voters. And I’m not talking about the youth vote that gets tossed in Obama’s corner all the time. The new average age of video gamers is now 35. We are getting older every year and still playing video games. This form of advertising reaches a much wider audience than people think.

Where does that put McCain or the people advising his campaign advertisement spending? Why isn’t his team investing in new forms of media to reach the same demographic? He admitted in an interview last year that he doesn’t use a computer or email. And that’s completely understandable. He’s from a generation that simply didn’t use computers and his war injury precludes him from typing.

Let’s say for a moment that I completely agree with McCain on all issues. (I don’t, nor do I with Obama.) Putting issues like Net Neutrality aside, rapid changes in computer technology already influence an incredible amount of policy decisions. How in the world do I plausibly vote for someone that doesn’t integrate computer technology into his daily life? I use a computer every single day of my life. It’s integral to my job, my livelihood, my social network. It’s the same for millions of Americans. Why shouldn’t we expect the same of the next President of the United States?

I want a President that uses iChat, Skype and Google Talk to stay in touch with Senators and Congressmen. I want a President that’s got world leaders connected via LinkedIn. I want a President that uploads Flickr pictures from the iPhone and posts updates about his / her day on Twitter. I want a President that publishes Youtube videos about what’s going on with policy decisions. I want a President that answers a few topical questions via a weekly podcast that gets fed out to iTunes.

All political positions aside, I want a President that gets it.

I also came across two moderately funny web items today. The first is Where is Bob? It’s supposedly the tale of a absentee IT manager.  It’s likely a viral marketing campaign of some sort as the writing is a bit too good and the stories are just slightly outlandish.  It’s still worth looking at for a laugh.

The second is a Hulu video of a short comedy called The Line. It’s about a group of crazy fanboys that sit in a line 11 days before some sci-fi movie opens.  There are a couple guys from SNL in the mix.  Jason Sudeikis is particularly funny as the movie theater operator.

I’ve been listening to Chopin all day for some reason.  Dead Polish piano players seem to increase my productivity on the writing front.

I’m happy with the blog design for now.  I keep tweaking it every day just a little bit, so expect to see small changes.  I’m also looking to add something new to the sidebar, but I’m trying to figure out what I should toss in there.  I’m really digging the minimalistic look right now, but I’m still missing something.

I also completed a quick video preview of Friend Book for the iPhone this afternoon.  It’s not out on the App Store on iTunes yet and it’s certainly worth checking out when it hits the digital streets.  Click the picture to the left or the Youtube link at the top of the page to watch the 3 minute preview.

I tend to embrace my apathy. It’s especially fun to invoke during conversations. I’ve noticed that people automatically assume that you are of a differing opinion when clamming up; political and religious conversations in particular. For instance some liberal co-workers at my previous job thought I was a staunch conservative; all from adopting an apathetic stance. Truthfully I’m probably somewhere in the middle, but I don’t see the point in talking about something that I’d have to pretend I had the ability to change.

That’s the real beauty of apathy.  I don’t have to lie to myself about how much I should care about matters of supposed importance.  I get to focus on stuff that’s important to my little egocentric mind instead; work and play perhaps.  Everything else gets deleted from my brain after conversations end.  But on to more social topics…

I added a LinkedIn profile recently for networking purposes.  Seeing how my previous jobs weren’t exactly tech-related, I couldn’t beef up my contact list.  I strapped on my creativity hat and sent a mass-mailing to VGT contacts about adding me.  It will help me keep track of their job-hopping movements anyway.  I got about 60% to add me.  Not too shabby!

I also got in on the Ping.fm beta finally.  For those that don’t know, Ping.fm allows you to send the same status up to mutliple accounts.  For instance, I have it setup to send my status update to Twitter, Myspace, Facebook and LinkedIn.  It works with tons of other services as well (FriendFeed, Xanga, Livejournal, Blogger, WordPress, Pownce, etc…).  I have a beta code if anyone wants to sign up.

I’ve been receiving an inordinate amount of Facebook friend requests lately; many from complete strangers.  No matter how many times I passively hit Ignore, they keep firing pleas at me.  Facebook desperately needs to add more options for my possible response.  Speaking of Facebook, the new look absolutely stinks.  It’s slow to load and I have to browse those stupid tabs to read someone’s page.

I’ve been playing around with the Flip Mino for a week now.  The video and sound quality is really excellent for the size of the camera.  It’s about the height of my iPhone, but skinnier in width.  I wish I had the camera when my sister and I filmed our Rock Band session a couple weeks ago.  Unfortunately Mikey and Gerbil broke up after our three day World Tour in Rome, London and Paris.

Shazam: This music app is great for people who are clueless to the names of songs and artists.  It can listen to any song playing on the radio or over a loudspeaker and identify it through the iPhone’s microphone.  You can mark the song for download on iTunes, watch any Youtube related video about it or send a link of the song to your friends.

Box Office: This simple app takes your GPS location and finds all the movies / theaters in the area.  It offers the Rotten Tomato rating for every movie and can be organized by rating or title.  Most importantly, it offers fast access to the showtimes in all the nearby theaters.

NetNewsWire: This is the fastest way to read RSS feeds on the iPhone.  I can rummage through posts on 15 sites when I wake up in about 10 minutes.   Just be careful to keep up with the feeds otherwise there will be a huge number posted on the icon all day.

AOL Radio: Turns the iPhone into a radio with 200 stations of music.  You can bookmark stations and mark songs for download on iTunes later.  The sound quality is extremely good for a web based radio.  Pandora is also pretty good for specific artist preferences.

Tap Tap Revenge: It’s Guitar Hero for the iPhone.  It’s only 3 buttons and four songs, but there are four levels of difficulty and the possibility of downloadable songs in the future.  You can also shake the iPhone to hit the right beats instead of tapping the screen.  Lots of fun and it’s free!

Graffitio: This app uses the GPS to figure out where you are and looks for nearby restaurants, bars, stores, parks, events, etc.  The apps creates persistent online graffiti walls for you to write notes about the business.  You can also read notes from people who have been there before.

Apple’s strategic advantage will be in the applications that are created with live tracking GPS in mind. Apple already demoed Loopt.com; an app that tells you your friend’s exact location, recent pictures, little messages and alerts you when they are nearby.

The possibilities are so ridiculously intriguing. For instance, imagine twittering, blogging, or updating your Facebook / Myspace status with not only a message, but also your current location automatically.

Locating nearby restaurants is nothing new for GPS, but imagine a one click Yelp.com application that automatically recommends the top 3 nearby Italian restaurants based on user reviews and according to your GPS location.

Imagine a music application that offers a list of upcoming, nearby concerts based on the type of music you keep on your iPhone (or your Pandora.com likes / dislikes) and your current GPS location.

Imagine being in an unfamiliar city and desperately needing to find a public restroom. One button click on the iPhone, your GPS location could be sent to Mizpee.com and a list of the closest toilets (along with reviews if you are a clean freak) would pop up along with directions to each.

Imagine not only all of your pictures being geo-tagged with locations due to GPS, but also tossed into a map-like trip diary documenting vacations as you travel or even the mundane details of your life; all via a one click social networking app on the iPhone.

Imagine sitting at work and hitting a one click Craigslist search that allows you to find nearby apartments (obviously to save on $4 a gallon gas) based on your current GPS location.

The point I’m trying to make is that the iPhone is going to make this type of techy GPS stuff incredibly easy to do. Blackberry already has plenty of GPS apps, but they aren’t for the casual phone user; they are mostly for the tech-heads. Ideally, iPhone users will just load up the App store with one click, download & install a GPS application within a few seconds and away they go. The streamlined process will ultimately increase the number of users and bring these sort of live tracking applications into the mainstream very quickly.

To sum it up, a Yelp user wrote a negative review for a Mexican restaurant in Saint Louis and the restaurant owner threatened her with a lawsuit if she didn’t remove it. For those that don’t know, Yelp is a social networking site for people that like to eat out. You can sign up to write reviews of your favorite restaurants and browse other opinions via a city breakdown.

Getting back to the story, she received a threat of a $100,000 lawsuit if she didn’t remove the review from the site. Being the social networking butterfly, she responded by using Twitter to pose a question to the collective internet about what she should do. It spread to Digg and the restaurant’s Yelp page is now being bombarded with bad reviews.

So instead of watching the negative review slip away among the positive ones (assuming the food & service was consistently decent), the restaurant owner effectively destroyed his restaurant’s rating in the online world. Not only is the Yelp rating getting trashed, but internet users are spreading the word to any publication that mentions the place; St. Louis blogs, newspapers, forums , etc… I wouldn’t be surprised to see local news coverage eventually.

Digsby’s blog indicates they will eventually add the ability to move FB Chat users into groups as well as syncing IM status to FB status. Very cool moves for the IM / Social Network power users. Digsby just keeps getting better.

While I have always found American politics to be incredibly tiresome and out of touch with my interests, the internet’s collective latching onto Barack Obama’s campaign fascinates me from a social networking standpoint. It’s blatantly apparent on community-based news sites such as Digg, carries over financially to benevolent sites like DonorsChoose and grows exponentially faster on social networks like Facebook. Why have the majority of internet-savvy users latched onto the young senator from Illinois? The most obvious clue is the difference in technological understanding in the Obama / Clinton camps, most well defined by their web presence.

Social Networking Integration:

While Cinton’s campaign finally emerged from their social networking slumber to add links to official Myspace, Facebook, & Twitter groups this year, Obama has had 16 web relevant social links on his page including links to Digg, LinkedIn, and Eventful. He also has the clear edge when it comes to number of supporters within social networks. 600,000 more on Facebook, 150,000 more on Myspace, 35,000 more subscribers on Youtube, 22,000 more followers on Twitter, etc…

Additionally, Obama’s site launched a built-in social network to join people on a local level. It essentially organizes the most passionate Obama supporters to handle volunteer projects like phone banks, rallies, and get-out-the-vote efforts. Clinton added a similar system on her site at a later date, but it feels isolated in terms of communication and building relationships on a social level. The design of Obama’s network encourages online communication on an internal basis as well as self-designed organization of events with newfound, politically like-minded friends.

Neither candidate uses their site blog to personally write about each day’s events, but rather the campaign staffers handle it. Obama’s blog is more rapidly updated by comparison and offers more content on a daily basis. It also has an edge on number of commentors. There are slight differences to their social sharing choices of blog posts as well. Both sites include sharing links to Digg and del.icio.us, but Obama’s blog includes sharing links to Stumbleupon, Facebook & Newsvine. Clinton’s blog only extra link is to Technorati search which is a really strange choice and doesn’t seem to be used by her comment contributors.

Candidate Branding:

Obama’s web site is very much designed to brand his candidacy. Note the soft white light emanating from the background to reflect a feeling of hope in coordination with his message. The “Gotham” typeface as the graphical font default is clean, understated and well defined. The font also matches every single piece of Obama campaign swag that’s distributed; pretty damn impressive from a large-scale standpoint. Highlighted graphical links light up as if they were alive and full of energy. The color scheme, while predominantly blue, has light undertones of white & red to subtly create a feeling of patriotism.

Strangely Clinton’s site is oddly similar in format to McCain’s web presence, both of which look like free web templates. The sites are static, utilitarian and lack any uniform artistic design elements. Clinton’s web admins keep adding features similar to Obama’s site, but they don’t cohesively contribute to any type of branding for Senator Clinton. What’s left is a stale website that distracts or confuses the viewer with a link-crammed home page rather then engaging them with proper design.

I find Obama’s branding to be similar to companies like Apple and Target who entered the market as underdogs. These companies are very accessible to the American public, but with tremendous elements of heavy design involved. They target consumers by creating a feeling of stylish comfort with their products and market their design choices as an important purchasing decision. Similarly, Obama’s web presence, among other things, shaped a politician with less political experience than his rivals into a well designed brand, more effectively selling the possibility of change than Senator Clinton.

Regardless of my opinion on Obama’s politics, there is something comforting in the fact that he, or at least the people within his campaign, understands the Web 2.0 generation. It’s reflected in his website, his position on net neutrality as well as his relationship to young voters. In turn, that creates hope that he will surround himself with tech-savvy opinions on policy, assuming he wins the nomination and becomes President. That’s the most identifiable reason that social networking internet users seem to be attracted to his candidacy.