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Now that Wells Fargo bank has purchased Wachovia bank, will they keep their employee social media network or will they merge with one of there on. as I have discussed before Wachovia was letting their employees access wikis, blogs and profiles that include photos and information about the roles of employees. Their social network allows users to access a corporate directory for contact information and can note whether an employee is available via instant messaging or phone or is in a meeting.  Employees  also create their own ad hoc wikis and blogs.  Most of the Wikis are set up for processes, policies and products.  For 120,000 people to access this kind of social networking, their staff must be using Web 2.0 tools  and a good rock solid server.  Has anyone heard if these two giants will merge their social networks?? Only time will tell.

Social media optimization (SMO) is a set of activities that are designed to generate publicity with social media, it can get time consuming, online social communities along with community websites. There are many methods of SMO for your site, include adding RSS feeds, you can add a “Digg This” button and others, including blogging and incorporating third party community functions like photo slides and picture galleries or even videos. Social media optimization is a form of search engine marketing.

Social media optimization techniques are connected to viral marketing where word of mouth is created not through your friends or your family but through the use of networking with others in social bookmarking, social micro-blogging via twitter, video presentation and photo sharing websites. Do them all, they will help with each other in generating traffic vis the search engines

It now seems that some folks are trying to make the internet more personal. The site allows you to send real mail to your social network of family, friends and customers in the form of custom cards that you will create from your digital art.

Touchnote gets you using digital content to send personal greetings to your social network. Share what you make online. The cards are designed for those that enjoy getting regular mail. It has all the bells and wistles with a simple interface for uploading your digital art, you can customize the front and inside of the card. Now I can say it old school networking meets current social networking.

Comcatalyst.org - Social Catalyst

The folks a Twellow have created a people directory untilizing the micro-blogging Twitter. You can got to Twellow, look for your Twitter ID and you popup. Click on the Claim this profile, enter your Twitter password and you are added. Twellow has sections that tell you who has recently claimed profiles and recently updated bios.

I can see Twellow become a more useful social networking tool that helps you to find people on Twitter by category. Category can help you find like minded folks or bite my tongue market to a category of Twitters. Twellow even will help you connect with certain professions by finding people then see if there are mutual follows. This is starting to look like marketing 101.

Comcatalyst.org

StumbleUpon is getting more that Lipstick on a pig, so to speak. The new StumbleUpon wll become a toolbar-free version. The old design required thay you download a toolbar for StumbleUpon to function properly. The StumbleUpon homepage is receiving a complete makeover with a new innovative header to the StumbleUpon site.

StumbleUpon now lets us users able to check the most selected articles, top pictures and top videos that the StumbleUpon community has marked for you as popular.

When every a story or article is discovered via someone using StumbleUpon, it will be ranked on a scale 0-5 stars. The numbers are based of course on thumbs up, size of the website reviews, and other parameters. Cool stuff will have to start back using more.

Social Catalyst

Over the years it seams that we have gone from a closed realm of you do your thing to get website traffic and other do their thing to gain visiter traffic.  Now it seam we are all one collective helping each other out with SEO issues, Search Engine Issues, Social media optimization issues with oneline at one time communications.  There seems everyday to be another new social stream site for use to communicate our selves and share news - services with others that make up the communities. Below is a list of Social steam internet user collaboration sites. I suggest we all take part in these top performers and  the many others that make up the social media world.

Social Stream Collaboration 

    * Social bookmarking: Google bookmark, Digg, Technorati, Delicious, Reddit, Yahoo Buzz, Propeller and StumbleUpon

    * Wikis: Wikipedia, PBWiki

    * People Search Stream: Wink

Social Stream Communication

    * Micro-blogging : Twitter - Jaiku - Tumblr - Pownce

    * Social Networking : MySpace, Facebook, Linked : the big three

    * Blogging Platforms: Wordpress, Blogger, TypePad and others

    * Social network aggregation:  FriendFeed

Social Stream Multimedia

    * Photo Streaming: Flickr, Picasa, PhotoBucket, Shutterfly, Webshots

    * Video Streaming: Blip.tv, Google Video, YouTube, MySpaceTV and Vimeo

    * Audio and Music Streaming sites: Last.fm, Pandora, Yahoo Music, imeem

Social Stream Entertainment

    * Virtual worlds:  Second Life

Did I leave any one out, send them to me and I will update

Micro-blogging is a form of blogging that will allows you to write brief text updates and publish them on micro-blog websites. Posts are viewable for public consumption or make them private for a select fews. Some have even go as far use these as a mini-newsletter or a latest news update.  Your micro-post can be submitted, by web, text messaging, third party posting providers, instant messaging or via email.  This has become a challenger to some types of blogging. One micro-blogging happenings that stands out was the guy overseas that was texting to his twitter account and told his boss he was going to be arested and where he was at. This enabled his employer go read is Twit posts to get him out of jail and to the local Amercian embassy. Saved via twitter.  

Along with Twitter, there several others to mention Jaiku, Tumblr, Pownce and Fazr. All should be part of your Social Media Marketing took kit.

These Micro-blogging sites allow users the ability to share links, events and news. Some cool things about todays mico-blogs is that they are developed with an  open platform  in mind to allow the  third party developers to build applications on top of them.