Book Review: Social Nation

Business, Reviews

I recently had an opportunity to read Social Nation: How to harness the power of Social Media to attract customers, motivate employees & grow your business by Barry Libert. Heckuva title.

Libert is the the CEO at Mzinga, which is a company that connects other companies–and their customers–using social media to collaborate and communicate. Social media is, quite simply, using the internet to drive interactive communication. This includes Twitter, Facebook, and forums. Sometimes, it’s just discussion, sometimes, it’s sharing user-generated content.

Social Nation “will show you, as an employee, customer or partner, how to use new social technologies, make yourself heard, and produce better products and services.” It bills itself as a “complete toolbox” for social media. Does it match the hype? Let’s see.

The book is broken into three sections.

Part 1: The Future of Business is Social

Libert asserts that the future of business is social. That is obviously true, to a degree. A solid viral marketing campaign can drive more eyeball to a product than a full-page spread in the New York Time or a 30-second spot during Super Bowl halftime. However, there are a lot–possibly a majority–of business-to-business companies that will gain no value from a social media campaign. Would a regional supplier with an exclusive distributorship for a top-name line of faucets benefit from being on Twitter? No. On the other hand, 17% of our time online is spent on social applications and the fastest growing demographic on Facebook is 35 years old or older. There is certainly some value to be gained by have a social media presence in some markets.

This section(all of chapter 3!) also contains a link to a test to determine your social media skills. I haven’t taken the test, mainly because I don’t feel like registering for another site. This struck me as nothing more than lead generation, which is a shame. It could be a useful tool.

Part 2: Seven Principles for Building Your Social Nation

This section has seven chapters, containing 7 case studies that detail the 7 principle of social media, as defined by Libert and Mzinga.

The principles include:

Let the culture lead the way, as demonstrated by Zappos.com.
Involve your fans. The big takeaway from chapter 8 is that, when you create a community, your job is to facilitate involvement, not to control it. If you try to run it with an iron fist, it will choke and die.
Reward others and you will be rewarded. Apple lets developers keep 70% of the money they make in the app store. That encourages developers to develop, making everyone more money. Give. Karma will take care of the rest.
There are 4 other principles, but some are just common sense, and I don’t want to give away the contents of the book.

Part 3: Start Today and Create Your Own Social Nation

aka

Chapter 11: How to Get Started and 10 Pitfalls to Avoid

Section 3 has just one chapter, but it’s a good one. It explains the difference between followers and fans, the value of each and how to bond with each. The difference? Fans are actively involved. Followers are far more passive.

This section/chapter also goes into some things to avoid, like abandoning a social media strategy too early, failing to market your business, underestimating the power(positive and negative) of a social network.

Is it worth getting the book?

Social Nation bills itself as a complete social media toolbox, but it falls a bit short. The book tackles social media from a purely strategic point of view, ignoring the tactical concerns. It’s clearly geared toward helping a company plan its social media strategy from a 10,000 foot perch. For the people in the trenches, or anyone with a grasp of strategy that’s looking for the details on running a social media campaign, it’s not enough. That said, if you are trying to plan a social media strategy, or you have no idea where to start, this is a great book for you. It holds a lot of value, but stops some distance before “complete”. Definitely worth a read if you are involved is social media planning.

Giveaway

I’m giving away Social Nation. If you’d like to have a chance to get it, just leave a comment, telling me how you like to see companies use social media. Fair warning, this is the book I read, so it’s “used”. I take care of books, so you can’t tell that it’s used.

Publishers, Publicists, and Authors

If you have a book you’d like me to review, please contact me.

Clearing Up Social Debt in 3 Steps

Finance

Debt can be thought of as a disease–probably social. Most of the time, it was acquired through poor decision making, possibly while competing with your friends, occasionally after having a few too many, often as an ego boost. Unfortunately, you can’t make it go away with a simple shot of penicillin. It takes work, commitment and dedication. Here are three steps to treating this particular affliction.

1. Burn it, bash it, torch it, toss it, disinfect. Get rid of the things that enable you to accumulate debt. If you keep using debt as debt, you will never have it all paid off. That’s like only taking 3 days of a 10 day antibiotic. Do you really want that itchy rash bloodsucking debt rearing its ugly head when you’ve got an important destination for your money? Take steps to protect yourself. Wrap that debt up and keep it away.

2. Quit buying stuff. Chances are, you have enough stuff. Do you really need that Tusken Raider bobble-head or the brushed titanium spork? They may make you feel better in the short term, but after breakfast, what have you gained? A fleeting memory, a bit of cleanup, and an odd ache that you can’t quite explain to your friends. Only buy the stuff you need, and make it things you will keep forever. If you do need to indulge, hold off for 30 days to see if it’s really worthwhile. If it’s really worth having, you can scratch that itch in a month with far fewer regrets.

3. Spend less. This is the obvious one. The simple one. The one that makes breaking a heroin addiction look like a cake-walk(My apologies to recovering heroin addicts. If you’re to the point that personal finance is important to you, you’ve come a long way. Congratulations!). Cut your bills, increase your income. Do whatever it takes to lower your bottom line and raise your top line. Call your utilities. If they are going to take your money, make them work for it. If they can’t buy you drinks or lower your payments, get them out of your life. There’s almost always an alternative. Don’t be afraid to banish your toxic payments. Eliminate your debt payments. This page has a useful guide to debt and how to clear it off.

Update: This post has been included in the Festival of Frugality.

Debt Burnout

Finance

You’ve got a budget. You’ve got a debt repayment plan. You’ve been paying off your debt. You’ve even paid off a few of your smaller debts. Now you’re staring down the barrel of your big debts: your mortgage, a $30,000 credit card, maybe a car payment. You’re looking at months of payments with no quick wins; no more watching your debts die every few months. You’re in the middle of a very long slog.

All of the easy milestones have been reached and the next one is a year or more away. This is when debt repayment gets hard. How can you avoid getting burnt out doing the same thing, month after month, with no major visible progress?

1. Keep your eye on the prize. Try focusing on the end result, while ignoring the time it takes to get there. Do you have a reward planned for when you pay off your debt? If not, consider that to be your new shining goal-post. My wife and I plan on taking an Alaskan cruise when our debt is repaid.

2. Ignore the prize. If #1 doesn’t work for you, try focusing on just the current month’s progress. How much did you pay off this month? Was it more than last month?

3. Make micro-goals. Try breaking the long slog into bite-sized pieces. How fast can you pay off the next $1000? How many months will it take to pay off that TV you bought last year? Sometimes, meeting a smaller goal can make the whole works feel like it’s going by faster.

4. Take a snowball vacation. For just one month, take every dollar you would normally apply to your debt–except your required payments–and have some fun with it. Take a weekend trip, have a fancy dinner, or pick up that video game system you’ve been eying. Something. Anything to take your mind off of your repayment plan for a while. Be careful not to make this a habit or you will never get out of debt.

5. Start a blog to share your pain.

A debt snowball is a long, intense process. If you’re not careful, you can burn out and let the whole thing collapse. How do you avoid burnout?

I’d Tap That: Making Life Difficult for Government Spying

Life

Skip to the bottom if you’re familiar with PRISM and don’t want to hear any political talk and rampant violations of our Constitutional rights, but still want to protect your privacy.

For those of you who haven’t been paying attention, the PRISM program is an NSA program to monitor electronic activity.

Lots of electronic activity.

The companies identified to be working with the NSA in this grand overreach include AOL, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, PalTalk, Skype, Yahoo! and YouTube. For most people, that is the definition of “the internet”. If you’re doing it online, the NSA is–or could be, at their leisure–watching.

This isn’t a crazy conspiracy theory. This is happening, and the government has admitted it. In fact, when this broke, the executive branch’s response was along the lines of, “Don’t worry, we’ll find the guy who leaked this information.”

On top of that, the government has been demanding phone records from at least Verizon on a daily basis.

In addition, the Justice Department was just busted wiretapping Associated Press phones.

Seriously, if you put this in fiction, nobody would buy it, because it’s ridiculous in the land of the free.

As far as the people who say I’ve got nothing to worry about if I’m not doing anything wrong: shut up. You can speak again when you give me your email passwords, bank records, and let me install a toilet cam in your house. What are you trying to hide?

Seriously, there is such a mess of non-legislative administrative regulations that are considered felonies that the best estimate is that most people commit three felonies a day, without realizing it.

Catch your kid with a joint and neglect to call the cops? Welcome to the federal penitentiary.
Use one of those pill planner things to sort prescription meds for your half-senile grandmother? In some states, that’s a felony.

When we live in a system with so many rules that have never been voted on and our legal system refuses to consider legitimate ignorance of the law to be a defense and we have a collection of secret laws that are a felony to disclose or violate, government spying gets far more dangerous.

Many TSA guidelines are secret.
The Banking Secrecy Act of 1970 has a number of secret provisions.
FISA.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978(FISA) is the law the NSA is using to justify all of these data requests. The law, that we all must obey, is being overseen by a small subcommittee in Congress, and the FISA courts are just a small subset of the judges. The judges are signing warrants allowing the wiretaps and massive surveillance, but that is clearly unconstitutional and, hence, illegal.

The text of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, the supreme law of the United States is: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

Any warrant that cannot name a place to be searched is illegal.

Any warrant that cannot describe the person to be monitored is illegal.

Any warrant that is not backed by probable cause is illegal.

Tell me how “I want to watch what everyone is saying on Facebook and seize all of the data” meets any of those criteria.

Bueller?

Wiretapping the AP is a serious violation of the First Amendment, too. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

“Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press..and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Monitoring the press in case somebody breaks a story the government doesn’t want broken is crap.

How can we petition the government for redress of grievances that they call a felony if the company discloses the violation to us? It’s self-serving circular crap.

When you throw the IRS harassing charities working for the “wrong” politics, you start to pine for the good old days of Nixon-level fair play and integrity.

To be fair, FISA got nasty with the Patriot Act, which was an abomination enacted by a different political party. Hey, Washington, next time try to remember that your laws will someday be administered by your political enemies, k? (NSA: I trust you’ll pass the message for me?)

Political talk is over. How do we stop the government snooping?

There are four main pieces to discuss, based on the scandalous Constitutional violations reported recently.

1. Social media monitoring. There’s nothing to this. If you post things on Facebook, the government sees it and knows it’s you. Don’t post anything you don’t want broadcast to the police, your grandmother, and your priest.

2. Internet browsing. There is very little that is secure on the internet. The government can subpoena your ISP and get any records they keep. Unless you go anonymous and encrypted. Welcome to TOR. The Onion Router is a system that encrypts your internet traffic and bounces it all over the world. Once you enter TOR, nothing you do can be tracked, until your internet request leave the TOR system. The system is not centrally owned or controlled, so nobody in the system can track what you are doing.

For example, if I use the TOR browser to search Wikipedia, a snoopy NSA goon could tell I’m using it, and they could tell there was a request from the TOR system to Wikipedia, but they can’t tie one request to the other. If I’m dumb and log into Facebook, I lose that anonymous shield.

That’s solid protection from anyone watching your internet traffic.

How do you use it?

Easy. Just install the Tor Bundle. When you want the NSA to stop snooping over your shoulder because you want to do a search on erectile dysfunction, you launch TOR and the TOR browser and search without having to share your embarrassing secrets.

3. Email. Email is easily the least secure means you can communicate. When you send an email, that message is in plain text, and it bounces from server to server until it reaches the recipient. Any of the involved servers can keep a log of the traffic and read your email.

Never, ever, ever, ever put anything incriminating or important in an email. Don’t send credit card numbers, your social security number, or the address of your meth lab.

But what if you want to have a dirty conversation with your spouse without letting the sick voyeurs at the NSA listen to you ask your wife what she’s wearing and how would she like it torn off?

Use PGP. OpenPGP is a free software encryption program that is basically impossible to decrypt. It’s known as public-key encryption, which means that anybody can encrypt a message to you that only you can read.

It’s like magic.

To use PGP, the easy way(for Windows users) is to get Gpg4win. Install that, then open Kleopatra. This will let you generate your encryption key. You do that by:

Clicking File, then New Certificate
Click Create Personal OpenPGP key pair
Enter your name and email, then click next, then “Create Key”. Enter your passphrase when asked.

You now have a set of PGP keys. To get your public key that others can use to send you messages, right-click your certificate and select “Export certificates”. Pick a path to save the certificate, then do so. You can open this file with notepad to get your public key, or you can email the file out. There is no need to worry about security with this file.

You will end up with something that looks like my public key here:

—–BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK—–
Version: GnuPG v2.0.20 (MingW32)
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=fHba
—–END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK—–

To get your private key, that you can use with any number of plugins for your email client, right-click on your certificate and select “Export secret keys.”

You can either use PGP as a plugin for your email client, or you can use Kleopatra’s feature “Sign/encrypt files”. To do that, write your message in a file, then select the feature inside Kleopatra. You’ll end up with an encrypted file you can attach to your email that snoopy government man can’t read.

4. Phone calls. This would appear to be harder, since your phone is largely out of your control. There’s nothing practical you do about a landline, except to avoid saying anything sensitive. On your cell phone, you have options, assuming you use a smartphone.

For Android users, it’s free an easy. Install Redphone. If you place a call with Redphone, it checks to see if the caller also uses Redphone. If he does, it places an encrypted call over your data plan to the other phone. Nobody can listen in to an encrypted call. The same company also makes a program for texting.

For iPhone users, you’re stuck with Silent Circle for $10/month, which may be a better option, since there is support for more devices, including Android. It was designed by the guy who designed PGP and handles texting and email, too.

That’s it.

There you are, the whats, whys, and hows of modern, hassle-light, private communications. Doing what we can to foil bad government programs is our patriotic duty.

Money Problems – Day 7: Paying Off Debt

Finance

Today, I am continuing the series, Money Problems: 30 Days to Perfect Finances. The series will consist of 30 things you can do in one setting to perfect your finances. It’s not a system to magically make your debt disappear. Instead, it is a path to understanding where you are, where you want to be, and–most importantly–how to bridge the gap.

I’m not running the series in 30 consecutive days. That’s not my schedule. Also, I think that talking about the same thing for 30 days straight will bore both of us. Instead, it will run roughly once a week. To make sure you don’t miss a post, please take a moment to subscribe, either by email or rss.

On this, Day 7, we’re going to talk about paying off debt.

Until you pay off your debts, you are living with an anchor around your neck, keeping you from doing the things you love. Take a look at the amount you are paying to your debt-holders each month. How could you better use that money, now? A vacation, private school for your kids, a reliable car?

If you’ve got a ton of debt, the real cost is in missed opportunities. For example, with my son’s vision therapy being poorly covered by our insurance plan, we are planning a much smaller vacation this summer–a “staycation”–instead of a trip to the Black Hills. If we didn’t have a debt payment to worry about, we’d have a much larger savings and would have been able to absorb the cost without canceling other plans. The way it is, our poor planning and reliance on debt over the last 10 years have cost us the opportunity to go somewhere new.

The only way to regain the ability to take advantage of future opportunities is to get out of debt, which tends to be an intimidating thought. When we started on our journey out of debt, we were buried 6 figures deep, with a credit card balance that matched our mortgage. It looked like an impossible obstacle, but we’ve been making it happen. The secret is to make a plan and stick with it. Pick some kind of plan, and follow it until you are done. Don’t give up and don’t get discouraged.

What kind of plan should you pick? That’s a personal choice. What motivates you? Do you want to see quick progress or do you like seeing the effects of efficient, long-term planning? These are the most common options:

Debt Snowball

Popularized by Dave Ramsey, this is the plan with the greatest emotional effect. It’s bad math, but that doesn’t matter, if the people using it are motivated to keep at it long enough to get out of debt.

To prepare your debt snowball, take all of your debts–no matter how small–and arrange them in order of balance. Ignore the interest rate. You’re going to pay the minimum payment on each of your debts, except for the smallest balance. That one will get every spare cent you can throw at it. When the smallest debt is paid off, that payment and every spare cent you were throwing at it(your “snowball”) will go to the next smallest debt. As the smallest debts are paid off, your snowball will grow and each subsequent debt will be paid off faster that you will initially think possible. You will build up a momentum that will shrink your debts quickly.

This is the plan I am using.

Debt Avalanche

A debt avalanche is the most efficient repayment plan. It is the plan that will, in the long-term, involve paying the least amount of interest. It’s a good thing. The downside is that it may not come with the “easy wins” that you get with the debt snowball. It is the best math; you’ll get out of debt fastest using this plan, but it’s not the most emotionally motivating.

To set this one up, you’ll take all of your bills–again–and line them up, but this time, you’ll do it strictly by interest rate. You’re going to make every minimum payment, then you’ll focus on paying the bill with the highest interest rate, first, with every available penny.

DOLP

This is the plan promoted by David Bach. It stands for Done On Last Payment. With this plan, you’ll pay the minimum payment on each debt, except for bill that is scheduled to be paid off first. You calculate this by dividing the balance of each debt by the minimum payment. This gives you an estimate of the number of months it will take to pay off each debt.

This system is less efficient than the debt avalanche–by strict math–but is better than the snowball. It give you “quick wins” faster than the snowball, but will cost a bit more than the avalanche. It’s a compromise between the two, blending the emotional satisfaction of the snowball with the better math of the avalanche.

Snowflaking

For each of these plans, you can give them a little steroid injection by snowflaking. Snowflaking is the art of making some extra cash, and throwing it straight at your debt. If you hold a yard sale, use the proceeds to make an extra debt payment. Sell some movies at the pawn shop? Make an extra car payment. Every little payment you make means fewer dollars wasted on interest.

Paying interest means you are paying for everything you buy…again. Do whatever it takes to make debt go away, and you will find yourself able to take advantage of more opportunities and spend more time doing the things you want to do. Life will be less stressful and rainbows will follow you through your day. Unicorns will guard your home and leprechauns will chase away evil-doers. The sun will always shine and stoplights will never show red. Getting out of debt is powerful stuff.

Your task today is to pick a debt plan, and get on it. Whichever plan works best for you is the right one. Organize your bills, pick one to focus on, and go to it.

Assuming you are in debt, how are you paying it off?

5 Steps to Save

Finance

: Image by BitHead via Flickr

“Saving is too hard.”

“I don’t know where to start.”

“How much should I save?”

“Who the heck are you to tell me what to do with my money?”

“Shut up, Jason.”

These are the things I hear when I start talking about getting a good strategy in place to save some money. Financial matters are intimidating to a lot of people. They’d rather not think about their money any more than they absolutely need to, if that much. Here, I’m breaking it down to some simple steps to make saving easy.

1. Get motivated. Why do you want to save some money? Are you trying to make a secure future, or do you just want to buy a new toy? These are the kind of questions you have to ask yourself. Nobody else can tell you why you want to make changes to your lifestyle, and nobody else’s reasons matter in the least. Saving money is something you have to do for you.

2. Figure out how much you can save. Generally, you’re going to need a budget so you can figure out what you can afford to save, but not always. If you are making ends meet, then you get a raise, you can obviously afford to bank the difference. If you do that, you’ll never even notice the missing money. If you try to save so much your mortgage goes unpaid, you’re plan is doomed to failure.

3. Open an account at a new bank. The biggest problem I used to have when I was trying to save was that it was too easy to get the money. Every time I checked the balance of my checking account, I saw the balance in the savings account. Worse, it took seconds to transfer that money from my savings account to my attached checking account. Every time I wanted to see if I could afford whatever toy I was looking at, I’d see money that wasn’t earmarked for anything in particular. Naturally, that money got spent more often that it was ignored and allowed to grow. Now, I can completely forget about the money.

4. Automate. I’ve automated everything I can. All of my bills are paid automatically, except for one company that insists on quarterly paper invoices. I’ve got $665(neighbor of the beast!) automatically transferred to my INGDirect account, to get divided between my various savings goals, including a fund for my semi-annual property tax payments and a fund to pay for the braces we haven’t actually had to buy yet, but will in a couple of years. The money disappears into a bank I don’t use for my day-to-day expenses and grows completely out of sight. Every once in a while, I look at the account and get surprised by how much has accumulated.

5. Get rich. Once you’ve got the other four steps in place, all you’ve got to do is let it work. Over time, you will build wealth in a way that may surprise you. Your goal at this point is to do nothing new. Every once in a while, you can pull out some money and tuck it into an investment account to get some real growth going for you.

“Thank you.”

“You’re the best.”

“What would I do without you?”

“How can I show you my appreciation? <wink><wink>”

“What the heck are you doing with my wife?”

These are the things I always hope to hear after sharing my strategies to save money.

Search Results for: debt-burnout/subscribe-by-email/Clearing Up Social Debt in 3 Steps

Part 1: The Future of Business is Social

Part 2: Seven Principles for Building Your Social Nation

Part 3: Start Today and Create Your Own Social Nation

Chapter 11: How to Get Started and 10 Pitfalls to Avoid

Is it worth getting the book?

Giveaway

Publishers, Publicists, and Authors

Political talk is over. How do we stop the government snooping?

That’s it.

Debt Snowball

Debt Avalanche

DOLP

Snowflaking