Well, as I mentioned, Chris is coming to Birmingham Wednesday, August 25 as part of the Green Building Focus Conference & Expo (Tickets still available. See more on Chris in the sidebar at the bottom). He’ll be leading workshops, a presentation, book signing and reception. I’m excited to see Chris because as long as I’ve ‘known’ him, we’ve never met in person. I met him on Twitter and we’ve been conversing on and off ever since.  Chris is one of the top thought leaders in the technology and social media space and I can say without a doubt that he is one of the most thoughtful and helpful people on the Web.

Chris is also one of the most prolific content creators I have ever seen. But sheer volume is not what’s most impressive, its the way that Chris is able to take a complex issue or a complicated theory and simplify the concept for everyone to understand. Chris makes learning and participating in social media approachable to everyone. In my social media consulting I often find that people are uncomfortable and sometimes fearful of getting started in social media. The high profile social media gaffes they see in the news have left them gun shy and full of self-doubt about this new sensation.  Chris Brogan has provided so much useful content-from how-to, to why not–and in the process has taught each of us that we’re all human and social and that we have what it takes to be successful in social media inside each of us. We just need to pull the curtain back on the mystery and move on to mastery.

Welcome to Birmingham, Chris!

Chris Brogan is an eleven year veteran of using social media and both web and mobile technologies to build digital relationships for businesses, organizations, and individuals. Chris speaks, blogs, writes articles, and makes media of all kinds at [chrisbrogan.com], a blog in the top 5 of the Advertising Age Power150, and in the top 100 on Technorati. He is co-author of the New York Times bestselling book Trust Agents, and the recently released Social Media 101.

The most popular networking site among the  over-50 crowd is Facebook followed by MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter.  Kevin Donnellan, the chief communications officer at AARP says the latest data tells us that social networking is becoming a part of everyday life for Americans 50 plus, and boomers in particular.

In terms of news preferences:

• Most adults 50+ prefer to get their news from print newspapers and magazines  (40%) or through a combination of print and online news sources (26%)
• Among adults 50+ who use social media websites, three-quarters (73%) are connected to relatives other than children and grandchildren, three-fifths are connected to their children (62%), and one-third (36%) are connected to grandchildren.
• Among those introduced by a family member, three-fifths (63%) said it was their child.

See the survey: http://www.AARP.org/socialmediasurvey

I was excited to see Lee Odden’s post that bears the title above. What Lee did was ask over 40 of his A-list friends about the issue and then post their responses. BUT WAIT! Before you go running off (and I really do want you to read it) please look through a few of my favorite quotes from the piece, which include Guy Kawasaki’s contrarian advice: “Don’t focus on some kind of high-level strategy. . .”

So read through this, bookmark it, share with a friend and then leave a comment to tell me what you think. I’d love to create my own post of MY A-Listers - YOU!

Jessica Smith – JessicaNow
VP Digital and Global Co-Chair WOM Fleishman-Hillard
What it comes down to is asking the question ‘How do you define success?’. Tactics don’t answer that question. Strategy does.

Toby Bloomberg, Diva Marketing Blog
Strategy First helps you identify which are the best opportunities to put into play to achieve your goals. You do have goals? Oh, that’s another conversation.

Aaron Kahlow – Online Marketing Connect
CEO, Online Marketing Connect : Online Marketing Summit & Institute
Strategy before tactics on Social Media is equivalent to diving into a pool before looking to see if there is water let alone the depth to handle such.

Jay Baer
Founder, Convince & Convert
A “strategy” that is based on tactical execution isn’t a strategy at all, it’s a recipe for playing a constant game of catch up. The trick is to focus on how you’re going to be social, not where you’re going to do social media.

Julie Roehm
Marketing Strategy Consultant
Social media without strategy is like cooking without a recipe. Sometimes it works but sometimes its disaster.

David Alston – Community Instinct
VP Marketing & Community, Radian6
The C-Suite talks strategy, not tactics. And you are going to need their support if you even want ’social’ to take root in the soul of the enterprise.

Guy Kawasaki – Blog – Alltop Social Media
Don’t focus on some kind of high-level strategy because no one really knows how to use social media yet. Focus on tactics: Get more followers, make them happy, promote your stuff to them every once in a while. That’s all you need to know about strategy right now.

If you have seen any of my presentations or read my posts and articles you know that I’m emphatic about creating an effective marketing strategy based on business objectives not the newest, hottest technology.  That’s why I think this is a valuable series for those who want to fine tune their social media strategy AND for those looking to create their first one.

Please leave comments for me after viewing and let me know what you think? Are there any questions that these bring up but don’t answer? What else needs to be included in this discussion?

The Social Strategy Trilogy

You can watch the hour-long recorded presentation with audio below.

Part 2: Developing a Social Strategy

Developing A Social Strategy Webinar

You can watch the hour-long recorded presentation with audio below.

Part 3: Getting Your Company Ready

Excellent presentation of how to utilize and identify your customers by recognizing certain social behaviors.

Above: Download the slides from slideshare and use as you see fit. The “crises plan” is a slide that can be customized for your needs, just provide attribution.

Social Strategy: Getting Your Company Ready, by Altimeter Group on Vimeo.

Above: Listen to the recording, including the presentation and attendees Q&A

So what’s this all about? WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg explains:

“The WordPress Foundation is a charitable organization founded by Matt Mullenweg to further the mission of the WordPress open source project: to democratize publishing through Open Source, GPL software.

The point of the foundation is to ensure free access, in perpetuity, to the projects we support. People and businesses may come and go, so it is important to ensure that the source code for these projects will survive beyond the current contributor base, that we may create a stable platform for web publishing for generations to come. ”

The move is an effort to further gather broad community support to make sure that the freely accessible software project remain that way.  When you look at the numbers you realize just how important WordPress has become:

• WordPress is available in 23 languages and has been downloaded about 18,000,000 times in 2009
• The more-than 1,100 free WordPress Themes have received over 11,000,000 downloads
• The 8,000 WordPress plugins  have received over 71,000,000 downloads

So, whether you are a WordPress user / fan or not, head on over to http://wordpressfoundation.org/ and have a look around on this momentous occasion.

(Hat tip to @acnatta for pointing this out on Twitter)

Then I started thinking about what else is missing. It stands to reason if there is no strategy and your just swinging your social media tools at random people, you probably don’t have much CREATIVE thinking involved either. After all, CREATIVE is what conveys the message that came out of the, you guessed it: STRATEGY.  I happened upon a post by Edward Boches, Creativity in the age of social media. Bam! Edward hit the nail on the head. He says that in social media’s infancy, the the tendency is to “simply abide by the protocols of social media:” i.e. listen, learn, share, engage and be transparent. His next questions are exactly the ones I’ve been thinking about:

But what happens when every brand is on Facebook and Twitter, when there are so many communities and conversations that we encounter cacophony? Will it be possible for a brand to gain notice or attention without it? Perhaps. But my instincts tell me that we, as marketers, will have to get more inventive with our content and that we as consumers will demand it.

We have an unprecedented opportunity for unlimited creativity not just in the content itself but also in how it’s presented and how users interact with it. Have you noticed that the most creative ideas are part message, part meme, part distribution? My two favorite examples that  Boches provides are Nike’s use of the Chalkbot and the Boone Oakley website that they executed on YouTube. See the embeds below and then next time you’re thinking about social media, think about creating an effective STRATEGY and stretching your CREATIVE muscle before picking up the social media tools.

Note: This was first published by The Terminal after I wrote it. I thought I’d post it here too for you.

I’m a music lover and a fan of City Stages. I was a volunteer for the first ten years of the music festival and attended City Stages for many years after that. I did not attend last year or this year due to what I describe as a lack of top tier and up-and-coming bands to stir my interest. I didn’t want to let City Stages slip away without saying goodbye. I decided what better way than a remake of an old classic American Pie.

A long, long time ago…
I can still remember
How that music used to make me smile.
And I knew if I had my chance
That I could make those people dance
And, maybe, they’d be happy for a while.

But has-been acts made me shiver
With every song they’d deliver.
Bad news on the bank step;
They couldn’t take one more step.

I can’t remember if I cried
When I read about his fallen pride,
But something touched me deep inside
The day the music died.

So bye-bye, City Stages good bye.
Drove my Hummer to the drummer,
But he didn’t reply.
And them good old boys were nursing their black-eye
Singin, “this’ll be the day that I die.
“this’ll be the day that I die.”

Did you write the book of love,
And do you have faith in God above,
If the Bible tells you so?
Do you believe in rock ‘n roll,
Can music save your mortal soul,
And can you teach me how to dance real slow?

Well, I know that you’re in love with him
`cause I saw you dancin’ at the park named Linn.
You both kicked off your shoes.
Man, I dig those rhythm and blues.

I was a lonely teenage broncin’ buck
With a pink carnation and a pickup truck,
But I knew I was out of luck
The day the music died.

I started singin’,
“bye-bye, City Stages good bye.
Drove my Hummer to the drummer,
But he didn’t reply.
Them good old boys were nursing their black-eye
And singin’, “this’ll be the day that I die.
“this’ll be the day that I die.”

Now for 20 years we’ve been on a loan
And moss grows fat on a rollin’ stone,
But that’s not how it used to be.
When George sang out for the king of lien,
With a note he borrowed from the cash machine
And a tax that came from you and me,

Oh, and while king Larry was looking down,
Stages played his bankrupt town.
The courtroom was adjourned;
No audience has returned.
And while Council read a book of larks,
The quartet practiced in the park,
And we sang dirges in the dark
The day the music died.

We were singing,
“bye-bye, City Stages good bye.
Drove my Hummer to the drummer,
But he didn’t reply.
Them good old boys were nursing their black-eye
And singin’, “this’ll be the day that I die.
“this’ll be the day that I die.”

Helter skelter in a summer swelter.
Stages flew off with a writeoff shelter,
Half a million bucks and growing fast.
It landed foul on the grass.
The players tried for a forward pass,
With vendors on the sidelines in a cast.

Now the half-time air was sweet perfume
While the sergeants played a marching tune.
We all got up to dance,
Oh, but we never got the chance!
`cause the players tried to take the field;
The marching band refused to yield.
Do you recall what was revealed
The day the music died?

We started singing,
“bye-bye, City Stages good bye.
Drove my Hummer to the drummer,
But he didn’t reply.
Them good old boys were nursing their black-eye
And singin’, “this’ll be the day that I die.
“this’ll be the day that I die.”

Oh, and there we were all in one place,
A generation lost in space
With no cash left to start again.
So come on: jack be nimble, jack be quick!
Jack flash sat on a candlestick
Cause fire is the devil’s only friend.

Oh, and as I watched him on the stage
My hands were clenched in fists of rage.
No angel born in hell
Could break that satan’s spell.
And as the flames climbed high into the night
To light the sacrificial rite,
I saw satan laughing with delight
The day the music died

He was singing,
“bye-bye, City Stages good bye.
Drove my Hummer to the drummer,
But he didn’t reply.
Them good old boys were nursing their black-eye
And singin’, “this’ll be the day that I die.
“this’ll be the day that I die.”

I met a girl who sang the blues
And I asked her for some happy news,
But she just smiled and turned away.
I went down to the Stages door
Where I’d heard the music years before,
But the man there said the music wouldn’t play.

And in the streets: the children screamed,
The lovers cried, and the poets dreamed.
But not a word was spoken;
The church bells all were broken.
And the three men I admire most:
The father, son, and the holy ghost,
They caught the last train for the coast
The day the music died.

And they were singing,
“bye-bye, City Stages good bye.
Drove my Hummer to the drummer,
But he didn’t reply.
And them good old boys were nursing their black-eye
Singin’, “this’ll be the day that I die.
“this’ll be the day that I die.”

They were singing,
“bye-bye, City Stages good bye.
Drove my Hummer to the drummer,
But he didn’t reply.
Them good old boys were nursing their black-eye
Singin’, “this’ll be the day that I die.”