This is my first post on the new StevenGroves.com (welcome BTW and thanks for visiting) so like everyday at my place, I’m going to start it with breakfast.

Here’s where we begin - two eggs, two uncooked, unseasoned, skinless pork sausages and a bread.

The sausages are the real highlight of the meal for me and here’s why – I spice them by hand.

For this, I start with a sausage that sometimes is a little hard to find unless you shop at a Kroger-branded store.  The brand of sausage is ‘Farmland’; in the freezer section, look for unseasoned, skinless and no MSG.  The fact they are unseasoned is a huge benefit because I get to make them taste like what I want – which in this case is red pepper flakes, coarse rubbed sage and white pepper.

I start by warming a small cast iron skillet.  After placing the sausages in the center, I sprinkle with sage, white pepper and then the red pepper flakes and then roll the sausages a bit in the mixture in the pan, coating the bottom and sides.  Then relax and let the heat do it’s thing.

I cook them at a medium temperature so it take a while for the outside to crisp just a bit.  After the second or third turn, I warm the egg pan and make sure the bagel is split and ready to go.

Once the eggs are in the pan, I make the final turn to brown the outside and push the button on the toaster oven for the bagel.  I just a few more minutes I’m at the table with a delicious breakfast meal.  After that, I think I’m ready for anything the day has to offer!

Sage, white pepper and red pepper flakes are my favorite, but how would you season the sausages?  Share your favorite flavors in the comments below!

Socially Yours,
Steven Groves

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• The Death of Social Media – Long Live Media That is Social!
• Hunger in a Land Of Plenty – Our Kids CAN be Fed

• My laptop died, had to get a new one and rebuild it
• I was uprooted / moved from one home / office to one in Central Phoenix (BIG transition there, still settling in)
• My 18 year old son moved in
• Took a business trip to Malaysia with Guy Powell & Jerry Dimos, my co-authors on the ROI of Social Media – able to talk to several new and prospective clients
• Opened files for several new / prospective clients here in Arizona – thanks to some word-of-mouth referrals made by some dear friends
• Lastly, and possibly most impactful was I went through a hugely disruptive spat of news regarding my dearly loved twin sister Stephanie and the potential diagnosis of her developing a brain tumor; a second opinion says she doesn’t have one and we’re all praying that that becomes a non-incident.

…and you get the idea.  No apologies, life has continued to happen and my media creation has lagged.

I am also way down on my media consumption; I usually read / review several hundred blog posts a day; not for several weeks have I been able to open a Google Reader that did not belong to a client project.  I always share what I like that I find and you can subscribe to my shared items here – I call it the ‘Best of The Best Feed’.

On the good side – there is a HUGE backlog of content on my computer that should start moving to the web here soon.  Podcasts from companies using social media with good effect, videos of the authors of the ROI of Social Media and a new community site for the book which should be coming up any day now. 

The ROI of Social Media community site is nearing a soft launch (click here to subscribe to this blog feed from Feedburner – you’ll get notice when it opens) – The community site will be a place where we’ll concentrate content from the book and invite people into a dialog focused on the models we present in the book for measuring and managing media.  It will be a place where we all can exchange ideas, improve the case studies and we can fulfill the promises for online content we made in the book – one of the elements we present is a model for evaluating measurement and monitoring tool and we promised to provide an online crowd-sourced director of tools.  We’ve seen some really good directories on this topic so far, referencing what we all know will be a part of the community function.

In any case, I’m feeling a bit more balance coming back into my efforts so the content should start back up.  Thank you to everyone who has supported me in these efforts over the last few months, especially Cynthia, who is my girlfriend, best friend and who has been the ‘wind beneath my wings’, supporting me in just amazing ways.

Look for more content soon!  Good to be back!

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• Launching theSocialMediaBible.com
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• Remembering Steven Groves II

One of those tactics is a drawing or door-prize that uses a contest model.  The conversation on how to develop an online contest has come often enough and over the holiday break, I took the time to use my favorite ideation tool to develop a model.

There are two legs to this model – one is low ‘hard cost’ and just requires a good deal of manual labor to implement, monitor and manage.  The second leg assumes most all of what is in the first, but allows for a more robust implementation assuming a funded budget for custom programming and monitoring tools.

What would be the results of this kind of a campaign?

• Increased awareness of the brand / message
• Increased followers / fans
• Some combination of the two

How would you determine the ROI of the effort? Begin with tracking the initial investments and setting the baseline of what’s happening now.  Establish what a success looks like and monitor measure and readjust as needed.

There are probably a few more aspect than I have considered here though – what would you add?

The model used MindManager from Mindjet to create the Mind Map of the Online Contest Model.  Make sure you are current with Adobe Acrobat8 and Flash9 installed and this mind map & player should work (MindJet requirements).  Mac users may have issues – contact me to send you the MindMap itself if you have the Mac version of MindManager.

FCC Disclaimer – TSMB Media is a registered reseller of Mindjets Mind Manager products and receives no remuneration / compensation

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Many, many thanks to the participants and panelist.  The interaction was lively and the topic engaging.

Jay Thompson / www.ThePhoenixRealEstateGuy.com, Tyler Hurst / www.TDHurst.com, Zane Burnett / www.HouseofZane.com and of course, the ultimate instigator of this whole event, Eric Bryant / www.MyRECoach.com.  Guys, just a whale of a good time and thanks for being a part of it.

I had a lot of fun using the Masked Mexican / Lucha Libre Wrestler theme too… Eric weighed in with a jump from the ropes about 1/2 way in and you could hear the crowd cheering or booing along with the ring bell.

By the way, if you’re wondering where the ‘SkyNet’ and ‘Donkey’ came from, as we covered the use of the moniker ‘Web3.0’ and how useful / useless it might be to define the next iteration, in the chat Tyler Hurst came up with his pick for the name of the next generation – yep, ‘Donkey’ is it and you heard it here first!  SkyNet?  Check the Terminator series of movies…

Speaking of hearing it here, here is a link to the playback – thanks again everyone!

(Image courtesy of jpockele on Flickr)

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How do I know?  A sweet little application from Neville Ridley-Smith (@nev) called ‘When Did You Join Twitter’.  I wanted this data a few weeks ago when I wrote the piece about the success of Gary’s marketing tactics, but did not have a nice quick way to get it.  I tweeted my request for the info and now we can all get that little morsel of data whenever we want. 

Neville said he did it by using a bit of programming to find the first tweet in a users stream.

Cool… nice job Neville

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Gary’s site at  Cork’d got hacked and I was happy about the experience.  Not that he was hacked mine you, but I really enjoyed the video segment he posted at GaryVaynerchuk.com, where he shared a little about the hack; starting that it got reported on TechCrunch before HE even know it had happened.

His post is titled “I had a wild day, you? Turning negatives into positives!” and in it he shares the roller coaster ride he had in getting the site back and working as expected.  In it he also talked about compensating people with money, Whuffies or whatever to get the site back online quickly.

I do not believe that Gary is poor by any means, likewise I do not think he made a gazillion in selling wine at WineLibrary.com, but in the video he talked about offering on Twitter whatever people wanted to get the site back up quickly.  At the time I heard him say it, I thought I had an idea what he was talking about, but not certain.  I wondered how I might find out about this ‘Whuffie’ to make sure I understood where he was going with his story…  enter the power of Viddler.

Gary uses a the video service from Viddler.com, which allows people to make comments at specific places in the video and only by noticing the comments from the post did I get a link to Tara Hunt / HorsePigCow.com and where she is proposing the use of the term ‘Whuffie’ (her term) to refer to the ‘social capital’ (my term), either of which comes from participating and sharing in the social media space.

Tara has refined the idea well enough that she has come out with a book ‘The Whuffie Factor‘ that is now in pre-order with Amazon(go to her site or use my link to get yours) and I admire her work in applying a word to it to make it memorable.  Turns out her use of the term was first proposed in the novel ‘Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom’ by Cory Doctorow, which portrays a world in which all your needs are met and the medium of exchange to build any kind of wealth, is your reputation, measured by Whuffies.

I suppose a Whuffie is fine by me, but my sense is we’ll not see the phases used in board rooms much – what I think will play is social capital.  Businesses understand the need for capital of all kinds, and the usage I saw coined back in June 2007 in an interview by the Washington Post about Twitter.  Social Capital and Whuffies might be about the same, but popular usage will dictate the day.

Which term do you like better – Whuffie or Social Capital?

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I’ve been called a romantic before and when I got a newsletter from 24Hr Fitness with some of these I thought I’d share it! 

1. Who was the first to declare Valentine’s Day an official holiday in 1537?
2. What was invented by NECCO in 1866?
3. The city of Verona receives 1,000 letters for whom every Valentine’s Day?
4. What product was introduced on Valentine’s Day in 1929?
5. Who sent the earliest known Valentine’s Day card?
6. What US state became a member of the Union in 1912 and is known as the Valentine State?

1. Who was the first to declare Valentine’s Day an official holiday in 1537?

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