Together with Founders Co-op, we are creating a place where people can gather, connect and engage in strategic conversations about the issues and innovations driving the digital marketplace. We’ll be inviting thought leaders and industry experts who will inspire you to look to the future; and, of course, we’re also going to be pouring local wine and microbrew to help you wind down at the end of a hard day.

The Dbar already has heard from some terrific folks who plan to join us and spark the discussion, but you’ll have to wait another few days to get all the details.  Suffice it to say, with The Dbar, we are raising the bar for digital communication. Stay tuned.

Astroturfing is a social media, marketing, or public relations campaign that is formally planned by an organization or agency, but is disguised as spontaneous grassroots behavior. In other words, sometimes reviews expressed within online communities are coming not from legitimate, sharing consumers, but rather from hired posters.

A recent survey by R2integrated (R2i), found that most marketers believe that astroturfing of online reviews occurs, that the practice is wrong, and, most importantly, may stop buying from a brand if they learned that the brand was doing it.

When R2i asked 284 marketing professionals from several leading industries about their attitudes toward astroturfing, more than 35 percent thought it “highly unethical,” and more than 42 percent thought it “unprofessional.” Nearly 85 percent of respondents agree that the proliferation of social media has increased the practice of astroturfing, and more than 87 percent of respondents believe that companies plant reviews.

In terms of buying behavior, 49 percent of respondents indicated that online reviews influenced their purchasing decisions “most or all of the time.” Nearly the same percentage indicated “sometimes.” When asked if they would stop buying from a brand if they found that the brand had planted reviews, nine percent checked “yes,” 63 percent indicated “maybe, it depends,” while 28 percent checked “not if I liked their products.”

It is clear that online peer-to-peer recommendations play an important role in the buying decisions of marketers as consumers, and that they are sensitive about the authenticity of reviews. Because fraudulent reviews can greatly impact buying behavior, brands have to be completely honest and transparent with their information sharing, and keep a close eye on their social media, marketing, and PR outsourcing if they intend to retain customer trust or attract new customers.

What do you think about astroturfing? How can brands best benefit from outsourced social media services while remaining honest and transparent?

These diagrams and meta dictionary will help other organizations understand the DNN architecture and save development time. Given that DNN Community Edition (CE) has several versions we reverse engineered the latest 5.42 (and for reference 4.95) versions to create the ERD and meta data dictionary. In addition there is additional reference defining the database differences between the versions.

DNN Community Edition 5.12 to 5.42

• CE 5.42 ERD Data Model (pdf)
• CE 5.42 Meta Data Dictionary (xls)
• CE 5.12 – 5.14 ERD Data Model (pdf)
• CE 5.12 – 5.14 Meta Data Dictionary (xls)

DNN Community Edition 4.95

• DNN495_ERD (pdf)
• CE 4.95 Meta Data Dictionary (xls)

R2i traveled to San Fran late in April to unveil the latest version of their social networking mash up technology, R2i Live, as the focal point of the Inbound Marketing Summit 2009 Conference. Assigned the aptly named moniker “Smash”, short for social mash up, R2i SMASH provides a robust and friendly environment which integrates the popular heavyweight social networking capabilities of Twitter, Flickr, text messaging, mobile video, Ustream, webcasting and multimedia messaging.

Extending on their open source frameworks, the R2i SMASH platform leverages a slick and easy to configure CMS backend, a modular what you see is what you get approach. The platform is easily configured for each service, allowing for direct streaming of text, image and video feeds in a readily malleable look and feel.

With R2i SMASH you can quickly setup anything from a simple page with grouped social streams, to a full event conferencing web property, complete with locations, sessions, abstracts and schedules to conduct a full social networking world’s fair online or shared and in person.

R2i SMASH has been used for simple websites used to act as the one-stop takeaway point for single day conferences, to multi-day extravaganzas. It can have a custom user interface for each event, or a set of shared layouts for quick setup for use in any setting.

•    Quick setup
•    Custom URLS
•    Popular social networking feeds
•    Twitter tweets by tags and phrases
•    Flickr pics by tag and author
•    SMS texts from custom email addresses
•    SMS pictures with automatic scaling
•    Video streams with web capture
•    Built in moderation capabilities
•    Quick export of all multimedia types for archiving
•    Adjustable and skinable layout

Custom dimension flexibility appropriate for any display requirements like:

• laptops/desktop
• conference booths
• TV and HDTV
• standard and widescreen projectors

R2i SMASH brings you the best features of social networking, in one centrally located package.

R2i SMASH has been used for GBTC’s TechNite 2008, OpenForce ‘08, Inbound Marketing Summit San Fran, and DPAC III. It will be appearing in upcoming events such as Inbound Marketing Summit Dallas and Boston, DigiDay Social, MD BIZ EXPO, and more.

For questions or to learn more, please contact Lindsey Hill @ lhill@r2integrated.com.

While the majority of my talk was spent discussing the various social media tool families (blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, online video, and so on) I was surprised when the conversation turned toward how do you take these tools inside the enterprise (Enterprise 2.0) and what are some of the challenges. 

So what are some of the challenges of taking Web-based tools inside the enterprise?

1.    The ROI debate. What is the return on these tools particularly when orgs have a significant investment in email?

2.    Security. Are the tools secure?  What about the content that travels the wire?  Do we need to control it or at least know what it is?

3.    Leadership perspectives.  The CEO seeks increased productivity via blogs and wikis. But management is scared someone will publish valuable IP accidentally.  And IT thinks PHP is a security risk.

One of the things that I wanted to get across is that people are inherently social and want to share—even at work. We satisfy this need by making runs to Starbucks, attending happy hour, and hosting potluck dinners.  During these outings, we’re not always talking about business.  We talk about relationships, our families, vacations, and embellish stories about our fishing trips. At least I do.

Inside the firewall, the Web plays a role in enabling this behavior, too. And this is one of the areas (besides security) where people get scared.  What if someone posts a photo from their baby shower or an unflattering photo from a “non work” related event?  This is a question that came up yesterday.

This sounds like a policy matter more so than a tools and technology problem.  What happens when I say something regrettable in an email?  It’s on me.  I’d like to know what questions were asked when email vendors tried to get in the door 15-20 years ago.  I bet they are similar, if not the same, as the ones being asked now about enterprise 2.0 tools.

History rhymes and people don’t change that much.

I have some more thoughts about this and I’m interested to hear your opinions in the comments.  I’ll either chime in or write up another post about it.

Many thanks to Bill and Patrick from CSO Breakfast Club.  Looking forward to more on this topic in Baltimore and DC in the next few weeks.

With that in mind, we wanted to create something that would help facilitate the search and spread of ideas for use by digital marketing professionals everywhere — something that would help thought leaders spread their ideas in a way that would provide practical value to those looking to understand this ever-changing digital landscape.

And so Digitips was born. Digitips is a widget that is updated bi-weekly with tips, thoughts and success stories from the thought leaders who live and breathe in this space every day.  The founding contributors consist of Matt Goddard, CEO of R2integrated; Dave Evans, Social Media Strategist and Co-Founder of Digital Voodoo;  Greg Cangialosi, President & CEO of Blue Sky Factory, Inc;  Johnny Boston, CCO of Raw Digital; and Nick Friese, Founder and President of DM2 Media. The founding contributors were chosen as people who we consider unequivocal leaders in their fields; ones who would bring unlimited contribution to Digitips users. You can view the founding contributors and their bios here.

Because we recognize that the digital landscape is an ever changing one, we happily soldier on in our quest for innovative approaches. If you have some to share, we want to know.  With that in mind, we are making a standing invitation:  If you are interested in being featured as a guest contributor and have something you want the world to know, we strongly encourage you to send to send it to us. Just fill out this short form. We want to hear from you – and we know others do, too.

As a Digitips user, if you find it has been valuable to you, please share with your peers, friends and colleagues by clicking the “Share This” tab on the widget.

Learn on!

R2i Live (see http://live.r2integrated.com and http://oflive.r2integrated.com) is a real-time media portal that empowers users to experience an event through a blend of pictures, videos, audio, text, and Twitter messaging from your colleagues at the event. Several months ago, our engineers were brainstorming for an innovative, yet simple way to use technology to engage not only attendees of a particular event, but also those who cannot attend. The product of that creative session is R2i Live, which we’ve since introduced at two events: The Greater Baltimore Technology Council’s TechNite and DotNetNuke’s OpenForce 2008. While attendees walked the events, attended sessions, watched exhibits, and spoke with attendees, they were sharing their first-hand experiences by snapping photos with their phones, texting, and emailing to R2i Live. R2i Live takes care of the rest, organizing the media on a single Web page, which can be accessed by attendees and people outside the event.

R2i Live at DNN OpenForce ‘08 in Vegas two weeks ago:

* DNN will be offered in two flavors starting 1st QTR 2009. there will be a continuation of the free version called Community and a subscription support version on a per server basis called Professional. Details will be forth-coming on the features, benefits and support services offered for Professional.
* DNN 5 release candidate 2 was made available publicly yesterday afternoon
* DNN 5 initial release will focus on several areas but represent a significant base to build upon. Significant features will be in the area of skinning, social, widgets and security.

Opening night at the exhibit hall saw a lot of foot traffic and things are jumping on the conference floor. But don’t take my word for it – visit Open Force LIVE to get a flavor of what is going on this year. In co-op with DotNetNuke, we’ve created a social platform that allows all conference attendees to participate in a variety of different ways. They can send in photos from the conference floor, or their favorite speaker, or even the great view from their hotel room. They can also send texts and tweets via Twitter, all in real time. If you get a chance, check out OpenForce Live at http://OFLive.R2integrated.com.

Would love to hear what you think. So far we have interviewed all the vendors and several of the core DNN team including Shaun. Stay tuned to see more as the conference progresses to see interviews from the R2i booth, and all of the buzz created by the attendees through texts, tweets and photos. Off to the DNN Social…

PS – I am up playing BlackJack – $20 which considering the fact I was down $100 I feel lucky. Such a big spender;-)