Tweetup with Social Media Mavens at Ripple6

Last night Ripple6 was pleased to host our first Tweetup*, welcoming many of our friends and social media Mavens.  Unfortunately the Tweetup’s date was dictated by Geoff Livingston’s (of the famous Livingston Buzz blog and author of Now is Gone an excellent read I highly recommend) travel schedule so it conflicted with Rosh Hashanah and many of our friends weren’t able to make it.  (We’re going to try to arrange another Tweetup soon.)  But we were very pleased to have all of the wonderful friends and soon to become friends there.

*Tweetup: A Tweetup is a meeting of friends who know each other mainly on www.Twitter.com  It’s highly anticipated because we get to meet face-to-face after conversing electronically for months, or years.  Meeting people on Twitter and getting to know them is easy, meeting face to face is often much harder.

The evening’s entertainment was provided by Geoff Livingston and Greg Verdino who are brothers from different mothers.  If you don’t believe me just see for yourself with these timeless pictures:

We want to thank everyone who made it for making the Tweetup a great evening:

Geoff Livingston, CEO Livingston Communications, and blogger

Charlie Oliver, ArtofTalk.TV

Greg Verdino, Chief Strategy Officer, Crayon, and Blogger

Jane Quigley, Relationship Director, Crayon, Blogger, and Socializer

Kathryn Jones, Producer, Synchronis.TV

Liz Pullen, Blogger, spiral-scratch.blogspot.com

Matthew Caldecutt, Account Director, Trylon SMR

Nichelle Nickels, Bookkeeper, Small Business Blogger, Keeping Nickels

Phillip Robertson, Director of Marketing Communications, ooVoo

Rick Liebling, Global Director of Client Management, Taylor

And Chris, Ed, Katie, Rich and Zack from Ripple6.

We hope we’ll see you all again real soon.

Social Best Practices- An Ongoing Series

Welcome to the exciting new series on Social Best Practices brought to you by Ripple6!

OK, ok so it’s not really exciting, but it is interesting if you’re into blogging and social media or social marketing stuff.  So we’ll call it the new INTERESTING SERIES ON SOCIAL BEST PRACTICES.  We’ll be running

an ongoing series of articles on best practices in social media, social networking and social mark

eting.  Which is why we are calling it “Social Best Practices” rather than “social media best practices”  because that wouldn’t cover the marketing or networking aspects of the whole thing.  And since Ripple6 is as much about the marketing and networking as about the media, (what the heck does the term “social media” mean anyway?) we needed a broader name.  Thusly, we’ve settled upon Social Best Practices.

If you think you’ve got a better idea for the name of the series let us know via the comments below and we’ll give each suggestion careful consideration before rejecting it.  Because this is a social place and that’s what we’re looking for, social interaction.

So back to the subject at hand, Social Best Practices.  We’re going to try to cover every area of the Social online scene here and keep updating the series.   Including but not limited to the following areas:

Best Practices for:

• Business Blogging
• Managing Online Social Networks
• Branding Online
• Managing Online Social Groups
• Participating in Online Social Networks
• Online Social Marketing

Now one way that we could do this series is to write a bunch of articles.  We’d start by reading the best articles on the subject from a couple of dozen bloggers.  Then we’d have to rehash and boil down the stuff they wrote into some short pithy articles.  But there’s a problem with that, (no it’s not that it’s a lot of work- but there is that ) the problem is that many of these excellent writers have already done that.  So we’d be reducing the reductions, leaving you with almost nothing.

So we’ve decided not to do that.  Instead we’re going to give you a list of the best of the best articles on each subject with some comments on what’s in each.  Then you can get it straight from the horse’s (bloggers) mouth (keyboard).

Today’s series starts with the list of the Best Online Social Bloggers.  We’ll make our selections here and you can comment and add your considerations.

BEST ONLINE SOCIAL BLOGS

• Mashable The best and most prolific blog covering the entire social online arena.
• Chris Brogan Chris constantly writes excellent how to articles with the best links and ideas to make you a better social animal.
• Read Write Web Consistently one of the very best blogs discussing online social issues
  
• Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang Jeremiah has a firm grasp on the state of the industry and his insights are invaluable.
• AllTop’s list of Top Social Media Blogs This a cop-out because AllTop isn’t a blog, but rather an aggregator that collects feeds from the top blogs in many categories.  But it’s really hard to pick the best of the best, so we went with AllTop as a really good list.

What do you think?  What should be added to the list?  Let us know in the comments below…

Cloud Communities by Ripple6

Cloud Communities are an innovation that make it easy to reach your most relevant audience over and over again, creating conversations and developing relationships with them.  Because the conversations happen in places where your audience spends time on the web, the dialogue is more authentic.

And by being at their place, you have an opportunity to tap into personal networks and word of mouth.The community around your brand can grow.  Check out this short video to learn more:

And an overview of how Cloud Communities work:

Welcome to the Ripple6 Blog

Ripple6 is pleased to announce our new blog.  

Here we’re not going to be your typical corporate blog we are looking to be a little bit more useful, and fun.  But, yes we will end up talking about our products and services but we’ll do it being a company that sells our social networking technology and helps our partners create great social networks for their audiences.

At Ripple we believe that activity and involvement is what makes a social network.  It’s what takes a big software site with some connection features and technology and turns it into a community where people go to talk and share their thoughts, worries, dreams and fears.  That community then grows into something that people love, trust and depend upon for news, ideas, and advice.  We’re proud of the fact that our technology helps to make this type of community happen.

Whew!  Got that corporate mumbo jumbo out of the way, now I can be real.

In this blog I’ll be sharing some of the stories that happen on our social networks and networks we manage for our clients, while carefully respecting the privacy of our users.  We’ll also offer advice on some of the nuts and bolts of  building social networks such as:

• Best practices in social networking, blogging, and social marketing
• How to guides on social marketing, networking, blogging, etc…
• Care and feeding of successful Social Networks
• Creating mutually beneficial interactions on social networks
• And the do’s and don’ts of social networking and social marketing

Along the way we’ll also talk about the Ripple6 family, everyone who works here and what we’re doing. (So this is a warning to all of our employees that we are going to talk about you when you do something great!) And we’ll tell you what we are doing in our real lives outside of the office. We hope that you’ll enjoy the blog and find it interesting and that you’ll come back often.

Thank you for visiting.

Chris Kieff,

Director of Marketing, Ripple6 Inc.

Chris is on Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, LinkedIn