Take one mini piano, attach a ukulele, and stick a kazoo on the end and what do you have? The Kazookeylele of course! Without the Internet, how would we ever find something as good as this? Enjoy this version of The Final Countdown on the Kazookeylele. If you need more Kazookeylele, here's his live version of The Bohemian Rhapsody.

I've been thinking a lot lately about where Facebook seems to be going for businesses, and I have several ideas about where it's going based on observation and experiences with my clients. I'm not quite ready to blog about these ideas yet. Sometimes ideas just need to marinate a bit longer, but these stats seem to validate where things are going. In the meantime, consider some of these new Facebook stats from ComScore:

Traffic:
In Dec. 2008, Facebook had 13 million daily U.S. visitors.
In Dec. 2009, Facebook had 37 million daily U.S. visitors.
This is an increase of 181%.

In Dec. 2008, Facebook had 54 million U.S. visitors total.
In Dec. 2009, Facebook had 111 million U.S visitors total.
This is an increase of 105%.

In Dec. 2008, the average Facebook user visited the site 16.8 times during the month.
In Dec. 2009, the average Facebook user visited the site 27.4 times during the month.
This is an increase of 64%.

Engagement:
In Dec. 2008, users spent 2.8 cumulative hours on Facebook during the month.
In Dec. 2009, users spent 4.1 cumulative hours on Facebook during the month.
This is an increase of 45%.

In Dec. 2008, Facebook users spent 10.1 minutes per visit.
In Dec. 2009, Facebook users spent 9 minutes per visit.
This is a decrease of 11% (Though this is a decrease I think it makes sense that people would spend less time per visit when they're visiting the site more often. There's less new stuff to see since the last time they were there.)

In the most recent episode of The New Mediology podcast, Nathan, Alison, Ray, and I discussed, among other things, the rise of a mobile phone-based location aware game called Foursquare. Alison does a good job explaining it (jump to the 14:15 mark of the podcast on the New Mediology page to listen to the Foursquare discussion) but the idea behind Foursquare is this: businesses sign deals with Foursquare and the people within a city who visit the business "check-in" with their mobile phones whenever they visit. By checking in, the person is broadcasting to his or her friends their connection to that particular business, resulting in marketing exposure for the business. The person checking in may get special offers from that business for checking in, visit frequency, or becoming the "mayor" of the business (person who's been there the most). At that point it's up to the business to decide how to reward people.

So what's this mean for you? It depends. Maybe nothing much. Maybe a lot.

Three Options For Foursquare And Your Business
If your company doesn't have any physical location in which business with customers is conducted, this may not mean much for your business. I may be missing something here (and if I am someone please show me what I'm not seeing) but locations are key to Foursquare, and therefore the absence of a location makes Foursquare less applicable.

If your business has a physical location of any kind you will want to know, at the very least, if anyone has claimed mayorship of your location. It would be interesting to find out if you have a mayor you never knew about. If you find out you do, you've got some connecting to do pronto!

If your business is anything retail oriented, you are really going to want to keep your eye on Foursquare. It appears to be rolling out its services slowly across the country, so depending upon where you live, you may or may not be able to sign your business up with Foursquare yet. Here in Nashville, for instance, it's relatively new. Frozen yogurt retailer, Tasti D-Lite, is using it locally along with several other bars and restaurants. You can see a full list of the businesses who have signed on with Foursquare on their businesses page.

In the end, the future success of Foursquare will depend upon getting enough people to participate. Whether players push retailers to jump in or retailers offer such good benefits to Foursquare players that it compels people to sign up, remains to be seen. At the very least it's time to pay attention to Foursquare and determine for yourself whether it's time to get in the game or not.

PS: As always, you can subscribe to the New Mediology podcast on iTunes.

This is certainly not the rooster you want waking you up in the morning. If you're a heavy metal fan you may enjoy this little remix of the same rooster. When I first saw this clip I actually thought of this scene from Dumb and Dumber.

One of the potentially difficult changes for companies to overcome with the current online culture of today is the humanization of business interactions. What that means is that the distant, sterile formality that used to be considered "professional" is being undone by informal conversations and interactions with businesses. These informal conversations with otherwise fully professional businesses are perceived by customers as actually more authentic and trustworthy.

This not-so-subtle shift in consumer perception about interactions with brands changes the way brands should engage their customers, particularly when using any social media platform. What used to be the "professional" way to engage customers has changed.

Why The Shift?
This shift may not seem like a big deal. It may feel like a touchy-feely nuance of the social media space, but it actually is quite significant because social media tools work best with informal interactions. You have to remember that social media tools weren't originally built for business. They were built for connecting people and letting people share what they create. It just so happens that companies have begun to realize the business opportunities in social media, but as such you have to enter the space as one who understands the culture and rules, rather than someone who thinks they can just do whatever worked for them up until now.

Implications For Branding
This will be a hard adjustment for companies that haven't operated with that perspective before, but think about like this: I can’t have a relationship with a brand. I can have a relationship with a person. If you offer me a person from your brand to connect with, I get the best of both worlds. I get the affinity and interest in your brand, and the person I can build a relationship with to help me feel even stronger about the brand. Though it may be informal interactions that connect me to your brand, there's certainly nothing unprofessional about engaging me and helping me  as a potential or current customer.

Understanding the culture and mindset that applies to social media is just as important as figuring out how to set up a Facebook page or shoot video for your YouTube channel. I would contend it's more important to get the cultural understanding down first. Though the technology gets all the headlines these days, if you don't know what you're doing with it you might harm everything you're trying to build...and that's not very professional.

Selling the the benefits of social media inside organizations may be the single greatest battle ground for social media right now. A friend who works as a social media director within a large organization confirmed this for me recently along with several  other conversations with employees from other organizations.

Part of the internal "sell" is identifying the people who have issues with social media and then understanding their points of view. The problem is, the people you're trying to convince are usually the very ones with the authority to really do something with social media or at least release it to take hold within the organization.

I've been doing social media consulting for three years now, so I've had my fair share of these kinds of discussions with everyone from the company CEO to an outside consultant working on the company's behalf. In my experience, the bottom line is one (sometimes more) flawed perspective of how social media must work. These flawed perspectives skew people's entire views on what social media can do, and together, they make up four kinds of people who can kill your company's social media efforts. It's time to call these killers out so you can attack them before they attack you:

I'm usually a fan of anyone who can take an average, everyday occurance and make me pay attention to it.  The folks over at Improv Everywhere are famous (and sometimes infamous) for that kind of thing, and I love the way they can take something so simple like giving high fives on a New York escalator and change the total demeanor of an otherwise average commute into the city.

I think there are some lessons we can apply to business here too. Are there some routine things you do for your employees or customers that could use an infusion of new life or attention with a simple and creative twist? Need some more inspiration? Check out the piano stairs.

One of the benefits of using Twitter in addition to conversation is to drive traffic to your blog posts. According to Dan Zarrella's "Science of ReTweets" presentation (which I got to see in person at Social Fresh Nashville this week) there are certain words that encourage people to ReTweet. For instance, if you use a phrase like "check out" or "new blog post" you're more likely to get a ReTweet. This is very valuable information to someone who's interested in getting ReTweets, but there's something to consider in addition to this: your personal ReTweet character count.

Determining Your Personal ReTweet Character Count
So we all know that you get 140 characters per Tweet. Whenever you post something and hope for a ReTweet, you need to keep in mind how many characters you should leave blank when someone wants to ReTweet you. In other words, don't use up all 140 characters and therefore force someone to modify your original Tweet just so they can share the love. I suspect people won't take the time to do that and will pass on the ReTweet instead.

Here's how to figure out your personal ReTweet character count.

• Step 1: Count the number of characters in your Twitter username. In my case, I'm billseaver, so my username character count is 10.
• Step 2: Add four to the total count in step 1. This accounts for the "RT" that comes with a ReTweet, a space, and the "@" sign before your name. My total, then, is 14.
• Step 3: Subtract your total number from the original 140 characters you have in Twitter. In my case 10+4=14. 140-14=126. So my personal ReTweet character count is 126 characters and I don't want to exceed that character count whenever I'm posting something that I hope will be ReTweeted.

The bottom line here is that this is a quick way to make sure you give yourself every possible opportunity to get a ReTweet when you're looking for it. Don't use up all the available Twitter characters to provide space for the person who may want to ReTweet you.

Last month I wrote a post about how to spot a problem with a Facebook fan page in 3 seconds or less. One of the common follow up questions I got from that post (several via Facebook incidentally) was, "Ok, so I need to do a better job of engagement...but how do I do that?"

That's a great next question. In fact, if you're even asking that question, you're already well on your way because that means you care about actual engagement rather than the mere appearance of social networking involvement. If your organization is having trouble getting its Facebook fan page off the ground, try starting with some of these:

1. Break corporate news on your fan page.
2. Share behind the scenes photos.
3. Interview some of the employees who make your organization great. Tell their story. Share one a week or one a month. You can do this with video, audio, or have them type it out, but keep it relaxed.
4. Share a testimonial that doesn't sound like the average testimonial your company gets.
5. Talk about an intra-office contest and keep the fans updated as it goes. Include pictures or video if you have them.
6. Share links to stories, sites, posts, videos, etc. that the people who follow you would likely want to know as well.
7. Pick a side on a hot topic in your industry. Set the rules for the debate: Disagreement is permissible for everyone, but personal attacks and obscenities will not.
8. Ask people what they would change about your organization if they could. Brace yourself for this one just in case...and don't get defensive even if it stings a little.
9. Ask people what they would never change about your company.
10. Give something away. Maybe it's something your company makes. Maybe it's something for the good of the community. Maybe it's the boss's favorite tie. Don't put a lot of strings on the giveaway. Just give it away. Make it fun. Make it random. Make it worth talking about. Make it audacious.

Be sure to note one big thing about the entire above list: they all require a strong dose of human-to-human transparency, informality, and openness that your organization may not be entirely comfortable with. In fact, that may be your biggest hurdle, and if so, that's where you need to get to work. You may not have a Facebook problem as much as a corporate culture problem. If that's the case, begin to make changes to the full extent of your authority and influence. Even small changes that you can influence will lay the groundwork for broader change in the future.

One More Thing: Don't forget that once people actually do start to talk with you on Facebook you always want to respond back to them. The more you close the conversation loop, even for seemingly mundane comments, the more you show yourself worthy of and interested in valuable conversations.

I recently found Mashable's top 10 funny videos of YouTube post and was curious to see how many of the top 10 (plus the bonus video) I had actually seen before. I had seen all but one of the videos, so I thought it was fitting that if I had missed a popular funny video over the last few years you had as well. This one's over two years old but somehow I missed it, so here is Cat Talking, Translated. I gotta admit, I'm not usually a fan of pet-related videos but this one was pretty dang funny.

Nielsen recently released a slew of 2009 consumer electronic data from their numerous 2009 surveys and studies. There are some interesting Twitter and Facebook stats here along with the sheer number of people and amount of time being used to access social networking and online video sites. Here are the U.S. social networking and Internet usage stats:

Social Networking

• Facebook reaches 56% of the active U.S. Internet universe with an average usage of 6 hrs a month per user
• Facebook is the #3 site visited by users 65 and older
• Twitter grew 500% year-over-year
• Time spent on social networking sites in the U.S. increased 277%
• The average U.S. worker spends 5 hrs a month visiting social networks at the office
• 32% of all mobile web users visited a social network

Internet

• 195 million: Active U.S. Internet users
• 160.3 million: People who accessed the Internet via a broadband connection: (93.3%... up 16% from 2008)
• 138.4 million: Unique viewers of video (up 11.4% from 2008)
• 11.2 billion: Total online video streams viewed monthly (up 17% from 2008)
• 200.1 minutes: Average time spent viewing online video per viewer monthly (up 12.5% from 2008)

Last month Google announced that they were changing their search results to include "real-time" updates, which is to say that now Google is actively indexing and displaying what people are saying in Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, MySpace, and a number of other social media/networking sites. What this means is that now a person who Googles your company, product, or service name can just as easily see what people are saying about you as they can find your own corporate website. This is no small change.

To some, this little addition to Google may not seem like a big deal, but I think it signifies now more than ever why it's vital for companies to be listening to what's being said about them in social media as well as participating in those conversations. We know that Google accounts for 65% of all web searches, and Bing, which is another 10% of web searches, has these same social components integrated into their search results as well. That means three out of four people who do any online search will have social results available to them. That's huge.

Where Real-Time Search Is Going
Google appears to just be getting started with the social media integration into their search results. According to my own tests with Google social search (currently in an experimental development phase but available to everyone if they want it), Google is going to not just pull in social data for your searches, but it will begin to show the social updates from your own friends to increase relevance, interest, and trust. That means if I do a search for a product, service, brand, restaurant, etc., I'm going to see if any of my friends have talked about it as well. I think this does for search what the customer reviews do for Amazon.com, but even better, because I'm even more likely to trust the sources since I am connected to them.

These changes mean that social media is no longer confined to the social sites themselves. It's now part of mainstream web searching.

It means that someone who has never heard of Twitter can be influenced for good or bad by what people are saying in Twitter.

It means that a company who is not paying attention to the conversations will more obviously be seen for their lack of participation and could even be taken advantage of due to their ignorance.

I know I'm biased, but I can't help but think now is the time more than ever for companies to get their social media houses in order. It's time to start listening to the conversations, creating content, participating in conversations, identifying the people you want to reach, identifying influencers, start establishing yourself as an influencer, and participate in what people find when they search for information about your organization whether on Google, Twitter search, Facebook search, or anywhere else.

I don't think I've missed posting a video of the week on a Friday in the last two years but due to the death of my grandmother last week I'm just now getting back into the swing of things, so here's a belated video of the week with a guy who really knows how to use a tape measure.