Go Red For Women is the American Heart Association's nationwide movement to wipe out heart disease, the #1 killer of women. One in three women gets heart disease (yes, you read that right... one in three) yet the common perception is that heart disease is a "man's" disease.

goredforwomen.org celebrates the power of banding together and fighting back by encouraging women to submit their stories, words of support, advice, and engage in discussion.    

Awareness powers these aspects of the site - allowing visitors to share and discuss their videos, text stories and photos. Awareness partner Edelman Interactive has done a great job weaving user generated content into the experience and anyone considering video submissions should look at their director's toolkit for ideas on encouraging participation. 

Spend some time on the site - the stories are inspiring! 
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If you're anything like me, your visit Hershey's ChocolateTV will be followed by a trip to the snack bar but it's worth the calories.  

The site lets you view a bunch of produced videos of chefs cooking a variety of things that incorporate Hershey's products as ingredients.  A variety of Awareness participation points - comment, rate, vote - leverage the video to stimulate conversation and drive registration.  Registered users can also submit their own videos via our platform and view approved submissions from other consumers.

Kudos to Awareness partners Arnold, JPL and Sapient for their respective design and integration efforts on the projeect.  Technically there's a lot going on in the site... Awareness API's, Flash, Brightcove integration, CRM integration, etc., but it's a great example of how you can use existing assets - in this case videos - to spawn conversation, registrations and community.


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Bringing social media and web2.0 to the enterprise is often an interesting balancing act between things like transpearency and compliance... As we continue to grow our team, we seem to end up looking to fill new roles with people that have a similar balance between traditional "enterprisey" and new "web2.0'ey" experience. That's no more true than with the current Business Development Support role we're trying to fill in our Boston office. Read on and please get in touch if you're interested in what I think could be a very cool job...
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I may even be short on the number of "rings" I typed in the title but it wasn't until the following email arrived that I realized we were failing Sales101 badly today
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Here's another thing I'll add to my "I can't believe I didn't think to do this" folder... I came across (via Charline Li) some great videos from Common Craft that explain some web 2.0/social media tools. If you've struggled to explain social bookmarking, RSS, wiki's, etc. to people, you'll appreciate these...

I love the lowtech approach in the videos and they do a great job explaining consumer web 2.0 tools. Here's the video on social bookmarking and links to the other's they've done are below:


- Social Bookmarking In Plain English
- RSS In Plain English
- Wikis In Plain English
- Social Networking In Plain English 

Each of the things featured in the videos  are features inside Awareness platform and, while we have our own take on each of them, these videos will give you the background/foundation you need to start to take advantage of them.

(And yes, I'm sure the task of getting our own videos together and available just moved up someone's task list a notch or two.)

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Today was a watershed day for the company formerly known as iUpload (queue the Purple Rain sound track in the background).

The announcements underscore the fact that we find ourselves in a pretty exciting position - we've grown to the be the leaders in the emerging enterprise social media space; we've created a unique and innovative platform; we have some of the most recognizable brands in the world as customers; and we're now more than 30 people - and it's time for iUpload to take it to the next level. The next level of awareness perhaps?

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If you'd like to weigh in on what the space should look like, what we should include, etc., I'd love your feedback. Below are the very basic notes thrown together for the space planner along with a couple of pics... you'll notice I've opened this up as a wiki so go ahead and click "edit" to add your thoughts. Very cool digs.
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I hate blog posts where the writer apologizes for not posting their blog in a while - you see them too often and I had vowed never to write one here.

Turns out I was using the Canadian definition for "never" which is "not very often"; a metric never, if you will. Business Blogwire's Easton Ellsworth has called me out...

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(Via Jeff Jarvis) An article in Sunday's New York Times put the call out to CEOs to start blogging.

While there are a couple of good points convered in the article, it is once again another example of how the delta between what is being written about corporate blogging and how we are seeing companies actually use blogs is huge...

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I'll be in San Francisco next week and speaking on a panel moderated by CNet's Dan Farber at Building Blocks 2006 along with imeem's Steve Jang, meebo's Seth Sternberg, and Gather.com's Thomas Grace. Here are the details:

Building Blocks 2006
August 15-17, 2006
Marriott San Jose Hotel
301 South Market St., San Jose, California
Session: Blogs, Mashups, Social Media, Wikis, and RSS as Mass Media - Blog Movements as Agents of Change
Session Time: Thursday, August 17 from 11:05 to 12:20 PM

The title is a mouthful and seems pretty broad so I'm interested in your thoughts/take... go ahead and post them as comments.

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