Did you get a less than enthusiastic 33 team member on the phone today? Us too. Here’s why. Follow them on @WeAre33.

Interesting website that analyses how well companies are succeeding with social media campaigns. One of their most recent articles from www.techeyetimes.com is about how The Times has lost over 50% of traffic since moving to paid online content. For more info about hitwise go to http://www.hitwise.com/uk/

Carve was asked last year to contribute a chapter to the Social Media in Recruitment guide, following a well received presentation I made on Corporate Social Networking ( where ‘Social Media meets Business’ ) at the British Library.

Our chapter is focused on ‘Developing an Effective Corporate Social Networking Strategy‘ and draws on our experiences of doing just that with organisations inside and outside of the recruitment world.

The result is published by the REC Industry Research Unit and has some thought provoking contributions from the likes of Matt Alder and Bill Boorman

We’ve made the report accessible for free download via this link - socialmediainrecruitment

As always, we’re interested in your feedback / thoughts.

For those of you who don’t follow the excellent Web Strategy blog written by Jeremiah Owyang from the Altimeter Group, here is a link to the matrix he has just built, comparing Google Buzz, Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. There’s lots of great stuff in this matrix, and it gives a seriously good SWOT analysis of the four platforms today.

To be fair, I was slightly surprised to see MySpace thrown into the equation as I don’t really see the platform competing with the others, but I guess you can’t really discard 57 million users in the US alone.

Talking about Google Buzz, I’ve only just started playing with it yesterday. Although I’m looking forward to see how it develops, I must say I haven’t really been bowled over by it so far. It looks to me like lots of noise that’s difficult to classify and make sense of. A bit like Google Wave, which I couldn’t get into either. Too much hype for not much susbtance after all?

The again, very few of my contacts have joined the Buzz so far so maybe I just need a few more friends to play with it?

If you happen to have missed the massive debate around Google Buzz these last few days, you can catch up here with ReadWriteWeb’s extensive coverage and analysis.

Your handy automatically updated widget (thanks la Google) to the hot search phrases and trends around social media marketing, social media agency and social media consultants.

I thought it might be interesting to keep track / share thoughts on some of the books that we’re reading,   in the  hope that we can distill / impart  some of the wisdom’s therein (or not).

I am catching up on David Meerman Scott’s The New Rules of Marketing & PR at the moment.  To sum up where I am thus far, ( in the words of La Meerman):

“The skills that worked offline to help you buy or beg your way in are the skills of interruption and coercion. Success online comes from thinking like a journalist and a thought leader.”

An elegant summing up from the Women’s iBusiness Journal of the main thrust of the book;

A couple of the old Marketing and PR  rules are:

• Marketing simply meant advertising and branding
• Advertising was one-way: company to consumer
• Companies had to have significant news before they were allowed to write a press release
• The only way that buyers would learn about the press release content was if the media picked it up

A sampling of the new rules include:

• You are what you publish
• People want authenticity, not spin
• People want participation, not propaganda
• Marketing is about delivering content at just the precise moment your audience needs it
• Blogs, podcasts, e-books, new releases and other forms of online content let organizations communicate with buyers in a form they appreciate

Have any of you read it? Like / dislike?