Online Reputation Management, and the accompanying Issue Resolution Process seems to be a very hot topic of late. There is much debate about the approaches to use in varied situations. That said, I thought I’d take a stab at trying to add some clarity to the process by creating a model to guide the decision making process. As it happens, I was so impressed with SEOMoz’s How to Handle a Google Penalty flowchart, that it occurred perhaps one should also be created in this situation … voila!

Delicious (they have dropped the del.icio.us) has just launched version 2.0 to a by invitation only preview group. Boasting 3 million registered users and 100+ million unique URLs bookmarked, Yahoo! owned Delicious is in for some major changes.

Founder Joshua Schachter was quoted saying that we can expect a complete code rewrite, along with a decidedly different interface, broken down into four sections; Home, Bookmarks, People and Tags.

Michael Arrington has a post with detailed screen shots of some of the new features which include:

When the Toronto Star published an article several weeks back announcing that roughly 700,000 Facebook users belong to the Toronto city network, my phone rang off the hook from clients asking what their Facebook strategy will be.

SEP has been working with Social Media, at a variety of levels, for some time, so the announcement that General Motors Europe is launching a “social media newsroom” caught my attention.

Essentially, GM Europe’s new website will allow downloads of its photography from Flikr, a link to their video collection in YouTube and news to be “republished, commented on, shared and tagged by a large community where the boundaries between news provider and news consumer continue to blur,” it said in a statement.

One of the latest link building strategies is to utilize social bookmarking sites such as digg and del.icio.us to post your story. These sites have a multitude of daily traffic and refers a great deal of visitors to a site, especially if the story or headline is interesting. Although some of the links are not valued highly in search engines, the traffic will indirectly link to your site if your content is interesting.

I came across this easy to follow video that allows you to see the power of social bookmarking and how it makes web pages easy to remember, organize and share.

I just received this email from Yahoo!

Dear Yahoo! Photos user,

For some time now, we’ve supported two great photo sharing services: Yahoo! Photos and Flickr. But even good things come to an end, and we’ve decided to close Yahoo! Photos to focus all our efforts on Flickr — the award-winning photo sharing community that TIME Magazine has called “completely addictive.”

We will officially close Yahoo! Photos on Thursday, September 20, 2007, at 9 p.m. PDT. Until then, we are offering you the opportunity to move to another photo sharing service (Flickr, KODAK Gallery, Shutterfly, Snapfish, or Photobucket). We’re making the transfer real simple, and with a couple clicks we’ll automatically move your photos to Flickr or wherever you want them.

The beauty of social networks is that they engage users and facilitate enjoyable forums to discuss a variety of topics.

One of the significant trends of social networks is that they are beginning to develop a distinct local flavour. Facebook
alone has over 1 million members from Toronto.

With this level of engagement it’s tough for traditional local print media to ignore, particularly the Yellow Pages, who have among the most complete local online business listings around. So when will Yellow Pages become social? According to Darby Seiben, Senior Manager - Traffic, Distribution and eProduct Management with YellowPages.ca, they already have.

I came across Tyler Reed’s blog who posted this great e-conomy presentation:

It underscores that consumers trust word-of-mouth more than any other form of advertising. In fact, 76 per cent of consumers don’t believe that companies tell the truth in advertising at all.

According to the Word Of Mouth Marketing Association, yes, there really is such an organization, over 90% of purchases made online were a direct result of some kind of word of mouth action and being a known brand website came in 2nd.

I have passion for Soccer, or Football as the world calls it. I’m a massive fan of Panathinaikos Athens, Toronto FC and Manchester United, so the story of a gifted nine-year-old being signed by the Reds caught my eye.

It wasn’t the fact that Rhein Davis was 9 years old, but that the worlds richest football club were interested after hearing about him from YouTube. The video showing him doing stepovers like Ronaldo, is a big hit, having been viewed by over three million people and counting!

Despite the fact del.icio.us has been around for quite a while I really didn’t fully understand its popularity. I saw del.icio.us as a facebook/myspace for bookmarks. This all changed when I started blogging.

I’ve always been a news hound and pour through tons of articles from a variety of sources covering dozens of subjects. After taking a closer look, I quickly found out that del.icio.us makes it easy to store them all in one place and, if tagged properly, access them from any computer in an organized and timely fashion as I needed them.

What a week it’s been for the business of Social Media. Telecom giant Nokia acquired social media sharing service Twango, the YouTube CNN debates delivered solid ratings and Sun Microsystems said its latest earnings report today will be released on its website 10 minutes before it is distributed to news services.

“Nokia’s unique vision for social media aligns perfectly with Twango,” enthused Jim Laurel, co-founder of Twango.com. “It’s really exciting to imagine what we can achieve by combining our social media experience with the resources of a company that has played such a major role in shaping the mobile landscape.” What makes this noteworthy is that social networking has yet to make the leap to the mobile phone arena. If you recall, late last year Nokia launched musicrecommenders.com, a site that recommends new music based on user’s preferences. With this purchase, Nokia is trying to bridge that divide.