Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Google is on a roll, not sitting idly by while Facebook has its moment in the media spotlight. After opening its Google+ social network to the public — gaining an additional 10 million users in its first two days — now the search giant follows Tuesday’s Android update of Google+ with a similar refresh to its iOS version, now available free on the App Store iTunes link.

What’s new? Like its Android cousin, the iOS version of the Google+ mobile app now supports Hangouts, letting groups communicate with each other using front-facing cameras on the iPhone 4 and iPod touch. In addition to Hangouts, the app offers better control of its various notifications, and a renamed Messenger (formerly Huddle) that now lets users attach photos to chat threads.

Other niceties include the ability to +1 in comments, improved +mention support, a map view in Profile for places you’ve lived, and various reliability improvements. Macstories‘ Federico Viticci had a chance to try out the new features in Hangouts — take a look at his experience here.

via Macstories

Looking to break into a social media career? Here’s pretty much everything you need to know about the job and the people who do it every day. Nearly 80% of corporations use social media, so there’s plenty of opportunity for aspiring strategists — especially as the other 20% get on board.

Step 1: Get a Twitter account — 100% of social media managers represented in the survey have one, and you have to know the lay of the land if you’re going to innovate and build a brand on said land.

Step 2: Be ready to wear many hats. When it comes to social media, there’s a lot to tackle, including crafting actual posts, analyzing metrics, training and managing a team, spearheading campaigns, working with agencies and managing a budget.

Want to know if you’re cut out for it? In the infographic below, you’ll see the personality traits, education, career paths and responsibilities of today’s successful social media strategists. Statistics were pulled from LinkedIn data, as well as job listings for positions in the field.

Social Media Job Listings

• SEO Manager at TIG Global in Chevy Chase, MD
• Project Manager at OMD in New York
• Web Developer at Design at Work in Houston

Infographic courtesy of Voltier Creative

This post reflects the opinions of the author and not necessarily those of Mashable as a publication.

Aaron Stibel serves as senior vice president of technology of Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corp, the leading provider of credit building and credibility solutions for businesses. He holds a BS in computer science from Johns Hopkins University.

There are a few ubiquitous projects that most computer science students remember: Hello world, the Fibonacci recursion sequence and the reverse Polish notation calculator, for example.

No project is more annoying to me than the dreaded MS Access database project. In my day, the project came in the form of a CD catalog. Now it is more likely to be an MP3 catalog or sometimes a college course catalog. Whatever the form, this project is typically a disappointing response to the job interview question, “Do you have any database experience?”

Technology moves quickly. I tell new college graduates to enjoy that feeling of knowing a technology that eludes your supervisor — because it won’t last. When a new crew of graduates comes along in a couple of years, they’ll be showing off languages that make AJAX and Ruby seem like COBOL and Pascal.

Our dependency on databases and data warehousing has exploded, mainly because storage has become a relatively negligible line item on IT budgets. Instead, software is the storage, retrieval, transformation and visualization of data. C-Level executives who don’t know Java Beans from coffee beans are now talking OLAP Cubes.

So with databases being part of technology and high-value businesses, colleges must start including databases all over the curriculum.

Of the top five highest-rated computer science programs — Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Cornell — none include a database course as part of the 2011 undergraduate degree requirement. Worse, the top four schools only offer a single database course as an undergraduate engineering elective. Graduate-level programs offer few additional options.

It never fails to amaze me how little database experience college graduates have. Most have no SQL experience, and I haven’t interviewed a single candidate who can design an ERD, properly tune a query or write complex SQL. This lack of qualifications is a major hindrance in today’s data-dependent world. Yet it doesn’t need to be. A single mandatory class would suffice.

My wish list of database requirements for a college graduate would be selfishly long. At the very least, however, graduates should be experts at SQL and have exposure to PL/SQL or T-SQL. A SQL tuning class that covers indexing and proper design would be great as well. Students should know what an ERD is, and how to design data architectures as well as they tackle data structures. Ask a software engineer what he uses more: a Red-Black Tree or a Table (the answer is obvious).

It has been 40 years since SQL was invented. It’s time to add database courses to the mandatory curriculum. It’s time to banish the dreaded MS Access project. It’s time to add data to the core theory, applications, and systems concentrations.

Image courtesy of Flickr, lu_lu

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Name: Olapic

Quick Pitch: Olapic helps online publishers add galleries of user-contributed images.

Genius Idea: Pooling images in a database of social content.

Olapic’s product is one way to do this. The startup makes it easy for site publishers to collect and display user’s photos through widgets they can embed on their sites. Visitors to the publications can either drag and drop files into a box on the site, choose to upload photos from social networks like Facebook or Instagram, email their photos to a special address or tweet their photos with a specific hashtag. Publications get a centralized moderation dashboard. As soon as they approve photos, they appear in a Gallery on the site.

New York Daily News, The Chicago Tribune and Styleist have either used the widget on their site or purchased a white label version Disclosure: Mashable is a customer of Olapic’s. Olapic charges a monthly fee based on each customer’s number of monthly unique visitors.

The majority of Olapic’s customers are news organizations, but co-founder Jose de Cabo said he also thinks the application has a future with sports teams and event organizations. One soccer team, the New England Revolution, already uses it to collect fan photos on its Facebook Page.

From a revenue standpoint, advertising seems to be an even more promising route than subscription fees. Olapic is, for instance, coordinating a branded Facebook version of its widget for Pepsi. It’s an instant campaign that engages consumers, and it can work well for hosting a branded contest. Eventually it may also share revenue with publications for ads the company can incorporate into the gallery widget.

But the startup’s grand vision extends far beyond interactive galleries.

“We’re building a very large network of sites that have video and photo-sharing,” De Cabo says. “What we want is to have this network where users can contribute with photos and videos, and get more exposure to their pictures.”

In other words, any website could search the entire database for material to publish. It sounds like a convenient solution for publishers, but will site visitors be eager to share their photos with the world without compensation? De Cabo says their excited reactions to the widget so far suggest that they will. That, and what he calls “vanity coins.”

Would you be willing to share your photos this way? Let us know in the comments.

Image courtesy of Flickr, Thomas Hawk

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

No one ever gets talker’s block. No one wakes up in the morning, discovers he has nothing to say and sits quietly, for days or weeks, until the muse hits, until the moment is right, until all the craziness in his life has died down.

Why then, is writer’s block endemic?

The reason we don’t get talker’s block is that we’re in the habit of talking without a lot of concern for whether or not our inane blather will come back to haunt us. Talk is cheap. Talk is ephemeral. Talk can be easily denied.

We talk poorly and then, eventually (or sometimes), we talk smart. We get better at talking precisely because we talk. We see what works and what doesn’t, and if we’re insightful, do more of what works. How can one get talker’s block after all this practice?

Writer’s block isn’t hard to cure.

Just write poorly. Continue to write poorly, in public, until you can write better.

I believe that everyone should write in public. Get a blog. Or use Squidoo or Tumblr or a microblogging site. Use an alias if you like. Turn off comments, certainly–you don’t need more criticism, you need more writing.

Do it every day. Every single day. Not a diary, not fiction, but analysis. Clear, crisp, honest writing about what you see in the world. Or want to see. Or teach (in writing). Tell us how to do something.

If you know you have to write something every single day, even a paragraph, you will improve your writing. If you’re concerned with quality, of course, then not writing is not a problem, because zero is perfect and without defects. Shipping nothing is safe.

The second best thing to zero is something better than bad. So if you know you have write tomorrow, your brain will start working on something better than bad. And then you’ll inevitably redefine bad and tomorrow will be better than that. And on and on.

Write like you talk. Often.

Instagram, the fun mobile app that lets users create stunning retro-looking photos with ease, is moving to the world of high art. From 22-23 October, London’s East Gallery at Brick Lane will be hosting the first ever UK exhibit of Instagram photos.

Dubbed “My World Shared“, the exhibit is organized by the London branch of Instagrammers, a community of Instagram users who offers tips and techniques and organizes “photowalks” and other social events for their users.

The exhibit will host photos from 30 participants. As explained on the official website, the idea behind the project is “to record in images our world around us, our lives, our outlook, our views, and share that view with the rest of the world.”

Instagram has been growing like a weed in the last year or so: in August, the service celebrated its 150 millionth photo, just nine months after the iPhone application first landed in the App Store.

Recently, Instagram launched a completely overhauled mobile app with a number of interesting new features, including the possibility of taking high resolution photos, live filters and more.

The market for listening services is rapidly maturing with vendors such as Radian6, Spiral16, Crimson Hexagon, Research.ly, Lithium, Sysomos, and many others improving how businesses monitor consumer conversations and experiences. The wide array of options and capabilities are nothing less than baffling, requiring expert analysis prior to committing any significant investment of finances or organizational resources now and over time. For those seeking top line advice on the differences between many of the top listening vendors, please read this helpful post at SocialMedia.biz.

I’m not going to take this time to preach about the importance of listening nor am I going to focus on which platform will best meet your needs. I would like to explore a very real issue around the enterprise-wide adoption of monitoring systems, or perhaps better said, the lack thereof, and also what businesses should think about as social media becomes increasingly consequential to the organization.

Social media is praised by experts for its promise to open up dialogue between customers and businesses. Perhaps most notably, social media is celebrated for giving a voice to the consumer and eyes and ears to companies for which to see and listen. The reality is that customers always had a voice. Social media amplifies and organizes that voice and packages it as a tremendous gift for businesses ready to earn relevance in a new genre of consumerism. Nothing matters however, if businesses are not ready to learn, engage, or take action based on what they hear.

According to a recent study by Capgemini, 57% of businesses currently monitor online conversations about the brand, products or services. But 20% do not listen at all and another 23% of respondents weren’t sure whether or not the company is listening to online conversations.

Yes, businesses are learning to listen. But what does that actually mean? To what extent are businesses capturing insights, solving problems, learning from recurring themes, and engaging customers and prospects? According to the Capgemini report, the conversions of conversation to action are impressive, but nowhere near their potential.

The majority of businesses polled, 41%, only respond to customers when a direct question is asked. This behavior must shift to full engagement to realize the opportunity that lies before them. Engagement is the currency of relationship building. Those that listen and engage across a greater set of conversations, 36%, are well on their way to building a social businesses. However, there are 20% today that listen and never respond. This is a number that I actually would like to see diminish over the years.

Monitoring vs. Listening

Everything indeed starts with listening. But, notice that the word “listen” is absent in the Capgemini graphs above. Instead, the industry is standardizing around “monitoring” as it more accurately reflects the behavior of businesses today in social media. Monitoring is the process of tracking keywords and reporting on the various attributes surrounding the activity of each. For example, tracking mentions of the brand, products, key personnel and also competitors are analyzed and reported out to key stakeholders to portray the state of conversations and sentiment, capture the share of voice, and set the foundation for benchmarking and metrics. Monitoring also encompasses potential crises and serves as an early warning system for businesses. Listening however, builds a layer on top of monitoring that examines conversations for enterprise-wide learning and cross-functional engagement. The difference between monitoring and listening is initiative, the ability to take what’s observed and take action internally or externally to solve, improve, or validate experiences.

The enabler for listening is monitoring, but a case must be made for action as defined by responding, connecting, and adapting. This case must emphasize how corresponding actions improve customer experiences, relationships, and in turn, influence their capacity to act and guide their peers. To listen takes a culture focused on customer-centricity and a philosophy that is intended to steer customer experiences.

Revisiting the Capgemini report, we can clearly see that 32% of businesses surveyed are on their way to designing what many would refer to as a social business or a social enterprise. These companies see listening as an integral part of marketing, selling, and servicing customers. As customers continue to come into focus, 32% see listening as a means for better understanding customer sentiment and needs and another 25% view social media as an additional customer service channels.

Asking the Unthinkable

In a time when progressive companies such as Dell and Gatorade are celebrated for their newly erected social media command centers, it is their ability to truly listen and their openness to allow conversations to reverberate throughout the entire organization that serves as a next-generation model for customer-centricity. But how many businesses can build a command center where technology opens doors to bona fide organizational transformation? Sure, many large organizations house sophisticated business intelligence divisions and certainly big data is well on its way to dramatically impacting how a business captures, analyzes, and translates data into actionable insights, but in the mean time, social media lives outside of B.I. and thus is limited in its ability to transcend silos.

To listen to conversations and build an infrastructure that can 1) Learn, 2) Engage, and 3) Adapt across the organization, the construction of a listening framework becomes far more complex than merely monitoring keywords and reporting out to key stakeholders. And for those of you who have had to program dashboards in some of the most popular social media monitoring systems, you can attest to the complexity of development. Factor in the complications of programming, the typical user experience of most monitoring platforms, and the day-to-day needs and responsibilities of stakeholders, and you’re faced with a series of hurdles that impede adoption. These challenges face any organization looking to scale the act of monitoring, let alone the development of an infrastructure for supporting engagement and adaptation.

Programming dashboards around keywords, filters, exclusions, associated alerts is arduous. Deploying these systems across the organization and expecting lines of business and other business functions to adopt complex systems is an incredible ask. Many monitoring vendors offer dedicated or part-time resources to support programming and also monitoring, which businesses are keen to employ based on resource limitations and lack of expertise. But those services come at a notable cost. And, the cost of adding seats and keywords to these systems is also not inexpensive. More important, these costs are not commensurate with the perceived value of “social media monitoring” among executives.

An opportunity exists for outsourced command centers to assist social businesses with monitoring, listening, and engagement support while the overall value for social media and customer-centricity matures. Whether this model exists within a vendor infrastructure or that of an agency that maintains multiple vendor relationships, organizations need cost-effective, efficient, and proficient solutions at the ready.

Existing vendor support models are expensive and limited in scope as tied to the product.

Current agency models are dedicated to the function they are typically designed to serve, for example, marketing, advertising, service, etc.

A new model built on the technologies, systems, and processes powering some of the most renown command centers in play today, can help expedite the customer-centric evolution of a business and how it listens, learns, engages, and adapts over time. Additionally, this model can free-up resources within the organization to build the necessary architecture to capitalize on social opportunities to demonstrate business critical value and the overall promise of social media to executives and stakeholders.

I’ve had an opportunity to work with some of these hybrid models where the best of each system is employed against the needs of each business. Expertise is part of the value proposition and that know-how is translated into actionable insights and opportunities for the companies they help. As businesses mature, the listening framework migrates internally, preserving the investment and setting the stage for scale and adoption.

Businesses testing outsourced command center models will report both challenges and successes. But nothing about the evolution of business is designed to be easy. We’re dealing with culture and a significant investment in legacy systems and supporting processes. The reality is that the future of business is based on listening and the actions that manifest as a result. Businesses are forced to invent frameworks as they go, but stepping back to address the bigger issues of what monitoring and listening solves and accordingly, how that translates into tying business priorities and opportunities is where businesses must initially focus. Building an infrastructure around those answers is the opportunity for stakeholders, vendors and service providers to solve today.

Are you a vendor with ideas or experiences that can help businesses?

Are you a representing a brand that is solving this problem?

Are you a service provider that has built an outsourced command center?

Please share your insights in the comments section for the benefit of all.

In the coming days, if you don’t restrain your enthusiasm for Apple’s new iPhone introductions, you’ll invariably be called fanboy or fangirl (fanperson?).

Last week, in part 1 of our 3-part series of iPhone 5 infographics, we dug deep into the question of who is most likely to upgrade. This week, we again tapped the power of our friends at AYTM (Ask Your Target Market) and research firm PaidViewpoint for part 2, illustrating the responses of a questionnaire given to 1,000 iPhone owners aged 18+ living in the U.S.

The result? A definitive diagnosis of Apple Fanboy Syndrome, which not only confirmed our suspicions, but showed us why these product launches get Apple fans so beside themselves with anticipation of the company’s latest products.

So now it’s your turn: Are you an Apple fanperson? Glean the answer from the infographic below:

For all that I believe the world has all discovered and become settled into Google+, I’ve heard that lots of people have yet to find their footing in there, and haven’t really set up a home. First off, if you’re still looking for an invite, there are lots and lots and lots of people who have free invites. Just search Twitter for #plusinvites, and you’ll find lots of URLs to pick from.

But then what?

Start Now on Google+ : Start With Your Profile

First off, go to your profile page. Click the red “About” Link (2nd one in), and click the blue “Edit Profile” button in the corner. Put in a photo. Add some information to your “introduction.” Add some (but not a lot) of links to the links area to the right.

And then, this is really important, where it says “Employment” (not occupation), put something REALLY interesting in the “current” one that lets people know who you are, what you do, and where. This is probably the most important part of profile editing that people don’t know much about. Why is it so important? Because when someone sees your name anywhere on Google+ and they hover their mouse over that content, that’s what they see as the representation of you. That little bit of text explains who you are to them at a glance. Don’t write a novel. Just, don’t leave it blank or put something lame there. It’s a power move. (hint: that’ll be in my new book.)

Everything else in your profile section is up to you.

Create New Circle Structures

Circles are how you group and organize people on Google+. Your circles are here. The first thing MOST people do is rename these circles into something more useful. For instance, if you want to follow local people, and you live in Charlotte, NC, then make a circle called “Wilbur.” If you want to build a circle of people who post great amounts of interesting and useful data, like myself and Robert Scoble and Chris Pirillo, make a circle called “Loudmouths.” Make sure you do this step. Organizing people LATER is a big pain in the butt, and it is important to put people into lists that match your interests and needs. Call them what you want. Editing circles is reasonably easy. If you get stuck, ask us in the comments. Someone (maybe even me) will walk you through it.

Find People to Circle

Now, find interesting people to connect with on Google+. I have a few ways for you to do this. Go to FindPeopleOnPlus.com, for one. There’s also group.as. Those are great for just striking out into the wild to look for people.

Once you add a few interesting people, go to THEIR profile page and see who they’ve added to circles. Now, you’re finding some interesting people. I call this “friendsurfing.” This, to me, is where the cool stuff happens. Once you find someone interesting, like Mahei Foliaki (you know him as @iconic88 on Twitter), or Ben Kunz, or whoever makes you cheery. There are celebs and things, but their list of people followed are normally lame. Besides, Ben and Mahei are my kind of celebs. One more for your list: Glenda Watson Hyatt.

Post Interesting Things

You can create 4 types of posts in Google+:

1. Link posts.
2. Video posts.
3. Photo posts.
4. Location posts.

You can write a post and offer a link to something interesting (like your latest blog post). You can upload a photo and write something to go along with it. You can point to YouTube videos or upload a video (terribly slow, even on my amazingly fast Comcast service). And you can post location information, if that’s your thing. (It is not my thing.)

Sharing is Caring

The other thing you can do is share other people’s interesting posts. There’s a “share” button below most posts. That lets you find the good stuff and share it with your growing community. One point: If someone else has shared something, and you see it in your stream, and then you decide to share it, it’s nice form to credit the person who shared it with you via the text above the share. (So, if Chris posts a funny photo, and Dave shares it, and then Margie finds it in Dave’s stream and decides to share it, Margie clicks share, and says “found via Dave” in the text). Make sense? It’s a nice thing to do.

Comments Are All the Rage

The advantage that Google+ has over Twitter is the comments. People are having really great time contributing to really good conversations in the comments sections. Comments on photos are just amazing, and in other forms, it depends on what you’re putting out, but people seem to really enjoy the back and forth. As I say about blogging, I’ll say about Google+: try to be the #1 commenter on your account. Respond as often as you can.

Try a Hangout

Last, but not least, try a live video Hangout. They are pretty fun. You can do some fun things with them. Aaron Smith does Bible study with his. John Herman does a game show with his. Michael Dell (yes, THAT Michael Dell) does all kinds of conversations with his. It’s really a great way to see what Google+ might be able to do for you as a platform, I believe.

So Go Forth And Plus

The reasons to love Google+ are that it’s clean, it’s fast, it’s useful, people are very engaged, and it’s got a strong boost to your searchability (I know that’s not a word) built right in. It’s fast-paced sometimes, and yes, there are a few too many animated cat gifs floating around, but I think that’s just us clearing the lines for something truly new, interesting and amazing.

Oh, and if you want to connect with me on Google+, I’m right here. Love to get talking with you there soon.