Can’t figure out a decent day for a gathering? You can bother going through everyone’s calendar on Outlook or Gmail. I find that annoying, especially with a large group. It might be easier to use the services of Doodle. And it’s not just the date for Bob’s retirement party. It could be polling friends/family/employees on what type of water cooler to get for the work room or to change to filtered water all together. Figure out if everyone wants to go to Peggy’s for Thanksgiving or would prefer Uncle Tom’s.

There are business options as well to help streamline and even do some branding. Mainly they focus on cleaning up the mess of convoluted thread emails – the same goal of Google Wave, but it looks like Doodle got there first in some ways.

There are drawbacks – your have to set up an account (even a free one), but it is quite possibly the easiest set up I’ve experienced in a while. Investigate it on your next monthly dinner gathering with friends, and hopefully you’ll avoid the “I don’t care where we go for dinner” conundrum.

Let me know if you use it and what you think of it.

We all know Google as a search engine, e-mail service, and chat service. Google Wave takes everything a few steps further and becomes a full personal communication and collaboration tool merging every aspect you can think of: e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking.

Google Wave has been out in “preview release” form for a month now. The original invite went to 100,000 users, each of whom were allowed to invite up to twenty additional users.

As Google Wave develops, the next release will be available as open source code. This will allow the public to work with the functionality and develop extensions. The full version probably won’t be released until late 2010.

Reviews have been mostly positive though some consider it too complex for it to be used by the masses. Check out the long explanation from the Google Wave video.

Photography is a critical aspect of our communication with one another. Images provide a sense of proof that words cannot. That said, images can be altered and modified to look the way we want. Even before the world of Photoshop, artists had the ability to deliver a story under their own terms. Clean Cut Media recently featured the most famous manipulated photos.

It’s obvious that you may deliver whatever message you may want, save the viewer’s interpretation, through the point and click of a camera. There is a key to good photography – just snapping shots of seemingly flat objects isn’t going to do the trick anymore. Decent equipment and knowledge of how to use it can accomplish quite a bit. A well educated photographer can take a mediocre shot and really bring it over the top – balancing light, tone and composition. Browse through a few slide shows on MSNBC or Big Picture (from the Boston Globe).

Make images of your product do the leg work for you and your marketing. Taking the time and expense to produce high quality images will bring your marketing to life – in print, on the web and even on the walls of your office/shop floor/plant.

Conversations are happening all the time, all over the world, and on all types of subjects. People are talking about their lives, their work, their industry, and about their products. Other people are talking about those products, and what they are saying can influence millions of others. More people trust what their peers tell them over what advertisers are showing them. Though kitchy – this video on youtube might shock you into some of inundation we are constantly subjected to.

People are Talking, Are They Talking About You?

There are 9 million people on Facebook, and those numbers are growing. If they aren’t talking about you, YOU should start talking to them. Get in on the conversation, Tell them how your product or service can help them – in the medium in which they already are chatting.

Has your company created problems? Address them – more than likely people will respect you and your company more for owning up to an issue than if you just ignore the problem. One such example is United Airlines, where a passenger had his guitar damaged in transit. Because his experience with their Customer Service department was so unsatisfactory, he wrote a song United Breaks Guitars – video-taped it a put it up on YouTube. In it, he named the customer service rep by name! Last time I checked the video had been viewed by over ½ a million people. There are now multiple versions of the song, taped and posted on YouTube. Talk about a PR nightmare!

It isn’t a fad: It is a fundamental shift in the way we communicate.

Companies have started hiring with Social Media skills in mind. Social Media Teams are now being created within companies to access and monitor all portals. Being part of the conversation is a vital component of your marketing strategy, if it isn’t, it should be.

So if you have a MySpace account you probably know that most of your friends have migrated to Facebook at this point. What about all those pictures that Aunt Marge posted on Flickr and your growing friends you respect for their Diggs. By the time 10am hits you’ve visited a dozen websites and still haven’t figure out what your former coworker recommended you for on LinkedIn.

There is a new tool, of course, to address this problem. FriendFeed is a social media aggregator that provides the latest and greatest highlights from several of your most frequented social media sites. Tagged links from other friends show up on your page, as well as any new discussions your might want to participate in, directly on FriendFeed.

Yes, I know…one more ID and passworded site to add to my day. But this site might be able to reduce your trips around the web each morning with your coffee. Try it out. Does it make navigation of new stuff more efficient?