My dear readers out there must have been wondering where we have been? How come Letche blog hasn’t been updated lately? My bad! I had to take a break to work on an important social network and intranet 2.0 project for a banking client in Nigeria. We seem to be at the tail of the project so I’m back on track with what we enjoy doing; “Talking Enterprise 2.0″. While working on the project I realized that a lot of people are getting more enlightened to the benefits of using social tools for business. I also coined a new term which I think will become very popular soon. I call it “Social Banking“. If you hear this term elsewhere know it started from Paulette at Letche. I refer to social banking as the use of social media tools to facilitate banking services.

Social Tools + Banking = Social Banking

Smart one right Jesse Torres is a respected figure when it comes to using social media in banking. I keep track of his updates within the banking industry. I’m not going to be discussing this in detail here for now but I will in my next post. While you await my post think about the positive impact of using social tools in banking. Or better still my new phrase ‘Social Banking’. As usual your comments are welcomed.

So long!

Paulette.

How well do you know Facebook? Do you know it well enough to regard it as a learning and productivity tool? I remember writing an article on Facebook being able to improve productivity sometime back when most employers where scared of the income that might be lost if employees kept up with the Facebook trend. Here’s a list of 100 outstanding Facebook applications. Thanks to my friends at Select Courses who took time to put this list together. Not just bluffing; see a preview of some apps.

Social Connections

Make connections with others who can help you through thes apps.

1. FriendFeed: Use FriendFeed as a convenient and time saving way to keep up with all of your friends’ online activities.
2. Professional Profile: Use Professional Profile for business networking on Facebook.
3. SocialCalendar: Get your social life together and share it with your friends using this calendar.
4. CampusBuddy Courses: With CampusBuddy, you can connect with other students on your campus.

Documents & Sharing

Use Facebook for documents, and even share them with the help of these apps. 

5. Zoho: Use Zoho in your Facebook profile, and you can use it to create and edit documents, spreadsheets, and more.
6. SplashCast: Share multimedia on Facebook through the Splashcast app.
7. Books iRead: With this app, you’ll be able to share the books you read and find out what others are reading as well.
8. Divshare: Divshare makes it easy to send and share files on Facebook.
9. Files: Use your Box.net account on Facebook with Files.
10. Last.fm: Use the Last.fm app to share your Last.fm stations with friends on Facebook.
11. Ma.gnolia: Ma.gnolia will allow you to save and share links to websites on Facebook.
12. Scrapblog: Using Scrapblog, you’ll be able to create multimedia slideshows from your Facebook photos and post them to your profile.
13. Notecentric: Take notes and share them with your classmates using Notecentric.
14. Webinaria Screencast Recorder: You’ll be able to record and share video using this app.
15. Documents: You can share, create, and collaboratively edit documents using the Documents app.
16. Visual Bookshelf: Visual Bookshelf will allow you to catalog your books on Facebook.
17. Mathematical Formulas: You can find and share mathematical formulas and solutions with this application.
18. Netflix: Stay on top of your Netflix queue and view others’ lists with this app for Facebook.
19. SlideShare: SlideShare offers an easy way to create and share presentations on Facebook.

Photos

Make working on and sharing your photos a snap with these Facebook apps.

20. Picnik: This application will let you edit photos within Facebook.
21. Picasa: Picasa makes it easy to upload, resize, and share images on Facebook.

Ratings & School Information

Use these apps to research your schools, professors, and more.

22. College Planner: Research colleges on Facebook with this app from Embark.
23. SkoolPool: SkoolPool highlights the best schools on Facebook.
24. Courses: Courses will help you organize your courses, find reviews, classmates, and more.
25. Pick-A-Prof: Pick-A-Prof makes it easy to get professor reviews, grade histories, and more.
26. Gradzilla: Find rankings, information, and more from US News and World Report on Gradzilla.
27. Course Profiles: Course Profiles will help you learn about courses available through The Open University.
28. Rate My Professors: Rate My Professors offers a great way to share your opinion of your educators, and learn about professors before you enroll in a class.

See all 100 Facebook Apps here….

Ford and Ford Fiesta agents are definitely doing something right. A journey which started on the ever-expanding social media with more than 4,000 applications submitted, with an excess of 640,000 views of applicant videos on YouTube. The Ford Fiesta also is gaining attention on Facebook and Twitter, with more than 300 fans on the Fiesta Movement Facebook fan page and more than 600 followers on the @FordFiesta Twitter account.

“We got a tremendous response from consumers, a lot of exciting people decided to apply,” said Sam De La Garza, small car marketing manager. “Choosing the 100 agents is a critical step in the movement, pulling us one step closer to getting people in the vehicles.”

The Fiesta Movement campaign is squarely aimed at Millennials, the next-generation consumer group born between 1979 and 1995. These consumers, which will total 70 million drivers by 2010, use social media daily and offer a prime opportunity for Ford to tap into a group that hasn’t yet established brand loyalty. According to statistics from a Microsoft study on Millennials, each day 77 percent use Facebook, MySpace or other social networking sites and 28 percent access a personal blog.

“Our group of agents is a broad cross section of people from across the country who are active in all areas of the social media space,” said Connie Fontaine, Ford’s brand content and alliances manager. “It’s a strong team across social networks that are geographically and occupationally diverse.”

The chosen agents are socially vibrant, unique and able to tell a good story. They come from all across the country and work in a variety of occupations. But most importantly, they have established social networks with a strong Web presence. Most have hundreds, if not thousands, of Facebook friends. There also are thousands of people following them on Twitter.

“We’re engaging outside sources that live in this space to make sure we are pushing the limit as far as we can,” said Fontaine. “By working with them, we will maximize the exposure of our content online, while at the same time receiving valuable feedback from the agents about our new car.”

Wanna cruise with this Fiesta trend setters, follow the Fiesta movement on:

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/fiestamovement

Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fiestamovement

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Fiesta-Movement/73386615309

Twitter: http://twitter.com/fordfiesta

 Omniture, Inc. (NASDAQ: OMTR), a leading provider of online business optimization software, today announced a new feature for Omniture SiteCatalyst customers that allows online marketers to measure brand activity on the popular microblogging site Twitter. In addition to delivering new insights to marketers, this announcement demonstrates the power of the recently announced Omniture Genesis APIs, which allow developers to integrate Omniture’s open platform with external sources for a deeper view into the expanding influence of online business — in this case an important measure of consumer sentiment around brands and product…Read more

TEKgroup International, Inc. has developed an integrated social media package for their TEKmedia Online Newsroom software product. The social media upgrade will ease the burden of overseeing and following viral messages for communicators and journalists respectively.

The features of the social media package enable communicators to create opportunity for their messages to spread quickly and inexpensively. Visitors can transfer or share content from the online newsroom to their individual social media accounts,…Read more

Carabiner Communications, a public relations firm that serves start-up and fast-growth technology companies, today announced a new social media and video service, SocialConnectorSM, to help clients build and integrate social media tools and content into their online communications campaigns.

The firm has named Kathy Cabrera as director of new media to lead the rollout of the new service to clients and account teams…Read more

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• Best Post on a South African Blog
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• Best South African Podcast
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• Best Green Blog
• Best African Language Blog
• Most Controversial Blog
• Best Travel Blog
• Best Personal Blog

Kogi the Mexican-Korean taco truck restaurant is doing very well with its strong web ingredient, Twitter. Hungry Los Angelenos Kogi followers  are able to get regular updates on the arrival of their favorite tasty hot taco. Although being in the catering business Kogi has done very well using social media in its business and has become ‘America’s first viral eatery’. 

Telling your friends what you are up, or what you are doing has become a tradition. Its normally interesting just reading status updates. No wonder this microblog of 140 characters is doing magic for both business and just leisure spenders. So many discussions are going around how Twitter seems to be ruling the web interactivity. The article ‘Twitter: Is Brevity The Next Big Thing?’ caught my interest. I think you should read through.

Everyone who is into web trends is Twitting. Daily activities are announced on Twitter. CNN uses it to send out headlines. Bloggers send out blog post updates using it. Facebook is taking a cue from Twitter in sharing. Twitter is definitely growing fast. You should probably create an account if you don’t already have one.

The official release of Socialtext Signals introduces the same micro-blogging style of open sharing that today’s popular public tools offer, but keeps the conversations secure within the framework of the organization. Unlike standalone “Twitter-clones,” Socialtext Signals(TM) provides an integrated user experience for social messaging across the Socialtext platform, such as the ability to Signal in context of wiki editing…Read more