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The letter marked “insured mail” with nine 39¢ stamps on it really caught my eye last night. I thought, ‘Oh no, who’s suing me now?’ I was relieved to find out, upon opening it, that it was my new membership kit from the Social Media Club.

It included a laminated member card, Social Media Club stickers, business cards for founders Chris Heuer and Kristie Wells, and a deck of “play it forward” cards from Akoha’s social reality game. The welcome letter was signed, “with love and respect.” I thought to myself, now that’s why I like social media—the people involved are genuinely nice and show love and respect and give you the warm fuzzies.

But when I showed it to my colleague Chris Zender, she had a more cynical reaction, characterizing the association as a community of touchy-feely folks who’ve found a new communication platform. “But then again, I’m a ‘T’ and you’re an ‘F,’ so maybe this stuff works for you,” she said.

Her comment about Myers-Briggs personality types—in which you’re rated with four letters depending on whether you’re Introverted or Extroverted; iNtuitive or Sensing, Feeling or Thinking, and Judging or Perceiving—got me thinking. I wonder if most people participating in the social media universe tend to be “F’s” (for people who make decisions based largely on internal feelings). The thinkers make decisions more logically and from a more detached standpoint. Feelers love connection and consensus; thinkers like cause and effect, rules, consistency.

So what do you think? If you’re a social media participant, if you’re on Twitter and Facebook and a member of the Social Media Club and attend online community events, are you also an “F”? Or is my theory full of hooey? Comment back and let me know. —Charlotte Ziems, VP, client engagement

The options for engaging with social media are seemingly endless and growing each day. Blogging, microblogging, online communities, message boards, article tagging….and myriad more.

I don’t know about all of you, but I find the sheer number of choices overwhelming—not to mention time consuming. There are only so many hours in each day that one can devote to online socializing.

So when you’re integrating social media into your marketing strategy, where do you place your bets? Is it better to have shallow participation across a large number of social media outlets or is a deeper engagement with a select few more valuable?

If you spent lots of time cultivating a network on MySpace, for example, what happened to all of those connections when suddenly Facebook was more en vogue and everyone started moving to that site? Twitter is all the rage at the moment and many people have built significant networks on the site already. What happens if Plurk or Jaiku or Hictu or any of the other Twitter competitors starts to gain more ground? Do you follow the hoards or commit to the community you’ve already built? Is it possible to bet on the wrong social media venue, rendering your time wasted if that venue falls out of favor?

I’m not actually offering advice here; I’m asking an honest question: When it comes to social media, what are your criteria for selecting venues and how much time is reasonable to spend socializing online? —Selena Welz, associate managing editor

This morning, shortly after Apple released the iPhone3G, mayhem transpired all over the Web when new customers were unable to activate their phones, and those trying to update their old iPhones stalled during the final step of the process.

Stories of the troubles quickly hit the front pages of major news sites. Bloggers, twitterers, and online community participants complained with vigor, some in a noticeable panic.

Some examples from Twitter:

cianna: So I held off upgrading yesterday to avoid what just happened me: I am looking at a very pretty brick.

cianna: today discovering how dependent I’ve become on iPhone: SMS & web. Feeling unreachable, hunting for wifi w/ MBP. Almost a luddite.

toss_garbage: iPhone 2.0 - An upgrade for disaster

judysalinas: 3g iphone day has turned into the black mac day. Wtf. Go nokia!

nickreed: Why is it that my iPhone was more stable with unsanctioned jailbroken 1.1.4 software, then with official 2.0 software? Nice work Apple.

Earlier this morning, the Associated Press spoke with an AT&T spokesman, who pinpointed Apple’s iTunes servers as the culprit. And what did Apple have to say? As of 4 p.m. this afternoon, nothing. Their corporate website makes no mention of the problems. The latest news in their “Hot News” section is, “Apple has raised the bar with iPhone 3G,” a post from yesterday. Their twitter account (appleinc) was last updated three days ago.

Take a cue from Zappos and JetBlue

Today’s consumers expect more than this, especially from a company like Apple, which has a loyal base of fanatics, many of whom are bloggers and twitterers. Wired’s article, “The See-Through CEO ,” cites numerous examples of corporations that own up to their problems, choosing to be more open with the public.

JetBlue’s corporate communications department monitors and responds to what’s being said about them in the twittersphere (see Jonathan Fields’s blog post, “Is JetBlue using twitter to spy on its customers…or blow their minds? ”).

The CEO of Zappos is also a power twitterer. He has 7,950 followers, actively tweets, and pays close attention to the conversations happening there. How close? Back in May, I tweeted, “@zappos Thank you for the super speedy delivery of my new Asics tiger sneakers. Ordered Sunday of a holiday weekend and received today!” Forty minutes later, he sent me a direct message: “glad you had a great experience!”

You don’t have to ask if I’m going to buy shoes from Zappos again. As for upgrading the firmware on my iPhone v1? I won’t be doing that anytime soon. —Anna Marie Panlilio, marketing specialist

Today I got my cell phone bill and learned something else about Twitter . My addiction is costing me, but not enough to get me to stop.

My Sprint contract allows for 100 two-way text messages a month, for $5. But this month I logged 191 additional text messages, at 20 cents a message, for an additional $38.20. I follow fewer than 20 people—a small number, really—and track several topics that haven’t appeared in all that many tweets. Guess I’ll be visiting Sprint to change my service contract.

Twitter addiction is a growing trend, as you can read here . Have you ever thought about how much money people spend to stay connected (I’m thinking postage rates + broadband access + phone contracts + mobile data, etc.)? Or how much your customers are paying to follow your brand or get updates from your company? —Charlotte Ziems, VP, client engagement

On Wednesday this week, I attended the Online Community Unconference , which was a fascinating experience. If you’ve never been to an “unconference,” it’s an event in which the agenda is created on the fly, on the day of the event, by the attendees. During the first hour, *all* 250 attendees were asked to introduce themselves and then invited to come to the front of the room and suggest the discussion subjects or sessions that they wanted to lead. These were quick 30- to 60-second pitches for discussion topics, written on an 8 ½ by 11 inch sheet of paper, and then affixed to a huge paper grid with time slots down the right hand column and session locations across the top. At the end of the hour, the entire grid was filled with ideas and, of course, the agenda.

I proposed the topic about which I last blogged—Do Corporate Blogs Require a New Approach to Corporate Leadership? Blogging requires a level of authenticity that some corporate cultures might not support. We might have all had management training at some point in our careers, but that was before the advent of social media. In today’s connected world, do you lead your team differently than you did when Facebook and LinkedIn and YouTube and Google/Yahoo didn’t exist?

I was pleased when about 10 people showed up for the discussion. As was explained at the beginning of the day, if no one attends your session, it just means no one was interested in the topic, e.g., don’t take it personally. Yeah, right. I was equally pleased that everyone stayed for the whole hour. We didn’t focus solely on leadership for blogging, as you’ll see from these key take-aways:

Roles. Corporate blogging is best achieved when the company hires a community manager, a person with strong editorial, management, and communications skills who can work with internal employees to encourage their blogs and manage them against guidelines, plan content, edit blog posts as needed/requested, sometimes write blog posts and comments, etc. etc. One community manager in the group shared stories of the challenge of getting executives to blog on a regular basis.

Internal vs. External Blogging. Two of the people in my discussion manage internal blogs that are kept that way since their communities include developers or research scientists who are blogging about company trade secrets. But the internal blogs are also used as a training ground to identify employees who’d be especially effective blogging externally. Once they’ve identified potential external bloggers, the community managers work with the employees to make sure they understand that blogging to the world requires different content than blogging internally (for one, it can’t contain sensitive trade secrets). And the manager will moderate an external blog more stringently than an internal one.

Motivating the discussion. Some companies are starting blogs and don’t have a huge audience; others have the huge audience and just need the bloggers. Regardless of your audience size, the community is better galvanized if it includes feedback and incentives and positive reward. Use other employees to comment back on blogs; measure and publicize page views for blog posts; pick a “comment of the week” and promote it; post a blog that extracts text from comments to encourage more conversation. Being a community manager is a bit like being a party host—you have to seed the audience and encourage their attendance and provide a nice environment for their interaction.

Leadership. In the end, we did decide that blogging requires a different approach to management. Blogging doesn’t work in a highly controlled culture and necessitates a more inclusive leadership style that invites participation.

What’s your corporate blogging experience? Does your company employ a community manager or have an internal blog? How do you motivate and seed the discussion? —Charlotte Ziems, VP, client engagement

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how an organization’s culture—or maybe “leadership style” is more accurate—can stimulate or hinder its employees from blogging. At Tendo, we help companies establish blogging programs and guidelines, but there’s more to motivating people to blog than giving them a set of rules. And many corporate blogging guidelines are geared toward the eager social media participant—the ones who need to be reminded of rules and legal implications and respectful behavior.

But what about the employees who are, well, shy? Afraid, even? Or who aren’t sure they have anything of value to add to the conversation? They may be smart and they may represent your company well and be perfectly social in face-to-face situations, but just aren’t as zealous on the Web. How does your leadership style encourage them to participate in your company’s online strategy?

My hunch is that two factors are critical in answering this question: trust (check out this post from Jeremiah Owyang, one of my favorite bloggers) and making sure employees feel they have permission—maybe “empowerment” is the right word.

I’ll post more about this in coming weeks, especially after attending the Online Community Unconference next week in Mountain View. In the meantime, send me your thoughts. Has your management style changed since your company instituted a blogging policy? Or do you manage people the same way whether they’re online or not? —Charlotte Ziems, VP, client engagement

I’ve been playing with Twitter the past couple months, mainly out of curiosity from the buzz it’s been getting (see here and here and here ). I just couldn’t understand the value of a tool that enables 140-character text-message answers to the question, What are you doing? Who cares what I’m doing? Why should I care what others are doing—I mean, in 140-character chunks? And why use Twitter to find out?

As I’ve discovered, Twitter is a very tiny form of blogging. In case you aren’t familiar with it, here’s how it works. Many people “tweet” in between blogs—it’s a faster, easier way to stay connected. When you tweet, your comments are readable by any other Twitter user, but most people don’t read everything that every Twitter user is writing. Instead, you set up your account to follow specific users and track different issues as you wish. Twitter can compare your email contacts to its user registry and tell you who among your contacts is already a Twitter user, so you can follow people you know. Or you can look at all Twitter posts on the website and choose to follow those who seem interesting. Or you can go to http://whoshouldIfollow.com , type in your Twitter username, and receive all sorts of suggestions for who you should follow.

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Everybody is buzzing about social media and what it can do for your company. With anything that’s “new” on the Web, there is always a lot of hype and hyperbole. So I was curious…how many people in the Tendo universe are actually using the big-name social networks?

I decided to conduct my own little experiment. I pulled all the email addresses from the Tendo contact database (approximately 1,320 addresses).

Then I fed those email addresses into the contact finder on LinkedIn and the friend finder on Facebook. (I would have done the same on my MySpace account, but MySpace doesn’t allow you to scan an uploaded list, and my own informal traffic monitoring shows that MySpace is on the decline.)

Both have a feature where they compare your address book to the addresses of active members and let you know if a member is in their network. (Don’t worry if you’re on the Tendo mailing list but don’t want your information circulated in either the LinkedIn or Facebook networks. Your information was not saved in either location; it was simply a one-time scan of the list.)

Here’s what I found: 50 percent of our contacts were members on LinkedIn and 18 percent were on Facebook.

Obviously, the Tendo list is not a “representative sample” of the whole world; given our business, we have many marketers and Web-savvy folks on our list. And LinkedIn is especially popular here in the Bay Area as a professional networking tool; the majority of our addresses are from the Bay Area.

But it’s interesting to me that nearly 20 percent of our list is on Facebook—a more purely “social” network and one that was not even open to non-college students a year ago.

Again, this is just a snapshot in time and we probably can’t make any grand conclusion based on these two numbers, but it’s fair to say that the number of people using social networks is on the rise. The basic functionality of these sites is going to become more and more standard in a variety of applications—perhaps even for your company’s network. So you may want to get yourself registered and start poking around. —John Kovacevich, VP, marketing services

If all the excitement around Web-based social media has you nervous about whether people can still hold a conversation in person, fear not. Social networking site Meetup.com has combined the ease and community-building capabilities of the Web with the primal need for in-person interaction.

Meetup.com reports more than 5 million regular users, facilitates more than 37,000 groups, and helps arrange about 80,000 physical events monthly. That’s a large group of motivated consumers, segmented by very specific interests—two attributes that typically make marketers salivate.

As reported by The New York Times on March 19, Meetup.com has found an interesting sponsorship model to support its various special interest groups. The site has signed both American Express Open and Kimberly Clarke, parent company to brands Huggies and Pull-ups, to underwrite and support Meetup.com groups for new mothers and entrepreneurs. Meetup.com’s sponsorships allow brands to provide valuable services to potential customers and opportunities to interact with their brands in meaningful ways. What’s interesting about Meetup.com’s approach is that it combines the best of two worlds: the convenience and ubiquity of the Web and the impact and intimacy of in-person interaction. —Bill Golden, managing editor