The Sheriff and Secure Communities

It sure seemed like grandstanding when we saw Worcester County Sheriff Lew Evangelidis interviewed by Juan Williams about Secure Communities the Bill O'Reilly show. 
Read the rest at my TelegramTowns.com blog

A printed social media magazine? Really?

If you're going against the flow and launching a print magazine, you've got to do a lot of things right to be successful. For starters, you should get the right month in the footer of your pages.
The Social Media Monthly^TM is on sale at Barnes and Noble stores in the U.S. and in other locations worldwide. There's also an iPad edition. (Curiously, there's no version of the magazine for B&N's Nook).
There was a fair bit of coverage about the launch of the magazine. Most of the coverage speculated on the need for, as the press release said, "the world’s first printed magazine to focus exclusively on the evolving technology area of social media." Some folks were eager to have something in print to explain it all.  BBC blogger Charles Miller's piece, titled Social media: on paper at last, wanted to know what kind of paper was being used. He wrote to the editor, Bob Fine, to find out where he could buy one in the UK. Fine wasn't sure and would get back to him soon.
Cool Blue Company LLC has a company website/blog that they promise they'll be updating soon. Their last update was in May 2009.

404 (Page Not Found) Error - Ever feel like you're in the wrong place?

The 64 glossy pages include a pleasing palette of colorful pull-quotes, several full-page ads, and a removable cover graphic. I
The QR codes at the end of each article suggested that I might get something special and learn more a clever way to use the codes. Unfortunately, however, the first code I tried went to their Page-Not-Found page. I tried several others with the same result.
And that's how it goes throughout the magazine:

• On page 9, we see that it's the August 2011 edition while the other footers say it's September 2011. This, according to the masthead, is from the second printing.
• Hyphenation in the big pull quotes is distracting and not necessary, particularly when hyphenating proper names such as Twitter.
• For seven bucks (eight in Canada), you want high quality production and might notice that the aforementioned footers drift a few points from the edge of the page.
• The QR code for The Brainzooming^TM Group has ad on the inside back cover ad, one of the most expensive places in a print publication. The code.takes you to a page that offers a social media metrics report. To obtain the download, you have to fill out a form. The form asks how you heard about the download. Too bad they couldn't have figured that out already because I came to the page by way of their QR code.

The content is interesting enough, providing an overview of current and evolving uses of social media along with some helpful tips for developing and managing a social media program.
A good magazine about social media would be a welcome offering to both marketers and business owners who are more comfortable with print. Until one comes along, there's The Social Media Monthly^TM.