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Social media integration - its not just about technology - its also about community.

The biggest buzzword on the web right now and in advertising and marketing is social media integration. I am having more and more meetings each week with clients asking how they do this.

We have a lot of technology that we can throw at this to make it easy to work - and the tech stuff is pretty easy. Most of the major players are now providing "open" or at least partially open access to data.

But none of it is any use if you are not able to make the community part work. Integrating your brand marketing and awareness with social media is not like traditional advertising, where you threw stuff out at people and barely listened to feedback it at all. At most my experience with big brand advertising has been that the feedback loop was filtered through ad campaign managers, 3rd party survey random sample providers and the odd bit of internal email dealing with the one or two very angry customers!

Outlook 2010 has some pretty sweet features. Here are some of the new ones.

Use the Outlook Social Connector with Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and Windows Live

Today, we are announcing that you can use the Outlook Social Connector with Facebook and Windows Live. Our partners LinkedIn and MySpace are also releasing updates for their providers. All of the latest providers appear on the provider page.

Download the social connector software

Download each of the social connectors

Choosing the right communication modality with the contact card

There has been lots and lots of rumours, speculation and conjecture on just what the new release of Windows Live was going to contain. The LiveSide website has been the source of plenty of leaked screenshots, links to downloads and other information on the way.

Download links available at LiveSide

Now that is released into the wild, and people are using it I thought I would write up a quick review of some of the new features – and there are plenty.

Live Messenger

• A whole new communicator window, with integration with Facebook and MySpace accounts – means all your contacts, status updates and commenting can be done in one place, along with access to media like photos and videos. Note the Facebook chat feature has not been enabled in the public beta yet but will come later. (Image from LiveSide)
• A new tabbed conversation window – at last!. No longer do you need to have 75 windows open of all your current messaging sessions, they are now contained in one window with tabs at the top. This is a major improvement.

The Ribbon and Backstage

Ok not everybody's favourite feature first time they switch from Office 2003. It does take some getting used to – and I still use keyboard short cuts for things. However the contextually sensitive ribbon has some major advantages over the old system. I honestly prefer the ribbon now especially in Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word. In Office 2010 the ribbon can also be personalised.

The backstage view (access from the File menu now places in one easy place all file management tasks such as save, share and print. All the similar commands are grouped together. No more going to 3-4 different places to set print settings for an excel file.

Here's the best way to think about the Ribbon and Backstage.

• The Ribbon is for everything you want to do in a document – insert stuff, format stuff, change stuff.
• The Backstage area is for everything you want to do with a document – print it, save it , share it etc.

Sparklines and Pivot Tables

If you thought pivot tables were cool ways to play with (analyse) data before than wait until you play with the sexy new pivot tables in Excel 2010.

And sparklines (inline in cell micro charts) are an excellent way of demonstrating trends in a small space. I can’t wait to start incorporating some of these features for some of our clients when they upgrade.

Check this pivot table taken from timesheet data. I added the pivot chart and sparklines in about 3 minutes flat.