We’re developing social media training systems together with association / corporate marketing groups and consultants who add their training content to the platform. For example, we’re working with a wine consultancy developing a national social media marketing business using the platform for “basic training” and reference for their client base.

Register for a peek at http://domusu.com/admin/first-time-users. We welcome discussion on this unique idea.

Everybody has been asking us – why is the Breaking News Network innovative?

1. Breaking News sites like Breaking San Francisco News aggregate the best Twitter feeds in a city. They filter the Twitter experience so you’re not seeing the noise.
2. The Breaking News Network is grass roots application design. We give it away to media/publishing companies and real estate brokerages and agents, and they can build a Breaking News site in 5 hours. And they OWN the sites; it’s on the Wordpress platform so it’s easily accessible to non-programmers and customizable to the market.  Once up, that real estate brokerage or media company provides a community service and instantly becomes the hub of their Twitter community in their city.
3. In three months, the Breaking News Network already covers over 100 cities. As the Breaking News Network expands to cover every city in America (as well as overseas), the network begins to look like the Craigslist for Twitter feeds. We plan to overlay new business models across this network.

We document the Breaking News Network on this blog. Contact us if you’re interested in participating in the Breaking News Network at @pkitano or pkitano (at) gmail.com

We’ve published a simple, but explicit eBook introduction to Twitter for local businesses called “The Local Business Owner’s Guide to Twitter” for free download. The final chapters provide high level tactics for using Twitter as a local advertising media.

Let us know what you think about the eBook and retweet it! For a real estate perspective on Twitter, download the Twitter for Real Estate Twits book at MyTechOpinion.

Although the barriers to entry for developing a web application are low, it’s still difficult for non-technical “normal” people to build their own web application easily.

Most DIY application development solutions like Ning and blog platforms provide templated designs with feature limitations, and they all look the same. The Wordpress platform offers open source application feature sets that allow non-programmers to cobble together working applications.

EVOLVING WEB DESIGN

This is the next phase of web design – facilitating non-techies in the building of applications. Wordpress, functional but unslick, is so far the most accessible to the masses. We’re building Breaking News City sites on the Wordpress platform because we can share it easily with non-programmers, and we can efficiently teach them how to build, customize and maintain a site in 4-5 hours.

What happens when anybody can build a web application? VC-funded stealth projects become more risky when anybody can easily clone them. The obsession with keeping traffic on site is threatened. The new paradigm will be for entrepreneurs to build applications that are easily owned, adopted and customized by anybody, and perhaps charge a subscription fee for the privilege. In this world, real estate agents would be able to create a fully functioning real estate listings search site similar to Trulia.com, but host it on their OWN domain. Facebook pages could be spun off onto their own domain.

Owning the domain will become analogous to “owning the house”. Traffic becomes equity, and more important, the houseowner sets the rules. The Domus Breaking News Project is based on creating the new accessible applications that can be shared freely through networks and society. Our business model is to consult with enterprises to adapt and customize these new applications for their business.

Zappos has become iconic as THE enterprise that embraces social media – it occupies a singular position that no other company seems to be able to touch so far. And it’s surprising that we haven’t heard of any other company that hasn’t institutionalized social media as an important facet of their organization. Social media is generally being recognized as innovating business disciplines from marketing to business networking to HR. Why aren’t more companies, particularly in the service industries, getting all their employees to social network with their client bases?

At Domus Consulting, we’re fortunate and honored to work with companies who want to infuse the culture of social media into their organizations. We call it Zappos-izing the company. The process of training every employee in a company on how to use Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn for networking and communication purposes will yield four results:

1. Internally, it will facilitate online social interaction across the enterprise with no departmental or geographical borders, and transcend the office siloes that naturally inhibit information flow.
2. Externally, it will make the enterprise’s relationships and dealings with their client base more transparent by using the public conversational pipes of social media.
3. It will create more business opportunities by connecting the enterprise “network” with other forming networks within client and partner organizations. As any Twitterer knows, it’s much easier to have a conversation with someone else on Twitter when you don’t need to schedule an appointment with their gatekeeper.
4. It will change the corporate culture because the social media is…well, fun. People in general are at first reluctant to join social networks because it seems scary to open themselves up to the world. Once they dive in, they realize the water is fine, and most enjoy the interaction and the networking opportunities they bring. Many become fanatical. The feeling of belonging elevates company spirit.

Just result #4 is a good reason to implement a management edict to attend training webinar sessions.

Daniel McCarthy, CEO of NCI, a publishing / local advertising company with a business based on nurturing local client relationships, saw the social media opportunity and embarked on Project Massive Network, with the mission of getting NCI employees AND their clients onto the social media. In the spirit of transparency, he has even opened up the webinars we’re doing together with NCI to show the methodology. Dan will be chronicling the Project on his blog Viral Housing Fix; the first installment is up. You’ll also be able to follow the progress with #NCI, the Twitter hashtag system that allows participants to comment and Q&A about the Project.

We’re registering for our next Social Media Marketing workshops starting Friday, May 8 at 10:30pdt / 1:30edt. During these sessions, we help build Breaking News City sites for our clients. Register at http://DomusConsultingGroup.com/101h.

Breaking News City Sites:

• London
• New York
• Orange County
• Los Angeles
• San Francisco
• Boston

The Domus Breaking News Network is a unique “instant” data distribution and marketing platform. Three reasons why the Network is innovative and changing the way web applications are being developed:

1. Breaking News sites like Breaking San Francisco News aggregate the best Twitter feeds in a city. They filter the Twitter experience so you’re not seeing the noise.
2. The Breaking News Network is grass roots application design. We give it away to media/publishing companies and real estate brokerages and agents, and they can build a Breaking News site in 5 hours. And they OWN the sites; it’s on the Wordpress platform so it’s easily accessible to non-programmers and customizable to the market. Once up, that real estate brokerage or media company provides a community service and instantly becomes the hub of their Twitter community in their city.
3. As the Breaking News Network expands to cover every city in America (as well as overseas), the network begins to look like the Craigslist for Twitter feeds. We plan to overlay new business models across this network.

The Breaking News Network Awarded “Most Innovative Media 2009″ by Inman News

Ongoing documentation on the Breaking News Project can be found at Media Transparent.com.

Hyperlocal Breaking News – bringing cities and communities into real time conversation

Breaking Topical News – aggregating the best breaking news on a variety of topics

BreakingSFNews.com, BreakingLANews.com and BreakingNYCNews.com broadcast what is happening in each city in real time through a survey of local Twitter feeds and contributions from Twitterers who add tweets to the scrolling news feed using a specific #hashtag system.

The Advent of the Breaking News websites

We’re just beginning to see the development of “breaking news” sites that chronicle and monitor the Tweets and other conversations on a topical or geographical level. MuckRack, apparently launched yesterday, aggregates the Twitter feeds of prominent mainstream media journalists.

Genesis of Breaking News on a Hyperlocal Level

My company, Domus Consulting Group adopted the mission to provide regular folks who happen to be hubs of their community a way to gather their community into compelling online applications like BreakingSFNews. We were early advocates of Twitter and clearly understood how the micro-blogging (aka micro-networking) platforms can tie communities together in a big virtual neighborhood. We also recognized that Twitter’s unique function to facilitate citizen breaking news was compelling (just listen to the buzz today).

The Transparent Development Process

We don’t develop applications in stealth. We develop in iteration by explaining in this blog our concepts, create prototypes as necessary, listen to feedback, and improve the product or service. The chronology for develop BreakingSFNews is literally detailed from this blog’s timeline:

4/10/2009: Real Time Local Advertising – A New Business Model

4/05/2009: BreakingShoppingNews.com: Twitter for Local Advertising

1/10/2009: The New Web 2.5 Opportunity: Creating Media Hubs

12/10/2008: “Breaking News” is a Mass Media Play

12/04/2008: Incorporating Breaking News into Websites and Make Them Compelling Reads

The Give it Away Business Model

We developed the breaking news template that BreakingSFNews is built upon with the intent of giving it away free. We’ve discussed that sharing website development with the people is a new model for spurring adoption of a new marketing paradigm; Ning for DIY social network creation fits into this paradigm. We believe empowering individuals by providing them with plug and play web applications will become more common because it “shares the wealth” and will somewhat disrupt the old VC-based method of stealth website development (why try to build a “monopoly” web property when it can be replicated and given away free in the future?)

A lot of our consulting work so far has been in real estate and in media/advertising, industries that rely on hyperlocal networking for business. We’ve developed hyperlocal Breaking News sites so companies and individuals can tie their communities together with very little financial risk. We even develop the business model behind Breaking News (in progress) so it minimizes business risk as well. And we’ll fully disclose and share all new business models for the benefit of those who adopt Breaking News sites.

Why We Believe Hyperlocal Breaking News is Compelling – it’s in Local Advertising

We discussed this one week ago. Simply put, there is now a void in where local merchants can advertise. They are pulling out of print publications, Yellow Pages and Penny Savers, and can’t figure out how to reach their customer base online. With hyperlocal breaking news sites, local merchants can address their community using Twitter to publish their “daily deals”. Yesterday’s NY Times provided anecdotes on how effective this kind of “advertising” can be. As friend Roberta Murphy put it, “in a Breaking News site, the local merchants aren’t pushing obnoxious ads any more, they are sharing their deals and inviting conversation”. And guess what? It’s free!

(Caveat: Of course, local merchants will need to understand the protocols of social media so they don’t spam and generally act uncouth…)

Everybody is looking for a deal these days; the hope is Breaking News sites will connect local merchants with consumers on the watch for deals.

How You Can Participate

As discussed, the Breaking News template is free to use for anybody interested in building a Breaking News site for their city, i.e. OCBreakingNews.com, SantaBarbaraBreakingNews.com, etc. It literally took me only three hours to set up each of the Breaking News sites, and we teach how to do this.

Join us for a free webinar next Wednesday, April 22 at 10:30pdt/1:30edt and we’ll explain the methodology to get a Breaking News city site up and running. Register here: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/526096234.

In this light, we’ve changed our mission statement on our Domus Consulting Group website. One thing that differentiates us as media consultants is our proven ability to train organizations from top to bottom on strategic social media marketing. Management often has problems with translating this vision when few of their employees are even on Facebook, let alone Twitter.

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Domus Consulting Group’s mission as management consultants is to work with corporations and organizations in developing social media sales and marketing strategies that extend to every employee and business partner. Since 2007, we have been leaders in developing new social media constructs that have been put into practical and successful use by the technology, the real estate and the media industries.

We achieve the following objectives with our clients, the first four steps often within the span of 1-2 months:

1) PLANNING: Strategy development on how best to position company within both traditional industrial media and the new social media worlds.

2) MISSION: Brand client company as the “Zappos ” of its industry by developing a systematic focus on customer support and interaction via the social media.

3) EXECUTION: Develop a massive referral-based networking system within the organization and extend that to the customer base for business development.

4) ADOPTION: Train large teams of employees live and via webinars to systematically and efficiently build their social networks, and learn 2.0 marketing protocols.

5) LEVERAGE: Develop unique applications that distribute and share essential real time information to corporate clients. (Example: Real time local advertising – a new business model)

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Our Management Philosophy ( a slideshow we originally posted summer 2008)