Good news for those of you asking when our next seminar in Des Moines will take place: On Tuesday, September 29th we are kicking off Lava Row Camp — a recurring, monthly series of educational workshops focused around various social and emerging media topics.

For starters, we’ll be tackling the topic of Big Brother 2.0: How companies can develop social networking guidelines that keep employees productive and web access open. We’ll analyze opportunity vs. risk, and share examples of what other organizations have done to address this evolving and complex issue. Participation is encouraged — we’re excited to learn from you and hear more about your specific challenges.

Tickets are $25 per person (plus Eventbrite fees) and can be purchased below, or by clicking here. The event takes place at the Des Moines Social Club at 1408 Locust Street in Des Moines. Please note, this seminar is a bring your own lunch affair. We’ll get started at noon, but don’t be shy — drop in for some good, old-fashioned networking between 11:30 and 12:00.

We’re excited to see you there! If you have ideas for future Lava Row Camp topics, please leave your thoughts in the comments section below.

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This morning we spotted a bit of creative street marketing outside our office and decided to capture the story behind it on video. It’s always a delight to come across a tactic like this, especially here in Des Moines where marketers don’t take advantage of the streets and public spaces around them often enough. We deal in digital forms of communication every day, so it’s refreshing to witness unexpected, “in-real-life” ideas like this one.

Here’s Laura Peters of Genus Landscape Architects explaining National Parking Day:

What has your business done that’s unexpected lately?

On August 18th, I tweeted this:

Today, in a move that established me as a modern-day Nostradamus, Facebook activated this exact feature. But in all seriousness, this is something Facebook has been contemplating / working on for months, and many users have been clamoring for it. Basically, the popular social network has turned on the ability for you to “tag” your friends in your status updates, simply by typing the “@” symbol and then choosing from an auto-fill drop-down menu. (Pages, events and groups can also be tagged.)

Seems like a simple add-on, right? So what are the long-term implications of this?

First of all, this feature is very Twitter-like. When Twitter came on the scene a few years back, mentioning friends via @replies and effortlessly creating links to them was one of the more appealing features. Over time, some lazy people (myself included) have set up our Twitter feed to update our Facebook status, negating the need to update in both places. This small change may now encourage many of us to update our status natively in the Facebook platform. It might also be appealing to those who “dabbled” in Twitter but never found any real value there.

Translation: Facebook wants you to think Facebook first, other networks second.

Status tagging is just one of many recent tweaks the social network has made to incrementally erode away Twitter’s core user base, including Facebook Lite (a stripped-down, bare-bones, Twitter-like version of the interface) and the ability to publish Page updates to a Twitter feed. (With links back to your content on Facebook, of course.) See the trend here? Facebook first.

Now, a logical person could make the case that no matter how many features Facebook adds, it can’t duplicate the Twitter experience because there are clear differences in the groups of friends you keep on each network. In other words, the quality of connections make the network.

I 100% agree with this, but I’m writing this post from the perspective of Facebook, which is a business, and that business is dedicated to going Scorched Earth on Twitter until there’s nothing left. Make no mistake about it, these social networks are fierce competitors. Remember that Facebook attempted to acquire Twitter back in 2008, believing that status updates were vital to the future of information sharing. Twitter spurned that offer, and since then Facebook bought Friendfeed, another (lesser-known) micro-sharing service, which was definitely a shot across Twitter’s bow.

Facebook and Twitter are at war over your social graph. Where do you stand? Will these recent changes change your social networking activity in the near future, one way or the other? What stand do you think Twitter can make to combat this? Please leave your thoughts below, I’m excited to hear all of your perspectives.

We hear a lot of conversations about how businesses use social media, but what about organizations like faith communities and churches? Today we caught up with Paul Stewart, Lead Pastor at a new faith community in downtown Des Moines called The Gateway Church. Here’s what Paul had to say about how The Gateway Church has leveraged social media to help spread the word and connect with the community.

Today on our way back from lunch through Downtown Des Moines via Locust Street, we decided to let the Flipcam roll and see how many businesses on Twitter we could identify. What, you think we were running out of ideas for our weekly video? How dare you! We were merely trying to illustrate how ubiquitous Twitter usage has become among local businesses.

Who did we miss? Add your comments in the video annotations above! Have a great Labor Day weekend, everyone.