Earlier this week, many of us in the Des Moines Twitter community learned about a rip-off of epic proportions: Local web startup SmartyPig had its CSS layout, logo and name carbon-copied by a Romanian company called TrustyPig.

Here is SmartyPig’s website (a legitimate, FDIC-insured company), designed by the legendary HappyCog:

And here is TrustyPig’s blatant rip-off:

A representative from SmartyPig had this to say in their Twitter stream to all their followers:

SmartyPig: B aware of trustypig.com. We are in NO Way affiliated with this Romanian ad outfit. Not sure what they are up to. But they have good taste.

Mike Ferarri, one of SmartyPig’s founders, expressed to me that he didn’t think there was any possible legal recourse since TrustyPig is located in Romania. That’s when the Twitter community decided to take matters into their own hands. I called for the organization of an angry mob. Andy Brudtkuhl got more specific and demanded a brand hijack, an effort which he led and organized with other Twitter users and bloggers.

A brand hijack is basically an orchestrated way to use blogs, SEO and social networks like Twitter and FriendFeed to “hijack” a brand’s placement in search engine listings. Andy further describes it in his blog post from August 11:

A brand hijack is an attempt to infuse a message as related to a brand. Often times companies do this internally or accidentally. Sometimes it starts from an external source. Most of the times it is viral. Rarely it is organized. Our goal is to takeover search results and word of mouth for the TrustyPig brand in order to communicate our message to any of TrustyPig’s potential customers.

Below is a screenshot of how effective Andy’s efforts were:

So this is a perfect example of why every company, including yours, should work their asses off to have brand enthusiasts — loyal customers who will take time out of their own schedules to defend your image.

In the first year that they’ve been in business, SmartyPig has fostered a community of customer evangelists by accomplishing the following:

• Creating an innovative, killer product: An online piggy bank that helps users visualize and share their savings goals while allowing others to contribute.
• Providing amazing customer support.
• Use of a popular social network (Twitter) to engage in real, authentic conversations with their customers. This beats an advertisement any day.

Two days after the brand hijack project began, TrustyPig changed their web design and we declared victory:

Let’s sum this up. By working hard to foster a loyal customer base, SmartyPig ended up spending zero dollars in legal fees when faced with this trademark infringement issue. The Twitter Mob took care of it for them.

Screenshots courtesy of Troy Rutter and Andy Brudtkuhl.

Follow the SmartyPig vs. TrustyPig conversation:
TrustyPig steals SmartyPig website via NerdFlood.com
TrustyPig - A Webjacker Gets Pwned via BlawgIT.com
TrustyPig.com Rips Off SmartyPig.com design via TroyRutter.com
Brand Hijack - Blogging via Getanewbrowser.com
TrustyPig - Social Brand Hijack via Getanewbrowser.com
(More links to conversations can be found on del.icio.us.)

This weekend Des Moines hosted Sarah Lacy, Silicon Valley journalist and author of Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good, for a stop on her User-Generated Book Tour. Sarah chose her UGBT stops largely based on enthusiasm from fans and readers within the communities, and we (and our good friends to the west in Omaha) were fortunate enough to reel her in.

Above is an interview I did with Sarah on Friday evening — we discussed Google’s rumored Digg.com aquisition and $200 million valuation, a possible monetization strategy for Twitter, and the “Human Router” concept. (Watch for a cameo appearance by her husband Geoff near the end!)

Beyond the business side of tech, Sarah is also incredibly well-versed on the topic of emerging cities and the various ingredients they need in order to foster growth of their creative class. Her insight is invaluable — there’s no way I could put a dollar figure to what I (and the Des Moines community) absorbed this weekend.

On a personal, one-to-one level, Sarah is extremely gracious and geniunely interested in what everyone has to say. She even took time to help paint the walls at Des Moines’ first co-working environment, Impromptu Studio. (Photo set on Flickr here.) I also noticed this quality in Gary Vaynerchuk when he came through Des Moines in June — it might be a consistent trait among those who have built up their personal brands via social mediums. Unlike “manufactured” celebrities and public figures, people like Sarah and Gary realize that — above all else — it’s about connecting with the readers, viewers, fans and community.

My main takeaway from the weekend is that our city’s entrepreneurial spirit hasn’t quite “hatched” yet. The excitement and passion are there, and the proper foundation is in place, but we need more and more people taking risks and making that jump. More killer ideas and tight executions like SmartyPig, more entrepreneurs with niche expertise like Liza Kindred, Mike Sansone and Andy Brudtkuhl. More people leading specific movements, like those who have picked up the torch already with 80/35, co-working and Barcamps. At Lava Row we are going back to the drawing board and re-thinking what else we can do, individually and as a company, to support the emergence of Des Moines as a culturally relevant city.

The pieces are in place, now let’s assemble them.

Please join me in thanking Sarah for coming to Des Moines! You can reach out to her on Twitter at @sarahcuda or by leaving a comment on her blog, SarahLacy.com.

Sarah Lacy, author of Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good, will be in Des Moines this Saturday, August 2nd for a book signing/reading event at East Village Books. Afterwards, Sarah will be joining us for conversation and frosty beverages at a Des Moines TweetUp at The Royal Mile. Everyone is welcome to attend!

I finished Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good a couple of weeks ago and found it to be an engaging window into the minds, psyches and social awkwardness of web entrepreneurs. Also interesting to me were the lessons learned from the original dotcom bubble and how they impact emerging tech companies today (going public vs. not going public). Sarah also writes for BusinessWeek and co-hosts Tech Ticker on Yahoo! Finance.

To help promote her book, Sarah asked her fans to make videos of themselves jumping off something while shouting the title. (I call this the LacyJump; no relation to the ShalerJump.) Here at Lava Row, we knew we could create an epic LacyJump with former gymnast Hillary Brown (@hillabean) on staff. Hillary’s video can be viewed below:

On behalf of the entire tech community in Des Moines, we are so excited to have Sarah in town this weekend! Don’t forget to stop by East Village Books and/or the TweetUp on Saturday and say hello. (Oh yeah, she’d appreciate it if you buy a book, also.)

RSVP on Upcoming: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/869511
RSVP on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=32730788248
Juice interview with Sarah Lacy: http://tinyurl.com/5jedk3

Social media has given power to the people, and with it, your consumers now have the ability to publicly share their experiences about your company, your customer service and your products online. (Sometimes positive, and sometimes negative.) Conversations that once took place inside coffee shops and bars are now public record across all sorts of digital channels.

If you’re currently participating in the “listening” basics (tracking mentions of your company name in Google News Alerts, Google BlogSearch, Technorati, etc.) you will immediately find out when a customer starts talking about your business within social media channels such as message boards, Twitter, or blogs. Whether these conversations are positive or negative, you can — and should — dip into the conversation stream with them.

Yet, the larger an organization is, the less time they can devote to following up on every single online reference or mention. So how do you discriminate?

First, check out the user who is posting the information. Let’s say the environment is a message board, and the user is very active within that space. He/she has over 3,000 posts. This is somebody you want to pay attention to, and potentially follow up with. Even within self-organizing communities like user forums, leaders (influencers) still emerge.

Now, say there are 10 blogs that have posted glowing reviews about your product or service, but you only have time for a few “thank you” follow-ups in their comments area. Do some research into who the bloggers are first. Determine their reach and influence. How big of a voice do they have? Are their readers actively engaged with the content? Are the readers leaving comments? If you see a lot of “Comments: 0″ you may want to pass.

There are billions of conversations happening right now on the web — some of them about your company. Depending on your organization’s size, developing an ability to filter through the stream of information, prune, and identify key influencers will be vital to your social media strategy.

I am thrilled to announce that Hillary Brown will be joining Lava Row as a Strategist in Social Media, New Media and Emerging Media on July 15th.

Hillary spent the past three years at Los Angeles-based Passenger, a provider of branded online communities for Fortune 500 companies. Her responsibilities included community management, digital strategy and utilization of social networking, viral marketing and consumer-generated media to develop branded discourse. (Translation: She knows a ton about the web.)

Before Passenger, Hillary managed guerilla, word-of-mouth and street marketing promotions at A.D.D. Marketing for a variety of entertainment-focused customers. Across all her previous positions, the roster of clients that Hillary has helped develop online strategy for is impressive: Apple, Nike, Nestlé, ABC, DreamWorks, X-Games, Activision and Target, to name a few.

Hillary’s extensive knowledge of new and emerging mediums makes her an invaluable addition to the Lava Row team, and I am so excited to have her on board. She is a Des Moines native and graduate of Iowa State University. Hillary can be reached at hillary at lavarow dot com or @hillabean on Twitter.

Gary Vaynerchuck, host of the popular video podcast Wine Library TV, visited Des Moines this weekend and spoke at East Village Books.

Gary V. is a new form of celebrity, self-made through tireless enthusiasm, infectious energy, hard work, and the ability to leverage powerful social networking tools like Twitter and Facebook. He actually interacts with the community he’s built — Gary typically receives 1,000 e-mails a day and he takes the time to answer each one personally. This is refreshing, especially in a media landscape that likes to package, produce and force-feed us “celebrities” that have zero relevance other than attending parties and appearing in garbage reality programming.

It was a pleasure hearing Gary’s thoughts on building a business and his full-throttle obsession with changing the culture of wine. After his talk and signing at the book store, some of us from the Des Moines TweetUp crew kidnapped Gary and went out for food and cocktails. (Above is a quick video interview that I captured in the back seat of Rob Jensen’s Camry.) Podcasting News also has a fantastic, in-depth interview that you should check out.

Thanks again to @garyvee for visiting Des Moines!

As the flood waters rise here in Des Moines, I am keeping a close watch on IowaFlood.com, a website that aggregates content from various citizen journalists and mainstream media outlets.

The site was created by Andy Brudtkuhl (of 48Web) within just a few hours, built with Yahoo! Pipes and Wordpress. Content is pulled automatically from various sources — alerts from NOAA and the National Weather Service, tagged photos on Flickr, YouTube videos, hashtagged chatter on Twitter, blog posts, articles from outlets like WHO-TV and the Des Moines Register — and all woven together into an incredibly robust, informative news experience.

The cool thing is how seamlessly old media and new media are working together. IowaFlood.com pulls in RSS feeds from the Register, meanwhile, a Register employee on Twitter is hashtagging his tweets with #iowaflood to ensure that his newspaper’s updates are correctly pushed to IowaFlood’s front page.

This creates a nice blend of reporting from authoritative media sources and human, block-by-block coverage that armies of citizen journalists can easily pull off. Thus far, IowaFlood.com has received over 16,000 visitors, generated over 1,000 posts, and survived one database crash — mostly due to word-of-mouth.

If only we had the internet back in 1993…

UPDATE 6/13: On Friday afternoon I went out and grabbed some video of the Des Moines river nearing it’s highest levels since 1993.

UPDATE 6/21: At Thursday’s Des Moines TweetUp, I asked Andy a few questions about the logistics behind building IowaFlood.com on the fly.

Good communication between employees is vital to all businesses, large or small. E-mail, unfortunately, often falls into the “bad communication” category. Tone is misinterpreted, context is lost and messages go missing.

That’s why today many companies are experimenting with internal wikis and private social networks to improve communication among their team members. Think of this as just an evolution of the corporate intranet.

By adopting the social features that have made online destinations like Wikipedia and Facebook successful, businesses can transform their stagnant, one-way intranet into a bustling expressway of shared thoughts, insights and collaboration.

Here are a few quick pointers for initiating a wiki project within your business:

• Start small. Choose a team within your organization to start using the wiki — not everyone at once.
• Develop a strategy to roll it out internally. (Hint: Don’t announce it via e-mail.)
• Give the wiki time to evolve. If users aren’t taken by it immediately, keeping pushing ahead, keep the faith and keep training.
• Determine what success is. Reduction of e-mail volume? Better communication? Knowing your goals ahead of time will allow you to justify the project later on.

If you’re ready to get started, there are multiple resources available, ranging from free, hosted services such as PBwiki, all the way to enterprise-level applications like SocialText. Good luck on starting up your wiki!

There’s a common perception that integrating video content into your website can be expensive. However, this isn’t the case any more — video-to-web is fast, easy and affordable.

Showcasing your product with video creates a much more intimate connection with your website visitor than just a photograph, diagram or list of services. Probably the best example is BlendTec’s "Will it Blend" video campaign, which illustrates the blending power of their products on objects such as iPhones and marbles.

Additionally, if you use a video-sharing application to host your content such as YouTube or Blip.tv, your video is instantly shareable in a peer-to-peer fashion. These services allow you to cast a wider audience net outside of your own website.

So how do you get started?

1. Equipment. Depending on the final quality you’ll need, you can hire a freelance videographer to shoot it, or simply create your own content with affordable digital video equipment such as the Flip cam.
2. Get it on the Web! This is much easier than it sounds. There are many video-sharing websites out there to choose from — I mentioned YouTube and Blip.tv earlier, but there’s also Viddler, Veoh, Revver and many more. It’s a snap to upload your video file to any of these websites and they will take care of file hosting and bandwidth for you, usually for free.
3. Integrate it. All video-sharing applications allow you to easily embed your video content into your website, blog, or social network profile. Typically this is as simple as copying and pasting a snippet of code.

In summary, there’s no reason to drop $10,000 on an expensive video shoot for your website. With the right tools and a little curiosity, you’ll be on your way to integrating video in no time.

Last week I discovered an interesting project called Brand Tags (Brandtags.net), a website that lets visitors “tag” globally-recognized brands like Coca-Cola, Microsoft, GE, etc.

Tagging is a common function built into peer-to-peer social networks and web-based applications. For example, while watching YouTube videos or looking at photos on Flickr, you may notice a cluster of descriptive words to the right. Those are “tags” that the user has added to help categorize where the video belongs. Brand Tags works in a similar fashion, except that you tag based on your perception (not categorization) of the brands.

Brand Tags is fascinating because it gives us a window into the collective mind of hundreds of thousands of people and how they currently perceive large companies — companies that spend billions of dollars to shape our perceptions.

Below are a couple examples of brands and their corresponding tags:

Brand: Apple
Tags: Cool, Design, Awesome, Innovation
http://www.brandtags.net/browse.php?id=72

Brand: MySpace
Tags: Annoying, Friends, Music, Kids, Teenagers, Ugly
http://www.brandtags.net/browse.php?id=41

Brand: Google
Tags: Search, Everything, God, Evil
http://www.brandtags.net/browse.php?id=2

Brand: McDonald’s
Tags: Cheap, Fat, Food, Unhealthy
http://www.brandtags.net/browse.php?id=47

The Brand Tags project is just another example of how social mediums have leveled the playing field between large organizations and their consumers.