Archive for the ‘Social Media’ Category
5 Things You Must Ask About Social Media (By Jay Deragon)
Posted on October 18th, 2009 by -
Categories: Social Media
Everyone seems to be asking a lot of questions about social media. Subsequently everyone has an opinion as to the answers to these very questions. The questions are all over the place from how to produce results to what technology to use and how. To say the least there are hundreds of different answers to each question asked.
Business leaders are jumping into the use of social media and expecting results. The results of using social media vary by who is using it for what purpose. However most of the purposes are aimed at marketing and public relations. The results of use are problematic to say the least. We hear of a few success stories but the bulk of the results reveal failure to comprehend the systemic nature of communications. What once was a one way channel to market a product, service or message has just been flipped on its head because everything is now a two way channel with significant reach and influence (see diagram).
Are You Asking The Right Questions?
Viewing social media as just another channel to “push” out messages is indicative of not comprehending the impact of two way communications and the related influence on markets. Corporations do not comprehend that use of social media as more systemic in nature than just thinking in terms of marketing. Failure to understand this means the market will easily and quickly reveal that which you don’t comprehend or have failed to recognize.
Amy Mengel writes: Five reasons corporations are failing at social media. So why is it so difficult for so many companies to successfully integrate social media? Her top five are as follows and I’d encourage you to read the entire post:
- They can’t talk about anything broader than their own products
- They listen to customers but don’t take any action
- They aren’t calibrated internally with the technology
- They’re not framing risk accurately
- Their internal culture isn’t aligned for social media success
Amy Mengel’s assessment is spot on and the point is that while social media can be used for marketing and PR unless the organization is strategically aligned with the market you will definitely fail. Organizational alignment is a lot different than the practice of marketing and PR. The market is no longer just the end consumer. Rather the market now encompasses everyone internally and externally. In other words “the market” is everyone who communicates anything to someone. Who would that be? Everyone!
What Are The Right Questions?
The success of any business is relative to finding and using answers to relevant questions about the business and how it can best serve a market. Given that the market now includes anyone and everyone within the chain of communications then everything that influences business success is now totally transparent to the entire market. Marketing and messaging is no longer isolated rather it is now a reflection of the organizational quality and effectiveness of management. Before a business jumps into using social media they ought to ask:
- Who is communicating what and why? What is our market hearing? Who is listening? It’s everyone & everything!
- What is influencing the quality of these communications? What are the constraints and problematic issues? Your culture, your knowledge and your organizational quality!
- Where are the markets which consume these communications? Everywhere!
- When will we know the markets sentiment? Every moment if your listening!
- Why do people care about communications? The freedom of speech has been and always will be an attraction and a powerful force of human nature.
As social media continues to fuel the influence of open and transparent communications it will force organizations to think strategically about everything. Why? Communication touches and influences everything. Organizational design, culture, strategy are all reflective of the quality of management thinking and skills. To effectively address these issues requires new knowledge from the outside. This knowledge domain is not the same domain as marketing and PR. What, where, how, when and why are questions whose answers depend on the purpose of your business. Every business purpose is fueled by communications. We will cover each question in detail in future post.
What say you?
via mediapitch.ning.com
How to Blog Almost Every Day (Chris Brogan)
Posted on October 11th, 2009 by -
Categories: Social Media
I put up a blog post (almost) every day, and sometimes, I put up more than one a day. On top of this, I write for clients, write for other projects, work on books, and other things. Some of you don’t have all these other writing commitments, but still want some ideas on getting more writing out the door. Here are some thoughts into my process that I hope will give you a framework for writing a blog post (almost) every day.
1. Read something new every day. Need a starting point? Try Alltop. (Hint: read something outside your particular circle to get new thoughts).
2. Talk with people every day. I get many of my topic ideas from questions people pose to me, or through conversations.
3. Write down titles and topic ideas in a notepad file. ( I’ve given you 100 blog topics and another 20 blog topics just to get started.)
4. Maintain a healthy bookmarking and revisiting habit. I use Delicious.com
5. Find 20-40 minutes in every day to sit still and type.
6. Follow an easy framework. Here are 27 blogging secrets to start you on what I mean.
7. Get the post up fast, not perfect. You can edit if you have to, later. Perfectionism kills good habits.
8. Dissect other people’s posts to understand what makes them tick. The more you understand of HOW they write, the more you can take the best parts of it into how you write. (hint, my 27 blogging secrets post gives you my patterns.)
9. Find useful and interesting pictures. I use Flickr photos licensed under Creative commons for most of my photos. This helps me sometimes get a great photo for a post I already have in mind, but it also gives me post material sometimes.
10. Think about what your customers and prospects need. I write from the perspective of the communities I serve. Every post is aimed at something I believe will be helpful to my community in some form or another. This focus takes some weight off my worries about what I should write about or not. I write about what my community needs.
11. Mix things up by sometimes blogging on paper first.
12. Mix things up by writing guest posts for sites that aren’t like yours. This gives your mind new formats to think about. I did this recently as part of a project and I loved it.
13. Mix things up by changing the lengths of your posts: some long, some brief. Learn what makes an impact how.
14. Never worry about throwing up the occasional “best of” post, once you get enough material. Example: here’s My best advice about blogging.
It’s not easy, but once you develop the habits, they stick with you. I’m writing quite regularly now, but it took me several years to get my groove down to a science. Some days, it’s still thrown off. Busy schedules can get the best of us, no matter what. That said, try to keep some content “in the can,” so that you’re rarely at a loss to keep your audience happy.
What do you think? Any other ideas to add?
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Social + Media = Change(David Cushman)
Posted on October 11th, 2009 by -
Categories: Social Media
Let’s deconstruct the phrase ’social media’ and try social + media instead.
It helps me understand where the focus should be: 90% on the social, 10% on media.
That doesn’t mean there’s no role for the media side. It plays a critical one, without which the social doesn’t get to happen – but it does reflect where the value lays, who creates it and how.
Social =
* The social technologies that connect us
* People
* Groups
* Hands and feet
* Action
* What we choose to do together
Media =
* That which flows through social technologies
* Content
* Distribution
* Mouths and ears
* Conversation
* What they would seek to do to us/get us to do
The media side is where we pass on messages from one to another, do the viral thing, create content and publish it – in social networks and on blogs and in tweets.
It is where we fulfil those mutliple roles that once were the sole domain of the media industry – we publish, we advertise and market (to our peers). We provide the distribution through peer-to-peer pass on. We do it all in networks rather than channels, in real-time rather than their time and many-to-many rather than broadcast from one-to-many, with the one at the centre.
It is a CRITICAL part of the mix. You don’t get the social without the media. The Eighth Mass Media. Us.
To recap on The Eight Mass Media:
* We are the distribution
* We are the content
* We are the user journey
* We are how messages are transmitted
* We are the medium and the media carried within it
* We are the connections AND how the connections are made
In this Eighth Mass Media element we find each other – we discover those we didn’t know we needed to know, we come together to serve a common purpose. We become communities of purpose.
And there is a great deal of value in this. We recommend stuff – our friends buy it or buy into it.
But the greater value lies in the new, fast, user-centric, efficiencies of the ’social’ part of the phrase.
That is, that all our media-like activity brings us together with people seeking to solve the same problem or improve the same experience
And this is where the efficiencies happen.
A very small-scale example:
* A social technology (Twitter) is created (social)
* I (social) tweet a complaint about a brand (media)
* A person (social) representing the brand uses social technology to discover this (social)
* The person (social) contacts me (media)
* We engage in conversation (media)
* My problem is resolved (social)
* The person representing the brand (social) discovers a way to improve their current system – making it more efficient for brand and consumer (social)
* I (social) tweet my peers to say how pleased I am with the outcome (media)
* I (social) recommend the brand representative to my peers (social)
How does that scale?
Remember: The people who can make most difference to your organisation don’t work for it. Adapting to the network means that they can.
So broadening the listening for what’s wrong with your brand, as experienced by end-users, effectively delivers crowd-sourced improvements – R&D and NPD – in rapid iteration and at small cost.
Make no mistake – there is much more to this than reputation management.
Social + Media generates low-cost NPD, R&D, P2P Marketing, Advertising, Recruitment and all that reputation management warmth, too.
The process adapts the org to the expressed needs of the network (people) – it transforms your organisation into one in which the greater part of its energy is generated from beyond the organisation – and one in which that increased energy nourishes a growing, changing and responding org.
The History and Evolution of Social Media | Webdesigner Depot
Posted on October 11th, 2009 by -
Categories: Social Media
Social media has become an integral part of modern society.
There are general social networks with user bases larger than the population of most countries.
There are niche sites for virtually every special interest out there.
There are sites to share photos, videos, status updates, sites for meeting new people and sites to connect with old friends.
It seems there are social solutions to just about every need.
In this article, we’ll review the history and evolution of social media from its humble beginnings to the present day.
Precursors to Social Media
Usernets
Usenet systems were first conceived of in 1979 by Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis. Usenets let users post articles or posts (referred to as “news”) to newsgroups.
Usenets have no centralized server or dedicated administrator, setting them apart from most BBSs and forums. Usenets are mostly responsible for the development of newsreader clients, which are the precursor to RSS feed readers so commonly used to follow blogs and news sites today.
Group sites such as Google Groups and Yahoo! Groups use many of the conventions established by the original usenet systems.
BBSs (Bulletin Board Systems)
The first BBSs came online in the late 70s. Originally these were primarily hosted on personal computers and users had to dial in through the host computer’s modem. Only one person at a time could gain access to the BBS.
While there were legitimate BBSs, most were at least somewhat involved in illicit, illegal, or other shady practices. Adult material, virus code, information and instructions for hacking and phreaking (phone hacking), and materials like The Anarchist’s Cookbook were commonly hosted on BBSs.
But BBSs were the first type of sites that allowed users to log on and interact with one another, albeit in a much slower fashion than we currently do.
Online Services
After BBSs came “online services” like CompuServe and Prodigy. These were the first real “corporate” attempts at accessing the Internet.
CompuServe was the first company to incorporate a chat program into their service. Prodigy was responsible for making online service more affordable (CompuServe had been prohibitively expensive for many, with charges of $6/hour plug long-distance fees that often made the service run $30/hour or more).
Genie was an early online service created by a General Electric subsidiary (GEIS) in 1985. It ran through 1999 and was one of the earliest services available. It was a text-based service, and considered the first viable commercial competition to CompuServe. The service was created to make use of idle time-sharing mainframes after normal U.S. business hours. GEnie offered games, shopping, mail, and forums (called RoundTables). There was even a print magazine associated with the service at one time.
AOL started as an online service too and made great strides at making the Internet more universally accessible in the U.S.
IRC, ICQ, and Instant Messaging
IRC (Internet Relay Chat) was developed in 1988 and used for file sharing, link sharing and otherwise keeping in touch.
It was really the father of instant messaging as we know it today. IRC was mostly UNIX-based though, limiting access to most people.
ICQ was developed in the mid-90s and was the first instant messaging program for PCs. It was at least partly responsible for the adoption of avatars, abbreviations (LOL, BRB) and emoticons. Other IM clients soon followed.
Early Social Networks
Dating Sites
Dating sites are sometimes considered the first social networks. The first dating sites started cropping up almost as soon as people started going online. They allowed users to create profiles (usually with photos) and to contact other users.
Forums
Online forums also played a large part in the evolution of the social web. These were really descendents of the BBSs popular in the 70s and 80s, but usually came with a more user-friendly interface, making them easier for non-technical visitors to use. Various forum platforms, including vBulletin and phpBB, were developed, many of which are still used for forums. Forums remain a popular part of online culture, and many have made strides to add more social networking-type features (like profiles).
While many people consider dating sites or sites like Classmates.com to be the first social networks, they don’t really fit the definition.
Dating sites rarely allowed you to keep a friends list, neither did Classmates in its early years (and profiles were severely limited). The following sites were the first true social networks.
Six Degrees
Six Degrees was launched in 1997 and was the first modern social network. It allowed users to create a profile and to become friends with other users.
While the site is no longer functional, at one time it was actually quite popular and had around a million members at its peak.
In 2000 it was purchased for $125 million and in 2001 it was shut down.
AsianAvenue, MiGente, BlackPlanet
These sites cropped up in the years following SixDegrees’ launch, between 1997 and 2001.
They allowed users to create profiles and add friends (generally without needing approval to add people). Users could create professional, personal and dating profiles on these sites.
While they were some of the earliest social networks, there were few innovations among them.
LiveJournal
LiveJournal started in 1999 and took a different approach to social networking.
While Six Degrees allowed users to create a basically-static profile, LiveJournal was a social network built around constantly-updated blogs.
LiveJournal encouraged its users to follow one another and to create groups and otherwise interact. It was really the precursor to the live updates we see in social networks currently.
World of Warcraft / MMORPGS
MMORPGS (Massively multiplayer online role-playing games) have become social networks in their own right. The most famous of these is World of Warcraft, where players interact both in the game world and on related forums and community sites.
Social interaction within the games ranges from teams set up specifically for tactical reasons within the game to friendships to romances. MMORPGS became popular in the early 2000s, though there were other online role-playing and other games prior to that.
Major Advances in Social Networking
The early 2000s brought some huge developments in social networking and social media.
Friendster
Friendster was really the first modern, general social network. Founded in 2002, Friendster is still a very active social network, with over 90 million registered users and 60+ million unique visitors each month. Most of Friendster’s traffic comes from Asia (90% of it).
Friendster operated by allowing people to discover their friends and then friends-of-friends, and so on to expand their networks.
Its goal was to be a safer place to meet new people than in real-life, as well as being faster. Friendster was, in part, a new kind of dating site.
Instead of matching complete strangers based on shared interests, it operated on the assumption that people with shared friends and acquaintances would have a better chance than those who had no shared connection.
Friendster was most popular with three different groups: gay men, attendess of Burning Man and bloggers.
Hi5
Hi5 is another major social network, established in 2003 and currently boasting more than 60 million active members according to their own claims.
Profile privacy works a bit differently on Hi5, where a user’s network consists of not only their own contacts, but also second (friends of friends) and third (friends of friends of friends) degree contacts.
Users can set their profiles to be seen only by their network members or by Hi5 users in general. While Hi5 is not particalarly popular in the U.S., it has a large user base in parts of Asia, Latin America and Central Africa.
LinkedIn was founded in 2003 and was one of the first mainstream social networks devoted to business.
Originally, LinkedIn allowed users to post a profile (basically a resume) and to interact through private messaging. They also work on the assumption that you should personally know the people you connect with on the site.
Gradually, other features have been added, including groups, question and answer forums, and advanced profile features, including real-time updates.
MySpace
MySpace was founded in 2003 and by 2006 had grown to be the most popular social network in the world.
MySpace differentiated itself from competitors by allowing users to completely customize the look of their profiles. Users could also post music from artists on MySpace and embed videos from other sites on their profiles.
Originally MySpace allowed communication through private messages, public comments posted to a user’s profile, and bulletins sent out to all of your friends. Blogs are also a big part of MySpace profiles, with each member automatically getting a blog.
In 2006 MySpace introduced MySpace IM, an instant messaging client that lets users chat with their friends.
Other recent additions to MySpace’s functionality include the addition of real-time status updates and a news feed showing friend activity.
While Facebook started out as a Harvard-only social network back in 2004, it quickly expanded to other schools, then to high schools, businesses and eventually everyone (by 2006).
In 2008 Facebook became the most popular social networking site, surpassing MySpace, and continues to grow.
Facebook doesn’t allow the same kind of customization that MySpace does. Facebook does, however, allow users to post photos, videos and otherwise customize their profile content, if not the design.
Facebook has added a number of features over the past few years, including instant messaging/chat and apps (and their developer platform).
Users have a few different methods of communicating with one another. Private messaging is available as well as writing on another user’s wall. Wall posts are visible to that user’s friends, but usually not to the general public. Users can easily change their privacy settings to allow different users to see different parts of their profile, based on any existing relationships (the basic privacy settings are “only friends”, “friends of friends”, and “everyone”).
Users can post notes that are visible to all of their friends. Users can also comment on or, more recently, “like” the posts of their friends, and conversations often occur within the comment sections among multiple people.
Other Major Social Networks
Multiply, a “family-friendly” social network and media sharing site was established in 2004 and puts much more emphasis on security and privacy than many other networks. Multiply users have the option to set security levels on each item they post, making things public, network-only, or invite-only.
Orkut, launched in January 2004, is Google’s social network, and while it’s not particularly popular in the U.S., it’s very popular in Brazil and India, with more than 65 million users. Orkut lets users share media, status updates, and communicate through IM.
Kontain, which launched in 2008, works a bit differently than many social networks, putting the focus on usability and allowing users to follow each other through photos, videos, and music, rather than just simple status updates. They also actively recruit businesses to sign up, promotin their service as a way to connect with customers.
Niche Social Networks
As social networking grew, niche sites began cropping up for specific interest groups. There are now social networks for virtually every hobby, passion, interest, industry and group that you could imagine.
Ning
Ning is a platform for creating niche social networks. Networks are hosted by Ning but can take on their own personality and can even pay to have their own branding instead of the Ning brand.
New users can either create social networks for any niche they choose or join any of more than 1.5 million existing networks.
Ning was the first widely-used social networking platform. It’s biggest advantage in the market was that it made it incredibly simple for even non-technical users to set up their own social network.
While most other social networking platforms required coding and programming knowledge, Ning required neither of those.
Company-Sponsored Social Networks
A number of niche social networking sites have been developed by corporations in all sorts of industries.
Authonomy is one example; it’s a writers’ network hosted by the UK division of Harper Collins that has attracted thousands of hopeful writers from all over the globe, but plenty of other companies have created their own networks.
While some of these have active groups, many do not, and end up being shut down due to a lack of activity.
Media Sharing
Social media isn’t just limited to social networking sites. Sharing photos, videos, and other multimedia content is also a popular social media activity.
Photobucket
Photobucket was the first major photo sharing site, launched in 2003.
Photobucket allows users to share photos publically or in password-protected albums. They allow users 500MB of storage (lowered from 1GB in August of 2009).
Pro accounts get 10GB of storage (lowered from 100GB to 25GB in July of ‘08 and then to 10GB in August of ‘09). Photobucket also hosts video content.
In 2007, Photobucket was purchased by Fox Interactive Media (a News Corporation subsidiary). It was rumored to have sold for as much as $250 million, though terms of the sale were never disclosed.
Flickr
Flickr has become a social network in its own right in recent years. They claim to host more than 3.6 billion images as of June 2009.
Flickr also has groups, photo pools, and allows users to create profiles, add friends, and organize images and video into photo sets/albums.
One of Flickr’s major advantages is that they allow users to license their photos through Creative Commons, as well as retaining all copyrights.
Flickr has also recently launched a collection called “The Commons”, which features archived photos and images from a variety of museums and other institutions under a “no known restrictions” license (basically meaning the photos are believed to be in the public domain).
YouTube
YouTube was the first major video hosting and sharing site, launched in 2005.
Users can upload videos up to 10 minutes long and share them through YouTube or by embedding them on other websites (social networks, blogs, forums, etc.).
YouTube now allows users to upload HD videos and recently launched a service to provide TV shows and movies under license from their copyright holders.
YouTube’s major social features include ratings, comments, and the option to subscribe to the channels of a user’s favorite video creators.
Revver
Revver took a slightly different approach to video hosting and sharing.
While YouTube, Metacafe, and most other video sharing sites let you post videos for free and didn’t pay content creators for any advertising revenues their videos generated, Revver has been sharing revenue from the start.
Revver splits the revenue generated by a video 50/50 with that video’s creator. Some other video sharing and hosting sites are moving in the direction of revenue sharing, but Revver still remains the primary one that does it with all content on the site.
Social News and Bookmarking
Sharing photos and videos wasn’t isn’t the only kind of information sharing happening with social media.
The advent of social news and bookmarking sites in the mid-2000’s brought about a whole new way of see what’s going on in the world and discovering interesting content.
News became more widely available thanks to sites like Delicious, Digg, and Reddit, who allowed users to share any news or other content they found interesting with a much wider audience than they might have otherwise had.
Delicious
Delicious (aka, Del.icio.us) is a social bookmarking site founded in 2003. It allows its users to bookmark any content they find online, tag that content, and then share it with other users.
Users can search for bookmarks or browse for them via tags. Delicious also allows users to view the most popular content among other users, as well as up-and-coming content, not unlike most social news sites.
Digg
Digg was founded in 2004 by Kevin Rose, Ron Gorodetzky, Jay Adelson, and Owen Byrne.
Digg users can share links to anything online and other users can vote that content up (”dig”) or down (”bury”). Users can also comment on content posted by others and keep a friends list.
Digg has undergone a lot of controversy in its day, including criticism about the power the top 100 Digg users have over what becomes popular on the site.
The “Digg Effect”—when content makes it to the front page, thereby sending a huge influx of traffic to that site, often overloading its servers—is also well-known and often frustrating to those unprepared for the sudden popularity.
Reddit is another social news site founded in 2005. Reddit operates in a similar fashion to Digg, allowing users to vote content up or down.
Users can view popular items, new items, and “controversial” items (presumably those items that have received a lot of both up and down votes). Reddit, like Digg, also allows users to comment on posted items.
Real Time Updates
Real-time updates have become the new norm in social media. With the advent of Twitter in 2006, status updates have become the new norm in social networking. Virtually all major social networks now allow real-time updates.
Twitter was founded in 2006 and gained a lot of popularity during the 2007 SxSW (South by Southwest) conference.
Tweets trippled during the conference, from 20k per day to 60k. Twitter has developed a cult-like following and has a number of famous users (Ashton Kutcher, Demi Moore, Soleil Moon Frye, MC Hammer, Oprah, Martha Stewart, and many, many more).
Twitter has also spawned a number of third-party sites and apps, turning it into more of a platform than a single service. There are Twitter clients for updating and managing followers; services that track Twitter trends; and services for posting photos and videos directly to Twitter.
Posterous
Posterous is the newest major microblogging application, started by Y Combinator in May 2009.
Users post content via email. Emails can include attached photos, MP3s and other file types that are also posted. No initial signup is needed, setting it apart from most other social media services.
Tumblr
Tumblr is sort of a cross between a lifestreaming application and a microblogging platform. Tumblr was founded in 2007 and had around 75,000 tumblebloggers switch to the service immediately.
The site lets users post photos, video, text, audio, links, conversations, and other content on blog-like sites. There are mobile applications available for posting to Tumblr, making it ideal for lifestreaming.
Tumblr is also very easy to use, making it well-suited to less technical users. It’s similar to Twitter and other microblogging platforms in the way that it lets you follow other Tumblr users and see their updates in a specialized dashboard feed. Users can also “heart” (favorite) other Tumblr users’ content and reblog posts from other users, keeping the original credit intact.
Other Services Adopt Real-Time Updates
As mentioned before, virtually every social networking site now allows for status updates. Facebook has incorporated status updates into their interface for years. MySpace adopted the practice more than a year ago. And most recently, LinkedIn has started to allow users to update their status.
Real-time updates allow users to stay connected to their friends and family on a constant basis and often improve relationships between people.
When you constantly know what’s going on with friends and family, it’s easier to discover shared interests, activities, and other information that might never have come out in real-life conversations. This can lead to stronger relationships offline.
The iPhone’s Role in Real-Time Updates
The iPhone can be largely credited for the rise in popularity of real-time updates. Prior to the iPhone’s launch, mobile browsers were clunky at best, and virtually unusable at worst.
But the iPhone made it easy and even fun to browse the web from a mobile device. Add apps for virtually every social network to the mix and it became possible for users to update anytime, from anywhere.
Other phones have followed suit and there are now mutliple devices available that let users easily update their status on the go (including posting photos and video updates).
The iPhone has taken such a huge role in social media that there are now social networks only available on the iPhone. iRovr is a social networking app specifically for the iPhone/iPod Touch.
It allows users to post photos, updates, links (including to YouTube videos), create polls, subscribe to RSS feeds and more. It was launched in 2007 and is still going strong two years later.
Lifestreaming and Lifecasting
Real-time updates have led to an increase in the number of people who are now lifecasting or lifestreaming virtually everything they do. While some opt to lifestream by aggregating their online activities in a single place (such as with FriendFeed).
Ustream.tv
Ustream was founded in the summer of 2006 and has become the streaming video host of choice for celebrities like Ashton Kutcher and Soleil Moon Frye.
While most Ustream users only go live occasionally, there are channels that are live around the clock (mostly security cameras, animal cameras, traffic cameras, and other stationary feeds).
Ustream allows viewers to post comments and ask questions directly to the feed host during live broadcasts, and this interactivity often engages users to a greater extent than other video sites where videos are posted after they’ve been filmed instead of being streamed live.
Justin.tv
Justin.tv is a streaming video host founded in October 2006 that lets lifecasters and live show creators to broadcast to hundreds or thousands of Internet users.
iJustine is probably Justin.tv’s most public user, lifecasting practically her entire life on the site at one time (she appears to be lifecasting a bit less recently, though she’s still very active on the site).
There are more than 400,000 channels on Justin.tv, and they get more than 41 million unique visitors each month.
FriendFeed
FriendFeed, which launched in 2007 and was recently purchased by Facebook, allows you to integrate most of your online activities in one place (Twitter, RSS feeds, and Flickr, among others).
It’s also a social network in its own right, with the ability to create friends lists, post updates, and otherwise communicate.
Other Lifestreaming Sites
There are a number of other lifestreaming sites out there that people are using. Most can be integrated into your blog or website to show your visitors all of your activities around the web.
There are even some dedicated blog plugins for lifestreaming. WP Lifestream is one such plugin, specifically for WordPress. It lets you integrate your profiles from Facebook, Flickr, Last.fm and Wordie right out of the box, and you can add additional modules for integrating more feeds.
Profilactic.com is another lifestreaming application that lets you integrate feeds from 190 different websites, including Blippr, Delicious, Digg, deviantART, Dopplr, Facebook, Flickr, Last.fm, LiveJournal, MySpace, Pandora, Revver, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Tumblr, and more. Sweetcron is a similar app, though it’s opensource and you host it on your own servers.
Social Everything
It seems that nowadays there are social and user-generated sites for just about every activity you can imagine. There are social shopping sites. Social financial planning sites. Sites for getting book, movie, app, and other reviews. Sites to share your goals and meet like-minded people. Sites to plan your travels and share them with others. And sites to help you make decisions on just about anything.
Social media has become a huge part of the lives of millions of people worldwide. Whether it’s something as simple as looking up reviews of movies from real, live people (instead of professional movie reviewers) or getting advice on major life decisions, there are social sites out there to provide you with the information you seek.
Even on general-purpose social networks and social media sites like Twitter there are thousands of ways to get input on just about anything.
Instead of using Google the next time you have a question about something, try asking on Twitter. A lot of the time you get better information from the crowd there in less time than pouring over pages of search results.
Social Media Concerns and Criticism
As social media has grown in popularity and become mainstream, it has been faced with growing controversy and criticism.
The main criticisms seem to fall along a few lines: Social media can be used by stalkers; Social media can be used by child predators; and, Social media sites open up privacy and security concerns.
While there is only so much social media sites can do about the first two, there is a growing trend among many sites to bolster the privacy policies and make users feel more secure.
Social Media Used by Stalkers
Facebook and other social media sites have come under attack for making it easier for stalkers to track their victims or even to find new ones. This kind of accusation is not entirely unfounded.
Many social media users don’t take advantage of privacy settings and leave their entire profiles public. While this is often a good idea for professional profiles where you want to make connections with people you don’t necessarily know, personal profiles can benefit from hiding some information from public display.
Social networks make these privacy settings available to users to help prevent stalkers and predators from being able to see their updates.
But they can’t force users to use them, so in the end much of the responsibility falls to the individual users, not the networks themselves.
Social Media Used by Child Predators
MySpace is the most publically attacked social networks accused of being a haven for child molesters and pornographers, but the site, and other social networks, have made great strides in protecting the identities and information of minors using their sites.
Again, this is one of those situations where much of the problem came from users not making their profiles private.
MySpace took a major step to prevent predators from friending underage teens by requiring friend requesters to know the email address or another personal identifier in order to send a friend request to a minor.
They also require the profiles of teens under the age of 16 to be private, not allowing non-friend users to view them. Other sites have taken similar steps.
Privacy Concerns
Facebook recently came under attack for changes to its privacy policy that were worded ambiguously enough to effectively grant rights to Facebook to use any of your content, private or public, for their own purposes (such as advertising) even after you’d delected your profile.
While the company maintains that was never their intent and it was simply unfortunate wording, the backlash was severe enough that Facebook changed their privacy policy back to its previous version and then solicited user input for revisions. It was a harsh lesson in how concerned many users are about the information they provide online.
When you consider that many people post information about all aspects of their lives online, mostly on social media sites, it’s no wonder many are concerned about what companies can do with that information.
Social networks and other sites have to rapidly respond to user concerns over privacy and security. With the information in an average social media profile, it would not be inconceivable for a hacker to illegally gain enough information about a person to steal their identity or otherwise cause problems.
Security concerns have also cropped up as average people have found their profiles hacked and embarrassing information posted about them.
While this type of thing was once relatively confined to celebrities and well-known people (or people who had a personal vendetta against them), it has become more widespread and it’s not unheard of for regular people to be targeted (such as this woman on Facebook recently).
The Role of Social Media in Pop Culture
Social media has, in the past year or two, become a mainstream online activity. In 2007, social media activities overtook pornography as the most popular online activity in the U.S. (the two industries continue to battle it out, alternately gaining or losing ground on a monthly basis).
Celebrities now use Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks on a regular basis. And it’s not just their publicists—stars are updating their status themselves and interacting with fans on a daily basis.
It’s not uncommon to see Twitter-inspired t-shirts, and there has been at least one “fail-whale” tattoo (I’m sure there are more out there).
When Twitter and Facebook both suffered a DDOS attack in early August ‘09, there was a real sense of loss among many users until the sites were back up.
Social media has become an integral part of how people communicate, stay in touch, keep on top of new developments, and otherwise connect with the world around them.
The Evolution of Social Media
Social media has come a long way since the days of BBSs and IRC chats. And social media continues to evolve on a daily basis.
With major social networks and social media sites making changes and improvements on an almost daily basis, it’s sure to keep evolving in coming years.
The one thing we can be pretty sure of at this point is that social media is not just a phase, and likely won’t go away any time soon…at least until something better comes along.via webdesignerdepot.com
Is Your Agency Making Social Media Easy?(Jason Falls)
Posted on October 11th, 2009 by -
Categories: Social Media
One of the biggest challenges brand-side marketers face in dealing with social media is incorporating the necessary time to monitor and respond to conversation online. Marketers are busy people. Most only spend about 10-20 percent of their time dealing with advertising or their agency partners. One of the biggest challenges for advertising and public relations agencies in relation to social media is getting brand-side trust to enable the agency to read and react to the social web without layers of approvals.
There’s at least one agency out there that seems to have developed a solution that helps mitigate both problems with an interesting tool and approach.
A Zeitgeits & Coffee Dashboard view featuring Facebook and Twitter posts for internal and client review. (Click for larger image.)
Media Logic, an “integrated communications firm,” (read: Ad agency) with offices in Albany, N.Y., and Oakland, Calif., has recently repositioned themselves as a “conversation-centric” marketing company with social media as the central focus of their offering. But it’s not that they’re using Facebook apps and “viral” videos to drive new business. They’ve actually put some smarts behind a technology platform and marketing approach that focuses on listening and engaging people on the social web.
The gist of their pitch is this:
* The primary driver of their offering is a technology platform called Zeitgeist and Coffee. It’s essentially a social media monitoring dashboard that the agency manages for the client. Each client is assigned a “conversation manager” who reviews the inbound stream, prioritizes mentions and conversations for addressing or follow up, and perhaps even offers suggested responses. The client can log in to the platform to review the latest posts, approve or amend suggested responses or even respond directly to the conversations.
* They claim their approach, a “suite of products,” defines opportunities and initiatives for the client; identifies goals and objectives; their technology then sweeps the landscape to gauge the conversations; establishes a platform, content, voice and volume for a marketing effort; defines roles and responsibilities for the effort and ultimately allows their clients to join the conversation.
* Media Logic’s angle is this is a social media-driven solution for marketers. They recognize companies and brands have internal struggles as to who controls social media. This puts the marketing team in the driver’s seat for consumer engagementThe key takeaway from learning about Media Logic for me was to show you how one agency is building an offering around social media by taking a brand manager’s stress relative to social media away. They’ve built an easy to use tool to monitor, prioritize and curate conversations so the brand can feel as if they have a grasp on what’s out there.
At first glance, Zeitgeist & Coffee appears to be an agency doing a good job of monitoring and holding their client’s hand with listening and cursory engaging in social media. But that’s one small part of doing social media well. Media Logic does offer a suite of “products” that at least seems to account for the other parts of social media — producing ideas that proactively engage consumers — but they certainly deserve some credit for attacking the sore spot for most brands with the Zeitgeist & Coffee product.
In case you were wondering, Media Logic doesn’t offer the Zeitgeist & Coffee product as a stand alone service. You pretty much have to bring them on board as your AOR for social media work to get access to it. They preach their process is more important than one or more of their products. Despite their generous use of the word “proprietary” (pet peeve of mine for some reason) Zeitgeist & Coffee while inventive and cool, especially coming from an agency, can be closely replicated with a paid monitoring solution and some smart thinking.
Still, don’t miss the important point of Media Logic’s approach: Your agency’s clients will be more comfortable with social media, and more willing to spend money with you for it, if you hold their hand a bit and make it easy for them to understand and engage. Kudos to Media Logic for showing some of us the way.
Media Logic isn’t the first to do it. They may not even be the best out there. What is your agency doing to embrace and help teach your clients to embrace social media. Please share your ideas in the comment section so we can all learn a new trick or two.
The Reasons Why People Subscribe To Content(Adam Singer)
Posted on October 11th, 2009 by -
Categories: Social Media
At Online Marketing blog, I explained why subscribers are a vital element of your site’s growth strategy. The reasons listed in that post include:
* The ~11% of web users who know to use RSS include the users savvy enough to be web publishers
* You’ll become a go-to area to link to
* Subscribers are your “sneezers”
* A base of well-connected fans could very well be the cornerstone of your social marketing strategy
* Community is what makes sites worth visiting
* Subscribers will motivate you to create better content
* A consolidated network presence is the most effective
* Subscribers and a fan base make you less reliant on push PR
It’s a topic I’m interested in not only because I’m a subscriber (aka a community member) to more than 500 blogs and an internet marketer who helps companies/clients build a following, but I’ve personally attracted a vibrant community of savvy marketers, web professionals and artists to this blog without using any sort of push mechanism.
If you’re one of the first 100 or so subscribers here, you were a catalyst for the rest whether you were conscious of it or not. And a percentage of those of you who are subscribed to this blog right now are actually responsible for any post gaining visibility outside of The Future Buzz community: you’re the ones who share this content with others (thanks, by the way).
The same is true for anyone’s web presence. It is inescapable that a community is necessary for you to grow month over month in a sustainable fashion. Web properties built to attract and hold a community thrive, because search engines and social media are both designed to send traffic to democratically chosen locations. And a true opt-in community will have an affinity for seeing your content spread, and in effect choose you.
Readers here are already aware of the reasons why organizations (and individuals) with audiences win. So by now, you’re wondering why exactly do people subscribe to content? Today, I’m going to share my subjective insights:
Not about quantity, but quality
Maki who keeps the popular blog Dosh Dosh hasn’t published a new post since May 18, 2009. Yet since that time he’s acquired around 10,000 new subscribers. This proves if your content is that good people will subscribe to hear what’s next regardless of frequency. Yes, frequency can help you grow rapidly, especially at the start – however frequency by itself is not a reason people subscribe to content.
A strong digital reputation
If you have a strong digital reputation, you’re naturally going to get endorsements from other influential people within your niche. And continued endorsements from the right people are going to result in others wanting to opt into your content and not miss a thing.
Enough people read it that your brand becomes a draw in and of itself
Sites like TechCrunch just get more popular because the rest of the world reads them. By not reading them you’re missing out on what the rest of the industry is reading, in effect falling behind. You may not be able to leverage the numbers TechCrunch has for your own content, but you don’t need to. If you can just show that enough people within your niche are reading/endorsing your content (the idea of social proofing) it will be clear to others that there is more to lose by missing your content than by subscribing to it.
Voice and personality that differentiates your content
If you sound like everyone else, why does anyone need you in their RSS reader or email inbox? They don’t, you’re easily skip-able. Don’t hold back and overly refine your content, find your voice and let it shine through. Be yourself and don’t let your content become the product of design by committee – that in fact will strip away all the character and personality behind your ideas and readers will mentally file you as another “me-too”. It’s difficult because so many have been trained to be perfect for so long, but we secretly don’t desire perfection. In fact, it is the imperfections in our writing and the quirks in our personalities that make content interesting. Embrace imperfection.
Your ideas resonate with others like yourself
If the ideas you are writing click with readers, those readers are going to have affinity for your thoughts and want to hear more. We connect with like-minded people, and web content in any form is merely an extension of ourselves. If your material isn’t resonating with the niche, then you’ll never acquire subscribers and you won’t earn permission to share content with an audience interested in seeing you grow.
A personal friend recommended you
This is a powerful but overlooked reason why people opt-in to content. Yes, it’s nice to make page one of Digg or get thousands or ReTweets (these things can help you gain subscribers too, of course). But sometimes the right few people who go out of their way to personally recommend you to others will ultimately build the most powerful community. And when you stop and consider the real value of your network, you’ll realize it’s not about how many, but who.
You’re just plain interesting
This goes along with the points listed above, except that it’s more basic: that you’re interesting and doing something remarkable. Besides being different and having ideas that resonate, if you’re undeniably interesting people are going to want to come back for more. This is so simple, yet so often missed. Learn the art of entertaining while educating, make a notoriously dry subject compelling, keep your ideas fresh, or in some way stand out and you’ll find success.
Conclusion
Opt-in rewards and promotions to entice people to subscribe might work a little but they all only help arithmetically and are not true ways to forge an organic opt-in list of those with affinity for your content. And I’d rather have an engaged community that made the choice to join without any incentive than one who subscribed just to get a reward.
image credit: Norebbo via Shutterstock
Why And Where We Share: Distributing Quality With Impact, Intent (Via Luis Gray )
Posted on October 9th, 2009 by -
Categories: RSS - Social Media
Regardless of whether you first came in contact with my content here, or through other streams, you know that the vast majority of my online life has to do with the creation, filtering and distribution of information. In addition to authoring new stories here on the blog, I try to be an active and avid consumer of RSS feeds, and updates from social networks including FriendFeed, Ecademy, Socialmedian, Twitter and Facebook. In turn, I make a very serious attempt to redistribute the best content of all that I see back out to these same networks. Even if the volume of data I am taking in and pushing back out is high, it is certainly not random. Every time I hit a “share” button, or I hit “post”, it is calculated. I thought it might be a good idea to discuss this a bit more.
First, some statistics.
In the last 30 days, according to Google Reader, from the 703 subscriptions I follow, I read 20,090 items and shared 766 items. This means that on an average day, I am taking in 700 to 900 items (less on weekends) and sharing about 25 to 30 items.
This data, for the last 30 days, shows 3.8% of all items get shared, or just under 1 in every 25 posts. And while it may seem that 703 subscriptions is a lot, it is, in my opinion, a very healthy segment of the tech Web. If subscriptions that I follow go too long without relevant data worth sharing, I do remove them from my feeds, while also always being on the lookout for new sources. So you can consider my shares to be the top 4 percent of what I think is the top 20 percent of tech news, making the result greater still.
Second, the flow.
When I hit “share” in Google Reader, a few things happen.
1. The item is added to my shared link blog.
2. The item is available for comments within Google Reader for approved contacts.
3. The items are shared on my FriendFeed, Facebook and Socialmedian.
4. The items are sent to the @lgshareditems account on Twitter.
One button hits as many as five networks – so yes, there is impact. I am cognizant that if I share too many items overall, or share too many off-topic items, it will harm the quality of my downstream feeds, and people will either stop engaging or unsubscribe.
But there’s more to sharing than Google Reader, as you know. Sharing can also be done through comments and likes on FriendFeed, which bump a story back to the top of the feed, and expose it to other people. The greater your following, the greater the potential for downstream impact, meaning if you have an active account, then it’s possible to look back on your activity and see others taking action on those items – much like the wake of a speedboat on a lake, as your zipping along leaves ripples behind. The retweeting phenomenon on Twitter has been well documented. Also, I share the bookmarks I make on Delicious to the same social networks – FriendFeed, Facebook and Twitter. One save hits four places. I wouldn’t take so much effort to get the flow right if I didn’t know that it had impact. One of the pleasing byproducts of being consistent and focused is that content creators say they get a traffic or visibility boost from my shares. My goal is to reward good writing, reporting and quality, and to also reward those who have opted into the streams, that they receive quality content.
Holden Page Saw His RSS Numbers SpikeSo how do I decide?
1) I Share Items On Topics Relevant to the Downstream Audience
The first filter on whether a story gets shared is if it is on a topic I assume my readers would find interesting. Even if I may be interested in baseball, humor, politics or food entries, they don’t get shared into the downstream feeds because the readers are looking for news on technology. Most specifically, coverage of new startups, Silicon Valley companies, social media and networking tools, RSS, business and statistics data.
2) I Share Originating Sources Where Possible, Not the Echo
If a company like Apple, Google, Digg, Facebook, or Twitter makes a new entry, it is no doubt going to be respun by dozens of downstream tech writers. If I see this happening, I will find the original unfiltered post and share that to bring their message directly.
3) I Share Items That Are the First to Report News Or Have A Unique Angle
In the tech blogosphere, it is not too uncommon for many different sites to talk about the same story – especially if it is about one of the most-popular companies. In the event of massive duplication, I try to share the first of the respected sites that gets the story right and done well. Because of this “echo chamber”, I am extra focused on finding new stories from people who are going against the grain – covering new companies that don’t usually get a lot of ink, or are thinking about the day’s news in a different way. I also am happy to reward sites that get unique Q&As or interviews with tech leaders, or are the first to pull down data from the SEC around funding or M&A activity – passing on true journalism rather than opinion.
4) I Share Items That Targeted Quality Over Speed
It is easy to tell when a blog post was quickly slapped together to be first out the door, or just to hit a post quota (a common issue at multi-author sites that are ad-driven). As soon as I can ascertain that a post is on topic, has an interesting angle and has been thoroughly researched, it is a pleasure to send it downstream. This is even more true when a more obscure blog acts in a mature way and deserves to be highlighted.
5) I Avoid Sharing Items That Are Built for Controversy
As I have tried to do here, I aim to keep my downstream feeds argument and rhetoric free, wherever possible. If headlines and photos and angles on stories are overwrought for the sake of driving debate, controversy or nonsense, they are skipped. I do not want to reward bad behavior.
In Conclusion:
I talk a lot about sharing and data flow on this blog, because I recognize the new world of blogging goes beyond these pages. Today’s best bloggers are participating in the downstream networks, both as content creators and as information filters. It takes effort to be in the first wave of filtering, to try and separate the wheat from the chaff, and drive quality to other networks, but it is very rewarding to know it provides value. Over time, I look forward to finding even better ways to filter, organize and display third party content that has passed through me first.
Google Wave Is The Future of Real Time Collaboration(Michael Fruchter)
Posted on October 8th, 2009 by -
Categories: Social Media
It’s been a very exciting week for me, as it has been with the select few of you who were lucky enough to snag one of the 100,000 invites for Google Wave. Being an early adopter, I have been ecstatic trying to get my hands on the next new shiny object. The hype that has gone on for months billed it as the next generation collaboration platform, an email replacement, a Facebook and Twitter killer, and the list goes on.
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So what exactly is Google Wave?
You could classify it as a real-time collaboration tool that enables communication between a group of people. The environment enables a multitude of media that can interact within a wave or be embedded, such as text, photos, videos, maps, gadgets, bots and more. It’s also a platform with a rich set of open APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services and to build extensions that work inside waves. Just as with Twitter, it’s the developer community that will make or break Google Wave. It’s very early in the game, but product innovation potential is there.
What a typical wave looks like:
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A wave is conversation with multiple participants. You can add as many people as you like to the wave to participate and collaborate. Rich content can be added to the wave by anyone is who part of the wave. The content can consist of gadgets, games, maps, video, photos, files and more. Similar to a message board, participants in the wave can reply any time and anywhere within a wave to anyone. Replies are threaded and can be edited anytime. You can also keep replies private and select the participants that should see it. The real in real-time in here is watching the other participants in the wave type every key stroke, and of course every spelling error right in front of your eyes. Think before you say it applies here, because there is no comfort zone as there is with typing an email. In an odd way, watching the other person type in real time changes the experience too. To some extent this has existed already in some instant messaging platforms, but if I recall correctly, it would only say ” the other user is typing”, and not broadcast the other users text in real time.
A wave with a simple gadget embedded in it. Diving a bit deeper into the wave you will notice on the navigation bar it has some of the characteristics of an email. Reply, archive, read, unread, spam and playback. Play back lets you play back each part of a wave so you can see exactly how everything unfolded, in chronological order. Above the navigation bar you see all of the participants in the wave. You can easliy add a person to the wave as long as they have a Google Wave account, it also populates contact list based off your Gmail contacts. Currently there is no way to delete a person from a wave.
I added the Tweety bot to this wave, allowing me to easily broadcast a Tweet.
Waves, extensions and bots, oh my!
Extensions are the plugins that will allow you use gadgets in wave. Gadgets are shared applications that run within a wave and to which all participants have access, such as real-time games and voting tools. In the above screen shot you can see the Yes/No/Maybe Gadget in action. Out of the box others gadgets that can be installed are a, map gadget, Sudoku, Conference, and itinerary gadget.
Then there are are Robots. This reminds me of IRC on steroids. Depending on the bot, they can do numerous things in a wave. They can automate tasks, but they can also function as a participant in a wave, interacting in the conversation based on their capabilities.
To use a bot add its email address to your contacts list. Create a new wave, then add the bot to the wave.
Some of the bots I have come across are:
Polly the Pollster (polly-wave@appspot.com): Creates and distributes multiple choice poll questions.
Yelpful (yelpful@appspot.com): Adds an in-wave interface to Yelp.com
RSSyBot (rssybot@appspot.com): Adds an RSS feed to Wave.
TwitUsernames (twitusernames@appspot.com): Links @usernames to Twitter.com.
Blog bot (blog-bot@appspot.com): Publishes waves to blog posts.
Emoticony (emoticonbot@appspot.com): Turns smiley faces into images.
Eliza the Robot Shrink (elizarobot@appspot.com): Talks to you when no one else will.
A more comprehensive listing can be found here.
Final verdict:
Google Wave is intended to be a powerful collaboration tool. As a tool for collaboration, I think it has great promise and once the rough edges are worked out, it’s something I would see myself using in a controlled environment perhaps with coworkers. I think it will evolve into an enterprise tool at some point, and for it to become a true collaboration platform it needs full integration with Google Docs. This in no way represents a new social networking tool, and I think using it as such would be rather cumbersome. The beauty of it is, the user can control the experience and dictate its purpose. When the bugs are worked out, and the developer community fully embraces the Wave protocol, and integration with Google Docs is seamless, this will undoubtedly be a game changer.
This post was intended to give a brief overview of Google wave. I barley scratched the surface with the capabilities and technical aspects of what Google Wave can do. In the future once I have had more time to use it, I will do a thorough deeper examination of the inner workings of Google Wave.
A big thank you goes to Eric Logan and Ted Pedersen for inviting me into Google Wave. Before you ask, my invites are all gone, sorry.
Other points of view on Google wave:
Google Wave Hits Shore. Flash Flood Warning In Effect. via @louisgray
Google Wave’s unproductive email metaphors. via @scobleizer
The Point You’re Missing About Google Wave. via@bluecockatoo
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