Last year I was on about 10 social networks, this year the number has gone up to 17 (which is  really19 as I excluded Google Reader and WordPress.com for visual purposes). But it seems to me that interconnectivity has still not matured enough, there is no “home” for your social networks, and I doubt this will change in the short term.

Click on the image to see a full-sized version.

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1. Social Media Revolution… A fad or to stay?
2. The increasing level of connectivity between Social Sites
3. Social Media and Marketing… Where are we?

Why Google Buzz is brilliant and deadly to social media 1.0

From the moment it launched, Google Buzz generated buzz:

• OMG another social network to manage
• OMG there’s too much noise
• OMG this is so redundant

And for the early adopters, it’s exactly that and more. It’s noise. It’s clutter.

It’s brilliant.

Here’s why. Google wants the best of the best data. Remember this. They are a data company. They are a data quality company. They are algorithmic in their approaches to solving problems.

For a lot of the social media crowd, the moment Buzz turned on, our valued inboxes became insanely cluttered as we linked up all our social media sites, networks, and properties. We discovered that frankly, we didn’t want the firehose of social media in our inboxes.

We realized quickly, if we didn’t already know, that most of our “friends” are in fact valueless robots spewing garbage at us all day. On services like Twitter and Facebook, we don’t really notice because it’s bite size garbage that passed by quickly. When it piles up in the inbox, we notice. Fast.

So for the early adopters, those who keep Buzz on, we’re pruning back hard. We’re not following back. We’re dropping auto-follows. We’re down to just a handful of people, close friends, that we REALLY want in our inboxes. How many of the self-proclaimed social media gurus are you actually allowing inside your inbox, in Buzz? Exactly.

Continue reading @ Why Google Buzz is brilliant and deadly to social media 1.0 : Christopher S. Penn’s Awaken Your Superhero.

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1. Removing The Noise | Six Pixels of Separation
2. Facebook in challenge to Google – BBC News
3. Social Media and Marketing… Where are we?

Did you know that you can have your 140-character tweets from Twitter also cross-posted into your Facebook status, LinkedIn status and now even into your Google Buzz without doing much of anything besides letting each platform know that you would like this happen? And while that may sound convenient for you to ensure that anybody and everybody who is following you can get your information, it should come as no surprise that we’re quickly all barrelling towards an information and attention crash.

Continue reading… Removing The Noise | Six Pixels of Separation – Marketing and Communications Blog – By Mitch Joel at Twist Image.

Related posts:

1. Why Google Buzz is brilliant | Christopher S.
2. Final addition to my Interaction Kit
3. The increasing level of connectivity between Social Sites

Douglas Rushkoff answers these questions in a powerfully simple way:

Once upon a time, before the middle ages, we had an abundance-based currency. Everyone lived happily, you were issued vouchers based on how much grain you harvested, and those vouchers could in turn be used to pay for things. It was based on abundance… In contrast to our scarcity-based currency model of today.

The monetary system we use today was created so that rich people could stay rich by being rich rather than doing anything.

We live in an economy where the sustainance of the economy itself depends on growth at the rate of interest.

Where do you get the extra money? You’ll have to borrow that too.

Corporations? They were created to support this economic system as well.

This was the value of our currency right through the industrial age. This is the system still in use today. It is an outdated system, one that must be ruled out.

Why and how did this happen?

The following video by Rushkoff explains this in 15 minutes, why the system is broken and how must we change things to create a better economic system.

Via poortaste

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1. An Ideal Economy

Pending matters (personal or work) tend to stick to your brain through the day, even though you are not focusing on them. They are like a cancer that cuts off productivity, just like a person who is going through divorce or difficult times will have trouble coping with work and friends, this holds with any kind of personal activities that have been left pending.

• If you take email seriously, divide it into “personal” and “work” folders. Attend to personal mail before leaving to work each morning, or at night before going to bed.
• Write down task lists (Use Google Calendar, Outlook, Google Tasks or even pen and paper) and divide them into days. You can’t do everything in a day, so be realistic. Try to do everything that is personal at home, and everything that is work related at the office.
• When you don’t accomplish a pending task, don’t leave it “hanging”. Set it for a later time (after work maybe?) and remove it from the “overdue” list. If it was something urgent you couldn’t accomplish and it involves someone else, let that person know (email? phone?) immediately that it will take you another day to finish it.
• While at work, be sure to have your pending activities listed appropiately and go through them in order, remember you can’t do everything at once and it will only stress you out thinking about how much you have to do, specially when you have a deadline.
• If you read personal email at work, try to archive (or store) personal emails that arrive, and mark in your calendar that you must attend to those emails when you get home. If it is something urgent, reply at once that you will attend to the issue at a later time.

By following these steps, hopefully you will be able to clear your mind at work and start to focus on what you have to do, not what you had to do and didn’t do, nor what you have pending and might have to do later. Everything at its time.

Now get to work!

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1. Another effective solution to handle the email backlog
2. Cooooontinue…
3. ididwork

Steve Writes “A challenge for most senior marketing professionals who cut their teeth any time before, say, last year has been to fully grasp the impact of social media on how they perform their job. The new many-to-many communications model forces everyone to re-imagine their tools, role, and strategies.”

On September 23rd The Silicon Valley Brand Forum held an event on the impact of social media on branding. The morning opened with this viral video that uses powerful statistics and visuals to hammer home that this is not your dad’s Internet.

So is Social Media here to stay? Or is it just a fad? What is your take on this?

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1. Social Media and Marketing… Where are we?
2. My Social Network Map
3. The increasing level of connectivity between Social Sites

Social Interaction: Lego People

Advances in Social Media are changing the way we market our products, services, or ourselves. It’s not all about *the logo* any more, it’s not about what your company represents, it’s about what your customers represent to you, it’s about how will your customers benefit from your service, and how can you learn from their experiences to build up on your products, and deliver better service.

One platform isn’t the future. One platform isn’t even better than another. A platform is a tool, and us marketers must know how to use these tools to reach our customers, without aimlessly devoting everything towards one specific platform. Today it might be Twitter and Facebook, tomorrow Google Wave, and the next day who knows, but we must always keep in mind that it’s the person that makes the platform useful, not the platform that makes the person useful.

Chris Brogan is an expert. I don’t usually call someone an expert unless I really mean it. He recently gave a speech at New Media Atlanta (which I obviously did not attend to), and he just posted the video capture for the whole speech on his blog. If you have a spare hour I recommend you give it a good listen.

So what are your thoughts about Social Media? Where do we go from here?

Related posts:

1. Social Media Revolution… A fad or to stay?
2. The increasing level of connectivity between Social Sites
3. Why Google Buzz is brilliant | Christopher S.

Return on Investment is the ratio of money gained or lost on an investment relative to the amount of money invested. It is usually presented as a percentage.

Example:

Johnny likes drinking water, but his faucet only delivers grayish-looking water, so he buys bottled water. Each 1.5 litre bottle costs him 1.00 GBP. He buys 4 bottles per week. Every month he approximately buys 16 bottles which means he spends 16 GBP per month or 192 GBP per year on bottled water.

The ROI yield is often expressed as Yield = (Return – Initial Investment) / Initial Investment.

In this case we have Yield = (0 – 192) / 192 which gives us a loss of 100% for a 1 year period.

Let’s suppose that the PUR FM-9400 water filtering system costs 21.50 GBP. As each water bottle costs 1 GBP, we can derive that for the cost of 21.5 bottles of water we could buy a filtration system. (21.5 litres / 16 litres per month) = 1.3438 months to obtain our return on investment.

Conclusion:

(1 GBP * 16 Bottles per Month) * 1.3438 Months = 21.5 GBP

Yield = (Final – Initial) / Initial
Yield = (21.5 – 21.5) / 21.5
Yield = 0%

So we have reached a conclusion. To obtain a return of investment equal to the initial amount invested we must invest 21.5 GBP, and after approximately 42 days we will have saved the exact amount we invested in the equipment, furthermore leading to profit obtained by not spending on any more purified water bottles.

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1. Coca-Cola’s bottled water is contaminated?

They are being phased out to encourage the switch to more energy-efficient fluorescent or halogen lamps, which use up to 80% less electricity.

Critics say the new bulbs are gloomy, and can trigger headaches and rashes in people with light sensitive disorders.

The ban is one of a series of measures in the EU to tackle climate change.

via BBC NEWS | World | Europe | EU bans old-fashioned light bulbs.

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3. Facebook in challenge to Google – BBC News

“Google look out, Facebook knows the real money is in real-time search,” said respected blogger Robert Scoble.

“Google is the king of regular search. FriendFeed is the king of real-time search. This makes the coming battle over this issue much more interesting,” Mr Scoble told the BBC.

“FriendFeed is well known for having some powerful and intelligent technology that allows users to aggregate everything they do online and do it all in real time.

What does FriendFeed do?

• Friendfeed lets users bring together many of the accounts they have on social media and networking sites such as Facebook and Flickr
• Updates posted on those sites by a user and their friends are echoed on FriendFeed.
• A built in chat system lets FriendFeed users instantly comment or start a conversation about an update.
• These feeds of what friends are up to can be embedded in webpages or fed out to services such as Twitter.
• FriendFeed works with almost 60 sites including Delicious, Reddit, LinkedIn and NetVibes.

“With this acquisition, Facebook is gunning directly not only at Twitter, but at Google. This is a warning shot to those two companies,” Mr Parr told BBC News.

via BBC NEWS | Technology | Facebook in challenge to Google.

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1. Twitter site reopens after attack – BBC News
2. The increasing level of connectivity between Social Sites
3. Why Google Buzz is brilliant | Christopher S.