Too many people are looking for too many ways to follow too many people and places. Your best bet is to do the opposite…
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.
Where are we today regarding Social Media and Marketing?
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?
A few years ago I dreamt of being able to have all this connectivity, lets say, things being published here, automatically-published there, and elsewhere. I knew we were getting there, as I have been configuring my services for the past few months, but I didn’t know we are so advanced.
If I made a rundown or a graph explaining the connectivity between social media sites I currently have, it would grow too large, or the connections would not exactly be easy to draw. * Update: Well I’ve decided to draw it anyway:
For instance: My Youtube is posting to facebook, google reader, twitter and two of my blogs. One of those blogs is lemiffe.com which when receiving a post will alert ping.fm which will then release a post of my new blog post to facebook, twitter, my blog at blogger, myspace, google talk’s status, and quite a few other sites.
Now, the only problem I currently see is the level of redundancy. Sites talked to other sites, which in turn talk to other sites, so whenever these sites provide much more connectivity to other services we might end up in a cyclic-post system in which one service posts to the other which in turn posts back to the first one initiating a never-ending cycle in which the user would have to stop one or the other service manually.
I really believe more insight should be applied, like, verifying the other sites connectivity and checking it will not repost to a site the first site has already posted to. This can be done via pure XML transactions between both sites, I mean, thats what web services are for, right?
Another thought I came up with is a Centralised User Account Service, which deals with the connectivity between users of different sites. Lets say: Gravatar meets facebook and ping.fm. All the services first verify the users information on the Centralised service, then they verify which permissions the user has applied concerning posting, which pages must the service send the new update, video or blog message to, and negotiate it only with the Centralised site, which will in turn send off the appropriate XML for all other “connected” sites.
It’s just a thought, Security-wise I am not sure where this would lead to as very tight security would have to be placed. Gaining access to the account of a user at the Centralised Site would be, well, Armageddon for that user. So probably a tighter security would have to be placed, with 128 big encription, SSL sockets, MD-6, who knows what else, but it’s just a thought anyway.
Social Interaction is just plain beautiful when it is easy to interact, socially.
A few weeks ago I started using ping.fm, a service to update most of your social network status’. I added it as a gadget to my igoogle homepage. It is straight easy to update my status on facebook, twitter, a few of my blogs, google talk, etc.
I had a problem nonetheless. Whenever I made a new blog post on lemiffe.com, the update only got sent to twitter. I am trying out an app I just found, “CR Post to Ping.fm“, hoping that if it works out as expected, it will be the final addition to my social interaction kit. It’s just great, you update all your status’ from one same place. You blog updates that place, therefore updating everything else.
I’m in love with gadgets, widgets and apps.