Social Media - made simple.

Picture by http://www.flickr.com/photos/aslanmedia_official/

There are so many social media and networking sites, and for many people it can be confusing to know what they are all for - and how people are using them. This posting is an attempt to simplify that for everyone. Hopefully helps, in a slightly amusing way, helps you to understand how and what people are using them for.


I cannot claim entirely that this approach of explaining what social media sites is all my own inspiration, as had seen something like this floating about online and from what I remember (and adding some of my own spin), here is a simple way to illustrate what each of the social media sites floating about are used for.....

• Twitter: I am drinking a cup of #coffee
• Facebook: I like drinking coffee
• Foursquare: This is where I am drinking coffee right now
• YouTube: Here is a video of me drinking coffee
• LinkedIn: My skills include drinking coffee
• Flickr: My photos of people drinking coffee
• Last FM: I am listening to "One more cup of coffee" by Bob Dylan
• Pinterest: Here are the brands of coffee I like
• Slideshare: Here is a presentation about drinking coffee
• Badoo: Looking to meet a partner of the opposite sex who likes drinking coffee
• Gaydar: Looking to meet a gay man who likes drinking coffee
• MeetUp: Join our meeting of coffee drinkers on Thursday
• WAYN: Places around the world I have drunk coffee

Hope this helps!


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Socialised brands can be contagious, social media is just stuff.

Social media strategy.

There’s something inherently wrong about that, no? Why create a bespoke strategy for this? Or worse, mistake “being on Twitter” as a strategy. Social media is becoming a bit like a collection of stuff; half a pound of Facebook here, a dash of blogging there and a slice of Twitter on top as a garnish. Oh and a bit of that FourSquare malarkey to make me look cool. To the extent where the phrase “social media” is becoming a bit of a hindrance rather than a help because people use it to default to executional elements such as having a Twitface.

Where social media is really interesting is it being an enabler to our business and brand strategy. Yes, I am going to use that word integrated because the social media world doesn’t just exist in marketing, it transcends the entire business. Which is why social media should probably be killed as a term. It suggests a marketing only existence. And the endless isolation of social media from other comms and its positioning by social media people as the saviour of everything is why it’s viewed by many senior marketers as a bit of fairy dust and not something that can fundamentally make a tangible difference to their strategy and their business objectives. You don’t just do a TV ad without understanding the business and brand challenges so why are we so eager to suggest getting on MyFace is right for your brand without understanding these challenges?

Change the focus to how social can enable your brand by using the space in the right way, being cohesive with all your other activities and allowing deeper engagement, amplification and reciprocation of your strategy.

Socialised brands can be contagious. Social media is just stuff.

Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn |nicholas.r.gill@gmail.com

SecondLife: a new networking protocol

Of all the speculations that can be made about secondlife, there is one of which I am certain: secondlife as we know it now is destined for a necessary and radical change, which will make this type of application take off.

I am speaking about the way in which the project is owned and run today as the private property of Linden Lab. Here is a link to the company overview page: http://lindenlab.com/press/overview.

I am not able to imagine that a similar project can evolve very much, since it remains in the hands of a single company; the problem is in managing a thing of such enormous complexity.

At least the history of humanity shows us that above a certain threshold of economic, political and social complexity, a community must formally separate political power and the other powers, as is happening in China or Vietnam.

This is not an ideological argument but a technical evaluation of possible management models.

Today secondlife is an environment with very few rules, all decided arbitrarily by the board of directors and the executive management of Linden Lab, in the interests of the firm shareholders, who in my opinion understand the problem very well, given that so far, they have shown great foresight.

If Linden Lab know how to run this process, it will remain the main protagonist for a long time, otherwise it will be crushed by the development of another secondlife environment having resolved this phase; a solution, perhaps the only one, could be to open the standard to anyone who supports the technical interface - meaning anyone will be able to run the servers and decide the rules connecting to a network of servers.

Everyone together will form the secondlife universe and each of us will be able to have our own server, just as every one of us has an intimate and indivisible individual sphere.

Another phase that we will rapidly see will be where a secondlab provider will decide that the rules can be decided by the citizens through voting.

It will be interesting to see which evolutions these neo-democracies will have, that rapidly overtake the efficiency of the democracies we know today. Just think of being able to vote not once every five years but continuously, drastically reducing political intermediation.

Technically, it is not impossible to imagine this in a community necessarily literate in the use of the information technology.

Interactive marketing channels to watch this year

Another interesting piece of research by Forrester Research I would like to share with you. Earlier this week, Forrester, published its ‘Interactive Marketing Channels To Watch In 2007’ report. The company asked some 170 interactive marketers what interactive marketing channels they use – and plan to use.

The results show that most marketers still focus on interactive channels that have proven what they’re worth: display advertising, search engine marketing and e-mail marketing.

Typical Web 2.0 phenomena such as social networking, blogs and podcasts are becoming more important but for the time being they are clearly less adopted by the marketing community.

Forrester sees a few important reasons for this. One of them is the fact that many marketers seem to have a ‘wait and see’ approach: they only invest in these new channels when their peers/competitors start doing so (but then of course you miss out on the first mover advantage). A second reason is a lack of measurable case studies that show the virtues and effectiveness of these new channels.

The providers know what to do: invest in relevant cases and content, showing advertisers the success recipes and the ways to achieve them…

Forrester has a nice PowerPoint presentation resuming the main results of the report: http://www.forrester.com/Events/Content/0,5180,-1667,00.ppt