Portfolio: Interactive & Transactional Systems

Social Media

Read the Business Week article, Social Media Will Change Your Business.

Social media has many definitions, and generates much philosophical (including ethical), psychological, sociological and technological discussion of late. Interestingly, much of the discussion about Social Media happens via various Social Media.

To be very simple, Social Media are technology-based systems intended to enable and enhance various forms of interaction between and among people. The most well known forms of Social Media usage are:

• Internet forums
• podcasts
• blogs (short for the the contraction of web log...a blog author/owner or 'blogger' posts content and readers can post replies and/or comments)
• wikis (wikis, from the Hawaiian word meaning "fast",  are like blogs where anyone with permission can originate a post and/or comment on other people's posted content)
• picture sharing
• video sharing
• e-mail
• music sharing
• IM (Instant messaging)
• Telephony over the Internet

Popular Social Media Applications:

All of these perform one or, more commonly, a combination of several of the activities listed above. Keep in mind that the list that follows is merely a small sub-set of an ever-growing universe of Social Media.

• TypePad (blogging, with many other social media options)
• Google Groups (reference, social networking)
• Wikipedia (collaborative reference)
• MySpace (social networking)
• Facebook (social networking for students...explicitly not for grownups!)
• YouTube (social networking and video sharing, with many blog-like features, such as posting comments, etc.)
• Flickr (photo sharing)
• Microsoft IM (Instant Messaging)
• Twitter (social networking with blogging features)
• Skype (telephony and real-time video, with social networking aspects)
• Mybloglog (social networking aggregation of other social networks)
• Technorati (aggregation and indexing of postings on blogs)
• Weblogs.com (aggregation and indexing of other blogs)
• Plaxo (social networking and aggregation)
• LinkedIn (social networking)
• The list goes on and on...

The discussion of Social Media could be a very long one; however, several points are essential for any company considering strategic use of social media for business purposes.

• Not all social media are appropriate for business use. In fact, many social media systems explicitly prohibit commercial use.
• Some systems, notably Facebook, is only for social networking among youth.
• There are two social media types that have been proven to increase the volume of traffic to commercial websites. They are:
  • Blogs in combination with the essential aggregation services.
  • YouTube
• Depending on the nature of a business's products, MySpace and be an effectively tool, especially if the target segment is young (as in 20-something) and the product is music-oriented or certain crafts.
  • I mentioned MySpace, as one of my clients is a world-famous violinist/fiddler (Darol Anger). Darol has created a MySpace page and he swears that it has driven much traffic to his "real" website, www.DarolAnger.com.
  
  
  • Most MySpace pages are extremely amateurish (Darol's is an exception)...that is more or less the appeal of it to many people. As an example, one of the part-time employees of one of my businesses has a MySpace page that would make a professional designer cringe. That being said, his MySpace page does what he wants it to do--make him a recognizable "rebel"  personality at large music festivals where he sells his glass products (note: he is an emerging glass artist)

The Importance of Blogs and YouTube

Among the various Social Media, two of the most important to businesses are Blogs and, in many cases, YouTube.

Blogs:

There are many tools and services for creating and hosting blogs. One of the most popular blogging tool/hosting vendors is Six Apart. One of its products is TypePad. A business can use any tool set and hosting arrangement it chooses for creating a blog; however, there are some features, all built into TypePad, which are absolutely essential in order for a blog to have any real commercial value. Most of these features have to do with "getting noticed" by the major search engines, namely Google and Yahoo!.

• The ability to map a real domain name such as "www.DonRickertDesign.com" to the blog; otherwise, users will have to type something like "http://drickert.typepad.com/blog" to get to the blog. A URL like this screams AMATEUR! This online portfolio has still not been mapped to a real domain name; however, it is really an extension of a site called www.DonRickertDesign.com.
• Automatic submission of the blog's sitemap to Google. Submitting a site map in the correct format (as specified by Google) is essential to getting quick and timely presence on Google.
• Automatic submission of the blog listings (and keywords associated with them) to the major blog aggregation sites, such as www.weblogs.com and www.technorati.com: Getting listed on the  majors  guarantees  being  listed on the hundreds of minor aggregation sites. While Google's algorithms for "deciding" where (the first page of search results or the 20th) your blogs and websites appear in user searches does not favor blogs because they are blogs.

Google's algorithms DO favor sites that have many links pointing to them. You see how it works...the blog aggregators very quickly begin to link to your blog (and everything it points to, such as your main website) in snowballing numbers. This activity is detected by Google and Yahoo! and, before you know it, your blog(s) and associated website are filling the first page or several pages of search results.

• Powerful management tools, especially the ability to block users and to delete negative commentary: There is a small, but significant, group of people out there with nothing better to do with their time than post negative or otherwise offensive commentary to blog postings. It is pretty much guaranteed, in fact, that this "bullet" point will inspire some of these misguided folks into posting something nasty (they don't like people writing about them).  Since I have commenting "turned off", they will post to one of my other blogs.

There is a lot more that could be said about Blogs, but that is enough for now I think.

YouTube:

YouTube is like a blog for video content. In addition to having unbelievably good video streaming technology, users have all sorts of features available, allowing them to comment (in words or with their own videos), sending video links to friends, sending private mail to the account owner, etc.--in other words, very powerful social networking/"buzz" creation tools.

While YouTube does not have quite the powerful tools of the best blogging software for influencing Google and Yahoo! presence, it gets pretty good notice, especially if you use your blog to tell people about and link to your YouTube videos. YouTube does has very powerful tools for managing commentary, as weird, off-base and just plain mean comments are a bigger problem on YouTube than with blogs. You have to monitor YouTube with vigilance.

YouTube is particularly useful if a company's products can be represented in videos. Your main website is displayed along with videos, so people can (and will) go there if they like what they see on YouTube.

An Example of How a Blog, YouTube and an Online Violin/Fiddle store work together in a coordinated manner.

1. The blog and YouTube page are highly cross-referenced to each other.

2. BOTH the blog and the YouTube page have MANY links to the actual online store.