Social Media in 2011

In a post on Seven Social Media Sites for 2011, there were of course some successes and some failures of prognostication. Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn (with an IPO), and The Blog are going strong, and in fact had huge gains.

Quora feels like a fad. Yes, there are some dedicated fanatics, but it has several problems, such as being a place for search engine results rather than driving traffic to other destinations. This is problematic in terms of value. Plus there is a lot of nonsense in non-tech answer space. Flickr I still love but it is not the biggest image site (Facebook is now), and the ongoing problems of Yahoo! cast a shadow over it.

Local, Geolocation, Daily Deals

Gowalla is a dead end due to the Facebook acquisition, and I got bored with Foursquare. I think the mobile space still needs a killer app and local deals is not necessarily it. Groupon and daily deals are a dying, slim-margin business. Living Social is doing better because it is going into different niches such as travel for which local makes sense.

Social Media for 2012

One theme that I’m going to explore in 2012 is back to the basics. Not being dazzled with platforms or trying everything new under the sun (as we know, there is nothing new under the sun). While we still have to worry about Flickr, and of course the ongoing onslaught of Twitter and Facebook, there are six sites that I want to focus on, two of which are fairly new to me. By cutting it down to six, maybe next year I can do five, and work my way down from there:

Amazon

Amazon.com is a labyrinth that is over 15 years old. There are some social aspects, especially the reviews, but there are many more nooks and crannies in the site. While on the one hand ecommerce and social don’t really play well together (witness the Apple Ping service), there are a lot of ways to communicate across the various platforms. More needs to be explored.

Slideshare

I was an early user of Slideshare and one of the co-founders taught classes at the Berkeley iSchool while I was there as a graduate student. In need to return there to get a better understanding of the changes they have implemented and the new uses and functionality available. Analytics is one item, but also how to work the social aspect of the community.

Kickstarter

Kickstarter is a great, active, crowd-funding site. In 2011 I backed two projects, one a book and another a screen-top keyboard for the Ipad. I haven’t yet received either of these, but both were fully subscribed (the keyboard was 2,000% funded and the book 268% funded). There is a real sense of ownership in being involved in product innovation and development by essentially buying the product before it is built.

SoundCloud

SoundCloud is the one new social site that I think is worth exploring more. It is yet another social music site, but what is great is the functionality and interaction, and some great music.

Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a granddaddy in the social space. Not a whole lot has changed across the platforms, but it is important to participate.

YouTube

YouTube got a makeover. There is now YouTube Analytics and a whole upgrade to Channels, which now includes bulletins as well as channel comments, channel backgrounds and channel avatar images, and a social subscription to websites that is now possible, see for example the www.boyinaband.com social blog on YouTube. Now some of this isn’t so new, but that just shows you how far behind things I’ve become.

• Twitter will continue its growth path
• YouTube is still the video sharing site of choice
• Flickr, even in the clutches of clueless Yahoo, is still the photo sharing site I’m sticking with
• Quora is a recent discovery though certainly other folks have known about this for six months or more
• Facebook is not going away anytime soon, especially with a recent 50bn valuation
• FriendFeed apparently never really went away and is experiencing international growth
• LinkedIn is still the choice for professional networking
• The blog is the eighth item here, not so much social media as simply a home page with a variety of musings and amusements

Honorable mentions:

• Wikipedia

What about Mobile Social Media?

You may notice there is no mobile social media included. Ok, will have to remedy that with either Foursquare or Gowalla (or something else I am not yet familiar with). However, my guess is that Google or more likely Facebook will begin to encroach into that space.

This is an update on the Haiku, Tanka and Image Meditation project, which is purely a hobby and amateur effort but is growing and getting some traffic.

Humble origins, Twitter Haiku

The 140 character limit of twitter is not a problem for micropoetry forms such as Haiku (with a syllable structure 5-7-5 in the standard American interpretation of the form) and Tanka (5-7-5-7-7), though that can occasionally take up the entire 140.

At 11:39pm on April 16th, 2008 the new Zen Haiku Twitter account Zenchine tweeted a classic by the Haiku master Kobayashi Issa:

World like a dewdrop – though it’s only a dewdrop – even so, even so.

Zenchine Blog – Image Meditations

Image meditations were added to the Haiku Tweets which became autoposted to the new Zenchine – Haiku, Tanka, Image Meditation blog

Il Buddha di Legno nel tempio in fiamme, originally uploaded by fedewild.

Identi.ca Zenchine Zen Haiku

On October 7, 2008 the Identi.ca account for Zenchine became the primary microblogging update (echoing out to Twitter) with the original Haiku

Anxiety-filled – belly of worries, groaning – overstuffed with doubts.

Zenchine blog PageRank 3 and other Stats

[http://zenchine.com](http://zenchine.com] now has a Google PageRank3 which is pretty good and gets about 3 visitors/day, about a third direct (bookmarks, typed-in URLs), a third from Google, and a third from referrals (links on other sites). Some other stats:

• There are 12 subscriptions to the RSS feed.
• http://twitter.com/zenchine has 459 followers
• http://identi.ca/zenchine has 36 subscribers

With the Twitter and Identica, I estimate 5% of followers see the messages, which means around 25 folks are reading the Haiku.

Facebook Page, the Next Horizon

Today, we have added the Zenchine Haiku, Tanka, Image Meditation Facebook Page

With the positive PageRank and @reply encouragement from the Twitter followers, I am encouraged to try and produce one or more Haiku and post one or two images to the blog post and syndicate that out to Twitter, Identica and Facebook.

This is clearly an amateur effort, the quality is not great but I figure some gems will appear based on volume alone–the Ernest Hemingway approach.

The Zen Way To Start The Day, originally uploaded by Clearly Ambiguous.

Hacking on the social web SocialDevCamp Chicago David Recordon & Luke Shepard Building with Facebook Connect and Platform A Brief History Connect Social everywhere Web Mobile Desktop Game Consoles Social Web Building Blocks Activity Opening up to the people around you Connections The people and connections you care about Identity Authentic representation of you Introducing Mu Facebook Connect for JavaScript Demo

Facebook Twitter Integration

Since the majority of communication is on the Facebook and Twitter platforms (for me, currently), the first question is how to integrate or provide for some kind of dual-management so that messages do not have to be manually repeated or conversations lost track of.

Facebook as primary interface

• Link your Facebook Page to Twitter allows for Facebook-to-Twitter message forwarding by type of message (status updates, links, photos, notes, etc.). What is great is that it continues the functionality of pages to act as full profile accounts, just as it is now possible for a page to fan another page.
• Twitter – Facebook app is an embedded Twitter client inside of Facebook (apparently for those who can’t bear to have another browser tab open). It also provides and option to allow Twitter to update Facebook, an can be enabled on a given page as well as the logged-in account, for those who want to echo everything from Twitter to Facebook (see Twitter as primary interface, below).

Twitter as primary interface

• Selective Twitter – Facebook app echos each Twitter tweet that has ” #fb” in it to facebook. What is nice is it allows for profiles and fan pages and has a nice interface that allows for setting different twitter usernames to different pages. Created by Andy Young.

A third interface option – HelloTxt

• HelloTxt is a great option for updating Twitter, Facebook, Identica, MySpace and LinkedIn, as well as many other social sites you care to use. I enabled the Jabber option and just open my chat client and send the message and it reliably updates all my accounts’ status.

Multi-account Twitter interface

I realize there are other offerings out there, but after testing HootSuite and CoTweet, for me the best multi-account tool is the simple, quick and effective TwitIQ.

Why are Social Networking Sites important?

Why is this important? In the age of Personal Branding, social networking sites are important places. Think of them as a portal of people.

On the other hand, the idea that one has to join every site and engage in the same level of interaction (or conversely, only behave in a broadcast, non-interactive mode), should be dispensed with.

Exclusive Rights

Joining social network sites, setting up profiles, and reserving usernames simply has value in terms of exclusive rights. This means that excluding others from reserving your current username (and therefore confusing the message of the brand name as well as ease of findability), is itself valuable. After all, intellectual property rights are exclusive rights, the right to exclude others from speaking on behalf of brands or being confusingly similar.

Social Networking Sites and their Ranking in Alexa

• Facebook = 4
• Myspace = 11
• Twitter = 25
• Hi5 = 36
• Orkut Brazil = 44
• Skyrock = 57
• Orkut India = 60
• Linkedin = 81
• Tagged = 82
• Friendster = 88
• NYtimes = 107 <– The Gray Lady
• Google Thailand = 112 <– Interesting ranking for a country of 63m
• Thepiratebay = 116 <– Mininova is higher ranked, but TPB is the largest bittorrent tracking site
• Netlog = 117
• Orkut = 122

Stage 1 – Initiation

• Create accounts
• Edit BIO, profile image(s), backgrounds, color schemes
  
  
  
  

Stage 2 – Introduction

• Begin messaging
• Engage in friending and joining activity
• Messaging is primarily introductory, thanking for following, etc.
  
  
  

Stage 3 – Involvement

• Integrate messaging
• Various social media accounts can have coordinated messaging from a single point (hellotxt.com)
• Messaging primarily information sharing and public conversation
• Metrics on SM campaigns and awareness-building
  
  
  

Stage Zero – Strategy

Of course all of this presupposes a previous stage, that of asking the fundamental questions, best articulated by Peter Drucker.

• What is our mission?
• Who is our customer?
• What does the customer value?
• What are our results?
• What is our plan?

If you are an individual and not an organization, then the questions go like this:

• What are my strengths?
• How do I work?
• What are my values?
• Where do I belong?
• What can I contribute?

And now you siii the 3 + 1 stages of social media…