Recently, I’ve watched this short interview with Brian Solis about the future of social networks. The interesting point has been made about privacy – Brian argues that due to the different social graphs and increasing social importance of the updates (status) social networks of the future will have to tailor the content to context – the right content to the right audiences at the right time – it’s kind of the new J-I-T communication system concept and tools will have to be developed. While I agree with these suggestions I also see some different trends which may reduce the need for such tools.
Everyone who likes you will listen
Social media has started from the idea of opines and transparency. The first bloggers wanted to share their personal experience with the whole world on their web dairies or journals. The innovators were driven by the idea that the world can be the audience not only of the big media companies but of common personalities. At those days bloggers ceternaly didn’t hide much and privacy concern was the last thing to worry about. So what have changed now? Social media has become a norm and instead of planed few international friends the certain messages of bloggers and other social media citizens has reached millions, including their friends, families, employees. Why it’s a bad thing? I think it’s not and that’s my main point – it’s not bad to reach the mass audiences with a single update / everyone who are willing to listen will listen , who are not will not. The problem is that we are afraid of ourselves to transmit the same messages to everyone and can’t figure it out how to make people listen to what we have to say. Simply put I think it is not a senders worry what messages the receiver gets (as he will setup filters in order to get the right messages anyway), but how to make him want to listen to your messages at all.
Well, I think that’s where personal branding comes in. I noticed the trend that people with the strong personal brands just can’t care less about delivering mixed messages or tailoring the messages to different audiences on their social networking accounts. People who like these personal brands (Guy Kawasaki, David Armano and etc.) don’t really mind these unrelated industry messages as it makes them more believable and attachable.
The networking culture is changing
The other trend which I’ve noticed in social media environment is growing social media consciousness and changing culture of sharing. People hear all these stories about other people being fired for unreasonable behaviour as a result they pay more attention before pressing "publish" button. They also start choosing their friends more carefully, as they don’t want to be associated with doubtable personalities. I think it’s a good thing that Facebook and other social networks exposes the pointless relationships and friendships. I noticed that there is forming a common understanding (at least in my friends circle) that you don’t publish anything related to others that you don’t want to be published about you. After the wild freedom on the web people are starting to embrace the idea that digital world is no different to real world (or it’s just an extension of a real one), with same responsibilities, liabilities and freedoms.
How these trends affect businesses?
Well I think businesses will have to embrace these changes together with the crowd and as businesses are just the groups/communities of people empowered by managed processes so I don’t see any difference in their communication strategies if they really want to create the relationship with the real people/customers. They will have to stick with "love it or hate it" strategy and concentrate on building or attracting strong personal brands within the company in various departments who would be happy to embed the company’s values able to carry the company’s messages far away from it’s borders.
The issue
The only problem that I see with the perspective of openness is that in a short term before the complete adoption of one personality it may decrease the creativity of some people, because some of the people may feel like put into the frames in terms of expression, and it may take some time to break through.
As you probably already noticed Digg.com has got a new face (if not I’ve got 5 invites to check it out). It’s much more flexible, customizable and most importantly much more social. I have to be honest with you I always liked the idea of Digg but never was a big fan of the page, because most of the time it was really slow, quite difficult to navigate and social features were more or less just addition to the page, but not really integrated in the business concept. Well, that’s changed completely. Now you can follow the news that you really want to follow and keep on eye what’s happening in your friend’s world much easier. It seems that Digg has become a mashup of Alltop.com and Facebook.com with the best features of both the sites (top news+social engagement). Well check it out yourself and let me know what do you think about the new design of the page?
I’ve just read this fascinating research on Discovery news about the happy cows. It turns out that the loved cows, who are personalized and called by the given names gives 5% more milk than the usual ones. It got me thinking about social media environment and why social businesses are doing so well, I think it is exactly the same simple reason – it is “Made in Love”. The personal relationship and attention has been a unique selling point of most of the SME businesses for years, they sell products or services which cost more than mainstream brands but are delivered with Love and Personality. The only difference is that now the businesses are enabled by social media channels to share these love stories for their clients with many more people. I definitely believe that we are going to see much more of that kind of branding in the future, where the “love manufacturing” becomes a standard addition to a great brand story . Who knows maybe in the future instead of labels as “Organic” or “Made in China” we are going to see “Made in Love”? What do you think?
It’s been a while since my last post, mainly because I was feeling a bit exhausted reading about the same stuff written over and over again – "top lists " "twitter this" , twitter that", "how to" and etc. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s brilliant that social media is finally getting the attention it fully deserves and the questioning about it being a fad almost gone, but sometimes I just get bored from reading the same stuff. I bet you understand.
I think that at these times, when you are feeling a bit tired it’s always good to go back and think why you’ve started doing what you are doing. I’ve decided to go back to the routes of my social media journey and write again about things I really care and intended to write about. Why I’ve started this blog? I always wanted to take a bit different approach in analyzing social media and analyze not the tools, channels or applications but the people in this environment - the people who make it happen, who live and breathe social media, who enjoy doing it just for the sake of doing it, people who explore and see not so many problems but the opportunities in our changing society, people that I call Social Media Citizens.
Maybe it’s not going to be 100 % original stuff that you haven’t seen anywhere before, but I will try to keep it unique, personal and hopefully quite funny by answering some simple questions like:
It is quite specific environment and I want to hear different stories, from different part of the world, compare them and learn from them. Everyone is saying that social media is about people, so I want to ask “The People” what is it about?;)
Here we go, all the mist surrounding Facebook’s development towards location based application is cleared off, The “Facebook Places” has been launched in US today, and probably shortly we will have it in Europe as well. It’s going to be interesting how it will challenge the favourite location based social network Foursquare. Personally, I believe it can affect Foursquare quite a bit, but let’s wait and see.
![social-media-marketing[1]](http://www.smcitizens.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/socialmediamarketing1.jpg "social-media-marketing[1]")
I’ve just read this article on Telegraph where the research suggests that “Mobile phones and social media are stealing our manners” and “damaging our social skills“. I think it’s nonsense.
Since the old days people used to express themselves more in writing than in any other form of communications. I don’t think it’s a confidence issue . In fact, i think it’s to do with politeness for some reason we as a society don’t find it so rude if someone writes bad about us compare to when someone says something bad.
People are so much more open and personal in writing, perhaps due to the fact, that they have more time to think what they put down on the paper and are not so impulsive. When you think about how many times you regretted about something you had said, I bet that there were 100 times less when you regretted about something you had written. Therefore, I think it’s even more real to me, what people write than what people say, because they always have chance to correct themselves and transfer their real emotion.
It is actually a paradox that we tend to say more in writing than when we speak, but actually I think it’s to do with all this political correctness and sometimes unnecessary politeness which limits people expression.
Is it a social disaster or social development, I don’t know? But living in the world of the fake smiles, I kind of enjoy straight forward language on social media sites. What about you?
Is Facebook building the new community-driven question-and-answer (Q&A) platform? I think it is. I‘ve just noticed an ad on Facebook, according to which Facebooks is looking for better testers for their new product:
“We at Facebook are preparing to launch a brand new product to the world. We think it will be as exciting as Facebook Photos and Facebook Events, but we need your help to make it great.”
From the description of the testers role it sounds a lot like crowdsourced answers platform something like Yahoo Answers or Answers.com.
“As a beta tester, your job will be to ask great questions and provide great answers about your favorite topics. Economics? Skydiving? Relationships? Mexican Restaurants? It’s up to you. You’ll be the first person outside of Facebook to use this product. Your expert writing will be seen by tens of millions of people — including job recruiters. And we’ll bring our best beta testers out to California to tour Facebook headquarters and meet the team.”
Interesting updates are coming up on Facebook. I wonder what kind of business model will be associated with it? Is Facebook going to be selective in people answering the questions? Would love to hear your ideas about these news?
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