Criticising social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook is as pointless as knocking people who discuss the weather

Cory Doctorow, via guardian.co.uk

Here are some suggested things to say if you want to sound like an idiot when you talk about social media:

• It’s inconsequential – most of the verbiage on Twitter, Facebook and the like is banal blather

Yes, it certainly is. The reason for that is that most of it is “social grooming” – messages passed between friends and family members as a way of maintaining social cohesion. The meaning of the messages isn’t “u look h4wt dude” or “wat up wiv you dawg?” That’s merely the form. The meaning is: “I am thinking of you, I care about you, I hope you are well.”

I don’t call my parents in Canada and recount the latest additions to my daughter’s vocabulary because they need to know that the kid can say “elephant” and “potty” now; I call them up to say, “all is well with your son and his family”, and “you are in my heart”, and “I love you”.

Criticizing the “banality” of Facebook conversation is as trite and ignorant as criticising people who talk about the weather. There’s a reason we say “Did you sleep well?” at breakfast and “How was your weekend?” when we turn up to the office on Monday (and it’s not that we care about the weekend or the rest).

Yes, people sometimes say consequential things on social media. The Twitter tag #whatTwitterdidforme has lots of sterling examples. But these are rare events that are not Twitter’s raison d’etre. People don’t join Twitter because they hope that someday they’ll be sprung from jail, land a job, or reunite with a long-lost friend. These are bonuses.

The real value of Twitter et al is to keep the invisible lines of connection between us alive.

And other things that make you sound dumb…check out the article to see why.

• It is ugly – MySpace is a graphic designer’s worst nightmare
• It is ephemeral – Facebook will blow over in a year and something else will be along

Over the past year, I’ve been speaking about the importance of social media to both businesses and individuals. Some people “get it” right away, but I’ve also been asked countless time to defend why social media isn’t just a fad and a big fat stupid waste of time.

Shelly DeMotte Kramer, a friend of mine and a super smart lady that happens to run a marketing firm out of Kansas City, explains it so well in her blog entry. Shelly graciously allowed me to share this in its entirety, so without further ado…
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It seems that every day I’m having a conversation with someone – friend, client, prospective client, you name it, about the importance of social media and the need to integrate it into your life and into your business. In fact, I get a little sick of having the same conversation over and over and over again – especially since social media isn’t all that I do. I own a marketing firm. We do anything and everything relating to marketing and advertising and public relations. And yet, here we go, focusing once again on social media. But here’s the kicker – marketing and advertising and pr – and everything about the entire world of business and the world of life in general, as we’ve known it for the past few decades, has changed. And, it’s going to change more, and more often, than ever before.

The most common complaint that I hear is that people just don’t have time to add social mediums to the mix of the things they do, whether work-related or personally, on a daily basis. And they aren’t really interested in sharing information about themselves, or think that Facebook is stupid and that Twitter is for idiots, and that all social media is nothing more than a huge time suck and so on and so forth, yadda yadda yadda.

Here’s what I say – new media is really all about the Brand of You. Whether you own a business or want to own a business, have a job or are looking for a job (or might some day be interested in looking for a new job), branding yourself, especially in today’s online world, is nothing less than imperative. Do you have an up-to-date profile on LinkedIn? Do you blog or have a personal website? Do you have a working knowledge and understanding of Facebook, even if you don’t choose to participate? Do you have any idea of the demographics of the user group that comprises a community like Twitter? Do you know what happens if you Google yourself? Do you have a Google profile? If you answer no to one or two of those questions, that’s probably not the end of the world. If you answer no to three or more, frankly, I feel sorry for you.

We used to operate in a world where people had resumes and business cards and static websites that never needed updating, and they networked face-to-face. We now live in a world where people have avatars and profiles and blogs and micro-blogs and are connected to, influenced by and collaborating with not only people who live in the same town, but people who live all over the world. The world isn’t changing – it HAS changed, and it is those of us who choose to acknowledge those changes and adapt ourselves accordingly who will reap the most benefit.

So, what about you? What’s the status of the Brand of You? How are you positioning yourself to let people know who YOU are, what you have to offer and why they should collaborate with or, from a personal standpoint, even get to know you? Are you sitting in your office waiting for them to call you on the phone or send you an email and ask to get together or see your resume? Are you feeling complacent and secure because today you happen to have a job and, as such, don’t need to concern yourself with what’s happening in the world around you? If so, I hate to be the one to break it to you, but you could be sitting there, alone or, even worse, job hunting with little chance of success, for a long time to come.

As we close out a year and a decade and move into a fresh year, I suggest we all spend a few moments reflecting on the Brand of You. What is it today? What would you like it to be in the future? What makes you a valuable asset? What makes you worthy of attention? What do you do really, really well? What do you have to contribute that might make the world a better place? What do you have to contribute at all? And, most importantly, what are you going to do to make sure that people know about it? You. Who are you and why do you matter?

What have I forgotten? I would love to hear your thoughts on the Brand of You.

With so many self-professed social media “gurus” these days, it would serve us well to be able to distinguish the ones worth listening to from the ones that are bullshitters.

The brilliant Sam Ladner, PhD wrote in her blog:

The bottom line is this: social media bullshitters have no knowledge of social theory or methodology. Trust a person who provides no easy answer, who carefully selects their research method, and who understands complex concepts.

This is basically the same criteria for the evaluation of all “experts”. Beware of those with the easy answers…

According to the rumours before Google Wave was introduced it was something to replace all current social media networks (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, etc.). It’s not that at all–-it’s a work collaboration tool. The basic premise is that Google was is what email would look like if it was invented today.

I think Google Wave has a lot of potential to do exactly what Google set out to do with it–which is to create a collaboration tool which will replace email. As it is now, Google Wave would only be good for working directly with someone directly.

Here’s Google’s own 10 minute explanation on when to use Wave.

From Regular Geek, here is the required reading list for people interested in social media:

First, there are the blogs I recommended in the quick guide, Louis Gray, Alexander van Elsas, Muhammad Saleem, SarahInTampa and SheGeeks. In many cases, you may see these people or others in the list guest posting (or writing full time) at ReadWriteWeb or Mashable, which you should be reading anyway. Here is the rest of my list:

• Tamar Weinberg of Techipedia (and Mashable and several other sites)
• Reem Abeidoh
• Mark Dykeman of Broadcasting Brain, with apologies to Mark for falsely accusing him of including social marketing Sorry Mark.
• Colin Walker
• Hutch Carpenter of I’m Not Actually a Geek, but absolutely should admit his geekiness.
• Social News Watch, which covers the social news sites almost exclusively.
• JD Rucker of Soshable
• Chris Miller of The Social Networker
• Julian Baldwin
  

We’ve had questions from clients on what they should look at on the web if they want to learn more about Social Media. While surfing, we found that an apropos post by Regular Geek. Here is the Regular Geek’s required reading list for people interested in social media:

First, there are the blogs I recommended in the quick guide, Louis Gray, Alexander van Elsas, Muhammad Saleem, SarahInTampa and SheGeeks. In many cases, you may see these people or others in the list guest posting (or writing full time) at ReadWriteWeb or Mashable, which you should be reading anyway. Here is the rest of my list:

• Tamar Weinberg of Techipedia (and Mashable and several other sites)
• Reem Abeidoh
• Mark Dykeman of Broadcasting Brain, with apologies to Mark for falsely accusing him of including social marketing Sorry Mark.
• Colin Walker
• Hutch Carpenter of I’m Not Actually a Geek, but absolutely should admit his geekiness.
• Social News Watch, which covers the social news sites almost exclusively.
• JD Rucker of Soshable
• Chris Miller of The Social Networker
• Julian Baldwin
  

It’s that time of year again.  The Learning Guys are going to PodCamp Toronto 2008!

See you there…

Open Social was announced yesterday to a lot of fanfare and pontification by social media geeks. However, there were few people that explained its significance to the Business audience…our clients.

The basics of Open Social is an open (vs. proprietary) application platform (also called Maka-Maka)that is very similar to the one released by Facebook a few months ago. By opening up the ability for third-parties to write applications that work within the popular social media site, Facebook has added tremendously to the popularity and stickiness of the site. There are little apps that let you give virtual gifts to other members and our favourite, a Facebook version of Scrabulous where we’re geeking out battling each other in games of online Scrabble!

While the Facebook application environment is fine, it is proprietary and the apps you write for Facebook can ONLY be used on Facebook. Open Social is being backed by an alliance headed by Google, and promises to create an open standard whereby the applications written for one social media site can be made to run on other Open Social sites with only minor adjustments.

The announcement of Open Social was broken by Techmeme here, and Google says:

Common APIs mean you have less to learn to build for multiple websites. OpenSocial is currently being developed by Google in conjunction with members of the web community. The ultimate goal is for any social website to be able to implement the APIs and host 3rd party social applications. There are many websites implementing OpenSocial, including Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING.

What does this mean to Business though? Jeremiah Owyang, explains it very clearly in an excellent post. Spend some time and read it and understand what Open Social is all about and how to capitalise on these opportunities:

Efficient development: Since there’s standardization in the code use (APIs) If you develop an application for OpenSocial, it should be easily re-used on all the social networks that are particiating. This greatly reduced development time, you no longer need a ‘myspace strategy’ or ‘bebo strategy’.

Harness existing communities: Since these applications will be plugged into existing communities, the need to ‘build an audience’ isn’t as crucial, as you can leverage the communities where they already exist. Why build if you can easily join.

Open standards help long term: It appear that the standards and development languages are commonly known and not proprietary so it reduced the chance of vendor lock in. Having a common code (API) across all networks makes movement easier, reducing development and re-configuring in the long term. One should always be cautious, as no system is perfect.

Your existing applications become social: Now, your standalone applications can now be shared with communities. If you’ve already spend resources on creating interactive marketing, large libraries, or other projects, consider how they can be re purposed on these websites, be efficient with your resources.

Future brings social to your website: The trend clearly nods towards the direction I forsee, that social networking features (friends and connections) will be brought to the static corporate website. Soon, there will be customers, prospects and employees networked on your own corporate website. We’re not there yet, but start planning on how that will look.