Comments on: Social Media vs. Social Networking

By: Steve Spencer

Steve Spencer — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 16:31:38 +0000

Excellent points, as always Andre. Thanks much!

By: Steve Spencer

Steve Spencer — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 16:31:01 +0000

Thanks Tyler!!

By: Tyler

Tyler — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 16:28:08 +0000

Excellent post! I’m saving this to my social bookmark right now ;D

By: Andre Shoumatoff

Andre Shoumatoff — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 17:38:45 +0000

Excellent points Steve, right on target. I also agree that the RSS readers are also deminishing, what I find is people are becoming more loyal to certain blogs only and are increasingly reading them traditionally, and only a few. So you have dedicated followers, and not necessarily the population numbers we once saw. For this reason a lot of social media experts are declaring blogging is dead, welcome to “life streaming”, but I think this is incorrect. The good news is dedicated blog readers become evangelists; they spread your message on your behalf, which is really what the crux of social media is all about (at least from a corporate or messaging standpoint). For example a reader of this blog I would suspect is more likely to recommend Twelve Horses as an Internet firm. They also integrate your corporate identity into your own, much like all of the folks who have a Backcountry.com sticker on their car in Salt Lake valley, or someone who chooses “X” corporation under their “pages” section of their facebook profile.

Cheers,
Andre

By: Steve Spencer

Steve Spencer — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 16:18:02 +0000

Larry,
You know, when I watched the video of Google Wave, my mind really started spinning on similar questions. The problem is that it’s so hard to really predict what social networks will or won’t be adopted, to what level, and what the usage will really be like. As an example, when Google Social was all the buzz, and the ability to build social apps that could be easily installed on iGoogle, my first thought was that it was potentially a Facebook killer. But it wasn’t. It really hasn’t seemed to gain much traction.
Similarly, why is the actual usage of Facebook and Twitter so distinctly different? There are different capabilities to be sure, but even where they are similar the usage is different (an example in my article is the concept of the ReTweet.)
No longer can the best platform be assured to be the one that really catches on…. even if you’re Google.
Don’t get me wrong… I was blown away, and excited over the Wave demo. We’ll have to see how well it really rolls out, what the adoption is, what crowd really jumps on it, and how they use it.
I can’t wait to embed Wave’s in my blog though That looks awesome!

Thanks for the comments! I really appreciate it!!

By: Larry

Larry — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:59:16 +0000

Excellent post, Steve. I think your analysis of not only the language around social media/networking is right on point. More importantly, you’ve done a great job here of noting the effectiveness of specific channels without getting too technical in your analysis. I wonder…what’s next? Will Google’s Wave make an impact on the mix?