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Choos­ing between all those other Social Networks

November 11, 2009 | 6 Comments

Writ­ten by: Lee on Novem­ber 11, 2009.

socialnetworkMy ini­tial aim was to write a num­ber of arti­cles on var­i­ous social medi­ums and I am con­tin­u­ing with that, how­ever when it came to social net­works there are so many out there that I decided to do one arti­cle about the ‘other’ ones. Look­ing at Wikipedia’s list of major active social net­works, there are so many on there I have never heard of.

Real­is­ti­cally, it would be impos­si­ble to be per­son­ally active on even 10% of those. Now if I had a nifty tool/platform that linked to all the dif­fer­ent Social Net­works with a sin­gle profile/account ID and allowed me to view my mes­sages from them all in one place, fil­ter dis­cus­sions from them all, keep track of key­words on them all, share on them all, have an events cal­en­dar linked to them all and pro­vided me with met­rics on them all and do any­thing else I might want to do on them all — that would be cool.

I am sure that some­where some­one is work­ing towards that right now. If I had oodles of funds I know would prob­a­bly be look­ing into that myself. I have read a bit about OpenID and I think the idea there is hav­ing a sin­gle pro­file to use on var­i­ous social net­work­ing sites instead of cre­at­ing a ‘hun­dred’ pro­files every­where; I just won­der if the var­i­ous big social net­works would be open to that or if they would want to hang onto their pro­pri­etary — any­way back to choos­ing between all the social net­works available.

When it comes to social net­work­ing in busi­ness and you have decided to incor­po­rate social media into your busi­ness strat­egy, whether for inter­nal com­mu­ni­ca­tions, recruit­ing, mar­ket­ing, lead gen­er­a­tion, PR, CRM, research, brand­ing to name some, the first thing you need to do, as I have kept say­ing through my arti­cles, is to define your goals and objec­tives and your tar­get audience/market for social media. Once you know these things you can find the social net­works that reaches your tar­get audi­ence and achieves your goals. It is impor­tant to ensure the social net­work is active with the type of mem­bers they claim. With online plat­forms like Ning any­one can have a social net­work. I would also research which net­works my audi­ence was using to get an indi­ca­tion of where you should be.

I found this review of some of the top social net­works but none of these are focused on pro­fes­sion­als (more busi­ness ori­en­tated) like LinkedIn, Plaxo or Xing. I also came across this nifty pie chart based on a list cre­ated by Peter Kim’s Wiki of com­pa­nies using social media. I think the break­down gives a good idea of the types of social media chan­nels to focus on, obvi­ously within your strat­egy. You def­i­nitely want to focus your energy on the net­works and chan­nels that give you the most ‘bang for your buck’. I am not sure social media could be deployed as a quick win unless you are a tech com­pany with a new inno­va­tion in this field.

One chan­nel that is rather small on this pie chart is forums and dis­cus­sion boards. That sur­prises me some what. I would have thought more peo­ple would be tar­get­ing indus­try ’round tables’ and dis­cus­sion forums to con­nect to their audi­ence. Per­haps there is a time issue here.

I found another great list on Mash­able list­ing some social medi­ums var­i­ous com­pa­nies are using. The most intrigu­ing for me was see­ing Dell had bought an island on Sec­ond Life: a vir­tual world. I had to find out what that was about. Now imag­ine sell­ing vir­tual prod­ucts of your brand and make real money from it. That seems like the idea here as peo­ple buy these vir­tual prod­ucts with game money bought with real money and it works on a rev­enue share model. Obvi­ously not at the price of the real thing. I see this as an exten­sion of hav­ing your brand show up in a game but done in social vir­tual world that can gen­er­ate income — very clever.

In my next post I will cover Linkedin and Plaxo.

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6 Comments so far

  1.    Lee on December 1, 2009 11:04 am      Reply

    Wal­ter — I com­pletely agree. I think the prob­lem is iden­ti­fy­ing which to study as there are hun­dreds of niche social net­works and mediums.

    Once you have iden­ti­fied your poten­tial bas­ket it them comes down to tar­get­ing, rel­e­vance and poten­tial return in deter­min­ing which to invest your time in.

  2.    Lee on December 1, 2009 11:00 am      Reply

    How about a book store sell­ing your short sto­ries? :D LOL.

    I have never used Sec­ond Life but it is always inter­est­ing to see how var­i­ous medi­ums are being used by some of the top brands.

    I think hav­ing a strat­egy for using Social Net­works is impor­tant and estab­lish the amount of time needed to imple­ment your strat­egy and then mea­sure the results. I have seen some inter­est­ing ways authors are pro­mot­ing books, papers, almost any­thing written.

    It is also about rel­e­vant tar­get­ing. Who is the mar­ket for your short stories?

    Lind­say, I will email you and we can chat. I worked with a book author a few months back and would happy to see if I can give you some advice.

  3.    Lindsay on November 25, 2009 11:45 pm      Reply

    Hmm, I won­der if I could pro­mote my short sto­ries by buy­ing real estate in Sec­ond Life. ;)

    I have a hard time with the social media stuff and have yet to stick with any of them for more than a few weeks. I like being social when I go out, but when I’m at the com­puter, I see that as work time.

    Any­hoo, inter­est­ing read­ing your post and the links you pointed out. Thanks!

  4.    Walter on November 21, 2009 6:55 am      Reply

    One must study each social media chan­nel before using it in fur­ther­ing his/her goals. At first, I’m was con­fused. But then by fur­ther study­ing, I found some impor­tant nuances about each. :-)

  5.    Lee on November 16, 2009 11:32 am      Reply

    Thanks for that link Stephen. I posted a com­ment to your arti­cle. I agree with what you have to say.

  6.    Stephen Breen on November 16, 2009 10:15 am      Reply

    Liked the post. I blogged on Fri­day on a sim­i­lar theme, pre­dict­ing some new super plat­forms will be launched soon to make all this social media white noise more man­age­able for us all.You might be inter­ested in it http://www.breenmedia.co.uk/blog/

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