Strip Malls for Personal Brands
Steve Rubel has a thoughtful post about the recent state of Internet social sites. In it, he suggests that users are acting as tenants in a rental property situation, and that it seems we’re all a bit flustered when our properties, like Twitter, have damage. I like the perspective, and I think the conversation should definitely be had. But immediately, I had another analogy come to mind for a slightly different reason. Steve mentioned the difference between “renting” on other people’s services versus “owning” our blogs. For whatever reason, I thought about the way we “shiny object” types are showing up on all these various social platforms, and I thought about strip malls.
We’re Everywhere
A quick digression: I believe that if we ever invent time machines, they will be situated in WalMarts and other big box stores. Why? Because they’re everywhere and look roughly the same. We won’t be as baffled when we shift between locations on the globe.
Strip malls feel like that. Sure, there are different stores, but they’re just places full of stuff. You can get a haircut, buy a cheap Chinese buffet, mail a letter, and take a karate lesson in any given cluster of strip malls. The same names start to pop up.
So, in Steve Rubel’s tenants and owners analogy, I liken a lot of us who are taking up space on these various social networks as some kind of strip mall tenants. Think about it.
I’m on Jaiku.
I’m on Pownce.
I’m on Twitter.
I’m on Plurk.
I’m on Facebook.
I’m on MySpace.
I’m on LinkedIn.
I’m on Utterz.
I’m on Seesmic.
I’m on Flickr.
I’m on … I can keep going.
And so are you. So’s Scoble. So’s Paisano. Lots of people are everywhere all of a sudden.
In a way, haven’t we made little branding strip malls? Little outlet stores for the product known as “me?”
What’s your take?
Photo credit, le
The Power of Links
Kevin Burton’s post about how Google implemented the “nofollow” on all posted links as a baseline behavior on their new Sites implementation. (Briefly, this means, when Google’s or anyone else’s spiders go out and see what’s on a website, they don’t follow links off to other sites to see what those sites are, and index them as well). Now, I’m not a search guy, and so I’m not sure what Google’s reasons are for this. But here’s what this has me thinking about.
Links Signify Intention
This relates to what Steve Gillmor talks about with regards to gestures and attention and the like. If I put a link in a blog post, it suggests that I find value in what lies at the other end of the link. It means that I think YOU should click the link and see what’s going on.
So think about that for a moment. Think about YOUR behavior with links. When you write about Britt Raybould’s Bold Words blog, but you DON’T put links, you’re signifying that you’re not interested in people following the link to discover her work ( link to Britt’s great blog, btw). When you talk about LinkedIN, but you link it back to your own blog post instead of to LinkedIN, you’re signifying that you want to keep traffic on your site. SOMETIMES, this makes sense. If I said, “here’s my other article about LinkedIN,” then that makes sense. But if EVERY link keeps the audience on your site, you’re telling me that you don’t want me wandering around the web sharing attention.
Links Build Networks of Thought
Years ago, when I got the first ever Mac, it came with HyperCard. It was SO amazing to me. I could link up words inside of text, and give you all kinds of nuance and reference and sidebar conversations, all the while keeping the original document in-line. Links are part of that same magic, only better. Because HyperCard, at least when I was starting out with it, was relegated to referencing my own computer and documents, whereas links let me point all over the web.
To that end, you can build amazing and interesting networks of thought. You can build posts that give people an understanding about something by synthesizing data FOR them. Sometimes, you’re not the authority, but you are always in a position to thread up some articles, videos, and other resources to build out something of use to you. Being helpful means finding the right resources for the point you’re hoping to make.
Links Give Credit
If you click the photo included in this blog post, it takes you back to the artist who created it. Though it’s not a “perfect” way to give credit ( Steve Garfield schools me on this all the time), it’s better than just using their picture in my blog post, and better than just writing that “Jared” did this work.
In this world of free, one of the ONLY currencies we still seek and demand are links. If you note, my work is all available to you for free, to repurpose in lots of ways. The only thing you can’t legally do with my work is directly make money from it. (Mind you, if my ideas help you make money because you EXECUTE on them yourselves, you get to keep that with my blessings). But you could repost every single blog post I put up here on your blog, on your dog’s blog, wherever you want, provided you give a link back to me here at [chrisbrogan.com]. That’s not asking a lot in return for all that I put into my work. Right?
So, links are a very important piece of Internet currency. They are the money of attention in that way.
Links ARE the Network
Your phone has plenty of buttons on it, but until you push them in the right order, it’s a lot of capacity and not enough intent. Building web pages like blogs and wikis and the like are YOUR chance to build a network of your own intentions. We do this all the time. FriendFeed is a tool to show you links to all my web presence. So is Lijit. Twitter, blogs, everywhere that we can input html, are ways to thread the needle.
When you add links to a page, you tell a story. You build networks of value. For example, if you build a blog post called “The top 20 Torrent Sites,” you’ve just given someone a resource to improve their web experience.
Go forth. Create networks. Learn how to make nice, beautiful, useful links, give people credit and signal your intentions, and thread a beautiful net for people who can use your help.
The return value is how this all ends up working for us. Doc Searls might call this a way to make because of value from what we’re doing. Do you agree?
The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.
Get the entire series by subscribing to this blog, and subscribe to my free newsletter here.
Advice for Traditional and Local News Media
Someone, a brave someone, from Boston’s local TV news scene asked a question to a panel with representatives from MySpace, Facebook, Eons, IBM, and a virtual worlds builder. She said she wanted to know the role of traditional media in this space, and what road she and her organization should get on for the future of media. Their answers were all over the map, but Jeff Taylor (former founder of Monster, current founder of Eons) had the start of a thoughtful answer, and his response blended with something someone else said earlier (either Jeff again, or Tom Arrix of Facebook): that if we observe the Superbowl ads for 2008, we’ll notice that the majority of them will point us to a web property. So, with this as backdrop, some advice.
Be Brief On Air, Go Deep Offline
The current champions of this method are NPR. They post all their subsequent materials, including longer versions of interviews, on their website for further review. For people you want to know about, watching or listening to just the snippets that make the news isn’t always enough. Having the option to go deeper is a great service that takes advantage of all the quality work a journalistic team has put into the experience.
This is a value-add for people interested in a particular story, but it’s also clever for marketing and understanding your customer base. We can track and observe and understand the behaviors of people, so that we may better serve them. That’s the first line value.
Integrate Local Social Media Types
Papers and TV are still missing an opportunity to “draft” independent media makers into their work. Move to an upstream, editorial and curation relationship with people who can go into their own communities, surface stories of interest to them, and then bring this body of work to editors and curators who can understand which of these stories are right for the air, which would do fine on the web, and which might merit further professional reporting, with a hat tip back to the original creator.
Embed Community Technology Into Your Sites
Pluck up the best of blogs and videoblogs in the area. Build community conversation sections, even if that invites critics to come out and shoot at your stories a bit. Build chat rooms for during-the-news discussion experiences. There are tons of ways to empower the voice of your audience to have reciprocal value. These are just a few. You probably have a few more.
Make Your Media Portable
Take some of the deep stories and make podcasts out of them. Give us embed codes for your media. Make a spot for metadata like user tagging. Give us ways to build your media into our sites and spread your word to more sources.
Switch Sensation for Causes and Empowerment
We put a premium on stories of what’s going wrong. Of course, it’s important to know about some of the bad news we’re getting out there, but why aren’t stories about where we can help coming to the fore in LOCAL news? Why aren’t we learning about people doing great work more often? Right now, they have that slot at the very end of the newscast, where the two or three people on desk make that weird half smile.
Push the empowerment stories up, and bring that into your deep web coverage as well.
Random and YOUR Ideas
One more thing: do we NEED everyone at a desk with monitors behind them, or sitting in fake living rooms? Aren’t there other settings? We haven’t mixed it up much for over 50 years. I guess this isn’t social media advice, but hey.
And what else? What do you think? How can we fix the news?
The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.
Get the entire series by subscribing to this blog, and subscribe to my free newsletter here.
Velocity-Flexibility-Economy
Think that social media has nothing to offer your “traditional” business? I can give you reasons along any of three points of view: velocity, flexibility, and economy. As our tools come closer and closer to approximating and/or enhancing human interaction, and further away from requiring an abundance of technological expertise, those who are exploring and sampling these tools are at an advantage that can be measured in speed, adaptability, and cost of operation.
We aren’t talking about the marketing department. We aren’t equipping PR professionals. This isn’t a new set of tools for launching campaigns. These are tools to improve interaction, and they are incredibly powerful and game-changing when you consider how much less impact on traditional business resources most of these solutions have.
Velocity
In the United States, in 2008, a “smart” cellular phone costs as little as $150 USD for the device, and under $50 for an account with a data plan. Wifi hotspots are on the rise. A reasonably good laptop can be purchased for under $500 with built-in wireless capabilities. With these two types of units as the base system, we can deliver the following capabilities:
- Instant communication in voice, text, email, photo,video, and even geo-locative.
- Information browsing, including SMS-based and voice search (Google).
- Presence status information (Twitter, dodgeball, jaiku, pownce)
- Shared documents (Google docs)
- Voice Conferencing (freeconferencecall.com and tons more)
- Access to thousands of web-stored applications and data.
All without a cubicle. All without an office, an office manager, any infrastructure whatsoever. We can work out of coffee shops and libraries, at hotels and in the upstairs office, on the side of the road, or across the globe. Fast.
Flexibility
As recently as five years ago, we considered which software our organizations would buy based on the operating systems we supported. (Maybe yours still does.) Before that, we had to choose between Token Ring and Ethernet. Beta and VHS. (Now there’s Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, but you’re not falling for that, right?). Today, we are flexible. There are some considerations to be had, but with so many applications running in the cloud, accessible through browsers, so much of what we choose to equip ourselves with is a personal choice, and is a matter of our Internet access more than any other deciding factor.
- Office apps via Google or Zoho, or desk versions from OpenOffice
- Operating Systems for free with Ubuntu (and hundreds of other Linux distributions), or irrelevant with the browser being our true compatibility choice.
- Collaboration through wikis, shared spaces like Facebook, or in Ning communities.
- Conversations across multiple Instant Messaging vendors via Adium, or Trillium or Meebo
- Blog on Wordpress, blogger, movable type, vox, whatever.
- Instant databases through Freebase.com or Zoho
- File storage through Box.net and so many more
- Video hosting from Revver, Blip.tv, Brightcove, YouTube
We can choose from any number of sources, mix and match. Flexibility is abundant. You don’t have to choose what your neighbor chooses. Email can be gmail, yahoo, and whatever else. Just use a domain forwarding/pop3 scheme to keep consistency to external sources.
Economy
Why pay for it when you can use it for free? Cost doesn’t insinuate reliability any more than free predicts uptime. Google is free and it is more diverse than any of your data centers. If you have to consider budget when considering social media, as with the rest of the premise, things fall back to the humans involved. Lots of companies are using ad-supported software models. Others are using services and add-ons and behind-the-firewall implementations to support their efforts. The point is still the same: you don’t have to pay anything (or much) to get into the game.
- Use Skype for free voice conversations (and cheap for SkypeOut)
- Use Wordpress.com for free blog hosting, or Blogger, or Vox, or Tumblr.
- Facebook is free. Twitter is free. Gmail is free. Google Docs are free.
- Wikis are free. Freebase is free. Zoho is free.
- STORAGE is cheap (not free) for people making media. Price out 500 Gigabytes of storage these days and you’ll see that it costs less than you used to pay for a box of floppies in the mid 90s.
There are other “costs” in retooling your business practices and the like. And yet, what’s the return? If you’re faster, more flexible, and have cost the company nothing in licensing, what have you hurt?
Beware those selling you “solutions” that are “more robust” than what’s out there. What’s out there is working just fine for lots of people. People out beating the street doing important things are using these free apps, these web-minded apps, these “you can’t always be connected to the Internet” apps.
What’s holding you back? What are the reasons you’re hearing for NOT using social computing technology to enhance the way people do business at your company?
(And yes, security will be one of the prime answers. Let’s hash that out in the comments section. What’s YOUR take?)
The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.
Get the entire series by subscribing to this blog, and subscribe to my free newsletter here.
Photo credit, Ishrona
