Friday, August 1, 2008
This is in response to Chris Brogan post Why Twitter Wins
Your friends drive your social media choices. Don’t believe me? Answer the following two questions.
1. What do you prefer to use Facebook Status or Twitter/Plurk?
2. What platform are most of your friends on?
The answer to the two questions will have the same answer.
I was in a critical meeting the other day with someone who was testing my social media knowledge. He started indirectly questioning me about Twitter and my Twit friends.
I walked away from the meeting feeling a little pissed off. This guy was going to measure my knowledge of social media by my low involvement in a social media channel.
GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!
At the end of the day Social Media comes back to the people who are driving it, which are your friends. In my case all off my offline friends are on Facebook, only a select few of my marketing friends are on Twitter.
I know that a lot of the social media/marketing community is on Twitter and Plurk and I try to make an effort to stay in touch but I find it hard because it is not my number one form of microblogging and information sourcing, I use Facebook Status and my RSS reader for that.
Social Media succeeds by being 80% Social (Friends), 20% Media (Technology Innovation)!
Twitter has not failed it just has not grabbed the critical mass of my friends yet, therefore I don’t use it.
Saturday, March 15, 2008
I just recieved the Hitwise Asia Pacific Social Networking Report.
Finally I have some evidence for what I knew was occuring. I have suggested before that Facebook is becoming the all in one user platform. Soon you will not go surfing the net but you will just surf Facebook. The Hitwise report suggests that the tasks of emailing and searching is being done within Facebook (tables above).
However 2 things have to occur for this to happen.
1. Critical Mass – A user will only use Facebook email over normal email if they believe that it is more likely to get to the receiver faster than if they used a normal email. I have noticed that this has already started happening with the emails that I send out to people, I prefer to use Facebook inbox.
Another advantage is that you do not have to remember an email address but rather just type someone name into the search. Kind of like when mobile phones started coming with address books built inside.
2. Search Engine – I can see in the not to distant future that you will be able to look up a companies name on Facebook and be taken through to their e-commerce site.
