Social Media Predictions Call - January 13, 2009

These are my notes from my session on Leesa Barnes' Social Media Predictions Call.

What are the social media threats, opportunities and trends that business owners need to take notice of in 2009?

Not dealing with your customer’s desire for distributed content.

You can’t worry about being THE destination anymore.  You can’t expect people to come to YOUR website all the time.  If you’ve got content that you want your customers to engage with, you need to make sure it can live outside your site.

Examples: shows and networks that allow embedding – much more popular than those that don’t.  Companies who put their commercials on YouTube get talked about.  Sites that syndicate their content get referenced.

From a practical perspective, that means you need to become familiar with:

  • RSS Feeds
  • Widgets
  • Lifestreaming

RSS Feeds and Widgets are going to help you distribute your content.

Lifestreams will let you aggregate your own preferred collections of content as well as understand how your customers are creating their own lifestreams.

See the sections below for additional resources on these three topics.  Also see my post Are You Trapped in a Destination Mindset?

Update: The cool thing about using these tools is that you can make sure that you can get the right set of your content to the right people.  By creating custom feeds or widgets, you allow your customers to pull just want they want.

Hrjonlucas2

RSS Feeds

Definition: RSS is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. Many news-related sites, weblogs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS Feed to whoever wants it. RSS solves a problem for people who regularly use the web. It allows you to easily stay informed by retrieving the latest content from the sites you are interested in. You save time by not needing to visit each site individually.  AND you can usually save a customized search as an RSS feed which is very helpful when you want to monitor what people are saying about you, your company and your brand(s).

Note: most blog and content management software offers the ability to syndicate content via RSS.  You generally don't have to create these files manually.  Check your product's documentation or technical support site.

Hrjonlucas2

Widgets

Definition: A widget is a small web application that you can place on your web site or blog, or on various homepages like iGoogle, Yahoo, Facebook, and Netvibes, or even onto the desktop of some operating systems like Vista or MacOS (Leopard).

Tools:

Best Links:

Hrjonlucas2

LifeStreaming

Definition: An online record of a person's daily activities, either via direct video feed or via aggregating the person's online content such as blog posts, social network updates, and online photos.

Tools:

Best Links:

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