Social Media

Since the advent of the Internet the ability of fans to share brands and shape brands has never been more open. Many are afraid of what it means when fans, clients, detractors and others can have fun with, share, mock, or otherwise talk about a brand.

The E*Trade Babyis a popular character representing the E*trade Brand. With recent turbulence in the marker a funny (yet somewhat crass) version of an E*trade baby commercial was made. E*Trade got it taken down for copyright infringement.

Last week I started a general review of Google+ however this week I want to dive into the business aspects of Google+. The first thing to say is that as of right now business is persona non-grata on Google+. Do not attempt to use Google+ for business at this time.

LinkedIn is an excellent tool to market your portfolio of job experience on the Internet. This social media tool allows you to publicly display your profile that acts in many ways as a resume. Additionally you can have a place to put a profile photo of yourself (professional of course), give and receive recommendations, and have a summary of your work experience.

Social media is a field of crops that the populous is harvesting in order to suit their needs and appetite for personal and professional connections. Businesses are cultivating these crops in advantageous ways to better connect with others and gather followers in order to reap the benefits, creating a cornucopia of knowledge.

This post was a response to a question posted on a forum about the disruption that Google maps is having on the first page of Google. Google is forever evolving. This debate will be mostly irrelevant in 2 months(ish) because Google will have made enough changes to the way they decide what sites are relevant or not. Right now Google is switching (like Microsoft Bing has in more significant ways) to highly valuing social input. Search engines will use the information gathered from sites like Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Amazon and others to determine the relevance of content.

foursquare allows users to share their location with friends by “checking in” to businesses via a smartphone application or by text message. When you sign up for foursquare and have the application on your mobile device you can physically walk into a brick and mortar store (hotel, restaurant, etc.) and an alert will notify friends that you are there, in real time, via Facebook or Twitter.

We live in a world of messages. This world has been evolving greatly with the advent of social media and tools like this blog. When anyone can blog and use blogs to define themselves as experts what does that mean for the future of publishing? Watch this video and remind yourself that the future of how we take in information is a future where each one of shares and we pay attention to the things we care about.

Today I clicked on an ad on from Facebook for Sprint and I got to the new Now Widget which is one of the coolest/strangest things I have ever seen. From this talking widget you can see how many sticky notes are being created, top words being used online, Google searches as they happen and news. This disying aray of content is put together to promote the Sprint Now Network. I wonder if Sprint will see sales from this site? This site just goes to show you that there are many things left to try with social media and the Internet.

Today I was asked if every business uses social networking how will we find any businesses and will there still be any value? This got me thinking….oh no! If every business and nonprofit had a blog, a Facebook page, LinkedIn business profile and so many other others things out there would there be even more junk out on the Internet. Please forgive me in advance for my indecisiveness. Since I don’t have an answer I am going to give a few plausible answers and try to come to a conclusion.