Social Media in Small "Business"

I'm seeing the use of Social Media being used in a "backwards" fashion. Normally it's small business who's willing to leverage newer tools to their advantage, but with Social Media it seems to be just the opposite. I was noticing the company I used to work with, this is a small software development and web hosting shop, has nothing online outside their local network. None of their principals have a blog, no way of knowing anything about them without going to their website. Now websites are OK, but they tend to be stagnant and they require an active user to find them. I was explaining to one of the principals for this company, as a user if I'm looking for a software development company, I'm going to go with the one that has an ACTIVE web presence, the one that shows that they are leaders, as opposed to those that just have websites. I think a small business that doesn't have an active presence, is doing themselves harm.

Active vs. Passive

I was thinking about Active vs. Passive while on a tour for a local plantation where I live. This plantation is cared for by the local museum and they are begging for people to come out to their events, they have postings on their website, they print out fliers and use word of mouth. This is good for people who are actively looking for something to do, this isn't good for people who may just be sitting around wondering what they could do today. A very simple Twitter or Facebook posting is a great way to push out information to these passive searchers, now passive isn't a negative, it could be that the person is just too lazy to search for something, but it could be that the person is so active that they don't have time to look for things to do, or they might be planning the next week, month, etc... when they see the posting. I feel this museum is in the end hurting their goal by not posting on Twitter/Facebook, it isn't that difficult, it takes maybe an hour to set up both Twitter/Facebook and then have Facebook accept the feed from Twitter. The museum would then just need to post to Twitter and have it propagate to Facebook. You can then configure Twitter/Facebook to email you if there's any need for attention.

This same issue goes for my local municipality, I'm renting here now, but I'm looking to purchase soon. I make a very good income, but I would refuse to live here, they have no social policy, they alert their citizens to events by placing a gasoline run sign board on the main road in town, sigh talk about a waste in money. I've spoken to both the Museum and the City about using social media, but they don't see the reason why. I explain to them, but they then admit that they have passed a resolution AGAINST using social media, again this is backwards. Why would you pass a resolution against something that could only make you money?

Change

How you get people to change is beyond me. There seems to be a wall set up by many older users. I was at a conference in Miami recently and one of the people lecturing says that he's using social media, but doesn't see that it's any good. This is upsetting to me. Social media isn't going to solve all your problems, but it needs to be seen as another tool to use in the arsenal of marketing and networking. Get to know people who do have followers, become a leader (don't just post marketing material, people will see you as a spammer), show that you're a person and share with people.

Social Media

Lately I've been researching social media, trying to figure out what good it is outside of kids wanting to show pictures of their latest parties, people showing what they are doing on trips or everyone trying to find a "friend". As I'm sure you know there are several social media sites out there, sites like: Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Swurl, Blogger, VisualCV, YouTube, etc... Most do the same thing, some do a bit more. I'll breakdown the sites as I see them:

1. Facebook - This seems to be fairly well put together, it doesn't have a strong search interface, you can't change the look and feel of the product, which is fine by me (you can do this on MySpace and most of the sites people build are unusable). Facebook is purely for family and friends, you shouldn't be using this to build a business network. You can hook facebook up to items such as blogger, though it doesn't give you the ability to do things like sort your posts, and it seems like you can have only one blog.
2. MySpace - The search with this is great, but I think everything else is second rate. The advertisements on the pages overtake the screen. The ability to tweak the look and feel of the screen has made most of the sites unreadable (things like white text on pink background). You can also associate music with your site, which is awful, everyone seems to have some junky background music playing
3. Twitter - I need to play with twitter some more, I'd love to find a business use for it, but outside being able to twit with all my friends, this doesn't make much sense to me. Now if you could develop streams that were business friendly, that would be fantastic for remote development teams who need to be alerted to something ASAP.
4. LinkedIn - LinkedIn is great I think, but it's for business only. Odd thing about linked in are the people who want to be ranked high by having hundreds or thousands of connections. I think it's useless to link in with these people, since you are then connected with everyone through them (and they don't know most of their connections). If you can manage your LinkedIn site properly, it can be a very valuable tool for you, try not to get into the "I've got more connections than you game", it should be the quality of connections that matter, not the quantity. I believe every professional should be using LinkedIn to keep contacts. The plus for LinkedIn is that in theory as people change jobs, they update their contact information in LinkedIn so you can contact them.
5. Plaxo - This is an interesting tool, it seems to be a combination of LinkedIn and Facebook. You can segment your content to friends, family, or business. This is great, but it's still another social site to maintain (phew it's getting tyring maintaining all of my sites).
6. Swurl - This site is supposed to aggregate of all your other sites, though I'm not sure if it's working that way. I've hooked up blogger, twitter, picasa, and youtube. My concern with Swurl is that there isn't much security, if there's anything I want to have private, well with Swurl, it's out there.
7. Blogger - I think Blogger is pretty decent, it's got a good editor (not great, but it works), it saves regularly and automatically (which is good for any work on the web were items such as browsers crash). You can modify the background HTML, use custom built templates or build your own (build your own is bad in some hands). What it doesn't have is a way to push your information to the world, that would be nice. I've got a couple of ideas about how to do this, but I'm keeping them secret for now ;).
8. VisualCV - VisualCV allows you to build a visual resume. It's not really a social site, but I think it's the wave of the future. It has some limitations, such as you can't modify the HTML behind the scenes, but overall it's a great site. Everyone should have a VisualCV ready to hand out.
9. YouTube - For me (actually my daughter) this site is purely for fun, take a funky video and post it up there. In the real world it's been gaining grounds as a place to start your viral marketing. It's been very well received in that world.

My take on Social Sites are that they are great tools for both play and work, and everyone should have something up and remain active, but you need to be careful about what you put up. One example is a coworker called in sick, seems she wasn't feeling good, if you checked her facebook page you would see pictures of the wild party she was attending the night before.

Security is a big issue, you should lock down all of your sites to only friends, there really isn't need for people to know all this information about you. Be careful in linking sites, I think tools like Swurl are cool, but they could cause issues with security. Be aware that in order to contact everyone, you'll most likely need multiple social sites, which means that unless you use something like Swurl, you'll need to update them all (swurl has an excellent timeline feature).

Are there any big winners, I don't think so, there isn't a simple and excellent tool like Google Search for the social media world. Biggest issues are security and having to maintain multiple sites. Great advantages, you can update most sites via an email, so if I go on vacation I can email my blogs in from my phone, I can even include a picture with that (of course I'm a geek, so I have a phone that can send emails and take pictures).

Who should be using these sites? EVERYONE! In my family all my neices/nephews and two of my brothers are on either LinkedIn, Facebook or MySpace (I think my 3rd brother should be, but I'm not sure if he'll do it or not).

Traditional vs Social Media

I Started thinking today about the differences between traditional online media, such as newspapers, newsletters, research sites, etc... and social media, such as blogs, twitter, instant message, etc... How can these be intertwined and should they be?

I guess we need to figure out the definition of traditional media and social media. It doesn't really matter if my definition matches with the rest of the world, but it needs to be something that I can work with in my blog (this is one of the joys of being a mathematician, I can define things as I like it and not worry about the rest of the world).

Definitions:

• Traditional Media: Let us define tradition media as sites that come from traditional paper sources, such as newspapers, newsletters, magazines, research sites (such as professional sites developed for legal, scientific, monetary, scholarly, etc... research).
• Social Media: Anything that is generated from the public at large, such as blogs, twitter, IM, websites, etc... It doesn't have to be something done by an amateur, since there are professional bloggers or people who blog since their jobs require it.
• Gray Areas: There are gray areas, there are "blogs" that are written on news sites by the anchors or other writers, I'm assuming that in these blogs they can express their opinion (subjective), instead of the news (objective). I can't use objective to describe traditional media, since it could be material that has been written subjectively.

Merger

Can the two forms of media merge? You betcha! It's already happening with traditional media, they are pulling in postings from users, taking live polls, publishing blogs, etc... all without the editorial over site that happens with their primary means of communication. Could this mean that we'll end up getting our news via our phones and twitter, possibly.

The bigger question to me is that can we apply some of the methods that are used in tradition media to apply structure to social media? I believe that this could happen on a level, but not without people providing labels for this post. These labels are essentially meta-data that is attached to the blog, this meta-data can be used for structure, it could be used to build your own personal taxonomy (hmm, I think I'll add that to my labels, taxonomy is just one of those words I think are cool). How can we apply meta-data to twitter? Some is inherent (date/time), can we also get location from the phone's GPS (do we want to).

Answers

I'm not really looking for answers to this, but I'm actually pondering more than not.