There have been a number of conversations concerning Attention, Engagement, Influence and Social Media measurement in general. I wrote about one here.
Sixty Second View has attempted to measure your social media footprint via the Social Media Index and it’s another good effort with some reasonable assumptions. Whilst there’s no golden bullet at present – much like search – there’s a set of criteria of sorts to measure against and then the 5% that’s human perception.
The continuing success of Facebook cannot be ignored and it will continue to have mass user adoption at a consumer level for many months, even years, to come. As I mentioned in another post, BooksOnCampus is a website that requires you to login before being able to access the site.
When Facebook starts using this identity system as a widget the potential will be for it to become what Microsoft Passport never was. For further insights into Facebook be sure to check out the Inside Facebook blog.
The implication is that Facebook could eclipse OpenID adoption and become the online identity solution. There’s just one problem…currently Google can’t search inside Facebook.
Facebook = Blackhole, Whirlpool, Vortex.
Facebook is a closed garden with one way doors. Data in, but no data out. It’s true that Facebook have opened up their API to developers, but none of the content produced within Facebook’s pages can get out and be indexed or referenced by another company or social network. With so many companies, startups, ecommerce companies building widgets for this platform did anyone stop to consider that they’re not letting data flow out? Matt Dickman agrees, watch his video. Here’s what we should be concerned about:
1) My non-Facebook friends can’t see what I’m doing. If I link to Facebook, you have to register and sign up. That sucks.
2) After I’ve setup my profile, I should have the ability to make my profile public and let folks see the elements I want.
3) What about my network? data? Profile? I want to export those. (Same thing to LinkedIn). The rolodex of today has an important field “friends”. I want to be able to export my network to other systems and applications.
4) As far as I know Facebook doesn’t have RSS…
Facebook (and whichever network follows suit) has a huge opportunity to not just be an application platform, but to be a true identity system for the entire network. Before we start jumping up and down, giving Facebook all of our data, and building our company widgets in Facebook should we first think about whether this is a black hole?
The smaller, more niche social networks or services such as Plaxo and others are building as open a platform as possible, enabling import, export and inter-change across the entire internet and enabling any search engine to find the content you’ve chosen to make public…will the long tail of competitors to Facebook eventually provide a better system to Facebook’s?
As Jeremiah Owyang notes:
“Facebook is a closed garden with one-way doors.
This means that data comes in, but it’s not coming out – yet.”
The Inside Facebook blog suggests that Google is not relevant to Facebook since it has it’s own news and feed ranking indexes and systems, its own search tool and its own social network to find information:
“Future information finding systems will evolve to use data from your social network, yielding results based upon your trusted peers” – Inside Facebook, NFO (News Feed Optimization) is the new SEO.
This concept of ‘trust’ is tied to identity and also to the belief that word of mouth advice between friends, families and colleagues is by far the strongest form of marketing around – crucially, it also flies in the face of Google’s current search algorithm which is based on popularity, not accuracy or trust.
If search evolves, will we rely on personal social network features (what do my friends think and recommend) over search? Will we evolve to smaller network based searches?
In many ways, this is what Mahalo was trying to overcome, the problem with that is that I don’t know (and therefore don’t trust) the editors creating the Mahalo data. This is why so many thought leaders are already thinking about their Facebook strategy.
Although Google continues to evolve it’s AI to build better search tools, trust continues to be the leading factor in finding information. Google’s search results have much to be desired: popular is not the same as correct.
The future of search will contain human elements in addition to algorithms.
Capture the Conversation is a great dource of information and tutorials on setting up and maintaining various Internet social media and search visibility tools such as Digg, NewsGator, Google Reader. The copany won a Gold Peak award in the Social Media category in this year’s American Marketing Awards.
Have a dig around, there’s an enormous amount of info…I found loads of it really useful, particularly in terms of getting started, subscribing to feeds and joining the conversations that are being started.
This widget can be added to your own blog by visiting Uniqlo’s website. The concept behind the site is simple: Enter your blog page details to be added to a global map of blogs and copy a snippet of code to add this widget to your blog.
Nice piece of online marketing – It’s desireable and well executed. Go get it!
