We have Twitter for instantaneous news collection, dissemination and research; Facebook for a mix of personal and professional networking and larger community collection; LinkedIn for keeping our professional profile updated and for recruitment; Foursquare for broadcasting your location; Facebook Places for following the location of others, blogging for deeper content and so on and so forth.

It seems we have all we need in terms of the large social networks. What we need now is services that filter, structure and personalise the kind of information that flows through these channels. In essence, this is the reason why the Old Spice virals took off. The minute the personalised videos started appearing is when it went from very successful to stratospheric promotion for the brand. We also need products that better connect the ‘real world’ with the internet, in a meaningful way of course.

A couple of resources come to mind here. One is Planely, a service that allows you to see if anyone in your network is getting on the same flight so you can meet for a drink or share a cab. That’s all it’s for, and therefore some would say limited. However, I’d argue that it’s useful for the very same reason – there is no confusion as to why you are using it so you are more likely to achieve outcomes for your input of time.

One service that has recently hit the mainstream is Quora. It’s a question and answer service that is a mix between Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers, LinkedIn Answers and Twitter. There are apparently about 200,000 users at the moment and the content appears to be very good, perhaps because there aren’t too many people bringing the standard down as yet.

For the rest of the post, click here.

I recently shared my thoughts on StopPress.co.nz on what’s happened in New Zealand’s marketing world in 2010. It got me looking back on what has been a great year. It also got me thinking about what lies in store for 2011.

Here are some of the biggest professional realisations I will take away from 2010, as posted on my company’s blog.

I’ve heard or read that many marketing types believe that one of the themes of social media next year will be continuous dialogue with customers. For a while I thought this sounded great; ongoing dialogue means more opportunities for marketing. And this is all synonymous with social media, or so they have us believe…

Having mulled it over, I’m not convinced that ongoing dialogue is the right way forward for most brands. Let me quickly clarify something. I feel that, broadly speaking, there are two types of brands when it comes to social media and online marketing: those that I call ‘utility brands’ and those that aren’t. Utility brands are those in the utility sectors themselves, along with pseudo-utility brands like telcos, banks and public sector organisations. Utility brands are those where we have few opportunities to switch (think long term contracts with electricity companies or telcos). Non-utility brands are those that we can pick up and discard easily. If a restaurant is rubbish, we just won’t go back, for instance.

For the rest of the blog post, please click here.

We had an interesting Social Media Club on Tuesday night. The topic was ‘Social Media for Social Networking’, an important topic for us all.

Our speakers were:

Linda Coles, trainer and speaker on building and maintaining relationships online (www.bluebanana.co.nz; @bluebanana20)

Jane Kennelly, Company Director of frog recruitment, industry veteran and innovator (www.frogrecruitment.co.nz; @frogrecruitment)

And me, Alex Erasmus of Bullet PR (www.bulletpr.co.nz; @AlexErasmus)

Linda mainly discussed LinkedIn and we can all use it for establishing and strengthening business relationships. I think her talk reminded everyone of the points of difference that LinkedIn has over the likes of Facebook. The most pertinent point for me was that it only takes a few minutes a day to keep your online profile looking good. In many ways, it’s simply a ‘hygiene factor’ for when you’re looking for work, but it’s a good habit to get into.

Jane Kennelly of frog recruitment showed she is one of the few in her sector who is embracing social media. There is certainly a sea change in recruitment, where employers are now often looking at LinkedIn profiles and not CV’s. This is especially true for those working in media, but will surely be true of many more jobs in future. This is, like a lot of social media related subjects, heavily tied in to faster broadband, free wi-fi zones and smart phone adoption. Jane gave the example of MOTAT, who produced a great recruitment video, which beats traditional methods.

I finished the evening with a quick run-through my take on online networking. My opinion is that you should start by being interested in what others are saying and listen to their responses. It also pays to have a clear understanding of what you are looking for from the relationship. Networking for networking’s sake doesn’t do any of us any favours. Moreover, are you actually adding value online? Rather than trying to connect with as many people as you can, why not try and do something different from others in your field so that people want to connect with you? This is a much better way of approaching it.

When I mentioned the #markchat that I’d set up, Jayson Bryant, of the Wine Vault informed us that some people’s tweets don’t appear in hashtagged tweet streams, even when they’ve used the correct tag. I have enquired into why this is and it appears it’s just  a technical fault with Twitter. Not a lot we can do about that one then, unless someone has a contact at Twitter?

The most interesting point of the evening was possibly when Vaughn Davis asked if too much thought about what you’re saying online prevents people from seeing the real you. My perspective is that it’s less about ‘hiding’ information from people and more about thinking whether anyone else is interested in what I’m saying. Maybe lots of people are fascinated that Justin Bieber is eating some cake or that Lady Gaga is going to wear a dress made of vegetables to an awards do; however, I don’t think the people in my business/ social circles are interested in this sort of fatuous content. And they’re certainly not interested in it coming from me.

Still, I’m not sure I’ve got the personal/professional balance totally right online. When you are passionate about your job, it’s tricky to draw the line sometimes. As I said on the night, what I do know is that you get what you give and you shouldn’t say anything you wouldn’t be comfortable saying in person.

Special thanks to Julian Waters of Communico web design and development for organising the night. We would also like to thank our sponsors, Monteith's, Hell Pizza and Saatchi & Saatchi, who hosted the event.

This morning I read a really thought provoking article on The Guardian website about Google Instant. The article is essentially all about how the internet is making our attention spans shorter and shorter.

For those of you who don’t know, Google Instant is a new addition to internet search technology that shows results below the search window as you type. The aim is to reduce the time spent searching for what you’re looking for, often without the need to even press ‘enter’ to bring up the right results. And yes, you can turn it off if you so choose.

For the rest of the blog post, please head over to Bullet Points.

Interesting video insights here from Brian Solis. It’s all about the movement from ‘social graphs’ to ‘interest graphs’.

He touches on what is surely the next significant step in social media: personalising the content we see.

The developments with Twitter’s advertising platform will be a key part of this as they try and tailor messages that have relevance to what you talk about.

Social media is rapidly becoming (has become?) such a deep sea of content, that it’s hard to separate what’s important from what’s just noise.

I just blogged over on Bullet Points about the need for long-term strategic planning when it comes to digital marketing and where we all fit in to the process.

I also found a really cheesy picture (see above) that I found when I typed ‘human touch’ into Google.