PR People Take Note - Targeted Social Networks Are Coming

Quora_logo

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.

 

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Wave goodbye to Foursquare and Gowalla

Foursquare

It had to happen. It was inevitable. Rumours are abound on Mashable and Advertising Age that Facebook is adding location features this month, which probably means the end for existing location-based services like Foursquare and Gowalla. Facebook’s huge critical mass allows it to get to where its smaller rivals could only dream of being and at the flick of a switch.

For more on that and an interesting company called Sticky Bits, check out my Bullet Points blog post.

Let battle commence: Facebook vs Google about to get serious

Facebook-google

There is an interesting guest post on Social Media news site Mashable about the ‘billion dollar battle’ between Facebook and Google to be your default social profile.

It highlights how the talk around location based services and group purchasing tools hasn’t yet gone mainstream, despite the hype. The real questions are whether Google Buzz and Wave are going to reach their much vaunted potential and if social commerce (the ability to buy ‘direct’ from within Facebook) is the way forward for retailers. Check out sites like Payvment to see what this is all about.

The article also looks at the phenomenon of virtual gifts. I have never personally given a virtual gift as I think they are nonsensical; however, other people clearly disagree as there is apparently a $1 billion market in the US alone.

Both Google and Facebook are moving towards ‘doing an Amazon’ and making it easier and quicker to move to point of purchase when looking at sites that have jumped on the social commerce bandwagon by accepting integration with the internet’s two biggest players.

The contributor asks who will you choose, which is an interesting question. But I want to know whether you are happy having one default browser that essentially follows you around the web, eventually giving almost omnipotent influence over your web lives? It appears it will be really useful and make purchasing quicker and having two companies competing will hopefully mean better offerings for the wider world.

I should cocoa

Nestle

There has been a lot of online debate recently around Nestlé’s Facebook fan page.

The page has almost 100,000 fans, which initially looks like a pretty good situation for the marketing folk at Nestlé. Except for the fact that many of the people who have signed up as fans have done so just to slag the company off, mainly about its use of palm oil.

As is usually the case with these online storms, there are some people standing up for Nestlé, but they do seem to be outnumbered by the haters.

Some argue that this is a great example of Social Media in action as it is a platform for people to vent their already existing views about a brand; on the other hand, where is the engagement from the brand and should there be a filter for the people putting up irrelevant, “funny” posts?

What do you think?