Social media is all about candid conversations and developing relationships. Blogs started it all by giving people a new voice, but that voice is still largely a one-way conversation. Most posts don’t have many comments, especially when you eliminate all the simple “great post” or “thanks for mentioning me/my company” entries. Sure you’ll see a few high profile blogs with hundreds of posts debating the issues and building on the points of the blog, but once you get beyond Technorati’s top 100 that level of interaction is rare.

Forums and discussion boards are a step up and many communities have deep and insightful conversations on very niche topics. The problem is you often have to look pretty hard to find these groups and you often see many people shouting at each other hiding behind anonymous usernames.

Twitter is different. The culture of Twitter is very open and personal. People are identified by their real names and their picture appears next to their name whenever they participate. A click on your name brings you to a profile page with a history of your tweets and links to your blog or website. Conversation occurs is real-time so whatever is on people’s minds at home and at work is represented here, as it happens. As you can imagine, that includes many discussions about brands and product experiences.

There is certainly a lot of noise here, but that is what monitoring tools like Radian6 and specialty search engines like Summize are for. As with any type of social media, the sheer volume of conversations requires that you use smart tools to organize the data and apply metrics to understand the trends.

Companies are involved now. For example, Comcast has been widely praised for the way they are using Twitter. Service reps are monitoring tweets about the brand and reaching out personally to get their service problems solved. Customers love to see that their voice matters and companies are taking them seriously.

The funny thing is that the opportunity here isn’t necessarily about Twitter. Twitter itself may not even be a big part of this trend in the future – unless they get bought. Twitter is a private, understaffed organization struggling to find a way to make money…and they have a lot of shortcomings. I see the “fail whale” more than I see my kids in a typical day. What’s important here is that Twitter is a great innovation that started a new type of consumer behavior.

Thanks to Twitter, people are now comfortable making frequent posts about what they are doing and what they are thinking throughout the day. Aggregators like Friendfeed make this even more interesting. They collect your “tweets” and then add many of your other online activities - like shared news items from your RSS reader, Facebook updates, and product reviews submitted - and make them all available in a single “lifestream” that is published online.

Not only does this lifestream change the way people present themselves online, it encourages them to share more. Google talked about this at the Supernova conference recently. They say people have been reluctant to share a lot of their lives because they don’t want to feel like they are interrupting and spamming their friends. In this new lifestreaming environment, sharing is encouraged since friends can subscribe to your news feed and view your pictures, stories, product reviews and commentary when they want to see them. People are now motivated to share more of their life as they grow their network and shape their online image.

As the information in these profiles become richer it becomes even easier to get advice and recommendations on purchase decisions from your extended online social network. This pushes the influence of corporate marketing and advertising messages even further away from the consumer.

But this is where social media marketing gets interesting. Lifestreaming facilitates the power of consumer-to-consumer influence making it even more important for companies to be actively involved in social media. These profiles are a new window into the lives of the advocates and critics surrounding your brand. You can learn a lot more about what they like or dislike and track the impact of their influence all across the web so you can engage with them on a more personal level and participate in their lifestream.

I use Twitter to communicate and share interesting interactive and social media news and issues. If you find that interesting, follow me here.

The news out of Burma continues to prove the country’s need for responsible leadership and humanitarian aid, and many thousands of Burmese citizens are still in need. There are those who may question a donation to a political campaign in this time of human need, but until we can change the Burmese leadership into the hands of those elected by the people, the current government will continue to block the aid from making it to those who need it most.

For those who would like to donate directly to the relief effort, we also wanted to provide a quick list of humanitarian agencies that are already on the ground in Burma, making it slightly easier for them to get contributions to those who are in desperate need.

http://www.foundationburma.org/may-cyclone-message.pr3.5.7.08.php
http://hope-international.com/appeals/08_myanmar.html
http://www.ideorg.org/work/myanmar.php
http://www.psi.org/news/0508c.html
http://www.metta-myanmar.org/
http://www.cwasiafund.org/projects.php
http://www.worldconcern.org/NETCOMMUNITY/Page.aspx?&pid=397
http://www.opusa.org/whoweare/pressreleases/myanmarcyclone2.html
http://www.justgiving.com/burmarelief

Thanks to Hella Delicious for the link list and the moving video clip you left in your comment!

To read the original post, and all the comments, click here.

Social media is all about relationships. Everything you do in social media is about cultivating and nurturing the relationships of the people that shape your brand. The different ways to measure that influence is what the slides below are all about.

This short presentation summarizes the different types of influence in social media and how they can be measured. Since that elusive business impact is so difficult to quantify, I included some interesting industry studies that point to the specific ways social media is impacting business results.

I’d love to hear what you think about these slides and if you have additional ideas to make it better. Leave a comment, send an email or find me on Twitter.

If you have any questions about our group or the work we are delivering for our clients, feel free to contact me by email or on Twitter.

Initially, noise management came in the form of the RSS reader, pulling together feeds from blogs and news sources so you didn’t have to make multiple stops on the web. Then came blog aggregators, and as we embrace the term “social web”, we find ourselves with activity aggregators like FriendFeed and Facebook, whose activities’ can be dropped right back into RSS readers onto blogs. (Well, not Facebook – their information isn’t going anywhere.)

However, there is still the same amount of noise. It is now aggregated, but just as time consuming to go through. The most “social” thing about these services is being able to choose who to get information from. In terms of reducing the noise down to the items that matter most to an individual, there’s still a ways to go.

It will be interesting to see what the next generation of social aggregators will look like, and how well they will work. Services like FriendFeed and ReadBurner already have the framework in place, but it is still a matter of letting users view information through an even finer-toothed comb. Smart RSS readers like Illumio (via ReadWriteWeb) are focusing more directly on the problem by allowing users to set up specific preferences.

The next challenge for the social web is finding the balance between the information people want and information people need. If the web stays this noisy, they may begin to tune out.

On Micropersuasion.com, Steve Rubel writes:

“By 2009, the Radicati Group predicts that we’ll spend 41% of our time managing email. Now add to that the IMs, documents, Facebook pokes, RSS feeds, Twitter tweets and text messages coming at us and we’re officially way oversubscribed. Unfortunately, the problem will not abate. Human attention is finite. It doesn’t scale. Worse, the pace of change today is so rapid there’s a huge need to stay digitally savvy.”

He’s right. What balance I once had has now been ruined with my new found love for Twitter.

Clay Shirky, NYU professior and author of the new book “Here Comes Everybody” offers another perspective. In this presentation from last month’s Web 2.0 conference, Clay makes the case that Americans actually have a tremendous “cognitive surplus” from hours of TV viewing that can be applied to participation activities online.

To illustrate the scale of this surplus, Clay estimates that the entirety of Wikipedia represents about 100 million hours of human thought. That my sound staggering until you realize that Americans spend about that much time every weekend just watching TV ads. According to Clay, the 200 billion hours that Americans spend watching television each year represents about 2,000 Wikipedia projects. That is per year.

Nobody is implying that behavior will shift that dramatically, but just a 1% shift of American’s time from TV to participation online would amount to 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

So while the social media savvy may feel over saturated with information, we have to remember that a majority of the population still haven’t joined the party.

Here’s the video of the presentation. Also, the full text transcription is on his blog.

In this interview, Paul describes the dramatic shift in consumer behavior from TV viewing to computer browsing. But with so much of today’s market dollars still dedicated toward TV a tectonic pressure is building that will soon cause a huge change in the business model of television in the next couple years.

Enjoy the interview and feel free to add your comments on this issues here.

Webmaster Radio
Web Content Technology Akamai CEO Paul Sagan profiles his companys work in web content technology developed so that end users can easily access web content with the help of thousands of servers , plus he discuss the evolution of delivering rich media content Show Host: Larry Weber Show: Market Edge Channel: Internet Marketing

We’ve been busy here at DIG and haven’t had as much time to post as we’d like. We love this blog, but our client work comes first. While we don’t normally talk about our client work here, this month we have a rare exception. Occasionally we have a project that touches our hearts in a way that changes our lives and our attitudes. Burma: It Can’t Wait is one of those projects, and with the recent cyclone and the need to get aid to the citizens of Burma (also reported as Myanmar in the news), this campaign is even more important. If you want to learn more about the campaign, please take a look at the site or add the application to your Facebook profile and help us raise one million voices of support for Burma.

As part of our commitment to the people of Burma, Digital Influence Group will contribute $10 to the U.S. Campaign for Burma for each unique, non-spam comment or trackback to this post, up to $5,000 total. The deadline for commenting is May 31, 2008, because for Burma: It Can’t Wait.