Someone asked me “The Benefits of On-line Social Networking ?”
Seeing Facebook, Twitter, Bebo, Orkut, Flickr simply as marketing devices misses the point on many different levels. Web2.0 is less about networking and more about online communities. There is tremendous potential in this, but also many pitfalls.
The only way to get traction from the WOM potential is to the spend time not only getting familiar with the causal lexicon and unspoken rules, but to achieve a certain amount of ‘immersion’ through the experience.
You need to make a commitment to reach out to other members of the community, to get involved, establish your online ‘street cred’, gain trust and make a few real friends through this process. The last thing you want is to be seen as a social network ‘spammer’ – using the access to many different people who share interests to send un-wanted spam. I have had to drop a number of people off my ‘approved’ list due to inappropriate zeal in sending out unwanted invites to groups after I made a personal appeal to remove me from their list.
Of course, there is never enough time in the day to do this across the spectrum of available social websites. Establishing accounts with Facebook, Linked In, Beebo, Flickr is something that over time will be potentially useful, but the key is to find one site that fits your interests and passions, and to focus on getting immersed in the experience, put yourself out there, develop some real connections with people you that share your interests and passions.
Tricky stuff, and not for the light of heart. An unspoken bargain is struck between you and the users in the community that participation is a two way street. In order for you to get connected to the movers and the shakers, you have to give to get back in return.
Transparency is a huge issue, due to the speed in which Google and the other search engines index content these days. Always a good idea to put down twitter after you have had one too many. If you like to engage in late night rants, I would look into creating some parallel accounts that do not have you true name or business name. You would be amazed at how fast twitter gets indexed by Google in certain keyword spaces.
What I find really exciting is the fact that the web is finally living up to it’s potential with these new online applications, Open Source, WiFi and mobile. People are engaging each other in new and unique ways, with simple, powerful tools and hi speed access. People are out there, fact checking and calling big media out on the table when the the spin doctors and political propaganda hide the truth, or engage in outright lying.
Advertising and Marketing is beginning to go through a paradigm shift due to the power social networks and user based content. This last year it has become clear that dismissing the complaints and concerns of the customer is done at the peril of the company’s bottom line.
The cool part about this phenomena is that is it happening now, and due to the hesitation and risks involved, many of the Fortune 500 – 1000 companies don’t seem to be able to wrap their minds around the strange notion of actually listening to their customer base (for a variety of different reasons). This presents a great opportunity for smaller companies and individuals to be able to establish themselves through the use of blogs, blog networks and social networks and create new relationships based on transparency and trust.
Techdirt’s Mike Masnick Rocks !
Been following TechDirt for a few years now, and I believe he is square on the money on this one !
Techdirt founder Mike Masnick has followed the twists and turns of the digital music debate for more than a decade, offering some of the most prescient and lucid information and arguments on the topic anywhere. Today he tackles growing calls for a voluntary music-licensing scheme, pushed most recently by Warner Music Group to universities, that would basically allow file sharing by having ISPs impose a surcharge on all users to be paid out to copyright holders. (A version of this has been done before with blank media like tape cassettes in some markets, including Canada, but this would be a massive expansion of the idea.)
TechDirt and its; republish on Wired
Really excited to see this getting picked up by Wired, for it puts the discussion one step closer to mainstream media, which in the end is where it needs to head to have more people engage in a public debate at large.
Net Neutrality Heats up again in the wave of recent events.
Comcast throttling bandwidth form P2P networks, Verizon censoring political text messages, I guess the Telcos will never change. trying to hang on to an old dying business model in the wake of the emergence of companies like Google, Flickr, Facebook, eBay, etc.
If the AT&T, Verizon and Comcast get there way, this will be the future tiered pricing of the Web: (from a graphic found floating around the Internet. If you know who created this, please email me)
Jim, if you are out there and find you posted comment ‘reprinted’ here, drop me an email. I have not read anything anywhere over the last year on Net Neutrality that is as clear and direct with a historical context as this. I would love that info to attribute, Thank you.
The notion that the telcos and cablecos are free to do whatever they want with “their” networks is nonsense. First of all, these have an remain heavily regulated companies, with at least 51 state and federal regulators overseeing their business activities. To obtain a less regulated state of competition, all of these companies made deals with regulatory bodies and legislatures, few of which have they honored. Executive teams at these companies will continue to violate such agreements so long as the FCC and Congress let them. What you see now is a few Congress-people awaking from their stupor to the seriousness of the flawed telecom policies of the US government (under Clinton and Bush administrations). Our country has neither a fully deregulated telecom industry, nor a fully regulated one. For as long as this purgatory continues, the US consumers and businesses will not get access to communications services that are and will be available in other countries around the world. By fully regulated, I don’t necessarily mean like the old ATT days. A more viable model would be a fully regulated wholesale monopoly that must provided bandwidth on a common basis to all its customers, which would be the entities actually providing service to businesses and consumers.Alternatively, a completely deregulated environment would reserve certain radio spectrum bandwidth for government use, and let the “market” sort out how the rest should best be used.
Regarding Ted’s assertion that there is no public Internet in America, that’s also nonsense. While ISP’s are unregulated, the underlying networks (physical and logical for OSI enthusiasts) are regulated and therefore subject to public policy expressed vis those regulations. There would be no Internet as we know it now had the Internet not originated as a public service of the federal government. As a former telco employee who participated in the planning process, I can assert this as a fact. Prior to the creation of the Mosaic browser in 1994, all the RBOC’s were attempting to build their own “information superhighway” or broadband network. It was the intent of each RBOC to tightly control all content on that network, as well as the devices that were permitted to attach to it. In that world, their would have been no Amazon, Ebay, Google or Facebook, because the telco bureaucrats would never have allowed it. Fortunately for us all, Netscape popularized the Mosaic browser, AOL popularized dial-up Internet access and the RBOC’s have been trying to put the unregulated Internet genie back in the bottle ever since.
The telco/cablecos excel at one thing and one thing only – manipulating the regulatory bodies.They know their legacy business (voice minutes sold on a metered usage basis). They do not know how to transition that business model to a broadband, open access environment. So every attempt to “manage” P2P taffic, or VOIP traffic, or locked cell phones is simply an attempt to revert the world to one they understand. To believe otherwise is foolish, especially if you have never listened to an internal telco/cableco discussion of such issues. Bottom line: unless Congress wises up to the real state of affairs, bandwidth will remain a scarce and rationed commodity in the US, while other countries with more enlightened telecom policies develop a surpluses (France, Korea, Japan, Scandinavia, etc.).
Post #17 by Jim read on techcrunch
