Digital Marketing, Media, PR Analysis And Insight – The Future Buzz

That’s your new mission. My friend Eric Friedman and I recently started work on a new side project (what he likes to call a sandbox project). I’ve been toying with the idea for a unique kind of content-based site for quite awhile – yet I kept stopping short of actually executing on it due to time constraints. It’s funny, the premise had been staring me in the face for about four months – only now, as I come to a different crossroads in life (which I’ll share more on when I can) has the idea been boiled to the surface. Eric and I flushed out the idea together and we’re taking a 50/50 stake in the entire process.

I’ve never felt overwhelmed with the rate of information published to the web, but I know some do. To address those who feel this way, I wrote on the fact that there’s no reason to feel overwhelmed, and in it stated the basic facts that you:

• Are in control how many RSS feeds you read
• Choose who you follow on FriendFeed/Twitter
• Can easily use tools to filter out the noise
• Should never worry about missing something, everything is archived – you can always go back if you’re busy

Louis Gray recently put these ideas and more into a great SlideShare worth clicking through:

Jeremiah Owyang recently outlined the future of the social web: in five eras

The Five Eras of the Social Web:

1) Era of Social Relationships: People connect to others and share
2) Era of Social Functionality: Social networks become like operating system
3) Era of Social Colonization: Every experience can now be social
4) Era of Social Context: Personalized and accurate content
5) Era of Social Commerce: Communities define future products and services

A few days ago, I posted some insights from Twitter and as a next step asked you to share one of your own. Today I’m going to share the responses from the Twitter community with you.

Lots of great thinking, and as promised I will highlight my personal favorite 10 first with images and bios. Do take the time to read through them all though (not just the first 10) as everyone has their own unique and interesting viewpoint.

I haven’t written many posts about Twitter here because everyone else seems to be covering that beat just fine. But I’m going to join in the buzz today.

Instead of writing up tips for using Twitter(there are entire blogs devoted purely to that), I thought it might be even more interesting to share some personal insights from using the network.

And to make it interesting, everything is 140 characters or less:

Many of you reading this already know who Matt Cutts is. For those who don’t, he is Google’s head of webspam. Simplified and in plain English, what that means is he helps make sure those Google results you receive for your queries are of high quality and spam-free.

But this post isn’t about webspam or SEO. What’s even more interesting to me as a communications professional is that in many ways, Matt represents the future of PR as a transparent, seamless process internally for sophisticated, industry-leading companies.

There’s a lot of great thinking from Steve Rubel, Jeremiah Owyang, Brian Solis and others about the future of PR.

In the beginning of 2009, I compiled 22 smart, inspirational quotes from bloggers to share with you. Today I thought it would be fun to mash-up the quotes with visuals to make them come alive (be sure to view full screen):

Facebook wants to become the one-stop-shop for social networking. They didn’t upset 94% of their users without good reason. I was hoping someone would map out their potential path, and Robert Scoble did just that:

The 7 phases Facebook is going through:

Phase 1. Harvard only.
Phase 2. Harvard+Colleges only.
Phase 3. Harvard+Colleges+Geeks only.
Phase 4. All those above+All People (in the social graph).
Phase 5. All those above+People and businesses in the social graph. (Robert notes Facebook is moving into this phase now)
Phase 6. All those above+People, businesses, and well-known objects in the social graph.
Phase 7. All people, businesses, objects in the social graph.

(Interesting they are moving into phase 5 when there is still much wrong with the site as is, but perhaps this explains why they aren’t bothering to fix the little things – they’re focused on big picture.)

I’ve been called a web “expert” or “guru” by others both internally due to success with client work and externally from personal projects/my writings here. I don’t relish those terms – the word expert signifies a total understanding, something not possible in a media landscape that is rapidly shifting beneath our feet. I also don’t like the word guru, if only because it implies superiority — certainly I am confident, but let’s not confuse the two. Yes I write on social media, but I’m exploring it from the perspective of marketing as it has huge potential for that in particular. I do not nor would I encourage any of you to self-proclaim expert status.

image credit: aussiegall

Both personally and professionally, I’m a huge fan of Creative Commons. It actually goes beyond being an advocate – I license all my art under Creative Commons and encourage other artists and creatives to do the same, at least for some of their works. I’ve written up some of the tangible benefits before, and for it that post received coverage on Techdirt (which has more than 800,000 RSS subscribers) as well as on the Creative Commons official blog.

All the great imagery I use in my blog entries is from talented people adding their works to Flickr under a Creative Commons license. It’s all free PR for those artists taking advantage of the open nature of the system, and concurrently helps my blog content be visually appealing – it is a symbiotic relationship where everyone wins.