Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

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As part of my duty as a contributor (and now Editor) for ThreeMinds, I have to inundate myself with blogs about social media, emerging technology, and digital culture on a daily basis. Not all of the insights from these blogs are enough on their own to make it into a ThreeMinds article. However, the pattern they create together, especially over the course of one week, can be a great snapshot into what is going on in the digital space.

For those reasons, from this week on I am going to begin a weekly digest of interesting articles from around the web. Please feel free to continue the conversation and post articles that you have found interesting this week. This is a social medium after all.

What's Been Happening This Week...

Is Corporate Social Media A Failure?
It started with a post last week on the WSJ entitled, Why Most Online Communities Fail, which stated that less than 25% of corporate online community have over 1000 members and that 60% of them cost over $1 million dollars. Follow-up posts exploded all over the blogosphere from ReadWriteWeb to Social Media Today, each with their own explanations why the sector is underperforming.

At the same time, many articles were published about how White-Label Social Networks are exploding and lists of the corporate social networks that are succeeding (on Social Media Today and Mashable). So is the sector really failing? What are the biggest mistakes being made? Does it have anything to do with a need for a community manager that possesses the essential skills to get consumers involved with the brand?

Later the Wall Street Journal came back and announced that the 60% figure was really 6% of communities over $1 million, a pretty big typo. But the discussion still rages on... is social media succeeding or failing for brands? Sounds like a topic for Opposing Views, a new site that allows experts to wage a debate on both sides of important issues.

Which Social Network Is More Open?
Talking about cloudy issues, first ReadWriteWeb announces that while Facebook is growing, it is still far behind MySpace. At the same time, MySpace pushes it's announcement about supporting OpenID only a day before the big Facebook announcement about letting users port profile data to other sites. It's a war of "Data Availability" vs "Data Portability", and every network is wanting to be the one that appears the most open.

It's a complicated topic that you can spend hours reading about:
MySpace Aims To Win Developers
What Facebook Connect Means For Corporations
Why Facebook Connect Matters & Why It Will Win

Speaking of hours of reading, I have a feeling next week is going to spark a great debate about two newly launched applications: Google Knol versus Twine.

Anyone else's brain hurt yet? Well the Informaiton Overload Research Group offers some scary statistics and a few solutions on how to deal with the seemingly endless flow of information.

Marta Strickland