image credit: guardian.co.uk
What's Been Happening This Week...
Is Corporate Social Media The Wave of The Future?
Going 180 degrees from last week, Mashable asks, "Could corporations be the real push behind social media?" The article does not deny that corporate adoption has been slow, but states that once the economics of social media is proven that practice will snowball.
I guess companies better start reading the twelve best practices for online customer communities now rather than later. Every list like this is starting to sound the same, repeating the same social best practices: join the conversation, community first, forget traditional metrics. But I found this quote about collaborating rather than marketing insightful:
"Customer communities tend to project customer influence and demands deeper into an organization and create more sustained contact. And the reverse is also true, with the result being outcomes which don't appear so much as marketing but as cooperation, mutual brainstorming, and co-development of ideas and outcomes."
Speaking of collaborative communities...
Is Google Evil or Just Unstoppable?
In the corner of evil, we have the launch of Google Knol, a user-generated knowledge base that, for better or worse, is being compared to Wikipedia. Many in the web world, like Jason Calacanis from Mahalo, are becoming seriously concerned with Google's new position as a major content provider. If Google owns Youtube and Knol, two platforms that will rank high in their own search listing pages, then isn't Google technically competing with its partners? Now top that concern off with the idea that splogs are starting to autopopulate content on Knol and you have something really scary.
In the corner of unstoppable, we have the launch of Cuil, which went from dramatically over-hyped to technical failure to blogger backlash in the first day. People had declared it a possible contender to Google, before digging in further to find out that its search listings are often not as valuable and sometimes erroneous.
Today's Web Clutter Is Tomorrow's Space Clutter
Speaking of blogger backlash and underdogs, both Twitter and Bebo had some interesting news this week. After being beat-up by bloggers for repeated failures and for not being the new "shiny object" called FriendFeed, Twitter made big news this week for being the first to report out about the earthquakes in Southern California. For at least one day, people seemed to realize the value of Twitter again, even suggesting ways to get the not so tech savvy to join.
Bebo, meanwhile, is giving users a way to send 500 messages into space as part of a time capsule. So if it wasn't enough to fill our human minds up with social junk like pokes and tweets, we will now be able to clutter the universe with our everyday chatter. So, when we put our collective message out there, do you think people on other planets will want to friend us or block us?
"All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value." - Carl Sagan
Marta Strickland
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