Social Media

Social Media is a Game

“Like it or not, social media is – in part – a competition. It’s a game… The only way to get recognized in the social cloud is to have more friends, more influence, more followers, more badges, more everything.” (Mashable)

It’s true – social media is in part a game, and I very much dislike that aspect of social media.

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Social Media Lack of Trust

I have a coupe of clients who sell products for moms. These clients are trying to get into social media. Specifically, they are trying to get mom bloggers to notice them and follow them, and boy is it hard.

The thing is, both of these clients are VERY legitimate businesses. They are legit and interesting and want to contribute – but the people on social media in general, and mom bloggers in particular, are suspicious.

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Will Social Media Stay Free Forever?

The recent announcement by the social networking platform Ning that it is going to close all free accounts and start charging for its services came as quite a surprise for its users, and should serve as a warning sign to all of us about the future of social media in general.

While it’s unlikely that social networks such as Facebook and Twitter will start charging for their services at some point while phasing out all free accounts, it IS very possible that these networks will in effect force users to pay by making the free accounts bare-bones and only enabling certain attractive features in paying accounts.

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The Nestle Social Media Fiasco: What Can We Learn?

Environmental activist group Greenpeace has long been pressuring Nestle to stop using palm oil, since producing it causes deforestation, greenhouse gas emissions, and endangered species loss. In an interesting recent development, environmental activists have taken over Nestle’s Facebook fan page, filling it with negative comments about the company and with a call to consumers to [...]

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You Can’t Put Social Media on Auto Pilot

I have a new client who, up until now, used to have an interesting approach to social media: he has several social media accounts, including Twitter and Facebook, and also Ping, which enables him to send a message to all his social media accounts at once. Basically, he created the different social media accounts, and [...]

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Fear of Social Media

Some companies are afraid to use social media. When I suggest that they start a blog, or that they interact with customers and prospects via Twitter, they say, “But what if we make a mistake? What if there’s backlash against us?” I think they’re wrong. When you join social media and start interacting with your [...]

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Could You Give Up Social Media for a Week? For a Month?

I read with great interest Matt Cutt’s blog post about doing a “digital cleanse” and going Twitter-free for a week. He later decided to make it 30 days. My first reaction was jealousy. I can’t go Twitter-free because I tweet for a living, and while being paid to tweet may sound like a dream come [...]

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Social Networking Boundaries

Social networking has a way of really sucking you in and causing you to share – sometimes too much and often with complete strangers. The following tweet by Penelope Trunk has been discussed to death already, so I won’t get into the details of why she did it (she did provide an explanation) or of [...]

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Social Media Spam

No doubt, spam and scams are the Achilles’ heel of social media, and some even say they will eventually ruin social media. People who responded to my last post on paying for social media agreed that they would be happy to pay for using social media, since it would likely kill spam. Today, Facebook announced [...]

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Would You Pay to Use Social Media?

When Seth Godin said that charging a small fee for using Craigslist would improve the site’s service and usability by preventing spam and scams, I thought that this is not a bad idea at all, and that perhaps we could expand it to social media platforms, and especially to micro blogging service Twitter. If the [...]

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