Social Media Strategies

The way internet usage has evolved, we have been introduced to some interesting products recently. Google Friend Connect is one of them that is still in test mode but will be launched any week, in fact the Microsoft funded Facebook took everyone by surprise last week launching their new Facebook Connect widget. It seems Microsoft are fighting back, taking Google head on in a Social Media turf war that has just been stepped up a notch. Both widgets serve as plausible tools that are using the power of social media effectively.

With Facebook and Microsoft testing similar social connect technologies these days, it seems to be a new direction for the industry to focus on. We’ll find out more about this open-social based power play in the weeks to come, but for now, suffice it to say that these little innovations will go a long way for small and large website owners and social networking tragic’s alike.

When website owners add the widgets onto a site or blog, it will allow the website to act as it’s own social networking destination for users of Google or Facebook to join and invite their friends from any other social network to come and join them. From a website owner’s perspective, the good news is that you can customize the widget according to your interests, generate the code from Google or Facebook and insert it into your website without any hassle of programming. Furthermore, for analysis purposes you can generate “reports” and check the growth of your social network that has joined your site through these widgets.

When I say social network I mean a mini network of people who are all interested in the content your site offers, who have joined through either the Facebook or Google widgets placed on your website or blog pages that are directly connected to your members Facebook or Google Friend connect accounts. All this happens in only a few clicks and barely a few minutes.

Now as a user, you can sign up for any website with these widgets using your Gmail ID or Facebook ID. Interestingly enough, all the accounts that you have on social sites that you have ever joined, whether (Orkut, LinkedIn, hi5, Plaxo, Facebook or any other), will appear within the widget and you can source friends from those accounts asking them to join you at whichever website across the net you have joined.

Additionally, you can also publish activities that you perform on that website into your social networking profiles. This may help in the big boys aggregating together people with similar interests. You can keep a track of your friends who have joined the site and also keep others updated on your actions on that particular website through feeds & bookmarking.

If you publish content on your social network through a Friend Connect widget, friends sharing similar interests would be more inclined to check out the site. In this way a solid contact base can be aggregated into the social website. Also, you can initiate topics, share media, add photos, have polls or any sort of discussion on the website to interact with people who have similar interests as you.

The new “Open Social” developers code has been written into most big social networking sites, including our site Events Listed . Now, I am not a techie person, but from what I understand having been involved in the development of my application that has this functionality, is that this code slaps AA tags on text fields where there is communication between different members of any site. This text is stored in the Google word database with our names tagged against it. Now, privacy isn’t an issue because if we want to continue to have access to these multi-million dollar applications for FREE , we do it on their terms.

What this means is that this database knows who has commented on my wall and notes and what words they used. This is enough information to be able to know who I am, who my friends are and what I am interested in by the time I sign up through my Friend Connect widget on any website.

In this way, every blog or site can form a community around it. Communities where people of similar ideas and interests can interact, collaborate and socialize. Some people may think that this is what they do already. Nope, this is more like you visiting my blog about event marketing , you can join my community through either the Google Friend Connect widget or the Facebook Connect widget (we have integrated both and will be one of the first websites to have done so), once in your widget account (a pop up window whilst still at our blog) you can invite friends to join you from plaxo, Orkut, Gtalk if using the Google Friend Connect and if join through the Facebook widget all your Facebook friends. You can send them a message like, “hey come and join Events Listed its got some great event marketing strategies.” Your friends accept so are now a part of the Events listed Friend Connect community that is connected by not only the Events Listed community, but their common membership through the widget, gmail accounts, gtalk and the RSS feed from our blogs is automatically fed into their Google Feed reader. This means that if our blog represents great value it’s members can continuously invite more friends from other networks to join, the cycle of interacting and learning would continue to grow amongst like-minded people who are already connected in the bigger social networking communities - giving birth to a much easier form of interacting with people who share your interests.

Now, if we stopped providing great quality content, our community would start talking about leaving, amongst themselves through the chat function on the widget, in Facebook or through gtalk and quicker than we can say WAIT, our social audience has gone off. Marketing websites in the future will all be through word of mouth, we need to attract people who have contacts that listen to them so when they invite them to join a site, they will come through a common interest and trust factor.

To put it short, it adds the facility of having everything in one place with the comfort of being linked to everyone in multiple mini networks scattered across the internet. Considering we are all members of such social networking websites, it’s about time we integrate it effectively to attract people to our blogs and websites.

It also gives you the opportunity of increasing your social circle in the niches that count for you, you can anchor your general social network to Facebook whilst spending more time in the niche networks amongst consumers and friends who all have the same interests. Finally, for newbies who haven’t ever gotten their heads around RSS feeds and feed readers, don’t worry. You won’t need to any more because if you sign onto a blog social network through Google Friend Connect, you automatically receive that blogs feeds into your Google Reader that comes with your Google Friend Connect account.

Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)

Today’s tip! The first step to being super organized is to manage all of your passwords in you’re browser. Being able to share them across your team is a bonus.

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