Social Media Strategies

This is an excerpt from my book due out November 5th - “Social Traffic”

There has been a lot of discussion to understand the social ecosystem that has been built around a person’s online existence. Because of my interest in anthropology and sociology, I spend a significant amount of my time studying online trends. What’s most interesting is that when you start plotting your social network on a graph it comes up with such an intertwined complex network consisting of different platforms and nodes - all relevant to your online existence in some way or another.

A lot of people have used complicated ways to illustrate our online social maps. In theory its actually quite simple. If you think about the different websites or applications that you use, you’ll notice that there is an actual thing (or object) that forms the basic cohesive power.

When I go to Wikipedia, the object is information. When I go to eBay, the object is the product. When I go to Flickr, the objects are the pictures. The objects are the underlying value that the site offers and differentiates itself with. Websites that forget to focus on an object, lose the social media game. The reason why we call them objects is because we want you to feel like they are actual entities that form the heart of the application. Building your own applications may be difficult in this fast-paced cut-throat business, but associating yourself with existing social networks is easy. Instead of spending 5 to 20 thousand dollars to build a site which will have zero traffic initially, you can build a presence on different social networks at no cost and create hundreds of thousands of dollars of opportunities through it. The purpose of this book is to help you figure out how to do that on your own.

The image above is my view of the social map. It contains two key elements: collaboration and sharing. A few categories of sites emerge from these (marked in grey boxes), like “information”. These basic categories are sub-divided into different types of online applications (marked in red boxes). Everything outside the dotted box is based on an object of value offered. For example, when sharing information on your personal blog, the object of value is your “thoughts”.

In practice, when I starting plotting those graphs I realized that Milgram’s Six Degrees of
Separation theory isn’t that far from reality.

The way the internet has evolved - specifically web 2.0 technologies - we can effectively reach out to people we could never have previously dreamed of. The important thing for us to learn is how to make the most of these online networks without giving away or risking too much. Having said that, I’m going to dedicate the next section of this book (section 2.2) to walk you through the uses and benefits of different applications.

Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)

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