As you may know, I belong to (and am active on) a lot of different social networks. Though these networks have a lot of similarities, including connecting with friends, sharing information and meeting new people, it seems that those similarities cause many people to treat them as one and the same. How else can you explain the desire to link all Twitter posts to LinkedIn and Buzz, or all Foursquare posts to Facebook?

In efforts to make posting to social networks “easier” and “more automated”, many power users have try to link all of these networks together and batch update. When you accept an invitation to a Facebook event, it updates your Twitter and Buzz. When you update your Foursquare account, it posts to your Twitter, Facebook and Buzz. And when you tweet from the event, it updates your LinkedIn, Facebook and Buzz. Even if we’re aware that the networks are different and serve different purposes, by automatically linking everything, we’re essentially using them in the same way.

So why is that wrong? Well, for starters, the audience is entirely different. What are the differences and how do they compare to other networks? Let’s break it down:

Twitter

Twitter is almost entirely focused on its feed. Profiles are extremely limited, and though there is integration with a number of different clients using its API (and a lot of potential for Twitter in location-based mobile services), at the end of the day it’s all about the feed and the information spread through it. The volume of a power user on Twitter is generally much higher than for any other service (unless that service integrates a handful of other networks), which makes it difficult to translate to any other social network.

Facebook

Facebook is about MUCH more than just a stream of posts – it’s integrated with dozens of different applications, games and deeper profiles. Yes, there’s a live feed, but that feed is a very small part of what Facebook is. More than anything else, Facebook is about connecting with current friends. Where Twitter users will often discover new users through hashtags and location, that’s slightly more rare on Facebook, which puts a premium on the friends you already have, or people you’ve already met in person.

Foursquare

Foursquare, like Twitter is feed-based, but its focus is entirely location-centric. So, if I’m from Seattle and you’re from London, do you really care about which pizza joint I went to if it gets updated to Twitter? Probably not. Yet more often than not, people link their Foursquare directly to Twitter, which is more often used to connect you with users around the country rather than being hyperlocal.

LinkedIn

And LinkedIn is a work-centric network – how is a Foursquare post about my location or a Tweet about an unrelated event at all relevant to my LinkedIn audience? Yet, a good deal of the people I’m connected to on LinkedIn use Twitter as a direct feed into their profile. In terms of update frequency, it makes little sense – people are much less apt to check for updates on LinkedIn, a business network, than they are to check on Twitter – therefore an integrated Twitter feed tends to flood the LinkedIn network with irrelevant data.

As a society, we always look for the easiest solutions to our problems, and that solution often comes from automation. However, automation without consideration is madness. It leads to mixed messaging, spam and annoyance. Imagine if I sent out a mass email every time I checked into a new restaurant. Or if every picture I posted on Flickr automated a text message to each one of my friends. Automation is there to make life easier, but rather than mindlessly clicking an innocuous little check-box, take a few minutes to think of what you’re automating and who your audience is. I promise it will save everyone time and effort.

As part of my own due diligence, I’ve made a quick and dirty list of how I use my own networks, and what gets pushed where.

Twitter: Pushes nowhere. The stream is much more frequent than any other service, and pushing my Twitter stream anywhere else risks disenfranchising and annoying that audience. Honestly, this is my biggest concern for Twitter moving forward – it seems like the most overwhelming social network and is the first for people to drop in a crunch for time.

Facebook: Occasionally pushes to Twitter and Buzz. This stream is fairly versatile, but I still have a slightly different audience on Twitter than I do on Facebook.

Foursquare: Pushes to Facebook. I once pushed this to Twitter, but found that it was just the wrong audience. Facebook has a number of close, local friends, so posting on Foursquare makes sense in the event that people want to meet up at a local place.

LinkedIn: Pushes nowhere. LinkedIn is a pretty niched audience. Though I will sometimes post the same things on LinkedIn that I might on Twitter, I don’t update my LinkedIn status enough to ever post it elsewhere – the status/microblog portion of LinkedIn is a very, very small subset of the overall product.

Google Buzz: Pushes nowhere. Mostly because a lot of my content pushes to Buzz.

My blog: Techshots pushes to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Buzz. Since these networks are in part used to promote my content and disseminate information, it only makes sense that my blog would push everywhere.

heartithateit: Same as blog, except it doesn’t push to LinkedIn, because it’s more for fun than for work.

How do you use your social networks? Where does your information get pushed, and why?

There’s a lot of feedback about Google Buzz since it launched. Some positive, some negative, and some just hilarious. There are some great things about Buzz, and there are certainly some flaws. But even if Google does nothing to change/modify Buzz, they’ve created a product that gives me everything I always wanted from Twitter, but never got. Don’t misunderstand the point of this post. I still really enjoy using Twitter, and will continue to do so. But Buzz offers some incredible features that I always hoped would come from Twitter.

Smaller, more genuine friends list. I don’t follow back on Twitter. At least not on my personal account. So the idea of building up “networks” of 10,000, 50,000, and 100,000 followers made of 50%+ spammers and bots really never appealed to me. I wanted Twitter to be about connecting with the people and the information I cared about. I choose to follow people that interest me, and my hope is that people follow me for the same reason – not with false hopes that I’ll follow them back.

Social media is not, and should not be about a popularity contest. I want genuine friends to connect with. I want smaller, not bigger. Google Buzz gives me that. I would be shocked if I end up following more than a couple hundred people on Buzz. Ever. Because I’m not going to let random people I don’t care about fill my inbox. Sorry, not gonna happen – I get enough email traffic as it is.

Threaded, not linear. Linear posting was fine to start, but with hundreds or thousands of followers, it’s obnoxious to not have threaded conversations. A system where I can’t easily see who else has replied to a certain post? That makes absolutely no sense. With Google Buzz, they take from the initial Google Reader system of “Like” and “Comment”, and it works beautifully. It’s this reason that I liked FriendFeed, but FriendFeed just never really got enough critical mass or interest for me. Linear posts are an anachronism, and Google Buzz does away with it.

Spam be gone. I have to imagine that most people will take my route and not follow back with their Buzz accounts. If that’s the case, there will be no market or growth potential for spammers on Google Buzz. Twitter was an easy breeding ground for spam accounts due to the ease of use and the existing (broken) social contract of following back. With no such contract in place (the only people I follow back *automatically* are the ones already in my contact list – who I clearly have had some sort of interaction with), spammers are screwed – you have to opt-in to follow them, something that will no doubt happen quite rarely.

Right where I want it. I already use Gmail as my primary (personal) email account. This means I don’t have to go download another application like Tweetdeck, Swift or Seesmic if I want to see my Buzz account. I don’t have to load up Facebook.com or FriendFeed.com if I want to view those live feeds. I’m already there. And it’s on my mobile phone, too. Listen, I’m lazy. The less clicks I have to make and websites I have to remember, the better.

Feature integration. Easy, intuitive integration of blog feeds, Twitter, Google Reader, etc. make this an easy win. You can integrate a number of feeds into Twitter as well, but the ease of use for Google Buzz is unparalleled, in my opinion.

Mobile done right. Buzz is perfect for mobile use. With an easy tie-in to Google Maps, it will easily (and quickly) provide extraordinary relevant and up-to-the-minute results. Now I fully understand why Google just decided to kill off their location-based Dodgeball. Buzz would have destroyed it anyway.

Imagine the possibilities with the Google Maps tie-in over time. First off, the Android platform will continue to take off, which will add a lot more users. Add live results to search – so when you’re searching for “mexican restaurant seattle“, you don’t just see the results, reviews and websites, you see a heatmap of what places are really hopping. Will this happen? Who knows, but I sure hope so.

The people I want to connect with. I don’t know about you, but most of my friends are already on Gmail. Maybe it’s a generational thing, but many of my friends and I connect over Gchat, and pretty much all of my friends from college exchanged our Gmail addresses when we left off to move on to the real world. This means that without doing anything, my FRIENDS are already connected to me through Buzz. Sure, there are plenty of additional people I will have to add, but this is a great start for me.

The negatives. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows for Buzz. There are still a handful of things it does worse than Twitter. But my hope is that over the next few iterations, some things will change. And if not, there’s no reason I can’t still use Twitter – it’s still a great program.

Mass dissemination of information. By only following a tightly-knit circle of friends, news stories will take longer to get to me. Think of the idea of six degrees of separation. On Twitter, you’re really only 2 or 3 degrees away from a big story, because chances are you’re connected to one or two people who have hundreds of thousands of followers. When someone with a megaphone gets the news, it spreads like wildfire. News will take slightly longer to break on Buzz, but then again, does an extra 15 minutes REALLY matter? Plus, once you get the news, you can comment on it using threads, making things much more neat!

Social media marketing campaigns suffer. Twitter was really easy to use when it comes to mass marketing a social media campaign. Stories were extremely easy to share (retweet), and a company with multiple products could create multiple accounts in order to divide and conquer. Buzz takes a step backward there. I don’t foresee many TV shows saying “Follow us on Buzz!” the way they did with Twitter. Could happen, but seems less likely. But marketers will find a way to penetrate Buzz, I’m sure. It’s just a matter of time.

New friend discovery. One of the advantages of Twitter is that it really introduced a lot of new people. Without Twitter, I may have never met some of the amazing people at SMC Seattle. Buzz makes it more difficult to discover those kind of people. But there are still opportunities using the Nearby feature on mobile, and by browsing other user comments. Frankly, it can be a more targeted networking solution – you meet friends of friends, rather than complete strangers. But the downside is that it really gets rid of some of the fun discovery process of meeting total strangers and connecting.

Automatic opt-in. I know a lot of people who don’t (or really won’t) care about Buzz. Being opted-in automatically isn’t ideal for them, as they really don’t want the extra clutter. But for those people, it’s not all that difficult to ignore. Seriously. Plus, now some people will be introduced to social media who never would have gotten started in the first place. This could turn out to be a good thing.

There’s nothing more depressing than mediocre efforts to engage using social media. On any platform. Whether it’s setting up an automated direct message to feign interest, creating an empty/useless Facebook Fan Page, or blanket spamming an advertisement on Twitter based on keywords, half-hearted and generalized attempts at personal interaction are piontless and often obnoxious.

Without getting too much up on a soap box, I think lazy social media efforts are insulting to a customer’s intelligence and are disrespectful to the value of their time. There, I said it. So when I see sales outlets set up their Twitter account solely as a RSS feed for their website, I feel like it’s a genuine disservice. Which brings me to Woot.

Woot.com is one of my favorite online outlet retailers. Scratch that, they’re my definitely my favorite. They have built an entire business on creative and funny ways to interact with their consumer. Rather than put together a boring and nondescript product page for their sale items, they create a story for every single piece that they sell. It sets them apart (and far above) pretty much every other online outlet. So it’s somewhat puzzling that they have put absolutely no effort into their social media attempts. Their Twitter account is essentially a feed for Woot.com’s new sales.

Woot could easily leverage their 1.5 million followers on Twitter by offering specialized sales, promotional codes or time-based offers, but instead they choose to leave their account general and bland. It’s unfortunate that such a creative and forward-thinking company does not come up with a better way to monetize their (obviously) valuable social media presence.

It’s important to preface this post by saying that I am a huge geek. From VLOOKUPs to PivotTables to OFFSETs, I’ve spent way too much time tinkering around in Excel and can give you a lecture on why I think spreadsheet software should never move completely to the Cloud. But this isn’t about me. This is about an entirely different set of geeks. This is about Social Media Club Seattle (or, as you may refer to their events, #smcsea). This is about a place where I fit right in.

Over the past year since I’ve moved to Seattle, SMC Seattle has provided a number of events and functions to help me meet other folks in the area. Buena Vista Social Club was about dancing and music, this social club is about tweeting and Facebook. I’ve listened to talks about crowdsourcing and corporate Tweeting and carried on lengthy conversations about WordPress and Facebook. It’s rare to find such a large range of people, all unified by two common denominators: geekdom and a love for social media (though they may go hand-in-hand).

If you’re a Seattleite, and you love tech, their events are absolutely worth attending – they’re filled with intelligent, informed and interesting people engaged in social media. Their board members also include some of the most influential folks in social media, so they know what they’re doing when it comes to creating captivating events. It’s also an extremely tight-knit group, and I consider myself fortunate to have become friends with many SMC Seattle regulars.

These events are different from gaming or tech conventions, where the vast majority of people have a similar background. SMC Seattle events have plenty of programmers and developers, yes. But you’ll also find marketers, program managers, baristas, copywriters and even former airplane pilots.

These are experienced geeks. They are well-versed in the language of social media, and they’re not afraid to show it. But that doesn’t make them unapproachable either. All conversations are welcome at SMC Seattle, whether you’re talking about new ways to improve your social media ROI or just learning how to put together your Facebook Fan page. It’s a forum for learning and discussing.

However, SMC Seattle is not without its inside geekery and name-dropping. If you’re at an event, you’ll hear Chris Pirillo’s (founder of Gnomedex and SMC Seattle board member) name dropped a half dozen times. You may find yourself involved in a half dozen conversations that are way over your head. But just ask questions if you don’t understand, and you’ll find people willing to help explain things. The beauty of SMC Seattle (and social media in general), is that though we’re all geeks, we were all new to this thing less than five years ago. The learning curve isn’t as steep as it may seem sometimes, and you’ll always find a helping hand.

Though SMC Seattle attendees may all be geeks, they’re also all extremely different and interesting in a multitude of different ways. So come out to the next SMC Seattle event, and introduce yourself to a dozen geeks you’ve never met. You’ll learn a great deal about technology and social media, and you’ll meet some lovely people. It’s an absolute win-win.

Photos from LifeAsArt

Over the past six months, I’ve consulted a handful of people on launching and maintaining a social media presence. From how to develop a social media plan to managing communities both large and small, I have spoken with people in all stages of their deployment schedule. The one unifying question that each and every client and friend has had is “how do I define success?” Many of those new to the space (even those that truly understand the value of social media) are still unsure how to properly measure a successful social media campaign from a dud.

There’s no one way to measure a successful campaign, as each business has an entirely different and unique model. Still, whether you’re selling $100,000 business contracts, working entirely off of an ad-based revenue or are a band looking for new fans, there’s a way to measure success and ROI in your social media marketing campaigns.

Though social media marketing is one of the cheapest forms of marketing in terms of dollars spent (in most cases it can be an entirely free campaign), it does take time and dedication to build a successful social media campaign. It is of the utmost importance that you define goals, and understand how you will measure your own success. Here are a handful of metrics you can use to measure that success, along with a key example, where these techniques work, and where they fail. I also added a few methods to measure these metrics.

Key example: The best examples are sales organizations. Companies like Woot or Amazon who use Twitter (or other resources) to push their sales. These are obviously not the only people that can measure their success using sales, but the ones for whom sales is really the only metric of success.
Where it works: If you are a product-driven business building a campaign to increase sales, this is the only measure you should care about. Everything else is secondary to the sales that are generated by your campaigns.
Where it fails: Many web businesses and service-based revenue models won’t see a large increase in sales due to their social media campaign. For example, ESPN’s Twitter account will not be likely to drive sales for its ESPN Insider accounts or for subscriptions to ESPN The Magazine. Those are just not important metrics to measure. If your website is entirely based on ad revenue, measuring sales really won’t help you at all.
How to measure it: Accounting for seasonality and possibly doing A/B testing, you can quickly do a back-of-the-envelope calculation to see how your sales responds to various social media campaigns.

Key example: Insert any SEO campaign here. As a website’s ranking in search engine keywords changes, its traffic can (and likely will) change dramatically. A successful campaign that brings a Google ranking from 10th to 3rd can drive significant amounts of traffic, all of which can be tracked using tools like Google Analytics.
Where it works: Traffic always works as an easily measured metric to track. Nearly every online campaign will drive traffic somewhere, which can be measured. The most important thing to consider is how important traffic really is to determining success for your campaign.
Where it fails: So you just got 1,000 hits because of your recent email marketing campaign. Now what? How many sales did that actually create? How did that change the impact to your brand? Unless your revenue model is based on CPM advertising, web traffic isn’t as important as you think it is.
How to measure it: Google Analytics, Omniture, email marketing software, Bit.ly links, Mint; there are a number of free and (even more) paid solutions to track the traffic of your social media marketing campaigns.

Key example: Coca Cola’s Facebook Fan page is fueled by an engaged and passionate community. With thousands of user-submitted photos and thousands of user posts to the discussion board, Coke users are finding a fantastic way to engage their brand.
Where it works: Engagement is great for a brand where increased exposure will likely increase sales. Large consumer brands like Coke and Budweiser rely on brand awareness and engagement – the more a user engages with their brand, the more likely they are to purchase and promote it to their friends. A website looking to increase its traffic can also benefit from engagement, as it can create passionate users willing to stick around and will ultimately grow the user base.
Where it fails: Many social media campaigns are not measurable by engagement, as they drive users to purchase or to add traffic. Plus, it will always be a much lower sample size of users participating (just 3,000 photos have been submitted by users out of nearly 4 million fans). If you have a really small campaign or a brand that will not benefit from community engagement (i.e. it won’t increase sales), then this is not an important metric for you to focus on.
How to measure it: In any campaign where you want users to respond and interact, you can measure engagement. Engagement can be measured by tallying comments, user submissions, or responses (e.g. @replies to your Twitter account).

Key example: Chris Brogan’s Twitter account and blog is all about building his brand. Sure it’s about many other things, but most importantly it’s about his personal brand as a social media consultant and expert in his field. Chris has built up a great brand for himself using numerous social media tools, and that can all be measured by the engagement (see above) on the various platforms.
Where it works: Large-scale businesses that rely on not only brand recognition, but brand satisfaction, rely on social media as a customer service and support tool. It’s extremely important to measure how a creative marketing campaign affects a consumer’s view of your brand and your product.
Where it fails: Most small brands do not have enough recognition for their brand health to really matter too much. Though it is still important to see if a brand is being mentioned/recognized, a 20% increase in brand recognition or positive brand awareness may not be crucial to the success of a small business.
How to measure it: Focus on where your campaign is being targeted. If you’re creating an intensive Twitter campaign, use Twitter Search. With a Facebook Fan page, read your own discussion boards. After that, use all sorts of tools to search for linkbacks and mentions of your brand and see how its reputation has changed. Measure your brand before your campaigns, during and then afterward, and see if the buzz about your brand has changed. Even if it’s as simple as “before nobody was talking about us… now there are a handful of people talking about us”, that’s significant.

Key example: Do you get emails from Amazon or J Crew? Macy’s or Xbox? Most likely they’re happy to measure metrics such as open rates and click-throughs, but one of the most important metrics for them is conversions. A high open rate is ultimately unimportant if it doesn’t convert into sales.
Where it works: If the focal point of your email newsletter is to sell, then the bottom line is this: How many of your customers can you convert? An open rate of 30% and clickthrough percentages of 10% are much less relevant if none of those people opening your newsletter or clicking through to your products are buying them.
Where it fails: Conversions have to be taken with a caveat. If you run an advertising campaign, or even link to an item in an email newsletter, a user might not buy the product immediately. Though their awareness may grow, they might not buy until weeks later. Solely measuring conversions can easily downplay the importance of a marketing campaign. Additionally, if you’re pumping an enormous amount of traffic to your website through your marketing campaigns, your conversion rate may be artificially low.
How to measure it: Conversions are the measurement of sales to users. If you have any sort of advanced analytics software installed on your website, you should be able to track the path of your users, and recognize whether their initial clickthroughs are driving them to an eventual sale. Unfortunately, it’s more difficult to track a user’s motivations if they made the purchase organically (i.e. not through your targeted social media marketing campaign). You can also track how many/what percentage of users are being driven to your product page, or to learn more about your services. Though they may not be a sale today, these users can qualify as leads for future sales.

Key example: If you want to see public relations success in action, just take a look at the job done by @ComcastCares. Frank Eliason’s customer support/twitter help staff has done an outstanding job of building and maintaining a premiere customer service brand and receiving a positive PR response.
Where it works: Any sort of viral marketing campaign can greatly benefit from a PR success. Think of the Skittles marketing campaign. If you can come up with something new and creative that captivates an audience, you can find PR success.
Where it fails: If you’re doing search engine optimization or an email marketing campaign, this probably won’t help you. Also, on the flip side of where it works, it is very easy to garner the ire of the media if you execute a campaign poorly, or fail to use best practices. Be warned.
How to measure it: Scour news aggregators like Google News and blogs for mentions of your brand. However, if you’re being either a) praised, or b) lambasted for your campaign, you’ll probably find out about it very quickly.

These methods relate to any type of social media campaign you deploy, whether that’s using Twitter or email marketing. Feel free to consult this list as you develop a social media plan. Please leave your feedback in the comment section below.

What we have here is a failure to communicate. Over the past few years we have focused so much on Quantity, that we have really lost touch with the most important modifier of all: Quality. We want our newspapers to print More news, and we want to see blogs that update us More often. We want More Twitter followers and More web traffic. Heaven forbid we ever have Less of anything.

But what’s so wrong about Less, if it increases Quality? Wouldn’t you rather have 5 followers than 5,000 if those precious few included Oprah, Kevin Rose and Perez Hilton and they loved retweeting your posts? Unfortunately, we’re so driven to increase quantity that we rarely stop to think about quality. The Velvet Underground received one of the greatest compliments a band could ever receive:

“Only five thousand people ever bought a Velvet Underground album, but every single one of them started a band”
-Brian Eno

Ultimately, The Velvet Underground ended up being inducted to the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame, and many of their albums eventually sold very well. But if they were only judged by initial sales and popularity, we’d see an entirely different picture of Lou Reed’s experimental rock band. The same popularity vs. substance quandary debate rages on for social media influencers.

Every month I see hundreds of social media “experts” writing about how to get “More Followers”. (Techniques listed often include follow spamming and using more hashtags.) However, it’s much more rare to see posts about building quality connections and lasting relationships. You’d think the “experts” would care about such things. But apparently more is always better, and all that matters.

Take one blogger I really respect who values quality over quantity: Neil Patel may only make 2 posts a month, but they’re both of extremely high quality. I would rather read 2 of his posts a month than 30 useless posts a day. Just as I’d rather have 500 quality followers than 5,000 useless ones.

Here’s a proposal: Instead of focusing on More, let’s focus on Better. Instead of increasing Quantity, let’s worry about Quality. Just imagine what we could achieve.

Many people have this huge misconception about Twitter and social contracts. They believe that there’s an implied social contract on Twitter that says “if I follow you, you will follow me back”. There’s a built-in feeling within each and every one of us that believes that if we are given a gift, we must return the favor. Dr. Robert Cialdini covers it extensively in his book: Influence. In today’s social networks, that “contract” is absolute BS.

Unethical marketers with bad intentions have ruined that social contract. Now, 90% of the people who follow me are salespeople, marketers and BS artists looking to show me how to “Gain 2,000 followers in a day!” “Lose weight fast!” and “Make Money Online!” Unfortunately it took a large number of jerks to spoil the party for everyone else. Once-meaningful methods to build relationships like #FollowFriday on Twitter have since become spam-bait. The practice of following interesting people has given way to the practice of using bots to automatically mass-follow people you don’t care about. Because of that, this social contract has been broken.

I will not ever follow anyone back automatically unless I have already connected with them in a meaningful way, or their profile is at all interesting to me. That said, if you comment on my blog with something meaningful or if you actually connect with me (via @reply) on Twitter, I’m likely to return the favor. If we exchange business cards at a conference and I tell you I’ll call you, I will. Those are still meaningful connections to me. But if you simply follow me without saying anything and expect me to reciprocate, I’m done with that.

A few weeks back I had a conversation with Brian (or Magical Dad), who suggested that I just use filters to selectively choose which people I want to listen to. But why should that onus be on me? Why can’t my Tweetstream be only the people I am interested in hearing about? It seems foolish to try to enforce an antiquated social contract that inconveniences me just so that a few people get one extra “follower”.

Right now I have just under 200 people that I follow. I’m guessing that if I follow more than 300-400 people then I will literally never be able to keep up. Some people follow tens of thousands of users. And we wonder why they never @reply us. If that means that I’ll never have more than 500 or so followers, so be it. But I’m not going to subscribe to a broken system just to get some additional internet popularity. And if that’s what you’re currently doing, I suggest you re-evaluate or realize that you are either a) working too hard to filter, or b) not actually paying attention to anyone you follow.

I love this video. And the best part about it? My dad sent me a link to it this morning. Though I think some networks may be more or less doomed over the next few years, social media is truly a fundamental shift in the way we consume media. What’s even more exciting is that it hasn’t even come close to reaching its potential yet.

If you read this blog, you probably know a little about my entrepreneurial spirit. In fact, I made a post earlier this year about the importance of acting now, saying:

Stop putting off your plans until tomorrow. Because if there really is no tomorrow, think of all the time you have wasted. Change the world. And do it now.”

I’ve also worked on and helped out with a few other projects (listed here).

As such, it brought me great joy to get in touch with a group of hungry, passionate entrepreneurs with a love for social media. Yu-kai Chou, Jun Loayza, Joseph Yi and Olina Qian are among those working on an new project called Viralogy, a website created to measure the rank and influence of social media users. In the Viralogy team I saw a group of people unafraid to work hard, take risks and develop a product that they were truly passionate about.

So when I was given the opportunity to join their team, I jumped on it. After multiple talks with Yu-kai and other members of the team, I agreed to help the team out in its efforts to develop its business in Seattle, as well as online. As part of my work for Viralogy I am also writing a weekly column on Social Media Tactics. I hope you’ll help support my new venture by adding your blog to Viralogy and following my posts on there as well. From time to time, my new endeavors may cause my posts on Techshots to slow, but posts here are far different from those that I will be publishing on Viralogy, so as long as I have the bandwidth to do so, I will keep making a couple posts here each week.

Unfortunately, this post also marks end of my very first startup, winAround.com. Started in late 2006 with Craig Barger, winAround was a gaming news and community website focused on bringing local coverage to competitive gaming tournaments and events. With over 70,000 visits and 750,000 page views per month in early 2008, winAround was the number two website dedicated to delivering eSports news for the game Counter-Strike: Source behind Gotfrag. Over a dozen volunteers (some pictured above) worked on publishing gaming news, organizing online tournaments and running a community forum. All of winAround’s success came entirely from that group of people. Later during 2008, winAround was taken down to begin repurposing the site to focus more on social and community aspects of online gaming.

Over the past year, a small team has worked on and off on developing an entire social networking website from scratch. However, with work still to go, and interest in such a network currently waning (my partner and lead developer) Mike Murray and I have decided to put the project on hold indefinitely. The continued rise in console games and the failure of predominant online gaming leagues such as the Cyberathlete Amateur League have changed the online gaming sphere in a way that diminishes some of our offerings. Though our product was close to complete, we decided that the additional investment in time and money was not worthwhile even though we had come so far. Over the next month or two, I will be releasing some screenshots of the concepts and ideas we had been working on, as well as describing some of the ideas we were hoping to bring to the table.

Though winAround.com may ultimately never see the light of day, Mike and I hope to use some of the knowledge and experience we gained from winAround to create new and exciting web projects in the near future, developed under winAround, LLC, the company under which winAround.com was created. I will continue to support the community gaming forums created for winAround as well.

To see some of the things Mike was working on, click here or here.

Though the end of my first startup in winAround.com is a tough pill to swallow, I am excited about the other opportunities at hand. It’s absolutely true that when one door closes, another one opens, and I am greatly looking forward to the new pathways that are opening up.

Social media turns a lot of traditional marketing and thinking on its head. In many ways it takes the power of the media and the power of advertising and puts it in the user’s hands. One of my favorite old comedians, Yakov Smirnoff popularized the Russian Reversal, which looks something like this:

In America, you listen to man on radio.
In Soviet Russia, man on radio listen to YOU!

Here are some great ways that social media (and the internet in general) has turned the traditional world on its head and thrown all conventions out the window. I’ve also added links and logos for background.
 

In America, you connect with brands.
In social media, brands connect with YOU!

Twenty years ago it was a rarity for brands to interface with users publicly. Now the biggest corporations from Coca Cola to Comcast are all but expected to connect with their consumers. It’s a form of social media that has absolutely turned traditional marketing upside down.

In America, you listen to Skittles marketers.
In social media, Skittles marketers listen to YOU!

Though some criticized Skittles’ efforts as a social media fail, Skittles created the ultimate reversal by putting marketing in the hands of not just its users, but public users on Twitter. Effective or not, Skittles turned the tables in a way that would have never been possible years ago.

In America, you go to bands.
In social media, bands go to YOU!

Tons of targeted music content is served up every day from sites like Last.fm, Pandora and Blip.fm. And let’s not forget how Myspace allowed bands to compete on an equal playing field. Though the online music industry is still playing out, social media has given us an incredible amount of control over our listening experience when compared with radio and technologies of old.

In America, you look for your old friends.
In social media, your old friends look for YOU!

Where would we be without Facebook? It’s hard to imagine a world where friends and old classmates had such trouble finding one another. Now it’s impossible to join Facebook and not get a slew of incoming friend requests from people you forgot even existed.

In America, marketers ignore you.
In social media, you ignore MARKETERS!

Ads can be targeted to find you, but there are also many more opportunities for you to ignore irrelevant ads. Facebook and Digg have created +/- systems to find your favorite ads, but in general social media gives you more choice and ability to change the channel/website if you’re not happy with the ads being served.

In America, you find products.
In social media, products find YOU!

Targeted ads and products have now become the norm rather than the outlier. Google Adsense and Adbrite are served up on hundreds of thousands of webpages and the Microsoft/Yahoo merger will likely create more targeted ad networks to help find relevant customers.

In America, you’re inspired by marketing.
In social media, marketing is inspired by YOU!

Companies like Zooppa have created user-generated advertising, and changed the way products are marketed (a few people make decisions that affect a vast majority) and user content fuels brand recognition for a number of products like the Valve game Left 4 Dead.

In America, you update your friends.
In social media, your friends update YOU!

 

Status updates have been around for years with AOL Instant Messenger, but it wasn’t until Twitter (and later Facebook) created a way for you to be automatically updated through a feed that it really gained momentum and popularity. Now anyone and everyone can tell you exactly what they’re doing.

In America, large companies create content.
In social media, YOU create content! (I know, it’s a stretch)

Online, user-generated content has found a place to live, and social networks give it a place for users to interact. In blogs and forums, in Facebook and Myspace, users can create, share and disseminate content. And a place like Youtube is the ultimate reversal in allowing users to watch (and more importantly choose) their content instead of being force-fed whatever is on the television or radio.

In America, you follow celebrities.
In social media, celebrities follow YOU!

Just because celebrities like Britney Spears, Robert Scoble and Guy Kawasaki “follow” you definitely doesn’t mean they’re listening to you. However, at least it opens up the stream both ways. Before social networks and the internet, there were few ways for celebs to have any idea what was being said by the Average Joe, but nowadays they can follow you just as easily as you follow them. 

In America, you search for TV shows.
In social media, TV shows search for YOU!

User-generated content has created a number of TV shows online like The Guild and Red vs. Blue. TV shows are taking cues from users and are building their programming around consumer interest. Verizon has even created a feature on its FiOS TV that allows users to search for user-generated content from sites like Dailymotion.

In America, you worry about sex offenders.
In social media, sex offenders worry about YOU!

Nothing scarier than sex offenders in your neighborhood. FamilyWatchDog allows users to find out about the registered offenders in their neighborhood to help educate the population and avoid issues. However, since an iPhone app was created, offenders now have to worry about members of the general population knowing too much about them. Talk about a reversal of fortune!

What are some social media reversals that you can think of? How has the internet and social media world managed to turn the traditional world upside down? Please share in the comments!