Where is the conversation? Where is the business value in social media?
Nick O’Neill has proved himself to be a conversation starter once again. His post today at the Social Times neatly sums up some one of the recent shifts that I’ve seen filtering through blogs and social media: ain’t no walls around here.
Disqus, despite its drawbacks, offers a great service and gets a lot of traction because it’s working to centralize the conversation.
Nick opens his post by asking “where is the value in blogging?”
It’s not about getting eyeballs on your site. It’s not about catering to the masses the way mass media often caters—this audience is not passive. It’s about knowledge.
To me the answer is clear: the value is in the conversation. The debate. It’s fun to participate, and it’s informative to watch.
The platform is fickle. Facebook can’t stop the outflow of user data. Neither can any other social network. The trick is not to own the platform, but to sit at the top of your field on whatever platform exists.
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Hey Jason,
Thanks for the conversation! Also, I like the new design for the site
Of course, Nick, thanks for getting the gears in my head turning!
And thanks for the design compliments, as well. I think we’ll be rolling it to our other sites soon…
Hello Nick,
I can’t agree more. Communities exist beyond infrastructure and I view them as made up by “people” , “places” and “conversations”.
I’m following MY community around social media and this includes blogs (700+ of them) , Facebook, LinkedIn profiles and Q&A … what’s critical is: knowing who is where, talking to whom and talking about what.
We’ve build a platform to map these different constituents of a community and provides knowledge and information to enable buzz, outreach and advertising.
Here is a simple real use case that I find interesting:
- I was listening to a really good post from a blogger on social marketing
- I left a comment.
- 2 days later, I didn’t saw my comment on her blog
- using our application and tracking my activity, I discover my comment was not published.
- the blogger was shown in our app as a Facebook user so I sent her a message… very contextual.
- she told me my comment went to her spam box and that she’ll fix it.
- she even asked for a demo and we had a very rich discussion
So, even for such a simple thing as getting a comment posted, it was important to look beyond the wall of existing infrastuctures: in our case Facebook and Wordpress.
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