After each new post on this site, there is a natural spike in traffic from those who have subscribed to this site via RSS. Traffic increases again significantly when I tag items for facebook newsfeeds. So much so, that it’s now part of my post-publish routine. Friends and colleagues more often refer to my “facebook feeds” than their own RSS feeds.

Call it the natural beacon effect?

Whatever you want to call it, as a blogger or marketer you need to incorporate a facebook strategy as part of your overall marcom plan. 

Blogger tip: Add social bookmarking to your blog template so that people can tag your article to their favorite tool. Also include a twitter push so that everytime an article is published you will automatically tweet your followers with link.

Just as marketers are finally figuring out what the heck facebook is and why they should be embracing the platform as a way of reaching & engaging their customers and potential customers, there is a new trend developing that may impact facebook and other social mediums…

Enter social aggregators.

Aggregators won’t replace facebook - but much like RSS feeds have supplemented users visting websites directly, social aggregator services could mean marketers looking to reach and engage people through social media sites like facebook will find a smaller direct audience to engage with.

I’ve signed up with socialthing and others are raving about feedfriend. Both do about the same thing - they take updates from all your social media sites like flickr, facebook, twitter, yelp, linkedin and stream them as one interface in something called a “lifestream.”

The idea is great - instead of checking for updates on multiple sites, you can get them all at once - much like how i use Netvibes or Protopage to aggregate all my RSS feeds.

Personally I get everything I need from Netvibes. 

I can add twitter or facebook status updates to Netvibes… and i don’t really care for the extra features social aggregators include such as comments on the different feeds. When I also consider the fact that most of my friends aren’t as geeked out as I am on ‘web 2.0′, it makes even less sense. Just getting my friends on facebook was a monumental task.

Having said that, the mobile interface for Socialthing is a thing of beauty.

They also have an optimized interface for the iphone which makes checking out lifestreams on the go a pleasant experience.

I have a hard enough time keeping up with my RSS feeds (270 currently) - I’m not sure I have enough time (or care enough) to follow the lifestream of every person i know. Having said that, it could be really useful if you are stalking following a few choice people…

How can marketers get in on this?

Websites got around a similar issue when RSS feeds became popular by not including all the content in the feed - so users who liked the lead content were driven back to the site… where sponsored ads could be displayed in all their glory.

One suggestion - build your own branded social aggregator…. and include your own relevant content as one of the feeds.

I could see this working really well for Automotive, Financial, Pharma, Retail… well pretty much any brand looking to participate in & influence a person’s lifestream.

Ever since the return of my iphone from it’s odyssey in Vegas, I’ve been spending more time with the iphone installer to see how it can be better customized to my daily routine.

One of the most interesting applications I’ve installed so far is something called Twinkle. It’s Twitter with a nifty interface optimized for the iphone with location and picture capabilities.

The interfaced is optimized for the iphone - so i can check in my tweets easily throughout the day if i’m so inclined. I’ve included a screen capture from my iphone to the right (thanks to the iphone screenshot 1.2.1 app from robota)

The really interesting feature is the “near me” button which identifies other people in your area who are also on twinkle. You can follow their tweets and even send them private messages.

I also like the idea of taking a picture of where I am right now… and having that included as a tiny URL link in my tweet.

Twitter hasn’t taken up a lot of mind-share when i’m on my desktop(s) or laptop… but increasingly it’s getting a slice of my mobile time - and twinkle makes it that much more interesting.

I haven’t tested any twitter clients for my blackberry yet - but I’ll try and do so in the next few days and report back my thoughts.

How about you - do you tweet on mobile… or do you use something else - like mobile instant messaging (MIM)? MIM will also be the topic of my next post over at onedegree.ca 

Do you twitter? Follow me here.

Is it just me, or does twittering what you are doing right NOW or updating your facebook status kind of like yelling at a room full of everybody you know? Isn’t it kind of like sending an email in all caps?

Ok - so maybe yelling may be a bit of an overstatement, but wouldn’t it be super if you could segment your tweats or facebook status updates based on audience? 

I would love the ability to go from a 1 to many broadcast  of what i’m doing right now to a 1 to a few broadcast segmented by topic, group of friends, family, or co-workers.

For example, I’m sure my marketing friends don’t really care how much snow I skied in this past weekend, and likewise my ski friends really don’t care about QR codes.  When I think about it, only my mother (and maybe my girlfriend) really care or want to know what I’m doing RIGHT now…. 

Is there a way to do this already? Let me know.

Do you Twitter?

Last October I posed that same question and blogged my perpective on what Twitter is and what it’s good for. You can read that full post here.

Fast forward six months and despite a nifty integration option with my facebook status, I’m yet to reach a critical mass of followers to make it truly useful.

It’s not yet a useful marketing channel - but some colleagues are now “following” industry subject matter experts / celebrities as an additional research channel. If you’re using Twitter and getting a great return on your time investment, post a comment and let us know how.

For those of you still trying to figure out exactly what it is, check out Twitter in plain english by the common craft show below:

Social Media has really evolved over the last 12 months. 

Arguably it started when facebook opened up their platform to developers.  

The number of applications went from 8 to hundreds within weeks and the level of user engagement increased and accelerated.  

Many other major social media sites followed facebook’s lead and announced plans to open up their platform too… most notably Google’s Open Social announcement near the end of the year which had the promise of portability of applications and widgets across multiple platforms.

Many other sites that were struggling to match the pace of facebook’s growth declared that they would also join Open Social so that collectively they could change the landscape of social media once again (maybe this time in their favour).  

There was just one major barrier 

facebook’s social graph meant that people would not easily or quickly leave facebook for another platform - not after investing so much time and effort into creating networks and connecting to friends, family and colleagues. 

As blogged on this site (see links below), it’s unlikely that consumers will abandon or share their online social media time with facebook until their data assets built within facebook became portable to other sites. 

Enter dataportability.org 

Their philosophy is that you own your own data - so you should have the right to do with it as you see fit…like export or port it to another platform, tool, or application. Check out their mission statement here. 

As of now, the group is no more than a round table of smart people looking for a way to materialize a vision…. but what’s interesting is who has joined the round table discussion.  As of today, key people from LinkedIn, Flickr, SixApart, Google, facebook and Twitter have joined the conversation.

If this turns out to be more than a PR stunt, this has the potential to be the biggest story of 2008 as true identity portability means we can take our social equity and use it however we see fit - and where ever.

That’s what I’d call Social Media 2.0

Or Identity 2.0

Whatever you want to call it - this is a significant signal that the digital social media space will continue to evolve at a rapid pace this year and we all stand to benefit from this.  

Need to catch up on the conversation? Here are links to some of my previous articles that referenced portability of identity and identity 2.0:  

• Identity 2.0 - where does it begin?
• Open Social not cause for open celebreation….yet

Do you twitter? It’s a question I recently posed on my facebook account. Only a handful even knew what Twitter was…only three actually admitted to having a Twitter account.

Twitter is a really neat free social utility tool - it essentially allows you to post very short messages about what you are currently doing RIGHT NOW to the Twitter website - which you can personalize. This is very similar to creating status updates on MSN messenger or facebook…or even setting up email or SMS auto-replies.

The neat thing about Twitter is that you can follow somebody’s Twitter in many ways - either through a website (by visiting their site), as an update on your IM, as a SMS alert, RSS, or email. Think of it as micro-blogging - or blogging for people who don’t have enough to say to actually blog… or for people who want to say a few things but don’t want to create an entire blog posting around it.

I created my own Twitter account and admit i’m struggling to really find a use for it. After investing significant time in building my social equity on facebook, why do i need a separate social utility tool for status updates when facebook already does this automatically to my network of friends? Do i really want to tell people what i’m up to all the time? Do people even care? Will people accept my invitation to join Twitter in a lame attempt to make my twitter page more popular? I’m thinking the answer is no to all of the above.

Having said that, some people have said that Twitter has become a hot newswire - industry insight and news is sometimes available through a Twitter feed before it hits the blogs or news pages. I guess that’s important for some industry people…but does anybody else really care if they hear about industry news 3 hours before they read it in their RSS newsreader? One sign that Twitter has become a hit is the fact there are lots of imitations now available globally - like Pownce, Jaiku and Dodgeball.  Wikipedia reports that there are over 100 knock-offs of Twitter now. It seems like instant messaging 2.0 has arrived. 

As marketers, how do we leverage this channel to reach our audiences and deliver messages? If you are marketing an established personality (or trying to create one), this is an interesting space to play in. Celebrities and politicians have setup their own Twitter pages in order to connect with a younger audience. U.S. presidential candidate Obama has his own Twitter page here.

In previous blog posts I’ve discussed the idea around “Identity 2.0” or creating a way for people to manage their online profiles centrally so that they don’t need to manage multiple accounts or create new ones when they want to join new communities. I would suggest the same thing is or will be needed for micro-blogging to go mainstream.  Wouldn’t it be great if somebody created a widget that automatically updated my status on all my channels? In this scenario all I would do is create a status update on facebook and watch (or not) as the widget automatically publishes my status to Twitter, Pownce, MSN Messenger, my RSS feed, personal website, blog,  or email. I reference facebook because it’s easy, it’s already there and there is already huge social equity in the platform.  

If Twitter can build more social equity beyond the early adopter tech / celebrity / politician communities, it has a great chance of being really useful. The best way to do this will be through real integration with facebook, myspace, and all other social networking tools

UPDATE 10/07: IF you actually click on the Twitter settings within facebook, you can have Twitter automatically update your facebook status. Sweet!