Blogging is a Contact Sport!

Hey Big Bad Corporation...your blog sucks! You think you know how to do everything but guess what you don't.

You're not on top of this social media stuff...this social media

hype and it's killing you.

All the traditional methods of marketing that you knew to work are being challenged by something crazy called Twitter.

You've never been one to talk to your customers.

Guess What?! Your customers are already talking about you.

Here are 3 Ways to Improve Your Corporate Blog:

1. You need to be Committed to your Blog.

The people that buy your product want to know that you are there behind your blog listening to their comments.

2. You are not Engaging.

Your blog is supposed to be having a conversation with the reader and it's not.

3. You sound like a Corporation.

Main Street hates Wall Street. People want to be talking to another person rather than a machine. You must personalize your brand.

Let me give you one more reason. I was Tweeting like crazy about the Grammys.

And, I found myself in tons of back channel conversations.

By the thousands, people were tweeting about the artists and performances at the #grammys. It was fun!

The point is that people are talking. And, they are talking about everything. Which means they are talking about you.

They are talking about your brand. And, they are talking about their experience with your brand.

If you want to keep up, you better start listening and start engaging.

Oh and you can follow me on Twitter @MeeraManek

Thanks.

Neighborhood Watching

Jeff Howe of Wired magazine examines whether crowdsourcing is evil. I’m just trying to understand what crowdsourcing is and how it is being used.

Crowdsourcing involves submitting work traditionally completed by an employee or contractor but instead is offered to a group of people or community. Utilizing Web 2.0 differently, business, organizations, authors, and journalists have been making crowdsourcing trendy.

Sure, it makes complete sense that the business can turn to this form of product creation especially in a social networking world where everyone is an expert. People are competing in this weak economy to find innovative ways to cut expenses in their cost structure and this is one way to do it. I’m a huge fan of twitter and I can see an underlying sense of crowdsourcing there where celebrities ask fans for opinions about their next venture or product.

I have a friend who runs an editing company (www.papercheck.com) and his editors are all over the nation. He doesn’t need anyone in his office. The editors just have to pass a grammar test and then they can choose which hours they work. They are connected through the Facebook and Twitter communities and have positive results. When I think of crowdsourcing, I think if my friends’s paper editing company.

Crowdsourcing is in its infancy and this use of web 2.0 should be given more time to develop before judging it as evil. The only real issue I have with crowdsourcing is it name. Can we call it something else? I'm always tempted to call is crowdscoring when I read crowdsourcing. Let’s call it something else.... perhaps neighborhood watching.

What's your Jersey Shore name?

We are growing into a freakish online culture where we need to know what our networks of friends are doing and saying at every moment all day long. You check your Facebook page as soon as the contact lenses are in and I'm sure you've all heard the term "Facebook stalker?!"

In order to stay on top of the social networking frenzy, Mark Zuckerberg posted a Facebook blog demonstrating that Facebook understands these social networks by coining the term "social graph." This term represents the understanding that connections already exist in the in world be them friends, companies, or interest groups and these connections can be mapped. Facebook hopes that social graphing allows the Facebook user to access those connections more easily and feel empowered by the ability to connect to connections perviously held as unapproachable.

While sites like Facebook continue to feed the hungry bear of social networking, they will be pressed to research, test, discover, and unearth what runs the social graphing machine.

I'll take this time to introduce them to Benjamin Waber, invader of privacy and MIT PhD student that studies the way groups interact socially called "reality mining." Waber and his team "track people people using location-aware devices like mobile phones or electronic badges." This data has been used to understand how communication and networking really function in the work place.

The next place Waber can naturally take his research is on-line and with Facebook.

Tracking and mapping us by following our cell phones is just a little frightening when it comes to the impact this has on our privacy. Waber tracked 100 MIT student using their cell phones and "deduced likely future meetings with impressive accuracy."

This just begs me to ask - how badly do we need to connect with each other? People following our every move and trying to determine how we interact just to improve forums like Facebook. I feel like we are already communicating at an intrusive level - I mean how many of us have unfortunately already had our high school reunions on Facebook.

Just knowing that the social networking phenomena is perceived as continuing to grow is going to demand a deeper understanding of social connections and the need to connect. I just worry about how much more our privacy needs to be poked and prodded in order to feed the half awake social networking giant.

It is going to be stupendous to see this idea of Web 2.0 and social networking evolve because just seeing it come this far has been freakishly cool. I just hope that it's direction and understanding does not involve grave intrusions of privacy only for the government to use it against us and handicap us of our own thinking like they have with everything else.

Very 1st Post

Greetings!

I'm a second year MBA student at American University and this is the very 1st post for a class in social networking. As my classmate says, this could be the beginning of fruitful discovery!


On my honor, all posts on this blog are my own.