Follow Friday is a common practice on Twitter where many people spend friday posting things like #FF @aplusk @guykawasaki … This practice is distracting at best and fails to accomplish the single purpose it intends. Follow friday began as way to share lesser known twitter users with your community. A great idea that quickly grew out of control.
I propose a better implementation that will not only accomplish the original intent but will do so in a non-distrcting manner by leveraging twitter lists. I propose that any individual that wants to share their recent finds, favorite follows or other gems create a list called “recommends”. Keep a handful of people on this list. Cycle them out as often as you like. You can find mine at @spf13/recommends
social media
A Better Follow Friday
Does Seth Godin Get It?
Earlier this week Seth Godin announced his first presence on twitter with the post Delivering blogs via Twitter..
You can receive instant daily updates of this blog by following @thisissethsblog. I create the tweets automatically using a service called twitterfeed. It’s free and it works really well. (PS this is my only presence on Twitter… I’m focused on the blog and my books, and alas can’t tweet and do that at the same time).
Managing Your Social Media Presence
Image via CrunchBase
As social media continues to emerge, many professionals are curious on what is the best way to manage these various networks. For posting updates I have found ping.fm an invaluable resource. I use it to manage updates across all my networks including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flicker, FriendFeed and more. Here's the skinny on how I utilize this resource.
The Death of Search
Social media will be the next innovation in the most unlikely of places, search ( leveraging the community to scale infinitely ). It’s not that people will all together stop searching, but the approach that they take to finding information will become increasingly social (rather than algorithmic) in nature.
For the last decade, search always seems on the cusp of “intelligent” results. Each new engine promises to be able to overcome “search overload” as Microsoft puts is. Yet none have been able to actualize this goal. If you want to know the best place in NYC to get pizza, you don’t ask google. Why, because google will give you hundreds of results, without any acutal value attached to them. You will certainly find better responses by inquiring through social media.
Ranking Social Media
Image by steve.francia via Flickr
In business it's common to use sales as a metric to determine success. Songs, albums, books and movies are all ranked on "best seller" charts. While this isn't a perfect metric, it is largely useful due to the innate control built within. There is friction to a sale in that buying something costs money of which people have a limited supply. This makes it so that someone couldn't just repeatedly buy their own song, album, book or movie and have a best seller (not to mention they would be losing a ton of money to the distribution and retail channels).
Social Media Recognition
Recently I've been fortunate to be recognized in a few publications. I extend a warm welcome to all my new friends and followers. I look forward to engaging with you.
