Walking around together

These days, it seems like there are way too many missed opportunities as we are socializing on the Net. I believe that even Social Media experts don't even fully understand all the possibilities available. For instance, I consider myself to be pretty Socially Saavy if not an outright expert and I'm still not totally confident I understand Digg. I even worked for a Social Media company for several months and things were changing so fast, the list of social networks they integrated with was out of date before marketing could issue a new Powerpoint Slide. In that case, the whole company seemed stiffled by the growth potential. When I started, we "could" launch a campaign in 4 weeks. Then it was 8 weeks with a "rush" charge...By the time I left, we needed a full 12 weeks to launch a campaign. Any idea why I left? :)

Nevertheless, the ideas around Social Media Marketing abound and much has been said about the "Social Graph." In fact, the Social Graph is the very thing that many marketers seem to think is the holy grail of product marketing in the future. The idea itself is inherantly complex. The benefit of understanding it is enourmous.

The term Social Graph seems to have been coined by Facebook to define their own social network. The concept however, is far more powerful when understood from a commerce perspective. The idea of a graph is basically a visual representation of a math model. In the case of the social graph, it's a way to understand how various "nodes" (let's call them- Oh I don't know, how about PEOPLE) interact with one another online.

So the idea is that if I like cycling and I just bought a new bike, there are some people in my social networks who will care and others who won't. If a company is selling bikes and they just sold one to me, there's a pretty good chance they'd want to know about anyone in my social network who would care that I just bought a bike.

I know alot more about this topic than I have time to blog about so if you want to know more, reach out to me or perhaps I'll get a chance to blog more about it soon. In the meantime, the point is- pay attention to social media. Register yourself and your company in as many ways as you can. even if you don't see the point right now, it's likely you'll be glad you did later. I've had a linked in profile for about 4 years and have been at 100 percent complete for over 2 years. I'm now glad I did. However, apparantly I somehow managed to send out too many invitations to connect with colleagues who didn't remember me and they declined my invitations (still considered RUDE in social networking) and now I have to know someone's e-mail address to send them an invitation. Anyone know how to fix that?

So as we are all walking around together in thing called Social Media, let's encourage one another as we venture to learn together what is possible. Perhaps soon we'll all be up and RUNNING together.