Future uses of social stuff

I found a new social chat service recently, after a comment to a blog post I made about Twitter. The comment was smart and rational, and absolutely correct about the need to not only have a "corporate" presence on these services. (And for what it's worth Russ, I did solicit posts from everyone recently asking them to leave their Twitter handles. Only three of us did, but if you're still interested, you can find them here.) But that's not what this is about, actually - because in the comment, the poster referred to Plurk.com. This is another Twitterclone, one of many I've been seeing lately. Plurk's take is interesting, in that it has a visual time line from which you can keep track of your friends' comments, rather than the scrolling list on Twitter which can become impossible to keep track of if you only look at it once a day or so. (Which is about how often I look at it, because I have this real life that keeps getting in the way of my being social.) Anyway, Plurk is a nice twist on Twitter. Just as Britekite, Utterz and Pownce are. (Well, Pownce doesn't add anything new, but I love grouping things in threes.) But here's my problem: With so many of these sites being created all of the time, who's going to use them? Whenever I sign up for one of these things, I do a cursory check for my Twitter friends to see if they're already there too. Of course, they are - mostly developers, marketers and various other Web 2.0 minded people like myself. Unless I'm missing something though, (and if I am, I'm sure to hear about it soon,) all of these people are there for the same reason I'm there - to kick the tires, see if its any good, make a couple of comments, and move onto the next program. Because no one productive has enough time to maintain ALL of these places. Just so I can keep up on these things for our clients, I have a maddening number of accounts for social sites. The average person, the person we as business-minded people should be thinking about, REALLY don't have time for all of that. Unless we give them a reason to. Whenever a developer creates one of these communication tools, it becomes geekland - as I say, full of people like... well, me. But if a website with a broader reach and interest were to implement it, then it would become mainstream. For example, what if Plurk was used by Paramount Pictures as a place for fans of their various film franchises to talk? Fans of Star Trek, Indiana Jones, the Jackass movies... there are plenty of average people interested in those. If there was an easy to sign up for, easy to use Plurk waiting for them when they came to the site, it would be a boon to Paramount. So not to be the Ugly American here, but that is where social needs to go next. Not in the creating of similar sites with minor changes to them, but in full scale products that can be sold to companies interested in continuing a dialog.' Shouldn't these companies just use Plurk or Twitter itself and be done with it? Well, there are some problems with that. First off, you are at the mercy of these sites to stay on line. (Any frequent user of Twitter will tell you your chances of using it and not having it poop out on you at least once are slim.) More importantly the focus of the current sites is infinitely broad - anything and everything is discussed. Paramount, with their own network, would limit the focus of discussions just by right of who they are. Sure, there would doubtlessly be discussions that have nothing to do with the next Mission: Impossible movie, or any other movie - but the majority of comments would be about them, because most of the users got there because of an interest in something they do. If nothing else, it might alleviate the congestion on the broader networks if more niche topics are already covered elsewhere. It might even mean Twitter doesn't need to update their server package after all.

About the Author: Eric Reid

I am the Social Media Services Manager for Off Madison Ave. I've been with the company since 2006, when I was hired to do SEO, and link building in particular. When social networking sites started cropping up, at first I started using them to create backlinks - but they weren't the best for that, given all of the "nofollow" attributes. However, I did see the potential for all of the direct referral traffic they represent. Since then I've been actively pursuing both tactics for clients: Links that can help them for search, and social postings that get them involved in the conversation. It's about the coolest job you could ever get. ;)

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