For many people, social media barely extends beyond Facebook events and a few messages. For most, it’s hard to understand why people need to be constantly connected.  But social media and networking is a valuable tool for every person in every industry, from executive to homemaker to student to chef. How you use social media relies on your style, interests, and goals.  Everyone can find benefits in social media with just a little effort.

Make new connections / Revive old ones

Social networking gets lambasted for valuing acquaintances or people you don’t really know, but in reality, these networks are vast databases of everyone you’ve met. And who knows when you’ll need them again.  On a job search, you can search your network to see who works at places you’d like to work. LinkedIn makes this even better by telling you who in your network knows someone else who works at a specific company, and helps make the introduction for you.

Party planning

For convenience, having all your friends listed in one place can make it easier to plan parties, arrange reunions, or just find someone to hang out with this weekend.  Facebook has a built-in party planner making it a point-and-click affair to invite everyone (or someone some) you know. And with a master list, it’s harder to forget someone.

Discover new interests

Last.FM and Pandora Radio to make it easier to discover new music. Digg and StumpleUpon help you find exciting news or fun articles.  Netflix and Amazon help you find movies and books (and anything else) you might like. None of these are an exact science, but simply help wade through the massive sea of the internet to find things you might like. And each one has a social media component to help you see what other people have bought or liked or better, what your friends have bought or liked.  Tuning into these spaces can improve your own media and purchasing experience.

Promote yourself

Everyone Google searches people, from potential employers to co-workers to dates. This means you want to control your online brand. When someone searches for you, it’s better they find information you’re willing to share, like on your Facebook page or a personal blog.  You don’t have to detail every part of your life (once something’s on the internet, it’s no longer private). While it sounds cold, it’s reality – you are your own brand, just like Coke or McDonalds, and you want to control how the world views you.

Find out if that boy/girl you like is single

And the true purpose of an social network – social stalking.  Just kidding…

The old guard of media have years of status and experience that make them seem more important. The Associated Press’ recent hoopla over links to its articles shows a disconnect from the old guard to the web world. Start-ups dream of getting some New York Times coverage because that would just set them up for success, but they ignore an article in TechCrunch or popular story on Digg might be more valuable.

Martin Varsavsky wrote for the Huffington Post about publicity his company Fon was getting. The New York Times featured him and his company on the cover of the Sunday business section followed by an article in Forbes magazine. But his website only saw 200 new uniques. A popular post on Digg netted him 50,000 uniques.

Varsavsky recognizes the benefits of print media - more resources, physical product, and established reputation. “Paper is more credible than pixels” he says. But if its traffic you need, old media won’t help you.

The Associated Press reminded me of this issue because, even as it whined about other websites sending it free publicity, the A.P. refused to link to other websites. It had no problem quoting them and saying the name of the blog, but wouldn’t include links to the quoted blog. The New York Times has recently started adding links, mostly to their blog and not their articles. Other mainstream media sites leave you the impression there’s nothing else on the web. Even new media companies like IMDB.com won’t provide links to sources, even when quoting them directly.

The issue is these links are incredibly valuable. The major tech blogs and aggregators, TechCrunch, Gigaom, Slashdot, and Digg to name a few, can bring a website down because of all the traffic they send. And once that traffic is on your site, it’s your job to keep them there. 2.3 million people read the Sunday times, but it’s a lot harder to get them to sign online and go to a website. With a link provided, you just click. Easy, no effort, effective.

Mainstream media needs to join the link culture. Linking to other sites isn’t just polite. Many sites (like Prodigeek) show links to sites linking to them. I’ve gotten reliable traffic from several blogs and that traffic inspires me to link to them more. Moreover, I don’t like to link to websites that don’t link at all (unless they’re the original source). I’d prefer to send traffic to other blogs who share in the link culture than news sites that don’t. And companies that are hostile to the link culture get blacklisted.

For companies trying to monetize their website, whether through sales, advertising, or something else, need to put their PR where the traffic is. That means publicize on the TechCrunches and Gigaoms and taste makers of your industry. The credible that comes from a Times article sounds nice, but it isn’t helping you meet traffic goals. As companies (hopefully) recognize this, blogs and websites will gain credibility as they become the next-generation of king-makers, discovering the next Googles, Microsofts, and Facebooks while the mainstream media plays catch up. Mainstream media needs to join the link culture (which includes not suing websites) or get left out and left behind.

Updated 6/24 1:37p.m. - I just read a great post by Chris Brogan on this same subject, noting how the Boston Globe wrote out the link to his blog on their website and newspaper, but didn’t link to it.

How did you discover that new web game or hilarious video? Between social bookmarking, social networking, socializing, the internet has made sharing information and ideas as simple as pointing and clicking. So do we need anointed trend setters anymore? Two conflicting theories are hashing out the marketing debate, but both forget to give credit to the real influencer - the internet. The internet has flattened the playing field for anybody to contribute to starting or spreading a trend.

Marketing conventional wisdom has followed the teachings of books like The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell and The Influentials by Jon Berry and Ed Keller. These books claim a few well connected individuals inspire the vast majority in terms of the clothing we wear or movies we watch. These people are often called influentials. Marketing companies promote their connection with these influencers and often focus advertising budgets strictly to reaching this oligarchy of culture.

New research is challenging this conventional wisdom. Clive Thompson writes for Fast Company about Duncan Watts research on social trends.

[Duncan Watts] has analyzed email patterns and found that highly connected people are not, in fact, crucial social hubs. He has written computer models of rumor spreading and found that your average slob is just as likely as a well-connected person to start a huge new trend. And last year, Watts demonstrated that even the breakout success of a hot new pop band might be nearly random. Any attempt to engineer success through Influentials, he argues, is almost certainly doomed to failure.

“It just doesn’t work,” Watts says. “A rare bunch of cool people just don’t have that power. And when you test the way marketers say the world works, it falls apart. There’s no there there.”

Watts theorizes trends are more random, or at least harder to track. All the research done on trends has looked at successful trends. Trends that failed to catch on are harder to study. Watts computer simulations give more credit broader social networks, meaning marketing to a larger group is more important than a select group. Simply, if more people know about your product or idea, the odds are more likely someone will share that information.

(more…)

Newspaper editors can relax. Geeks aren’t replacing them yet. The Project For Excellence in Journalism reported a study compared the leading stories on social bookmarking sites like Digg, Reddit, and Delicious to 48 mainstream news outlets, finding great differences in the types of stories that get the most visible placement.

Social bookmarking sites, who’s stories are chosen by anyone with an account on the site, have a greater focus on blogs and other user generated sites like YouTube. These stories rarely overlapped with the lead stories in major news outlets. Social bookmarking sites focused more on technology like the iPhone and video games, crime and celebrity stories, and a lack of international coverage.

The study tries to hold social bookmarking sites to task for being standards of what’s news and what’s not. The study says:

Despite claims that the Web would internationalize consumers’ news diets, coverage across the three user-news sites focused more on domestic events and less on news from abroad than the mainstream media that week. Yahoo News, both on its main news page and three most popular pages, meanwhile, stood out for being decidedly more international that week.

Unfortunately, the study forgets one important detail about social bookmarking sites: the people. Social bookmarking caters to niche, often geeky audiences who pick stories they like to recommend to others. Digg thus far is not positioned nor intentioned to replace standard media outlets for news coverage. Instead, it helps the social community around the site find articles, websites, and features that would interest the community. Finding popular stories increases your clout among the community. But like any social community, sociability is only as good as the community.

Digg, Reddit, and Delicious are still catering to early adopters, often tech-savvy individuals, much like how Wikipedia features more articles about Star Wars characters than world religions. There’s nothing wrong with this, even though this study seems to portray these bookmarked articles as trivial. They are not trivial to the people who take the time to post them or the people who make them popular. There is a difference between what people need to know and they want to know. The question should be who is responsible for each.

As part of the movie industry’s flawless strategy to combat piracy, the Advanced Access Content System provides encryption data for HD DVDs and Blu-Ray discs.  After their spotless record of never being able to stop the copying of DVDs, the same song is being sung for HD DVDs.  Hackers posted the encryption key used to prevent the copying of HD DVDs.  AACS sent DMCA warnings to websites with the key claiming copyright infringement.  This action sparked more publicity for the encryption key, including high popularity on the social bookmarking site Digg.

But HD DVD sponsors Digg.  So Digg removed the link to the encryption key even though it looked to be one of the most popular links on the site.  This has lead to a mini-revolt of bloggers and hackers who have united to spread the encryption key and force its placement to the top of Digg’s popular links.  The first four pages have been dominated by web pages with the encryption key, often in the title, or at least talking about the story. 

Why the AACS and media companies believed their new fanged encryption software would be any more challenging for hackers remains a mystery.  The entertainment industry used the same tactics and even the same organization to protect its next-gen discs after watching simply software allow anyone with a computer to copy DVDs.  And by resorting to DMCA threats, the AACS has only brought more attention to its failure.  Media companies keep wanting to blame YouTube, BitTorrent, and KaZaa for failure to police or stop piracy when these media companies can’t even do it themselves.