Social Media Lines are Blurring

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This podcast is a discussion about a guest blog post I recently wrote on Hubspot entitled: The Lines are Blurring between Social Networks…Let Them!

As we spend time on social networks, blogs, Twitter, YouTube, etc., the lines are blurring between them.

As I’m sure you know there are three types of social media destination sites

Content Publishing sites – Blogs, YouTube, Twitter
Content Sharing – DIGG, Reddit, Mashable, etc.
Networking – Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, etc.

But, most of these are starting to cross over into each other. For example, people show their updates on social networks. LinkedIn and Facebook both have a “what are you working on now?” status which you can update or you can link to your Twitter account.

The social media lines are blurring….

Is Facebook just a social networking site? What is Twitter?

Twitter is a communication tool as evidenced by how many companies and non profits are using it including Apple, Jet Blue Airways, Zappos, Tampa Bay Red Cross, ABC Action News, etc. The list of enterprise Twitter users is growing every day.

Twitter allows you to have a mini-profile similar to social networks. It’s a very brief profile, nonetheless it has a similar characteristic to a social network profile, just shorter.

What about YouTube? What is it? It’s part social networking and part content sharing. Any business can create a channel in YouTube. It’s free. Just open your channel account, select the type of account you want. I like the “guru” account type for subject matter expertise. You can aggragate video content from any source including your own and any other video in YouTube. If you sell “blue suede shoes” provide a link to Elvis singing “blue suede shoes” video.

If you aggregate interesting video content, promote it to your following in Twitter and to your Facebook friends. So, is YouTube content sharing or social networking? You decide…

If I share ten new videos with you and only one or two of them are actually my videos, you’ll still give me credit for all the relevant videos I sent to you (assuming I’m sending you relevant video content). In this example, I would be a source of good video content, even if I didn’t create all of the videos.

The social media lines are blurring…

As marketers we need to harness all the content and all the platforms that are relevant to our communities. The social web platforms overlap with each other, but that’s ok. Let them. We can use them all.

I predict that in Web 3.0 the lines will be less blurry. We’ll be able to create a common profile that travels with us from platform to platform. This movement is already in progress called OpenSocial led by Google but it’s not ready for prime time yet. Just stay tuned on that…

In the meantime let’s enjoy the fact we can use Twitter as a social networking tool and a communication tool. Ditto for other social web platforms.

One of my favorite examples is the Twitter stream. By using a hashmark with your Tweets, e.g., #rays for Tampa Bay Rays, you can communicate in a real time stream to anyone (anywhere) that wants to follow that stream. I just returned from my favorite Internet marketing conference – Pubcon. People around the world who didn’t attend the conference were following along the comments made by more than half the attendees using the #pubcon Twitter stream.

The BusinessWeek cover story in May 2005 was focused on blogs in business. In the follow up story May 2008 the article discussed all the social platforms and said “the new resume is 140 characters” in a reference to how Twitter is a communication tool.

As marketers we can use all the social web tools to engage our buyers, our community, listen to them and build relationships with them without concern over whether you’re in a blog, social networking site, a media outlet or wherever you may be online.

The market place is busy and crowded. And, the social web opens up doors for conversations. Just get engaged in the conversations even if the lines are blurred. Let them…

Bernie Borges
http://twitter.com/berniebay