You Can’t Tell the Players without a Program

Social media is a fast-moving phenomenon. There's a lot to know and get up to speed on, and more happening all the time. Sometimes it helps to pause for a few moments and take a look around. Check out some of the trees that compose the forest.

Here is a random overview of some of those trees. Some have already grown into mighty redwoods, others are mere saplings. This list is definitely not comprehensive, but maybe you'll find a few items of interest here or tap into a jumping-off point for further exploration. And as your own explorations uncover sites or applications that you find particularly useful, please let me know.

Although I have accounts on sites like LinkedIn, MySpace and NewsGator, I have not analyzed or delved into many of the other sites on this list deeply enough to endorse or dismiss them. Some may be useful; others may be virtual time wasters.

But that's the nature of social media: As the number of sites and applications continues to grow at Internet speed, some social media tools will demonstrate significant value for businesses while others will not. Be that as it may, knowledge is power and hopefully this list will contribute to our collective knowledge:

Bloglines is a free online service for searching, subscribing, creating and sharing news feeds, blogs and rich web content. Upon registration, users can access their account from any computer or mobile device.

Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking service that allows users to tag, save, manage and share web pages from a centralized source. With emphasis on the power of the community, Delicious strives to improve how people discover, remember and share on the Internet.

Digg is a site for people to share content and collectively determine its value. As submissions receive increasing numbers of "Diggs," they are promoted for other visitors to see.

Digsby is a free software product that helps you manage all your IM, email, and social network accounts from one application.

EveryZing provides search technology and brings the benefits of search engine optimization (SEO) to online audio and video content. By aggregating structured and unstructured digital content for faster, easier discovery, EveryZing adds value to search and drives user consumption of multimedia content.

Facebook is a social networking site. Millions of people use Facebook everyday to keep up with friends, upload an unlimited number of photos, share links and videos, and learn more about the people they meet.

Flickr is an image and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community platform. In addition to being a popular Web site for users to share personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers as a photo repository. Its popularity has been fueled by its organization tools, which allow photos to be tagged and browsed. As of November 2008, it claims to host more than 3 billion images.

Friendfeed is a feed aggregator that consolidates the updates from social media and social networking websites, social bookmarking websites, blogs and micro-blogging updates, as well as any other type of RSS/ Atom feed. Users can use this stream of information to create customized feeds to share (and comment) with friends.

Goodreads is a free website for book lovers, conceived as a large library that you can wander through and see everyone's bookshelves, their reviews, and their ratings. You can also post your own reviews and catalog what you have read, are currently reading, and plan to read in the future. You can also join a discussion group, start a book club or contact an author.

LinkedIn is a social networking site. When you join, you create a profile that summarizes your professional expertise and accomplishments. You can then form connections by inviting trusted contacts to join LinkedIn and connect to you. Your network consists of your connections, your connections' connections, and the people they know, linking you to a vast number of other professionals.

MySpace is an online community that lets you meet your friends' friends. Create a community on MySpace and you can share photos, journals and interests with your growing network of mutual friends

NewsGator seeks to help individuals and businesses improve the way they find information and communicate internally and externally through a wide range of RSS aggregation products and social media tools.

Pageflakes is a customizable portal to the Internet based on '"Flakes" – small, movable versions of all of your web favorites that you can arrange on your personal homepage.

Plurk is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send updates (otherwise known as plurks) through short messages or links, which can be up to 140 text characters in length. Plurk is a communication medium meant to form a balance between blogs and social networks, and between email messaging and instant messaging.

Qik is a web application that enables users to share video from their mobile phones and post video live on any website.

Reddit is a source for what's new and popular online. Users vote on links that you like or dislike and help decide what's popular.

Seesmic is a video blogging web application in alpha stage to make video uploading easier for those using webcams. Seesmic has been called the "Twitter of video", however conversations do not take place in real time. The service has 20,000 users to date and 70,000 viewers per month.

SlideShare is a community for sharing presentations. Individuals and organizations upload presentations to share their ideas, connect with others, and generate leads for their businesses. Anyone can find presentations on topics that interest them. They can tag, download, or embed presentations into their own blogs and websites.

StumbleUpon uses ratings to form collaborative opinions on website quality. When you stumble, you will only see pages that " like-minded stumblers" have recommended. This helps you discover certain content you might not find using a search engine.

Technorati collects, organizes, and distributes the global online conversation. Technorati was founded to help bloggers to succeed by collecting, highlighting, and distributing the online global conversation.

TweetDeck is a free beta application that aims to improve the functionality of Twitter by taking large numbers of twitter feeds and organizing them into topic-specific columns, thereby consolidating tweets into more manageable pieces.

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users' updates (AKA tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length. Updates are displayed on the user's profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them.

Viddler is a web application that allows you to upload, enhance, and share digital video inside your web browser. Viddler supports tags as a way of identifying content and finding a specific video (even among your own) when you don't know or remember the title.

Vimeo is a video-centric social network site that supports embedding, sharing, video storage, and allows user-commenting on each video page. Users must register to upload content.

Yahoo Buzz can be about anything - a great story on a major news site, an extraordinary bit from an obscure site, an intriguing video, or a fantastic blog that shouldn't be missed. Instead of editors, anyone can help determine the top-rated stories. With Buzz, Yahoo determines the most popular topics that people are searching for on Yahoo. Then they showcase the most popular stories within those topics, based on activities like voting and emailing stories to friends. Stories with most "Buzz" are then published on the Yahoo! home page.

Yahoo Pipes is a Yahoo composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web. Simple commands can be combined together to create output, such as combining many feeds into one, then sorting, filtering and translating it.

Comments? Insights? Welcome to the conversation!

The Community Decided

Congratulations Barack Obama on this, your first day as President of the United States.

One of the mantras of social media is "The Community Decides," which simply means that the interactive discourse between people enabled by the Internet has the power to trump even the most artful hyperbole and spin.

The peaceful transition of power that took place on the steps of the U.S. Capital today culminates a journey that began with the first campaign speech in a democratic election process that at times seemed endless. Through our votes, throughout America, the people (AKA the community) decided on who will lead us as the head of government through the serious challenges ahead.

Those challenges, of course, are far bigger than any single person can solve. But not only has the community decided who will lead, the community is also speaking to how we want to be led. Even with storm clouds all around, this day feels bright and hopeful -- due in large measure to the rhetoric President Obama expressed in his inaugural speech…

"Our challenges may be new, the instruments with which we meet them may be new, but those values upon which our success depends, honesty and hard work, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism -- these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history.

"What is demanded then is a return to these truths. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility -- a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character than giving our all to a difficult task. This is the price and the promise of citizenship."

Do these words inspire, motivate and empower? Do they reflect our hopes and ambitions? Do they resonate as authentic and true?

The community will decide.

Trust, but Verify

The Internet is a remarkable invention. Not only is it the backbone of all things social media, it has forever changed the way business is conducted, how human beings interact, how problems are identified and solved and so on.

In the early days of corporate blogging, even the companies that led the pack in recognizing the vast potential of social media quietly worried about pitfalls and risks, like "What if one of our bloggers says something wrong?" or "What if readers say something bad?"

Today, it's widely understood that the benefits of blogs and other social media systems far outweigh such risks. Even the worry that somebody might say something bad about our company has matured into a realization that companies do not control public conversations (we never actually did). Moreover, the multidirectional nature of social media-based communication provides a powerful means of surfacing issues… and solving them.

Having said that, let's be clear that the same cyberspace that manifests so many wonderful benefits also has the potential to do great harm.

From spam to phishing to mischievous hacking to criminal fraud, it's a dangerous world out there.

Somewhere between laughing in the face of danger versus sitting meekly on the sidelines, there is a middle ground that calls for basic vigilance.

Everybody knows not to share passwords with strangers or to run executable applications from unknown sources. Here is one more precaution to add to that list:

If you are a blogger, always read user Comments before approving them to "go live."

One of our Synopsys blogs was attacked earlier this month by spammers trying to post comments with X-rated links. Although our spam detection software caught and filtered out hundreds of such attempts, about a dozen dastardly comments arrived in the "Comment Approval" queue right alongside perfectly legitimate entries. At that point, human vigilance and engagement is the last line of defence against bad content going live.

In this case, I noticed and promptly removed the offending content. But let's always remember to work together as a team on this. If you ever see malicious content on our website, escalate it immediately – either to me or through the management chain – for prompt resolution.

By the way, the guidance to read comments before approving them should not be confused with the idea of censoring or filtering legitimate comments, however negative.

Social media depends upon transparency and authenticity to perpetuate trust and credibility.

There's plenty of room in the blogosphere for all manner of views and opinions, positive, negative or in between. It's the bad stuff from the dark shadows that has no place on forthright websites.

Discuss v. Talk At

Here is a graphic that illustrates one of the key points of my previous blog post (The "Social" in Social Media)… the part about the fundamental shift in marketing from a one-way "tell" paradigm to a model that's multi-directional, interactive and conversational.

In the "olden days" when customers were a fragmented bunch, companies marketed to their target audiences through advertising, slickly-produced collateral and such.

Marketers worked diligently to come up with innovative, catchy, memorable messages that they could "tell" their customers.

That kind of telling cost lots of money, of course, because it took untold thousands of paid impressions (in the form of repetitive ad messages, direct mail campaigns, etc.) to try to break through the noise of a competitive marketplace and create/build/enhance brand awareness.

As marketers focused on doing all that telling, did customers totally believe what they were told?

Ever watch a focus group from behind the trick mirror? Or talk to a customer about whom they most trust for unbiased product information? (Hint: telling and selling have never been the final word.)

The power of the Internet and the tsunami of social media are opening new doors and opportunities as they present compelling challenges for how to effectively communicate with customers.

With community interaction at the core, welcome to the era of "Engage and Influence."