Best of the Holidays: Social Media Posts

By Mark Evans in Social Media No Comments Tags: , , , ,

With the holiday season lasting a solid two weeks, there was lots of time to think, ruminate and write blog posts. Here are some of the social media-related posts that I did:

- Reality Check: Blogs Haven’t Lost their Mojo
- The Community Manager Emerges in 2010
- 2010: The Year of Quantity, Not Quality
- 2010: The Spotlight on Social Media ROI
- Eight Thoughts on Social Media in ’10
- What’s Ahead for Social Media in 2010 (Sysomos blog)
- The Social Media Workforce in 2010 (Sysomos blog)
- TwitSweeper Sweeps Spam Away (Twitterrati)
- Five Predictions for Twitter in ’10 (Twitterrati)

Reality Check: Blogs Haven’t Lost Their Mojo

By Mark Evans in Blog Services, Blogs, Social Media 4 Comments Tags: , , , , ,

One of the downsides of the hype about Twitter (aka the glamor girl) is how it makes blogs look downright dowdy. It’s easy for everyone to get all hot and bothered about 140-character (or less) messages because anyone can do it fairly well. Blogs, however, require time, a nugget of an idea, some work and, hopefully, solid writing.

In other words, Twitter is easy; blogs are difficult. Twitter is dessert; blogs are dinner. Twitter is paint-by-numbers, blogs are a canvas, some paint and an easel.

Nevertheless, millions of blogs continue to be created every day because they’re a low-barrier platform for anyone to ruminate, pontificate, speculate, opine and babble about anything and everything. Unlike Twitter, there are no arbitrary restrictions on the length of a post. You can go long, you can go short (a la master blogger Seth Godin), you can post a photograph, or comment on someone else’s blog post.

As Peter Kim outlined in a recent blog post, there are plenty of reasons why blogs appear to be losing their mojo. But I believe Kim’s thesis ignores some basic truths – the blogosphere continues to expand, and blogging continues to be the social platform to demonstrate insight, and the ability to create a community around it.

This is the reason that I encourage most of my clients to seriously consider writing a blog to show customers and potential customers who they are and what they think. To me, blogs are the perfect business card, white paper and marketing brochure in one tidy package. It also helps that Google loves blogs so blogs are a great SEO tool.

Sure, blogs aren’t easy because you’ve got to work them on a regular basis. (Note: “work them” means staying committed, which could mean one post/week or several posts/week). But in the long run, the rewards from blogging outweigh anything you’ll get from Twitter.

For more counter-thoughts on Kim’s blog thesis, check out the Future Buzz. As well, the chart below that shows how WordPress.com and Blogger.com have grown over the past year (27.7% and 28.2% growth respectively in unique U.S. visitors).

My 2010 Technology Wish List

By Mark Evans in Main Page 1 Comment

Here’s a list of some of the things I’d like to see tech-wise this year:

1. A tool that deletes profiles from all those Web 2.0 services that I’ve checked out but rarely, if ever, used over the past few years.

2. An upgrade to the iPhone’s OS that enables easy switching from app to app like the Palm Pre.

3. A new search engine that comes out of nowhere to rival Google, and doesn’t under-deliver such as Cull or Powerset.

4. New Canadian copyright laws that strike a fair balance between owners and users.

5. A lot less talk (aka hype) about Twitter, and a lot more walk (e.g. a business plan)

6. New sources of early-stage funding for Canadian high-tech entrepreneurs.

7. Some real discussion and exploration about the rise of “publicy” and the demise of “privacy”. While everyone seems to have accepted the fact that everything is now public, no one seems to really be looking at the social implications.

8. The continued emergence of alternative/green energy given Jeff Rubin’s book “Why Your World is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization” has me completely spooked.

9. The end of “2.0′ or “3.0″ for anything.

10. Newspapers and magazines discover a way to stay viable so they can continue to create high-quality content and employ all the journalists who provide material used by millions of bloggers and social network users. Maybe the Kindle will be the newspaper industry’s salvation.

Finally, all the best for everyone in 2010!

Update: Here’s Om Malik’s wish list for 2010.

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