by alec on January 5, 2010
Yesterday Seesmic bought Ping.fm, and Critical Path bought Shozu. Speaking as a user of Seesmic, Shozu, and Ping.fm I could comment on synergies, but that’s not the really interesting story here. Since the summer, conversations about “consolidation” and “roll-ups” have been rumbling in the communications industry. These two events are the beginnings of some application roll-ups around social networking systems. Seesmic is broadening the reach of it’s services to over 50 other social networks. Critical Path is taking it’s core identity assets, and carrier relationships and adding applications to sell to the carrier.
Congratulations to all four companies on being out ahead of this trend. For the companies that survived 2009, 2010 will be an interesting dance as boards and CEO’s figure out whether they are buyers or sellers. Some, like Seesmic and Critical Path, have already made that determination.
by alec on April 17, 2009
Social media gives marketers a lot of tools to add to the kit bag. So how do you know what the right tool is, and can they be used in an integrated fashion?
Easy!
- Podcasts are great for creating intimacy, and delivering longer high value messages. That’s because they’re often consumed during commute time, and because podcast consumers tend to be older and upper income.
- Blogs are the right tool for engaging an audience, especially with a thought leadership campaign, which might demand repeated and ongoing conversation with your market.
- Microblogging tools, like Twitter, are a megaphone for reaching your audience.
Here’s a concrete example of what I mean:
On April 14th, I wrote a piece called The Cloud in Your Hand. It doesn’t matter what it was about. What matters is what happened next.
Whatever is written on this blog is propagated to my RSS feed, which is consumed by TweetFeed (highly recommended service!), whereupon URLs are shortened and tracked via bit.ly (also highly recommended), and then propagated via ping.fm to a variety of social media, including Twitter. It’s highly automated, and I like it that way.
The Cloud in Your Hand was published to this blog, and has been read 1216 times since then in the following ways:
- 810 readers originated from Twitter.
- 398 readers viewed it in the RSS Feed and clicked back to the site.
- 117 readers read it from within a web based RSS feeder.
- 8 readers found it via a search or some other mechanism.
Your RSS is a respectable and powerful way to reach your hardest core followers. There’s no doubt of that. But Twitter is the amplifier that lets your RSS feed really attract a readership. It’s the megaphone that you can use to engage your audience.
