Ugh!!'s Greymatter Honeypot » social networking

Is it “spying” or “adding value” ?

Owen — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 16:10:44 +0000

So, you have a problem dealing with a company and post about it on your blog, on Facebook or on Twitter. Would you be surprised if the company contacted you to try and rectify the situation? I wouldn’t be, but apparently the Daily Mail has an interesting article where it calls this spying on customers. There’s nothing like a bit of sensationalism to get the blood boiling!

The reality is that nowadays organisations are must more in tune with what is being publicly said about them and this often proves to be a very valuable way for them to tune their performance to the needs of their clients, and saying that they don’t have access to this public information is misinformed and misguided. Regardless whether you’re BT or some small seo essex company; it’s really up to you how you gather feedback from your customers, and up to you to decide how to act upon it.

But I guess that’s how some newspapers are sold, on the basis on alleging that businesses are infringing customer’s rights and spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt. And people actually pay for this “news”?

Seesmic Launches Facebook Desktop Client

Owen — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 01:08:09 +0000

In a move that puts Facebook one step closer into the league where Twitter plays, Seesmic has released a desktop client, based on the Twhirl technology for Facebook users to get access to their Facebook dashboard directly on their desktop. Here’s what it looks like:

As you can see it’s quite similar in concept to Twhirl and it will be interesting to see Facebook users get on board with this concept. There are some interesting ideas as to why Seesmic decided to launch this as a seperate app instead of integrating it with Twhirl, but personally, my Twitter and Facebook account are linked through the Twitter Application for Facebook, so I’m not a prime user for the app. To tell you the truth, I just love the search facility in Twhirl so much I’m addicted to it now. You can specify a search term, example, “wireless alarm” and it will integrate the results directly into your Home stream, so that as soon as someone tweets something with that term, you’ll know about it. I wonder if the Facebook client does the same?

Do you “get” Social Media Marketing?

Owen — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 14:05:24 +0000

Here’s a great video you might find interesting:

Don’t discount the first few minutes of the video, Perry talks through the basics of social media, then puts together a flow of how the Marketing side of it works. He compares social networking websites to a Party, your blog as your Home. When you go to a party you don’t ram what you do down people’s throats. Rather you are nice to people, you may even invite them to your home and possibly tell them what you do. The people you meet will remember you for this and recommend you to their friends, extending your reach way beyong the few social contacts you have made.

Moral of the story: Be Cool .. interesting concept.

MyBlogLog’s new coat of paint

Owen — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 12:30:57 +0000

I’ve just read that MyBlogLog has redesigned their site, making it look shinier and giving it more rounded edges. There seems to be a lot of debate around the fact that the redesign didn’t actually introduce any new features, however the design community seems to like it. To tell you the truth, I haven’t been to MyBlogLog is so long, well, it all looks rather new

The one thing I hadn’t come across before was their Connector tool which lets you link up with people across different social networks they might be on. They’re not aggregating content in the same way FriendFeed does. Instead, it simply scans what services you are on, looking for people you know and links them up with you. The connector than takes you to that person’s profile page so that you can link up with them. I thought that was useful.

Import to Elgg

Owen — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 10:48:26 +0000

I’ve been playing a bit with Elgg, an open source social networking platform and one of it’s cool features is the ability to automatically syndicate content from a different blog. Here’s how to do it:

go to your profile
click on Your Resources in the menu bar
click on Feeds (right under the page title)
add the address of the RSS feed for your blog
click on Publish to Blog (right under the page title)
tick the checkbox next to your newly added feed, and add a tag for Elgg to tag your incoming posts with
Click the update button.

Quite a neat feature (yes I’m testing it with this post)

Update: *scratches head* – doesn’t seem to work …