The social media ecosystem: 15 basic categories at a glance, the second 5

In a former weblog I was talking about Safko and Brake giving in their Social Media bible a relatively and handy 15-category classification system that will make it easier to talk about the Social Media ecosystem. The 15 categories are: Social Networking, Publish, Photo, Audio, Video, Microblogging, Livecasting, Virtual Worlds, Gaming, Productivitity applications, Aggregators, RSS, Search, Mobile and Interpersonal. In this weblog I would like to discuss the second 5: Microblogging, Livecasting, Virtual Worlds, Gaming and Productivity applications:

A famous statement of Blaise Pascal, ” If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter ” really makes clear where Social Media is all about. You have to limit yourself in the length of your messages (sometimes difficult for me :-) ). Especially the first one I would like to discuss, really has to deal with this problem!

Microblogging is text messaging and a little more. One of the first providers (and still the most important one) of the microblog was off course Twitter, started in 2006 as a result of an R&D project (yeah, see how important R&D is!) and was in the beginning for internal use only. Off course you have more providers, for example Google Buzz. But as you can see if you click on the Twitter- or the Google hyperlink in this weblog you will notice that I am very active on Twitter and totally passive on Google. I am not saying this say everything, but in my opinion (and not only my opinion off course) Twitter is the most microblogging platform at this moment. Nice trends are the location based microblogging tools. Nice example is obviously Foursquare Also Google and Facebook are playing with the location based possibilities. ScanYours all ready implemented for example together with a customer the possibility to check in using Foursquare on a location and receiving a free coffee in return. So practical implementation will be more and more common practice. As a practical joke, 7 commandments for Twitter (with thanks to Safko and Brake):
- Thou shalt begin microblogging;
- Thou shalt Tweet;
- Thou shalt follow Twitterers;
- Thou shalt invite others to follow you;
- Thou shalt set up groups;
- Thou shalt use news feed Tweets;
- Thou shalt use Tweets for internal communications (this last one, I have my doubt about it, we could have a nice discussion about: what is communication really about?).
Livecasting: live from anywhere: creating live content that uses the internet to distribute that content. We (ScanYours) still don’t use within our own Social Media activities, yeah I know… But we actively do use it for our customers. Interesting forms are Do-It-Yourself Radio, Webinars, Web Conferencing, Webcasting and Videoblogs. Nice examples are: BlogTalkRadio, Justin.tv and TalkShoe.
Virtual Worlds: real impact, but still difficult to build a proper business model on. Off course we all know Second Life and how difficult it is to earn money in this world. But there is also the example of the complete failure of Google Lively. So in my opinion it is still interesting and you have to be very aware of all the possibilities, but the relation between effort/ money and turnover is at the moment rather doubtful. Still, it can go very fast, so do not ignore this at all!
Gaming: the discussion about gaming is very often about the enormous large communities playing games as World of Warcraft. But do not forget that there are also games like Farmville, which are an integrated part of another Social Community (in this case Facebook). In my opinion, an important role of games in the future will be: making sites more interactive, making relations with customer more regularly and building online communities related to your brand, product or services.
Productivity applications or RSS, Really Simple Syndication, is a one-click solution that allows all of your content to be sent to your followers the moment you publish it. The reverse is also the case. Warning, be careful with the usage of automatic news feeds integrated in other Social Media tools, people will recognize it and after a while they will be very critical about it. So use it in a proper way, visible for the followers that it is a news feed, so the will not be disappointed later in. Lots of possibilities here: Feedreader, Hubdog , iGoogle and so on. Just fill in the word news feed and you will find plenty of possibilities.