First steps to social networking and media

"Social networking", one more buzzword used by marketing consultants around the world. It is such a wide term that it is getting harder to explain. Wikipedia article is only one sentence, google search finds 69million+ results. So what is it?

In short social networking is everything you do in the internet that links you and some group. Writing blog is just one example, your blog has readers that can leave comments and interact with you in the blogosphere. Facebook, Orkut and other social networking sites take this one step forward, you can comment on friends and create new groups for people to join in. Using Twitter to share your thoughts to the world every few hours (or even minutes) gives all your followers idea of what you are doing / thinking right now (if they care about it).

Now after using Facebook, Twitter and others for about a year or so and reading my friends statuses and blog posts I have noticed that I'm not really that interested on what they are writing. I've gotten more interested on how the group reacts to their writings. "Did they get any comments", "Is someone retweeting them" and so on. As the amount of Facebook statuses and Tweets keeps growing and growing getting your own message through the noise is getting hard. My guess is that Facebook and friends will probably start implementing some kind of filters for users in the near future, "filter out all messages about cats" would help for starters.

Why are the reactions of the group important? It's not. If you just want to write your thoughts somewhere it doesn't matter if someone reads it or not. When it starts to matter is if you want to leverage the network for you. Most companies have Twitter accounts and Facebook pages that share information usually before any other media. In corporate environment it does start to matter if anyone reads your messages or not. Writing messages is still someones job (even if it is not your main job) and takes valuable time, companies want something back for that time. If no one reads your messages about a new interesting product you are about to launch why is the message even written? Understanding the mechanics behind social networking is essential for companies to get results from the network.

So where to start? Start a Facebook page, write interesting blog posts, market your blog on the Facebook site and recruit friends to your network. Tweet about your thoughts and comment others. Building a web presence is easy to start but hard to keep up. Committing to write something each day can be a daunting task and building even small network can take weeks (especially if you start from scratch). It is easy to spend one to two hours per day just reading and commenting blogs, writing your own blog posts and updating pictures to your Facebook account.

Does it pay off? Especially some internet startups would probably never have surfaced without social media. First time I heard about Spotify was from twitter many weeks before any traditional media had written anything about it. Messages in social media spread like a forest fire, every tree that lights up tends to spread the fire to at least three other trees around it. There are even some studies about a message traveling around the world in minutes through hundreds of people. The possibilities for this kind of coverage are astounding, but only if you have a good story to tell.