From the Sage MAS Team

[#1]

While many of us may not use Facebook for business purposes, I bet a few of you out there do have LinkedIn accounts and have found it beneficial for tracking down contacts. A primary goal of social media is propagate relevant content to appropriate communities. This is why your teenage kids spend time on Facebook or MySpace. The "content" they find so valuable (who said what, who's dating who etc) is in one place, packed oh so nicely for their consumption.

This got me thinking about social media and its place in business. Sure, blogs are a great way to provide a relevant community a place to comment, critique, disagree on a specific topic. But what about trying to get a near real-time pulse on what your customers think about your product, service or company?

To that end, I set out to see what others were thinking about on this subject. And I quickly found myself at one of my favorite sites, ducttapemarketing.com. The Chief Duct Taper there, John Jantsch, just recently put together a quick read on how to use Twitter for business purposes. Perfect!

After reading it, the blinding light of the obvious struck me. Why not setup a Twitter feed so the crew here in the Sage MAS team can get real-time feedback too? Obviously, I'm not a rocket scientist.

So with Sage Summit next week, what better time than now to provide such a barometer and communication conduit. We have setup a Twitter feed (www.twitter.com/tellMASteam) so our guests at Sage Summit can provide us real-time thoughts and comments. If you're confused about something (mixed messages, incomplete info... you name it) or just wanna say you're having a great time and learning tons, send a post to this Twitter feed and if appropriate, me or one of my Sage MAS colleagues will respond and do our best to steer you (or us!) straight.

If the word "Twitter" is new to you and/or you just don't know how to use it, check out John's quick read on the subject. In no time, you'll be social media expert. And have something new to share with your teenager. They'll be so impressed you "Tweet." 

Finally, if you're heading to Denver for Sage Summit, safe travels and I hope to see you there. And of course, let us know your thoughts of the event -- real-time -- through the Tell MAS Team Twitter feed.

[#2]

I have a concern about Social Media type activities (Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, MySpace - etc).

What happens when they get so noisy and filled with marketing that their effectiveness diminishes.

To some extent this already happened with email. As a solution - Social Media type activities (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace) have sprung up and while they're shiny new toys everyone (myself included) wants to play.

Because there's (relatively speaking) not a lot of people using these tools - their usefulness is huge. The noise factor is very low.

What happens when everytime I send a Twitter message about Blackberry I get three or four auto-generated Twitter replies from people who sell BlackBerry accessories? 

What happens if someone rants about a company they work for and gets a call from the HR department or their supervisor.

What happens when companies start to use software to crawl Social Media  for information on what their employees may be doing or saying?

These things aren't very far outside the realm of possibility. Some of them are happening now. Some will be soon

As corporations "catch on".

As marketers "catch on".

Will Social Media be as fun and useful?

[#3]

All valid thoughts. And to be candid, I think it is for all of these reasons email will become more and more irrelevant for "micro" (quick, short) messaging. Think about IM. You use it for messages to travel "over the top" of your email to someone else and when you need a quick response.Email is way over used, and thus, completely poluted with unnecessary (and unsolicited) communication.

I'm very hopeful some crafty organization (individual???) will develop a social media aggregator. Something that is the like the Outlook client, but for your social media. I use RSS aggregators today for a lot of this purpose. RSS aggregators afford me the ability to quickly skim all my aggregated feeds and drill into the ones I need. Yes, there needs to be a better way, but I think the concepts of an RSS aggregator should be better leveraged for our social media hub of the future.

[#4]

Mike,

You mention a social media aggregator, one that comes to my mind is FriendFeed.

[#5]

Yup, FriendFeed is in the ballpark, but what I am thinking of is at the opposite end. FriendFeed allows me (the content publisher) to aggregate all my published content together into a single feed. I'm actually looking for the opposite: something that allows me to subscribe to all content and manage it in a single location.