Talking about how great new innovations in social media are, is fun and easy. You can do this and you can do that. Isn’t it great?
More often, however, the difficulty comes in when trying to explain in clear terms what the benefit of these new social platforms is to business. Businesses want to know: What’s in it for me, how can we use it and how long will it take to see results.
Each of those questions is tough to answer definitively, because a certain amount of trail-and-error is required to know for sure.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduces Facebook Places
Last week Facebook debuted their latest product, a geolocation feature called Facebook Places. In the months leading up to the formal announcement, there was a lot of talk that Facebook was developing it, just no-one from the company would say so in any official capacity.
At the moment it is only available to Facebook users who have the iPhone application. Users had to download the latest update in order to get the new Places feature, which now appears directly in the middle of the menu screen on the application.
I had the opportunity to begin using the new feature on Thursday last week, while out with friends. We visited a few different locations, so I was able to try a few things out.
When writing a social media strategy, the main focus is often on Twitter, Facebook and a blog. For the widest reach, it’s a good idea to focus a large amount of your time and resources there.
But those are not the only platforms that you should plan for. There are may other second-tier, niche social platforms that are worth considering when devising a social media strategy, whether for your agency or for a client. I recently wrote about one, called Take Me Fishing, meant for outdoors and fishing enthusiasts.
Here are a few more that are worth considering:
The scene outside of my hotel
I made it back safely from India and let me start by saying it feels good to be home! Not because of any cultural divide between east and west, but simply the challenges of coming and going. I arrived back in the United States on May 9th after my 12-day journey turned into a 13-day one, due to a missed connection in New York. That made two such occurrences on two separate domestic airlines (United and Delta), on both ends of my trip.
It is day 5 of my trip to India and I have been working hard and learning a lot about this bustling subcontinent, its people and life here. I’ve moved from Ahmedabad, further east to Rajkot. I’ve haven’t been able to take a lot of pictures, as I’ve mostly been inside offices or in transit by car. My hosts had hoped to take me to see lions inside Little Rann of Kutch Wildlife sanctuary, but unfortunately it is closed as they are counting the lions in the forest– a good thing, because you wouldn’t want to “lose” one of those.
