I attended a five hour social media-centric conference today. I have mixed feelings about it because, although it was a great conference filled with great people, I wasn't exactly its target audience. The subjects were more geared towards social media novices trying to leverage the tools to build a career, and very few speakers approached the subject from a business perspective, my primary interest in the topic.
Maybe the funniest moment of the day was when Jeffrey Cohen from Howard, Merrill & Partners used Google's caching service to bring up Marvin Austin's tweets from over the summer, discovering: "I deleted my txt messages foolz, how they gon git me now!? #unc". Obviously, they still got him.
Another useful topic covered was blogging for businesses. Businesses can leverage blogs to drive sales and increase engagement, but they must treat it like a trade publication. That means developing an editorial calendar, divvying up content amongst relevant categories, answering consumers' most-asked questions somehow, and becoming an individual face for the corporation. As one panel member said, "People don't want to do business with corporations, they want to do business with people". This is ever more true in the social media landscape.
Perhaps the most entertaining panel was the last on the future of social media. Every panel member had very different views over where social media was going. At one point I asked the panel if they believed that a social media bubble was forming similar to the dot-com bubble of the late 90s, and two panel members disagreed so vehemently that a shouting match nearly erupted in the student union.
Zachary Clayton made a great point that information and distribution of that information is becoming commoditized, and that the value of information in the future lies in the ability to filter through thousands of irrelevant pieces of information to focus on the very few relevant pieces. He spoke about the ongoing war between the search engines and the spammers who are gaming them and how important a concept that he termed "vertical search" will be in the future. I must admit that I have no idea what vertical search is but I will be sure to look into it and discuss it later.
What I got out of this is the inevitable rise of social search. As search engines continue to get bogged down in spam and information that isn't relevant, people are going to turn to social media more and more to get news and information. After all, the information they will find most relevant will probably be the information that their friends and other people who are like them find most relevant. We are a long ways away from Facebook replacing Google, but the truth is that Facebook is already starting to replace portal sites such as Yahoo. More and more people are setting their homepages to social media sites. It is an interesting change to think about.
--Taylor
tell me what's the difference if we go back to normal again
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