Social media has changed and continues to change the way we communicate both professionally and casually. We talk and share things with our friends and family, and we market our businesses through networking with others and conversing with other professionals.
In many ways, the medium opens up our lives, and we learn more about others than we would have years ago, and in return, we expose more of ourselves as well. It's almost as if social media makes the web a little less anonymous (though there is still plenty of anonymity available if you want it). This in itself has its pros and cons.
You're putting yourself out there for all to see (depending on privacy settings and variables like this), and on one level you can inspire a greater amount of trust from people, because you're giving off an "I've got nothing to hide" kind of vibe. That is what makes social media appealing from the business standpoint.
But on the other hand, you don't want things out there that cast you in an unprofessional light and draw any negativity to your business, which is where reputation management efforts come into play. This has been, I won't say "easy," but relatively manageable to some extent. You can control what you post on your Facebook Wall or your MySpace page. You can watch what your friends post about you, or if they put up any embarrassing pictures of you. If you missed something that you would prefer not be there, you could at least rest knowing that it was pretty much confined to the people within your network.
Things are changing though.
Data portability (of the social kind) is not exactly a brand new concept, yet only recently are we really seeing it make significant progress. A
Services like Google Friend Connect, and others have come to light, and are becoming integrated with countless third-party websites. Websites that you will use. You will share actions that you previously would not have shared. More people will know about what you are doing on more sites. More people will read what you wrote in comments on more blogs. Basically, everyone will be watching your every move. Ok, that's probably a bit of an exaggeration, but I think you see my point. I think managing your reputation is going to get harder
Dave Naylor talks about some other potential privacy and abuse issues related to data portability this video:
personalization in search, and you can either complain or embrace it. Your life will probably be easier if you choose the latter.
SEOmoz tells me that he sees data portability as being increasingly essential to services that want to compete in the social networking and social media world. "If you already have a powerful, established brand, you can control portability because you own the channel (think Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.)," he says. "However, if you're a new or emerging player, you need the power of portability to help bolster your value proposition and attract new converts to your service."
"In the future, I find it exceedingly unlikely that the social web landscape will remain fractured - users are already finding ways to aggregate the data they want into the services they prefer, so watch for this to be a massive trend over the next 5 years," added Fishkin.
Once Data Portability Is the Norm
We're not quite there yet. We appear to be on that track, but until we realize one day that we really are there, we can merely speculate about how it will affect our Internet marketing efforts. It is possible that the more unified social networking (and the Internet in general) becomes via data portability, the easier it will be to measure your social media marketing efforts. If you have everything coming into one place, it will be easier to keep track of, much like a feed reader (and major players are
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