SEPTEMBER 12, 2008

Social Media Summary

As part of the social media team here at TMG, I like to try to stay on top of all the new developments coming out. I’m going to start posting bi-weekly summaries of interesting social media news; many of these topics reflect growing technologies online and innovative ways to use these technologies, so hopefully it will be interesting to you!

LinkedIn, a popular social network for professionals, partnered with CNBC in hopes of bringing users of both sites added functionalities to help them share news content. In this blog post written by Dan Nye, the CEO of LinkedIn, I found his third bullet point about the implications of the partnership to be interesting: “Community-generated content from LinkedIn will also be broadcast on CMBS programs.” Looks like user demographics on social networks are becoming more valuable to news sources like CNBC.

We see some more adoption of social media in the nonprofit realm, as the AARP recently announced that their revamped site will feature a social network. The Arthritis Foundation also added social media tools to their website in August, allowing members to create blogs, profile pages, and RSS feeds. It seems like nonprofit organizations can really benefit from the use of social media tools, since their goal is often to inform and represent a specific group of people. These new site features will help people get to know others who face similar challenges; the nonprofit organizations are establishing themselves as community centers for their target audiences.

Google released Chrome, its new web browser, this past week. The technology realm has been completely overrun with commentary on Chrome, since the browser brings some new offerings to the table. Google has developed Chrome to handle multiple rich web applications better than any other popular browser. Since social media involves many of these rich web applications, Chrome widens the possibilities for programmers as well as users. I think it might be interesting to see developers work with the Chrome technology to make it even more social media friendly, like the Flock browser that was based on Firefox 3 technology.

InvespBlog interviews a top anonymous Digg contributor, shedding some light on how he earns money from his Digg activities. The contributor charges up to $1,200 dollars for a story that gets on the front page of the site. Digg tries to combat any sort of abuse of the system by advertisers, and has attempted to do so by changing its algorithm in the past. However, they fight an uphill battle to figure out how best to represent the most popular and relevant stories without allowing users and advertisers to take unfair advantage of the system. It seems that the social media spirit of group sharing and voting causes difficulties to developers who want to create sharing platforms that accurately reflect popularity.