All in Social Media
Yesterday's announcement by Facebook about their new messaging service, dubbed Facebook Messages, proves one thing — that social is still about people.
Despite all the advancements in technology; the connections between services; the ability to create content on the fly; and, the how easy it is to get the info we, as consumers want, social remains to be centered around people.
Services like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, Foursquare, Yelp, etc. connect people with people. Yes, people are connecting because of content, but at the end of the day, it's the relationships that we forge via these channels that really matter.
Today IBM announced new software and services that indicates Big Blue can see the forest through the trees in terms of social media's potential impact on business.
The new software is part of Lotus Notes Connections 3.0, a platform that provides enterprises with communities, forums, wikis and blogs to help users discuss and refine ideas. Today's announcement adds social analytics capabilities to the platform, which, In essence, helps close the time-to-answer gap for questions like:
- who worked on that project?
- who is the expert in this field?
- what connections do we have to this reporter?
In addition to the software, IBM is launching a new Global Business Services initiative to help companies understand how social networking is being used and how it'll fit into their business.
Yesterday's launch of Facebook Deals is big news for business. If you haven't heard, Facebook Deals is tied to Places, the ability to check-in at a location like Starbucks for example.
Despite location-based services being popular among tech lovers and social media geeks, there continues to be two beefs: the first being that they intrude on privacy, especially with the ability to "tag" other users who might not want to be so public with their activity; two, the services haven't really proven much in the way for business outcomes, mostly because the location based services just aren't mainstream enough.
With a half a billion users, Facebook aims to change that second point. Deals is going to be a big winner for both consumers and businesses. The service makes absolute sense, has a low cost barrier for businesses and consumers are going to love it. This much we know.
One thing businesses might not know about Deals is that despite it being a simple yet effective way for business of all seizes to get tap into real time customer interactions, this sales tactic equals more work offline.