Social Media

Sorry, Mashable, YOU'RE Doing Facebook Wrong. Why Highlight Wasn’t A Breakout Success At SXSW. [Editor’s Note: Brenden Mulligan is an entrepreneur who created Onesheet, TipList, ArtistData, MorningPics, and PhotoPile. He’s a mentor for 500 Startups and several startups. You can find him on Twitter at @mulligan.] Highlight is one of the most talked about apps out there. It was touted to be the breakout app at this year’s SXSW. (The same probably goes for Glancee, Sonar, etc.. but I only really tried and talked about Highlight.) I’ve had many discussions about the app and most have been really polarizing. But SXSW was the wrong place for it to break. Battery Drain Fear Some people experienced this, some didn’t.

SXSW is a week when most people buy $50-100 battery extenders because everyone is out and using their phone to communicate for hours on end. Relevance When you release an app, you want it to feel useful from the beginning. Once the user is in an app, it should continually feel useful. Highlight just set the bar too low. SXSW is already too noisy Curiosity ! Sign In. Social Media: A Year in Review. 2011 was a huge year for social media. Granted, since 2004 we’ve seen an explosion of social networks, an insane growth in Facebook users, and Twitter take on widespread adoption. More of my students are using Twitter today that in previous semesters. But still, in comparison to other years, this year was huge for social media. Not only did Facebook and Twitter see massive changes, but we saw another big tech company enter the social media ring: Google. Google+ Let’s be honest. Okrut, which never saw widespread adoptionGoogle Buzz, which was kind of a disasterGoogle Wave, which was good but misunderstood So all in all, not great, but Google felt that would all change with Google+.

Google+ When Google+ launched, it offered a number of incredibly nice features, including something called Circles. Hangouts allow you to video chat with multiple people at once. Publishing To Facebook Subscribers Shouldn’t Make Us Spam Our Friends. I have one major gripe with Facebook’s Subscribe feature: I have to publish to all my friends to reach my Subscribers. In September, Facebook launched Subscribe, its Twitter-esque option that lets people receive the public updates of other users without being their friends. But I don’t publish my articles to my Subscribers who want to read them because I don’t want to spam my friends who aren’t interested in tech news. This same issue is impacting a lot of journalists, public figures, and other content producers, and I believe it’s preventing wider adoption of the Subscribe feature. I did a feedback session with Facebook about Subscribe soon after it launched, and the company is well aware of the problem.

I commend Facebook’s Subscribe team for building an otherwise useful and ambitious product, and for critically thinking about how to solve the issue without opening new spam opportunities. My suggestion? Facebook Currently Doesn’t Support A Core Sharing Use Case 1. How To Fix Subscribe. Irene Koehler - Google+ - The third party tools have just been enabled. What are your… We are the 5th P: People Brian Solis. InShare299 Part 4 in a series introducing my new book, The End of Business as Usual… It seems that adding the word “social” to any category escalates its importance. From the Social Customer to Social Commerce and from Social Business to Social CRM, the common thread that weaves everything together is people. It is people after all that are responsible for placing the social in social media.

Everything else is just technology. Regardless of media, good business comes down to a simple process of identifying customers, learning what they want or need, feeling their challenges, learning how they communicate with one another, and observing how they discover and share information. Even though businesses are experimenting with engagement in Facebook, Twitter, forums, comments, et al., I’m not convinced they see us beyond our avatars. The bottom line is that customers are not necessarily looking to build relationships with brands. We’re not driving experiences, we’re reacting to them. Why You Should Never Connect Your LinkedIn and Twitter Accounts. An Introduction to and Celebration of the @KloutAPI. The @KloutAPI is wickedly simple to work with. Recently, @Mashery made it even more straightforward. With their I/O Docs page you can now interactively run queries against the API and view the response right from your browser.

Wait. What is an API? An API is an Applications Programming Interface. But, even the most intuitive APIs need excellent documentation, and we’re working to improve that. In addition, we’re ramping up the public presence of our API’s potential by attending more conferences, hackathons, and driving inspiration across a multitude of use-cases. @rahims won the Klout Prize at ReCommerce Day for his Klout implementation in Today’s Threads ( a LookBook/Polyvore-like app that lets a blogger identify clothes they’re wearing, and link them to be purchased by online vendors. This illustrates the simplicity and power of the Klout API.