Social media marketing | Liz Hover's Diary of a Web Gal

Apologies to those of you who read this link via my Twitter stream. This seemed like such a great article with so much food for thought I had to post it here too.

Noupe – a website I regularly read – posted an article about how the web might look five years from now.

The Future of the Web: Where Will We Be in Five Years? is an insightful look at emerging trends and some that are already sticking.

Some highlights include:

• There are a few unsurprising predictions such as the growing influence and use of social media (a term, some of you will know, I think is silly). What this means is social interaction on the internet will be an even bigger feature of the web spaces we visit.

• Our never-ending fight against spam and fraudulent internet behaviour may well increase but I don’t think we’ll ever really be totally safe from this stuff.

• As a chick who spends a large (some might say, excessive) amount of time online I heartily look forward to better and more online film and TV content.

• And Microsoft’s world domination of our PCs may be over sooner than you think. With Google set to launch a Chrome operating system we’re looking at a virtual online office as our operating systems move online.

This is all very exciting stuff. But as Noupe points out, predictions fly around the internet at the speed of tweets so there’s no telling what the future really holds.

Over at Mashable, writer Adam Ostrow asks if social media is making corporate websites irrelevant.

Remember the dotcom era?

Websites were the thing. And then it all went arse up.

Adam wonders if corporate websites are still useful today with the rapid growth of spaces such as Facebook and Twitter. More and more brands are using those sites to market their products and push their message. Should we even bother with a website?

Let’s look at it another way.

Corporate websites need to do much more to pull in functions from social media sites that add value to their own online space. A company always needs a home base. It’s where you can find all the bits. This is such an exciting time in website and marketing development. Companies should be clawing at API (application programming interface – that’s the thing that lets you and and me build stuff on our websites using bits of Facebook or Twitter or myriad other cool social media sites.)

One problem with the social web is the fragmentation of everything. At some future point we’re probably gonna want to reign things back in. Just a little. API and our corporate websites are where we’ll do it. Sure, corporate websites will go through some transformation along the way but ultimately we’ll want a tidy place where we can find all the parts without going all over to find them.

A website is still key to your brand and probably always will be. Your portfolio of online space will get bigger but ‘the website’ gives it all a home.

I love email. And so I religiously read everything that arrives in my inbox. This includes over 20 email subscriptions from technology, web design, blogging, social media and marketing websites.

I couldn’t do my job without a lot of the information that comes my way.

One of the requirements of website management is the need to continuously nuture your knowledge base. I find these email updates are one of the best ways to stay in the loop.

So I get some of these sent to my personal email address and others go to my work account. If you’re trying to absorb this much information you’ll need to be pretty organised about how and when you read the updates.

Of course email alerts don’t work for everyone. And most if not all of the sites I list below also offer other ways to subscribe. Or you could just regularly visit these sites. But that’s a heck of a job.

Here are my picks in no particular order:

• One Degree – the inside scoop on digital marketing and social media for Canadian marketers.
• ProBlogger – created by uber blogger Darren Rowse, the site is dedicated to helping other bloggers learn the skills of blogging, share their own experiences and promote the blogging medium. Includes well over 3,500 articles, tips, tutorials and case studies.
• TwiTip – also from Darren Rowse, a tips site for Twitter users who want to improve their use of Twitter.
• Skidzopedia – a blog offering updates about the latests gadgets, softwares, news and reviews.
• MediaShift - tracks how new media – from weblogs to podcasts to citizen journalism – are changing society and culture.
• VentureBeat – Silicon Valley news about tech money and innovation.
• Mashable – the world’s largest blog focused exclusively on web 2.0 and social networking news.
• MediaPost – resources for media, marketing and advertising professionals offering news coverage, event information, a social network, and industry jobs, directories and research. Folks can subscribe to updates from over 20 blogs.
• Media in Canada – the latest news keeping media and marketing execs up to speed on the Canadian media scene.
• Micro Persuasion – a blog exploring how emerging technologies are revolutionizing marketing and communications.
• Silicon Alley Insider – news, commentary, and discussion about digital publishing, entertainment, news, music, social networking, mobile, and gaming.
• All Facebook – the unofficial Facebook blog.
• Seth Godin – Seth has several sites. I currently subscribe to Seth Godin’s Blog which offers riffs on marketing, respect, and the ways ideas spread.
• John Battelle’s Searchblog – thoughs on the intersection of search, media, technology and more.
• MakeUseOf – news about cool websites, software, and how-to articles.
• NETTUTS – a site aimed at web developers and designers offering tutorials and articles on technologies, skills and techniques to improve how you design and build websites.
• Six Revisions – a blog that shares useful information about web development and design, dedicated to people who build websites.
• ZDNet – technology news and reviews.
• Blogging Me, Blogging You – marketing, blogging, social media, PR and technology news.
• TechCrunch – a weblog dedicated to obsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies.
• Daily Blog Tips – erm, I think the title speaks for itself.
• Web Design Ledger – written by web designers for web designers. Web design related knowledge and resources. Topics range from design inspiration to tips and tutorials.
• ReadWriteWeb – a blog that provides web technology news, reviews and analysis.
• Smashing Magazine – trends and techniques in web development. They don’t provide email updates so I follow them on Twitter.
• The Web Squeeze – web design articles on business and computers to web development tutorials on topics such as CSS, PHP and Javascript.
• PR 2.0 – Brian Solis’ blog covering marketing and technology.
• Blogsessive – blogging tips for bloggers.
• Six Pixels of Separation – fellow Canadian Mitch Joel blogs about marketing and communications. No email updates so I check this site manually when I remember.

It happens every year. A host of ‘experts’ offer up their opinion on what’s to come.

I recently wrote a short post on the National Screen Institute website about the future of the media industry. Not that I’m lauding myself as one of the experts by any means. I read a bunch of stuff by others and collected it together for the post.

But today I read another interesting article on the Media in Canada website.

What struck me about this post was the mention about real-time marketing and the need for brands to be dealing with lots of things at once 24/7.

It’s happened for me over the past 18 months. As a website manager my responsibilities are wide and include lots of marketing online. I do more than I can fit into a working day not because I’m any kind of workoholic but because I love what I do.

This means lots of time online whether it be Facebook, Twitter or various industry sites. Not chatting with friends but trying to get NSI’s message out there one way or another (ok, I admit it, or my dog’s: Sadie Shih Tzu.)

The line between work and play has been blurring for a long time but it’s different than the marketing I did five or six years ago when things seemed very print, radio or TV focused and you could sign off on your proof, leave the office and stop thinking about it.

This is not a complaint. Merely an observation.

Which is why I’ve been playing around a lot with Twitter tools like Tweetdeck to help organise some of the information coming at me and make the best use of it.

My inbox is full everyday with bulletins about web design, Photoshop, social marketing, web and tech trends, industry rumours and I still find time to read them all because if I didn’t I wouldn’t be able to do my job.

There comes a point though when you have to know when to stop. By the sounds of things all these predictions are pointing towards an even greater need to be doing, observing, interacting.

My wish for 2009? More tools like Tweetdeck that help us focus our marketing and organise the noise because I think it’s going to get very loud in here.

Read a great post today in an email update from ZDNet. And it comes with the best headline: how to be less stupid in 2009. Having shared this with one of my work pals I was told that this simply wasn’t possible for him and he plans to spend 2009 becoming more stupid.

I digress.

This is the first time I’ve read anything by its author, Dennis Howlett.

But if this post is anything to go by, I want to read more. He sounds like a straight forward guy. Tells it like it is. My kind of person.

Howlett serves up his thoughts for the year ahead in tech. And he doesn’t mince words. Whether he’s right or not remains to be seen but I like what I’m reading.

I recently read a bunch of reports about demographics. They seemed to suggest that young affluent men were the largest consumer of online video which as we know is increasing its presence on the internet. Our new website will host online video so I’m super keen to read about what’s going on.

I read with interest that Emily Chang, a US designer, mentions an article in the New York Times about a recent study that says young women are leading the way on the social web but as a means of self-expression.

Ok, now things are really getting interesting. I just found this article in The Times which refers to the same study. Girls and young women are indeed leading the way on the internet. Traditions are shifting. The two newspapers just lead with slightly different emphasis.

But apparently YouTube still has more boys uploading content.