TheWayoftheWeb

No more explanation needed:

Found via the Wikinomics blog.

Sadly my attempts to blog more frequently have been slightly inhibited by impending fatherhood, some pressing tasks at work, and what I suspect is a lurking chest infection. So I’m falling back on some quick thoughts and some quick links to share some half-baked ideas before the weekend.

• Firstly, the idea of a ‘music tax‘ is an abomination in so many, many ways, I probably don’t need to add to the outcry. But just for the record, it sounds like the dying cry of the dinosaurs before the meteor hits.

• Great inspirational post here, by Andrew Bruce Smith, on how you could start a PR company using Google and a credit card….
• I’ve been doing a lot of research into buzz/social media monitoring and Net Promoter Scores. And this is an interesting article on the topic.

And there’s probably a certain irony in the fact both @brendancooper and @jemimakiss either linked to their own, or someone else’s article about how Twitter shouldn’t be just a newswire/RSS feed, and for whatever reason missed/ignored/didn’t have time to answer my responses! I don’t blame them, as it can be hard to keep track of @ messages without an external service, but it made me laugh a bit. Especially as Jemima’s article is for The Guardian, which commits exactly the same crime: e.g. @guardiantech.

And now to home and either bed, blogging for Disposable Media, Rainbow Six, or a combination of the three. Tomorrow will be the first annual meeting in real life of some of the DM team, which’ll be quite interesting, as I’ve know them virtually for 18 months, produced about 5 issues with them, and now I’m going to have to buy them some beers as we decide how to make progress for the next 12 months…

Funnily enough, I’d just finished reading a piece about social shopping by David Cushman when I checked the top five viral videos for last week (from viralvideochart). In at number five, behind Barack Obama’s ‘A more perfect union‘, and Boston Dynamics very cool Big Dog, was the flipside of the social shopping concept – this promotional video for product sourcing company SaleHoo.

I’m not going to go into whether or not it’s a good company etc, but I do think it’s interesting anyone is increasingly becoming able to go to product suppliers, and essentially become a reseller of a product, giving it a human element. It’s another revenue stream, alongside affiliate deals, or the traditional reselling of ISPs and Domains that many net geeks have been doing for years.

It also reveals how reputation and ratings will become increasingly important throughout the web. In a formal shopping setting like Ebay, you can see a formal rating (reliability is always an issue), but on a forum, or an unfamiliar blog it’s a bit harder – unless you’ve got the time and energy to research anyone making a recommendation.

So is the answer an open, consistent ID across the net which allows for some type of commerce rating? Or joining a dedicated shopping network, like Ebay? Or what about Stylehive or This Next, which aim to provide the tools for social shopping?

Or how about all the people that you’ve already connected with and trust?

Hence the power of a social network. If I’m able to ask the good friends that I’ve hung out with, got drunk with, and shared my life with already – then I won’t be relying solely on ratings or guesswork…

Whenever I look at websites or blogs, there’s one key ingredient which is essential 99.9% of the time. It’s so obvious it can easily be missed, and isn’t down to technology or snazzy design. And, despite my slightly misleading title, it can be the easiest and the hardest thing to create and maintain.

It’s focus.

To clarify, I don’t mean a dogmatic clinging to one aim or proposition set in stone for all eternity. In the social we we now inhabit you’ll need to change and adapt to the needs and desires of your potential and actual audience.

But there’s an overwhelming amount of ways and means to achieve your goals – and a similar amount of things you might wish to cover. No matter how big your team or organisation, by trying to be all things to all people you’ll end up spreading yourself too thinly, and doing everyone a disservice.

It’s a lesson I’ve sometimes struggled with in the past, and one that reappears with my current employment, my blog, and Disposable Media all asking for my time – in competition with my life offline.

That’s why I have to prioritise my work first, then my blog, then Disposable Media, and then anything else online.

It’s also why the blog I started to look at anything online which interests me is now increasingly about social media marketing, community marketing and social networks. It’s my work, my main interest, and the thing it makes sense for me to focus on.

It’s also why I value the reminders about priority from a colleague of mine, and why I’ve already seen how much value comes from her work in establishing clear propositions on some of the titles I work with.

As another example, compare Pandora.com (If you’re in the U.S. and still able to) with what I thought would be a good substitute, Meemix. Both have a streaming radio station of your preferences at their heart – but where Pandora was incredibly quick and easy to get going, Meemix is prettier and yet less satisfying. Meemix has games, profiles, and all sorts of lovely graphical interfaces – and yet for me it crashes, cut outs, and fails to load. And whilst I can understand their need to differentiate themselves from Pandora in the past, now that non-U.S. residents are looking for a quick musical fix, they could be serving the millions now searching for a replacement. Instead, it’s just as quick to go to Last.fm, and gain the extra social context it offers.