What a difference a year makes – according to Forrester 75% of US online adults now use social tools to connect with each other compared with just 56% in 2007. The implications to this are far reaching and offer what would seem to be an infinite number of topics to write about, which I will do tomorrow afternoon… or not.
The greatest benefit to social media is the ability to get immediate feedback about your company, idea, reputation, etc. based on what people are saying on non-traditional/social media sites. The challenge is how to capture this information when there are so many place to look. Traditional search engines won’t always track social media tools such as twitter, message boards, etc., at least not in one place. Fortunately Yahoo created pipes (check it out and play around for a while if you aren’t familiar) and Kingsley Joseph created the Social Media Firehose an easy way to search social media sites.
From Kingsley’s page, update the query with the information you want to search for and remove any domains you don’t want included (do this so it won’t pull information from a particular site. Hit run pipes and see who is saying what. The example blow is a query for “Oklahoma State University” and “School of Journalism” with the results from the website www.okstate.edu removed.
Have fun and if you find an interesting query, post it below in the comments.
I like the new blog and its’ title.
I had not tried pipes until recently, and wonder what level of privacy will exist in 10 years– or even 10 months– and if that is a positive shift. Do you search pipes every week to look for recent mentions of your business/yourself? Should ‘online identity management’ be searched for and monitored daily, weekly, or seasonally?
I decided to try a privacy experiment and see how easy it would be to find out a YouTube user’s name. The person posted their first name on their profile, giving a birthday and state. They linked to their blog, in which an old post listed the abbreviation/nickname of their school bookstore that they once ranted about. From that, a quick facebook search of their first name and school network gave the full name, photo, and friends list. What do you think about college (or, for future teens’) YouTube video and blog posts? Many post very casual videos, sometimes sharing details or personality characteristics that a future employer might not find flattering. Should recent graduates/job seekers go back and find their previous web videos, blogs, and feeds to clean them up/censor them?
I wonder if pipes will ever be able to access social network feeds, and if an employer could subscribe to a (hypothetical) identity service that automatically sends updates about employee’s new profiles, videos, or blogs (if under their name).
I got into a discussion with my boss once about what control a person has over what is posted about them online and in social networks. My answer was: very little. With facebook, a person can untag themselves, but not delete the photo. If a student goofed and posted (or let friends post) embarrassing party photos of themselves their freshman year, what recourse do they have to clean up their acts before job hunting? Or, what if someone had a common name and potential employer’s mistook you for someone else? I know there’s at least 15+ other people with my name online, some in similar professions.
And, a final question is, do anonymous blogs (or twitter and flickr accounts) serve any use other than personal enjoyment? I’m not sure if you remember me from class last year, but my blog goes under a title instead of name. Since it’s not a professional blog (it’s more satire), should I keep it that way? Should I, even as a student, create a second “professional” blog to find something work or industry-related to talk about?
P.S.- Congrats on being in the O’Colly’s poll for favorite professor.