Forums, Blogs, and Social Networks

It’s easy to get the tools mixed up, but it’s important to know the differences. Quite often (usually by executives) I’m asked the difference between Forums, Blogs, and Social Networks, here’s usually how I explain it (focusing first on usage and benefits rather than technical details):

Forums are like social mixers, where everyone is at equal level, milling about and discussing with others. These many to many communication tools allow anyone to start a topic and anyone to respond to one. Members are often at equal level, and content is usually segmented by topic. (rather than by people).

Blogs are like a keynote speech where the speaker (blogger) is in control of the discussion, but allows questions and comments from the audience.
Blogs are journals often authored by one individual, and sometimes teams. In the context of business communication, these are often used to talk with the marketplace and to join the conversation that existing external bloggers may be having.

Social Networks are like topic tables at a conference luncheon. Ever been to a conference where different lunch tables had big white signs inviting people to sit and join others of like interest? It’s like that. Social networks allow members to organize around a person’s relationships or interests, rather that just focused on topic. People that know each other (or want to meet each other) will connect by a variety of common interests. These are great tools to get people of like interest to connect to each other and share information.

It’s important to know the many different tools in your tool chest as every type of accessory fulfills a different need. Before you jump to tools, you should first understand who your community is, where they are, how they use social technologies, and most importantly, what they’re talking about. To learn more about the many forms of web marketing, see this updated list (now in Italian, Indonesian and French).

Via Web Strategy by Jeremiah

Mike Douglas Helmet Cam

Here's a cool video that's playing on the RipTV front page right now, yet another embeddable, streaming player.

X Games

With Winter X just around the corner, I've been checking out the site. No new snowsports videos just yet, but here's the Skier X finals from last year. The "Nascar" of skiing, there's a couple good wrecks.

Technology Adaptation - Medieval Edit

A historical perspective on the challenge of adopting new technology.

Via Publishing 2.0

Online Marketing Summary

At my company, I've been meaning to put together a list of sales and marketing definitions for the other employees. Mainly because we're in the action sports industry (ASI) and I'm the closest thing to a "geek" in the sales and marketing side of things.

I set aside New Year's Day to knock this out, along with a couple other things. As luck would have it, a popular web strategy blog posted the exact thing I was trying to build.

So here are the steps I'm taking to make this available and relevant to my co-employees:

• Grabbing the relevant definitions and placing them on our company wiki. The wiki has, up until this point, been used almost exclusively by our developers. It requires a little understanding of how to create a new page and mark it up. But as far as reading, all my fellow shred-heads need is their company log-in and password, which is the same as their e-mail. I parsed the article and only used the categories and definitions I thought were relevant, and generally only grabbed the first sentence or two.
  
• Adding other definitions I feel are missing, and putting everything in layman's terms by modifying the above with my own words and other, more generic definitions I find elsewhere.
• Including the most common examples (Google Ad Words, Ad Sense, Facebook, etc.) to bring it home.
• Emailing the links to my fellow employees: the new page on the company wiki (they will still have to log in) and the original article (rather than sharing it via Google Reader)
  
• Saving to a social bookmarking site for sharing this and other such articles in the future. Again, this is a departure from my previous habit of just sharing via e-mail on Reader, so it will be a good opportunity to learn something new.