Social Media tools have endless resources coming in from the public to a point where there is a colossal amount of information continually flowing through the network. There are sites such as Twitter, Blogger, Facebook and many other Social Media sites that produce gratuitous amounts of tweets, blogs, and comments! For a marketer trying to find information for topics such as consumer satisfaction/ preferences how could they even begin to do so? Also, will this cloud of information on hobbies and feelings become overwhelming to the Social Media venue?
In the book, Secrets of Social Media Marketing, Tamar Weinberg, wrote an article called “How to Deal with New Media Overload” about special social media tools she uses to organize her vast amounts of social media ‘overload’. Tamar said she uses a web-based news organizer called ‘Bloglines’, which “…makes it easy to read information published using RSS (Really Simple Syndication), which is a format that pushes information from Web publishers to subscribers” (page 43). This tool makes it easier for all of the blogs, related to a specific search, to be condensed down from hundreds of thousands of blogs into one simple display. This makes the search for blogs, at least, more simple and to the point when in need of information.
Tamar Weinberg also suggests another way for organizing data through way of social media with typical search engines such as Google, Ask.com, and Bing by using the ‘advanced search’ option. This can save marketers immense amounts of time by grouping the most significant websites into the search and leaving all of the miscellaneous related searches out. Also, putting certain words in parenthesis in your search helps signify the important information that is needed. For example, when looking for a hotel in the Netherlands one might search, ‘best Netherland hotel resorts’ which would bring up less more reliable searches than best Netherland hotel resorts without the parenthesis, because the parenthesis ask for hotel resorts in the Netherlands and no where else.
This topic is important, because there is a need for the organization of this data in order to use socail media to the most prosporous destinations. Tools like Bloglines and Digg make customizing useful information through the Web easier to gather and formulate into business. Finally, this process of social media organization should make the whole information gathering less overwhelming to researchers.
I agree, I can not imagine having to search through all these different types of social media just find research and feedback. I can barely keep up with all of my own social networking sites, let alone everyone else's sites. I even find myself becoming overwhelmed just on facebook with new news-feeds popping up every minute. Also, my email account is full of notifications from linked-in, facebook, and blogspot telling me i have another comment or friend request. This was a good point, social media can become very cluttering.
ReplyDeleteI agree as well. While reading your blog, the first thing that popped in my head were the Microsoft Bing commercials. They have really done a great job of taking this problem and creating a benefit for the consumer in their advertisments. Although I am still a faithful google user, out of habit, I believe that the problem of these social media outlets are popping up and at the same time being resolved by the competition. Great topic!
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ReplyDeleteYou brought up a really good topic and excellent points! I also agree that with all the tools available, its easy to get lost in the social media craze. Constantly I have to ask myself: what is everyone using? Whats the next big thing? How do I use it? Is it valuable for me to use?
ReplyDeleteI currently use atleast 5 solid means of social meedia, and while im up to explore more social media tools, I wonder how im going to continue to keep up with them. The ones I use already take hours out of my day to update and follow. I think this is a concern for everyone that is participating in the social media world, im glad you brought it up!
I really enjoyed your post and I find myself thinking about this same question a lot while at work. There are so much information available on the internet and so many new social media outlets that it's difficult to sift through it all sometimes. I actually did not know a whole lot about RSS until this week but there are tools available such as Google Reader that allow you to read multiple RSS new feeds in one place. Google Reader also allows users to follow different blogs or links and see all of the new posts on one page. Great thoughts, really interesting topic.
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