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9
It’s interesting that the phrase “Social Networking” is often used these days to mean “Online Social Networking”. So I’ve been a little pedantic with my post title as I really see the two phrases as being two different things, although “Social Networking” can obviously encompass the Online version too. Right, that’s cleared that up!
Although I’ve been around the web since 1997 it’s only in 2008 that I’ve decided to get serious about online social networking. Of course during the time I’ve been on the web I’ve been socially active online through emails and numerous web forums and it’s only in recent years that the whole social boom has really kicked in.
In later years I’ve become involved with YouTube, flickr, plus mine and other people’s blogs. All these have a social networking element to them, but really the focus of this post is sites like MySpace and Facebook which exist almost exclusively for networking.
I started out with MySpace in the spring of 2007 and although it was initially quite exciting I quickly became bored with the site and the seemingly tenuous nature of the ‘friendships’ I had on there. Of course I was quickly hit by a number of bands wanting to promote themselves by gaining as many ‘friends’ as they could. This seemed fine to me but I really wanted to connect with people and dropped my involvement with the site (although I’m still registered with them).
About the same time I signed up for Facebook after someone invited me. At the time Facebook seemed even more boring than MySpace and left me thinking these sites were good if you had nothing else to do with your life. Then late in January of this year I got an email alert from Facebook saying a lady wanted to be my friend. I think at the time I had about 5 friends on there as I just hadn’t tried at all. It turns out the woman in question was an old friend from my childhood that I’d had no contact with for 28 years.
Of course I was really pleased to hear from my old friend, but this got my imagination going and made me look at Facebook more closely. A lot had changed in the time I’d been away, most significantly the fact that Facebook had opened up the site to third-party developers. By the time I got back to the show, third-party developers had been going crazy building new apps for at least 6 months. Also during that time the take up of membership had grown amazingly in certain countries, including my own - the UK. This was leading to a great deal of press coverage and the inevitable worries about privacy - all of which created a big buzz. Plus I now had a wider range of real-life friends who were on there to hook up with.
I was also thinking about more ways to grow my online businesses and the online social networking phenomenon seemed like an obvious area to look at. Obviously this is the future and some very large businesses around the globe are investing heavily in research into this topic. I decided it was time for me to get in on the act and consolidate my current online activities to create one large online social identity to take into the future.
Incidentally, the creation of the website you now read is part of all that. I’d thought about a personal blog (as opposed to my other, niche topic blogs) for a long time, but had shied away from getting too personal. In embracing an online identity fully, I believe you need to completely open up about who you are and market yourself fully. So I took the plunge with the blog at last. Ultimately I hope this website will be my online identity’s portal - all other sites I’m a part of will point here and vice versa.
So what this post is really about is an introduction to what should become a vast section on online social marketing. I’m going to blog about everything I do in that field and I’ll be trying out all the major sites along the way. This could go on indefinitely of course as new sites and ideas come online all the time.
As a starting point for this section, I’d like to map out where I am with online social networking as of the 9th of March 2008:
- Active on about half a dozen forums
- Post videos for my online shop and personal hobbies on YouTube
- Post hobby photos on flickr that get fed into blogs
- Have a MySpace account currently with 78 friends - not touched it for months
- Have a Facebook account that has become my real starting point in experimenting with online social networking. Currently have 308 friends
- Have 3 blogs that I actively work on, though to differing degrees
The rest of this section will describe the rest of my journey.
Photo Credit: Delgoff
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Tags: blogging, facebook, flickr, myspace, Online Social Networking, social networking, youtube