Collaboration and Aggregation - Social Median & The Online Playbook
If I had a penny for every time these two words are used in our industry at the moment I'd be a million, add social media and we'd be talking billionaire.
That's not to detract from the benefits of either, both are very good, used properly can reap many rewards. But they can also be thrown around as if they are the magical answer to all of our problems, they are not.
What's aggregation without quality content and in the same vein what's collaboration with the wrong people, it's not going to help, in fact its going to hinder.
I hear about new sites with aggregated feeds of whatever news I need on a regular basis, equally I hear about new social network sites. I usually drop on to the site and check the content, see who else is using the site and what new functionality I can gain that would be beneficial to my current work flow.
The two sites I'm intending to invest more time in over the next few weeks are The Online Playbook, established by Steve Rappaport (co-author of the online advertising playbook and member of the ARF) and Social Median, a feed aggregator with a bit more to offer, setup by (amongst others) Jason Goldberg.
Social Median, I'd been put on to this after reading about it on Jacob Morgan's blog, signed up and have started to explore. It's effectively a feed aggregation service but with bells and whistles added to allow you more leverage of the data being passed through.
You sign-up and then add all of your own feeds, rss, friendsfeed etc, nothing new here. You then get an i-Googlesque homepage where your feeds, a long with everyone else's feeds, are feed into a continuous stream of data. So far, still nothing that new, although the homepage is pretty customisable with tabs breaking the content down pretty quickly.
The nice bit that really pulls Social Median away from the current crowd are the newsgroups and the e-mails that these can feed. Like friendfeed, you can join groups of like minded individuals to streamline your content to a more personalised feed. As a member, your feeds are then fed into the now filtered mix.
You can then request a summary e-mail of your newsgroups to be delivered to your inbox, I'm still testing this feature and may report back on this at a later stage, but I know it is something Jacob liked. As well as the newsgroups and e-mails, you have a sliding scale "mood vote" on topics posted, allowing you to grade your like or dislike for a discussion thread. A noise slider allows you to filter your news groups further, allowing for specific subject matters to be prioritised.
I also like the hot posts area that allows for a "Sphinn-like" chart of popular articles published by members. This with the slider features mentioned above adds a grading system that should increase the quality of the content gaining the lime light, in an ideal world.
Altogether, I like some of the additional features of the site and it does add value to the data I currently receive via many other applications and sources by filtering content.
Moving onto the next site, The Online Playbook. I found this site following a search to see if The Online Advertising Playbook had any on-line presence, after reading the very helpful book that preceded the site I was interested to read more. When I first started delving into on-line marketing I bought and read the book front to back and it provided me with much insight into the business.
I registered for the site then, but only received my membership details through recently. I suspect Steve has been with waiting for a specific number of people to sign up or for certain functionality to become available.
My reason to sign up for this site was completely different to Social Median. Here I see the value in the sites members rather than the sheer quantity of information passing through the site. I've already shared several conversations with Steve about content for his planned new book to follow on from the original playbook.
In fact Steve's personal contact on the site added a value to the site that would otherwise be hard to achieve with functionality or additional technical features. While I did get a message from Jason Goldberg after joining Social Median, it wasn't the same as the conversation that I had with Steve upon accepting my membership to The Online Playbook, and this is a good example of the value I see in the site.
The site has a professional feel about it, something I believe it should make every effort to hold onto over any idea of increasing its popularity through increasing it's quantity content by incorporating ideas such as those on Social Median.
Other than this brief overview I've yet to have a good delve around the site and/or input on the existing content. But I do see some added value coming from the site and my membership in the near future, something that might actually be more apparent than the benefit gained from Social Median, we'll see.
But in summary, I am hoping both sites are going to add positively to my exposure to quality relevant content and also perhaps any collaborative work that I might wish to get involved in. I'll keep you informed of any news.
That's not to detract from the benefits of either, both are very good, used properly can reap many rewards. But they can also be thrown around as if they are the magical answer to all of our problems, they are not.
What's aggregation without quality content and in the same vein what's collaboration with the wrong people, it's not going to help, in fact its going to hinder.
I hear about new sites with aggregated feeds of whatever news I need on a regular basis, equally I hear about new social network sites. I usually drop on to the site and check the content, see who else is using the site and what new functionality I can gain that would be beneficial to my current work flow.
The two sites I'm intending to invest more time in over the next few weeks are The Online Playbook, established by Steve Rappaport (co-author of the online advertising playbook and member of the ARF) and Social Median, a feed aggregator with a bit more to offer, setup by (amongst others) Jason Goldberg.
Social Median, I'd been put on to this after reading about it on Jacob Morgan's blog, signed up and have started to explore. It's effectively a feed aggregation service but with bells and whistles added to allow you more leverage of the data being passed through.
You sign-up and then add all of your own feeds, rss, friendsfeed etc, nothing new here. You then get an i-Googlesque homepage where your feeds, a long with everyone else's feeds, are feed into a continuous stream of data. So far, still nothing that new, although the homepage is pretty customisable with tabs breaking the content down pretty quickly.
The nice bit that really pulls Social Median away from the current crowd are the newsgroups and the e-mails that these can feed. Like friendfeed, you can join groups of like minded individuals to streamline your content to a more personalised feed. As a member, your feeds are then fed into the now filtered mix.
You can then request a summary e-mail of your newsgroups to be delivered to your inbox, I'm still testing this feature and may report back on this at a later stage, but I know it is something Jacob liked. As well as the newsgroups and e-mails, you have a sliding scale "mood vote" on topics posted, allowing you to grade your like or dislike for a discussion thread. A noise slider allows you to filter your news groups further, allowing for specific subject matters to be prioritised.
I also like the hot posts area that allows for a "Sphinn-like" chart of popular articles published by members. This with the slider features mentioned above adds a grading system that should increase the quality of the content gaining the lime light, in an ideal world.
Altogether, I like some of the additional features of the site and it does add value to the data I currently receive via many other applications and sources by filtering content.
Moving onto the next site, The Online Playbook. I found this site following a search to see if The Online Advertising Playbook had any on-line presence, after reading the very helpful book that preceded the site I was interested to read more. When I first started delving into on-line marketing I bought and read the book front to back and it provided me with much insight into the business.
I registered for the site then, but only received my membership details through recently. I suspect Steve has been with waiting for a specific number of people to sign up or for certain functionality to become available.
My reason to sign up for this site was completely different to Social Median. Here I see the value in the sites members rather than the sheer quantity of information passing through the site. I've already shared several conversations with Steve about content for his planned new book to follow on from the original playbook.
In fact Steve's personal contact on the site added a value to the site that would otherwise be hard to achieve with functionality or additional technical features. While I did get a message from Jason Goldberg after joining Social Median, it wasn't the same as the conversation that I had with Steve upon accepting my membership to The Online Playbook, and this is a good example of the value I see in the site.
The site has a professional feel about it, something I believe it should make every effort to hold onto over any idea of increasing its popularity through increasing it's quantity content by incorporating ideas such as those on Social Median.
Other than this brief overview I've yet to have a good delve around the site and/or input on the existing content. But I do see some added value coming from the site and my membership in the near future, something that might actually be more apparent than the benefit gained from Social Median, we'll see.
But in summary, I am hoping both sites are going to add positively to my exposure to quality relevant content and also perhaps any collaborative work that I might wish to get involved in. I'll keep you informed of any news.
Labels: aggregation, collaboration, online advertising playbook, social median
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posted by Ed Richardson at
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