In case you are wondering about social media and if and how it reaches your (or any) audience, check out 20+ mind-blowing social media stats.
Some that I find interesting:
I get the irony of linking to this article, but I loved it: Meet the rehashed, repeated, warmed over web
It begins…”Stop me if you’ve read this one before. Actually, stop me if you’ve read anything at all original on the Web over the last year. Odds are whatever you did read was copied or repeated from someone else, who took it from someone else, who took it … and so on and so on.”
In looking for information about how to set create a social media strategy, I found this great entry on Beth’s Blog: Creating your organization’s social media strategy map.
The target market is non-profits but I think it works for any business, especially small businesses with limited resources.
The highlights:
As I’ve said before, I’m not big on the lack of standardized categories for website content.
Like most, I’ve gotten used to searching Google for things. Although I’m not anti-Google, most of my searches are done reluctantly and with a sigh at the knowledge of all the dreck I’ll have to sort through. These days, sadly, it’s almost the only way to find something online.
Then…there is an outage. Here’s a great article on the single point of failure for finding content on the web.
Just when I think I’ve finally gotten a handle on a technology, it morphs into something new. On which I do not have a handle. This isn’t anything too new (not bleeding edge, this), but optimizing website for mobile devices is getting to be more important.
iMedia asks Is your website ready for a handheld world? Good question. What I’m curious to know about is the size of the market. Cell phones are big sellers no doubt. What percentage have internet access capabilities? What percentage access the internet via cell phone?
I’m not doubting this market is important. Just looking to understand how size of the pie.
As information consumers, it used to be fairly easy to identify authoritative resources. If it was printed in the New York Times or Encyclopedia Britannica, we could trust the information. We counted on the publishers who, by reputation, delivered accurate and authoritative content.
These days, the internet, as with all things open to everyone and without oversight, is filled with much content of questionable quality. And, like with most things human, we seek ways to categorize and to trust. Sites like Technorati allow users to categorize content and provide authority by dint of a large number of people agreeing that a site is worthwhile. Bloggers like Seth Godin and Michael Stelzner are trusted because of the expertise and reputution of the bloggers themselves. And groups like the open-source Trusted Travel Blogs Network are created as a way to provide industry specific, independent validation.
Of course, this primarily deals with sites that are free and open to everyone. Traditional publishers who’ve adapted to the new media model are still out there, and still authoritative. And like before, still not free.
What do you think about all this validation and classification? Does it help you understand more about the information you get from a site?