Social media websites are fast and furious! Quick coming in as well as going out!

While many of you are building your communities on the social media, it is good to take note that the social media websites can be taken over faster than we can ever thought.

I can still remember using ICQ with so many friends… I thought ICQ is not going to be taken over by MSN easily even though it was introduced in every computer… The community in ICQ is so huge that it is hard to understand any reason why the community can move over to MSN without our knowledge! But the fact is that I don’t know any of my friends are using ICQ now… They are mostly using MSN, or probably Yahoo Messenger…

Then, I can remember so many of us are using Friendster… I do believe some of my friends are still using Friendster… But I have not touched my account for a very long time! I don’t even remember what I have last done with my Friendster account… Subsequently, everyone of us are using Facebook! And it is so huge that I can’t remember asking anyone who has Friendster…

Now, we have Twitter… And we can find different varieties such as Blip.fm, Friendfeed, Facebook status, etc… Who knows if Google Buzz could take over as the number 1 social media in the realm of updating our status.. I do hope that they can make Google Buzz a standalone program and not to be integrated with my Gmail account…

What’s the lesson to learn here?

While it is easy to leverage on the high traffic of social media to build your community, it is good to have a standalone website to let your community fall back at when that social media website is falling apart… It can be disastrous if your community is affected by the business performance of that social media website… And the interesting part to know is that many of these websites are actually not making money, and they are waiting for big players like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo to buy over once they have built enough awareness. It is just a matter of time when those websites – which are not appreciated by investors – are shutting down without any notice… (hopefully they can give at least one month’s notice though…) And the reason for shutting down is their high expenses of maintenance with insufficient income to take care of them…

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While many of you are building your communities on the social media, it is good to take note that the social media websites can be taken over faster than we can ever thought. I can still remember using ICQ with so many friends… I thought ICQ is not going to be taken over by MSN easily [...]

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Social media is media designed to be disseminated through social interaction, created using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. Social media uses Internet and web-based technologies to transform broadcast media monologues (one to many) into social media dialogues (many to many). It supports the democratization of knowledge and information, transforming people from content consumers into content producers.

Charles Lau

Thanks for sharing :) It does give a voice for everybody (It doesn't matter anymore if you are the broadcaster or not)

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Looking for help on the best or Innovative Practices for Using Social Media Websites?

Charles Lau

Best practices? I think the social media is still a little too new to have best practices... we only have ideal thoughts from the various social media evangelists such as Chris Brogan (http://www.chrisbrogan.com), or Darren Rowse (http://www.problogger.net), and so on...

There are a couple of case studies along the way also from various companies on how they handle social media crisis when it strike on them... (try googling them out!)

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I work for a small electronics company and am wondering if building a group page on LinkedIn would help our search engine optimization? When someone joins your group, does the link to your site on their page help increase your number of inbound links.

Charles Lau

LinkedIn groups didn't use nofollow.. Hence, it does help a little.

I think that instead of SEO, you should focus more on building a relationship with the people in the linkedin. Participation in the social media helps a lot... It may gives people more idea about you, and may even talk about you with no strings attached!

I think that by focusing on the relationship marketing, you will build your SEO unknowingly!

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There are some social networks which will help your PR because they have not made the links on their sites nofollow. Linked In Q&A articles, Yahoo Answers and You Tube frequently show up in Google's SERP's so it is worth the time to develop company profiles on Linked In and You Tube. Facebook is questionable depending on your target demographic.