Social media is the online equivalent of Australian Idol. It is a popularity contest. Digg allows users to vote on their favourite articles on the web. StumbleUpon & del.icio.us allow users to vote on their favourite web sites. In both cases the article/site with the most votes reaps the rewards – aka massive exposure and traffic via their front page. Human participation is the key to social media. And it is the integration of human authority to the search engine algorithms that has a lot of people excited. Finally… a way to incorporate human feedback & behaviour into the search engine results.

Tech Crunch has a screen shot of how Yahoo intends to use the del.icio.us results. The benefit is fairly obvious. The search engine produces the results, and the del.icio.us data can be used to assess the ‘human credibility’ of each page (the more votes the better). The premise is good, but it’s not exactly a new one. In fact, it is essentially just PageRank rebranded. At a very basic level, the premise of PageRank was that each inbound link to a particular site was perceived as a vote of confidence. Indeed, links were the primitive form of social media and social voting.

The key issue at the moment is that the del.icio.us voting system is wide open to abuse. Unlike Digg and Stumble Upon it does not have a procedure to vote/bury spam. So while the integration of del.icio.us votes would initially provide an improvement to search results, it would not be long before black hat SEO’s begun the mass bookmark process (if they haven’t already…). Even if the number of del.icio.us votes did not directly impact the order of Yahoo’s rankings, there would still be a perceived benefit in accumulating the most votes in a particular industry. It wouldn’t be long before the del.icio.us data lost its credibility.

So while Yahoo’s initiative is a step in the right direction, it won’t solve the search engine accuracy issues overnight. Until a downward voting system is introduced for del.icio.us it will be open to abuse by black hat spammers (presuming people still care about optimising for Yahoo). Ebay may be the big winner out of all of this. As the owner of StumbleUpon, which maintains a more credible voting system, they may well own the Internet’s most valuable social data. Which means they may find themselves in the centre of a bidding war between Google and Yahoo… Ching Ching…$$

Social media and user generated content are so hot right now! It seems like another Digg or YouTube clone surfaces every day. But as social media outlets continue to grow, so does the challenge of mastering them. In fact, unless you are a self-employed consultant (with a severe shortage of clients), the task of managing and participating in more than a handful of social sites is downright daunting. So how the heck can you use all the social media outlets to your advantage…?!?!

You can’t. Try subscribing to more than 10-20 blogs and you’ll soon find out why. I subscribe to just six online marketing blogs (found in my Blogroll), yet opened my RSS reader yesterday to find over 150 new articles. Woo hoo… fat chance of reading all of those on a Sunday. And that’s before I even went to Digg, Sphinn and others to see what’s making news. Without a strict social media filter you’ll quickly find yourself drowning in information.

The key is to find the social media outlets that work for you. I’ve filtered my list down to a handful that help me meet a range of personal objectives:

Objective 1 – Keeping up with industry news and trends

My Blogroll lists my favourite blogs for industry news. Anything that they don’t cover probably isn’t that important. I use Bloglines as my RSS reader to aggregate content from each blog. I tried a desktop RSS reader but found it inconvenient & annoying to run another desktop application. I also subscribe to a range of email newsletters from Clickz, Marketing Sherpa, Search Engine Watch & Imedia. I do so to manage my email and RSS volumes. Too much volume in either format tends to send my brain into meltdown…

Objective 2 – Shameless blog promotion

While I haven’t begun hammering promotion of this blog as yet, it is only a matter of time When I do I’ll be turning to StumbleUpon, Sphinn and perhaps Reddit. I’ve found these social news sites to be the most effective in generating targeted traffic to an online marketing blog. Given that I find these news sites the most beneficial, I also try to ensure I retain at least a semi active account in each network. When I come across an article I like in my daily reading, these are the sites I will submit and vote on.

Objective 3 – Bookmarking

Notice that I didn’t write social bookmarking. The reason is that I don’t use any social bookmarking sites. Google’s toolbar gives me the basic benefit of accessing my bookmarks from any computer, minus the social aspect. I figure I’m using enough social sites already. I don’t need to add del.icio.us to the list. Perhaps I’m missing out on something, but I figure I’m also keeping a little bit of my sanity.

Objective 4 – Socialising and maintaining personal relationships

Facebook was the first social network to capture my interest, and is likely to be the last. I don’t see a lot of point maintaining profiles in MySpace, Hi5, Orkut and others, particularly when I would maintain a similar friendship group in each. So Facebook it is for now… We’ll see if that changes when the next ‘hot social network’ arises (as did Friendster, MySpace and now Facebook).

Finding your right blend of social media

My social media usage is heavily influenced by my objectives. Yours should be too. Before jumping in, think through what you want social media to do for you. Once you have decided what you want from social media, you’ll be ready to jump try out each player and determine which ones work best for you.

I love this story and I love the unconventional approach of the company at the centre of it even more. This is crisis management 101 with a twist. The story centres around hosting company Dreamhost, who had the mother of all f__k ups this week when they accidentally over-charged their customers to the tune of $7.5 million. Whoa!

Naturally this is a crisis of epic proportions. A quick response was required. Dreamhost attempted to diffuse the situation with a little humour via their blog. Taking inspiration from Homer Simpson, they blamed the error on their fat fingers (in one particularly funny episode Homer was unable to dial for help during a nuclear crisis as his fingers were too fat for the telephone keypad). They also included light hearted references to a previous newsletter, that had joked their bill may inadvertently triple in the future as employees may be too busy looking out the window while working.

The response

Unfortunately for Dreamhost, not all of their customers saw the humourous side. Indeed, they received over 600 responses to their blog post, many of them scathing of the error and the reponse. TechCrunch chimed in to the issue with a post critical of Dreamhost’s action.

But despite the criticism I think Dreamhost handled the situation brilliantly. Perhaps it’s because I love The Simpsons and appreciate good humour. Or perhaps it’s because I have been through exactly the same situation when my company inadvertently over-charged thousands of customers. But I appreciate the courage it took to see the lighter side of the situation. In my eyes they did a lot of things right:

1. They recognised the problem and communicated with their customers swiftly.
2. They explained the source of the problem in detail.
3. They took action to prevent the mistake happening again (and explained that to their customers).

Most importantly however, they maintained their brand voice despite the situation. They even apologised if the tone of the blog was perceived to be a little too light. Dreamhost have always taken a humourous approach to their customer communications. Indeed, recent blog posts have shown a picture of their building on fire and told of a Christmas party where they were too busy playing pool to deal with customer problems. So the Homer Simpson gag certainly wasn’t out of context.

Fortunately for Dreamhost, some of their customers were able to have a chuckle. There were at least as many positive comments left for the company on the blog as negative comments. I can certainly understand why some customers were furious at the situation. But I say bravo to Dreamhost for taking a risk and daring to go against convention.

Inspiration comes from the strangest places sometimes. Indeed, I would never have imagined my first blog post would relate to a boring transactional email. But I found a recent email from PayPal inspiring… Here it is:

___________________________

Dear James Duthie,

This email confirms that you have added the following address to your account:

45 Hxxxy St
Axxxxe xxxx, Victoria
Australia

Sincerely,
PayPal

Did you know:

EBAY HAS PRODUCTS FOR YOUR NEW HOME

* Lawn Mowers * Faucets * BBQs * Furniture
* Spas & Pools * Flowers * Lamps * Vacuum Cleaners
* Major Appliances * Plants * Tools * Wallpaper

___________________________

What’s the big deal? Relevance and intelligent use of personal data. What was a standard change of address confirmation message became a cross sell opportunity for Ebay (who own PayPal). They took a seemingly meaningless piece of personal information (a change of address) to correctly predict that I had purchased a new home. Now that’s relevance! It seems so simple in retrospect, but it really is smart marketing!

Unfortunately for Ebay the email didn’t motivate me to purchase any household items via their auctions. Given that it’s my first home I want all my décor to be shiny and new. But it did bring Ebay to the forefront of my mind as an alternative for household purchases. So kudos to PayPal and Ebay.

With this in mind, is it any wonder that marketers globally salivate at the thought of the personal data Facebook holds? If PayPal and Ebay can turn a change of address into a sales opportunity, imagine what could be done with someone’s personal interests, favourite movies, favourite books, favourite sports teams etc.

Now if only Facebook could find a way to use that personal data that didn’t totally piss their users off…