SocialSev

As a relative newcomer to social media, sometimes I think my inexperience works to my advantage. I don’t carry with me the baggage of traditional strategies that don’t translate well to emerging technologies. One of the things that stands out like a sore thumb to me is the tendency of organizations to continue to approach social media with the same ideology that they applied to traditional marketing campaigns.

In the “good old days,” if you could afford to reach millions of viewers with a 30 second spot on network television, you’d done your job. Hire yourself a creative marketing firm to squeeze the maximum amount of “I’ve gotta have that” into half a minute and Bob’s your uncle. Big companies with a substantial advertising budget had a sizable advantage over the little guy. That same logic applied to print and radio campaigns. The rich kept getting richer. But the game changed when social media gained acceptance as a viable marketing tool.

The race is not given to the swift, nor to the strong, but unto him that is able to endure unto the end.

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The Concept

I recently had the opportunity to test drive another new app that gathers Twitter data. But this one is a little different. Foller.me, launched in beta on June 1st, is a service designed to provide detailed information about a specific Twitter user. According to the developer’s blog, Foller.me aims to take the guesswork out of deciding whether to follow back those who follow you. To do this, the IP simply asks you to enter any Twitter name into the text box. The service then utilizes data from that user’s last 200 tweets to generate a page displaying three tag clouds: Recent topics, #hashtags, and @mentions. The usual Twitter information is also displayed, including number of followers, number following, and total status updates. But in addition to the standard fare of bio and web address, Foller.me developer Konstantin Kovshenin also includes the user’s “tweeting since” date, a nice touch. Read the rest of this entry »