DISQUS

A well considered piece. Social search is changing the way consumers do things on the internet. Consumers search the social sphere for recommendations, referrals and information around brand, product, service or company.

Google, Yahoo and others are investing in this area. Yahoo is a good case in point, they already own many social platforms and are committed to the area.

From a corporate perspective, searching the social sphere, aggregating then analyzing the conversations for trends, sentiment or other is equally as important.

Just a note on region filtering.

As a consumer I will be influenced by the commentary I view. If I search for a product and read reviews on it my buying decision may or may not be altered by what I read. I will NOT care if the comment was made in the US, UK, Europe or other.

Agree that the Johnny Cache video by D.Alston is a work of genius.

Whoa! I have been saying for years to anyone that will listen "do something that you enjoy doing" irrespective of financial gain. I love this keynote speech, one I will watch before going out and speaking tomorrow night.

I am doing what I love and KILLING IT.

Great post - I can't agree with the 'Blessed' logic. Rather I would say that the people that use Twitter are the ones that have created the value. Regardless of if the site is up or down people will continue to use the site whilst their personal networks continue to deliver value. When Twitter collapsed several weeks ago and wiped all of my followers panic set in, I was not alone in searching out and registering on alternative Microblogging sites. The problem with this however was that my network became dispersed over several sites, loosing it's value and convenience immediately. So when Twitter came back to life and my followers reappeared everyone conveniently forgot the problems.

It is the people you follow and those that follow you that give the value.

Thanks for mentioning me in your post Ian. The theory behind social media and the tools it provides reducing the dependence on cold calling has certainly stoked a healthy debate. One very good point that has been consistently put forward is that social media/networking will in affect warm the call up.

If anyone wants to connect with me to discuss these theories further please feel free to do so.

Great post.

I stopped buying newspapers quite some time ago as the content to me was old by the time it hit the shops. Likewise I have now stopped reading the BBC website as again the news is old by the time it is reported.

Local news is even worse, they often report as "Breaking News" a story first tweeted about 48hrs earlier.

They really need to wake up or be left behind. Is it a question of education? perhaps they don't even use social media personally, perhaps they view it as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo and believe it is something the kids do!

If the news websites employed a small team of web surfers instead of an army of reporters they would have quicker, more relevant news to report, furthermore they could report the news that is being most talked about and which is deemed more valuable by joe public.