SEO, Social Media & eCommerce Talk @RTMLWise

Maybe none of us will accept this but most of us are lost in the social media jungle. There is so much of information that we are likely to be overwhelmed by it. To make things worse, killer apps are being released which tend to make thing worse. Sometimes I fear that my nerves would snap one fine morning from information overload.

My day typically begins with my inbox. I have five different email id, each for a specific purpose. There is my personal id, official id, social id, download id and misc id. Most of my time is taken up by the official and misc id. From my official id inbox I usually branch out to my Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn social sites which may take me away to some unknown space in and around the internet. By the time I am done with all the commenting and viewing, the writing on the Facebook wall is clear – I mean clear as mud. Add to it the constant twitter   and I really don’t know how to cope up with all this stuff.

Once upon a time I used to think that RSS feed would unclutter everything. Sad to say that instead of a solution, it has become a problem of sorts. How many feeds can you handle anyway? The problem gets more and more acute when you subscribe to all kinds of feeds. I am that kind of a guy – if I like something I instantaneously subscribe to the RSS feed. The result is that my inbox is full of crap.

Social Median

In my hour of darkness, my prayers seemed to have been answered by this cute little website socailmedian.com.  I would like my readers to try it out. Maybe it can unclutter some of the confusion. I could to an extent segregate my interests and read some interesting stuff without wading through muck and quicksand ( some information just sucks you in and waste your time). It is an online experiment which I subscribe to. Though it has limitations, the potential is apparent. Finding the right information is what the entire thing is all about. Web browsers, killer applications, search engines, knowledge aggregation platforms ( like Wikipedia)  and social media are all driving towards the same destination – providing rich user experience. Social Median is just the tip of the iceberg.

Flock 2.5

This one is another experiment which has lately caught my fancy. I downloaded this version of Flock just yesterday and am still playing around with it. First of all, let me confess that I am an open source buff and enthusiast and anything from the Mozilla guys captures my fancy. Anyway we are moving towards open source, whether Microsoft likes it or not (I am not one of those ‘I hate Bill gates’ variety, though). Coming back to Flock- it is an interesting experiment. I can branch out to all my favorite email providers (Gmail, Yahoo……) as well as reach out to my social sites like Facebook. YouTube and Flickr are just a click away with preview. But as I said earlier, this is only an experiment. I can do the same thing which Flock does by bookmarking all the sites. So nothing earth shattering here. I could log on to my blog from a convenient button placed in left panel. Once again something which can be achieved with a bookmark.

I am discussing this issue from my monetizing angle. How do I fit into the scheme of things? How do I make sense out of the clutter? How do I navigate through the jungle without losing my sense of purpose? Many of us spend an inordinate amount of time on the internet without any specific goal. Twitter has made things much worse. Getting hammered and battered by messages is not my idea of having a good time. But at the same time we just cannot escape from the madness. The search for an ideal solution is on but meanwhile we must differentiate between noise and signal which are emanating from the internet. There is no point following hundreds on Twitter – rather it is pointless. I find it   funny that many of us simply join the bandwagon as if it were a fashion statement. Boasting about your Twittering prowess is somehow associated with having arrived. It is akin to “The Emperor’s New Clothes”.

As things stand today ,we must be clear about the message we want to convey and much more importantly, we must be clear about the message we want to receive. This is the only compass by which we may be able to find our way out the social media  jungle.