I'm all in favour of the contrarian perspective and here, Robert Strohmeyer has a warning about those professing expertise in the Twitterverse or Facebookology including himself. Beware the Social Media Charlatans

Unfortunately, the dirty little secret about using social networks like Twitter and Facebook to promote your business is that, with the rarest exceptions, nobody wants to be buddies with a company. We live in a society that is absolutely sick of being advertised to and marketed to, and most of us turn to social networks to escape the forces of commercialism. We have a word for people who use social networks to send out unwanted offers and announcements about their business, and that word is "spammer." [Read more →]

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On 1 November 2008 Kim Hill interviewed Barbara Gibson, Chair of the International Association of Business Communicators, on the topic of Networking and Authenticity. It's a 22 minute interview; the MP3 file is around 8Mb, so quite small.

Gibson spoke clearly and with enthusiasm about the importance of using 'social media' — things like blogs and Twitter for connecting authentically with an audience one is trying to reach.

While her domain is business, everything she said also holds true for community organisations.

And for those organisations who represent the views of consumers, of goods or services, this interview is also particularly interesting. Gibson spoke, for example, about how the Internet has changed the way that companies interact with their customers; about how companies are quickly found out if they attempt to communicate in ways that are inauthentic and disingenuous.

It's well worth a listen, and even those on dial-up can probably manage an 8Mb audio file.

Note: RadioNZ seems to be making their audio files available for longer these days. The sidebar on the Saturday Morning with Kim Hill page now says:

Audio is available for all 2008 programmes.

Download:

• Barbara Gibson: networking and authenticity (Ogg Vorbis)
• Barbara Gibson: networking and authenticity (MP3)

Social Media Sites: A Handy Reference Guide :

Social Media Sites - just what are they?  … I wanted to offer a place of reference for the audience to see all the different working parts of Social Media in easy to reference post.

The post looks at:

• Social News: sites such as Digg, and Reddit.
• Photo Sharing: sites such as Flickr and Picasa
• Video Sharing: sites such as YouTube and Blip.TV
• Bookmarking: sites such as de.licio.us, Furl, and ma.gnolia.
• Social Networks: sites such as MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and Live Journal.
• Answer Services: sites such as Yahoo! Answers, and Answers.com.
• Forums & Message Boards: sites such as Rotten Tomatoes, StarTrek Message Boards, and Epicurious.
• Measuring Social Media: sites such as Buzzlogic, BlogPulse, Technorati and Feedburner.
• Also: StumbleUpon andWikipedia.