Archive for March 11th, 2008
An Intermediation Machine
I am a regular reader of Mark Bradley’s Markets are Relationships (MaR) blog but it is like a robot with no soul. Today at 09:55 exactly my Google reader reports 5 posts appeared and another 5 at 11:18. Somewhat annoyingly the feed only show 2.5 lines of content split mid-sentence, but I suppose it is enough to tempt.
The title of each MaR post is the title of a 3rd-party post in another blog. As the first content line we see the other party’s post title repeated as a link, and only then do we see the most valuable part of the MaR post – a succinct, edited summary of the 3rd-party post using direct quoted passages. If you like the summary you are tempted to follow the link to the target blog post for the full information.
Mark certainly locates highly relevant blog posts, but his regimented feed just as certainly drives you to his own blog first making it a really effective intermediation machine. Is it a low price to pay? I believe many like myself use river-of-news feed readers like Google Reader. Having to actually follow the link to the blog post itself costs time, and feels annoying when you read 100 posts or more a day.
Obviously for me I would prefer to see the link+summary included in the MaR feed, but the I would very rarely visit the MaR blog itself. Is this an acceptable price of an intermediator?
Enterprise Social Media by Objective
It is interesting to see advice from Josh Bernoff of Forrester giving advice to enterprises on How To Choose The Right Social Technologies. Essentially the approach is to first pick the objective, and only then choose the appropriate social media package:
Picking Technologies By Objective
Listening Tools: Research Communities And Brand Monitoring
Rather than pay the USD 25/page for the report it makes more sense to read the book on which many of this advice is based, Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies.
