Psychology of Social Networking

Sarah Wenger has shared this interesting infographic with me an email. The graphic has been created by Psychologydegree.net. and talks about the big-impact Facebook has been making in our lives.

Take a look at it…

Preventing Social Media Spam

Image by Josh Russell via Flickr

Sometimes it feels really sorry to see the tactics of a select group of folks in the name of using Social media as a Conversation Medium ! By-and-large this is applicable to Twitter baring the first couple of points.

The Problem

1. Email spam: They  continue to send you bulk promotional emails, although you never opted-in for their newsletter. On the name of customization, they start the email with your name prefix and believe they are not spamming your email box.  To your surprise, you are not allowed to copy & reproduce their email although they didn’t take your permission at the first place.
2. Blog Spameeters: They start a one-dimensional blog to blatantly promote the poor client’s new product offerings.
3. RTing & RTing: They create multiple accounts on twitter, send tweet from one id and then re-tweet from others. End-result = The user ends up thinking that there is a great conversation going on.
4. Follow mania: They follow all the celebrities and all those who have more than 1000 followers in a hope to attract some eyeballs.
5. Twomit dosage: While it is the lifeline of many, they continue to talk about the color of their underwear on twitter. Eating food, walking dog, brushing their teeth. It’s a moral obligation.They all know twitter has a threshold when it comes to maximum requests at an instance and maximum no. of tweets. However, they never refrain to curse twitter every time it suffers from an outage.

Criticising Social Media ?

Criticizing social media?

Are you doing so for any of the following reasons:

• Because you think this is a buzzword which will eventually die-down
• Because your mind tells tells you that there’s nothing to social media beyond twitter, blogs and Facebook
• Because every second person you have seen on twitter claims to be a social media evangelist or a catalyst
• Because you do not seem to understand the differences and similarities between digital media and social media

Image by Laughing Squid via Flickr

• Because you are fed up of blog-posts talking about socialmedia ROI & budgets and don’t understand what is the ROI
• Because you see brands jumping on social media bandwagon and you fail to understand what they’re gaining out of it
• Because you witness endless talks about conversations, communities, content
• Because you are trying to understand the meaning of terms of ‘social’ and ‘media’ and combined together
• Because you discuss your problems with consultants and every time you talk to them there’s more confusion than ever before

Rather not do it as it is more a perception issue than anything else !!  Understand  Social Media as a Philosophy and its application as a Culture.

Indians in Social Media (2009)

By-and-large most of us would agree with that  Social media is still in a nascent stage in the Indian context and there is a lot that remains to be explored in the Social media space.

Having said that the ripples in the social media wave created by many Indians involved are ensuring that Social Media is taken to the next level.

Note: For (businesses [small or large] or individual/s) who are trying to understand the online medium and how they can use it.  You should definitely follow these guys, not because some of them qualify as so-called thought leaders, but since they’re early-starters, they might have a degree of influence on your mind with their observations.

Social Media Conversation series (Talk with Peter Bihr)

Background: This is the third blogpost in a series of conversations with Social Media change agents, thought-leaders, experts and mavens to answer some of the most important questions surrounding the subjects of Social media and Web2.0 ! The emphasis of this discussion series is to address ‘socialmedia’ at a ground level and talk about the real world issues that are being faced by us on both sides of the road: i.e. as actual users and as consultants/agencies in this space.

Social Media Conversation series (Talk with Anna Farmery)

Background: This is the second blog-post in a series of conversations with Social Media change agents, Social media thought-leaders, experts and mavens to answer some of the most important questions surrounding the subjects of Social media and Web2.0 ! The emphasis of this discussion series is to address ’socialmedia’ at a ground level and talk about the real world issues that are being faced by us on both sides of the road: i.e. as actual users and as consultants/agencies in this space.

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After the engaging conversation with Dennis D. McDonald, Ph.D, I am proud to have with me, widely read and heard social media and branding trainer, Anna Farmery.

At a personal level, I am a great fan of Anna’s  The Engaging Brand podcast series  which has been nominated for two years as the Best Business podcast. In addition, she consistently speaks and delivers workshops on branding, motivation and social media. You can read Anna’s blog or listen to her free weekly audio show at http://www.theengagingbrand.com