Archive for 22nd July 2008

New York Times and LinkedIn tie-up

22nd July 2008, 10:04 pm

I read in today’s Financial Times how the New York Times has struck a deal with LinkedIn. This is just a further example of the New York Times becoming more social (see our previous post here), and for the FT this is a sign of a significant change in the traditional media industry:

The deal, between the New York Times and LinkedIn, the largest online social network for professionals, is one of most far-reaching attempts yet by a traditional media company to tap into the booming popularity of online networks to super-charge its own services.

The deal means that personal profile data entered into LinkedIn will be used to make the content and advertising an individual sees on the New York Times site targeted to their industry, country, interests of profession.

This is a really interesting example for two reasons:

  1. It shows how traditional media and publishing firms are having to adapt to the challenges and opportunities presented by social media and social networks. They need to change the way that they offer their content and be prepared for people wanting to interact with it in different ways. The barriers between the social and the editorial are blurring.
  2. It highlights a significant benefit of social networks - the depth and richness of data that is gathered and kept by these sites. That the New York Times has struck a deal to use LinkedIn profile data to target advertising shows just how detailed this data is. With people adding and contributing to their social networks on an increasingly regular basis, the quality of this data will only heighten.

I expect us to see similar arrangements and innovations that build on these two reasons in the future. Social networks will seek to monetise the depth and quality of data they have gathered and traditional media and publishing firms are looking for new ways to target their readers. It would seem that a pairing of the two is a good solution and maybe the New York Times and LinkedIn will show us how good it could be.

Some more reading
Category: Innovation, Matt Rhodes, Social networks  |  Comment

The blurred world of online friends - social media manners

22nd July 2008, 09:27 pm

I read a good post from LouisGray about the social rules of social networks. Who do you follow and why? Who don’t you follow and why not?

The online etiquette of social networks and online communities is an interesting and emerging area, and one that tools such as OpenSocial will only influence. For instance, I have profiles on a range of sites, from LinkedIn and Facebook, to Twitter and FriendFeed, to niche industry social networks and ones of people with similar interests to me. I often have different friends on each of these and in fact probably use each one for very different reasons.

These reasons are worth investigating. Some people choose to become friends with only their close circle of real-world friends, or conversely may accept every friend request they get. As LouisGray points out:

Suddenly, the issue of friending became less about wanting to actually follow real friends, or peers, and instead, became an arms race - to get the most followers, to follow the most people, to rise up a leaderboard, or feel some kind of achievement because you could claim a friend as a household name.

So whether you have your close friends, your wider friendship group, or as many friends as you can lay your hands on, you have a set of social media manners that define who you invite when.

Some people talk about having social network friends. I think this is a misnomer - you don’t have social network friends, but rather have Facebook friends, LinkedIn friends, Twitter friends and so forth. Not everybody I follow on Twitter are friends on LinkedIn, and I probably wouldn’t one some LinkedIn connections to follow me on Facebook.

Social media manners are actually quite advanced and getting more so as people adopt more networks and communities. I have decided that I want to use Facebook for certain purposes and so invite appropriate people; LinkedIn I’ve decided is for other purposes and so invite a different mix of people. The distinction isn’t clear-cut with a lot of overlap, so these friendship groups become blurred.

I would imagine that everybody has slightly different groups of friends on each different social network or online community they are a member of. I would also expect that their is blurring between them. Social networks are developing, rather than having distinct and distinguishing brand identities and so mean different things to different people. This means that the policy I have for using LinkedIn and making friends there is probably different to the one everybody else has.

This is where the real blurring is. Social networks are centred on me and so I decide how and why I use it. I develop my own social media manners and then develop and test these. The world of social media is changing and developing all the time, and we are helping to shape this by the mere fact of using them.

Some more reading
Category: Matt Rhodes, Social Media, Social networks  |  3 Comments