The Social Media Atom

We have made no secret about our love of and reliance on social media.  It's a core part of our strategy at bGreen.  We're involved with Twitter, Facebook, Blogging, and YouTube.  We think that these four components really make up the core of social media.  The nucleus, if you will.

We recently engaged in an internal debate on the value of Facebook as a core social media tool.  There are countless articles on why you NEED Facebook for business, but we just weren't sure.  What's the point?  We're attracting followers on Twitter (400+ so far), our blog is having a moderate amount of success (150+ hits on one particular day), and we're set to launch our website shortly, which will really be the main portal for all things bGreen.  So where does Facebook come in?  We're not looking to share pictures of us from Spring Break '98 and we're not looking to reconnect with our nursery school sweethearts.  I think we were really just over-thinking it.

Everyone is on Facebook.  My mom, your mom, my 82 year old grandfather.  Everyone.  Allegedly the user base is over 100 million strong.  Imagine if you get 0.0001% of the people on the service to notice you.  What about 0.01% or 0.1%?  That's a serious amount of people catching a glimpse of what you're doing, and frankly, it's a market you can not overlook.  So, perhaps to our chagrin and despite Facebook's massive shortcomings on the business application side, we'll be there (we're currently putting the page together).

This morning, while thinking about some other social media applications, I got to thinking about where some of the other services will fit into our strategy.  There are applications like Flickr, Tumblr, LinkedIn and even TwitPic to some extent, that offer great services and are gaining in popularity.

Flickr, as most people know, is a photo sharing service.  Perhaps it's most valuable feature is search.  Fred Wilson, of avc.com, when talking about image search says, "When I look for an image, in the past, I would go to Flickr first and Google second. In the future, I'll go to Flickr first and Bing second."  So there is value in using Flickr.  We obviously want to leverage this value and get people seeing the pictures we're posting, but there hosted in variety of other places as well.  They're on our blog, in our Twitter feed via TwitPic, and some will end up on our website.

Tumblr falls somewhere between Twitter and Blogging, and seems to be popular amongst early adopters and those heavily involved with other forms of social media.  I look at it as a place for short bursts of info; a picture, a link, a video, that may otherwise not qualify for a blog post, but requires a more permanent home than a tweet.  Their software and interface are great and their iPhone app is snap.  My verdict is still out on Tumblr, and I'm not sure where (or if) it will fit into our mix.  Perhaps I'm overlooking some of their core services.  If so, please correct me and fill me in.

I can see the value in LinkedIn as well.  It connects professionals with other professionals.  It's like Facebook, but stripped down to resumes and networking.  We think it's important, and we're working on setting up a profile.  However, I hardly see this as part of our core social media strategy.

Perhaps in all these additonal services lies the solution.  We have our nucleus (Twitter, Facebook, the blog, and YouTube) but we also have the orbiting electrons (like Tubmlr, Flickr, LinkedIn, and TwitPic) that make up the rest of the Social Media Atom.  We'll focus on the nucleus, but perhaps it makes sense to complete the atom and bring the electrons into the mix just a bit.