Erica Glasier: Oversocialized! Social media & interactive futurism from sunny Winnipeg

Here are my two reactions to the fundamental non-usefulness (for me, at this time; I reserve the right to eat my words) of Google Buzz.

1. Email does not necessarily represent friendships

Remember when Hotmail went all social? I logged in one day accidentally (I keep the account around so I get a desktop alert through Messenger when something happens on Facebook—how steampunk is that?) and I saw “social” updates like “Paul changed his profile picture” and such. And I was like “Wow. Who cares?”

Email is pretty much a business communication in my universe. I have the Xobni plugin for Outlook, so when I get an email (from anyone) it skulks around and pulls in whatever social data it knows how to find. Typically I see a  professionally appropriate LinkedIn photo grinning back at me. I feel like I’m invading their privacy, for Pete’s sake. It’s uncomfy, because email just doesn’t foster relationships I wish to pursue in that kind of detail.

2. Can’t we just do this through Facebook Connect? Somehow?

I was kind of hoping Google would roll out social search and all that without me having to create a profile. It just seems like surrendering the very last shreds of even the pretense of privacy to get naked with Google on purpose. Google already knows a lot about me. I have an uneasy relationship with their ever-so-slightly-Big-Brother brand. It just feels wrong to give them any more info than I have to. I’m more comfortable spreading my identity out and making Google work a little to profile me, however naive that might be.

Listen, Google, it’s not you, it’s me, : I just don’t email my friends, & I’ve got too much social inertia on other sites to create another profile. Thanks, though!

Mmmk, I don’t think I fully grasped what social search meant for brands when I first wrote about it. A recent Altimeter post by Charlene Li, who I had the pleasure of seeing at last year’s SXSWi, really broke it down for me. It’s ok to be confused about this, because it’s a big jui jitsu match right now between the web’s sweatiest heavyweights, and when the dust settles the web will be fundamentally different.

So, while the eventual goal will be search results that are local and profile-based to some extent (your friends talking about what you’re interested in), the first deals between Twitter, Facebook, Bing* and Google will focus on real time trending topics and authority, meaning someone with a lot of followers (or fans, or friends, presumably) will come in at the top of the results, and people’s interactions with brands (good and bad) will spread like so much melted Cheez Whiz**.

For brands, companies, and organizations, this means less direct control over messaging than ever. Your own site pages will not necessarily be the most important results when the real-time web is elevated to equal status with the “brochure web”. The opinions tweeted by your customers/users/whoever wants to say anything about you will be very visible when people search you. Customer service is your new brand experience and the resulting word-of-mouth is your new advertising.

A moment to ponder Heather Locklear, here.

So what’s a poor org to do? How do we “make sure” people are saying nice things about us? Continue reading