Thursday 11 November 2010

Socially Networked

Ok I admit it, my brain hurts!

I was looking for an extra bit of code to add into the website this morning to add some nifty share buttons for Facebook and the like. The first item I found proudly announced it provided over 300 links to social network and sharing sites which suddenly raised the question of how far do you go with all this social networking, book marking and on-line presence?

The website is the easy one, it holds details of all we do and does all the formal stuff, along with the shop where this enterprise is supposed to make money. It does it's job and gives a portal to all the social network stuff, but a concious decision has been made to keep it a clean portfolio without all the social network content creeping in.

Ok, Facebook seemed a good idea, hey I've got a Facebook account and in general it's a nice little diversion, a good way to keep in contact with a few people and sometimes a handy way to tell my wife I'll have a cup of tea if she's making one! To be honest though, I couldn't care less about how hungover someone is because they had too many sherbets last night. In terms of what we do, it's an easy way to drop a quick update to people who 'Like' us about what's going on and how some of the other sites have been updated. It's pretty low maintenance as most of the contact arrives by way of feeds from other places.

Now the blog I like, it's the informal outlet that hopefully keeps the website clean and to the point. The blog is 'look what happened to day' and 'doesn't this model look nice' along with a bit of a ramble from time to time. The blog happily feeds into Facebook to let people know something has been posted and goes out to those who've signed up to the news feed, other than that it looks after itself.

Twitter is still an experiment but is a bit addictive too. It's another outlet, a quick fire, short message of what's happening right now, pretty banal at times but an easy way to say we're still alive. The added bonus is that it will feed through to Facebook as a status update too saving a little bit of time!

While looking for the website code I stumbled upon Google Buzz and started wondering should we be levering this as well in a similar vein to Facebook or just leave well alone? At the moment it needs to research time I think and come back to this as and when. There will be some form of sharing buttons appearing on the website though.

To be honest though all this stuff is about you the customer, what do you want to see in terms of interaction? There's not a lot of point in doing it if the people on the outside don't really care ....

No comments: