The social media triangle

I noticed Andy Lark's latest tweet this morning, referencing his latest blog entry, which in turn referenced another blog entry. It occurred to me that the only thing missing here was a link to a Facebook page and then the social media triangle, as I'd like to call it, would be complete. It seems that one of the keys to doing good social media PR is to generate content on a blog or on a community site like Facebook and then link to it via another blog or community site and then top it off with a quick reference on Twitter for those of us who can't keep track of all the blog posts and Facebook entries people make these days.

What does strike me as interesting in this triangle is:

1. That there is no dominant blogging platform in the way Facebook dominates the community space
2. That Twitter is becoming a great way to quickly see all the social media content changes that people have made that may have value

A Long Tale on the Value of Blogging

Excuse the pun but I recently came across a paper co-written by some IBM and Google researchers on the connection between blogging and the sales of products. The paper was written back in 2005 so is not new but it is one of only a few papers I've ever seen that have tried to draw a clear link between the impact of blogs on the sales of companies. The good news for bloggers is that there appears to be a connection. At least there was when it was written. While rather academic it is worth a read.

http://labs.rightnow.com/colloquium/papers/prediction_from_chatter.pdf