Execution is everything! (ref. David Armano in Futurelab)
Having a great idea about a business, a trip, or anything else in life is essential but not nearly sufficient. The quality of the execution is everything! And guess what? This applies to your contributions on social media sites, so do research, proof read, and if a good idea doesn’t stick, try from a different angle.
[We're starting this new series of short posts offering tips to bloggers, video producers and other digital creators - Our faithful users have been receiving these tips in their weekly scoring update emails for a while already]
Is it ok to get paid to promote a brand?
The jury is still out in the online community at large but our opinion is that the same principles apply to brand endorsement as they do for your contribution in general: be honest and transparent and your audience will respect you and your choices.
Successful web publishers (bloggers like Michael Arrington of Techcrunch, video producers like Christine Gambito aka. Happyslip on YouTube) have already taken steps towards full disclosure when they have a vested interest in the story they cover.
For more on this, Karl published a post on the topic a couple of days ago that you can find here.
Since yesterday’s announcements from Google and Facebook (a couple of hours apart) that they would both make their social ID standard available to all sites, the (micro)blogosphere has been quite active to look at the merits of each solution and try to predict who will emerge victorious.
Social data standards are paramount to TRAACKR and we’d like to chim in with our own point of view on the suject. So, Facebook or Google? WHO CARES??!?
No, seriously, who, outside of Facebook and Google, cares? We should just all be happy that this arm wrestling between the 2 giants is taking place because it means that standards are indeed converging, which is really all that matters.
Why should there even be 1 single standard? We tend to forget that the “winner takes all” approach to Web businesses doesn’t always hold true, far from it.
If OpenID and Facebook Connect are both adopted widely, it won’t be long before some small genius businesses (like yours truly) start building bridges between the major standards to unify them. I’d just be content if we’re left dealing with only 2!
We only wish for this battle for standards to expand in scope and start including more social data types than basic social network info. It’s undoubtely the way it is going and the fact that both Google and Facebook are leading the charge will only accelerate this trend.
So our opinion on this? Keep on the good fight!
