Social Media Marketing Strategies

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I was thinking about all the data we lifestream. What does this data say about us?  How valuable is this data in the right corporation’s hands?  Bookmarks are very telling of a individuals mindset, habits, and interests. The same interpretations can be made about the data we lifestream.  A person’s digital fingerprint is a potential gold mine of data for various industries.

Upon analyzing my own lifestream on FriendFeed, you could tell the following things about me:

Music:

My digital music fingerprint shows that I stream classic rock and hip hop. While I like many types of music, I tend to listen to these two genres the most, at least when I’m online.  Music industries are you listening?

Twitter:

Tweets show that I’m a father. It also shows that there is at least one child in my household. Babies R Us are you listening?

Pictures:

These pictures show my beautiful daughter Kaylee. It pretty much echos the tweet. The visual just completes a potential new customer profile. What’s the latest and greatest in baby products for a now almost four month old infant?

RSS:

My profile reveals that I read and follow quite a few bloggers in the tech and social media space.  Technology and social media are the dominating factors on my lifestream.

Read my feeds. That should give you a good idea of the products I might be interested in. If you dug into my digital fingerprint further, you would easily find your hook.

Bookmarks:

My bookmarks are always a good primary indicator of my mindset at the moment. They chronicle my current interests, and also serve for future reading and exploration. As a side note, bookmarking can also be misleading.

My blog is titled  “My Thoughts On Social Media”. This is my main focus of interest.

Behavioral targeted advertising is nothing new in social media. Tracking and targeting can easily be done now with lifestreaming and rss, as opposed to traditional cookies.

What does your digital fingerprint say about you. More importantly, what information are you broadcasting to corporations?

Mike Fruchter Friendfeed, lifestreaming, Social Media

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Sweetcron is the latest new shiny toy in self-hosted lifestreaming. Sweetcrons main selling point is the ability to store your lifestreaming data on your own server,and on your own domain. There was much awaited anticipation of this application. It has garnered lots of publicity for the past few months. I finally installed Sweetcron and took it for a test drive..

I was extremely unimpressed. The hype sold me, but that’s about the only thing that I can say will sell me about this application, or at least in its current stages.

Most of us who attempt to set up self-hosted lifestreams must be comfortable with php, and for the most part, rely on plugins in conjuncture with some type of blogging platform, usually wordpress. While I expected Sweetcron to be so much more, it’s pretty much a stripped down wordpress blog with tags and the capability of importing rss. In it’s current state it does not look very secure. The php scripts running it, look off the shelf and possibly highly exploitable.

It’s in pretty rough shape: nowhere near a 1.0 release. The architecture and design decisions come off as amateurish as well. I wouldn’t trust it with my data. – Mark Trapp

I agree with Mark Trapp’s comment quoted above, from this FriendFeed thread. I also would be very cautious of the data you input into Sweetcron at its present stages. This application needs some serious development. It could be your own personal FriendFeed, without the friends, but it’s simply not.

What Sweetcron does have going for them is the fact it’s open source and easily customizable. At least now, others can improve on this application where Sweetcron seems to have failed.

Under the hood, it runs on php and mysql. Setting it up was relatively easy. Create your database, modify your php files and it’s installed.  The control panel is so bare-bones it could not be any more basic.

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The dashboard is minimal. It’s pretty self explanatory from the screen shot. You can do 3 things here.

1. Write: Post directly to your lifestream
2. View Items: Delete, edit, unpublish/publish.
3. Feeds: Add or delete rss feeds.

You can also post directly to your lifestream. I guess this could be useful if you were extremely bored. This is what Twitter is for. This sort of defeats the purpose since you more then likely would have tweets imported in via rss.

This is your options page, or should I say lack of options page.

Last but not least, Smartcron has a link for comments, but failed to implement a commenting system. It’s great they suggest using Disqus for comments, but after all this application is built on mysql and php! Commenting could have been easily implemented.

At this stage in the game, there is nothing to see here folks. My advice is if your looking for a service like this, set up a self-hosted wordpress blog, and customize it.

Mike Fruchter lifestreaming, rss, sweetcron

I focused in on my last post, about how Friendfeed could be a great resource for spammers. Delving further into the subject, it got me thinking. With Friendfeed becoming a social bank of information, it would be an ideal tool for private investigators, law enforcement, debt collectors and so forth. We are so quick to be active contributors to social media, the majority of us, sadly do not sit back and think about the implications of how our digital footprints can be used against us.

What most of us do on sites like Friendfeed, Myspace, Facebook etc, can be classified as a type of life-streaming activity. Life-streaming is a continual broadcast of events in a person’s life through digital media. Friendfeed is one of the platforms that facilitates the process. Friendfeed takes it a step further. It added the community aspect to life-streaming, something the competitors in the space, such as Socialthing & Profilactic were late to figure out.

Friendfeed allows one to add a multitude of services to compose their life-stream. You can broadcast your online status, your favorite music, videos, images, bookmarks. Location-based social networking, such as Brightkite takes it a step a further, and allow one to broadcast your location in real time, tracking not only you, but your networks of friends and family as well.You are archiving and broadcasting these activities simultaneously in real time, leaving a traceable, easily accessible digital profile behind in the background. There is not much we can do about that. This is a small price we all pay using social media online. We all have done Google queries on our names at some point. We find hundreds, some several thousand pages of archived public,  life-stream data. This data is accessible to any person, corporation, and even law enforcement entity.

Most private investigators and law enforcement use search engines as their primary source for fact finding information. Circumstances permitting, they would use social media as a second avenue for investigative research. Think about how beneficial the information an individuals lifestreaming feed could be . An instant profile can be created of the target. This profile could contain an individual’s photos, websites, comment postings (with time stamps), music play lists, tweets, employment and business affiliations etc. The scope of the profile and data will vary based on how active the target is, and what social media applications they use.

Friendfeed being the main hub for all these services to plug into, makes it the ideal one stop shop to monitor and profile a target’s activities. Private investigators, and cyber sleuths would have a field day monitoring sites like Friendfeed. They could easily monitor a potential cheating husband or wife’s daily whereabouts, twitter conversations, etc. This all can be done from the comfort of Google Reader, by simply importing the targets Friendfeed RSS feed. Law enforcement is one example, there is a whole slew of industries who can and are using an individuals life-streaming activities to track them down for whatever reason. I am not blogging about anything new. It’s common knowledge for most of us that everything we do online is logged, archived and stored somewhere. The question is, have we become to complacent on what we broadcast online? What are your thoughts on the negative ramifications of life-streaming and how it can be used against you?

Related reads:

Who needs Carnivore when you have lifestreams.

Mike Fruchter lifestreaming, Social Media