mailing lists versus social networking: the new web

2009 December 16

by Lisa

Buzzwords ahoy!

I’m a hip and with-it computer internet person; running a business that is all about the web, you have to be!

Mailing lists are old favourites on the web and are based on the assumption that people like to receive email messages with information in them, be they specials you’re offering, general information or even changes to your class timetables.

They do work, but the problem is that they need content, and content takes time to write in a single sitting. They’re also dependent upon you being able to schedule things in advance and can sometimes be a little late to market.

That’s why more and more, people online are relying on different means to convey their message quickly and with a minimum of fuss.

These alternate means are broadly described using the buzzword “social networking”.

Social networking is one of the more recent internet buzzwords and is a term used for what people do naturally anyway – talk to one-another.

The difference on the web is only the method. Rather than chatting with a phone call (arguably the first electronic social-networking) people do it with instant messengers, applications like blogger, twitter or other similar applications.

Basically, all “social networking” is about is communicating with other people, either one-on-one or as a group (one to many), but doing it electronically.

The bottom-line here though is that it’s nothing new, and nothing particularly to be confused about. Like I say, we’ve been doing this for a while now, just in different ways.

Instant Messaging

Instant Messengers are the rough equivalent of the phone call just with a keyboard typing the message rather than you saying the words yourself. Sure, you can add people to the conversation, but you can do that with a conference call can’t you? Applications like Microsoft Messenger for PC and Mac, Skype (which also does video calls, which is another subject for another time) and Adium for Mac will handle all manner of different one-to-one systems. Adium for my money is one of the nicer systems for the mac, and can handle any account, from MS Messenger, Google Messenger and others. A beta is out at the moment which handles Twitter (albeit rather oddly, but that’s what you get in beta, almost ready but still incomplete code).

Blogging and Microblogging

Blogging is effectively the diary but put online for all to see (or if you want to be cagey, you can lock things away from prying eyes. Childrens photos are a big candidate for the lock and key because, unfortunately, if you can see a photo, you can download it with a simple right click command).

Blogging has been around since the early days of the net, and some sites are still running.

Effectively blogging gives a voice to your opinions, and they’re being used for many different purposes, including simple venting to information. The movie Julie/Julia started life as a blog, then became a book before hollywood took it on.

Microblogging is ultimately the same as blogging, but with the restriction of less characters to type. Tools like Twitter have a limit of 140 characters, which has meant people who use it need to get to the point as fast as possible. As a distribution medium for additional information which can be accessed with a click of a hyperlink, it’s quite neat and there are several tools (including tinyurl)which you can use which automatically shorten your addresses – tweetdeck for the mac and Tweetr are but two of such applications, but there’s a bunch of them for all the different microblogging systems out there.

Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn

Large-scale “social networking” systems are available online for whomever wants to use them. They offer a complete ecosystem, effectively a web within a web, where people can search on your name or business, link with your profile and become a “friend”, and exchange information.

Facebook and MySpace are more for personal social networking, while LinkedIn is dedicated to so-called “professional” associations, but there’s no reason why you can’t do both using Facebook. Indeed, Facebook’s user-base is far in excess of LinkedIn and has far more features.

MySpace, even though it is said to have “lost” the Social Networking wars (and I’ll state for the record, that it’s become exceedingly boring to describe everything as a “war”) but is still used almost exclusively for musicians and bands. Arguably, the only reason Facebook won through was because their user interface (what you see on the screen) was less bad than that of MySpace.

Why use them?

The question is, why is using instant messenging, blogging and microblogging a substitute for an email?

Overall, we’re talking about distribution and speed.

With a mailing list, only the people who are members of your list can get the goodies you’re offering. This works for some marketing models, but increasingly (and aligned with the overall open dissemination of information online) are less and less effective to get your message out quickly. The Iranian elections are a perfect example of how fast information can travel with only a 140 character limit.

With some clever and regular posts to your Twitter, Facebook or your blog, you can reach far more people than with a locked-down email message. The web can be used to work for your business, indeed, it’s something overlooked by many people online: the website you have designed can work for you, not just be an online business card.

But there’s a catch: like everything online, you have to make it relevant. Your information needs to speak to your market, and to communicate information that people need to hear. This is what Search Engines use when determining where you appear in their results. It’s all about content. And hiding your content away in a locked-down email message won’t help you reach more people.

For example, the tweets (that’s the term for the messages you send using Twitter) that you’ll find at http://twitter.com/tallpoppy are almost completely dedicated to web and the technologies we’re working with. The personal twitter account is hidden from prying eyes (but as a result of the number of tweets and the subjects I write upon, draw just as many spammers as does the professional account)!

The information we post on the Tall Poppy blogs, found on our site, are dedicated to keeping our visitors up-to-date with web-related information and technology, with the once weekly status report on what we’re doing, just to prove we’re humans and not spambots!

And there’s the point of difference that you should aim at if you choose to take any of these new technologies up: make it human, make it real. By doing that you become your own representative on the web, and people like talking to people; we’re all voyers online and hearing positive stories about businesses doing great work means you’ll start to attract people you’d like to do business with.