Me Chatting with Kimberly Maul of PR Week

Good chat with Kimberly Maul of PR Week about consumers in the social space, the Facebook/Friendfeed business and some work we did for Ford recently.

Friending everyone you meet – what’s up with that?

Not so long ago, social networks were pretty straightforward:  MySpace & Facebook were for friends, Linkedin for business contacts, and a bunch of others for everything in between.  If you met somebody (online or off) that you got on with you connected with them on one of the first two, if you met somebody you were doing business with and liked (or wanted to) you connected with them on the latter.  They were, in one way or another, qualified contacts.  Seems like in the last year or so particularly, the boundries between them all have gotten blurred.  I’ve had facebook ‘friend’ requests from people whose name I don’t know, or whose face I don’t recognise.  Met them once, was on a conference call or in a meeting… exchanged cards at a conference.

Twitter self-polices in a way, in that if you’re following somebody who drives you crazy, you’ll quickly unfollow or ignore them.  Part of the beauty of Twitter is that it’s a great way to connect with folks you didn’t know previously. That’ll be the subject of a different post though…

My point is that connections run the risk of losing value.  If you connect with everyone you meet on linkedin, how valuable is that connection to you or your network?  If you can’t vouch for that person personally, is the fact that you’re linked of any worth?

Personally I try to only connect only with people I consider to be friends, or folks who I like  or liked working with and respect.  There’s a good deal of crossover between Facebook and Linkedin for me within those two groups (a different issue), but the same rules apply.

Yahoo To Turn Down M$ Offer

According to reports.

Gotta admire the cojones there, though not exactly unexpected. Yahoo is going down the tubes: getting soundly thumped in pretty much every department, but they’re holding out for more. Need to squeeze as much as possible out for their shareholders of course, but you’d think 61% over would work.

I would be rather surprised if this doesn’t happen one way or another. Combining forces gives MS & Yahoo a fighting chance to unseat or at least compete with Google. On their own neither has been able to make much of an impact.  Google’s given both a proper spanking, basically.

Smart move from MS imo, Google can’t be happy. Microsoft aren’t always the quickest to innovate, but they’re the best in the business at catching up. Will be fun to watch what happens.