marketing in traffic by brian branca

I think we can all agree there is a plethora of social media tools/sites out there. Some might say it’s getting a bit ridiculous & I would agree. While I would love to think that each is created to give people new & interesting ways to connect, the cynic in me says this is just an attempt to get in the game with the ultimate goal of generating advertising dollars. Oh wait, that’s what pays my bills.

That said; I feel compelled both personally & professionally to check these out. For your benefit; I’ll keep a log of my thoughts & experiences during the sign up & initial investigation phases.

Plurk: Your life, on the line

• First Impression: Holy crap; there’s using design to be different/endearing/edgy & there’s plain stupid. A weird fish asking a headless pig, “What is up, headless doc?” This seems like something looking to compete with Twitter. Note to head Plurk guy or gal; Twitter is dumb enough a name, don’t mistake our affinity for the tool to be something related to having to talk about Tweets, retweeting, & using the @ or # symbols.

• Registration Process: One step to sign up. You can search for friends from your AIM, Yahoo, or MSN instant messenger accounts, Twitter, or email. The latter two are much more helpful. Twice submitted AIM account info & got a HTTP 400 Bad Request page. A subsequent attempt using my Yahoo IM info yielded the same. Lame. I am then brought to my home page with an invite to the tutorial.

• What It Is: You can view both your own & your friends’ plurks, over time. Conversation is displayed in a timeline manner &, just like Twitter, you get 140 characters per post. Very easy to navigate & using the tool (updating, changing account settings, editing your profile, & finding new Plurkers) is easy. There’s even a link – Interesting Plurkers – which allows you to browse people you may want to add. Mobile & IM capabilities exist; although I think this is standard now for the Social Media world. The last note in the tutorial explains that Plurk is not 100% instant, meaning that you should check back for new plurks, comments, or friends.

• Potential: Like all social tools, there needs to be enough people with similar interests who will start meaningful conversations. I sort of like the manner in which the conversation is displayed & I find it amusing that you can segment friends into Cliques. Plurk has done a few things to differentiate themselves such as creating color-coded words that are commonly used to start and the ability to share multi-media without opening a new browser or leaving the page. There are also Karma points; not sure what these are as there is now mention within the FAQs (dumb), but a Google search tells me they’re awarded based on activity.

• Why You Should Join: If you can get all of your Twitter friends to abandon it, completely, & move over to Plurk, it might be worth your time. The multi-media components give you the opportunity to share more dynamic content & the timeline view is easier to read & navigate, in my opinion, than a simple list, a la Twitter.

• Why You Should Avoid: If you are already actively using Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc., & have a healthy influx of new content into your RSS reader, adding something that takes more time to monitor, update & investigate will eat into the little free time you have.

Look for more upcoming; I’ll be doing one a week (or so) & will include brightkite, Plaxo, Jaiku, & Utterz. If there are any others you would like me to scope out, let me know.

It’s worth noting that I am not heavily engaged in all of these tools; I have a life & would like to keep it that way. That said, I’m sure there are some things I’ve missed or possibly misinterpreted. If you have any feedback, I’d love to hear it! If not, go plurk yourself…