Here’s a good midway point of the year article by Jim Tobin from Ignite Social Media on what the future of social media might bring. How many of these do you agree with? My 2 cents is that #4 will be more portable in regards to social media being more mobile rather than portable.
I haven’t had a chance to check these guys out Ecairn, but let me know if you do.
I’ve written about this in the past in regards to whether your online identity is alligned with your offline identity and Dan Thornton’s article takes it one step further. Check out his post, Is your online indentity in your control?
Richard at Dell has a nice compilation post from yesterday of things you should check out, not the least of which are The Blog Council, which I’m still on the fence with, and Feedly, which I have not checked out yet.
I love Mike Manuels’ post about measuring social media as well, since I sat in a bar last friday night and talked essentially about the same thing with Jason Breed from Neighborhood America. The bottom line and Mike’s post back it up. Very few companies have a clue about how to monitor their online engagements with social media as well as their online personas in general. You have to have a way to monitor your web traffic but then if and this is a big if, you are monitoring your social media interactions, what is the data that you are wanting to pull from it? What are your goals?
Read this post on Stowe Boyds blog, How we are made great and then lastly on Jason Falls blog, KatFrench has a great post on social media specialists chucking their backgrounds that basically asks the question, who’s running the ship for social media?
Direct Marketing Observations 
Hi Marc,
Thanks for linking to the Disclosure Best Practices Toolkit. We’re putting this out there to show everyone that disclosure is the right thing to do.
I’m happy to discuss the Blog Council and/or the Toolkit if you have questions. Feel free to call me or email me (my contact info is below).
By the way, I’m actually on the fence myself regarding Feedly. I think it’s a nice step toward humanizing RSS, but for my money, the best reader that did that was GreatNews.
Cheers,
Michael
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michael@blogcouncil.org
312-932-9000
I am a Blog Council employee and this is my personal opinion.
Hi Marc,
Thanks for the mention. I think you’re right that the portability may come via mobile. Good point.
As for Feedly, it’s great. I use it a lot. If you’re interested, check out my review at: http://www.ignitesocialmedia.com/feedly-review/
I enjoyed Kat’s post as well, but need to check out some of the others.
~Jim
@Michael, I think the blogcouncil is a great idea. Let me know when a free seat opens up! Just kidding.
-Marc
@Jim
No problem, thanks for stopping by. I’ll let ya know about Feedly.
-Marc
You’re a gentleman and a scholar. We appreciate the point. Kat will be thrilled. Thanks!
@Jason. It’s true though. I can see it now, the intern is sitting there and the CMO walks in and asks, “Who’s good with social media”? The intern says that they use MySpace and FB. The CMO says, Ok’ we ‘d like you to run with our new social media department. Next thing you know, that interns brain is picked to pieces.