Social Media Innovation is Dead? Two contradictory examples [kwiqq]

Posted on | March 2, 2009 | No Comments

Social Media Innovation

Social media has seen a constant growth in its adoption and acceptance. More and more commercial websites are adopting social media. Whether its a social media strategy or simple modifications like adding a ShareThis widget or YouTube video. Social media has been heavily reliant on usability and simplicity of its interface. Launching mainstream products, i.e. not only catering to a niche but wider audience, requires major investment but more importantly innovation. Some consultants feel “Innovation” is Dead and we need a major change of thinking.

I’m listing two examples I feel break the mould and are innovation in their own right:

Blog

There are thousands of blogging software/services available in the market. Users have the option to procure free / expensive, self hosted / SaaS (Software as a Service) and several other variations. But there is one example I feel totally breaks the mould: Tumblr

Tumblr Options

Whilst WordPress doesn’t seem to encourage multimedia, Tumblr provides several options to upload them to your blog. My only reservation is the software is available as SaaS (Software as a Service). See Tumblr in action:

Geo Micro Blogging

Twitter is a fantastic example of Micro blogging application. Although other players have the potential to gin some of the market share of Twitter and harness the popularity of micro blogging platforms. One such application is BrightKite.com, which solves the problem what are people (physically) around you thinking / doing.

BrightKite options

On BrightKite users can make friends and keep track of what people around them are thinking. Could be a fantastic tool for instance for bars/restaurants with drink/food offers on a Friday night ? Advertisements like “2 for 1 drinks at our bar in Leicester Square for the next 45 mins”.

Also see how BrightKite works on the iPhone:

Related articles by Zemanta

• Twiphlo: Small Is Beautiful For Geolocation (stoweboyd.com)
• Central Desktop Using Twitter for Sales, Service, and Brand Monitoring Conversations (socialmediatoday.com)
• Tumblrette becomes Tumblr for iPhone (downloadsquad.com)

Comments