Forget destinations. Your brand is everywhere and nowhere.

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Forget destinations. Your brand is everywhere and nowhere.

This means that marketers will need to rethink how they approach content creation and distribution. They will need to understand how content will be broken down from the source and aggregated elsewhere across the web. This means that brands will be everywhere. And they will be nowhere. They will be surfacing on potentially any website, and they will no longer exist as a whole in any place with meaningful traffic – that does not also have aggregated content from elsewhere. As a concrete example, this means that marketers will need to stop thinking about their Facebook page as a destination – a place to drive traffic to, and instead start thinking about it as a platform for publishing – a place to create content that will surface in many places.

I’ve been saying something similar for a short while in a briefing here and there. Paul Adams says it better and more clearly.

Facebook and social connectivity: Closer friends | The Economist

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Facebook and social connectivity: Closer friends | The Economist. - ”According to a recent study by Facebook and the University of Milan, our degrees of separation are apparently decreasing (from the proverbial six). The study indicates that “people were separated from one another by an average of just 4.74 conniptions (down from an average of 5.28 in a study the network conducted in 2008).”

More information from Facebook Here.

Research on Social Network Sites

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Research on Social Network Sites. - ”This page provides a bibliography of articles concerning social network sites. For an overview of this space, including a definition of “social network sites,” a history of SNSs, and a literature review, see boyd & Ellison’s 2007 introduction to the JCMC Special Issue on Social Network Sites, Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship. Example social network sites addressed include: Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, Orkut, Cyworld, Mixi, Black Planet, Dodgeball, and LiveJournal.”

The Social Graph is Neither (Pinboard Blog)

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The Social Graph is Neither (Pinboard Blog). Funny (and good) discussion about the idea of the social graph. This was the starting point for an interesting discussion on the topic around the Web this week,

You might almost think that the whole scheme had been cooked up by a bunch of hyperintelligent but hopelessly socially naive people, and you would not be wrong. Asking computer nerds to design social software is a little bit like hiring a Mormon bartender. Our industry abounds in people for whom social interaction has always been more of a puzzle to be reverse-engineered than a good time to be had, and the result is these vaguely Martian protocols.

But let’s say an inspired mathlete proves me wrong. There’s a brilliant hack that fixes all the issues I’ve raised and we go ahead and build the Platonic social graph. What can you actually do with it