{"id":88,"date":"2010-02-16T04:58:31","date_gmt":"2010-02-16T09:58:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.yupingliu.com\/wordpress\/2010\/02\/16\/yet-another-social-solution\/"},"modified":"2010-03-17T02:28:40","modified_gmt":"2010-03-17T07:28:40","slug":"yet-another-social-solution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.yupingliu.com\/wordpress\/2010\/02\/16\/yet-another-social-solution\/","title":{"rendered":"Yet Another Social Solution"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week, yet another social media solution was announced. This time, it came from the Internet giant Google, and it is called Google Buzz<\/a>. In my opinion, Google Buzz is a mixture of FriendFeed, Facebook, and Twitter.\u00a0 It resembles FriendFeed in the sense that it can aggregate your activities across multiple social networks and display those to your followers in one place. It resembles Facebook in the sense that it has a status update and commenting function similar to Facebook status update.\u00a0 And it resembles Twitter in terms of its follower structure and also its status update functionality. The one key difference with Google Buzz, however, is its integration with email, where you see all the buzzes within your Gmail account.<\/p>\n

Frankly, I am not impressed. With so many social media solutions already out to “revolutionize” the way we communicate, I am starting to feel indifferent.\u00a0 Just count the sheer number of social networks out there, and we see how fragmented online social networking has become. While I am a strong believer in the value of social media, the number of competing solutions is suggesting that this market is getting to a more mature stage.\u00a0 Just like the hundreds of car brands in the earlier part of the last century, we are bound to see a shakeup of this marketplace, and the ones that eventually survive will be the ones that offer differentiation that appeal to a large enough network of consumers.<\/p>\n

\"Doll\"<\/div>\n
http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/magickshop\/<\/a> | CC BY 2.0<\/a><\/div>\n

So with this idea of differentiation, I thought of doing an exercise.\u00a0 In market research, there is a technique called brand personification which is used to explore in-depth a brand’s meaning to consumers.\u00a0 The technique asks consumers to imagine a brand as a person and to describe what this person would be like.\u00a0 Here I took the liberty and brand personifies some of the best known or “buzzed” social networks we see today.<\/p>\n