TechWag

Image via CrunchBase, source unknownYesterday I gave my presentation to a group of Chinese business people who were interested in social networking as a way to expand their business. I used the Comcast and Jet Blue case studies that I posted on the blog, and overall the group was interested and engaged. They were getting the idea that social networking is something that they need to do as a way of generating enthusiasm for bottom up demand creation for their products and services.

What was interesting was during the hour long Q&A session afterwards was the explanation and showing off the use of Friend Feed as a location point for all the various aspects of a company’s social networking. Using Robert Scoble, Louis Gray, myself, Mike Fruchter and Matt Cutts as examples on how and why this works. That was what really had them engaged was taking one of their companies, and working out a social media, social networking road map for them to follow. We worked through one business during that hour, and it ended up that friend feed was the lynch pin of the whole process.

Friend feed allows someone to have a single drop point for all the social media things that a company can be doing. If they are throwing their commercials up on YouTube, blogging across multiple blogs, twittering, flickring, and otherwise throwing information out there, few people will have the desire to go to all these sites, having one site that brings them all together into a single package made a lot of sense. Friend feed filled that one gap in the social media networking that they would be doing. They can leverage what they are doing, but link it all together using friend feed to make it happen.

All the social networking programs are worthy, but what the social media policy needs is a way to tie them into a one stop shop. That was the conclusion that we came to yesterday during the Q&A session. It is great to have stuff all over the internet, but having someplace to hang them all on, one where people can interact with what is happening (likes, comments, one place to subscribe, tracking followers and usage) friend feed filled the bill.

So if you see a bunch of Chinese business people signing up for friend feed and using that to tie their social networking sites together they will be working on the idea that we worked on yesterday. While twitter has become a critical tool for getting information out in minutes of a major issue (earth quake, tsunami, and volcano’s come to mind), tying everything into friend feed is the next logical step for a company to tie together all their social networking sites into one good place to go visit and interact.

Tags: china, business, friend feed, twitter, social network, framework, cohesion