TechWag

: Image via CrunchBase

You finally got all the political and social buy in that you are going to get, everyone is all for it, just one last presentation to go and you are in like flint. But not so fast, your social networking ideas still need one last thing, what are you going to build and what are you going to integrate the system into?

The hardest thing to do at times is with the hundreds of social networking sites is working out which ones are the ones you want to integrate to. The first real question is where are your consumers? If your consumers are mostly Facebook, then Facebook makes sense, if you are G4, then MySpace makes sense. If your customers flock to places that might be contrary to your public image then you need to think about where you are going to link to.

Something as simple as association can truly damage the brand, but you also want to be where your customers are. This does not mean all your customers, just the majority of your customers, if only 2% of your customers come from MySpace, you can pretty much so ditch the bling in favor of the staid, professional if a bit dull interfaces of Linkedin and Facebook.

For the project I am working on, the goal here is to link into systems that have a professional look and feel. Since we want to portray a professional look and feel, the idea is that where we are must also have the same professional feel.

For this case we are linking into:

Twitter
FriendFeed
Social Median
Facebook

The image is more important, and even though people will get potty mouthed on these systems, show NSFW pictures (rarely) or gross out surgery pictures, it is better than what is available on other systems where the image is more about bling and skin than it is about a professional look and feel.

There is not much in terms of documentation about “guilt by where you connect to” but thinking that this is going to be the next big thing in terms of reputation management. Where you link and where you show up is going to be just as important as what you say on line and how well you deal with the eventual screw up that is going to happen with any new social networking project.

When you are thinking about upstream linking and sharing, the web sites you link into are just as important as the content you are making because of “guilt by association”. Much like your mother said “be careful who you make friends with” social networking people should be saying “be careful who you upstream associate your content with” to make sure that the same look and feel (which ever one you want to have, hip bling of MySpace or Professional like Facebook) is what your company is wanting to portray on line.